Promoting a proven hoax

I had a quiet Christmas with Sister and Niece, who came to visit for a few hours. We had a simple meal and talked, and not much beyond that. Haggard Hawks, who enjoys language facts, tweeted a thread about tidbits related to the song the Twelve Days of Christmas. For example:

The ‘four calling birds’ in the Twelve Days of Christmas were originally ‘colly birds’. COLLY is a dialect word meaning sooty or stained with coal dust, and is recorded in the 18th and 19th centuries as a nickname for a blackbird.

Lucy Saunders tweeted a thread of photos of a team of Star Wars Storm Trooper action figures assembling an artificial Christmas tree. Be sure to check out what the dolls in the background are doing. I finished the book Playing the Palace by Paul Rudnick. Back in June, I wrote that my bookstore had a table of LGBTQ books for Pride Month I saw two books of gay romance in which one of the couple was an American and the other was the openly gay crown prince of Britain. I bought one – this one – and later saw reviews saying the other one was better. Not that this one was bad. It was an enjoyable, breezy read that took only a few days to get through. Carter is the American. He works as an “event architect” – setting up and running whatever sort of event a customer might want to hold. He’s at the United Nations building in New York installing all the decorations for Prince Edgar’s speech. Edgar shows up early to practice that speech and Carter, with some acting in his background, gives Edgar some tips on how not to be so bland and boring. It proceeds as romance novels do, including the expected mishaps and ending. What makes one romance novel different from another is the setting and how that affects the characters. So there is discussion of what it is like to be a royal in England and how said royal is affected. It seemed real enough to me and I assume Rudnick did research with actual royal watchers to get details right. But I think he got one important detail wrong. Carter is staying at Buckingham Palace as Edgar introduces him to what his job entails and to get England used to them as a couple. Of course, many of those events go wrong (as in let’s see how many roadblocks the author can throw up). The night before one of these events, which turns into a climactic scene, Carter sneaks out of the palace. My reaction was nope, can’t happen. I’m sure the palace, with both the queen and crown prince in residence, has very tight security. Someone near the building exits or on the grounds (there is a reason why tourists can see the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace) would have seen him and either detained him or became his security detail (and by this time Carter is on a first-name basis with the prince’s personal team). Even if that night’s incident is allowed to happen that security detail would have been a witness, gotten more info on the perpetrators, and given a report to the prince and queen in the morning. Beyond that it was a cute story. And the idea that the crown prince, and eventually king, of Britain could be gay and be a trailblazer for LGBTQ and human rights is refreshing. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos discussed something that Drewtoothpaste uncovered – one way to track this pandemic is to chart the number of reviews on Amazon for Yankee Candles in which the reviewer says the candles have no scent. Yankee Candles are known to be highly scented, though there is debate on whether those scents are pleasing. December, with omicron rising, brought a fresh batch of bad reviews. Hunter of Kos, prompted by a report on CNN discussed that the Republican Party is now a fully fascist movement. That CNN report says that Republican candidates have near-unversally adopted the Big Lie. Hunter wrote that CNN is good at identifying the claims are false and at noting if a candidate admits the nasty guy lost the race he will lose his primary. But Hunter wrote that CNN missed the larger context, which Hunter supplied. The second paragraph of my quote is important.

The only reason to demand fealty to an abject hoax even after it has been proven, proven for all the world to see, that the hoax has resulted in violence and an attempted coup is because you believe the same violence and sedition may prove useful in the future. It would have cost the party not a damn thing to reject Trump's criminal farce after violent insurrection proved the party could not serve both his whims and their country, but they did not. Across the country, they repeat it. They endorse it. They look to use it in their own campaigns. ... That is the context. A fascist coup. It is not a coup "in slow motion"—it is being carried out with the same speed that past versions were. A first attempt, an evaluation of what didn't work, a purge of those unwilling to go along, new laws passed wherever the coup supporters have enough power to do it, in order to dismantle the specific roadblocks that held things up, an absolutely rabid demonization campaign against whichever public officials foiled the attempt, and an unrelenting campaign to drill the same pro-coup hoaxes even deeper into the public brain. This is how it's done. These candidates are promoting a proven hoax, even after it led to violence, even after members of their party specifically used it to incite violence. There is no innocuous explanation. They are using a hoax intended to discredit democracy and replace it with something else. This is propagandism. It is specifically crafted to deceive. Call these candidates what they are: anti-American. Enemies of our Constitution. Cowards. Corrupt. There is no excuse for promoting, defending, or even staying silent on a hoax of this magnitude. The only reason to do it is a belief that your own political career is of more value than the peaceful transfers of power that America once held sacrosanct.

Darrell Lucas of the Kos community, quoted and discussed a tweet from Liz Harrington, a nasty guy spokesperson, who quoted the start of a nasty guy rant:

All the Democrats want to do is put people in jail. They are vicious, violent, and Radical Left thugs. They are destroying people’s lives, which is the only thing they are good at.

I note this is pure projection: One person accusing his opponents of doing what he feels constrained by society from doing. Lucas quoted former FBI Counterintelligence Chief Frank Figliuzzi who sees a bomb about to go off – a person who believes he is cornered by the House January 6 Commission and various other legal cases and is about to become violent. Melissa Block of NPR explored the Big Lie. The webpage for this radio segment is a news story rather than a transcript of the audio. Rich Hasen of the Fair Elections and Free Speech Center said he is scared about American democracy because of the metastasizing of the Big Lie. He feels he is sounding an alarm and no one is listening. Timothy Snyder of Yale said the nasty guy is exploiting an old tactic of inverting the lie. Snyder said:

Part of the character of the “big lie” is that it turns the powerful person into the victim. And then that allows the powerful person to actually exact revenge, like it's a promise for the future.

The original big lie is in Hitler’s Mein Kampf. He blamed Jews for all of Germany’s woes. Snyder said:

The lie is so big that it reorders the world. And so part of telling the big lie is that you immediately say it's the other side that tells the big lie. Sadly, but it's just a matter of record, all of that is in Mein Kampf.

The nasty guy’s big lie has now been firmly anchored in public opinion – 36% of Americans and 78% of Republicans do not believe that Biden legitimately won the election. That has driven new voter suppression and election control laws in red states. Snyder said the likely scenario for 2024 is the candidate who lost by every measure still becomes president. Yet, the Democratic controlled Congress hasn’t passed voting rights laws. Carol Anderson, professor of African-American Studies at Emory University said it is about devaluing black people. She said:

This is about, “My nation is about the real Americans. And all of those folks aren't real Americans.” It is so vile. It is so racist. And it works. That's the thing, it works.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, one of two Republicans on the Jan. 6 Commission compared the Big Lie to a cancer eating the Republican Party. He said:

More importantly in my mind, what is the rot in the system that led up to Jan. 6? And where have we come since? And how do we stop anything like this from happening again? 'Cause even though Jan. 6 technically failed, there's a lot of areas where you can learn from, if your goal is to overthrow a legitimate election and potentially do it successfully next time.

A failed coup is practice for a successful one. Leah McElrath quoted a tweet from Bree Newsome Bass:

The most misunderstood thing about those of us who are always considered “alarmist” is that we don’t want to be right. We want to warn people in the hopes a different direction is taken.

McElrath added:

Many of us literally pray to be wrong. We also often self-censor and are selective about what we discuss publicly. We speak out NOT to fear monger but rather, as @BreeNewsome notes, to warn—in the hope of encouraging action to shift trajectory from the worst of what we foresee.

Joan McCarter of Kos reported on the need to expand the Supreme Court and began by saying:

If there is anyone in Washington, D.C. as stubborn, arrogant, and thick-headed as Sen. Joe Manchin this week, it’s Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen Breyer. The 83-year-old remains doggedly committed to the fantasy that if he says the judicial confirmation process should not be politicized, it won’t be. As if the last decade of Sen. Mitch McConnell flexing his power hadn’t happened.

Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Kurt Bardella of USA Today:

From Meadows to Manchin, absolutely nobody is afraid of this White House or of Democrats in general. Republicans, on the other hand, have taken the politics of fear and turned them into a Jedi-level art form. Fear is their weapon of choice, and they love nothing more than using it to bludgeon Democrats over and over and over again.

Michael Harriot tweeted:

After the ‘08 Recession, we gave trillions to the banking & auto industries. When COVID hit, we gave families’ stimmys & forgivable loans to businesses. Apparently, just handing out money can fix any financial issue & stimulate ANY economy. This tweet is about reparations.

In another roundup Dworkin quoted Dan Froomkin of Press Watch who commented on an article Nina Bernstein wrote for the New York Times in 1999. Bernstein’s article was about then-mayor Rudy Giuliani’s intention of locking the homeless out of shelters for minor violations and the effect that had on a family of eight.

Simply by describing the facts, Bernstein was making Giuliani’s plan look cruel. And that created problems for her in the newsroom. “Getting it in the paper involved overcoming lots of editor pushback,” Bernstein recalled. She and I spoke on the phone and exchanged emails. It was a problem she ran into with some frequency: “To write factually, up close, with what I like to call intelligent compassion about these people’s lives basically invited charges of partisanship.”

Alyza Michael Enriquez tells the story of their transition. They declared being transgender but didn’t feel right in a female body or a male body. It took a while to find the words and a while more to properly explain it to a doctor. They wanted something in between to express being non-binary. Instead of taking full doses of testosterone to fully transition they took microdoses.