A TERRIBLE EX-JOURNALIST SHOWS US WHY WE GOT TRUMP AGAIN

You might have seen this a few days ago:

A Gallup poll suggests that President Joe Biden will be viewed as the worst commander in chief since Richard Nixon....

Respondents were asked how they thought presidents would go down in history—"as an outstanding president, above average, average, below average, or poor?"

The poll found that among U.S. adults Biden received a net score of -35—the percentage Outstanding/Above Average minus the percentage Below Average/Poor.

The only president to receive a lower score was Nixon, with -42.

Biden has made his share of mistakes, and I suspect that a period of high inflation piled on top of forty years of increasing economic inequality left a lot of Americans with deep credit-card debt at high interest rates. Based on that record alone, his unpopularity was probably inevitable. But is he the worst president since Nixon? Why?

You probably know my thinking on this: Voters believe Biden is a terrible president because he's the worst public communicator in the modern history of the presidency. His public speaking deficits and physical presence prevent him from being a reassuring voice at moments of uncertainty. He's done a fine job on many fronts, but he doesn't seem competent.

Is that what people want from leaders? Do they really believe that seeming like a leader is what's most important? Amy Chozick certainly feels that way, by her own admission.

You might remember Amy Chozick. She was a terrible Wall Street Journal political reporter who in 2008 wrote a story suggesting that Barack Obama might not win the presidential election because he wasn't fat enough.

"I won't vote for any beanpole guy," [a] Clinton supporter wrote last week on a Yahoo politics message board.

The story strongly implied that this was a spontaneous outpouring of contempt, but it was later determined that Chozick had started a Yahoo thread with the express purpose of eliciting this opinion, and that exactly one commenter said what she wanted to hear. The Journal later issued a clarification. Undaunted, Chozick went on to a job at The New York Times, wrote a bestselling book about her time covering the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign, and is now a writer and producer in Hollywood.

The Times just published an op-ed in which Chozick laments the fact that none of the politicians dealing with California's wildfires seem like leaders she admired in the past -- many of whom were incompetent:

I can’t keep up with Rudy Giuliani’s criminal indictments, but after Sept. 11, America’s mayor stood at Ground Zero and assured a broken city that the terrorist attacks would only make us stronger. Will someone — anyone? — stand in the detritus of the Pacific Palisades or Pasadena and say the same about Los Angeles?

In 2005, after widespread criticism of the response to Hurricane Katrina, Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré took charge in New Orleans. Then-Mayor C. Ray Nagin called Honoré, “a John Wayne dude,” who “came off the doggone chopper and started cussing and people started moving.”

In those dark early Covid months, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York didn’t deliver niceties. (I’m not sure he’d know how.) But his daily briefings became essential. That is, before Mr. Cuomo resigned, amid allegations he downplayed Covid deaths at nursing homes and engaged in sexual misconduct, which he denied.

Chozick knows Cuomo resigned in disgrace, and knows he didn't really do a good job during COVID. She's aware that Giuliani has disgraced himself, though she may not recall that he stupidly ordered New York City's emergency command center to be placed in the World Trade Center after it was bombed in 1993, and hadn't replaced the radios that had failed first responders in 1993 by the time of the 2001 attack. Also, she seems to recall the response to Katrina as a success because one of the key figures had swagger.

Maybe Chozick isn't quite the living embodiment of that famous Bill Clinton remark:

"When people are feeling insecure, they'd rather have someone who is strong and wrong rather than somebody who is weak and right."

Donald Trump isn't doing it for her.

President-elect Donald Trump, meanwhile, instigated a schoolyard squabble, calling the California governor “Gavin Newscum” and blaming the devastation in Los Angeles on Democratic policies.

But, of course, neither is President Biden, as far as she's concerned, despite the guarantee of federal assistance that Biden has provided (and Trump threatens to withhold):

Our city is being reduced to ash and we’re being governed by puerile social media posts and presumably by President Biden, but honestly, who knows?

She doesn't care if everything that can possibly be done is being done in a situation of unprecedented awfulness -- she wants to be told it's being done right:

We’re willing to make sacrifices and overlook mistakes as long as we feel like someone is giving it to us straight. But we are getting neither poetry nor prose....

I’ve watched all of this enraged, but also beside myself. Why is it that the town that gave us Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman and Will Smith (OK, there was The Slap but he still saved the world) cannot find a lead character to try to save us from this catastrophe? This state loves a charismatic action hero so much that it birthed The Terminator’s political career.

You know all those actors were playing fictional characters, don't you, Amy?

Chozick wants stirring words and manly bearing. I think that's what millions of Americans wanted from Joe Biden the last four years, and they never got it. That's why he's one of the most despised presidents of our time. After a while, it didn't matter what he did or didn't do. All that mattered is how he seemed.

Mayor Karen Bass certainly isn't doing it for Chozick, and Chozick is sure many people agree with her:

On Sunday, a petition to recall Ms. Bass “due to her failure to lead during this unprecedented crisis” had over 100,000 signatures.

Of course, anyone in the world can sign a Change.org petition -- I signed it from here in New York using a fake email address and the fake name "Dick Hertz."

But I think what Chozick from politicians is what a lot of Americans want. Some of them think they're getting stirring words and manly bearing from Donald Trump, and that's why he won. Very few Americans think they can get these things from Joe Biden, and that's why Democrats lost.

"BABY CRIES, MAMA BUYS"

I found this picture today:

It was taken in Boston in 2016. Here's a close-up shot of a slogan that appears on the truck's body:

I remember seeing this slogan on an ice cream truck in Boston forty years earlier, though I'm sure it wasn't the same vehicle.

Because American political life has been dominated for the past decade by an infantile whiner named Donald Trump, I think about this slogan a lot. The implication is that resistance is futile: when Baby cries, Mama doesn't have a choice -- she has to buy or Baby simply won't shut up. That's certainly how Trump operates.

And this seems to be happening in California now:

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) has invited President-elect Donald Trump to visit the Golden State to see the devastation of the Los Angeles fires firsthand.

Trump has been critical of Newsom’s handling of the wildfires, and of California’s overall wildfire prevention efforts, calling on the governor to resign and blaming the natural disaster on him. Newsom ... sent a letter to Trump inviting him to visit the state as he returns to the White House....

“In this spirit of this great country, we must not politicize human tragedy or spread disinformation from the sidelines. Hundreds of thousands of Americans — displaced from their homes and fearful for the future — deserve to see all of us working in their best interests to ensure a fast recovery and rebuild,” he added.

Maybe Trump won't take Newsom up on the invitation. I think he will, and he'll be reasonably polite while he's in California -- and then immediately resume sniping at Newsom as soon as he leaves, now pretending to be an expert with firsthand knowledge. Newsom will have given him what he wants: attention and credibility. Maybe he'll concede some point to Trump, on water usage or forestry, in an attempt at cooperation. Trump will pocket that win and continue attacking Newsom.

Danes and Greenlanders are doing it too:

Denmark sent private messages in recent days to President-elect Trump's team expressing willingness to discuss boosting security in Greenland or increasing the U.S. military presence on the island, two sources with knowledge of the issue tell Axios....

The Danish government wants to convince Trump, including through the messages passed to his advisers this week, that his security concerns can be addressed without claiming Greenland for the U.S.

In a way, you can't blame Trump fans for seeing this as a good approach to governing, a real-life "art of the deal." Trump picks an enemy and goes on the attack. He makes a lot of noise. The enemy tries to mollify him by giving him part of what he wants. Everyone in MAGA: Trump wins! Baby cries, mama buys.

But on the other hand, what does the MAGA base get out of all this? We were told that Trump won the election because voters were upset about the price of eggs. Right-wing voters were upset about immigration. Ads attacking trans people reportedly had a major impact.

How does strong-arming Gavin Newsom until he agrees that maybe California should clear more underbrush address any of those issues? How does a thuggish attitude toward Greenland and Denmark strengthen the U.S.-Mexico border or lower grocery bills?

The truth is that Trump's base might be concerned about certain policy goals, but they'll be very happy if Trump just beats up someone they hate. Fox News, talk radio, and Republican politicians trained the GOP base to despise California long before Trump entered politics -- and the same is true for the godless socialists of Denmark and other Western European countries.

The conventional wisdom is that these fights are attempts to distract us from the real Trump agenda: cutting taxes and regulations on the rich and big companies, pursuing a full-blown Heritage Foundation culture war. Maybe there's some truth in that, but I think the fights might be efforts to distract us from Trump's inevitable policy failures. He's admitted that it's "hard" to lower grocery prices. His Department of Government Efficiency concedes that it won't find $2 trillion in budget cuts. His border czar is lowering expectations on the scope of the immigrant crackdown.

Trump is picking gratuitous fights to reassure voters that he still has the right stuff -- and I think he's also doing it to reassure himself. He has a desperate need to believe he's the greatest president ever, even though he knows deep down that he can't solve the problems he faces. But hey, he can beat up Greenland!

YES, IT WOULD BE TERRIBLE IF DEMOCRATS DID THAT THING THEY DID EIGHT YEARS AGO THAT ... UM, WORKED

We're being told again that it would be bad for Democrats to oppose "everything" Donald Trump is doing. In a Rolling Stone story about Democrats' supine response to Trump this time around, Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng quote a Democratic operative:

“I think it’s important to distinguish between capitulation to Trump in a way that betrays Democratic values, versus constructive pragmatism,” says Jesse Lehrich, a former 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign spokesman. “Because I actually worry about both ends of the spectrum — weak-kneed Dems letting Trump steamroll them on one end, and the party just reflexively opposing anything Trump supports (i.e., 2017-style ‘resistance’) on the other.”

This echoes a December quote I've posted here several times, from Senator Brian Schatz:

“The mood is slightly different than the last time and there is a sense that if you are freaking out about everything, it becomes really hard for people to sort out what is worth worrying about,” Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, told CNN.

I question whether Democrats were "just reflexively opposing anything Trump supports" and "freaking out about everything" in 2017. Fifteen members of the Democratic Senate caucus voted for a majority of Trump's 22 initial Cabinet appointees, while nine more voted for at least ten of them and every senator, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, voted for at least three. And have we all forgotten how eager Democrats were to work with Trump on infrastructure? From December 2016:

But let's accept the premise that Democrats were "just reflexively opposing anything Trump supports" and "freaking out about everything" in Trump's first term. What were the negative consequences of that?

Democrats won control of the House of Representatives in 2018, gaining 41 seats. Was that a bad thing, according to Democrats now?

And in the 2020 elections, Democrats won back the presidency and the Senate, while holding on to the House. Was that bad?

During Trump's term, he and his party failed to overturn the Affordable Care Act. They faced pushback on separation of immigrant families. Very little of the wall was built. Trump and the GOP passed a standard-issue pro-plutocrat tax cut, but that was Trump's only major legislative accomplishment.

But now I guess Democrats think all that was bad. Winning a few fights with Trump? Can't have that!

THE LIARS ARE WINNING, BUT HEY, AT LEAST THE TRUTH FINALLY LOCATED ITS BOOTS

So I learned from The New York Times today that the lack of water in California fire hydrants is perfectly understandable:

Officials now say the storage tanks that hold water for high-elevation areas like the [Palisades] Highlands, and the pumping systems that feed them, could not keep pace with the demand as the fire raced from one neighborhood to another. That was in part because those who designed the system did not account for the stunning speeds at which multiple fires would race through the Los Angeles area this week.

“We are looking at a situation that is just completely not part of any domestic water system design,” said Marty Adams, a former general manager and chief engineer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which is responsible for delivering water to nearly four million residents of Los Angeles.

Municipal water systems are designed for firefighters to tap into multiple hydrants at once, allowing them to maintain a steady flow of water for crews who may be trying to protect a large structure or a handful of homes. But these systems can buckle when wildfires, such as those fueled by the dry brush that surrounds Los Angeles’s hillside communities, rage through entire neighborhoods.

In fact, this has happened in other states, including a red one:

As urban growth spreads into wilderness areas around the country and climate change brings more challenging fire conditions, an increasing number of cities have confronted a sudden loss of water available for firefighting, most recently in Talent, Ore.; Gatlinburg, Tenn.; and Ventura County, Calif.

But ... but ... we were told it's all President Biden's fault!

Or Mayor Karen Bass's fault, as the Times strongly suggested yesterday:

Rick Caruso, a real estate developer who lost to Ms. Bass in the mayoral race in 2022, said that he had a team of private firefighters in Pacific Palisades on Tuesday night helping to protect a major outdoor retail space he owns, as well as some nearby homes. All night, he said, they were telling him that water was in short supply....

“The lack of water in the hydrants, I don’t think there’s an excuse,” Mr. Caruso said. “This was very predictable,” he said, referring to the forecasts that predicted the devastating windstorm.

Mr. Caruso, who served two stints as president of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said that it will take time to account for why firefighters struggled to get enough water to fight the fires.

Apparently it won't take time to account for why the water wasn't there, because we already know that our systems aren't built for this, and remedying that would be very, very costly, and possibly ill-advised:

Greg Pierce, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies water resources and urban planning, echoed the concerns over water systems that are designed for urban fires, not fast-moving wildfires. But redesigning water systems to allow firefighters to take on a broad wildfire would be enormously expensive, he said.

A more fundamental question, he said, is whether it’s a good idea to rebuild neighborhoods adjacent to wildlands, an issue that has been broadly debated across the West as climate change increases the frequency and intensity of fires on what is known as the wildland-urban interface.

If Caruso proposed a crash program to upgrade the water infrastructure of Los Angeles at great expense when he ran for mayor, I'm not aware of it.

The lie that the lack of water is all liberals' fault has gotten halfway around the world -- but hey, at least the truth belated knows where its boots are.

*****

That saying about lies and the truth could also apply to Donald Trump's Cabinet nominees. Remember how Democrats reacted late last year, when Trump announced that his Cabinet would include a motley crew of lunatics, sleazebags, and incompetents? We were told that Democrats didn't want to raise a fuss right away:

“The mood is slightly different than the last time and there is a sense that if you are freaking out about everything, it becomes really hard for people to sort out what is worth worrying about,” Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, told CNN.

Democrats wanted to keep their powder dry because there'd be plenty of time to object:

“Until these folks are scheduled to face the Senate, Democrats are going to let the Republicans do the knifing,” one senior congressional Democratic aide told The Post.

But Republicans didn't actually do any "knifing" after they'd dispatched with Matt Gaetz. And now that hearings on the nominees are about to start, Democrats are discovering that -- having squandered a great deal of time by keeping their powder dry -- they might not have the opportunity to challenge the worst nominees properly because the hearings will be rushed:

A quiet but bitter partisan clash is underway on Capitol Hill over President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choices for key cabinet posts, as Republicans face immense pressure to fast-track confirmations and Democrats charge that they are cutting corners on vetting for critical administration jobs.

... Democrats on the committee have begun raising objections about a potential lack of access to background materials such as an F.B.I. report on [defense secretary nominee Pete] Hegseth....

“Republicans choosing to rush nominees is quickly becoming a pattern,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said on the Senate floor on Thursday. “It’s hard not to wonder what are the Republicans trying to hide about these nominees from the American people.”

So when these people were first appointed, you said nothing (or nothing apart from "I want to seem cooperative with this president, even though he calls me and everyone else in my party evil and treasonous, so I'll give all his nominees a fair hearing"). And now the big chance you claimed you'd have to confront the nominees will come and go in an eyeblink, because Republicans plan to rush the process -- which is something you could have foreseen.

The lie that got halfway around the world is that Robert Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and other extraordinarily unfit nominees are reasonable choices to help run America. While this was happening, Democrats ensured that the truth wouldn't put its boots on. They could have been making a lot of noise for weeks. But now all of these people will probably be approved, and most Americans won't even know why that's a problem.

THE RIGHT-WING MEDIA ATTACKS KAREN BASS FOR FOCUSING ON RIGHT-WING PRIORITIES (AND THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA PILES ON)

It's possible that Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass deserves all the criticism she's getting, but if you're The New York Times, this is not how you should be reporting on that criticism -- with a story that includes direct quotes from only two people apart from the mayor: a homeowner who doesn't really have any way of knowing what the mayor did or didn't do while traveling at the request of the president of the United States, and her opponent in the last mayoral election, a rich ex-Republican who probably wants to run again in 2026:

When a series of dangerous, wind-driven fires broke out on Tuesday in the Los Angeles area, Mayor Karen Bass was on the other side of the globe, part of a delegation sent by President Biden to Ghana for the inauguration of its new president....

The mayor’s absence has drawn criticism from some Angelenos....

“There was zero preparation. There was zero thought here,” said Michael Gonzales, 47, whose home burned down in Pacific Palisades, a wealthy neighborhood that overlooks the Pacific Ocean. His family of five was camped out in a hotel in Santa Monica on Wednesday as they began figuring out where they will live.

Mr. Gonzales, a lawyer, said he believed Mayor Bass made a poor decision to remain overseas despite forecasters warning of the most dangerous fire conditions in more than a decade.

“It was an utter breakdown in leadership and it starts with the mayor’s office,” he said in an interview....

Rick Caruso, a real estate developer who lost to Ms. Bass in the mayoral race in 2022, said that he had a team of private firefighters in Pacific Palisades on Tuesday night helping to protect a major outdoor retail space he owns, as well as some nearby homes. All night, he said, they were telling him that water was in short supply.

City officials confirmed that water tanks ran dry during the intense firefight early Wednesday in Pacific Palisades because demand surged to four times the normal rate for 15 hours. The system, they suggested, was not designed to supply so much water in such a short period.

“The lack of water in the hydrants, I don’t think there’s an excuse,” Mr. Caruso said. “This was very predictable,” he said, referring to the forecasts that predicted the devastating windstorm.

Mr. Caruso, who served two stints as president of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said that it will take to time to account for why firefighters struggled to get enough water to fight the fires.

“This is a massive failure of epic proportions,” he said. “To know the storm was coming and then to leave, and not rush back. Leadership matters and the first thing is to be present.”

But this is how the mainstream media operates. Because right-wingers have been attacking mainstream news organizations as liberal for sixty years or so, they reflexively assume that any criticism of a liberal is justified, while assuming that there must be a valid reason for nearly everything conservatives do, even when they're proposing batshit crazy ideas like annexing Greenland.

As a rule, Democratic officeholders spend the majority of their terms on the back foot because when they're viciously attacked by the right, the mainstream press inevitably piles on. The right is attacking Bass for reducing fire department funding, and it's true that her 2024-25 budget cut the fire department's budget by $17.6 million. However, as Politico reports, there was supplementary funding that actually increased the fire department's budget:

The city was in the process of negotiating a new contract with the fire department at the time the budget was being crafted, so additional funding for the department was set aside in a separate fund until that deal was finalized in November. In fact, the city’s fire budget increased more than $50 million year-over-year compared to the last budget cycle....

And who was the big winner in Bass's initial budget? The police department. Fox 11 Los Angeles reported in April:

... the proposal — described by Bass a "reset" — includes ... an increase of more than $138 million for the Los Angeles Police Department; and a decrease of about $23 million for the L.A. Fire Department.

The right-wing media always says that police budgets should be increased, and raises hell if there's even the slightest indication that a city plans to trim the money that goes to cops. So Bass was doing what the right wanted.

In fact, when Bass and Caruso ran against each other and against other mayoral candidates, they battled one another over how many new cops they should add to the LAPD.

... real estate developer Rick Caruso revealed details of his platform Tuesday, including a plan to add 1,500 officers to the LAPD's force if elected mayor.

The Los Angeles Police Department's current personnel number stands at 9,521 sworn members, 185 fewer than its authorized deployment for the fiscal year, Chief Michel Moore said Tuesday.

An additional 1,500 officers would put the department just over 11,000 officers, the number called for by mayoral candidate and LA City Council member Joe Buscaino. City Attorney Mike Feuer has said as part of his campaign for mayor that the department should expand to at least 10,000 officers, and Rep. Karen Bass said that if elected mayor she would bring the department to its authorized levels of 9,700 officers by hiring civilian personnel to move desk officers to patrol.

There's also a Fox Business story with this headline:

Los Angeles Mayor Slashed Fire Budget Last Year, Prioritized Homeless Population

Really? Has there been a Fox story about California in the past five years that doesn't describe homelessness there as a massive problem? So why is Fox objecting to the fact that there's more money in the budget for dealing with homelessness than for dealing with fires? Isn't that what the right wants?

And as this story concedes:

The budget for homelessness was also reduced in the 2024-2025 budget....

So you can't win. The right sets the terms of every debate and changes those terms 2when circumstances change. The mainstream media frequently echoes right-wing critiques -- and so every Democratic officeholder is perpetually operating in enemy territory.

GROUCHO TRUMP TRIES TO USE US AS HIS MARGARET DUMONT

Yeah, that was a weird press conference yesterday.

There was talk of the rising number of beached whales in Massachusetts, the victim, the president-elect said, of those windmills that have been erected off the coast. They “are driving the whales crazy, obviously.”

There was a vow to rename the Gulf of Mexico, by presidential decree, to the “Gulf of America.” And then there was Donald J. Trump’s refusal to rule out using military force to seize the 51-mile Panama Canal on national security grounds, along with the 836,000 square miles of Greenland, the world’s largest island....

He waxed on about a favorite complaint during his first term: Shower heads and sink faucets that don’t deliver water, a symbol of a regulatory state gone mad. “It goes drip, drip, drip,” he said. “People just take longer showers, or run their dishwasher again,” and “they end up using more water.”

Is it dementia? Is it a brilliant scheme to dangle shiny objects before reporters so they won't pay attention to Trump's corruption or his degradation of the rule of law?

Regular readers know that I think Trump has mild cognitive impairment at worst. He's still sharp enough to approach a press conference like this with an intuitive sense of what works for him.

What works for him is impropriety. Usually, as in this case, it's aggressive impropriety. Sometimes it's just Trump doing weird shit, like dancing to one of his mix tapes for more than a half hour at an event that was supposed to be a town hall.

The point of it -- and I don't believe Trump has analyzed this as much as intuited it, because he has a lifelong instinct for how publicity works -- is that the critics respond by saying, in effect, This is unseemly! It's preposterous behavior and it's unbefitting of a national leader!

That reaction is why it works.

My grand unified theory of why right-wing populist parties are on the rise globally is as follows: The super-rich want more and more, and it's a zero-sum game because ordinary people are hurting as inequality rises. Mainstream right-wing parties don't even want to help the non-rich, while mainstream liberal parties help the non-rich only in small, incremental ways, because the super-rich won't permit real progressive change (as genuine leftists learn when they gain power in some countries).

So no one is going to improve the lives of the non-rich -- but right-wing populists will at least make a great show of scapegoating and hurting immigrants, LGBT people, racial and religious minorities, and other groups they've taught the working classes, in particular, to despise. Ordinary people's lives never get better, but right-wing populists at least give them focused hate.

Some of that hate is focused on "elitists." Elitists, of course, aren't actual elitists -- for instance, Elon Musk, according to this worldview, is a swashbuckling iconoclast who's the richest man in the world because he deserves to be. The real elitist is the college professor with a low-six-figure salary who hates Musk and watches MSNBC at night.

If you're reading this, you're an elitist, as Trump's base sees it. You're an elitist because, among other things, the impropriety of Trump's public appearances bothers you. You think it's buffoonish and reckless to call for annexing Canada or Greenland or the Panama Canal. You say, logically, I thought people voted for Trump because they were upset about the price of eggs. How does this lower the price of eggs?

You represent propriety, and Trump's base is delighted that, as they see it, you're "triggered," that you have "Trump Derangement Syndrome." You are -- and I'm really dating myself with this reference -- Margaret Dumont.

Margaret Dumont played an upper-crust woman in seven Marx Brothers movies between 1929 and 1941. The brothers, Groucho in particular, uttered impolite quips and did inappropriate things while she looked on, aghast.



Marx Brothers movies had a vogue in the late 1960s and early 1970s, around the time when the Yippies and other groups were trying to use violations of propriety to help start a left-wing revolution. When the Yippies introduced a pig as their candidate for president in 1968, it seemed Marxian in the sense of Harpo, Groucho, and Chico.

I don't know if Donald Trump has ever sat through a Marx Brothers movie. I'm sure he found the Yippies repulsive. But he's intuited that millions of voters think the system sucks, and that defenders of the system, and of propriety in general, are enemies.

That's us. When Trump does crazy shit and we recoil, we're Margaret Dumont. He uses us as his foil.

But that's absurd. We're not actually defending propriety -- we're defending sanity. I think there are millions of other voters who understand that.

By coincidence, yesterday on Bluesky I saw this paragraph from a July 2024 profile of John Fetterman:

I could point out that the Fetterman aide who's quoted here, Adam Jentleson, is a Columbia graduate. I could also point out that the winning presidential ticket in November included a Yale Law graduate.

But there's something to this. Maybe a little scruffiness would help the Democratic Party.

On the other hand, the 2024 Democratic ticket had some scruffiness, or at least non-"elitism." Tim Walz was a Midwestern guy with no elitism in his pedigree. He called Republicans "weird" until consultants, presumably, told him to stop.

Walz shouldn't have stopped -- and maybe John Fetterman should pick up the slack. Maybe the message Trump wants to buy Greenland? What a weirdo! should be coming from a guy in a hoodie and cargo shorts.

Instead:

This is not the senator Pennsylvanians elected... themindshield.com/fetterman-bu...

[image or embed]

— Covie (@covie93.bsky.social) January 8, 2025 at 9:11 AM

Here's a passage from that July profile of Fetterman:

Igor Bobic, a senior politics reporter for HuffPost, told me that Fetterman first caught his eye that fall, during then Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s ill-fated effort to impeach President Joe Biden. “The words he was pulling out were just totally words that you wouldn’t normally hear in the Senate,” Bobic said. “You know, like ‘jagoff’ and ‘circle jerk,’ and calling Republicans ‘dicks.’”

Maybe Fetterman's response to Trump's Greenland talk should be "He's a dick. People can't afford groceries and this is what he's talking about? That's a dick move." Maybe he should have said this in cargo shorts on Fox News. He would have pissed some people off and he wouldn't be invited back, but he'd be framing this in a way that Margaret Dumont never would.

THE INTERNET INEVITABLY LEADS TO INFORMATION BRAIN ROT! (UNLESS YOU'RE A DEMOCRAT)

In The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel and Mike Caulfield argue that the GOP's ability to rewrite the history of January 6 is all the internet's fault:

... misinformation is powerful, not because it changes minds, but because it allows people to maintain their beliefs in light of growing evidence to the contrary. The internet may function not so much as a brainwashing engine but as a justification machine. A rationale is always just a scroll or a click away, and the incentives of the modern attention economy—people are rewarded with engagement and greater influence the more their audience responds to what they’re saying—means that there will always be a rush to provide one....

The justification machine ... has made the process of erasing cognitive dissonance far more efficient. Our current, fractured media ecosystem works far faster and with less friction than past iterations, providing on-demand evidence for consumers....

Warzel and Caulfield are right to argue that false assertions spread fast on the internet. But they write as if the internet inevitably destroys people's abilities to process information that's contrary to what they believe (or want to believe).

Yes, many of the messages that were spreading on the internet in the wake of January 6 argued that left-wing or government saboteurs were responsible for the violence, and that Trump supporters were entirely innocent. But as I noted yesterday, the internet had plenty of help. Fox News and other elements of the right-wing media were also spreading these messages, as were Republican politicians and influencers. They've never stopped spreading these messages -- on the air and, in the case of GOP officeholders, in official proceedings of Congress.

Wurzel and Caulfield's article appears under the headline "The Internet Is Worse Than a Brainwashing Machine." The suggestion is that the online world has a unique ability to rot brains, and resistance is futile. But if that's the case, why doesn't it work that way on the Democratic side? Recall, for instance, that in the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, a story spread that Elon Musk had used his Starlink internet service provider to manipulate the vote count and give Donald Trump a victory. If internet-based falsehoods that confirm partisans' prior beliefs inevitably supplant reality in the minds of those partisans, why don't the majority of Democrats now believe this falsehood?

The majority of Democrats don't believe this narrative because the media outlets we like didn't embrace it. Neither did the Democratic politicians we vote for.

Wurzel and Caulfield's effort to bothsides this comes up embarrassingly short. Here's how they argue that the internet eats the brains of Democrats as well as Republicans:

During this past election season, for example, anti-Trump influencers and liberal-leaning cable news stations frequently highlighted the stream of Trump supporters leaving his rallies early—implying that support for Trump was waning. This wasn’t true, but such videos helped Democratic audiences stay cocooned in a world where Trump was unpopular and destined to lose.

How is that comparable to believing that all the violence in the Capitol on January 6 was the work of Antifa and the FBI? Some people actually did leave Trump rallies early. Many polls showed Kamala Harris leading Trump. Those two facts helped give many of us a false sense of confidence. But what percentage of Democrats concluded that a Trump victory was utterly impossible? And what percentage still believe that Trump couldn't possibly have received enough legitimate votes to win, which is what most Republicans continue to believe about Joe Biden in 2020?

Wurzel and Caulfield write:

A culture where every event—every human success or tragedy—becomes little more than evidence to score political points is a nihilistic one. It is a culture where you never have to change your mind or even confront uncomfortable information.

Republicans appear to live in a culture like that, but Democrats don't. Democrats are urged to change our minds all the time. We're regularly told that we need to change our minds about bail reform, about student loan forgiveness, about compassionate treatment of immigrants and homeless people, about COVID school shutdowns, about providing care for trans youths and letting trans girls play on school teams. We're told that our values are elitist. We're told that our unwillingness to embrace right-wingers is arrogance, even though many of those same right-wingers openly declare that they hate us and want us executed or imprisoned. Maybe we're never required to change our minds, but we're told that we're terrible people if we don't.

The misinformation internet is not an all-powerful brain-deadening machine. Many people still look to other information sources for confirmation of what the misinformation internet tells us. When Democrats do that, we get the truth or something relatively close to it, even if it's not what we want to hear. Republicans mostly get exactly what they want to hear.

NO, WE WEREN'T ALL IN AGREEMENT ON JANUARY 7, 2021

Recalling the events of January 6, 2021, Matthew Yglesias writes:

The scariest thing about contemporary American politics is that on January 7, 2021, it was widely acknowledged among American conservatives that Donald Trump’s behavior on January 6th was completely unacceptable.

No one, at the time, was emotionally or intellectually invested in debating whether it was “really” a coup or whether a political movement that did something like that was “really” fascist.

Trump was "widely" condemned on the right. As Yglesias writes, "Mitch McConnell said Trump was morally responsible for the crimes committed.... Kevin Williamson of National Review rightly called the riot at the Capitol 'just the tip of a very dangerous spear.'”

But quite a few people on the right were "emotionally or intellectually invested" in debating what happened that day. They began trying to rewrite the narrative on January 6. Many of them worked at Fox News.

As a New York Times story noted a couple of days ago:

Before the Capitol had even been secured, Representative Paul Gosar, Republican of Arizona, was asserting on Twitter that the events had “all the hallmarks of Antifa provocation.” Hours later, the Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham was telling viewers that “there are some reports that antifa sympathizers may have been sprinkled throughout the crowd.” And by morning, Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, was claiming on the House floor that some rioters “were masquerading as Trump supporters and in fact were members of the violent terrorist group antifa.” ...

According to M.I.T. Technology Review, this fabrication was repeated online more than 400,000 times in the 24 hours after the Capitol attack, amplified by a cast of MAGA influencers, Republican officials and members of Mr. Trump’s family.

A post I published on the evening of January 6 included these tweets:

Do not be surprised if we learn in the days ahead that the Trump rioters were infiltrated by leftist extremists. Note: this is not to excuse any of them.

— Brit Hume (@brithume) January 7, 2021

Sarah Palin on Fox just now begins by blasting “fake patriot” protestors, then blames the media and suggests Antifa was behind the mob

— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) January 7, 2021

These are not Trump supporters. pic.twitter.com/ptcNp2lzrG

— Attorney General Ken Paxton (@KenPaxtonTX) January 6, 2021

I later discovered that the Antifa rumor was sourced to a Washington Times story, the original version of which read in part:

Trump supporters say that Antifa members disguised as one of them infiltrated the protesters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday.

A retired military officer told The Washington Times that the firm XRVision used its software to do facial recognition of protesters and matched two Philadelphia Antifa members to two men inside the Senate....

One has a tattoo that indicates he is a Stalinist sympathizer. Antifa promotes anarchy through violence and wants the end of America in favor of a Stalinist-state. “No more USA at all” is a protest chant.

XRVision also has identified another man who, while not known to have Antifa links, is someone who shows up at climate and Black Lives Matter protests in the West.

I don't know who the "retired military officer" was, but he was lying, as BuzzFeed reported on January 7:

An attorney representing XRVision ... issued a statement to BuzzFeed News refuting the Washington Times story. The statement said XRVision’s software actually identified two members of neo-Nazi organizations and a QAnon supporter among the pro-Trump mob — not antifa members....

The Washington Times removed the story just after 1 p.m. ET Thursday, after this story was published. Roughly five hours later, it published a completely rewritten version that removed the references to antifa members and included a correction acknowledging that the paper's original claim was false.

Also on January 6, a rumor spread that the so-called QAnon shaman was a Black Lives Matter or Antifa supporter.



A Reuters fact check debunked this on January 6.

The notion that Trumpists simply wouldn't riot was out there. Laura Ingraham wasn't the only right-wing TV pundit attempting to rewrite history, as a Forbes story noted on January 7:

Newsmax's Greg Kelly said, "these people don't look like Trump supporters. Trump supporters don't do these things."

And then there was Tucker Carlson. Forbes reported:

Fox News Host Tucker Carlson was one of several popular conservative media pundits who condemned the violence that took place Wednesday, but he also expressed sympathy for many of the "deeply frustrated" Trump supporters who engaged in a siege on the U.S. Capitol....

* Carlson on Wednesday night described the pro-Trump mob that ransacked the Capitol building as "kind of solid Americans," and asked if "people in Washington... really understand why" they’re aggrieved and if they'll "empathize with their frustration."

* Speaking of Ashli Babbitt, a white woman who was shot and killed by police while attempting to climb through a barricaded door in the Capitol building, Carlson said, "it's not enough to call it a tragedy. Imagine for a second that Babbitt was your daughter" ...

* Over the summer, Carlson described Black Lives [Matter] as “poison,” and he admonished the protesters in Minnesota and elsewhere, claiming, "the rioters in Minneapolis and in other places act as if they're allowed to loot and burn... No one stops them. The authorities don't arrest them. Instead, they pander to them, flatter them, desperately try to win their love."

* In contrast, Carlson claimed that Babbitt "bore no resemblance to the angry children we have seen wrecking our cities in recent months," adding, "she looked pretty much like everyone else."

Prominent Republicans were denouncing Trump and telling reporters that they might support impeachment or an invocation of the 25th Amendment to remove him from office. But under circumstances like these, many people on the right instantly snap into action, spreading falsehoods that advance the right's usual narratives. We saw that again this week, when Fox News falsely reported that the vehicle used in the New Year's Eve terrorist attack in New Orleans had crossed the Mexican border a couple of days earlier, a narrative that was subsequently picked up by Trump:

Fox News incorrectly said that a car a terrorist suspect used had just crossed the U.S. southern border. Fox then released a statement by Donald Trump where he incorrectly said crime is at a level "no one has ever seen before." Slightly over an hour later Fox issued a retraction. pic.twitter.com/HA4LuGTyFf

— Decoding Fox News (@DecodingFoxNews) January 1, 2025

Prominent elements of the right always try to rewrite the truth under circumstances like these. They started within hours of the January 6 riots. They wanted to muddy the waters and prevent the banishment of Trump from public life -- and they accomplished their mission.

THE MAINSTREAM PRESS DOESN'T WANT TO ADMIT THAT MUCH OF THE COUNTRY THINKS DEMOCRATS AREN'T AMERICANS (updated)

Josh Marshall makes a very good point about the mainstream media's coverage of Matthew Livelsberger, who blew himself up in a Cybertruck on New Year's morning in Las Vegas:

... Livelsberger ... appears to have suffered from PTSD and possibly a traumatic brain injury since returning from a tour of duty in 2019.... But at least for the moment there is a pretty striking lack of attention to the political motives he expressed in at least two documents ... that investigators found on his iPhone.

Those documents denounce Democrats and demand they be “culled” from Washington, by violence if necessary, and express the hope that his own death will serve as a kind of bell clap for a national rebirth of masculinity under the leadership of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Bobby Kennedy Jr.

Did you miss that stuff?

Yeah, me too!

... the only places I saw these parts of Livelsberger’s writings in any detail were relatively obscure publications. I was worried that maybe they were hoax documents that had somehow found their way into a few publications. So I traced them back to yesterday’s police press conference. They are indeed real.

Mediaite published them, and Marshall's characterization of them is correct. One reads in its entirety:

Fellow Servicemembers, Veterans, and all Americans,

TIME TO WAKE UP!

We are being led by weak and feckless leadership who only serve to enrich themselves.

Military and vets move on DC starting now. Militias facilitate and augment this activity.

Occupy every major road along fed buildings and the campus of fed buildings by the hundreds of thousands.

Lock the highways around down with semis right after everybody gets in. Hold until the purge is complete.

Try peaceful means first, but be prepared to fight to get the Dems out of the fed government and military by any means necessary. They all must go and a hard reset must occur for our country to avoid collapse.

-MSG Matt Livelsberger 18Z, 10th Special Forces Group

Another reads in part:

Focus on strength and winning. Masculinity is good and men must be leaders....

Stop obsessing over diversity. We are all diverse and DEl is a cancer.

... Rally around the Trump, Musk, Kennedy, and ride this wave to the highest hegemony for all Americans! We are second to no one.

Why isn't this widely known when it's widely known that the perpetrator of the other major violent event on New Year's, the deadly car attack in New Orleans, was an ISIS sympathizer? The easy answer is that Shamsud-Din Jabbar wasn't a white male and Matthew Livelsberger was. I know that the media likes to say that violent white men have mental or emotional problems while other perpetrators of violence are driven by ideology (or by pure evil) -- but there are exceptions. When Dylann Roof killed nine black women in a Charleston church in 2015, the press quickly told us about his racism. The same was true when Payton Gendron shot up a supermarket in a black neighborhood in Buffalo in 2022. The press openly discussed the anti-Semitism of Robert Bowers, who killed eleven people at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018.

But the ideologies of these white men are seen as beyond the pale, just as support for ISIS is beyond the pale. Both of our major political parties claim to abhor anti-Semitism and anti-black racism. A violent man with the views of Jabbar, Roof, Gendron, or Bowers is seen as outside of our political system.

But Livelsberger's viewes are well within the system. Millions of Americans agree with him that Democrats aren't legitimate Americans and don't belong in government. The next president of the United States appears to believe this. It appears to be a core belief of the Republican Party and the majority of its voters.

For years, the mainstream press has been in denial about how much the American right despises the Democratic Party. Even after nearly half a century of anti-Democratic rhetoric from Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Fox News, and Donald Trump, even after January 6, the press has a desperate need to believe that America has two reasonable ideologicasl wings that seek to coexist with each other. The Democratic Party clearly seeks to coexist with the Republican Party. (It sometimes seems as if D.C. Democrats want a strong Republican Party more than they want a strong Democratic Party.) But the GOP and the right in general clearly believe that America would be better off if the Democratic Party didn't exist.

So we're not going to talk very much about Matthew Livelsberger's manifestos. Talking about them would get us unnervingly close to truths our politcal establishment can't face.

*****

UPDATE: I realize that I didn't give you a sense of how the press is avoiding this subject. In The Washington Post, Livelsberger's denunciation of the Democrats is buried in the 33rd paragraph of this story. The story says this:

In the writings investigators found on his phone, the soldier expressed concern with America’s standing in the world and Democratic control of government. He called for soldiers and veterans to “move on DC starting now” and to “occupy every major road along fed buildings.”

Livelsberger wasn't just "express[ing] concern with America’s standing in the world and Democratic control of government" -- he was calling for a military siege with the goal of purging Democrats from the federal government and the armed forces.

The New York Times did a bit better, although the information is buried in paragraph 13 of this story:

The writings found on Sergeant Livelsberger’s phone suggest that he had been increasingly concerned about politics. In one note shared by the police, Sergeant Livelsberger said that people should “try peaceful means first but be prepared to fight” to get Democrats out of the federal government.

But he didn't just say they should fight -- he said they should lock down the capital. He said they should, in effect, launch a successful January 6. The coverage is utterly inadequate.

I DON'T KNOW WHY WE THINK THE BAD GUYS LOST YESTERDAY

Yesterday, when the House of Representatives was voting to choose a Speaker, Democratic senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii posted the following at Bluesky at a time when it appeared that Mike Johnson's bid was failing:

This Speaker vote should remind all of us that literally nothing Republicans try to do will be easy, or a foregone conclusion. And often, they are going to have to come to Democrats to enact anything at all. We have lost power but we are not powerless.

— Brian Schatz (@schatz.bsky.social) January 3, 2025 at 1:47 PM

Not long after that, Johnson flipped two Republican votes and won on the first ballot. In other words, even with a slightly smaller majority, Republicans had an easier time electing a Speaker this year than they did two years ago, when it took four days and fifteen ballots to elect Kevin McCarthy.

I know this shouldn't have been a difficult vote -- Republicans settled on reelecting Johnson late last year, then a few of them decided to challenge him after the fight over the continuing resolution to keep the government running -- but in the end it wasn't all that difficult. (In that December fight, Republicans also settled their differences in time, and there was no shutdown.) Nevertheless, it's now conventional wisdom that Donald Trump will have a very difficult time enacting his second-term agenda. "Bad News for Trump’s Legislative Agenda" is the headline at The Atlantic. In The New York Times, the headline is "Johnson’s Reward for Keeping His Gavel: An Impossible Job Delivering for Trump."

But as the Times story notes, the Johnson holdouts came around precisely because of their loyalty to Trump:

Just minutes after Speaker Mike Johnson could exhale, having put down a short-lived conservative revolt and won re-election to his post on Friday, hard-right lawmakers sent him a letter.

It was not congratulatory.

They had only voted for him, they wrote, “because of our steadfast support of President Trump and to ensure the timely certification of his electors.”

We're told:

Now, with total Republican control of government and President-elect Donald J. Trump’s enormous domestic agenda at stake, [Johnson] is facing his toughest test yet.

But how much of Trump's agenda do Johnson's supporters and critics disagree on? And how much of the agenda is even legislative?

Will any Republican try to stop Trump if he begins rounding up and deporting or imprisoning undocumented immigrants? Will they object if he cracks down on trans people? Will they block him if he wants to gut renewable energy programs in favor of "drill, baby, drill"? Will any of them defend the diversity programs Trump opposes?

For that matter, will any Republicans try to stop him if he wants to sic the Justice Department on his enemies? Republicans in the House and Senate were quick to express their opposition to the selection of Matt Gaetz as attorney general, but I don't hear a word of protest from them about the choice of Kash Patel to head the FBI or Pam Bondi's nomination as attorney general.

The Times story tells us:

Mr. Johnson will be responsible for pushing through Mr. Trump’s economic plans, including one or more huge bills that lawmakers say they want to simultaneously increase the nation’s borrowing limit, extend the tax cuts Mr. Trump signed into law in 2017, cut federal spending, and put in place a wide-ranging immigration crackdown.

There certainly won't be any dissent over the immigration crackdown, and when in the past 45 years has any Republican ever objected to a tax cut?

There'll be a fight over the debt limit, as well as on the question of whether cuts to disfavored expenditures should be merely reckless or batshit crazy. (I'm expecting that at least some of the craziest cuts proposed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will be enacted into law.) But on the main agenda items -- mostly to do with the culture wars and Trump's thirst for revenge -- Republicans appear to be in absolute agreement.

And yes, I know that the House will lose two Republicans soon:

The margin in the House will only tighten if the Senate confirms Reps. Mike Waltz of Florida and Elise Stefanik of New York to serve in the administration as national security adviser and United Nations ambassador, respectively.

But Waltz represents Florida's 6th congressional district, which the Cook Political Report rates as R+14. Stefanik represents NY-21, which has a Cook rating of R+9. And Matt Gaetz, who isn't returning to Congress, represents FL-1, which is rated R+19. They'll all be replaced by Republicans very soon.

What we see whenever there's GOP infighting isn't a Republican crack-up. Republicans essentially live by the aphorism often ascribed to Arabs or Muslims, as in Leon Uris's 1984 novel The Haj:

So before I was nine I had learned the basic canon of Arab life. It was me against my brother; me and my brother against our father; my family against my cousins and the clan; the clan against the tribe; and the tribe against the world. And all of us against the infidel.

Republicans simplify this: Pragmatic right-wing extremist against the even more extreme, but all of us against the infidel. And we -- Democrats, liberals, progressives, anti-Trump Republicans, the Justice Department, public schools, librarians, trans people, climate activists, city-dwellers, people of color, people who want abortions, people who believe in vaccines, companies that pursue diversity and inclusion -- are the infidels.

WHY AREN'T PUNDITS PROPOSING A "UNITY" SPEAKER NOW?

A new session of Congress begins today. In the House, things don't look great for Mike Johnson:

Speaker Mike Johnson is facing an alarming revolt from conservative hardliners....

Johnson has a tenuous single-digit majority, while a dozen hardliners have publicly questioned whether he deserves to remain speaker.

... It’s entirely possible that Johnson could lose the speakership today or this weekend, or that the balloting goes more than one round.

If there's no Speaker by Monday, Congress can't ratify the election of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. And if the impasse continues for another two weeks, what happens?

If there is still no speaker, no functioning House, and no certification by Inauguration Day on Jan. 20, then the new GOP-controlled Senate’s president pro-tempore, 91-year-old Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), would become president, according to the presidential line of succession.

I suspect Republicans will either elect Johnson today or resolve their differences by January 20 -- but the fact that they might not has the Washington press corps talking.

But here's something no one in the press is suggesting: that the House should elect a compromise "unity" Speaker, chosen by a mix of Democrats and Republicans.

This is a completely unrealistic outcome, obviously. But imagine if the parties were reversed. Imagine an alternate 2024 election in which a Democrat won the presidency with a popular-vote margin of less than 2 points and Democrats had a tiny majority in the House. Now imagine that angry Democratic progressives threatened not to vote to give Speaker Hakeem Jeffries a majority, and there appeared to be no compromise candidate who could win the necessary 218 votes.

Under those circumstances, every mainstream pundit in America would be recommending that the House choose a candidate who wasn't beholden to the Democrats. Maybe it would be a House Republican perceived as being middle-of-the-road. Maybe -- because the Constitution doesn't require the Speaker of the House to be a member of the House -- it would be a wild-card figure like retiring senator Mitt Romney or a plutocrat like Jamie Dimon. So many names would be bandied about: Liz Cheney! Elon Musk! Andrew Yang! Anyone but a Democrat in good standing, because Democrats are icky. Everyone in Washington agrees on that, including Democrats.

No pundit is proposing a "unity" Speaker now because, according to conventional wisdom, Republicans are entitled to their partisanship and extremism. Democrats are incessantly accused of extremism, even though, in the aggregate, their party is cautious and centrist, while Republican extremism is just accepted as a fact of life, like the weather -- you can't change it, obviously. Republicans battle over the speakership on a regular basis, but the tone of the media coverage is always Oh look, more GOP infighting. It's never When will the GOP abandon this offputting extremism and tack to the center, where the majority of the American people are?

The reasons for the double standard are obvious: The small handful of Democratic leftists challenge the interests of billionaires, while Republican far-rightists don't. Also, the nerdy, bespectacled members of the press corps admire right-wing extremism, which they associate with the rugged frontier manliness they hate themselves for lacking.

Even if this fight goes on for weeks, or is repeated several times over the next two years, the press will never scold Republicans and demand that they abandon their own ideology. That treatment is for Democrats only.

IMPERFECT INFORMATION-GHAZI!

Right-wing media figures and influencers have a thousand different ways of making the Republican base angry at their enemies. One important way of making the rubes angry is by accusing the enemies of dishonesty and bad faith just for doing their jobs in an environment where all the facts aren't known.

Twitchy rounded up several outraged X posts that accused the Associated Press of disinformation merely for saying that a Tesla Cybertruck caught on fire in Las Vegas on New Year's morning:

On no planet did the Tesla truck simply “catch fire”

It was loaded up with explosives & detonated@AP, you’ve navigated the frontiers of NY Times v. Sullivan for far too long

This is defamation, and it’s a actionable here—even from a public figure like @elonmusk

Good luck!🧨 https://t.co/oU3ejfk18c

— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) January 2, 2025

They just can't report the truth of events. They can't simply just publish what happened. Not even once. https://t.co/91RXqN299m

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) January 2, 2025

But in the original version of the story, AP did "simply just publish what happened" as far as its reporters knew. The vehicle did catch fire and explode. At the time, AP said, "No cause was given and details were sketchy." Even Eric Trump tweeted that this was "a reported electric vehicle fire." But it's important to keep topping up the base's level of rage, so Elon Musk tweeted that AP should be called "Associated Propaganda."

A Hot Air post collects other tweets that accuse multiple news organizations of disinformation for reporting what they knew when this was a breaking and imperfectly understood story:

BREAKING: Media headlines are misleading audiences, suggesting the Cybertruck caught fire or exploded due to a malfunction.

The truth is that explosives were placed in the back and intentionally detonated, likely as part of a terrorist act. Don’t fall for the misinformation. pic.twitter.com/19f1jmtwxS

— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) January 2, 2025

The Cybertruck literally saved lives in Las Vegas today. The local police department confirmed it.

Then the mainstream media writes headlines that make a terrorist attack look like Tesla’s fault.

This is dishonest and shameful.
We need a way to community note these authors. pic.twitter.com/yXhlrqZuia

— Penny2x (@imPenny2x) January 2, 2025

It should be noted that Cybertrucks have actually been known to catch fire, and that there have been so many reports of Tesla vehicles catching fire that the dedicated website tesla-fire.com has documented 232 such incidents.

In the other major terrorist incident on New Year's Day, in New Orleans, right-wingers were told to be outraged at the FBI because it hesitated before declaring the incident an act of terrorism. Early reports told us:

LaToya Cantrell, the mayor of New Orleans, described the incident as a "terrorist attack." The FBI said it wasn't yet using that term.

The FBI called the attack an act of terror later that day. But that wasn't good enough for right-wing rabble-rousers such as this leader of the British far right...

ADMIN POST.

FBI; "This is not a terrorist event". pic.twitter.com/gJMraU2zwv

— Tommy Robinson 🇬🇧 (@TRobinsonNewEra) January 1, 2025

... or this former Ted Cruz communications aide:

The FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge who initially said the attack in New Orleans was not a terrorist attack is playing weird language games.

Why say the FBI is "investigating this as an attack of terrorism" & not use the colloquial and plain English term terrorist attack? pic.twitter.com/OQLbsWOr32

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) January 1, 2025

News organizations and the FBI are being accused of dishonesty and bad faith for reporting on partial information in an obviously good-faith way. Meanwhile, America's president-elect and his allies have linked the two terrorist incidents to immigration, even though the culprits in both cases were born in America. CNN reports:

During the 10 a.m. hour on Wednesday, Fox reported that the New Orleans suspect’s truck crossed the US border in Eagle Pass, Texas “two days ago.” Some of the right-wing network’s coverage explicitly said “the suspect” drove across the border, leaving viewers with the impression that a foreigner might be responsible for the deadly carnage.

In fact, the New Orleans attack suspect was a US citizen and Army veteran. But those facts weren’t publicly established at the time Fox aired the faulty information.

Eight minutes after the first Fox segment that mentioned the border, Trump issued a statement about “criminals coming in” from other countries....

Some of Trump’s family members and political allies also immediately connected the attack to illegal immigration and cited Fox.

“Biden’s parting gift to America — migrant terrorists,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote, sharing the Fox claim on X. “Shut the border down!!!” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene exclaimed.

(Both of those tweets are still up as I write this.)

As the CNN story notes, Fox reported this incorrect information -- for whatever reason -- without fact-checking it:

Fox tried to walk back its incorrect report about an hour and a half later. The network said the truck used in the attack was actually in Eagle Pass nearly two months ago, not two days ago. More importantly, the truck was being driven by someone else at that time – it was available on the car rental app Turo – so the detail about the border was completely irrelevant.

But the damage was done. References to Eagle Pass continued to spread across social media. Fox continued to stream a clip on its website of the incorrect information. “Some Republicans continued to beat the border drum well after Fox News retracted its initial report,” The Daily Beast’s Josh Fiallo reported.

But Trump continues to rabble-rouse about "open borders":

Oh, but Trump and Fox are allowed to mangle the truth -- no one expects them to have standards, right? Meanwhile, when mainstream news organizations tell us only what they know, they're branded as liars, and there's more overall anger in America about their conscientiousness than about Trump's flagrant dishonesty.

BRAD SPAFFORD MIGHT HAVE BEEN DREAMING OF A TERRORIST ATTACK, BUT AT GATEWAY PUNDIT, HE'S JUST A PATRIOTIC AMERICAN

On a New Year's Day when we're waking up to reports that a man killed ten people when he drove a vehicle into crowds on Bourbon Street in New Orleans last night, there's another disturbing story about a possible would-be terrorist:

A Virginia man was arrested this month with what federal prosecutors described in court papers on Monday as the largest cache of “finished explosive devices” ever found in the F.B.I.’s history.

The man, Brad Spafford, was taken into custody at a farm outside Norfolk on Dec. 17 on the basis of a single-count criminal complaint accusing him of illegally possessing an unregistered short-barrel rifle. When investigators searched his 20-acre property, in Isle of Wight County, they found in a detached garage more than 150 explosive devices — mostly pipe bombs, some of them labeled “lethal,” prosecutors said.

They found more pipe bombs in a bedroom inside Mr. Spafford’s house, loosely stuffed in a backpack that bore a patch shaped like a hand grenade and a logo reading “#NoLivesMatter,” prosecutors said.

No Lives Matter is a nihilistic, far-right ideology that largely exists on encrypted online messaging apps like Telegram. The movement’s adherents promote “targeted attacks, mass killings and criminal activity” and have “historically encouraged members to engage in self-harm and animal abuse,” according to a threat assessment released in August by the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness.

It's hard to know what if anything Spafford was planning to do, but there's this:

... the investigation into Mr. Spafford began last year, after a neighbor reached out to the authorities. Mr. Spafford had lost three fingers on his right hand while working with a homemade explosive device, the neighbor said, and he was stockpiling weapons and homemade ammunition.

The neighbor reported that Mr. Spafford had told him that he and his friends were “preparing for something” that he “would not be able to do alone,” the court papers said.

The neighbor also told investigators that Mr. Spafford sometimes used photographs of President Biden for target practice at a local shooting range and believed that “political assassinations should be brought back.” After the attempt on President-elect Donald J. Trump’s life in Pennsylvania in July, the papers said, Mr. Spafford told his neighbor that he “hoped the shooter doesn’t miss Kamala,” an apparent reference to Vice President Kamala Harris.

The New Jersey report on No Lives Matter (NLM) finds ties to global groups that want to use violence to spread chaos:

* In July 2024, NLM shared a post on its Telegram channel to announce a partnership with Mordwaffen Division (MWD)—a European neo-Nazi group—stating “NLM x MWD deadly alliance” and “Support your local nazi terrorists.” In 2023, NLM partnered with a Russia-based WRME [white racially motivated extremist] group, Maniac Murder Cult (abbreviation MKU based on Russian translation) to co-author the NLM Kill Guide, which provided attack tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). Several pages in the guide reference MKU, calling the group its “brothers in arms” and stating “NLM x MKU we can strike anywhere, at any time.”

* In June 2024, NLM released two extremist publications called the Terror Guide and the Manhunt Guide, both of which provide TTPs for members to “sharpen” their skills.” The Terror Guide includes instructions for making poison and constructing various improvised explosive devices. The guide also provides operational security (OPSEC) practices, weapons preferences, fighting techniques, and instructions for “manhunting” victims. The Manhunt Guide provides additional tactical guidance and OPSEC techniques while providing “manhunt requirements” such as recording “brutal” beatings.

(By the way, "Mordwaffe" means "murder weapon" in German.)

In a post about all this, Digby links to a long and informative report from West Point's Countering Terrorism Center (which I'm guessing Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will seek to eliminate). The report focuses on MKU (which it transliterates as MKY) and its links to No Lives Matter, the Mordwaffen Division, a group called 764 that engages in online sexual extortion (although No Lives Matter has now dissociated itself from 764), and Satanist/neo-Nazi groups such as the Order of Nine Angles. This is a very deep rabbit hole, but I'll give you just a small taste of what's in the West Point report:

M.K.Y. has published three ideological and instructional “handbooks”....

The third edition of the Haters Handbook officially stated that an alliance had been formed between M.K.Y. and NLM (No Lives Matter). Chapter 8 of this edition is titled “Weapons of Anarchy” and contains a compilation of previous instructional materials disseminated by M.K.Y. Included in this compilation is a version of the document “NLM Terror Guide,” now named “MMC/NLM Murder Guide.” This guide contains a section titled “Just Terror Tactics Truck Attacks.” ... The second tactic described in the guide is how to carry out attacks with bladed or blunt weapons....

NLM acts as the English language hub of M.K.Y., seeking to recruit and mobilize individuals from the English-speaking world. NLM has published three original instructional manuals in English, as well as many translated M.K.Y. documents.

The Sweden Herald reported in September that "At least eight attacks in Hässelby in western Stockholm can be linked" to "the Swedish part of 764 and its subgroup NLM (No lives matter)," including the stabbing of an 80-year-old man by a 14-year-old boy.

Is it possible that Spafford was planning something like this? I went to Gateway Pundit and learned that, unsurprisingly, the commenters there don't care -- they think the authorities are acting like totalitarians, while Spafford is just an ordinary American citizen exercising his fundamental human rights:

... Since when is a short barreled gun illegal? And registering arms? WTF is that all about?

Last I checked the 2nd Amendment hasn't been repealed. Every single thing this guy owned was legal, if the Constitution still means anything.

And the FBI says he was using political figure X for target practice. Still no violation of any law.

Disband the FBI now!

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Yeah and them freaking out about him making 50 rounds of ammo per day. Seriously. You shoot way more than that going to the range. And when has it become illegal to stockpile ammo? Ever since the ammo shortage during the Obama years many people do this just to avoid being caught flat footed if there is another shortage.

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If you have 25 freedom tools and 500 to 1000 rounds for each, which is normal, you are deemed a threat to society?

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Except for the pipe bombs...I see no problems.

A commenter named Jack knows who's really at fault:

Sounds like a case of Judeo-Bolsheviks trying to disarm the peasants

AFT head Steve Berkowitz Dettelbach 🔯

FBI reports into AG Merrick Horowitz Garland 🔯

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I don't believe a damn thing the media says either

Remember that BOTH sides are controlled by the minority that drove Bolshevism/World Communism

Did they take over the media for the good of the peasants -- or to enslave them?

No commenter pushes back on this. At Gateway Pundit, this is perfectly acceptable discourse.

It's hard to know whether Spafford was on the verge of engaging in a terrorist attack or was merely a garden-variety wingnut weapon hoarder. But it's a good idea for the authorities to look into him if he's violating laws. Nevertheless, much of the right believes that it's categorically impossible for a right-wing gun owner to commit an illegal act -- and the incoming Trump administration will probably agree.