Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

It’s one of those Big N numbers. I recently came across it, and it’s fair to say it blew my mind. Shocking but not surprising, as we say these days—but the more that I reflected on it, the more weight it carried. Ready?

70% of people say they’re “financially traumatized.” Whew. Put aside the shocking-but-not-surprising face that’s de rigueur these days, the shell of cool ironic distance that keeps us all sane and protected from bitter reality. Let me assure you, wearing my Official World’s Top 50 Thinkers Hat: that’s incredibly dire.

If you watch the video I made to accompany this post, I talk about some context. But int this post, let’s go deeper than that.

What does this number tell us? 70% of people financially traumatized is an American number, and it’s something that we should never, ever see. We should never see it in a poor country, let alone a nominally rich one. It beggars belief when you really stop to take it in. Just think of it as: 70% of people feel traumatized. You don't need, really, I think, to add "by the economy," because of course, this is a real form of trauma, too. How so?

The idea of “financial trauma” goes beyond mere stress. The numbers on stress alone, though, combined with a range of other social indicators, of course, back up the point that trauma is exactly what’s emerging. America’s seeing multiple, severe social crises afflict it. Friendship’s cratering, as it becomes a luxury, loneliness is soaring, deaths of despair are skyrocketing, and so forth. I recently called these a “modern crisis of being.” Half of American young people say they feel “persistently hopeless.”

In other words, there’s a theme here. What is that theme, though?

America’s economic model hasn’t worked. We can gild that lily, and try to veil the central point in politesse, like pundits, or we can just…speak frankly about the facts. That the vast majority of Americans say they’re “financially traumatized” is about as clear evidence as there ever could be that an entire socioeconomic model has failed.

We can call that economic model many things. Probably, we should just use the term “predatory capitalism.” The idea being that maximizing profit is the point of life, the raison d’être for institutional existence, which then gets translated to a ladder, a sort of hierarchy, of organizational forms. Shareholder value dictates the primacy of social priorities, and that basically means that the last penny of profit is to be wrung out of everything, at any cost. Including people.

Now, I don’t mean mom-and-pop local scale human variant commerce, trade, etcetera. No, I’m not saying you shouldn’t own a drycleaner or bakery or brewery. We’re talking here of mega-scale extractive economics, and what kinds of societies and lives it allows.

You see, this number is is really dark. Grim, sure, and dystopian, true, but it speaks of an unnecessary tragedy, too. It can’t be the case that 70% of people in a society—remember, especially, a nominally rich one—are “financially traumatized” at their own hands. This is the kind of thing that speaks to what insurers call “force majeure,” or we economists call “shocks.” When a number’s that big, the problem’s baked into the system.

So how has predatory capitalism failed? First, I want you to see the abject, colossal, terrifying dimensions of the failure. 70% of people say they’re scarred for life just by their financial lives. That’s crazy, wrong, awful, and heartrending. Look beneath that surface and you can easily see just why. Americans are stressed out by a wierd cycle of indebtedness—they can never seem to get out of it, really. Meanwhile, there’s a global “cost of living” crisis, meaning that just making ends meet has become a bitter, brutal struggle.

The result is that Americans are left living incredibly precarious lives. Asked, they’ll say they need north of $150K to feel “comfortable”—which is more than twice the median household income, meaning that just feeling stable and secure is completely out of reach for the vast majority of people. Again, that’s an important point to establish, because yes, it feels that way, but that feeling is real. Big N Numbers like tell us so without a shadow of a doubt.

So what appears to have happened in America is that predatory capitalism’s done its job all too well. It’s a system optimized to deliver maximum, record-breaking profits, whatever the price. And it’s done that: profits have skyrocketed, year by year, even through the pandemic, no matter what. As a system, this hierarchy works—at least for capital.

America’s been the subject of a Grand Social Experiment, in other words, as we talk about often. In Europe and Canada, the social contract is fundamentally different. There, great systems of public institutions tend to manage a much, much larger component of life than in America. So, for example, there, retirement systems are often public, like France’s treasured pensions system—meanwhile, Americans have “401Ks.” Healthcare is public, of course, too, even if it’s a mixed model—people are given vouchers or allowances and so forth, and the market’s carefully regulated, while in America, infamously, everyone has to obtain some kind of Wild West style health “insurance.” I could go on, but you get my drift.

This model has failed. Grand Social Experiments are all well and good, but what’s different about this age is that we’re seeing the results of America’s come in daily. And they are catastrophic. Think about that number again—70% of people feel financially traumatized. I imagine we’d have found similar results in…the Soviet Union…the Weimar Republic…any number of failing states.

So we should learn something from numbers like this. They aren’t just there for us to gawk at, or feel pity about, or even to get angry about. They’re forms of knowledge, which teach us crucial lessons.

In this case, the number 70% of people in America feel traumatized is sort of the ultimate proof positive that predatory capitalism has failed, ruinously so. Think about what it really says, and let’s go even deeper this time. Americans…work…notoriously hard. So it can’t be that they’re lazy. They’re by and large industrious and decent people—people go to their jobs, and perform what in the rest of world would be seen as fairly heroic feats. They get knocked down, and get back up, time and time again. The stats tell us all those things without a shadow of a doubt. So they haven’t failed the system—the system’s failed them. Even while working out perfectly for itself.

Think about what else we know about the American economy. American companies, at least the successful ones, are so profitable that they don’t know what to do with their incomes anymore. So the latest trend that developed in finance over the last decade or so is the “stock buyback,” meaning that companies will buy their own shares, to juice the share price, since that’s what bonuses are often based on. But what’s the point of that, in a larger economic context? All that’s happening there is a wealth transfer—upwards.

And it’s an astronomical one. One estimate puts the wealth transfer from America’s former middle class to it’s ultra rich at $50 trillion. We’ll dig into that one more in future posts. For now, that’s half of the entire world’s GDP. The average American would be on the order of $1250 a month better off if their incomes had kept up, aka, if that wealth transfer had never happened. That, I’d bet, would add up to a lot less financial trauma, because…

Let me try to put this another way, so that you really understand it. Why is it that even though Americans work hard, and try to get ahead…60-80% end up…living paycheck to paycheck? You see, that’s a very curious thing to see happen. It tells us that no matter what people do, how hard they work, what they accomplish, in their society, the outcome is the same: they’re left right on the edge.

And that implies that their economy has evolved to leave them right on the edge. It’s not a coincidence, a mistake, a random event that the majority of people are on the edge. That must be what the system’s designed to do. Especially when, as this research reveals, it keeps happening, across generations, which rules out some kind of natural catastrophe or external cause, really. It must be baked into the system, and that means a specific thing: the system must be optimized to keep people right at the razor’s edge.

In other words, such an economy is designed to extract maximum wealth from people, and leave them with…just enough to survive. Just enough so that they’re forced to compete, brutally, for money, food, shelter, medicine, the basics—but never enough to really be secure or stable. When we see that particular result? The vast majority of people in a society right at the razor’s edge, generation after generation, no matter what they do? Something’s up. The system’s become predatory, and it optimizes to leave people in that state.

And that’s where America is today. The average person goes on just being battered and bruised financially, living at the edge—precisely because the economy leaves them with just that much. That’s what it’s designed to do, and I mean that almost literally—there are entire industries whose only real purpose it is to ascertain just how much people can be pushed to the brink, and what the maximum rate of profit is that can be extracted from them.

Do you see my point a little bit? It’s a sinister and creepy thing. Let me put it in context. Yanis Varoufakis just wrote a book about the return of feudalism. The rule in the Middle Ages, and across much of history, was that peasants kept half their harvest. That was how that system was optimized. This system’s optimized to leave people right at the edge, in a modern way. That means…

Dependent. Why are Americans hooked on debt? Because they have to be. When you’re living paycheck to paycheck, you have to go into debt for everything to emergencies to groceries, if prices rise just even a tiny bit—much less how they’ve soared in recent years. And that’s how the contours of financial trauma begin to emerge. Trapped in a lifelong cycle of debt. Along the way, social mobility erodes, social bonds rupture, social ties shatter, and trust and faith in institutions craters, while optimism and confidence begin to die.

Now tie that back to how pessimistic Americans are about the future. Wouldn’t you be if you were traumatized, in these ways, too? You see, the prevailing attitude in America is that systems are rigged against people, and in a sense, that attitude is correct. If you work hard, play by the rules, try to be an honest and decent and productive person—and your reward is that you get financially, socially, emotionally traumatized…of course you give up, after a while, and turn pessimistic, too.

So results like these matter. They speak volumes. In this case, they tell us that a Grand Social Experiment’s failed. Does it work when we privatize everything from retirement to healthcare? When we give billionaires tax breaks and tell the rest the wealth will “trickle down”? When a society allows mega concentrations of power to emerge? Those questions used to be political.

But they’re not anymore. Now they’re empirical. It’s not a matter of your political beliefs or mine anymore. We can observe the results instead. The results say that this model, this paradigm—it’s a catastrophic failure. No, the idea of Darwinian, dog-eat-dog society, where the most greedy and ruthless and cunning rise, and everyone else is to fall, because only the strong should survive, and the weak perish—sorry, doesn’t work. At least not as a society, versus as a get-rich-quick scheme for a tiny portion of it. Nope, the notion that the average job or profession is more or less worthless, and superstars are worth a million, a billion times the average person—doesn’t work either. Nor does the idea that life itself is worthless, nobody deserves anything, and money is the only point of all human activity and existence.

All of that’s a failure.

Now, I’m under no illusions, and you shouldn’t be either, that America’s going to reinvent that anytime soon. And yet there are undercurrent of discontent now roaring. All the above explains why anyone under the age of 40 will laugh contemptuously when pollsters ask them about capitalism. It explains, too, quite mercilessly, why America destabilized politically—despair is the handmaiden of democratic collapse, the vacuum in which demagogues emerge, and point fingers at scapegoats.

Nobody knows, really, if America will be able to reinvent itself. But what we can do right now is learn. We should never see startling, jarring Big N Numbers like these, anywhere, really, outside natural calamity, war, or some other form of ruin. To see the vast, vast majority of people in a society traumatized, especially financially and economically, which of course lays the groundwork for social, relational, and personal trauma, too—that’s a Nine-Alarm Fire, which tells us that the house is burning down. The Grand Experiment in turbo-charged predatory capitalism failed. That’s going to be one of the great lessons of the 21st century—and only time will tell who learns it, and who…repeats it.

Coupled with the emergence of conservative law schools, wealthy groups like the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, the Judicial Crisis Network, and religious leaders like Jerry Falwell, they were able to secure political power at the local, state, and eventually the federal level. By the time Trump entered politics, there was a whole base of alienated voters ripe for his "grievance" message. I know it seems almost conspiratorial to imply that the present crisis was the result of a rational and successful design but when you look at the career of someone like Leonard Leo it sure looks like that was the case.

There are conservative Christian positions that are only too happy to be appropriated by the right and become populist.
So there are elective affinities.

This happened on Netanyahu's watch...

Is it too much to ask people to view Palestinians as humans? Apparently so
Arwa Mahdawi

As the last few weeks have made abundantly clear, Palestinian lives don’t count

I do not want to ever hear western democracies lecture the rest of the world on human rights ever again.

As I write this, more than 10,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza – almost half of them children. One child is being killed every 10 minutes in Gaza. Those numbers, it should be noted, only count the kids who are dying as a direct result of Israel’s indiscriminate bombing. The kids who were “lucky” enough to die instantaneously in an airstrike. And the not-so-“lucky” ones: innocent children buried under rubble, dying painful and protracted deaths as they are suffocated by the eviscerated remains of their home.

Those numbers don’t count the kids slowly dying of hunger and thirst. The kids getting sick from drinking sewage and sea water. They don’t count the kids with cancer who will not be able to get any care now that the Israeli siege has forced the only cancer hospital in Gaza to suspend operations. They don’t count the kids who are going to die from entirely avoidable diseases because hospitals in Gaza are ceasing to function. They don’t count the kids who are so traumatized from being born in an open-air prison, so scarred from having their neighbourhoods and loved ones eradicated in an apocalyptic act of collective punishment, that their lives have changed for ever.

But also? Those numbers just don’t count, period. They’re Palestinians. And, as the last few weeks have made abundantly clear, Palestinian lives don’t count. They don’t count to many in the media, who steadfastly refuse to empathize with Palestinians. Who use the passive voice to describe Palestinian death. Who justify unjustifiable death tolls. Who are very keen on international law when it’s being violated by the likes of Russia, but not so keen to mention things like the Geneva conventions when Israel is the offender. Who immediately report anything that the Israeli government says, sending out every IDF statement as a push alert, while looking at Palestinian voices through a permanent lens of suspicion. Can’t trust those pesky Palestinians, you see. Every single person in Gaza is being used as a human shield by Hamas, don’t you know?! There are Hamas-owned weapons under every inch of Gaza! Every single person in Gaza is a terrorist, even if they’re still in utero! Better kill them all, just to be safe.

Those numbers certainly don’t count to the president of the United States. The empathizer-in-chief; the man who likes to make a big song and dance about what a decent guy he is. Joe Biden came right out and said: we don’t believe Palestinians about the death toll.

It would be funny if it wasn’t so ******* horrific, so ******* insulting. I’m sorry … what does Biden think is happening, exactly? Does he think that people in Gaza are holding some sort of underground rave while crisis actors, surreptitiously shipped in from elsewhere, ordered on crisis-actor-Amazon (two-day delivery!), cosplay a massacre? Does he think the pictures of entire neighborhoods being wiped out are some sort of AI deepfake?

Of course not. Biden may be many things but he is not stupid. He knows very well that the numbers from the Gaza health ministry have been proven to be accurate time and time again. Which makes all this even worse. It isn’t enough that Palestinians are dying and being displaced: we must be dehumanized and discredited too. We must verify our deaths as we die.

Doing that, by the way, is getting increasingly difficult. One by one, journalists in Gaza are being slaughtered or threatened with death. And, rather than champion the importance of the press, the US is actively trying to suppress coverage of the living hell in Gaza. Two weeks ago, the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, asked Qatar to moderate Al Jazeera’s coverage of Israel’s war against Hamas. Can’t have too much of the truth coming out; too much truth is a terrible thing.

But, Arwa, what about Hamas? You might be saying. Aren’t you going to condemn Hamas? Of course I will absolutely condemn Hamas massacring innocent Israeli civilians on 7 October and taking hostages. And let’s be very clear here: while nothing Hamas did on 7 October can be condoned, their actions did not take place in a vacuum. This conflict did not start on 7 October. Palestinians have been killed, displaced, humiliated, detained unlawfully, for decades; the media only sits up and pays attention, however, when an Israeli dies. Ask yourself this: do you know how many Palestinians were killed last year by Israeli forces and settlers? Do you know how many Palestinians are being forced out of their homes by settlers in the West Bank – where Hamas is not in charge? Do you know how many Palestinian children are being held by Israeli forces without trial or charge for “crimes” that can be as minor as waving a Palestinian flag?

I will absolutely condemn Hamas but I ask that the absolute condemnation goes both ways. And it doesn’t, does it? People demand that Palestinians denounce violence while screaming that Israel has the right to defend itself at the top of their lungs. Israel has the right to defend itself, you see, but Palestinians do not. Everything that the IDF does has some sort of justification, explanation; violence by a Palestinian is never justifiable.

As for non-violent resistance? That’s not allowed either. The US has long been trying to criminalize the peaceful boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. Calls to boycott the 2019 Eurovision song contest, which was held in Tel Aviv, was described as an “weapon of division,” and demonized. Going on a pro-Palestinian march is smeared as antisemitic – the UK home secretary, Suella Braverman, branded them as “hate marches” – even if half the people marching are brave Jews in organisations like Jewish Voices for Peace. Not even children’s art is tolerated if those children are Palestinian. Earlier this year a London hospital took down artwork by Gaza schoolchildren after UK Lawyers for Israel said that “Jewish patients … feel vulnerable, harassed and victimised by this display.” Those children some people felt so harassed by? There is a good chance they are now all dead.

So what are we supposed to do, I ask you? What are Palestinians supposed to do? That’s a rhetorical question because the last three weeks have made the answer to this crystal clear: we are supposed to shut up and die.

Indeed, Israel is not even being coy about its intentions for Palestinians right now. Craig Mokhiber, a top United Nations human rights official who stepped down last week, wrote in his resignation letter that what is happening is “textbook genocide.” In an interview with Al Jazeera, Mokhiber noted: “Usually the most difficult part of proving genocide is intent, because there has to an intention to destroy in whole or in part a particular group. In this case, the intent by Israeli leaders has been so explicitly stated and publicly stated – by the prime minister, by the president, by senior cabinet ministers, by military leaders – that that is an easy case to make.”

Tell that to the US government. Tell that to the cowardly and hypocritical US press. Twenty years from now, when it is far too late for journalism to make any difference, someone will win a Pulitzer for telling the truth about this moment. They’ll be celebrated for unequivocally and unapologetically using the words that people are currently losing jobs or being targeted by hate campaigns for saying: occupation, genocide, ethnic cleansing. Only when every single Palestinian is dead or displaced will it be acceptable to treat us as human.

Yes. That's a very clear-eyed set of observations. Sadly, America's simplistic and delusional myth stories about itself serve to make these deep structural trends quite invisible to most citizens.

Today was Election Day across the country. In a number of key state elections, voters rejected the extremism of MAGA Republicans and backed Democrats and Democratic policies.

Four of the most closely watched races were in Ohio, Virginia, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania.

In Ohio, voters enshrined the right of individuals to make their own healthcare decisions, including the right to abortion, into the state constitution. Opponents of abortion rights have worked hard since the summer to stop the measure from passing, trying first to make it more difficult to amend the constitution—voters overwhelmingly rejected that measure in an August special election—then by blanketing the state with disinformation about the measure, including through official state websites and with ads by former Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson, and finally by dropping 26,000 voters from the rolls.

None of it worked. Voters protected the right to abortion. Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion in June 2022, voters in all seven state elections where the issue was on the ballot have fought back to protect abortion rights.

Today’s vote in Ohio, where the end of Roe v. Wade resurrected an extreme antiabortion bill, makes it eight.

Abortion was also on the ballot In Virginia, where the entire state legislature was up for grabs today. Republican governor Glenn Youngkin made it clear he wanted control of the legislature in order to push through a measure banning abortion after 15 weeks. This ploy was one Republicans were using to seem to soften their antiabortion stance, which has proven terribly unpopular. Youngkin was taking the idea out for a spin to see how it might play in a presidential election, perhaps with a hope of entering the Republican race for the presidential nomination as someone who could claim to have turned a blue state red.

It didn’t work. Voters recognized that it was disingenuous to call a 15-week limit a compromise on the abortion issue, since most serious birth defects are not detected until 20 weeks into a pregnancy.

Going into the election, Democrats held the state senate. But rather than giving Youngkin control over both houses of the state legislature, voters left Democrats in charge of the Senate and flipped the House of Delegates over to the Democrats. The Democrats are expected to elevate House minority leader Don Scott of Portsmouth to the speakership, making him the first Black House speaker in Virginia history.

Virginia voters also elevated Delegate Danica Roem, the first known transgender delegate, to the state senate. At the same time, voters in Loudoun County, which had become a hot spot in the culture wars with attacks on LGBTQ+ individuals and with activists insisting the schools must not teach critical race theory, rejected that extremism and turned control of the school board over to those who championed diversity and equity.

In Kentucky, voters reelected Democratic governor Andy Beshear, who was running against Republican state attorney general Daniel Cameron. A defender of Kentucky’s abortion ban, Cameron was also the attorney general who declined to bring charges against the law enforcement officers who killed Breonna Taylor in her bed in 2020 after breaking into her apartment in a mistaken search for drugs.

In Pennsylvania, Democrat Daniel McCaffery won a supreme court seat, enabling the Democrats to increase their majority there. McCaffery positioned himself as a defender of abortion rights.

There will be more news about election results and what they tell us in the coming days. Tonight, though, political analyst Tom Bonier wrote: “My biggest takeaway from tonight: in '22 abortion rights had the biggest impact where it was literally on the ballot, less so when trying to draw the connection in candidate races. That has changed. Voters clearly made the connection that voting for GOP candidates=abortion bans.”

I would like to remind you here and now that exactly 100 years ago Adolf Hitler (and Erich Ludendorff) tried in vain to overthrow the German Reich government in Berlin from Munich.

This attempted coup was an attempt to eliminate the first German democracy.
It is therefore all the more important to remember that a well-functioning democracy cannot be taken for granted, but must be defended.

Yesterday was a bad day for extremism in the United States of America.

In Ohio, voters enshrined the right to abortion in the state constitution; in Kentucky, voters reelected Governor Andy Beshear, a Democrat, for another four-year term; in Pennsylvania, voters put Democrat Daniel McCaffery, who positioned himself as a defender of abortion rights, on the state supreme court; in Rhode Island, Gabe Amo, a former Biden staffer who emphasized his experience in the Biden White House, won an open seat in the House of Representatives to become Rhode Island’s first Black member of Congress; and nationwide, right-wing Moms4Liberty and anti-transgender-rights school board candidates tended to lose their races.

In Virginia, Governor Glenn Youngkin campaigned hard to flip the state senate to the Republicans, telling voters that if his party had control of the whole government he would push through a measure banning abortion after 15 weeks. This has been a ploy advanced by Republicans to suggest they are moderating their stance on abortion, and Youngkin appeared to be trying out the argument as a basis for a run for the presidency.

But voters, who are still angry at the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which protected abortion rights until about 24 weeks, after fetal abnormalities are evident, rejected the suggestion they should settle for a smaller piece of what they feel has been taken from them by extremists on the Supreme Court.

Today, Youngkin indicated he will not run for president in 2024.

The Democrats who won have prioritized good governance, including the protection of fundamental reproductive rights. In Kentucky, Beshear focused on record economic growth in the state—in his first term he secured almost $30 billion in private-sector investments in the economy, creating about 49,000 full-time jobs—and his able handling of emergencies, as well as his support for education and, crucially, reproductive rights.

In Virginia, Democrat Schuyler VanValkenburg beat incumbent Republican state senator Siobhan Dunnavant, the sponsor of a culture war “parents’ rights” law that was behind the removal of books from schools. While Dunnavant tried to convince voters that VanValkenburg, a high school history and government teacher, was in favor of showing pornography to high school students, he responded with a defense of teachers and an attack on book banning, reinforcing democratic principles. As Greg Sargent noted in the Washington Post, right-wing culture wars appear to be losing their potency as opponents emphasize American principles.

In Ohio, exit polls showed that Republicans as well as Democrats backed the protection of reproductive rights. As Katie Paris of the voter mobilization group Red Wine and Blue put it: “Reproductive freedom and democracy are not partisan issues.”

After such a rejection, a political party that supports democracy would accept its losses and rethink the message it was presenting to voters. But since the 1990s, far-right Republicans have insisted that election losses simply prove they have not moved far enough to the right.

That pattern was in full view today as front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination Donald Trump explained away Republican Daniel Cameron’s loss in Kentucky by blaming it on Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who MAGA Republicans insist is too moderate.

Cameron had tied himself closely to Trump, antiabortion, and the police officers who killed Breonna Taylor in her own home in a mistaken drug raid. Three days ago, Trump had said that Cameron had made “a huge surge” after Trump endorsed him and voters saw “he’s not really ‘a McConnell guy.’ They only try to label him that because he comes from the Great State of Kentucky.” Trump assured Cameron, “I will help you!”

Now Trump blames McConnell. Right-wing podcast host Mark R. Levin echoed Trump when he told his 3.8 million followers on X that “RINOs have no winnable message.”

They are not alone in insisting that Republicans lost not because they are extremist but because they aren’t extremist enough. Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote that “Republicans are losing Republican voters because the base is fed up with weak Republicans who never do anything to actually stop the communist democrats…. The Republican Party is tone deaf and weak…. Republican voters are energized and can not wait to vote for President Trump…. [T]he Republican Party has only a short time to change their weak ways before they lose the base for years to come.”

It is worth remembering that just six days ago, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) called Greene a close friend and said he did not disagree with her on many issues.

Last night’s results highlight a key problem for the Republicans going into 2024. Their presumptive front-runner, former president Trump, is responsible for putting on the Supreme Court the justices who overturned Roe v. Wade and is on video saying he thinks that women who get abortions must be punished. That position has made him a hero with the party’s evangelical base, including lawmakers such as House speaker Johnson. But it is demonstrably unpopular in the general voting population.

As writer Molly Jong-Fast said today: “Women don’t want to die for Mike Johnson’s religious beliefs.”

Within MAGA Republicans’ refusal to admit that their far-right positions are unpopular is a disdain for those voters who disagree with them. Journalist Karen Kasler, who covers the Ohio statehouse, reported the statement of Republican Senate president Matt Huffman in the wake of yesterday’s election loss. "This isn't the end,” he said. “It is really just the beginning of a revolving door of ballot campaigns to repeal or replace Issue 1."

Ohio House speaker Jason Stephens’s statement more explicitly rejected the decision of 56.62% of Ohio voters. “I remain steadfastly committed to protecting life, and that commitment is unwavering,” he said. “The legislature has multiple paths that we will explore to continue to protect innocent life. This is not the end of the conversation.”

Later today, 27 of the 67 Ohio House Republicans signed a statement taking a stand against the abortion measure approved yesterday and vowing to “do everything in our power” to stop it.

In a conversation on the right-wing cable show Newsmax, former senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) complained that young people turned out because there were “sexy things” on the ballot like abortion and marijuana. He warned: “[P]ure democracies are not the way to run a country.”

The sentiment that it is not important to let everyone vote appeared to be at work yesterday in Mississippi, where at least nine precincts in Democratic-leaning Hinds County ran out of ballots. The most populous county in the state, Hinds County is 70% Black and includes the city of Jackson, which is almost 83% Black. Officials rushed to print more ballots, but the lines ballooned. After a judge tried to remedy the situation by extending the voting hours in the county by an hour, the Republican Party of Mississippi fought that order.

Republican governor Tate Reeves won reelection.

There was, though, another blow to the Republicans yesterday: special counsel David Weiss, who has been investigating President Biden’s son Hunter for the past five years, undermined Republican conspiracy theories when he told the House Judiciary Committee that no one is interfering with his investigation and that he, alone, makes the decisions about it.

Earlier this year, House Republicans produced an IRS employee who claimed that Biden administration officials had pressured the IRS to back off from the investigation. Weiss made it clear that accusation was wrong. “At no time was I blocked, or otherwise prevented from pursuing charges or taking the steps necessary in the investigation by other United States Attorneys, the Tax Division or anyone else at the Department of Justice,” he told the committee.

Nonetheless, in the wake of yesterday’s damaging election results, the chair of the House Oversight Committee, Representative James Comer (R-KY), today issued subpoenas to Hunter Biden and the president’s brother James.