Giving a pardon to avoid a corrupt, incompetent freakshow

Dana Nessel, attorney general for Michigan, wrote an opinion piece in last Sunday’s Detroit Free Press. Her main point is that the nasty guy staffing his cabinet with people accused of sexual assault will mean two things. Assault survivors will be less likely to report the crime because they feel it won’t bring justice and reliving the trauma will be useless. And assault perpetrators will feel they have permission to attack again. Those who have been accused are Pete Hegseth, nominated for Defense, Robert Kennedy Jr, nominated for Health and Human Services, Matt Gaetz, nominated for Justice (yeah, he withdrew, but he was still nominated), and Linda McMahon, nominated for Education. McMahon isn’t accused of committing assault, but is accused of enabling abuse of children by employees of her organization. That got me thinking that in the mind of the nasty guy a sexual assault accusation is a bonus. As I’ve discussed several times the nasty guy is highly invested in the social hierarchy. He wants to be top dog and have no rivals. He wants there to be a huge difference between himself and the teeming masses and will oppress them to make that difference greater. The only people he will tolerate in his presence are those who profess their adoration. He has been convicted of sexual assault. In his mind being accused of sexual assault is a bright sign to say that person is also one highly invested in the hierarchy (otherwise they would not have committed assault). That makes them a strong candidate for his regime. It’s going to be a dreary future. Following similar logic... Oliver Willis of Daily Kos reported:

Donald Trump ran for president by selling the notion that he would be a fighter for working-class, blue-collar values. But he has selected a slew of obscenely wealthy people to help him run the government when he takes control in January—and their net worths are nowhere near the average American family’s.

The median family net worth in America is $192,700 and a lot own much less than that. Several of these nominees are billionaires. They are clueless about the issues most Americans face. This will be government by the billionaires, of the billionaires, and for the billionaires. An Associated Press article posted on Kos reports that Biden has pardoned his son Hunter for his conviction in a case of lying on a gun permit application and his guilty plea for tax charges. A lot of talking heads are saying but Biden said he wouldn’t pardon his son. Yeah, he did. Circumstances changed. A second AP article on Kos explains the pardon in more detail. It also mentions Biden’s reasoning:

In his statement Sunday, Biden said that his son had been “selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted.” Biden has been concerned—as Hunter Biden was—about his political adversaries. ... “No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son—and that is wrong. There has been an effort to break Hunter—who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me—and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”

Put another way Biden saw who the nasty guy was nominating to various Department of Justice jobs He knew the attacks on Hunter would continue. Better for Hunter and the rest of the family to stop it all now. In particular Biden saw, as Oliver Willis of Kos reported, that the nasty guy nominated Kash Patel to head the FBI. For Patel to take that spot the nasty guy would have to fire the current director Christopher Wray, whom the nasty guy installed in 2017 and whose ten year term is supposed to protect the agency for political meddling. The nasty guy has complained that Wray has followed the law too closely, authorizing investigations into the nasty guy and his minions. There are two big reasons why Patel got the nomination. The first reason is the statements Patel has been making.

Patel authored a memo arguing that it was disloyal for then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper to oppose a request by Trump to deploy military troops against American citizens protesting police violence against Black people. After Trump lost to President Joe Biden in 2020, Patel pushed lies about the election being stolen and argued that reporters debunking Trump’s election lies should be targeted by the government.

Yeah, he wants to go after reporters debunking Trump’s election lies. And he’s big on loyalty. The second reason is that Patel wrote a trilogy of children’s books that are nasty guy fan fiction. The first is The Plot Against the King with the plotter being Hillary Clinton. The second was the battle against Sleepy Joe and the third was against “Comma-la-la-la.” These books are definitely propaganda. Patel would definitely find reasons to continue prosecution and persecution of Hunter. As for actually running the FBI, who said anything about qualifications? There was lots of commentary that Biden pardoning his son gave permission for the nasty guy to pardon the insurrectionists. But he is going to do that anyway. In the comments of a pundit roundup exlrrp posted couple memes about Hunter and Patel. The first is by Keith Boykin:

President Biden has pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, and I would have done the same thing under the circumstances. If Trump can be elected as a convicted felon, I’d be damned if I let my own son go to prison for the sake of a principle that only one side believes in.

The other meme:

Biden did not pardon Hunter until he saw the corrupt, incompetent, conspiracy driven, freakshow that Trump was nominating for the DOJ. The media might want to mention that.

Lisa Needham of Kos discussed what would happen if Republicans succeeded in dismantling the Department of Education. To answer that Needham lists what the DoE does. Republicans don’t like the DoE believing the federal government shouldn’t tell states what to teach. Surprise, it doesn’t. The DoE hands out Title I funding for lower-income families, which pays for teacher salaries. Some of that goes to urban districts in blue states. More of it goes to rural districts in red states, with Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, and Arizona most dependent on Title I funding. So will Title I funding be eliminated or go to a department that doesn’t know what to do with it? Also in the DoE is the agency that delivers federal funding for students with special needs. That about 15% of all K-12 students, or 7.5 million students. Federal money is supposed to pay 40% of the cost for special education, but has always fallen short. And many states don’t cover as much as they should. What will happen to this? The DoE also oversees student civil rights. That includes the rights of LGBTQ students and students of color but much more goes for the rights of students with disabilities. These are not things other departments could easily pick up. Project 2025 calls for turning all that DoE money into block grants without strings. Then the states could do what they wanted with it – including shifting all of it to private schools. Republicans have a lot of angst over the DoE’s 4% of the federal budget. Which implies this isn’t about the money.

What gutting federal education funding and oversight will do, however, is widen the gaps between well-off and low-income families, between well-funded and struggling public schools, and between blue states and red states. Trump voters may have believed they were casting a vote to hurt woke liberals, but they likely hurt themselves and their children much more.

There’s that social hierarchy again with the desire to oppress those lower down. Gutting the DoE also means the oppressed are more open to the claim that in the natural order of the world they’re supposed to be oppressed. Prairiecrat of the Kos community discussed an article in Baptist News in which a gay ex-pastor of a Baptist church surveyed people who had left the Baptist denomination. Most of the reasons were related to a distaste for conservative politics and the accompanying attitudes. Another big reason was the nasty guy. Those who left saw the vast contradiction between what the nasty guy and conservative Christians said and did compared to what Jesus said and did. They saw Jesus showed love and these people showed racism, sexism, and greed.

Indeed, according to the 2023 PRRI Census of American Religion, in 2006, white Evangelical Protestants outnumbered white Mainline Protestants among the population by 23% to 17.8% — a gap of more than 5 points. As of last year the gap is down to 13.4% to 12.2% — just over 1 point. It’s true that non-white Evangelicals are making up for some of the decline in white Evangelicals, but Evangelical populations are still declining nonetheless. Expect that with 4 more years of Trumpism, this trend will accelerate.

Peter Twinklage posted a thread that he thinks explains why some Democrats outperformed Harris and won their seats. They championed progressive policies while using conservative cultural coding.

Ryan campaigned with AOC in the Hudson Valley but made a point to highlight his military service in every campaign ad. Gluesenkamp Perez co-sponsored a bill to protect medication abortion while constantly talking about her history as a flannel-clad car mechanic. Gallego never apologized for his tenure in the House Progressive Caucus but aggressively pursued male voters with soccer and boxing match watch parties. All of them spoke proudly in defense of queer Americans while also never condemning constituents who lacked the language to voice their concerns about certain issues in a politically correct fashion. Having grown up on a farm with a Fox News family, I think this is the way.

Concert season begins tomorrow. I’ll be posting much less over the next two weeks. I’ve already deleted a few browser tabs of things I know I won’t get to or will be out of date by the time I can write about them.