Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

The reality of the “parents’ rights” movement is that it is meant to empower a conservative and reactionary minority of parents to dictate education and curricula to the rest of the community. It is, in essence, an institutionalization of the heckler’s veto, in which a single parent — or any individual, really — can remove hundreds of books or shut down lessons on the basis of the political discomfort they feel. “Parents’ rights,” in other words, is when some parents have the right to dominate all the others.

i think even the most rabid MAGA nutjobs would pause before voting for a convicted felon...

i think even the most rabid MAGA nutjobs would pause before voting for a convicted felon...

Although no one has seen the charges, MAGA Republican lawmakers reacted to the decision of a grand jury of ordinary citizens to charge a former president by preemptively accusing Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg of abusing the power of the government against MAGA Republicans.

“[C]orrupt Socialist District Attorney Alvin Bragg [and] the radical Far Left” (New York representative Elise Stefanik) “irreparably damaged our country” (House speaker Kevin McCarthy) “for pure political gain” (Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin). It is “a direct assault on the tens of millions of Americans who support [Trump]” (Ohio senator J. D. Vance), and “[the House Republicans] will hold Alvin Bragg accountable” (Stefanik, again).

The lawmakers have reached their position after extensive coordination with Trump, with whom Stefanik, Jordan, and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) speak regularly to keep him abreast of what they know about investigations and to plan policy. As Stephen Collinson pointed out on CNN, they are taking to a new level what they have been doing since Trump took office: weaponizing the government to put Trump back into power.

As the Manhattan grand jury’s investigation got close to a decision, McCarthy backed an investigation of the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Promptly, committee chairs Jim Jordan (R-OH, Judiciary), James Comer (R-KY, Oversight and Accountability), and Bryan Steil (R-WI, House Administration) demanded that Bragg turn over all documents and testimony related to the investigation and appear before them to answer questions. As the counsel for the district attorney’s office, Leslie B. Dubeck, pointed out in response, these demands are “an unprecedented and illegitimate incursion on New York’s sovereign interests” and amount to “unlawful political interference.”

Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, told Washington Post reporter Greg Sargent: “This is an extreme move to use the resources of Congress to interfere with a criminal investigation at the state and local level and block an indictment.” It is, he said, “the kind of political culture you find in authoritarian dictatorships.”

At Axios today, Sophia Cai and Juliegrace Brufke ran the numbers of Trump backers in Congress. Thirty-seven Republicans have already endorsed him, and in the House, McCarthy has put them into key positions. Trump supporters make up more than a third of the Republicans members on the Committee on the Judiciary, which oversees the legal system, and the Committee on Oversight, which oversees government accountability. Nine of the 25 Republicans on the Judiciary Committee support him; 11 of the 26 Republicans on House Oversight do, too.

What is actually in the indictment remains unknown, but the language Republicans are using to attack it reveals that what it says doesn’t particularly matter. Their claim that “the Left” is “weaponizing government” against the right echoes “post-liberal” ideology. This worldview explains why the right wing continues to lose ground in society despite Republican victories at the polls. The problem is not that right-wing positions are unpopular, post-liberal thinkers insist, it’s that the “left” has captured the nation’s institutions.

They argue that the ideas that underpin democracy—equality before the law, separation of church and state, academic freedom, a market-driven economy, free speech—have undermined virtue. These values are “liberal” values because they are based on the idea of the importance of individual freedom from an oppressive government, and they are at the heart of American democracy.

But post-liberal thinkers say that liberalism’s defense of individual rights has destroyed the family, communities, and even the fundamental differences between men and women, throwing society into chaos. They propose to restore the values of traditional Christianity, which would, they believe, restore traditional family structures and supportive communities, and promote the virtue of self-sacrifice as people give up their individualism for their children (their worldview utterly rejects abortion).

The position of those embracing a post-liberal order is a far cry from the Reagan Republicans’ claim to want small government and free markets. The new ideologues want a strong government to enforce their religious values on American society, and they reject those of both parties who support democratic norms—for it is those very norms they see as destructive. They urge their leaders to “dare to rule.”

Those who call for a new post-liberal order want to “reconquer public institutions all over the United States,” as Christopher Rufo put it after Florida governor Ron DeSantis appointed him to the board of New College as part of a mission to turn the progressive school into a right-wing bastion. “If we can take this high-risk, high-reward gambit and turn it into a victory,” Rufo told Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times, “we’re going to see conservative state legislators starting to reconquer public institutions all over the United States.”

To spur that process, Republicans have turned to so-called culture wars, but as David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo notes, issues are becoming heated not in some vague way, but because Republicans are deliberately making normal processes partisan to destroy consensus about them. So, for example, Rufo pushed the idea that the legal framework “critical race theory” was being pushed in public agencies and public schools in order, he told Benjamin Wallace-Wells of the New Yorker, “to politicize the bureaucracy.” He hoped to “take some of these essentially corrupted state agencies and then contest them, and then create rival power centers within them.”

The Republican attacks on Bragg reflect this process. They are quite deliberately destroying public faith in the justice system, declaring Trump’s looming indictment a political attack even before we know what’s in it, and attributing the indictment to a single man—a Black man— rather than to a jury of ordinary citizens. That attack, as Raskin pointed out, is their own attempt to politicize the Department of Justice and then take it over.

It is important to understand the pattern behind these attacks on American institutions. They are not piecemeal; they are a larger attack on democracy itself.

Republicans are wrong, not only in their attacks on Bragg, but also in their premise that liberal democracy is immoral. It has not destroyed families or communities, or ended self-sacrifice: just the opposite.

The principles of liberal democracy made nineteenth-century writer Harriet Beecher Stowe turn her grief for her dead eighteen-month-old son into the best-selling novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which showed why no mother’s child should be sold away from her. It made Rose Herera sue her former enslaver for custody of her own children after the Civil War. It made Julia Ward Howe demand the right to vote so her abusive husband could not control her life any longer.

It made Black mathematician and naturalist Benjamin Banneker call out Thomas Jefferson for praising liberty while denying it to Black Americans; Sitting Bull defend the right of the Lakota to practice their own new religion, even though he did not believe in it; Saum Song Bo tell The New York Sun he was insulted by their request for money to build a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty when, three years before, the country had excluded people like him; Dr. Héctor García realize that Mexican Americans needed to be able to vote in order to protect themselves; Edward Roberts claim the right to get an education despite his physical paralysis; drag king Stormé DeLarverie throw the first punch at the Stonewall riot that jump-started the gay rights movement.

And self-sacrifice? Americans trying to push the United States to live up to its principles have always put themselves on the line for freedom rather than permitting democracy to fall to white supremacists or theocrats. As James Meredith recalled of his long struggle to desegregate the University of Mississippi in the 1960s: “My entire crusade at Ole Miss, you see, was a love story. It is a story about my love for America….”

The reality of the “parents’ rights” movement is that it is meant to empower a conservative and reactionary minority of parents to dictate education and curricula to the rest of the community. It is, in essence, an institutionalization of the heckler’s veto, in which a single parent — or any individual, really — can remove hundreds of books or shut down lessons on the basis of the political discomfort they feel. “Parents’ rights,” in other words, is when some parents have the right to dominate all the others.

‘Like lighting a match’: Trump ramps up rhetoric as legal walls close in

The former president has responded to his indictment with invective and dire warnings amid an already polarised situation

David Smith
David Smith in Washington
@smithinamerica
Sun 2 Apr 2023 07.00 BST

Donald Trump understands the camera. He is particular about angles, lighting and his inimitable orange hair. But come this Tuesday, in a New York courthouse, the camera will become his tormentor as Trump, once the most powerful man in the world, is told to provide a mug shot like a common criminal.

The first reality TV star to be elected US president, and the first US president to be twice impeached and attempt the overthrow of an election, is now the first US president to be charged with a crime. The 76-year-old faces the humiliation of being photographed, fingerprinted and entering a plea to charges involving a 2016 hush money payment to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels.

The impact of that is already being felt. There are signs that the legal perils now engulfing Trump are pushing him to new extremes. Trump has never been a conventional politician, but his divisive brand of populist-nationalism is growing ever more intense and extreme.

His 2024 campaign for the White House is embracing a violent rhetoric that could inflame tensions and put America on a path to conflagration. Barricades have gone up around the courthouse in New York. Daniels canceled a Friday television interview out of “security concerns”. Trump’s language on the campaign trail and social media, haranguing his enemies, is laced with race-baiting and antisemitic conspiratorial tropes.

“There’s nothing traditional about Donald Trump and there never has been, but we’ve never been in this situation before and what’s different now is how polarised we are,” said Frank Luntz, a pollster who has worked on numerous Republican election campaigns. “This is like lighting a match in the middle of a bonfire that’s been doused with gasoline. I’m afraid that we’re lighting a match and we’re going to see on Tuesday what happens.”

For a moment, it had seemed that this time might be different. Trump launched his 2024 election campaign last November at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida with an uncharacteristic low energy, steering clear of his stolen election lies and insisting: “We’re going to keep it very elegant.”

He then went unusually quiet before embarking on small-scale campaign events, issuing policy proposals and hiring staff in early voting states. Unlike his ramshackle 2016 effort, his campaign team appeared disciplined. The Hill website observed: “Former President Trump is doing something shocking – he’s running a campaign that is starting to look quite conventional.”

But just as hopes that Trump would grow into the presidency were constantly dashed, so this newly orthodox candidate was never going to last. The trigger came two days after he became the first contender to hit the 2024 election campaign trail, delivering unremarkable speeches in the early primary states of New Hampshire and South Carolina.

In a surprise move, Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, revived what had seemed be a cold case, an investigation into an alleged $130,000 payment to Daniels in the waning days of the 2016 campaign. Daniels has said she received money in exchange for keeping silent about a sexual encounter she had with Trump in 2006, when he was married to Melania Trump.

As witnesses testified to a grand jury and the walls closed in, Trump used the threat to raise money and rally supporters as he seeks his party’s nomination to challenge Joe Biden next year. He abandoned all pretence of moderation and reverted to the old demagoguery.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference at the National Harbor in Maryland, he spoke in apocalyptic terms of a “final battle” and vowed to supporters: “I am your retribution.” On his Truth Social media platform, he inaccurately predicted his own arrest and called for protests, echoing his charged rhetoric ahead of the January 6 2021 attack on the US Capitol by his supporters.

Luntz commented: “He knows the power of that word ‘protest’. He knows what happened the last time he used that word. This is a deliberate effort to engage people in his situation and I am concerned about the consequences of him using that word.”

Trump went on to warn of potential “death & destruction” if he were charged and described Bragg as an “animal” who was “doing the work of Anarchists and the Devil, who want our Country to fail”. He accused Bragg, who is Black, of racial bias and even shared an image – later removed – of himself holding a baseball bat next to a picture of the district attorney. Bragg’s office has been the target of bomb threats in recent weeks.

Then, last weekend, Trump held his first campaign rally in Waco, Texas, exactly 30 years after a 51-day standoff and deadly siege there, and began by standing with hand on heart during the playing of a song that features a choir of men imprisoned for their role in the January 6 insurrection singing the national anthem, as footage from the riot was shown on big screens.

The ex-president proceeded to describe the “weaponisation of law enforcement” as the biggest threat to America today and vow: “The thugs and criminals who are corrupting our justice system will be defeated, discredited and totally disgraced.”

When on Thursday the grand jury had voted to indict, Trump responded in similar fashion and, significantly, Republicans rallied to his defence. Such is his grip on that party that even potential 2024 rivals felt compelled to defend his claim of a witch-hunt. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, called the move “un-American”, while former vice-president Mike Pence told CNN the charges were “outrageous”.

Both will have been aware that Trump’s campaign of rage in recent weeks has put him back in the headlines and expanded his lead in opinion polls. DeSantis, promoting a new book, has found himself going backwards. It is little surprise that Trump feels emboldened.

Luntz said: “His numbers have gone up five points since this whole thing came about and I’m afraid that it will galvanise and solidify the support that had been leaving him. Donald Trump is the best politician in my lifetime at playing the victim card. There’s no one who comes close to him.”

Trump alleges that there are political motivations behind all four criminal investigations he is known to face – including into his retention of classified documents and attempts to overturn his election defeat, and a separate Georgia investigation into his efforts to overturn his loss in that state. One line of attack is reframing January 6 as a heroic defence of democracy.

Tara Setmayer, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: “It’s clear that January 6 is a badge of valour for him, given that he’s continued to escalate the violent rhetoric similar to that which he used prior to January 6. He seems to get off on the idea of people engaging in violence on behalf of him.”

She added: “He’s like a political vampire with a taste. He got a taste of what that violence can do on his behalf and now he wants more because he feels powerful.”

The shift to the right goes beyond posturing. Trump has unleashed a barrage of policy proposals that include punishing doctors who provide gender-affirming care, measures that would make it harder to vote and imposing the death penalty on drug dealers. He appears to be taking the Republican party with him.

Staunch allies such as Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia have risen to prominence in Congress. Republican state legislatures across the country have passed extreme legislation curtailing abortion and LGBTQ and voting rights. DeSantis, seen as Trump’s principal rival for the nomination, has adopted many of the same positions or tried to move even further right.

Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: “I don’t think he’s dragging them anywhere. They’re going willingly and voluntarily. They’re not putting up any kind of struggle. It just tells me intuitively that this is what they want, this is the kind of party that they want to be a part of because they’re doing absolutely nothing to divorce themselves from the extremism that Donald Trump regurgitates every single day.”

Police are likely to close streets around the Manhattan courthouse ahead of Tuesday’s expected appearance. In a sign of the increasingly febrile atmosphere, Trump loyalist Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator for South Carolina, mocked Bragg’s sense of priorities by writing on Twitter: “How can President Trump avoid prosecution in New York? On the way to the DA’s office on Tuesday, Trump should smash some windows, rob a few shops and punch a cop. He would be released IMMEDIATELY!”

A potential trial is still at least more than a year away, meaning it could occur during or after the presidential campaign. While it is unclear what specific charges Trump will face, some legal experts have said Bragg might have to rely on untested legal theories to argue that Trump falsified business records to cover up crimes such as violating federal campaign finance law.

Luntz, the pollster, warned: “If you go to kill the king and the king lives, you die. If you prosecute Donald Trump and he is found innocent, there will be no stopping him. If he is found guilty, there’ll be no calming down of his most fervent supporters. Either way, it’s bad for the American democracy.”

Merrick Garland is a weird one, I will agree!

But I see the possibility of a very bad outcome if independent voters are swayed that it's just a political vendetta. And polls show that many of them do believe this. I don't think a 'guilty' verdict in this case will do anything to win them back. And a 'not guilty' verdict will be even worse.

Luntz, the pollster, warned: “If you go to kill the king and the king lives, you die. If you prosecute Donald Trump and he is found innocent, there will be no stopping him. If he is found guilty, there’ll be no calming down of his most fervent supporters. Either way, it’s bad for the American democracy.”

One of the main architects of the "Contract With America" was a Republican pollster named Frank Luntz, who has been at the forefront of political messaging for 30 years. Luntz is credited inside and outside Washington, DC, with teaching a generation of Republican politicians that "it might not matter what we say so much as how we say it," Scheufele said.

Throughout the '90s, Luntz developed theories on political messaging and engineered countless phrases that subtly promote conservative ideals. Those ideas have since been absorbed into classes at the Leadership Institute, a conservative nonprofit that it says teaches "political technology" to prospective politicians and activists. His rhetorical tips and phrases are regularly distributed among Republican circles. (Luntz declined multiple interview requests.)

LARA TRUMP (GUEST): I think everyone in this country feels that this is not just about Republican versus Democrat. This is about good versus evil. There is spiritual warfare going on in America right now.

...but I don't see why it would be so for the rest of that cohort.

"lust"? I'll assume you mean "list".

In answer to your question, I say probably no or almost always no. But I can't throw out an absolute answer.