The MAGA alphabet, continued

For those questioning Biden's fitness....

 

What QAnon supporters, butthole sunners and New Age spiritualists have in common

Oh where to being?

Christopher T. Conner, University of Missouri-Columbia

Even though it’s been linked to cancer, butthole sunning
is an alternative wellness practice that has become
popularized. Nick Lehr, CC BY-SA

After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, former NBA player Royce White became an outspoken advocate of defunding the police. Over those ensuing months, he appeared at a number of protests and marches in Minnesota – demonstrations that conservative politicians and pundits excoriated.

Four years later, White accepted the endorsement of the Minnesota GOP in the state’s 2024 U.S. Senate race.

In the interim, White had appeared on the show of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, where he decried the “establishment” and “corporatocracy.” While on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, he complained that women “had become too mouthy.” Elsewhere, he lambasted the LGBTQ+ movement as “Luciferian” and described Israel as the vanguard of a “new world order.”

White’s transition from an NBA player who advocated for progressive causes to an acolyte of Jones is more common than you might think.

Many people might associate conspiracy theories with certain demographics or political leanings. But the reality is far more nuanced, with emerging research finding that there is far more diversity among conspiracists than scholars previously thought.

Conspiracy theories are just as likely to be held by your MAGA-hat wearing uncle as they are your best friend who’s a fan of the band Phish and goes to CrossFit three times a week.

Is this the "rural character" Ruth Platner always talks about?

Why rural white Americans’ resentment is a threat to democracy

Thomas F. Schaller, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Rural white voters have long enjoyed outsize power in American politics. They have inflated voting power in the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House and the Electoral College.

Although there is no uniform definition of “rural,” and even federal agencies cannot agree on a single standard, roughly 20% of Americans live in rural communities, according to the Census Bureau’s definition. And three-quarters of them – or approximately 15% of the U.S. population – are white.

Since the rise of Jacksonian democracy and the expansion of the vote to all white men in the late 1820s, however, the support of rural white people has been vital to the governing power of almost every major party coalition. Which is why my co-author Paul Waldman and I describe rural white people as America’s “essential minority” in our book “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy.”

As a political scientist, I’ve written or co-written five books addressing issues of racial politics at some level of government or part of the country. My latest, “White Rural Rage,” seeks to understand the complex intersections of race, place and opinion and the implications they hold for our political system.

The unfortunate fact is that polls suggest many rural white people’s commitment to the American political system is eroding. Even when they are not members of militant organizations, rural white people, as a group, now pose four interconnected threats to the fate of the United States’ pluralist, constitutional democracy.

Although these do not apply to all rural white people, nor exclusively to them in general, when compared with other Americans, rural white people:

• Express the most racist, least inclusive, most xenophobic, most anti-LGBTQ+ and most anti-immigrant sentiments.
• Subscribe at the highest rates to conspiracy theories about QAnon, the 2020 presidential election, Barack Obama’s citizenship and COVID-19 vaccines.
• Support a variety of antidemocratic and unconstitutional positions and exhibit strong attachments to white nationalist and white Christian nationalist movements inimical to secular, constitutional governance.
• Are most likely to justify, if not call for, force or violence as acceptable alternatives to deliberative, peaceful democracy.

Let’s examine a few data points.

Michael Flynn has a bad rep despite what Jim Mageau claims

Putting him on a pedestal tarnishes ours.

By Philip Eil, Rhode Island Current

Late December tends to be so sleepy for news, that at some point, the space between Christmas and New Years became known as “dead week.” But an uproar surged across Rhode Island screens and airwaves in recent days. And for those of you just returning to your desks, here’s a recap. 

The hubbub began on Dec. 20 when Boston Globe columnist Dan McGowan reported that the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame had voted to include former National Security Advisor – and Middletown native – Michael Flynn in its 2024 class. Outrage ensued. 

Six members of the hall’s 25-member board resigned (a number which, per Providence Journal reporting, later grew to eight). And others around the state voiced their disapproval in tweets, columns, and letters to the editor. 

On Dec. 26, the story made the New York Times, which is always an event in the smallest state. Then, on Friday Dec. 29, honorary state Historian Laureate Patrick Conley weighed in with this statement. 

Speaking as the hall’s past president and “Volunteer General Counsel” Conley talked about a lot of subjects: the hall’s history, its funding, its “extensive website,” the nine other inductees in the 2024 class, the barrage of letters it received about Flynn’s induction, the hall’s long history of induction ceremonies undisturbed by protest, and, eventually, the board’s decision to “defer Flynn’s induction to a more peaceful and rational time and a more secure place.”

What he did not talk about was Flynn’s conduct or say that the induction wouldn’t happen at all. In a single sentence, Conley dismissed concerns about Flynn’s felony conviction for lying to the FBI. 

The board “accepted as true the grant of clemency from the president of the United States asserting that no crime was actually committed and the fact that charges against Flynn were dropped by a weaponized Department of Justice,” he wrote, without mentioning that other Trump pardonees include murderers and war criminals. 

Conley’s statement was disappointing. But given his record of commentary – his eagerness to defend awful men, his tendency to fire back at critics, his apparent impatience for left-leaning protests – it wasn’t surprising. 

And if you do look closely at what Flynn has done, it becomes clear how colossally inappropriate the hall’s choice was, and how further misguided Conley’s efforts are to defend, defer, or do anything short of rescind it. (In 2022, the University of Rhode Island’s board of trustees wisely revoked an honorary degree Flynn received in 2014.) And if Conley and the hall aren’t willing to explore why Flynn is so unworthy of induction, I will. 

Flynn’s outrageous behavior falls into roughly three categories.

Justice denied

The new alphabet

 

Too much Viagra?

Why Republican lawmakers are obsessed about sex: Three reasons

ROBERT REICH

The Republican Party, once a proud proponent of limited government, has become a font of government intrusion into the most intimate aspects of personal and family life. 

Last Friday, a judge who previously worked for a conservative Republican legal organization and was then nominated to the bench by Trump and pushed through the Senate by Mitch McConnell, invalidated the FDA’s approval of a 23-year-old abortion pill (mifepristone) used in over half of pregnancy terminations in the United States.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the Dobbs case (in which Republican appointees on the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade), Republican states are criminalizing abortion. Some are criminalizing the act of helping women obtain an abortion in another state. 

Texas gives private citizens the right to sue anyone who helps someone get an abortion. Idaho just passed an “abortion trafficking” law that would make helping a minor leave Idaho to get an abortion without parental consent punishable by five years in prison. Tennessee Republicans have made it illegal to mail medical abortion pills. 

In the last Congress, 167 House Republicans co-sponsored the Life at Conception Act, conferring full personhood rights on fertilized eggs. 

Has the GOP Lost Its Brain?

The GOP DOES still have ideas – bad ones that are extremely dangerous ones

JEFFREY C. ISAAC for Common Dreams

Timothy Noah is an incisive commentor on U.S. politics. His recent New Republic essay, “How the GOP Lost Its Brain,” nicely documents the ways that the Republican party has become both increasingly anti-intellectual and incoherent since the days of Reagan. The GOP deserves to be skewered for its inconsistencies, absurdities, and lunatics. And its very real fissures ought to be analyzed with care, for they can grow, and contribute to the party’s weakening if they do. 

But it does not follow from these fissures that the GOP is an agglomeration of nihilists and no longer has “ideas.” It has ideas, and they are summed up in the acronym MAGA, which now defines both the Republican base and its major leaders and presidential aspirants.

These are powerful and dangerous ideas, even if they do not constitute a coherent policy agenda.

Noah writes that the party’s “failure to produce a party platform in 2020 proved beyond a doubt that there was no such thing as a GOP ideology.” I get what he is saying; that 2020 Republican not-platform was surely a sign of something troubling. But Noah’s account is not quite right. 

The RNC’s one-page announcement in the summer of 2020 declared that the Convention “would adjourn without adopting a new platform” until 2024 (emphasis added.) This announcement was immediately preceded by this Resolution: “That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.”

In short, the GOP in 2020 registered its continued adherence to its 2016 platform and, more important, announced its unqualified and total support for the agenda, the rhetoric, and the performance of Donald Trump, this after numerous scandals, the Mueller Report, and an impeachment.

There is a term for this: The Leader Principle (in German, more ominously, Fuhrerprinzip). It played an important role in the history of fascism. As Noah well knows, for years now a serious debate has raged among scholars and public intellectuals about the extent to which Trumpism has fascist dimensions. 

The semantic debate about “fascism” will surely continue. But what is really beyond debate is that the GOP has become deeply hostile to liberal democracy, and its principal leaders and ideologues have quite explicitly lauded the xenophobic, nationalistic, and anti-liberal regime of Hungary’s Viktor Orban.

All Extremist-Related Murders Last Year Were Committed by Right-Wing Extremists

Trump, Fox and others have a lot to answer for

By David Badash

A new report from the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism reveals that all extremist-related murders in 2022 were committed by right-wing extremists. 

More than four out of five extremist-related murders last year were committed by white supremacist right-wing extremists. 

The report finds that nearly all extremist-related mass killings were committed by right-wing extremists, and warns the numbers of those mass murders “is of growing concern.”

“All the extremist-related murders in 2022 were committed by right-wing extremists of various kinds,” the ADL’s Center on Extremism (COE) reports, “who typically commit most such killings each year but only occasionally are responsible for all (the last time this occurred was 2012).”

“Left-wing extremists engage in violence ranging from assaults to fire-bombings and arsons, but since the late 1980s have not often targeted people with deadly violence.”

The report adds: 

“White supremacists commit the greatest number of domestic extremist-related murders in most years, but in 2022 the percentage was unusually high: 21 of the 25 murders were linked to white supremacists. Again, this is primarily due to mass shootings. Only one of the murders was committed by a right-wing anti-government extremist—the lowest number since 2017.”

Congressman who cowered on Jan. 6 is handing these out to House Republicans

Chicken hawk has a weird sense of humor

by TARA DUBLIN

Now that they’re enjoying a razor-thin majority, House Republicans are smoking in their Congressional offices while not having to worry about security preventing them from packing heat on the floor.

In fact, to celebrate the MAGA victory over the Democrats, AR-15 pins started showing up on the lapels of a lot of the worst people in place of the traditional American flag pins.

That's him on the left hiding behind a Capitol police officer

But tell me more about Black football players disrespecting America, Trumpocrites.

It took a while before anyone solved the mystery of the Man with the Golden Gun Pins, but like all mediocre MAGA men, the culprit couldn’t stand not getting the credit he thinks he deserves.

The guy who’s been handing out AR-15 lapel pins to his fellow NRAnuses in the QAnon Caucus is none other than Rep. Andrew “Run and Hide” Clyde (R-GA), who famously cowered behind braver men during the January 6th insurrection that he probably knew was coming but somehow thought wouldn’t impact him.

Reps Cicilline and Magaziner discuss first days in Republican-controlled House

"Working" with the right

By Steve Ahlquist for UpRiseRI

On Thursday January 19th Uprise RI alongside other local journalists sat down with Rhode Island’s United States Representatives David Cicilline and Seth Magaziner, both Democrats. Representative Cicilline has served since 2011, Representative Magaziner was recently sworn in for his first term, after a long delay as Republicans in the House, who hold a small majority, struggled to elect Kevin McCarthy to the Speakership.

This conversation was held in Representative Cicilline’s Pawtucket office with a small number of local journalists. It was rather informal, with a good back and forth in questions. The transcript has been edited for clarity, you can watch the full interview here: United States Reprepresentatives David Cicillini and Seth Magaziner Press Conference - Jan 19 2023 - YouTube

Find the "mistakes"

For more cartoons by Tom Tomorrow, CLICK HERE

An Epidemic of Loneliness and the Dark World of Far-Right Conspiracy Theorists

What I found in the deepest reaches of the Internet and the lost art—and political potency—of true human connection.

ANDY KROLL for the TomDispatch

We all do it. Make little snap judgments about everyday strangers as we go about our lives. Without giving it a second’s thought, we sketch minibiographies of the people we pass on the sidewalk, the guy seated across from us on the train, or the woman in line in front of us at the grocery store. 

We wonder: Who are they? Where are they from? How do they make a living? Lately, though, such passing encounters tend to leave me with a sense of suspicion, a wariness tinged with grim curiosity. I think to myself: Is he or she one of them?

By them, I mean one of the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of “people” I encountered during my many forays into the darkest recesses of the Internet. 

Despite the staggering amount of time many of us spend online — more than six-and-a-half hours a day, according to recent research — we tend to haunt the same websites and social media platforms (Facebook, YouTube, CNN, Reddit, Google) again and again. 

Not me, though. Over the past five years, I’ve spent more hours than I wish to count exploring the subterranean hideaways and uncensored gathering spaces for some of the most unhinged communities on the Internet.

Have a Merry Q-Christmas

For more cartoons by Ruben Bolling, CLICK HERE

 

Why Do So Many Americans Believe the Lies Pushed by the GOP?

We'd better figure it out

By Thom Hartmann for the Independent Media Institute

Nick Anderson

Donald Trump is still insisting he won the 2020 election, despite having lost by about 7 million votes and being wiped out in the Electoral College. 

Science, it turns out, is on his side.

Not the science of elections: the science of propaganda.  

New findings from psychologists at universities in California and Georgia and published in the journal Cognitive Research show that the more often a statement — regardless of its truthfulness — is repeated, the more emphatically it’s believed.

The researchers noted:

“Repeated information is often perceived as more truthful than new information. This finding is known as the illusory truth effect, and it is typically thought to occur because repetition increases processing fluency. Because fluency and truth are frequently correlated in the real world, people learn to use processing fluency as a marker for truthfulness.”

While modern science is affirming this truism, it’s been in use a long time. In the past century, for example, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called out his day’s Republicans for using what we today call the Big Lie around several issues. Running for re-election in 1944, he said:

“The opposition in this year has already imported into this campaign a very interesting thing, because it is foreign. They have imported the propaganda technique invented by the dictators abroad. Remember, a number of years ago, there was a book, Mein Kampf, written by Hitler himself.

“The technique was all set out in Hitler's book - and it was copied by the aggressors of Italy and Japan. According to that technique, you should never use a small falsehood; always a big one, for its very fantastic nature would make it more credible - if only you keep repeating it over and over and over again.”

Back then Republicans were lying that Democrats had caused the Republican Great Depression (as it was called until the 1950s) and that FDR had “failed” to adequately prepare America for war with Germany or Japan (while Republican after Republican took to the floor of Congress to tell us, before the War, that “we can do business with Hitler”).

Now Trump’s lies (like about the election) are parroted daily by Republican politicians and usually echoed in the media without push-back. After all, Trump reportedly slept with a collection of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside: he would be fluent in Hitler’s Big Lie strategy.

White nationalism is a political ideology that mainstreams racist conspiracy theories

We have been down this road before

Sara Kamali, University of California San Diego

U.S. President Joe Biden delivers a prime-time speech on Sept. 1, 2022,
 in Philadelphia. Alex Wong/Getty Images

In September 2022, President Joe Biden convened a summit called United We Stand to denounce the “venom and violence” of white nationalism ahead of the midterm elections.

His remarks repeated the theme of his prime-time speech in Philadelphia on Sept. 1, 2022, during which he warned that America’s democratic values are at stake.

“We must be honest with each other and with ourselves,” Biden said. “Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal. Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”

Former President Donald Trump embraces Kari Lake, the Arizona
GOP candidate for governor, at a rally on July 22, 2022. 
Mario Tama/Getty Images

While that message may resonate among many Democratic voters, it’s unclear whether it will have any impact on any Republicans whom Biden described as “dominated and intimidated” by former President Donald Trump, or on independent voters who have played decisive roles in elections, and will continue to do so, particularly as their numbers increase.

It’s also unclear whether Trump-endorsed candidates can win in general elections, in which they will face opposition not only from members of their own party but also from a broad swath of Democrats and independent voters.

What is clear is that this midterm election cycle has revealed the potency of conspiracy theories that prop up narratives of victimhood and messages of hate across the complex American landscape of white nationalism.

It's Not Just Trump

The Whole GOP Has Embraced His Craziness

JIM HIGHTOWER for Creators.com

In the 1990s, the sharp-witted Texan and renowned progressive writer Molly Ivins regaled (and appalled) readers with her reports on the tragicomic awfulness of George W. Bush's two terms as the Lone Star State's governor.

His tenure was notable for his deep ignorance, frat-boy arrogance and flagrant servility to corporate interests. But those very qualities made America's moneyed powers decide that—Wow!—wouldn't he make a dandy president?

Molly warned the general public about the folly of that choice, but in the 2000 race, W's patrons stuffed him with money, buffed him up with a glossy coat of PR Shinola, pulled off a flagrant post-election political heist in Florida ... and squeegeed him, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft and that whole regime of horrors into office.

Many Americans soon began expressing astonishment at how shallow, imperious, and dangerous Bush & Co. were proving to be, leading Molly to say with a heavy sigh: "Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please pay attention."

Don't look now, but another Texas gubernatorial goober, named Greg Abbott, is coming at you, insisting that he should be your next president. Sadly, Molly is gone, but I knew her well enough that I think I can speak for her on this matter of national import: "Oh, hell no!"

Excuse the redundancy here, but right-wing extremism has become extremely extreme, and Abbott is vying to be the "extremiest" of all. A clue to his loopiness is his vituperative anti-abortion absolutism, forcing victims of rape to give birth to their rapists' spawn.

Not a problem, proclaimed Abbott, for he's the Lone Star Wizard. He declared that he intends to go out and arrest all rapists—get this— before they rape anyone!

Abbott, a governor with no talent for governing, has run up a record noted for spectacular program failures, corporate bootlicking, widening inequality, corruption, political buffoonery... and so awful much more. If that's your idea of a president, there he is.

Perhaps you remember Sen. Barry Goldwater, the GOP's fringy, far-right-wing 1964 presidential nominee who famously said, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice."

Today, however, the core of the Republican Party has gone so far beyond the fringe that they would boo Goldwater's right-wingism as insufficiently rabid. Instead, their new rallying cry is: "Nuttiness in the defense of extremism is no vice."

Buying into conspiracy theories can be exciting

That’s what makes them dangerous

Donovan Schaefer, University of Pennsylvania

A protester holds a Q sign as he waits to enter a campaign rally
with then-President Donald Trump in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., in August 2018.
 AP Photo/Matt Rourke

Conspiracy theories have been around for centuries, from witch trials and antisemitic campaigns to beliefs that Freemasons were trying to topple European monarchies. 

In the mid-20th century, historian Richard Hofstadter described a “paranoid style” that he observed in right-wing U.S. politics and culture: a blend of “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.”

But the “golden age” of conspiracy theories, it seems, is now. 

On June 24, 2022, the unknown leader of the QAnon conspiracy theory posted online for the first time in over a year. QAnon’s enthusiasts tend to be ardent supporters of Donald Trump, who made conspiracy theories a signature feature of his political brand, from Pizzagate and QAnon to “Stop the Steal” and the racist “birther” movement. 

Key themes in conspiracy theories – like a sinister network of “pedophiles” and “groomers,” shadowy “bankers” and “globalists” – have moved into the mainstream of right-wing talking points.

Much of the commentary on conspiracy theories presumes that followers simply have bad information, or not enough, and that they can be helped along with a better diet of facts.

But anyone who talks to conspiracy theorists knows that they’re never short on details, or at least “alternative facts.” They have plenty of information, but they insist that it be interpreted in a particular way – the way that feels most exciting.

My research focuses on how emotion drives human experience, including strong beliefs. In my latest book, I argue that confronting conspiracy theories requires understanding the feelings that make them so appealing – and the way those feelings shape what seems reasonable to devotees. 

If we want to understand why people believe what they believe, we need to look not just at the content of their thoughts, but how that information feels to them. Just as the “X-Files” predicted, conspiracy theories’ acolytes “want to believe.”

Equal justice under law?