No single victory or toppled leader exhausts their zeal

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported that Biden will be focusing his campaign on how much the nasty guy is a threat to democracy. And the nasty guy’s campaign will have the same theme, though not quite those words. This post focuses mostly on that second campaign.

Trump’s campaign is buoyed up by decades of AM radio, Fox News, and social media that have fed the worst inclinations toward selfishness, intolerance, and disdain for justice. Decades of right-wing pundits promoting cruelty, equality as a weakness, and treating democracy as something to be sneered about has spread a kind of learned sociopathy. As Denise Oliver-Velez highlighted last year, “You’ve got to be taught to hate.” Americans are not only getting that hate passed on to them by the prejudices of their own families, they are getting it confirmed by news media, social media, and increasingly by Republican political leaders. They are saturated in this hate, basted in it. That polls show a plurality of Republicans saying that fascist statements make them more likely to vote for Trump is shocking … but it really shouldn’t be. It’s no longer even left versus right. It’s simply morality versus amorality. ... Hate may need to be learned, but empathy at least needs to be bolstered. Equality has to be taught. Democracy has to be valued. Otherwise, selfishness, prejudice, and narrow-minded support for strongman rule are easily spread. Trump is a source for the growing amorality of the fascist right, but he's also a benefactor of a portion of America that has absorbed hate right down to its heartland bones.

Kerry Eleveld of Kos turned to Biden’s side of the effort. He’ll start with a speech at Valley Forge, marking the 3rd anniversary of the Capitol Attack. Then he’ll give a speech at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina where 9 black worshipers were murdered in 2015. Later in the month Kalama Harris will discuss reproductive freedom in a multi-state tour.

Gone are the days when we had the luxury of arguing over tax rates and the size of government. This year, Team Biden is laying it all on the line right out of the gate: You either cast a vote in November for representative democracy and the freedoms protected therein, or you vote for an autocratic regime where campaigns, if they even exist, will be little more than window dressing for the world.

Eleveld also posted that Biden has released his first campaign ad. His main point is, “There's something dangerous happening in America.” Sumner reported the nasty guy released a series of posts in his version of Twitter explaining why he deserves total immunity from prosecution. My summary of Sumner’s summary: The crime wasn’t the Capitol attack, it was the election (kindly ignore the lack of evidence). So the nasty guy was well within his duties as president to prevent the fraudulent takeover by Biden. No, the election was not stolen by Biden. Yes, Biden won the election fairly. Biden winning the Electoral College vote on that January 6 was not fraudulently usurping power. An Associated Press article posted on Kos reports that a lawsuit has been filed in a Pennsylvania court to keep Rep. Scott Perry off the ballot because of his role in the insurrection. The article details Perry’s role in what happened. Last year similar attempts were made to block from the ballot Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs of Arizona. Those attempts failed. When the US House returns from the holiday break they have about two weeks to pass the first batch of funding bills to prevent a government shutdown. Joan McCarter of Kos reported the first item on the House agenda shows how dysfunctional Republicans are. That agenda item is “a second baseless impeachment, this time against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.” As in the guy in charge of protecting our borders that are being overrun (according to Republicans) by migrants.

The more Johnson bends to extremists on immigration, the more emboldened they will be to force a shutdown over the issue. He’s setting himself up for failure, for the very same trap that every Republican speaker since John Boehner has fallen into. Either Johnson bucks the Freedom Caucus and risks being ousted like former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, or he allows a disastrous shutdown.

A couple months ago, after the Hamas attack on Israel, three university presidents went before a House committee of some sort and asked about anti-semitism on campus. All three muffed the question. One of the (from somewhere in Pennsylvania) was ousted within a matter of days. At the time there were articles about how easy it should be to get the answer right. But I was surprised at how little attention was being paid to the questioner. She was Elise Stefanik, the woman who got the number four position on House leadership when Liz Cheney was removed for participating in the Jan 6 investigation committee. A high ranking Republican asking the question that tripped up university presidents? There’s got to be something else going on. I might be right. The second of those three presidents has resigned. It is Claudine Gay, the first black woman to be the president of Harvard. You can imagine the number of white people who would want to remove a black woman from an institution that seems dedicated to teaching the young of America’s white elite. After Gay’s removal she wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times. Chitown Kev included an excerpt in a pundit roundup for Kos, as well as other interesting takes on the issue. Here’s Gay:

This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society. Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda. But such campaigns don’t end there. Trusted institutions of all types — from public health agencies to news organizations — will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility. For the opportunists driving cynicism about our institutions, no single victory or toppled leader exhausts their zeal. ... At a congressional hearing last month, I fell into a well-laid trap. I neglected to clearly articulate that calls for the genocide of Jewish people are abhorrent and unacceptable and that I would use every tool at my disposal to protect students from that kind of hate.

I can imagine Stefanik creating that well-laid trap. Kev also quoted David Roberts of the “Volts” Substack.

Why are we talking about this? Is there any reasonable political or journalistic justification for *this* being the center of US discourse for weeks on end? Who has pushed this to the fore, and why, and what are they trying to achieve? ... There are a lot of important things going on right now. Why are we talking about this and not any of those? We know why: the right is expert at ginning up these artificial controversies and manipulating media. Again, they brag about it publicly! ... My one, futile plea to everyone is simply: before you jump in with an opinion on the discourse of the day, ask yourself *why* it is the discourse of the day and whose interests the discourse is serving

Down in the comments Jen’s dad posted a meme about the Jeffrey Epstein list that came out today. The list included (as I wrote about yesterday) Bill Clinton and the nasty guy. This meme makes an important point, “Joe isn’t on Epstein’s list.” McCarter wrote about the end of the year report on the state of the courts written by Chief Justice John Roberts. Elie Mystal of The Nation described it as a “long-winded holiday card where Roberts tells a hokey story while wearing his latest ugly sweater.” McCarter thinks Mystal is being kind. The big issue before Roberts is AI. Will it make judges obsolete? As part of attempting to answer that question Roberts delves into the history of the typewriter. Not in the report: The corruption in his court and how useless his latest ethics code is.

Should we be worried about AI taking over the Supreme Court? To quote Mystal: “I doubt it would do much worse than our current system, which forces us to live under rules divined by Sam Alito after he processes 15 straight hours of Fox News.”