A hard-charging, uncompromisingly conservative faction

My Sunday movie was the documentary Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story. Reeve is best known for being the title character in the Superman movies of the 1970s and ‘80s. When he said he was going to that audition his acting friends thought he was selling out. The first one rocketed him to stardom. The fourth was forgettable. But he did a lot more than that. In one film (maybe two) he played a gay character. The one I know about was Deathtrap, which is a thriller (or dark comedy) and I remember seeing after it was released in 1982 and made its way to TV. He also played gay in a stage production (I didn’t get the name) which annoyed some people that Superman would stoop to that. The other thing he was well known for was a horse riding accident in 1995 that left him paralyzed from the neck down. He lived another nine years totally dependent on others. He still managed to do a lot. Growing up he had a messy home life that did not show a healthy marriage and ended in divorce. He had a father who was hard to please. From both of those he found relief in theater. When filming Superman he met Gae Exton, who became mother to his children Matthew and Alexandra. They never married and after a while the relationship fell apart. Months later he met Dana who became the mother of son Will (who now looks a lot like his father) and became his wife. Will Reeve is in the film industry as an actor and producer. Dana made sure to include Matthew and Alexandra as part of the family. Reeve saw how a marriage should work. He was roommates with Robin Williams in acting school (Julliard?) and they were lifelong friends. After the accident Williams was able to get Reeve to laugh and he knew life would be okay. Reeve used his stardom to gain access as an advocate. After the accident he became an advocate for those paralyzed, creating the Christopher Reeve Foundation to raise money for paralysis research. He wanted to find a cure. Dana wanted to improve the care of those paralyzed. Before the accident Reeve was quite active. After that he realized what was important wasn’t the activity but the relationship. That deepened with his kids. I very much enjoyed the film and recommend it. Christopher Reeve was a hero both on and off the screen. An article by Kavitha Surana for ProPublica and posted on Daily Kos discussed Emily Waldorf and her miscarriage and its complications, made worse because she lives in Arkansas. She was caught in limbo, her body started the miscarriage but over several days couldn’t complete it. In the meantime her uterus was open to infection. But doctors said they could do nothing until the fetal heartbeat ended, she went into labor, or she showed signs of dangerous infection. When doctors told her they could not treat her she started keeping notes of her experience. Texas modified its rules around abortion and miscarriage to say Waldorf’s situation is one where evacuating the uterus was medically necessary. Arkansas and many of the others that ban abortion haven’t done the same. Other women with this complication have died. Waldorf lived to tell the story, though resolving her case required a four hour ambulance trip to Kansas, were abortion is legal. There her uterus could be emptied. The whole thing left her with $147,000 in medical costs, which includes $5,000 for the ambulance ride. She worked at the hospital that refused to treat her. She did go back after he medical leave was over and quit a month later. No doctor has yet been sued under the abortion ban. But the hospital lawyers are way too wary of over eager prosecutors. To me they aren’t sufficiently concerned about malpractice. Eleanor Klibanoff, in an article for The Texas Tribune posted on Kos, explains how the nasty guy has transformed the Republican Party in Texas (and elsewhere). There was a lot of news recently about the nasty guy endorsing Ken Paxton for US Senate over incumbent John Cornyn, which Paxton won big. The story is enough Republican voters are loyal to the nasty guy to vote for whoever he says to vote for and get the results he wants. But Klibanoff wrote the dynamics began before the nasty guy appeared a decade ago. Before MAGA there was the Tea Party (remember them?), which formed the ground from which MAGA arose.

Once led by chamber of commerce conservatives who preached small government and big business, the Texas Republican Party has been conquered over the last 15 years by a hard-charging, uncompromisingly conservative faction, operating on the vanguard of the nation’s culture wars and driven by a sense of perpetual insurgency.

Since then there has been a power struggle in the party where “the hardliners, who paint themselves as the perennial underdogs, just keep winning.” The nasty guy cultivated candidates who were “aggressive, ideological, proudly politically incorrect and, above all, loyal.” And voters keep voting for them. Oliver Willis of Kos, as part of his series Explaining the Right delves into why Republicans continue to support the nasty guy.

For decades, the conservative media ecosystem primed these voters for a political figure like Trump. Right-wing talk radio, news sites, and especially Fox News have beamed propaganda into millions of American homes. Trump, an avid watcher of Fox News, learned what many other Republicans struggled with: that conservatives are extraordinarily responsive to messages that echo what they hear as part of their daily media diet. While other Republicans tend to focus on conservative policy issues, Trump has focused on the red meat of the right. This means snappy, punchy, insulting, bigoted statements and the like.

Voters want to continue with candidates ready with the insult rather than supporting the party establishment. So what the party does when the nasty guy can no longer be on the ballot is an open question. At the moment Republican candidates are sticking as tightly as they can to the nasty guy.

Right now, the most prudent path for Republicans probably seems to be the pro-Trump lane, but the writing is already on the wall. Voters have been rejecting Trumpism in droves. And the odds are it will hurt them in the long run.

That is American voters who are rejecting the nasty guy and all he’s been doing. Republican voters still vote for their man. Stephen Fowler of NPR went to a Republican rally in Iowa and reported on what he heard there. Most of the speakers Fowler featured did the usual thing that all good stuff comes from Republicans and all bad stuff comes from Democrats. What caught my attention is the anger coming off one speaker. The anger level was so high I wanted to cringe and cower. Alas, since the transcript doesn’t portray the anger I can’t tell which one it was (and I’m not listening to it again). In today’s pundit roundup Greg Dworkin of Kos quoted Lawrence Winnerman of Blue Amp discussing what is actually happening in the American economy. He says it is worse than a recession.

We are running an economy this week on the country we were in February. The shelves still look mostly normal. The shipping bays still seem mostly full. The cargo still appears mostly on time where it is supposed to appear. None of this is the world we are actually living in. We are spending down the last inventory of the country we used to have and we are spending it down on a clock. Inventory is mercy. Inventory is the cushion the world leaves you between the moment a thing breaks and the moment you feel it break. The blast wave is real, but the blast wave is also delayed by the length of a supply chain, by the contents of a warehouse, by the days it takes a tanker to cross an ocean. We have this week the strange privilege of standing inside the cushion. We will not have that privilege for long.

Lisa Needham of Kos wrote about the recent legal issues of the nasty guy and his minions. A pair of them caught my attention. The first of the pair is acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and his handling of the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case. The Campaign for Accountability decided there’s enough unethical stuff in Blanche’s actions they’ve filed a complaint with the bar of New York. The second of the pair is Blanche’s predecessor and former boss Pam Bondi. She’s facing a bar complaint in Florida. And she no longer has the protection of being a member of the president’s cabinet. This here blog has set another record in viewership with 313,818 views during May! That is 76% higher than the previous record of 177,760 set in April. Just a few days ago the daily viewership hit 29,010, also setting a record. As I mentioned last month the viewership is now quite broad. Blogger shows me the top 19 countries (“Other” is the 20th) and over the last seven days every one of those countries has had at least 1,860 views. That one is Tunisia. At the top of the list is Brazil at 12,878 views, Bangladesh at 6,000 views, Iraq at 5,704 views, and Vietnam at 5,234 views before we get to the US at 4,762 views. Other is at 39.8K views, so there are at least 21 more countries that have viewed this blog over the last week.

Cultural decadence, feminism, and ladies with too many cats

An Associated Press article posted on Daily Kos reported:

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper in Washington, D.C., ruled that the Kennedy Center board’s March 16 vote to close the facility was “ill-informed and seemingly preordained” with no regard for its legal obligations. “The trustees might have assessed the propriety of closure in a number of prudent ways. This was not one,” he wrote. Cooper also concluded that the board “overstepped its statutory bounds” by unilaterally adding Trump’s name to the center. Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it, he said.

The board will appeal. They also said the Center really does need renovations (though I’m sure the place probably doesn’t need to close for two years to do them and doesn’t need to expose the building’s steel skeleton in the process). In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Lauren Gepford wrote in her own Substack about the Democratic Party:

We keep treating every election loss like a communications failure or a leadership failure when the deeper reality is that the Democratic Party apparatus itself no longer functions coherently enough to sustain a strong national brand. The “party brand” problem still deserves the #1 spot it held a decade ago. But branding isn’t just slogans and ads. A political brand is the external expression of an institution’s internal reality. And right now, the internal reality of the Democratic Party is fragmentation, bureaucracy, process obsession, and organizational incoherence. I spent 16 years in Democratic politics, from volunteering for Obama in 2008 to serving as a state party executive director and later executive director of a national party-aligned organization that coordinated with 40+ state parties and 500+ local parties in 2024. Somewhere along that journey, I lost about 90% of my clarity around what the Democratic Party actually is, what it means, and what its purpose is supposed to be — and that’s a problem.

The Bulwark has an article about Ken Paxton winning big in the Texas primary for the US Senate over incumbent John Cornyn.

This result came as a heavy blow to anyone still carrying a hopeful torch for some unsullied original-flavor Republican party to reemerge from the ashes of Trumpism. Believe it or not, these people are still out there; some of them are even senators themselves. For a decade now, these senators have clung frantically to the idea that, if they just stick with Trump for now, eventually he’ll ride off into the sunset and leave them in control of their own party again. And in the meantime, sticking with Trump had its direct benefits: It seemed for a while like a bulletproof shield against grassroots-insurgent primary challenges. You couldn’t find a better poster child for the accommodationist approach that the GOP Senate old guard took than Big John.

Dana Dubois of Blue Amp discussing the nasty guy’s administration calling on women to have more babies. Yes, the birth rate is way down and the nation has an interest to maintain a healthy birth rate.

And yet, here we are. Teen pregnancy rates are down, and Republicans think it’s a bad thing. Young adults are delaying marriage and parenthood. And rather than asking why Americans might feel hesitant about bringing children into this particular moment in history, the pronatalist MAGA right has decided the problem is cultural decadence, feminism, career women, and ladies with too many cats. Women need to log off Slack, put on prairie dresses, go full tradwife and start making babies again, I guess. Except many young Americans are having the exact opposite reaction. And can you blame them? If you wanted to design a society specifically engineered to make people feel terrified of parenthood, you would probably build something pretty close to modern America.

Kos of Kos discussed how weak the nasty guy is, including politically. Kos then highlighted stories from the week that show how deep that weakness is. He concludes:

Trump doesn’t care about Americans’ financial struggles. He doesn’t care about his party’s political future. He doesn’t seem particularly concerned with governing. He cares only about grifting and building monuments to himself. Republicans are trapped following a weak, feeble, self-absorbed man who mistakes loyalty for leadership and ego for strength. They can’t possibly suffer enough because of it.

In an article that’s been hiding in my browser tabs since last September Alex Samuels of Kos discussed why so many Republican voters think the nasty guy is more liberal than he is. Samuels establishes how not liberal he is. This blog has been doing the same for years and hundreds of posts.

And yet, a sizable share of Republicans still see Trump very differently. A late August YouGov poll shows just how off the mark GOP voters are about his record. According to the survey, 35% of Republicans think Trump supports raising the minimum wage, 45% believe he backs stronger worker protections, 26% say he favors higher corporate taxes, and just 29% think he’d raise taxes on the wealthy.

I wonder how much those numbers have changed in the last nine months. In contrast, Democrats and independents have a much more accurate view of the nasty guy. Samuels quoted polls that support that. Whether or not they agree with a position a Democratic politician takes they tend to know what that position is.

So why the misperception? Grant Reeher, a professor of political science at Syracuse University, said it comes down to polarization and “expressive bias.” “I imagine what’s happening among many Republicans is that they start with the notion that they are supporters of Trump,” Reeher told Daily Kos. “Then, when they are asked what he wants to do in those specific policy areas, they choose what they would like to see happen, and assume that’s also what Trump wants to do, because they support Trump.” That’s the polarization effect at work. Expressive bias takes it further. Popular policies—like raising the minimum wage or taxing corporations—are often attributed to Trump by Republicans who want to reinforce their support.

Rheeler also said some supporters may make a connection that doesn’t exist, such assuming if the nasty guy supports this thing he also supports that. And that whole bit about the 2020 election being stolen wasn’t about belief in fraud but about signaling allegiance.

That’s what makes Republicans’ perception of Trump so revealing. If GOP voters truly believe he’s more liberal than he is, it suggests two things: Either Republicans want policies like higher wages and stronger worker protections but don’t realize Trump opposes them, or they don’t know enough about his record to notice the gap between rhetoric and reality.

So perhaps Republicans should be for higher wages and stronger worker protections too? Most voters don’t understand the details of issues and don’t know how the policies of the two major parties differ. That means there is room for misperceptions and loyalty. Also from last September Michel Martin of NPR spoke to Jeff Selingo. He’s been reporting on college admissions and compiled it into the book Dream School: Finding The College That's Right For You. Martin said she had applied to four schools. Selingo said he had done the same. So why are people now applying to 30 schools? Selingo said:

Well, I've worked in and around higher ed for nearly 30 years, and I could say this with certainty that we kind of lost our way. We don't think about purpose anymore in higher ed. We think about prestige. And so what's happened just in the last 20 years is that the number of applications filed to the most selective colleges and universities have gone from about 600,000 applications to nearly 2 million applications.

This is even though the size of the freshman class has stayed the same. Selingo’s point then is to say the most prestigious college may not be the best for a particular student. They may enjoy, learn more, and be supported more at a less selective college. What caught my attention in the discussion is students and parents are looking at the college or university in terms of prestige, in how it improves their place in the social hierarchy, instead of for the education.

Sick of religion being used as a cloaking device for hate

I hadn’t heard much of John Fugelsang. I had to look him up to know he’s “an American actor, comedian, writer, television host, political commentator, and television personality” as his Wikipedia page describes him. I followed a link to his Substack to see his comments on Holy Hypocrites, also known as Christian Nationalists.

But nothing says “We worship Jesus, not idols” quite like unveiling a giant gold statue of a reality TV billionaire felon politician at a golf resort. Somewhere Book of Exodus just filed a copyright infringement claim. These same folks who’ve spent years screaming about the “War on Christmas,” just built the Golden Calf Expanded Universe near the 18th hole buffet. I saw this two days ago, and I’m still recovering from an overdose of metaphor. It’s like a deleted scene from the Fall of Rome.

Towards the bottom of the post is a photo of the statue. Fugelsang concluded his short rant with a parody of something Christians will recognize:

The Lard’s Prayer: Our Ruler, Who Art in Florida, Branded be thy name. Thy kingdom, dumb Thy cabinet, scum Thy girth, size fifty-seven. Give us this day our bigly bread; And give us our guest-passes, As we trespass against those who look more defenseless; And lead us now, to more inflation, But deliver us from feminists; Yay Men.

The source of the original link also linked to Fugelsang’s book, which looks like it might be a fun yet important read. The title is Separation of Church and Hate, a Sane Person’s Guide to Taking Back the Bible from Fundamentalists, Fascists, and Flock-Fleecing Frauds. From the book’s publisher description:

For more than two centuries, the United States Constitution has given us the right to a society where church and state exist independently. But Christianity has been hijacked by far-right groups and politicians who seek to impose their narrow views on government, often to justify oppressive and unequal policies. The extremists who weaponize the Bible for earthly power aren’t actually on the side of Jesus—and historically they never have been. How do we fight back against those acting—literally—in bad faith? ... But Fugelsang’s message is about more than just taking down hypocrites. It’s about fighting for the love, mercy, and service that are supposed to make up the heart of Christianity. Told with Fugelsang’s trademark blend of radical honesty, comedy, and deep political and religious knowledge, Separation of Church and Hate is the book every American needs today. It’s a rallying cry for compassion and clarity for anyone of any faith who’s sick of religion being used as a cloaking device for hate.

Emily Singer of Daily Kos reported on news of the nasty guy’s “anti-weaponization fund” to pay Capitol attackers who were convicted of their crimes. A slush fund. The news is that both California and New York are saying that the tax on any slush fund payout will be 100%. Democratic members of Congress are trying to pass such a provision, but they know it won’t go far, so states, at least blue states, are stepping in.

On Tuesday, New York state Assembly Member Alex Bores—who is currently running for Congress—introduced the New York Anti-Insurrectionist Act to fight the “slush fund created by a lawless president.” “It’s simple, if you’re a New Yorker and you take from this illegal slush fund, New York state will tax 100% of it,” Bores said Tuesday in a post on X. “If you storm the Capitol and you take from this slush fund, too bad we’re taking it.” ... “We can’t stop Trump from breaking the law in Washington. But we can decide that in New York, money you got for attacking American democracy is fully taxable,” Bores told NBC News.

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California is now saying the same thing. An Associated Press article posted on Kos reports:

A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s administration from paying any claims through a new $1.776 billion settlement fund for the Republican president’s allies who believe they were victims of a weaponized government. U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, also barred the government from moving forward with the fund’s creation while litigation is pending to challenge it.

Oliver Willis of Kos wrote:

According to The New York Times, government data and assessments by experts in drug trafficking show that the Trump administration’s fight against “narco-terrorism” is a dud.

The nasty guy and the war nasty said they were bombing boats to stop the flow of drugs to the US. But the street price hasn’t changed, meaning the supply of cocaine and other drugs hasn’t changed. So the attacks, which have killed people, have accomplished nothing in protecting US citizens. We’re not surprised. In Britain Alan Milburn published interim findings of his government-commissioned review into British youth unemployment. It said that the youth unemployment rate stands at 16.2%, higher than at the peak of the pandemic. Beyond that there are 957,000 (almost a million) youth who are NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training). 84% of them want a job or to be in training. They have essentially stopped looking for work or trying to get into a training program. The reason is the disappearance of entry-level jobs and a big drop in apprenticeships. Employers want work experience and there is no way to get that without entry-level jobs.

Meanwhile the government is spending £25 on benefits for every £1 it spends on helping young people into work. The system is optimised for managing the consequences of youth unemployment, not preventing it.

This is creating a lost generation. In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted an article in Politico talking of the consequences of Ken Paxton winning the Republican nomination for US Senator from Texas.

“It means that $100 million will have to go to bail out the Texas seat instead of helping win seats in Maine, Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina and elsewhere,” said the person, who, like many others in this article, was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “Last night will go down as one of the worst self-inflicted political wounds of all-time.” “No one is happier than Democrats. Even if Paxton holds the seat — as is likely, though not guaranteed — donor funds will be diverted from critical races,” a second GOP donor concurred. “And Cornyn, one of the Republicans’ best fundraisers, will be sidelined.”

David Graham of The Atlantic:

The situation demonstrates a few reasons that Trump is such a bad negotiator. My colleagues Tom Nichols and Robert Kagan have all written illuminating articles on the specific failures inherent or likely in any deal with Iran. But the incident also shows the structural problems with the president’s approach. First, Trump is unprepared. Some effective presidents (Dwight Eisenhower, George H. W. Bush) came to the White House with a history of deep engagement in public affairs and foreign relations, which made them ready to handle sensitive foreign negotiations. Others brought a formidable work ethic and a ruthless intellect (Barack Obama, Bill Clinton). Both types surround themselves with smart advisers whose input they take seriously. Trump is 0 for 3 on these conditions, which is one reason he wrote off the risk of Iran closing the strait in the first place: He both surrounds himself with less qualified aides than past presidents did and refuses to heed their counsel. The same failure of preparation extends to the frontline negotiators. Even after many of its top officials were killed in the war, Iran has maintained a hard-nosed corps of diplomats who have long been involved in foreign policy. Trump, by contrast, has dispatched a real-estate pal and his nepo-baby son-in-law. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, perhaps the best informed of Trump’s aides, has been largely invisible.

Another AP article on Kos reported:

In the next five years, the Earth is overwhelmingly likely to surge again and again past the international climate threshold set as safe and shatter its hottest-year record along the way, according to new United Nations climate projections. The World Meteorological Organization also forecasts an overheating Arctic that warms nearly 3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.66 degrees Celsius) between now and 2030 and a dangerous drought with potential wildfires for the Amazon, a crucial part of Earth’s natural defenses to lessen human-caused climate change. A hotter globe from the burning of coal, oil and gas means more extreme weather including floods, droughts and heat waves, scientists said. ... There’s a 91% chance that at least one of the next five years will shoot past the 1.5 degree threshold and an 86% chance that one of those years will smash the record for Earth’s hottest year set in 2024, the WMO report said.

The article also commented on the Arctic warming faster than the rest of the planet and that the forecast is for warmer and unusually dry conditions in the Amazon basin, leading to wildfires. The region that serves as the world’s lungs, that does the most to pull in carbon dioxide and push out oxygen, might be choked and damaged by smoke and making the whole problem worse. All this will affect the food supply. Back at the end of April, a week after Earth Day, Meteor Blades, Kos emeritus, posted about the Earth Day release of the World Meteorological Organization and the U.N. Food & Agriculture Organization, jointly released a new report — Extreme Heat and Agriculture. Blades titled his discussion of the report “‘Extreme Heat and Agriculture’ report released on Earth Day got less attention than the dumbest Truth™ Social post last week.” The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has now issued six assessments of the climate. The first came out in 1990. By the fourth report in 2007 it started saying global warming is affecting the world’s agriculture now. There is hope (at least a little) that this latest report won’t get put on a shelf. Some numbers from the report: Crop yields drop sharply in the heat. For many crops the threshold is 30C (86F). Livestock productivity and survival drop in the heat. Heat disrupts fisheries. Agriculture workers face health risks in the heat. Blades wrote:

As noted, many staple crop species begin seeing yield declines above roughly 30°C, with some, of course, more sensitive than others. Heat can interrupt pollination, accelerate maturation before grain development, increase water demand, and invite pests whose geographical ranges expand in warmer conditions. But for livestock, thermal stress commonly begins above 25°C (77°F), and at even lower temperatures for pigs and poultry, which cool themselves poorly. The consequences include reduced eating, slower growth, reduced fertility, reduced milk production, and death in severe episodes. One analysis found milk yields fell half a percent for every hour cows were exposed to high heat stress, with effects lingering for days. ... Labor, a topic often erased from food discussions, gets some focus in the report, too. Agricultural workers are among the most exposed people on Earth: long hours outdoors, limited protections, and little bargaining power. In some already hot regions, the report asserts that days unsafe for outdoor work may climb to 250 annually before the end of this century. Think about the cruelty embedded in that statistic. The people least responsible for emissions are asked to work inside the blast furnace those emissions built.

Brazil is a major food producer for the world. It is experiencing climate stress. If its productivity drops it will have a harder time feeding its own as a lot of food goes to export. (That reminds me of the Irish potato famine in the 1840s and the Holodomor in Ukraine in the 1930s – look them up!) Brazil is now a warning to the world.

Cut emissions fast. No adaptation strategy can keep pace with unchecked warming. Protect workers. Mandatory heat standards, paid breaks, hydration, cooling shelters, and enforcement. Build public resilience. Storage, irrigation efficiency, grids, extension services, and local processing. Democratize seed banks and research. Climate-resilient genetics should not be monopolized. Finance justice. Debt relief and grants for climate-hit nations. Diversify agriculture. Monocultures are profitable in spreadsheets and brittle in heatwaves.

Agricultural adaptation can happen with money. But at the moment it is poorly supported by those with money.