Rich man Romney wants to tax the rich

RETIII of the Daily Kos community discussed a recent op-ed written by Mitt Romney for the New York Times. Its title is Mitt Romney: Tax the Rich, Like Me. Romney looks to be retired now or at least retired from politics, though he had been a Republican senator, governor, and presidential candidate and is described as having lots of money, though not at the billionaire level. So, on to what he’s calling for. I’ll summarize both quotes of Romney’s statements and RETIII’s comments and add a bit of my own. The need for the government to raise more revenue or to cut spending is obvious if the nasty guy can add a trillion dollars to the national in just a couple months. Tariffs won’t raise enough. The biggest part of federal spending (beyond the military?) is Social Security and Medicare. There are endless articles about both programs being in fiscal trouble (though many of those are excuses to limit the programs). Mucking with them too much can bring great wrath from senior voters. One proposal is to raise the income limit on FICA. This supports Social Security and incomes higher than $176K aren’t subject to FICA. Romney supports getting rid of the limit. Along with that Romney wants to add a means test to Social Security and Medicare. In a sense there is a means test for Medicare. The higher your income the higher your premiums. But Social Security was designed as a benefit to all. RETIII understands why. If there is a Social Security cutoff or reduction then the rich will see it doesn’t benefit them. Increased FICA and they will pay more for a benefit they don’t get. If they don’t get it they will more easily brand Social Security as “welfare” and work even harder to undermine it. Romney calls for raising the retirement age because we live longer than when Social Security was enacted 90 years ago. But RETIII says working longer at a job that is physical labor is quite different than working longer at a desk job. Romney wants to eliminate tax “caverns,” what are usually called loopholes. One proposal is to eliminate the current practice of not taxing capital gains at death. Romney explains:

Let’s look at a hypothetical scenario using Elon Musk as a proxy. If he had originally purchased his Tesla stock with, say, $1 billion and held it until his death, and if it were then worth $500 billion, he would never pay the 24 percent federal capital gains tax on the $499 billion profit. Why? Because under the tax code, capital gains are not taxed at death. The tax code provision known as step-up in basis means that when Mr. Musk’s heirs get his stock, they are treated as if they purchased it for $500 billion. So no one pays taxes on the $499 billion capital gain. Ever.

Romney mentions a couple more. I can think of more that RETIII doesn’t mention: Tax capital gains at the same rate as wage income. Raise the tax rate for the higher income brackets. RETIII’s conclusion and a few comments say why Romney’s comments are important. They get the debate started. Having a rich guy talk about taxing the rich is much more important than when a poor or middle-class person says the same thing. Much of politics is about persuasion and Romney has started his persuading. We’ll see how hard he keeps at it. Mark Sumner, Kos staff emeritus, commented that the nasty guy has long complained that Biden used an autopen a lot and claims anything signed by an autopen wasn’t officially signed. But the nasty guy is an autopen – between naps he signs anything put before him without reading it. Sumner calls him Grandpa Snoozy. Think about the large number of times he’s asked about something he’s signed and he says he knows nothing about it. That means his staff – including Russel Vought and Stephen Miller – are actually running the place. Well, no surprise there. And that means they will never invoke the 25th Amendment that allows the VP and Cabinet to declare the president incompetent, which would end his term. And perhaps theirs. Lisa Needham of Kos discussed the problem of the nasty guy’s executive order declaring fentanyl as a Weapon of Mass Destruction. First, it isn’t – it isn’t so destructive as to kill millions in a single moment. Second, the chemicals that are used to make fentanyl also have other good and important uses, so banning them doesn’t make sense. Third, Venezuela does not produce fentanyl. Fourth, this isn’t about fentanyl. It’s about providing an after-the-fact justification for bombing Venezuelan boats. It also allows the Department of Justice to get the Department of Defense involved.

This looks like a pretty blatant attempt at getting a widespread permission slip for military personnel to be used in domestic criminal investigations, which is not great! ... There’s also the problem that the administration has reassigned everyone to the “brutally torturing immigrants” project, which means drug arrests have already dropped, and fewer new investigations are being opened. But rather than do those actual investigations and prosecutions, which is what should be happening if we face such a deadly scourge, this instead is an attempt to get full war on terror authority, a blank check for Trump and Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi and Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem to do anything they want, any time, anywhere.

In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Paul Krugman discussing the nasty guy’s viciousness:

Yet, on reflection, I realized that there’s a story here that’s bigger than Trump, a story in which Trump is one especially egregious example of a larger pattern. What is that pattern? That being vicious and bigoted is cool, is based in current slang. Trump is one data point in the midst of an epidemic of performative hatemongering in America. And while most of this is emanating from right-wing extremists, not all of it is.

I wanted to see what current slang reflects bigotry. So I went to Krugman’s article. It doesn’t discuss slang, though it does chart the rise of antisemitism and does talk about the increase in people of the far right around the world who say vicious and bigoted things. In the comments bjkeefe posted a cartoon by John Darkow of ICE agents picking crops. One of them says, “I guess we should’ve seen this coming!” Almost two years ago, about the time of Epiphany, marking the time the Wise Men visit the infant Jesus, I saw the phrase, “grifts of gold, frank nonsense, and merch.” Now Graeme Keyes did another take. His cartoon shows three guys in red “MAGI” hats. They guys could be Musk, the vice nasty, and the nasty guy. Their gifts are “Gold, Frankly dense, and Mire.” The Naked Pastor posted a cartoon of a brown Joseph and brown Mary – they lived in the Middle East – yet the just delivered baby boy is white. Which is how Westerners see him.

There is a vigor in their hatred

Andrea Chalupa of Gaslit Nation did an episode on the election just a few days after it. The episode description begins, “Was the election stolen? Yes.” I know the election was seven weeks ago. I held off discussing this one because I was waiting for the transcript, which wasn’t posted for what seemed to be a long time. Then I go caught up in writing about the nasty stuff the nasty guy was doing. Also, a couple holidays slowed me down. So I’m taking a break from all that to write about this – even though it may seem like old news. To my friend and debate partner, I know you say the nasty guy won’t be able to accomplish as much as he wants. Some people who have studied dictators, Chalupa being one of them, have been saying we could be in for much worse. I’d rather be prepared for the much worse and it not happen than not be prepared if it does. Joining Chalupa in this episode is Terrell Starr. Chalupa doesn’t describe him other than saying he is a “dear friend.” Later on he says he is black. Right now, before the new Congress takes power and the nasty guy gives his big speech in front of the Capitol, this is the last moments of normalcy. Nazis call themselves the storm. They’re coming to smash everything – laws that protect our food and water and much more. They’ll cut taxes for the oligarchs and the rest of us will be forced to make up the difference. In contrast to when the nasty guy won in 2016, this time there is a sense of uselessness, complacency, and grief. Things are going to get dramatically worse. Starr said we must recognize that many people voted for fascism. Yeah, they didn’t hear that term and may not know what it means if they had. Yeah, many people are out of touch. Pundits argue there were many things Biden and Harris could have done differently.

I just don't find that acceptable for the very simple reason that at some point we have to contend with the fact that as imperfect as Kamala Harris and Joe Biden is, are their imperfections so bad that Trump and all of his criminality was not?

The election went to the nasty guy because of white people and Latinos. Starr had previously pointed out “there is a vigor in their hatred.” Chalupa said they can’t wait to put their racism into action. They want the dominance and the power. They see that dominance in the nasty guy. This isn’t about facts, it’s about emotions. Biden and Harris made great strides in trying to overturn the “greed is good” mentality prominent since the Reagan era. But that mindset can’t be undone in four years. And not when the far right dominates media. Sinclair and Fox News have gobbled up local news. Those local stations not taken over have shrunk. The podcasts of Joe Rogan and Candace Owens reach millions and tell young men they will feel powerful when they dehumanize women. “We’re dealing with an epidemic of deeply insecure men.” And they’re dealing with it by dehumanizing others. Yeah, they should have outgrown it. But we have to deal with it now. Progressives have to beg for support from other progressives and from the Democratic Party. Far right conservatives merely have to act on their misogyny and they get support. They get money and an invitation to power. Democrats haven’t set up a way to counter the strong message coming from the far right. Conservatives are delighted when that misogynist has a black face because that black face can go into black places to preach misogyny and white supremacy from the black perspective – black people shouldn’t want to allow abortion because that limits the number of black people. That’s the same thing white people against abortion say. We cannot assume that a person of one minority cares anything at all about people of another minority. Or that they care about anyone other than themselves. Republicans will go to any media outlet that will let them push their message. Democrats appear reluctant to do that, wanting to go to outlets that “are serving up happy pills.” That is not what Chalupa does, even though she would gladly amplify the Democratic message. Economists say the economy is humming right along. But too many people are still juggling multiple jobs and not able to buy a house. A housing crisis makes that worse. Even so, many hurting financially did not vote for the fascist, rapist, predator, traitor, and Russian tool. So while the economy was important the election was also about sexism and racism. That’s been a part of American history for generations, amplified by Reagan. “Donald Trump is the Frankenstein monster of the Reagan Revolution, okay?” As for all those yelling about identity politics, scapegoating trans and gay people, launching a genocide against them, is also identity politics. Needing to say trans is good and gay is good was forced on us. Starr said:

Donald J. Trump is the master of identity politics because he operates on hate and grievance and resentment, and on this notion that whiteness is being devalued this whole election cycle. And his success is based on identity politics.

Don’t blame each other. Work at being a community. Chalupa is now hosting Monday afternoon salons to be that community. The far right is salivating at the opportunity to force non-white people into death camps. They’re going to start in blue states as a way to terrorize us into submission. Be ready for that. As you build your community screen people by asking them: Who did they vote for in 2024? How did you help get out the vote? How did you use your influence to stop the nasty guy? Or did you abuse power by trying to claim Democrats and Republicans are the same? If the latter, ignore them (and don’t buy their books). Democracy depends on a well educated public, yet the public school system is being weakened and college is increasingly unaffordable. Democracy also needs a robust, widespread, and credible free press. We don’t have that anymore. We have a media polluted with propaganda. Back to the statement at the top of his episode about whether the election was stolen. There was voter suppression in Georgia. Was the result hacked? MAGA people had the software, info on how these machines work. But DOJ, FBI, and Homeland Security did nothing about it. Our institutions failed us so we’ll never know whether the results were hacked. There is that huge far right media propaganda machine, including at the local level. The introduction also said the election was stolen through Russians buying MAGA influencers, oligarch consolidation, and mainstream media capitulation. Details of these were not included in this episode. And, yeah, inflation and the global effort to defeat incumbents were also issues. As was sexism and racism. There may not be another election for president.

Voters don’t want to cooperate, they want to dominate

The winners of the annual Bulwer-Lytton contest have been announced. This is a contest to come up with the worst opening sentence for a novel. It is in honor of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who opened his novel Paul Clifford with “It was a dark and stormy night.” Yeah, that’s the phrase that Peanuts character Snoopy used to open his stories. My favorites for this year are both from the same guy, who had a lot of entries chosen.

Stepping outside just after dawn, Chef Billingsworth was pleased to discover that for once the morning fog was not as thick as pea soup—or even lobster bisque for that matter—but was more a chicken velouté, or perhaps a beef remouillage. Mark Meiches, Dallas, TX To help maintain the spirit of the entire Apollo 15 crew during their lengthy and monotonous space journey, NASA scientists sent along fun snacks for everyone, including Space Food Sticks for the Lunar Astronauts and Space Food Milk-Bones for the Lunar Rover. Mark Meiches, Dallas, TX

My Sunday movie was Will & Harper a sweet documentary. I believe this is the first Will Farrell film I’ve seen, though, of course, I’ve heard about him. And this is a pretty good movie. When Farrell joined Saturday Night Live he met Andrew Steele, one of the writers. They said some of the stranger things Farrell did on the show and in later movies were Steele’s ideas. The two became good friends. During the pandemic, 27 years after their friendship started and at a time Farrell hadn’t seen his friend for a while, he got an email saying Steele has transitioned to female with the name Harper. She hoped they were still friends. Farrell responded yes, they were. Farrell proposed the idea of a cross-country road trip. During the long drive they could talk about her experience being trans. They could also visit various places so that Steele could get used to being in public as female with Farrell as support. As a man she had been across the country many times. But as female, would the country love her back? Yes, Will Farrell the comedian appears a few times, but mostly it is him being a very good and supportive friend as Steele tells her story. She’ll tell her friend anything he asks. She talks about recognizing she is trans in her late 50s. How happy she is to wake up after top surgery – puberty in four hours! She talks about wanting a place to hide so she could be a woman without condemnation from others. She explained her chosen name. She realizes that many places she visited as a man may not be safe for a woman, especially a trans woman. Along the way ... They visit the NBC studios and meet former SNL colleagues. They go to a Pacers game in Indianapolis and are introduced to Indiana’s governor. Only later do they find out how he has championed anti-trans laws. They visited Iowa City, where Harper grew up, and stayed with her sister. She visits a bar in Oklahoma and things go well. They visit a steakhouse in Texas and get a lot of mean tweets. In Albuquerque they have a hot air balloon ride. They end up at the ocean in Los Angeles. I am impressed at how much Farrell is the kind and supportive friend. This is a movie that explains the trans experience well. I’m glad they made it and hope America can learn from it. This one gets a solid recommendation. I wrote a couple days ago that creating a to-go bag is a good idea in case one must flee (or simply not want to live in an oppressive society) and include your passport in it. I realized that if you don’t have a passport or it is close to expiring, now would be a good time to get one. The upcoming administration will likely change the eligibility rules – a regime designed around oppressing those lower in the hierarchy won’t be able to do so if the peons flee (see: Berlin Wall). A passport is good for ten years. Many countries are reluctant to accept it if it is within six months of expiring. The media is still full of articles on why people voted the way they did, electing the nasty guy. I’m still ignoring most of them, though here are a few that make sense to me and say something similar to what I’ve been thinking. Paul Waldman, in The Cross Section on Substack calls on mainstream media to stop the votewashing, to stop making nasty guy voters look more virtuous than they are. From Waldman’s view these are the messages that 51% sent with their votes. We hate foreigners, especially non-white ones. We don’t like women either. We don’t mind being lied to. We love punching down on societies most vulnerable. We want leaders who hate the same people we hate. We don’t care if our leaders have no morality. The nasty guy promised to solve every problem people have and during his first term solved none of them, and that’s just fine with voters. We are wildly misinformed about the conditions in the country. Overthrowing the government is just fine. Fascism sounds awesome, so let’s try it.

If someone is upset about high grocery prices and their solution is “Let’s try fascism,” it doesn’t mean they don’t care about grocery prices, but it also means they’ve chosen fascism. And that’s a choice that shouldn’t be excused. I want to understand Trump voters; understanding why people make the choices they do is a central part of analyzing politics. But I refuse to apologize for them or paint their choices in the best possible light, especially when they are voting for the most corrupt, dishonest, and morally repugnant president in American history. And that’s exactly what much of the media is doing right now.

citixen of the Daily Kos community quoted an excerpt by David Frum of The Atlantic as another example of most of the media missing the point. Here’s part of that quote:

Don’t forget, this time around he’s a lawless potus. ... If MAGA controls the entire government, Democrats, and even plenty of Trump-voting Republicans, are only slowly going to realize: lawless executives are not going to allow democracy-as-we’ve-known-it to dislodge their majorities without real pain. We only have to look to the (sometimes bloody) civil rights era of the 50s and 60s to see what that looks like.

Kos of Kos wrote a two part opinion piece about how he understands what happened. In part 1 he wrote that there are things Democrats will have to think about. “Inflation is the new global third rail of politics.” Biden did a lot for unions but they didn’t love him back at full strength, so how to be the champion of the working class needs to be rethought. Infrastructure needs to be rethought. Support for Israel and Gaza need to be rethought, but didn’t make much difference in the result. There is a vast conservative noise machine and liberals have nothing comparable. Kos begged for investment in liberal media and told we already have the New York Times, which is accused of sanewashing the nasty guy, and NPR, which prides itself in being centrist. The lack of liberal media means there is little pushback when conservatives and conservative media twists liberal ideas and uses them as weapons. Another problem is the way liberals seem to be trying to right historical wrongs. The marriage equality effort changed public opinion strategically and gently. Current efforts seem to want to shame the public into agreement. An example is pushing “Latinx” even though most Latinos don’t like the term. There is also pushing proper pronouns for transgender people that sometimes is felt as a bludgeon.

There is a mass center of the American people struggling to get by, wondering why the Democratic Party is focused on things that feel irrelevant to them.

We should be able to condense everything down to a simple message, as Franklin D. Roosevelt did in his Second Bill of Rights:

Every American has the right to: 1. A job 2. An adequate wage and decent living 3. A decent home 4. Medical Care 5. Economic protection during sickness, accident, old age or unemployment 6. A good education

In part 2 Kos said Republicans had a simple message: Security. To explain why that worked Kos talked about his native El Salvador. The people overwhelmingly voted for Nayib Bukele, though he is Muslim in a Catholic country.

He took one of the most violent, dangerous peacetime countries in the world, and made it the safest in the Western Hemisphere. And he did that by calling a state of emergency and essentially eliminating all civil liberties, imprisoning virtually all young men. Yes, that cleaned up the streets of the violent cartels, but it also swept up innocent men with zero judicial review and threw them in a mega prison with a capacity of 40,000. The result?

Kos included a tweet from Bukele, that included a tweet by RadarHits, that said:

Just in: The murder rate in El Salvador falls from the world’s highest to the lowest in the Western Hemisphere – at 2.3 per 100k in 2023.

The highest was over 100 per 100k in 2015. Bukele added, “Strong men create good times…” As part of that effort he dissolved the country’s judiciary and created a rubber-stamping legislature. When Kos visited recently he talked to people about Bukele. Even if their friends and family got caught up in the dragnet they still supported him by massive numbers. Security beat freedom. What is the nasty guy selling is physical security (based on lies), economic security (his examples here are true), and cultural security (drag queens!). Most people don’t understand that the nasty guy’s solutions won’t fix their economic insecurity. Kos looked again at FDR’s Second Bill of Rights. Every item has to do with security. Security beat freedom. We can work with that. Long ago I saw the only thing the nasty guy is offering is a higher spot in the social hierarchy with permission to oppress those lower down. That’s it. That’s also a geeky way to say it. One can feel better about oneself by oppressing others. All of his policies are based on that. And most of those are designed to place himself in a higher position compared to those around him. He’ll lie on policy to get votes that will put him in positions of power. But he was incapable of lying about his true purpose – which is good for us who could read and understand his words. Bring the Lions of the Kos community has the same understanding, though it says it with a directness I like: The nasty guy offers domination. We ordinary people, at least the kind that try to stay reality-based, have to play by the rules. We can’t pretend the rules don’t exist.

Ah, but rich white guys can. Oligarchs like Musk can. Ride with Trump and his oligarch pals and you too can join them in breaking the rules. This is why Trump did not lose support as he was impeached, then charged, then found guilty. What was a clear liability in reality is an asset when you’re playing a game that you win when you show the rules don’t apply to you. MAGA, via Trump, is offering their supporters the chance to vicariously experience not just victory through Trump but what they want most of all: domination. The double standard is the point. The domination is the drug that keeps MAGA enthralled.

Harris offered joy and cooperation. Millions of voters wanted the opposite. They don’t want to cooperate, they want to dominate. Even against those we hate we want them and everyone to have good health care and housing. They want to be a part a movement to hurt others.

If you’re with him, you win- because he always wins. He gets away with it. He breaks the rules. He makes his enemies bend the knee and if they don’t he punishes him. ... If you are struggling economically, in a dead end job, living in one of many of the dire areas of this country, with no prospects of joining the “elite”- be it educational, cultural, or economic- MAGA is offering you a chance to feel it by being a part of a “movement” that will win and then dominate the people and groups on the other side.

People, not just white men without college degrees, beaten down by conservative economic policies that favor the rich want someone to get revenge for them against those living better than they are.

They wanted the satisfaction of “winning” and dominating. Trump always wins, and he bullies the losers. And millions of Americans, living on the edge, said give me that.

I hope you see the contradiction here. The nasty guy is offering domination – but not against the people who created the economic hardship these people are experiencing. His nature, his loyalties, his plans will make their lives worse.

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.”

CEO pay up 1,460% while typical workers’ pay up just 18.1%

The United Auto Workers contract with General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis (the current company owning Chrysler) expired Thursday night. The news Friday morning was that the UAW had called strikes at one plant of each company. This is the first time they called a strike at all three at the same time. Strikes will be called at more plants if the talks drag on without a deal. I worked in the auto industry for close to three decades. I had an office job so was not in the union. I went to work during strikes (I was far from any plant). And when the new contract was signed what improvements the union members got I also got. I benefited from the union. The central issue of the strike is, of course, money. The union gave concessions to keep the companies in business during the Great Recession. Now the companies are making big profits and the union says it is time to get back what they gave up. The companies are saying we need the money for the transition to electric vehicles. The union says EVs are good (though require fewer workers) but those battery plants you’re building had better be unionized. Walter Einenkel of Daily Kos reported that Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, showed how clueless top management be. Her compensation is 362 times more than the median pay for workers at her company. Compensation for the CEOs of Ford and Stellantis are similar. Barra saw a 34% increase in her salary (time frame not mentioned) and she thought a 20% increase for workers was good enough. Einenkel concluded:

According to the Economic Policy Institute, CEOs for the top 350 U.S. firms made about 20 times more than their typical worker in 1965. Between 1978 and 2021, CEO pay has increased 1,460% while typical workers’ wages have increased just 18.1%. You don’t have to be a Nobel Prize-winning economist to understand this isn’t a workable model.

Yeah, that’s what this strike is about. Hunter of Kos reported the nasty guy and DeathSantis went to Washington to court some conservative organizations. Among them is Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. It has been quite a while since I’ve come across those names. So I did a scan of blog entries. Between 2010 and 2016 I wrote about Perkins nine times. The last time to lament he had been appointed to the Republican Platform Committee. That lament is because the FRC has been designated a hate group by the SPLC because Perkins’ lies about LGBTQ people are used to justify our oppression. I have more laments because national media still likes to quote Perkins and candidates for the White House still think visiting him is important. Hunter explained the attraction:

Because what's important is that Donald Trump hates: He hates good and hard and often. That is the motivating force that drives anyone and everyone who would travel to Washington, D.C., to attend a Family Research Council event.

Last Monday Mark Sumner of Kos wrote about Republicans and taxes.

If Hunter Biden is behind on his taxes, it’s the worst crime in the world and worthy of a congressional probe spanning three House committees. If anyone else is dodging their taxes, that’s just smart.

That sentiment is playing out in the Republican demand to rescind the big budget increase for the IRS. Sen. Chuck Grassley warns of an IRS strike force with AK-15s ready to shoot a small business owner. That budget increase also comes with guidance on who the newly hired agents should focus their attention. * Those with income over $1 million with more than $250K in back taxes. * Construction contractors who pay multiple subcontractors, because that’s frequently a sign that those subcontractors are really shell companies to funnel money back to the rich owner. * High income earners who use foreign bank accounts, because that’s a way to hide income. * Large transactions in digital currency because that’s also a way to hide income.

So the IRS is coming after rich people who are known to be behind in their taxes, and groups who are going out of their way with shell companies, foreign accounts, and digital currency to hide their real income. All of which sounds … pretty darn reasonable. And it certainly raises a question: Why are Republicans so anxious to stop these audits?

Sumner also wrote about ways legislatures in red states are stripping power from urban voters. That’s things they do beyond portraying cities as a “crime-ridden, corrupt, dysfunctional hellhole,” a phrase recently used against Chicago. There were states that overturned local efforts to encourage students to wear masks during the pandemic, to overturn attempts to protect immigrants, to disband a board looking into the use of deadly force against black people, to usurp control of elections in Houston and Harris County, to overturn requirements that construction workers get water breaks, to take control of Jackson, Mississippi away from its black residents, and much more.

A 2018 law review article showed that as Republicans gained more power in state legislatures following 2010 redistricting, they used that authority to bear down on cities. “The past decade has witnessed the emergence and rapid spread of a new and aggressive form of state preemption of local government action across a wide range of subjects, including among others firearms, workplace conditions, sanctuary cities, anti-discrimination laws, and environmental and public health regulation.”

We are left with a common heartache of ideals betrayed

I hadn’t realized the Purple Rose Theatre in Chelsea, Michigan had matinee performances. I took advantage of that this afternoon to see their current production Human Error. Yeah, the audience was other retired people, a good size crowd. The story opens with Madelyn and Keenan, a mixed race couple and quite liberal, meeting their fertility doctor. He has bad news – their embryo was implanted in the wrong uterus. That uterus belongs to Heather, who is married to Jim. She can’t imagine how anyone can be unchurched. He appears onstage in a bright read Ohio State sweatshirt and insists on showing Keenan his guns. Keenan works as a comedy analyst at rival University of Michigan. Can the two couples tolerate each other long enough for the baby to be born? The most important argument is over abortion, quite important to the story. Heather declares she is carrying the baby to term for Madelyn because she is pro-life. She is sure Madelyn, who must be pro-choice (and is), would have aborted the baby the moment the error was explained. Madelyn, even though she is pro-choice, denies she would have aborted. Heather doesn’t believe her. All five actors – the two couples and the doofus doctor – do a fine job. See a review here. The show is only 85 minutes and runs for one more week. And the ending is quite satisfying and not at all what I expected. I listened to the latest Gaslit Nation episode this evening. Nearly all of the 35 minutes is Sarah Kendzior playing the audiobook of her reading one chapter of her latest book They Knew. A transcript of the episode is here. When she wrote it in 2021 there was some talk of a national divorce. Kendzior is frustrated that now that chapter looks like prophesy as the talk gets louder. Recently I had written about Marjorie Taylor Greene spouting off splitting red states from blue states. MTG isn’t the only voice. Kendzior starts by saying she is against a national divorce. She explains why. The call is a conspiracy for kleptocracts to exploit us for political and financial gain. Yeah, I could stop right there. On one side are those who believe they deserve more and that Democrats are keeping them from what’s rightfully theirs. On the other are those who believe people living under Republican legislatures deserve what they get. Neither is true. Both sides are attempts to create monocultures out of a multifaceted nation. No state is all red or all blue. And in many red states the citizens are suffering under a Republican Party that has created one party minority rule in defiance of the wishes of the majority. That was done through gerrymandering and voter suppression (given fresh power when some of the Voting Rights Act was gutted). It is difficult to regain rights when the mechanism to protect them – voting – is harmed. The lie that any state is deeply red or deeply blue is repeated enough that people believe it true – and believe it has always been true. They push the lie that the differences are ancient and the conflict is destiny, that differences cannot be reconciled. This is why there is a push to demonize Critical Race Theory. It has been divorced from its original meaning (I probably wrote about it two years ago) and is now a blanket term to hold whatever concepts they want to demonize. The goal is to carve up America into oligarch fiefdoms. Liberals may enjoy that – for a while. But there is still an oligarch in charge. And conservative fiefdoms will not not tolerate letting liberal ones exist for very long and will want to exploit the resources. This is happening because the US government is corrupt. Both Republicans and Democrats are being funded by foreign agents. Some may be American citizens, but their loyalties are elsewhere. And citizenship no longer matters since in November 2021 the Federal Election Commission said foreigners may fund US referendum campaigns.

There are a multitude of Americas, as one would expect in a country this large and diverse. But we are no longer unified by ideals. Instead, we are left with a common heartache of ideals betrayed. We share that pain and take it out on each other while disregarding each other's humanity, and being acclimatized by algorithms to do so. The new Civil War is fought on the internet where lies and memes spur exhausted people to hate each other; where troll farms can make AstroTurf rallies; where threats have been normalized and kindness is labeled virtue signaling.

These kleptocrats gain power because when they tested their limits no one who is supposed to have power intervened. Civic obligation crumbles. If oligarchs partition America what happens to St. Louis? This is where Kendzior lives. The city is politically blue, demographically black. It will be declared the enemy of whoever takes over Missouri. Illinois won’t want it because of its poverty and crime. Secession means friends and family will live in other countries where we may not be allowed to visit. The military will be replaced by mercenaries who will act with brutal impunity on who used to be fellow citizens. Basic infrastructure will be privatized by the most corrupt actors (a process already underway, but will accelerate under the shock of partition). Everything will go to the highest bidders. The most vulnerable people will suffer even more. Necessities will become luxuries. The American dream becomes the American ghost. People say that other people get what they deserve. But we don’t deserve this. And our younger generations certainly don’t. Arnold Schwarzenegger – the Governator – has been using his celebrity and tough guy image to try to influence his conservative fans through a series of videos where he talks to the camera. Walter Einenkel of Daily Kos discussed the latest and (so far) longest at 12 minutes. First Arnold talks about his recent visit to Auschwitz, describing what went on there. Then he says this is where fascism ends. This is what happens when people throw away their futures for hateful beliefs. He talks about growing up in Austria where his parents’ generation were all traumatized and broken by WWII, some of them suffering because they fell for a horrible loser ideology. Then he said:

Some of them joined the Nazis because they were filled with hate. Some of them joined because they thought they deserved more out of life. And they bought into the idea that the only way to make their lives better was to make other lives worse. Some of them joined because they were frustrated with the government, and some of them just joined because everyone else was doing it. In the end, it didn't really matter why they joined. They were all broken in the same way. That's the bottom line here. I mean, if you find yourself at the crossroads, wondering if that path of hate might make sense to you for one reason or the other, or even wrapping yourself with the flag of hate, I want you to know where that path ends. I want you to see very clearly in front of you, in your minds. Because throughout history, hate is always been the easy path, the path of least resistance. It's easy to find a scapegoat for a problem than to try to make things better ourselves. Right? But let me be clear. You will not find success in the end of this rope. You will not find fulfillment or happiness because hate burns fast and bright. It might make you feel empowered for a while, but eventually consumes whatever vessel it fuels. It breaks you. It's the path of the weak. And that's why there has never been a successful movement based on hate.

I had concluded that a great deal of what is going on in the world is people needing to show they are superior to others and doing that by “mak[ing] other lives worse.” That drives all of Republican policy. I am glad someone else has come to the same conclusion. Arnold says pulling away from fascism is hard work. One must give up old ways of thinking and maybe even friends. These are weak beliefs one is getting rid of. But doing that work makes one strong.

To create permission, a rationale for committing acts of violence

My Sunday movie was the first episode of Tales of the City on Netflix. The ten episode series is based on the stories of Armistead Maupin. Many years (maybe a couple decades) ago I read the original set of stories of a house in San Francisco with several apartments, each with LGBTQ characters living there, a place where they could truly be themselves and create their own community. These stories were over several books and there were probably a couple books more after I thought I was done. I don’t remember much from the stories. In the same way there were several Tales of the City series – 1993, 1998, 2001, and this one from 2019. It looks like Olympia Dukakis played Anna, the matriarch of the house, through the whole series. Alas, in all of that, this is the only episode I’ve seen. While it was an enjoyable hour it presents a quandary. I obviously came into the middle of the story. I think I caught enough of the backstory so I could go on from here. But that’s another nine hours. I could start at the beginning – the 1993 series – to understand the full story. And that’s a lot more hours. While this episode was enjoyable I’m not sure it was enjoyable enough to go the full distance, or even another nine hours (even if this one ended in a cliffhanger). My schedule today had an unexpected addition, crowding into my evening viewing time. Since there are still news stories of Netflix perhaps cracking down on password sharing I wanted to focus my viewing there. Back in January I pulled some ideas from a list of LGBTQ movies on Netflix. My first choices for this evening I found are not actually on Netflix. By the time I got that sorted out a single hour of something was about all I had time for. So I chose this. I recommend the Tales of the City books to any LGBTQ person and ally out there. These series could also be an enjoyable companion (or substitute). I’m not so sure I want to tackle it all now. I have not watched the long-running reality TV show The Bachelor and from the description I have no desire to do so. It may then seem weird that I enjoyed the book The Charm Offensive by Alison Cochrun, very much based on the show. What makes it worth reading is that during this season Charlie, the bachelor, realizes he’s gay and very much attracted to his handler Dev, also gay. Of course, the book version has some differences (not many) from the TV version. The book version is called Ever After, the bachelor is called Prince Charming, and at the end of each episode he passes out crowns instead of roses. The book also shows how such a show can be manipulated – each woman has a handler who can suggest how she might proceed, such as coaching one of them to be a villain. Nearly every romance novel has the expected ending (which is why we read them). It is obvious from the start, with sections alternately focusing on Charlie and Dev, where this is going. I began to predict what the climactic scene would be like. Fortunately, the book’s ending was much better. The story was also much deeper than I expected with both men struggling with how their love affects the show (which means Dev’s job) and what they expected out of life. This is a good one. I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data, updated yesterday. It looks like the low plateau that started in mid January is holding. The peaks in new cases per day for the last few weeks are 863, 1046, 1011, 800, and 681. The number of deaths per day for the last few weeks has been mostly 15 and lower, down into the single digits. All good! Interested in the national divorce that Marjorie Taylor Green has been talking about? CyberMindGirl of the Daily Kos community wrote:

Turns out Russia has formulated a plan for “ideological immigration” targeting European and American Conservatives. Think your country is going too “woke”? Can’t stand all the rights and freedoms being granted to LGBTQ+ people? Want to find a safe space from all the “woke” liberals around you? You’re going to LOVE Russia, a place where “Don’t Say Gay” is enforced at gunpoint and where “woke” liberals are sent to die a violent death on the front lines.

There is now a Russian governmental office for the Coordinating Headquarters to assist immigrants from NATO countries. They hope 7 million people would accept the offer. Each migrant would get ten hectares of land. Hunter of Kos added:

You'll note that the enticement there is 25 acres of what Russia has the most of: land. You'll note that there's no promise that your new plot of land will come with a shelter, or electricity, or an outhouse. We've been seeing more and more of late that highlights the lifestyles of most Russians who live outside the major cities, but conservative Russia-backers may or may not be aware that in modern day Russia, toilets are considered a luxury item. There's a reason that not just toilets, stoves, dishwashers, and washing machines but even the most trivial of home appliances are being looted in bulk from Ukrainian homes "liberated" by Russia and delivered back to the homeland. It's because stealing those things is the only way for the average non-connected Russian to get them. If you're a Tucker Carlson conservative who's looking to emigrate to a place that oppresses all the people you want them to, you'll have either dig your own poop-pit or import your own toilet. You'll have to import a dozen, in fact, because the odds of any one of those toilets reaching you through the theft-rampant national postal service is something close to zero.

Russia is making this offer because of the large numbers of people they lost from COVID, from the war in Ukraine, and from people fleeing to avoid conscription. They’re not giving exact numbers (or even estimates). But will the new migrants be willing to be conscripted?

Getting rid of up to 7 million of the most authoritarian-minded cranks in the United States and Europe sounds like a deal Western governments could all get behind; if Russia was proven to be serious in its plans to court our most militant and racist dregs, our own government could likely arrange for 7 million toilets to be delivered free of charge. It doesn't look like 7 million people are going to take Russia up on that offer, though. It doesn't look like 7,000 will either. It's one thing to wave guns around and bellow about the indecencies to be found in library book collections; it's another to put yourself at the mercy of the sort of autocratic nationalist government you claim to want.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos quoted an article from Bolts Magazine that says aspects of Obamacare implemented by the states is providing a way for women to sue to overturn abortion bans. For example, back in 2012 voters in Wyoming approved a Right to Healthcare Access amendment to the state constitution that says in part, “Each competent adult shall have the right to make his or her own health care decisions.” It is now a weapon against abortion restrictions. Joan McCarter of Kos wrote that, amazingly, when a government department is adequately funded it can actually do what the law says it should do. Her example is the IRS. It got a big boost in funding from the Inflation Reduction Act passed last summer and has been quick to put the money to work. This tax season the IRS is answering 90% of its phone calls (I don’t know what it was last year, perhaps less than 20%). It has processed 99.7% of returns filed already this year. It’s backlog of paper returns is down from 24 million (it rose that high during the pandemic) to 2 million. And it has enough money to upgrade its computers. Some of it’s current technology dates to the 1970s. Which is the way Republicans wanted it. Walter Einenkel of Kos reported that Jon Stewart, on his program The Problem of Jon Stewart, hosted Oklahoma state senator Nathan Dahm, a Republican. Dahm wanted to raise his profile by saying the Second Amendment can never be infringed upon. There can never be any sort of law that that puts any sort of limit on gun ownership. It didn’t go as Dahm had hoped.

Stewart isn’t having it, pointing out that Dahm opposes getting rid of laws that might protect people from guns, while instituting laws that would ban drag show readings to children. Stewart gets Dahm to lock into the logic that Dahm says he believes, which is that the government has the right to protect children. Of course, as Stewart very deftly explains, there is one thing at the top of the list of things that kill children in our country, “And I'm going to give you a hint. It's not drag show readings to children.” Dahm responds, “I’m presuming you’re going to say it’s firearms.” And Stewart says, “No, I'm not going to say it like it's an opinion. That's what it is. It's firearms. More than cancer, more than car accidents. Angry Stewart is the best Stewart, and he finished Dahm off with true righteous vengeance. “And what you're telling me is you don't mind infringing free speech to protect children from this amorphous thing that you think of. But when it comes to children that have died, you don't give a flying f--- to stop that, because that shall not be infringed. That is hypocrisy at its highest order.”

A couple weeks ago David Neiwert of Kos wrote of the arrest of a Lost Angeles man who had been shooting people as they left their synagogues. Fortunately, only two men were struck and their injuries were not life threatening. The shooter was definitely motivated by hate. Which prompted Neiwert to write:

The whole purpose of eliminationist rhetoric, as I’ve often remarked, is to create permission: a rationale for committing acts of violence and intimidation against a targeted scapegoat. This is how stochastic terrorism—the kind we’ve seen directed recently at the LGBTQ community, for instance—has always worked. Someone with a megaphone demonizes the target group and encourages violent expulsion, and someone listening makes that their excuse for acting on it. So like night following day, the recent spate of eliminationist antisemitism spewing from cultural figures like Kanye West and enabled by social media moguls like Elon Musk is already generating a fresh round of terrorist violence directed at the Jewish community.

Mike Luckovich tweeted a cartoon with the caption, “Why a citizen needs an assault weapon.” It shows a man walking a dog in a park and seeing a rabbit, deer, squirrel, and goose each with guns.” Bill Bramhall of the New York Daily News tweeted a cartoon of a teen reading Best U.S. Colleges Ranked by Number of Mass Shootings. Mark Sumner of Kos reported that many Republicans fear Special Counsel Jack Smith and his investigation into the nasty guy. That fear is because Smith appears to be moving quickly and has subpoenaed the big names on the nasty guy’s team, such as Mark Meadows and the vice nasty. Many claim executive privilege, but those who talk face wide-ranging questions on the nasty guy’s election claims and his document stash. But others, who are not Republican, worry that those broad questions indicate a man trying to write a thorough report, not a special counsel called on to indict someone. Will Smith’s report have the same minuscule legal effect of the Mueller Report? Or the two impeachments? There appears to be plenty of evidence to bring charges. So far no one has and there is good reason to think Smith won’t either. An Associated Press article chosen by Kos staff reports that in the more than 35 years since the Chernobyl nuclear accident dogs have been living in the exclusion zone. Yes, they manage to survive, still find food, and to breed. Genome researchers have been doing DNA tests of the dogs. It is a great opportunity to examine what long term radiation might do. They can identify how far particular groups of dogs live from the power plant. Their analysis is now looking at DNA changes and trying to determine in the fifteen generations since the accident what changes are from nuclear mutation and what are from evolutionary adaptation. Einenkel wrote about a recent Republican pronouncement that is getting a lot of deserved snarky replies. The GOP Twitter account tweeted: “Government should be so small you don’t even realize it’s there.” Some of the replies: Katelyn Burns: “So small it fits in your pants” Steven Blum: “Except for book banning, taking away the rights of women and LGBTQ+, and Social Security and Medicare that we’ve paid for, right?” Tim Fullerton: “So small it can’t do anything about a rail derailment am I right?” Hanjaro: “You mean so small there’s no oversight to keep you frauds in line.” Machine Pun Kelly: “So when I call the police, or the fire department, I shouldn't know it's there? When I retire, I shouldn't know I have social security? The military should be invisible?” Hunter of Kos has a lot to say about a Washington Post article about Joe and Jill Biden going to a restaurant and both of them ordering rigatoni, the specialty of the house, though that seems to defy some unwritten rule that groups at a restaurant should order different things so everyone can taste a bite of each. That leads to Hunter asking such questions as: Why did WaPo spend time reporting on this when there are so many more consequential issues the paper – and American society – should be discussing? Guns? The demise of democracy? Train derailments? Well, maybe...

The problem, then, may simply be one of font. Our papers of record could instead put news of attempts to overthrow the United States government in Times New Roman, but analysis of a president's tan suit might be presented in Papyrus or Comic Sans. There'd be differentiation there; you would know, at a glance, whether the Post or the Times or Forbes meant this to be a serious story, bearing the full weight of their journalistic brands and histories, or a goofy story meant to cleanse the palate between fascist coup attempts. The font would set the tone.

A basket of gripes and grudges

I wrote yesterday about Ukraine aiming towards Kupyansk, a Russian held city that is a major railway crossing critical to supplying northern Donbas. In a Thursday morning update Mark Sumner of Daily Kos wrote that in the last few days Ukrainain forces have covered 50Km and is within 10Km of Kupiansk. Several villages and towns along the way have been liberated. Russian sources discuss their panic. In a Thursday evening update Kos of Kos compared that day’s map to the one for the day before. There is quite a difference. Kos also discussed his puzzlement of Russia attacking Dibrovne south of Izyum, which Ukraine defended. Why is Russia attacking this meaningless village when Kupyansk – the source of all of Izyum’s supplies – is being attacked by Ukraine. Is it just another stupid Russian move? Kos offered an explanation:

Well, Russia explicitly prohibits personal initiative. Too dangerous, someone might get into their head the idea of overthrowing the tsar, in this case, Vladimir Putin. So some local commander has orders to march south toward Sloviansk, and he’ll keep doing it until told otherwise. Except that his superiors are up around Kupiansk and have either fled or are dead. So he’ll keep expending men, supplies, and ammunition on attacks with zero chance of success, just because that’s what he was last told. It boggles the mind!

Another thing Kos noted was the Ukrainians in that drive towards Kupyansk. When they take rest breaks there is no effort of secrecy. They’re out in the open. They know there are no Russian artillery positions or overhead aircraft. It seems Russian soldiers are fleeing, and leaving a great deal of equipment behind for Ukraine. The haul includes tanks, armored personnel carriers, anti-aircraft guns, trucks, and lots of other stuff. Kos included videos showing that it is safe for Russians to surrender to Ukraine. It is a best-case scenario. When Ukraine moves through Donbas they don’t want the locals to resist. They also want Russian soldiers to say Russia lied to us. We have nothing to fear from Ukraine. Donbas residents forced to fight are also seeing Russians loot the homes around them. So let’s win those Donbas residents over. Hunter of Kos reported on the rulings by the Michigan Supreme Court that ordered two proposals onto the November ballot. I mentioned this yesterday. The Michigan news today was that the Board of State Canvassers did meet and did approve both proposals. One of the dissenting justices was Brian Zahra. Democrat Justice Richard Bernstein had a rebuttal to Zahra’s reasoning:

Justice Zahra notes that, as a wordsmith and member of this Court, he finds it "an unremarkable proposition that spaces between words matter." As a blind person who is also a wordsmith and a member of this Court, I find it unremarkable to note that the lack of visual spacing has never mattered much to me.

One of the cases on the US Supreme Court docket for the coming year is from North Carolina and tries to argue that the Constitution says a state legislature has the only say in their slate of Electoral College electors – without regard to the actual vote of the citizens, the state’s laws, or the state’s constitution. This would lead to some drastic abuse of democracy. Will Doran, who writes about NC politics, tweeted:

In a rare move, the group of all 50 states' Supreme Court chief justices wrote to SCOTUS, urging them to shoot down the argument NC Republican lawmakers are making--that there should be no checks and balances for election laws--in their "Independent State Legislature" case.

That includes the chief justice of NC. Laura Clawson of Kos reported:

According to a new poll from Reuters/Ipsos, 58% of respondents, “including one in four Republicans—said Trump's ‘Make America Great Again’ movement is threatening America's democratic foundations.” A majority of the Republicans surveyed said they don’t think Trump and his MAGA movement represent their party. They’re going to need to start acting on that, then, because right now it’s not really showing. More than half of Republican gubernatorial nominees have sought to undermine the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. Same goes for secretary of state nominees in six states, attorney general nominees in four states, Senate nominees in seven states, and House nominees in 20 states. At least 60% of voters will see an election-denier on their ballot this November.

That includes Republican candidates for governor, secretary of state, and attorney general in Michigan. Rebekah Sager of Kos reported that US District Judge Reed O’Connor ruled that the Affordable Care Act mandate to cover HIV prevention drugs violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and is unlawful. These are drugs that keep gay men safe from HIV. The law was challenged by Braidwood Management who doesn’t want its employees to have those drugs covered because it encourages homosexual behavior and prostitution. My reaction is please no, not this again. O’Connor was appointed by Bush II and back in 2018 ruled the whole ACA was invalid. That was overturned. But we have a different Supreme Court. Joan McCarter of Kos reported that Sen. Ted Cruz is looking to overturn Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan. Cruz and the Heritage Foundation are looking for plaintiffs, those (presumably banks) who feel they’ve been wronged by Biden’s decision. McCarter goes on to explain why Biden has the authority to forgive that debt. But with this Supreme Court that may not matter. As with overturning the provision in the ACA we see Republicans don’t want those lower in the hierarchy to have nice things. They want them oppressed. Qasim Rashid, a human rights lawyer with a show on Sirius XM, tweeted:

MAGA: Canceling student loans is immoral. This is why we need a Govt based on the Bible. Deuteronomy 15: “At the end of every seven years you must cancel debts. This is how: Every creditor shall cancel any loan they have made.” MAGA: Not that part of the Bible.

Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Tom Nichols of The Atlantic. Nichols included a bit of Biden’s recent speech calling out the violence of the MAGA Republicans:

They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country ... MAGA Republicans have made their choice. They embrace anger. They thrive on chaos. They live not in the light of truth but in the shadow of lies.

Then Nichols added:

This, as Biden pointed out, is what makes the MAGA movement so dangerous. It has no functional compass and no set of actual preferences beyond a generalized resentment, a basket of gripes and grudges against others who the Trumpists think are looking down upon them or living better lives than they are. It is a movement composed of people who are economically comfortable and middle-class, who enjoy a relatively high standard of living, and yet who seethe with a sense that they have been done dirt, screwed over, betrayed—and they are determined to get revenge. Biden broke with tradition by saying what presidents are never supposed to say: He admitted that he was finally giving up on trying to accommodate a group of Americans, because he understands that they do not want to be accommodated. ... These citizens do not want a discussion or a compromise. They don’t even want to “win,” in any traditional political sense of that word. They want to vent anger over their lives—their personal problems, their haunted sense of inferiority, and their fears about social status—on other Americans, as vehemently as possible, even to the point of violence.

The quoted excerpt names the grievance. I’ll expand: They are white people who are told they should be at the top of the social hierarchy. And even with a comfortable middle-class life they see people above them – some way above them – and they see people who they believe should be below them are catching up to them. Their position in the social hierarchy is more important to them than their comfortable lives. Karen Attiah, a columnist at the Washington Post who describes herself as Ghanian, Nigerian, Texan, tweeted:

Black and brown people around the world who were subject to horrendous cruelties and economic deprivation under British colonialism are allowed to have feelings about Queen Elizabeth. After all, they were her "subjects" too.

Someone needs a warm fuzzy. Or maybe a good air conditioner. April Siese of Kos reported that researchers used computers to cross check four billion tweets against the UN’s definition of hate speech and against temperature. They found there is a window of 54F to 70F in which people stayed friendly on Twitter. Below and especially above that window hate speech increased. Previous studies had found extreme weather makes mood and mental health worse. Karin Kirk, a geologist and science writer for NASA Climate, tweeted:

Someone wrote to NASA and asked how such a small amount of CO2 can make such a big difference. I did some math and came up with this fun comparison.

Kirk included the tweet from NASA Climate:

Can you tell the difference between caffeinated coffee and decaf? If so, you have detected a concentration of 400 parts per million (ppm). There’s more than 400 ppm of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere. Small amounts of powerful substances have big effects.

I had written about the Patmos Library in Jamestown, Michigan in which some agitators made a lot of noise about the LGBTQ books in the library. They campaigned to defeat a millage that funds the library and won. I had mentioned a GoFundMe drive that covered the cost of keeping the library open. Marissa Higgins of Kos wrote that Nora Roberts has donated $50,000 to keep the Patmos Library open. She has offered to donate more. The Stateside program at Michigan Radio did a segment on the library. Host April Bear talked to Larry Walton, president, Board of Trustees for Patmos Library and John Chrastka, founder, executive director of EveryLibrary Institute. This segment begins at minute 12 of the audio and is about 20 minutes long. One of the points Chrastka makes is defunding a library isn’t just an attack on LGBTQ people and on this particular library. It is an attack on democracy. Walton said GoFundMe and other donations are great in the short term. But they can’t fund the library in the long term. Only a millage can do that. The millage will be on the ballot again in November. This time the library board and friends of the library will be campaigning much harder than they did in the summer. The presidential portrait of Barack Obama was recently revealed at the White House. Somehow that didn’t happen during the nasty guy years. Here’s a link to White House History that shows all of the presidential portraits. For Obama and before they are paintings. The last two are photographs. I imagine Biden will eventually get a painting. There is an interesting difference with Obama’s painting. Up through Bush II the background depicts some sort of setting. The background in Obama’s painting is plain white. Scroll down from the images of the presidents for a link at portraits of the first ladies and other women who had the role of White House Hostess.

The opposite of hate

In the 14 years and 7 months I’ve been writing this blog the major overarching theme (perhaps not expressed in every post) is what I’ve been calling supremacy. That’s one person or group asserting, even enforcing, a high or higher position in the social hierarchy. This is done most visibly through making the lives of the target people worse. This shows up in politics, especially American politics. It also shows up in daily interactions between people. I consider this strive for social position and its corresponding oppression of those lower in the hierarchy to be the definition of sin. I’ve been thinking about writing a book about supremacy to pull all my thoughts together into a cohesive narrative. That would be an improvement over the scattershot mentions and explanations of this blog. Don’t look for that book any time soon. I’ve written three outlines and none of them satisfy. I wrote a series of short chapters and I don’t think they came out well. I tried to write something I could use as a church sermon, which I thought would be appropriate since some of the loudest voices upholding the social hierarchy claim their place in it is ordained by their god. Even though I made a list of Bible verses that show Jesus taught we should not take part in the hierarchy and died for challenging the hierarchy, the sermon remains unfinished. I went through about 10 months of this blog to gather up sources. This blog can supply lots of sources – I expect to reach 5000 posts by the end of the year. The sources cover 30 categories of ways American policy and politics asserts and enforces the social hierarchy. But just writing the list of those 30 categories felt like I was missing part of the narrative. And still I haven’t started the book. When I started reading the book The Opposite of Hate, a Field Guide to Repairing Our Humanity by Sally Kohn I thought this looks pretty good, maybe I don’t have to write my book after all. By the time I got to the end I thought, well... maybe there is still room for a book of my ideas. Sally Kohn first gained fame as the liberal commentator on conservative Fox News. She has since gone on to be the political commentator on CNN. She is Jewish and lesbian and has a wife and daughter. I think her book is wonderful! It delves into and explains a great deal of the hate in our country and our world. I highly recommend it. I urge you to read it. Alas, I think there were a few more steps she could have taken. There are a couple times she mentions supremacy has something to do with hate. I wish she could have discussed that connection in more detail. Let’s look at the good stuff of this book. In the prologue she talks about an incident in upper elementary school when she was the bully, making fun of another girl. Her point, which she repeated several times through the book, is that through her broad definition of the term all of us have hated. We may claim we’re not acting out of hate, but we do and Kohn explains why we do that through the book. In chapter one Kohn tries to find out what’s going on with internet trolls. Being the liberal commentator on Fox they responded to her a lot. So she had her Twitter replies analyzed to see which users most often posted derogatory comments. Then she asked several of them if she could meet them in person. A few agreed. And they seemed pretty nice in person. This discrepancy of nice in person and a troll online brought up the fundamental attribution error. When we read something fundamentally hateful online we believe the writer is a fundamentally hateful person. When we write something fundamentally hateful we believe we’re a nice person who was provoked – by them! – so are words are justified. You’re a liar and a hatemonger, I’m truthful and civil. Along with that we tend to divide people into in-groups and out-groups and direct the hate towards the out-group. Kohl found who is put into which group can change as the situation changes. Added to the attribution error is essentialism. That’s assigning attributes to everyone in the out-group. An example is traits that are thought of as “essentially male” which implies all males are like that. The next step in the logic is to say those attributes are “natural” and – of course – considered superior to “essentially female” attributes. This sounds like a polite way of calling these traits stereotypes. Some of the trolls admit they are responding as they do for personal entertainment and out of boredom. Or they’re working through low self esteem – a study showed people are more likely to troll after losing a video game. The internet – where everyone is at a distance and mostly unseen – make it seem the target of their trolling is not a real person. So no harm done. They would never do that when faced with a real person. The internet also means no one is monitoring behavior (unless it gets really bad) so users shed some of their inhibitions. Kohl describes a way out of trolling, which should also work with fact-free relatives. She says it is ABC. A stands for affirm – find a part of the statement your feelings can agree with – “I’m also worried about the economy.” B stands for bridge – and definitely not “but” as in “I agree, but...” Leave that word and similar words out of the conversation. C stands for convince where one adds a factual detail (and probably only one at a time) appropriate for the conversation. Yes, it is hard. It can also be effective. Another way forward is what Kohl calls “connection speech.” Instead of answering hate with hate try to forge a deeper connection. Say something nice. Turn it into a joke (but be careful there). Try to get to know the other person beyond their tweets. Work to see them as a person. In chapter two she looks at the Israeli/Palestinian problem, one of those situations that had gone on for decades and appears to have no solution. Her guide is Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian who became a terrorist, with understandable reasons, and has renounced that life to try to bring the two sides together. He left the terrorist life after seeing a documentary of the Holocaust. A driver of these intractable conflicts is “competitive victimhood” in which both sides believe they are the victims, that they are suffering more because of the other. In response each side tries to make the other suffer because of how much they are suffering. Palestinians say they were peaceful until the Zionists pushed their way in and took their land. Israelis say they have been persecuted all over the world and especially in Europe during the Holocaust. They need a homeland of their own. Each feels justified in their violence against the other. Alas, we’re all victims. And we’re all perpetrators of hate. We hate because we feel we’re under siege, and hate is the response. We’re back to the attribution error – our hate and terror is rational. Theirs isn’t. The way out is to have compassion for your enemies. Yes, they’re still enemies because they hate you. That does not mean you hate in return. The way to compassion is understanding. Chen Alon, an Israeli and co-founder of Bassam’s group, does that through a theater of the oppressed. They stage performances in public places to dramatize the violence. This is connection speech. They want each side to have knowledge of the other side. The goal is to say, I’m suffering, I want to use my suffering to understand your suffering. In chapter three Kohn has a discussion with Arno Michaelis a former white supremacist skinhead. He got involved in a skinhead group because he needed a place where he belonged. These types of groups know this and when they recruit they make sure the new people feel like they belong. The ideology comes much later. And when it does the recruit accepts it as a way to stay with people who make him feel like he belongs. He gets into violence to keep the approval of the group. Kohn says a lot of people in these hate organizations slide into it sideways. They search for belonging, a sense of purpose, and a sense of meaning, not for the ideology. Wrote Kohn, “Still, why not join a chess club?” We need to be a part of a group. But being a part of one group does not necessarily mean hating those not of the group. A couple things got Arno out of the skinhead movement. First he became a dad and the child’s mother split. Then one close friend in the skinhead movement went to prison and another was killed. He found another group to which he can belong. It’s the rave scene filled with every ethnicity and the whole rainbow of the LGBTQ community – people he as a skinhead would have hated. He loves his new group. Our need to belong, to be part of a community, can be harnessed for hate or for good. To build community for good we need connection spaces. These are places where we can encounter others not like us and build connections with them. Kohn warns that building connections is not the same as not seeing the color, the differences of others. That makes us blind to internal biases. Internal biases is the topic for chapter four. Kohn calls it unconscious hate. She says it is indeed hate. And we’re all guilty of it. It isn’t just a “few bad apples.” It is everyone. It’s us. Kohn discussed research done by Jennifer Kubota, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Chicago. Her research focused on the amygdala, an area of the brain. It is involved when we learn about important, threatening, or novel things. It is an efficient filing cabinet. When a situation arises the amygdala quickly recalls similar situations to help us decide if a threat is present. The amygdala soaks up every message around it – including all the ethnic, racial, gender, etc. stereotypes that saturate our families, education, media, and every other aspect of our lives. We breathe these stereotypes throughout our lives. And when we’re in unfamiliar situations these stereotypes are what our amygdala hands us. The news over reports black crime, so the amygdala absorbs links between black and crime and is ready to hand us that association when it feels appropriate – as when we see an unknown black man in front of us. Kohl wrote that she sometimes wonders to herself whether female colleagues are qualified. She never thinks that about male colleagues. This plays out in all sorts of ways. Black people are assumed to be more tolerant of pain so doctors underprescribe pain meds for them. Police treat black residents differently from white residents. Teachers devote less time to black students. An employer will be less likely to interview a candidate with a “black” name than a “white” one. Black doctors will have their credentials questioned if they’re first responders in an emergency. When the driver of a Mercedes is white we assume he’s a lawyer, if he’s black we wonder about theft or drug deals. A white student with a scholarship is thought to deserve it, a black student must have gotten it because she’s black. And that’s just a tiny way implicit bias causes us to hate. Since this bias is saturated in the culture, since the US has a racist and hate-filled history, we are all affected by it. We’re all guilty of it. No exceptions. Kohn examined the case of the black girl with a scholarship. Many white students think it is unfair because it means a white student didn’t get that scholarship. They don’t see the history of racism that benefit the white students. An example is the University of Tennessee. It was founded in 1927. Until 1961 they admitted only white students. They didn’t get in because they were better than black students but because they benefited from a racist system. Because black students didn’t get in they were blocked from the higher paying jobs and were much less likely to leave an inheritance to their children. So it makes sense to rework rules to to allow more black students to participate. To which the modern white student says, “Why is that my fault?” The problem is the story white people tell themselves. In this case it looks like the black person is cutting the line, jumping to the front as we all try to get to the American Dream. It looks like the white people are being punished for being white. But this story ignores how white people were already ahead of black people in the line. To which white people say their starting place in the line shouldn’t matter. And they resent being told that inherited advantage isn’t supposed to matter. And that resentment is what elected the nasty guy. So what do we do? The first step is to recognize those biases within you. You’ve lived in this society. I’ve lived in this society and have them within me. They’re there. But they can’t be counteracted until recognize they’re there. The problem is not in having them. The problem is not acknowledging them and counteracting them. Kohn says to counteract them we need to use “connection thinking.” That means to consciously create other kinds of associations with other kinds of people we can store in our amygdala. Though a good place to do it is in our connection spaces, it can be done where we are. The fifth chapter is about the Rwanda Genocide of 1994. Yeah, Kohn goes for the heavy topics. In the course of 100 days the ethnic Hutu majority killed 800,000 Tutsi minority. It is a lot of dead. It is also a lot of people, not just a few, doing the killing. This is described as the fastest genocide in history. Why did they do it? Why did friend murder friend? Short answer: because they were told to. That means obedience to authority accounts for a lot. They’re told to harm another. They’re told they should be happy about it. They’re told it is a celebration that this other person is killed. See the many times in the American South when a person was lynched and the town came out, bringing their kids, to this public celebration. Kohn told about an experiment done by psychologist Stanley Milgram. His subjects were told to apply an increasingly strong shock whenever a colleague (actually research staff not connected to anything) got a question wrong. He found 65% of the subjects applied what they were told was a lethal shock. People are quite willing to be obedient to authority. Some people say the Rwanda genocide was a spontaneous event. But the whole thing had been worked out far ahead of time. For a couple years before the attack the Rwandan authorities broadcast messages that said Tutsis are not human and are worthy of being killed. The population was primed for a particular way of thinking. There were, of course, Hutus who did not participate in the killing and some of those even tried to stop it (at least their local version of it). These tended to be on the margins of society, such as Muslims and those who were multiethnic. What to do about this, what to do to stop genocidal thinking, is a tall order. We need our connection spaces and connection thinking to forge links to those not like us. We need to see others not as stereotypes of a group but as people. We also need to learn to think independently, to not rely solely on the messages of society, to have our own well grounded ethics. Doing both together can be hard. A Tutsi survivor who had lost everyone else in a large family said he had forgiven the Hutus who had murdered his family. That prompted a discussion of forgiveness. If a guy forgives is he a hero or a sucker? Is forgiveness a weakness? Does this imply the oppressed have an expectation to educate their oppressors? Does forgiving others put a burden on the forgiver and let the killers off the hook? Or does forgiving remove the burden? Some who survived the genocide have taken steps to make sure the burden of hate has fallen away. The topic of chapter six is systems of hate. An example of that is the ability to vote. Grace Bell Hardison is a black woman born in North Carolina in 1916. She was four when women were allowed to vote. But in 1934, when she came of age, she still could not. The first time she could vote was after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. We’re good, right? In 2013 the Supreme Court began gutting the VRA and various states quickly tightened voting access. In 2016 Hardison was removed from the voting rolls and asked President Obama to intervene on her behalf. She did vote that year, at age 100. This is hate. It extends back to slavery when black people were not considered human with full rights of citizenship. It continues through whose vote is questioned (see the action outside Detroit’s counting room in 2020), who has a harder time fulfilling the requirements to vote, and who gets threatened with violence. It is a system that suppresses votes. Similar systems are embedded in education, health care, criminal justice, housing, and much more. But it is more than officials acting out of hate or just implicit bias in an incident happening today. It is a system that replicates and maintans the hate of the past. Yet, we look at the incident and rarely look at the system. Kohn wrote:

For example, the way that voting-rights laws, local elections-office practices, popular culture around voting, the history of violence against black voters, and the history of racism and white supremacy and black oppression in the United States all interact and interlock. The system not only shapes the individual voting patterns but the entirety of our democracy. Which in turn means that when we see problems like low voter turnout, it’s wise to widen our analysis to see not only individual behavior and factors but the systemic variables.

After another example Kohn wrote, “Systems that are shaped by hate produce hateful results. Unless we stop them.” We as a community can pull the levers to force change. But only if we see the levers. Kohn showed the example of Omaha Public Schools that was consistently underfunded compared to the school districts in the white suburbs around it – formed, of course, to avoid integration. Using a little known law plus a lot of discussion and cajoling the area school districts were able to unite to equalize funding. Both white and black students received benefits. Kohn discussed an incident at a preparatory school on the campus of the Air Force Academy. In 2017 racial slurs were found on message boards. The head of the Academy, Lieutenant General Jay Silveria denounced and condemned the slurs. That’s great! But Kohn said that didn’t go far enough. It didn’t address the systems within the Air Force (and the military as a whole) that perpetuate inequality and injustice. Patriarchy is embedded in the military hierarchy. The whole premise of the military is dehumanizing the other. A soldier is trained to overcome the disinclination to harm another human. The military encourages hate. In another example Kohn discussed broadcaster Glenn Beck. When broadcasting was deregulated in the 1980s and they no longer had to present opposing viewpoints the audiences of conservative stations became smaller. To attract the attention of a smaller audience they promoted the biases of that audience. That means the system had an incentive to be hateful. Beck was ousted because a large number of people changed the incentives in his case. They convinced advertisers to pull their ads. Beck’s show was canceled. To dismantle systems of hate we need to understand them. Then we need to make them visible and help others to understand them. These systems shape us and our society. And we can shape the systems. In the title of the book Kohn said there is an opposite to hate. She said it isn’t love, because it is possible to not hate, yet not love. The opposite is also not some mushy middle zone without passion. One must still have strong beliefs and can disagree with the strong beliefs of others. The opposite of hate is connection. We face and challenge the hate within ourselves – we all have it. We also go to connection places and use our connection speech to create connection systems. Yeah, a lot of easy slogans requiring a lot of hard work. As I said there is a lot of great stuff here. I appreciate her understanding of trolls and how many people slide sideways into white supremacy while looking for groups to which they can belong. Let’s work to make good connection groups happen. I especially appreciate her description of systems of hate. I admire her willingness to explore the Rwanda genocide and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. I’m glad Kohn wrote the book and included much more than I could share here. I’m glad I read it and I strongly recommend it. And, as I mentioned at the top, I don’t think she went far enough. Here are some of my questions this book didn’t address: What about the trolls who aren’t so nice in person? I understand that might have been difficult to research because they likely wouldn’t want to give up their anonymity. What about those who operate troll farms that can attack a person’s online presence with swarms of hateful responses, rendering the target person’s account unusable (at least for a while) and sometimes driving a person off social media. These trolls don’t sound like lonely and bored people tossing vicious comments at a person who doesn’t seem to be really there. What about the leaders of white supremacist movements? Yeah, the underlings might slip in sideways, looking for a place to belong. What about the ones who develop the hateful ideology and make the effort to provide the place for the underlings to belong and then radicalize them for hate? What about the leaders of the Rwanda genocide, that for two years laid the groundwork for the hundred days of hate that killed thousands a day? Why did they do what they did? What about those who design and incentivize the systems of hate? They know full well the “side effects” of their rules and laws oppress people. They may claim they are for election security knowing full well their policies will more severely suppress the votes of a particular target group. What about the leaders in American politics who use hate to further personal goals? Why do they stir up grievances and a sense of victimization to advance a cause? Why do they not have any decency to condemn these actions in others, even in others in their own party? Why do they give every indication they want to end democracy in America? What about those political leaders who seem blind and unconcerned about the destruction of democracy, human rights, the country, and the environment going on around them? I see a great deal of We must do this! And when one person says no the response is a meek, Oh well, we tried. What about the members of the Supreme Court who seem to be doing all they can as quickly as they can to revoke rights and not caring of the pain, oppression, and death that result from their rulings? What about the owners of gun manufacturing companies? Are they, as any capitalist, truly in the business just for the profit? Why aren’t they embarrassed that their products are causing so much death and trauma across the country? Perhaps they want the death and trauma? What’s driving the richest men in the world? Why do they exploit their employees? Why do they buy politicians? Why do they drive competition out of business? Why do they work to hasten our global environmental collapse? Why do they demand laws that make themselves richer and poor people poorer? Why do they fund the end of democracy? Saying the answer is greed seems simplistic. Why has Russia invaded Ukraine? All that I’ve read indicates the war started and is happening because of one man, a man who doesn’t care at all about how his commands affect his soldiers, his citizens, the soldiers and citizens of Ukraine, and the rest of the world. Of course, if I really wanted to spend time I could come up with a much longer list of the types of leaders who promote or act out of hate. Kohn says many wise things about the underlings caught up in hate. But what about the leaders? What drives them? Is it just hate? Does hate describe it well enough? As I said at the top I look at a lot of issues from the viewpoint of supremacy. I define this as an idea or action in which one person claims, “I’m better than you.” Related sentences are: I can do this and you can’t. I’m going to heaven and you aren’t. My life is better than yours. I have this privilege and you don’t. I can do things I won’t let you do. I can remake my society so that you are oppressed (physically, mentally, spiritually, or economically). I can control you and make you dance to my tune. I can kill you and face little consequence. My position in the social hierarchy – above you! – is of high importance to me. I will give up a lot of money to maintain my position in the hierarchy. I would rather die than lose my position in the hierarchy. I can give you a middle position in the hierarchy and give you power to oppress those below you. Of course, most the actions of a supremacist will, to the target, feel a great deal like hate. The online troll responding to a post is making a supremacist move – I can make you feel bad by insulting you. The troll farms are also making a supremacist move – overwhelming a target to make them think twice about challenging a supremacist ideology. Skinhead leaders want white people to be the supreme race. The want to oppress others to prevent them from challenging the high spot in the hierarchy. The Hutu leaders of Rwanda are declaring their supremacy over the Tutsis, partly as payback when Tutsis were considered to be in a higher social position. The Hutus took it to an extreme point of declaring we’re so far above you we consider you cockroaches and we can kill you. American politicians have harnessed hate to keep people like themselves in a superior social position. They can do it by getting those lower in the hierarchy fighting those who are lower still. Other American politicians do little in response because of donations from those even higher in the hierarchy who tell them we’ll give you lots of status if you let us oppress these other people. And on and on. Supremacy plays a role in the actions of all the leaders I listed above. They make their lives look better by making the lives of others worse. Supremacy doesn’t just affect the leaders. Kohn got that part right. Supremacy affects every one from the guy who invaded Ukraine to show he’s king of the world, to the schoolyard bully. Kohn is also right in that it affects the actions of all of us through our unconscious biases. Did Kohn simply not go far enough? Or is there a working difference between supremacy and hate? Does supremacy explain things where hate does not? Since I think supremacy is the root of all sin I don’t think it is possible to have hate without supremacy. Is it possible to have supremacy without hate? I think supremacy drives the leaders I mentioned above and their actions show it to us as hate. I think supremacy is a better description of what drives them than hate does. As for supremacy without hate... Just at the start of the pandemic – when it was still possible to have 500 people packed into a room – I attended a five state handbell event. The 500 of us spent an evening and a day together to rehearse and perform a massed ringing concert. It’s an amazing sound, a wonderful experience. I didn’t take any bells, and didn’t travel with members of my community or church ensembles. I had arranged ahead of time to be placed in an open position within an ensemble who brought bells but not all their members. We had a good time in our short amount of time together – of course, bell people always have a good time when playing bells. Once home and with my community ensemble (our last rehearsal before shutdown) I commented to another member that I (with decades of handbell experience) played better with just a day with the music than those around me (with years of experience) who had spent a lot of time learning the music ahead of time. From the expression on my colleague’s I quickly realized I had made a supremacist statement. I’ve been thinking about supremacy long enough that I could recognize it as such – though that didn’t stop me from making the comment. But was it a hateful statement? One could argue either way. The people at the event didn’t feel the hate. On reflection, it probably was hateful. As Kohn wrote, supremacy and hate are in all of us. It takes self examination to root it out of our lives. I’ve been thinking about supremacy for many years and I still say supremacist things. I’ve got more work to do. And a book to write. Just don’t expect it soon.