I don’t think you can blame aid to Ukraine for two decades of crap capital gains policy.....
Long tonight, folks, but it’s been quite a day. And even still, I did not mention the day’s horrific shooting at a Georgia school.
Today, Vice President Kamala Harris announced a series of proposals to help entrepreneurs create small businesses. Like President Joe Biden, she and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, argue that small businesses and entrepreneurs are the “engines of our economy.” In a statement today, they noted that “small businesses employ half of all private-sector workers in America—creating 70 percent of net new jobs since 2019—and do trillions of dollars of business every year.”
The Biden administration has boasted of the record number of new businesses created since Biden and Harris took office. There have been 19 million new business applications in that time. Harris said she and Walz are setting a goal of 25 million new business applications in their first term. Their plan, they say, is to “kickstart…more young, small, and innovative firms.”
To make this happen, they propose raising the deduction for startup expenses from its current level of $5,000 to $50,000, noting that the average amount a new business spends to get set up in its first year of operation is $40,000. They also propose funding a network of new and existing “federal, state, local, and private incubators and small business innovation hubs” that will make it easier for small business and local suppliers to get technical assistance, funding, customers, and so on.
They also promised to make low-interest and no-interest loans available for small businesses, to protect and expand the support of the Affordable Care Act for small business owners, and to guarantee that one third of federal contract money will go to small businesses. They promise to make it easier for small businesses to file taxes, reduce excessive occupational licensing requirements, and urge state and local governments to cut the red tape of burdensome regulations by streamlining them across jurisdictions.
Harris and Walz said they are committed to making the investments that will build the economy while also paying for them and reducing the deficit. “They also know,” their statement said, that “we need to support America as a locus of innovators, entrepreneurs, and workers coming together to create a better future.
Harris calls this a New Way Forward, but it is curiously close to the old Republican reforms of the Progressive Era, when entrepreneurs joined forces with workers and farmers to demand access to capital and a fair economic playing field after decades in which a few wealthy industrialists stacked the system in their own favor. When we look at that era, as well as the New Deal reforms of the 1930s, we tend to emphasize reforms designed to benefit workers and farmers, but members of those groups always allied with entrepreneurs shut out of the system by wealthy industrialists. The demand for securities and exchange law in the 1930s, for example, did not come from western farmers, but from entrepreneurs who knew they could not break into the system if established businesses made up the rules amongst themselves.
Harris recalled that Republican reform impulse when she said we must make the tax system fairer. She called for rolling back Trump’s tax cuts and implementing common-sense tax reforms for corporations and the richest Americans. She calls for setting a minimum income tax for billionaires, the corporate tax rate to 28% (it was 35% before the Trump tax cuts), and quadrupling the tax on the stock buybacks that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest Americans.
She emphasized that no one earning less than $400,000 a year will pay more in taxes under her plans, and called for a tax rate of 28% on long-term capital gains for those who earn more than a million dollars a year. This is up from the current 20% rate, but less than the 39.6% rate Biden proposed in his 2025 budget.
A Fox News Channel host applauded some of Harris’s ideas, saying, “When a political candidate comes up with what I think is a good idea, I have to call it a good idea. And a fifty thousand dollar…tax credit for startups or small businesses, coupled with less red tape, I’ve got to say, that is a good idea, regardless of her other tax ideas.”
This was a nice endorsement of Harris’s policies, coming as it did after yesterday’s assessment by economists for the Goldman Sachs Group saying that the nation’s economic growth would take a hit if Trump wins, but will grow under a Harris presidency if she also has the support of a Democratic House and Senate.
In her statement about economic policy, Harris called out Trump for supporting “himself and the biggest corporations” and noted that sixteen Nobel laureates have said that Trump’s policies would ignite inflation and trigger a recession by mid-2025. That recession, economists project, would cost more than 3 million jobs, explode the deficit, and raise costs. Harris pointed out that Project 2025 would cut funding for the Small Business Administration and make it harder for small businesses to get access to money.
For his part, Trump has doubled down on the idea that the United States is a failing nation. For the past week he has been telling a story about a residential building in Colorado taken over by a gang from Venezuela. But it appears the story is entirely made up. Similarly, Trump on Friday said at a right-wing Moms for Liberty event that public schools in America kidnap children and operate on them to change their sex. This is bonkers, but it is bonkers in a way that deliberately demonizes Trump’s opponents.
Trump’s vision of the United States is one of darkness and carnage. As Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz said today, “It is a deliberate effort by some people to make them believe that our political system is broken. To make them believe that things are pessimistic. My God, every time I hear Donald Trump give a speech, it’s like the next screenplay for Mad Max or something. They are rooting against America.”
That bleak version of the United States, it turns out, echoes the talking points Russian handlers gave to their operatives working in the U.S. in an effort “to steer the U.S. public opinion in the right direction.” The Russians directed their U.S. employees to emphasize the following “campaign topics”: “Encroaching universal poverty. Record inflation. Halting of economic growth. Unaffordable prices for food and essential goods”; “Risk of job loss for white Americans”; “Privileges for people of color, perverts, and disabled”; “Constant lies of the [Democratic] administration about the real situation in the country”; “Threat of crime coming from people of color and immigrants”; “Overspending on foreign policy and at the interests of white US citizens”; “Constant lies to the voters by [Democrats] in power.”
The target audience of the campaign was “[Republican] voters,” [Trump] supporters, “Supporters of traditional family values,” and “White Americans, representing the lower-middle and middle class.” The focus was in particular on “[r]esidents of "swing states whose voting results impact the outcomes of the elections more than other states.
This information came out today when the Departments of Justice, State, and the Treasury announced sanctions against 10 individuals and 2 entities, and criminal charges against two employees of RT, a Russian state-controlled media outlet, who allegedly funded a company in the U.S. to hire right-wing social media influencers to push Russian propaganda before the 2024 election.
While the indictment does not name the Tennessee-based company the Russians funded, it appears to be Tenet Media, a company registered by Liam Donovan and Lauren Tam, who is associated with The Blaze and Turning Point USA, as well as RT. The two appear to be married. The indictment alleges that the company’s two founders knew they were working for the Russians, but suggests the six commentators—Lauren Southern, Tim Pool, Tayler Hansen, Matt Christiansen, Dave Rubin, and Benny Johnson, all staunch Trump supporters—did not know where their massive paychecks originated. After the story broke, five of the commentators denied any knowledge of the source of the company’s funding; some insisted their words were entirely their own.
One of the videos the company pushed at the request of the Russians was what appears to have been right-wing host Tucker Carlson’s visit to a grocery store in Russia where he praised the low prices (which even the company’s founders thought “just feels like overt shilling”).
Separately, the Department of Justice seized 32 internet domains that “the Russian government and Russian sponsored actors” have used to influence the 2024 election. In a malign influence campaign called “Doppelganger,” these domains produced fake articles that appeared to be from major U.S. news sites, to which influencers and fake social media profiles on Facebook, X, Truth Social, and YouTube then drove traffic.
Russian operatives called in bold type for Russia “to put a maximum effort to ensure that the [Republican] point of view (first and foremost, the opinion of [Trump] supporters) wins over the US public opinion. This includes provisions on peace in Ukraine in exchange for territories, the need to focus on the problems of the US economy, returning troops home from all over the world, etc.”
One of the documents produced in the affidavit justifying the seizure of the internet domains called for trying to stir up a conflict between the U.S. and Mexico in order to distract from the fact that the U.S. economy is “very healthy” under Biden.
Tonight, in an interview with Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity, Trump appeared to think he is running against Joe Biden. An internal email leaked to the press from the Trump campaign showed managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles warning staff not to communicate with the press and suggested anyone doing so would be fired.
Today, Steph Curry of California’s Golden State Warriors basketball team and former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president. “Endorsing Kamala Harris is important for me and my family,” Curry said. “Knowing Kamala and having been around her, I understand she's qualified for this job."
“There was never a doubt that the courageous Liz Cheney would endorse Vice President Harris,” conservative judge J. Michael Luttig wrote, “because Liz Cheney stands for America. She is the very embodiment of country over party and country over self. And she fears no one—least of all the former president.”
The Trump policy that scares economists the most
Former President Donald Trump wants to spend trillions of dollars on tax cuts. His plan to pay for that is alarming some mainstream economists.
Trump proposed sweeping tariffs on all $3 trillion worth of imports into the United States, including a 60% tariff on imports from China and a 10% across-the-board tariff on imports from other nations.
Recently, Trump doubled down on the threat, saying he is considering tariffs of up to 20% on most imports in a bid to protect working-class jobs and punish what he labels unfair trading practices.
In theory, the unprecedented tariff hikes could raise trillions of dollars, funds that would help cover the cost of the tax cuts. However, many economists warn that those tariffs could backfire – badly – by raising prices on American families, killing jobs and setting off a global trade war.
It’s part of the reason Goldman Sachs in an analyst note this week said Trump’s economic policies – particularly on trade – would cause America’s economy to shrink. By contrast, Vice President Kamala Harris’ economic policy proposals would grow the economy, Goldman Sachs predicted.
Goldman and other experts fear Trump’s tough proposed trade tactics could worsen the affordability crisis in America.
“It’s one of those magical economic proposals that can actually cause inflation and put you into a recession – at the same time,” David Kelly, chief global strategist at JPMorgan Asset Management, told CNN in a phone interview.
Kelly warned that tariffs are a “perfect stagflation machine,” threaten to scramble supply chains and invite a punishing response from trading partners.
“It’s a two-year-old’s mentality: You punch someone in the nose and expect them not to punch you back,” he said.
Here are the prices for a gallon of 2% milk in New Jersey.
The U.S. government continues to tighten the screws against Russian malign activity. This morning the Department of Justice announced an indictment charging Dimitri Simes for violating U.S. sanctions against Russia. Simes allegedly worked for a sanctioned Russian television station and laundered the money from his work. Simes advised Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
A second indictment charged Simes’s wife, Anastasia, with sanctions violations and money laundering through the purchase of fine art.
The Justice Department also issued a grand jury’s superseding indictment against six Russian computer hackers. Five were officers in Russia's military intelligence agency; one is a civilian. The six are charged with hacking into and leaking information from, as well as destroying, Ukrainian computer systems. The hackers also attacked systems in European countries that support Ukraine and in the U.S.
The State Department has offered a $10 million reward for information on the defendants’ locations or their malicious cyberactivity.
The fallout from yesterday’s revelation that six powerful right-wing media figures were on the Russian payroll continues. One of the right-wing commenters referred to in yesterday’s indictment, Tim Pool, has pushed the idea that the U.S. is in a civil war, interviewed Trump on his podcast in May, and has been fervently against American aid to Ukraine. Today, he posted: “Upon reflection I now understand that Ukraine is our Greatest ally[.] As the breadbasket of Europe and a peace loving people we cannot allow the Fascist Russians to continue their crimes against humanity[.] We must redouble our efforts and provide and additional $200b at once[.]”
By this evening, though, he was making a joke of the news that his paycheck had come from Russia.
Notably, Trump posted on his social media site a rant that tied his own 2016 campaign to yesterday’s indictments, although the indictment itself did not do so. He accused “Comrade Kamala Harris and her Department of Justice” of “resurrecting the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, and trying to say that Russia is trying to help me, which is absolutely FALSE.”
Vice President Harris is not in charge of the Department of Justice.
By tying yesterday’s indictments to his campaign’s involvement with Russian operatives in 2016, Trump might have been trying to suggest the story was old news, but it does highlight the parallels between Russia and right-wing operatives trying to get him reelected. Along with his colleague Donie O’Sullivan, Jake Tapper put it like this on CNN: “Today, the U.S. government is trying to peel back more layers of what officials say are massive and complex efforts underway to influence your vote in the upcoming election. One part of these alleged plots: replacing your average 2016 Russian social media bots with actual conservative Americans, right-wing influencers with a combined millions of followers, influencers promoted by Elon Musk, some visited by Republican politicians such as former president Trump.”
Then Trump fell back on the old trope that his opponents are communists, posting on his social media platform: “We are fighting true COMMUNISM in this Country. We have to save our Elections, our System of Justice, our Constitution, and our FREEDOM, but that can only be done after we win BIG on November 5th, and proceed to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”
Economists for Goldman Sachs Group Inc. say that a Trump win in November would hurt the U.S. economy, while a Harris win—if she also gets Democratic control of the House and the Senate—would make it grow.
Trump’s 2024 campaign is not at all about reality; it’s about a worldview. When asked at an event at the New York Economic Club “what specific piece of legislation will you advance” to make child care affordable, the 78-year-old Trump answered:
“Well I would do that. And we’re sitting down. You know I was somebody. We had Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that because—look, child care is child care. It’s—couldn’t, you know, it’s something you have to have it—in this country you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to—but they’ll get used to it very quickly—and it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care. We’re going to have—I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country, because I have to stay with child care. I want to stay with child care, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just told you about. We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in. We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people, but we’re going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about Make America Great Again, we have to do it because right now we’re a failing nation, so we’ll take care of it.”
There is no specific legislation here, or even a grasp of the specific nature of the problem of paying for child care. What there is, apparently, is an argument that high tariffs will solve all of the nation’s problems. In the New York event, Trump called again for slashing taxes on the wealthy and insisted that new, high tariffs of 20% on all imports, and as much as 60% on Chinese imports, will end federal deficits and bring trillions of dollars into the country, although he is wrong about how tariffs work.
Trump insists that tariffs are taxes on foreign countries, but they are not. They are essentially taxes on imported products, and they are paid by consumers. Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, recently tried to claim that economists disagree about whether consumers bear the cost of tariffs, but as Michael Hiltzik explained in the Los Angeles Times yesterday, economists agree on this.
When he was in office, Trump launched a trade war in 2018 by putting tariffs of up to 25% on $50 billion worth of Chinese products. The next year he added another set of 10% tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports, and the next year he did it again, this time on an additional $112 worth of Chinese products. The nonpartisan Tax Foundation calculates that this amounted to an $80 billion tax a year on American consumers, costing the average household about $300 a year and costing the U.S. about 142,000 jobs.
There are reasons to use tariffs. They can be used to protect a new industry from cheaper foreign products until the new industry can compete, or to stop foreign countries from flooding a country with cheap products that destroy a domestic industry. When he took office, Biden kept those of Trump’s tariffs that protected certain industries.
Trump’s insistence that tariffs will solve everything is not about economics, it’s about pushing a worldview from the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, one embodied by the 1890 McKinley Tariff. “If you look at McKinley,” Trump told right-wing media host Mark Levin on Sunday, “he was a great president. He made the country rich.” In fact, McKinley (R-OH) pushed through the tariff named for him while he was in the House of Representatives from his position as a spokesperson for wealthy industrialists. They insisted that high tariffs were imperative to the survival of the country, that such tariffs were good for workers because they protected wages, and that anyone who disagreed was a socialist. But in an era without business regulation, industrialists actually kept wages low and used the tariffs to protect high prices that they passed on to consumers.
In the late 1880s, the American people demanded a lower tariff, but when Republicans in Congress went to “revise” it, they made it higher. In May 1890, in a chaotic congressional session with members shouting amendments, yelling objections, and talking over each other, Republicans passed the McKinley Tariff without any Democratic votes. They cheered and clapped at their victory. “You may rejoice now,” a Democrat yelled across the aisle, “but next November you’ll mourn.”
Democrats were right. In the November 1890 midterm elections, angry voters repudiated the Republican Party. They gave the Democrats a two-to-one majority in the House—McKinley himself lost his seat. Republicans managed to keep the Senate by four seats, but three of those seats were held by senators who had voted against the McKinley Tariff, and the fourth turned out to have been stolen.
This week Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News star who now hosts one of America’s top podcasts, had an apologist for Adolf Hitler on his show. Darryl Cooper, who runs a history podcast and newsletter called Martyr Made, considers Winston Churchill, not Hitler, the chief villain of World War II. In a social media post that he’s since deleted, Cooper argued that a Paris occupied by the Nazis was “infinitely preferable in virtually every way” to the city on display during the opening ceremony of the recent summer Olympics, where a drag queen performance infuriated the right. On his show, Carlson introduced Cooper to listeners as “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.”
Over the course of a wide-ranging two-hour conversation, Cooper presented the mainstream history of World War II as a mythology shrouded in taboos intended to prop up a corrupt liberal political order. The idea that Nazi Germany represented the epitome of evil, argued Cooper, is such a “core part of the state religion” that we have “emotional triggers” preventing us from examining the past dispassionately.
This clever rhetorical formulation, familiar to various strands of right-wing propaganda, flatters listeners for their willingness to reject all they’ve learned from mainstream experts, making them feel brave and savvy for imbibing absurdities. Cooper proceeded, in a soft-spoken, faux-reasonable way, to lay out an alternative history in which Hitler tried mightily to avoid war with Western Europe, Churchill was a “psychopath” propped up by Zionist interests, and millions of people in concentration camps “ended up dead” because the overwhelmed Nazis didn’t have the resources to care for them. Elon Musk promoted the conversation as “very interesting” on his platform X, though he later deleted the tweet.
Some on the right found Carlson’s turn toward Holocaust skepticism surprising. “Didn’t expect Tucker Carlson to become an outlet for Nazi apologetics, but here we are,” Erick Erickson, the conservative radio host, wrote on X. But Carlson’s trajectory was entirely predictable. Nazi sympathy is the natural endpoint of a politics based on glib contrarianism, right-wing transgression and ethnic grievance.
There are few better trolls, after all, than Holocaust deniers, who love to pose as heterodox truth-seekers oppressed by Orwellian elites. (The wildly antisemitic Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust named its journal “An Inconvenient History: A Quarterly Journal for Free Historical Inquiry.”) Those who deny or downplay the Holocaust often excel at mimicking the forms and language of legitimate scholarship, using them to undermine rather than explore reality. They blitz their opponents with out-of-context historical detail and bad-faith questions, and they know how to use crude provocation to get attention.
Long before 4Chan existed, the disgraced Holocaust-denying author David Irving urged his followers, in an early 1990s speech, to break through the “appalling pseudo-religious atmosphere” surrounding World War II by being aggressively tasteless. “You’ve got to say things like: ‘More women died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chamber at Auschwitz,’” he said.
Until quite recently, American conservatives mostly maintained antibodies against Irving-style disinformation. Right-wing thought leaders generally shared the same broad historical understanding of World War II as the rest of society, felt patriotic pride at America’s role in it and viewed Hitler as metaphysically wicked. Rather than recognizing the way right-wing politics, taken to extremes, could shade into National Socialism, they would hurl Nazi comparisons at the left, as the conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg did in his 2008 book “Liberal Fascism.”
Goldberg’s approach was dishonest, but it was representative of a broad antifascist consensus in American politics. Cooper is, in fact, correct that abhorrence of Nazism has helped structure Western societies. If we could agree on nothing else, we could agree that part of the job of liberal democracy was to erect bulwarks against the emergence of Hitler-like figures.
For parts of the contemporary right, however, the social consensuses undergirding liberalism are artificial and even tyrannical. After all, the “Matrix”-derived metaphor of being “red-pilled” implies a realization that all you’ve been told about the nature of reality is a lie, and thus everything is up for grabs. And once you discard all epistemological and moral guardrails, it’s easy to descend into barbarous nonsense.
Candace Owens, another anti-woke right-wing celebrity who has lately become Hitler-curious, has also come to question received wisdom about the shape of the earth. “I’m not a flat-earther,” she said in July. “I’m not a round-earther. Actually, what I am is I am somebody who has left the cult of science.”
Obviously, not every red-pilled conservative ends up arguing, as Owens did, that Hitler gets a bad rap. But the weakening of the intellectual quarantine around Nazism — and the MAGA right’s fetish for ideas their enemies see as dangerous — makes it easier for influential conservatives to surrender to fascist impulses. When they do, they pay no penalty in political relevance, because there’s no conservative establishment capable of disciplining its ideologues.
Carlson has just embarked on a national tour with special guests at each stop. In addition to Alex Jones, he’s scheduled to appear with the vice-presidential nominee JD Vance and Donald Trump Jr.
Ultimately, Holocaust denial isn’t really about history at all, but about what’s permissible in the present and imaginable in the future. If Hitler is no longer widely understood as the negation of our deepest values, America will be softened up for Donald Trump’s most authoritarian plans, including imprisoning masses of undocumented immigrants in vast detention camps.
Toward the end of their conversation, Carlson and Cooper discussed how the “postwar European order” has enabled mass immigration, which has, in Carlson’s telling, destroyed Western Europe. “So why not have a Nuremberg trial for the people who did that?” asked Carlson. “I don’t understand. I mean, that’s such a crime.”
“Well,” Cooper responded, “we have to win first.”
In the movie The History Boys, based on Alan Bennett’s play, a student wins a scholarship to Oxford with the help of an argument he makes on an entrance exam: Hitler, he claims, was “much misunderstood.” As fiction, this is mordant comedy—a mockery of the particular type of arrogance required to twist the tragedies of the Holocaust into personal gain. But now the satire has come for our news cycle.
In a long and meandering interview on Tucker Carlson’s show this week, the podcaster Darryl Cooper offered musings about the “mythology”—the heroes, the villains, the plot, the moral stakes—of World War II. In his version, however, it is Winston Churchill who has been much misunderstood. Churchill, Cooper told Carlson, with dramatic flair, “was the chief villain of the Second World War.”
The claim is wrong, in every sense. The gravity of its error was highlighted by a resonant coincidence: Around the time the interview was posted, Alternative for Germany became the first far-right party to win a German state election since the Nazi era. The past is never dead, the old line goes; it is not even past. But Cooper and his enthusiastic host, these history boys with microphones, were not talking about history—not really. They were talking about themselves. They were treating World War II as a branding exercise. And this was, though not surprising in the context of Carlson’s show, a new nadir.
Consensus reality relies on consensus history. In this time of fragile facts, one point most people have been able to agree on is that Hitler was a bad guy. But the time for consensus is over, Cooper implied. Instead, as a phrase in the title of his episode summed things up: “Winston Churchill Ruined Europe.”
What becomes clear during the interview, as Cooper makes his convoluted case (“maybe I’m being a little hyperbolic,” he allows at one point), is that the true villains of his story are not, in the end, Hitler or Churchill, Axis or Allies. Instead, they are the culture warriors of the present: the woke, the mobs, the ruling class—the people who will be offended by claims such as “Winston Churchill Ruined Europe.” And the true heroes, consequently, are those who dare to say the unsayable. “There are just certain things you’re not allowed to question,” Cooper told Carlson, as he questioned the “myths” of World War II. (“Literally, it’s a crime to ask questions?” Carlson replied, before answering his own query: “Yes.”) One might not go to jail for the myth-busting, Cooper allowed; still, “you might have your life ruined and lose your job.” (“You might absolutely go to jail in this country,” Carlson countered.)
If your aim is to offer a clever reading of history rather than a true one, World War II will serve you well: Its excessive documentation is fertile ground, giving you many cherries to pick. It will provide the fodder you need to suggest that the Holocaust was, essentially, an unfortunate accident. And then it will allow you, if you choose, to treat the suffering of the people of the past as evidence for your own victimhood. You can take the accepted narrative and rewrite it.
In other contexts, Cooper and Carlson might have decried such an approach—an archly postmodern attitude in which all facts are relative, all orthodoxies suspect. But history boys need their straw men. And Churchill was the war’s true villain is less an argument than a provocation: a contention that, when World War II is mapped onto Hallin’s spheres, Hitler’s villainy should be relocated to the realm of legitimate controversy. It should be moved there because it is one of those things that you are not allowed to question. “Darryl Cooper may be the best and most honest popular historian in the United States,” Carlson’s show announced, in promoting the interview. “His latest project is the most forbidden of all: trying to understand World War Two.”
“Forbidden”—the stuff of perfumes, of clothing, of heterodox educational institutions—makes sense as branding. The forbidden is exotic. The forbidden is brave. The forbidden can transform history boys into men. And it can do all that from the comfort of one’s personal podcast studio.
History, from such a distance, is easy. Carlson and Cooper can talk about being arrested for questioning orthodoxies with no fear of that actually happening. They can traffic in the mystique of the “forbidden” with no reference to the many things—books, ideas, people—that bear the real risk of being banned. They are free to speak their mind. They are free to do so, indeed, because of the actions of people who did not have the luxury of treating the Holocaust as a thought exercise. The influencers can, if they choose, interpret others’ indignation as their victory. They can brag that they have “weakened the narrative” about World War II. They can choose not to wonder what their questioning really amounts to. “History nowadays is not a matter of conviction,” a teacher in The History Boys announces. “It’s a performance. It’s entertainment.” His students still have time to age out of such arrogance, the film implies. Or at least they should.
In other contexts, Cooper and Carlson might have decried such an approach—an archly postmodern attitude in which all facts are relative, all orthodoxies suspect.
If anyone is monitoring Biden, do you know where he is?
Is he running the country?
Who is?
One of the things that came to light on Wednesday, in the paperwork the Justice Department unveiled to explain its seizure of 32 internet domains being used by Russian agents in foreign malign influence campaigns, was that the six right-wing U.S. influencers mentioned in the indictments of the Russian operatives are only the tip of the iceberg.
Since at least 2022, three Russian companies working with the Kremlin have been trying to change foreign politics in a campaign they called “Doppelganger,” covertly spreading Russian government propaganda. “[F]irst and foremost,” notes from a meeting with Russian officials about targeting Germany read, “we need to discredit the USA, Great Britain, and NATO.” Through fake social media profiles, their operatives posed as Americans or other non-Russians, seeding public conversations with Russian propaganda.
In August 2023 they launched the “Good Old USA Project” to target swing-state residents, online gamers, American Jews, and “US citizens of Hispanic descent” to reelect Donald Trump. "They are afraid of losing the American way of life and the ‘American dream,’” one of the propagandists wrote. “It is these sentiments that should be exploited in the course of an information campaign in/for the United States.” Using targeted ads on Facebook, they could see how their material was landing and use bots and trolls to push their narrative in comment sections.
“In order for this work to be effective, you need to use a minimum of fake news and a maximum of realistic information,” the propagandists told their staff. “At the same time, you should continuously repeat that this is what is really happening, but the official media will never tell you about it or show it to you.”
According to the documents, one of the three companies, Social Design Agency (SDA), monitors and collects information about media organizations and social media influencers. It collected a list of 1,900 “anti-influencers,” whose accounts posted material SDA workers thought operated against Russian interests. About 26% of those accounts were based in the U.S.
SDA also identified as pro-Russian influencers more than 2,800 people in 81 countries operating on various social media platforms like X, Facebook, and Telegram. Those influencers included “television and radio hosts, politicians, bloggers, journalists, businessmen, professors, think-tank analysts, veterans, professors, and comedians.” About 21% of those influencers were in the U.S.
YouTube took down the Tenet Media Channels associated with the Justice Department’s indictments, and last night, Tenet Media abruptly shut down. In The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last noted that the Tenet influencers maintain they were dupes, although they must have been aware that their paychecks were crazy high for the numbers of viewers they had. He asks if, knowing now that their gains are ill-gotten, they are going to give them to charity.
Earlier this week, former Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson hosted Holocaust denier Darryl Cooper on his X show, where Cooper not only suggested that the death of more than six million Jews was an accidental result of poor planning, but also argued that British prime minister Winston Churchill, who stood firm against the expansion of fascist Germany in World War II, was the true villain of the war.
Cooper’s argument puts him squarely on the side of Russian president Vladimir Putin and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who insist that democracy undermines society. During the recent summer Olympics, Cooper posted on social media an image of Hitler in Paris alongside another of drag queens representing Greek gods at the Olympic opening ceremonies, an image some on the right thought made fun of the Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples. “This may be putting it too crudely for some,” Cooper wrote, “but the picture [of Hitler in Paris] was infinitely preferable in virtually every way than the one on the right.”
The idea that Churchill, not Hitler, is the villain of World War II means denying the fact of the Holocaust and defending the Nazis. It lands Carlson and Cooper in the same camp as those autocrats journalist Anne Applebaum notes are “making common cause with MAGA Republicans to discredit liberalism and freedom around the world.” Elon Musk promoted the interview, saying it was “very interesting,” and “worth watching,” before the backlash made him delete his post. The video has been viewed nearly 30 million times.
Carlson told Lauren Irwin of The Hill that the Biden administration is made up of “warmonger freaks” who have “used the Churchill myth to bring our country closer to nuclear war than at any moment in history.” Carlson is on a 16-day speaking tour, on which he will interview Trump allies, including Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance and Donald Trump Jr.
Trump today continued his effort to undermine the democratic American legal system in a “news conference” of more than 45 minutes, in which he took no questions. Although Judge Juan Merchan, who oversaw the election interference case in which a jury found Trump guilty on 34 counts, decided today to delay sentencing until November 26 to avoid any appearance that the court was trying to affect the 2024 election, Trump nonetheless launched an attack on the U.S. legal system and suggested the lawsuits against him were election interference.
He spoke after he and his legal team were in court today to try to overturn a jury’s conclusion that he had sexually assaulted writer E. Jean Carroll, a decision that brought his judgments in the two cases she brought to around $90 million. He began with an attack on what he said was a new “Russia, Russia, Russia” hoax, and promised he had not “spoken to anybody from Russia in years.”
Aaron Rupar of Public Notice recorded what amounted to close to an hour of attacks on the American Justice Department and the laws of the country, and also on American women (he not only attacked Carroll, he brought up others of the roughly two dozen women who have accused him of sexual assault). He attempted to retry the Carroll case in the media, refuting the evidence the jury considered and suggesting that the photo of him and Carroll together was generated by AI, although it was published in 2019.
Attacking women was an interesting decision in light of the fact that he will need the votes of suburban women if he is to make up the ground he has lost to Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris and vice presidential nominee Tim Walz.
For her part, former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) appears to see this moment for what it is. Although a staunch Republican herself, she is urging conservative women to admit they’ve had enough. Referring to both Trump and Vance in a conversation sponsored by the Texas Tribune, she said: “This is my diplomatic way of saying it: They’re misogynistic pigs.” She assured listeners, quite accurately, that Trump “is not a conservative.” “Women around this country…we’ve had enough.” “These are not people that we can entrust with power again.”
Her father, former vice president Dick Cheney, agreed that Trump “can never be trusted with power again” and announced today that he will be voting for Harris. “As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris,” he said. Eighty-eight business leaders also endorsed Harris today, including James Murdoch, an heir to the Murdoch family media empire. Citing Harris’s “policies that support the rule of law, stability, and a sound business environment,” they said in a public letter, “the best way to support the continued strength, security, and reliability of our democracy and economy” is by electing Harris president.
Meanwhile, at his event with Sean Hannity of the Fox News Channel yesterday, Trump embraced the key element of Project 2025 that calls for a dictatorial leader to take over the U.S. That document maintains that “personnel is policy” and that the way to achieve all that the Christian nationalists want is to fire the nonpartisan civil servants currently in place and put their own people into office. Trump has tried hard to distance himself from Project 2025, but last night he said the way to run the government is to “get the right people. You put the right person and the right group of people at the heads of these massive agencies, you’re going to have tremendous success, and I know now the people, and I know them better than anybody would know them.”
One of those people appears to be X owner Elon Musk, whom Trump has promised to put at the head of an “efficiency” commission to audit the U.S. government.
In 1858, Abraham Lincoln, then a candidate for the Senate, warned that the arguments against democracy and in favor of a few people dominating the rest were always the same. In his era, it was enslavers saying some people were better than others. But, he said, those were the same arguments “that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world…. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.”
In our era, Indiana Jones said it best in The Last Crusade: “Nazis. I hate these guys.”
If he was deemed too addled to run again...
Wonder who it is.
Finally, Dems are leaving that malign party in droves.
US ‘hero voters’ key to Harris win, say top ex-aides who plotted Labour UK victory
Two former senior advisers to Keir Starmer say their UK election strategy could benefit Democratic campaign
Keir Starmer’s former pollster, Deborah Mattinson, is to meet Kamala Harris’s campaign team in Washington this week to share details of how Labour pulled off its stunning election win by targeting key groups of “squeezed working-class voters who wanted change”.
The visit comes ahead of a separate trip by Starmer to Washington on Friday to meet US president Joe Biden, his second since becoming prime minister. It will also be his first since Biden stepped down and Harris became the Democratic nominee.
With the race for the White House on a knife-edge, Mattinson, who stepped down from Starmer’s office after the election, and the prime minister’s former director of policy, Claire Ainsley, who will also attend the briefings, believe the same strategy that delivered for Labour could play an important role in Harris defeating Donald Trump on 5 November.
Writing in the Observer, Mattinson and Ainsley say many of the concerns of crucial undecided voters will be similar on both of sides of the Atlantic.
“These voters – often past Labour voters – had rejected the party because they believed that it had rejected them. Often Tory voters in 2019, they made up nearly 20% of the electorate. Labour’s focus on economic concerns, from affordable housing to job security, won them back.
“For Harris, addressing core issues such as housing, prices and job creation could also win over undecided US middle-class voters, many of whom face similar economic pressures. Labour set about finding out as much as possible about these voters and applying that knowledge to all aspects of campaigning.
“They were patriotic, they were family oriented, they were struggling with the cost of living: squeezed working-class voters who wanted change.”
Mattinson coined the phrase “hero voters” to describe a group who were more often than not pro-Brexit and persuadable by political leaders if they felt they would address their fundamental core concerns.
The collaboration, they believe, could help tilt the balance by delivering voters in key US battlegrounds.
“Before November’s presidential election, Harris has turned on its head a contest that looked like a foregone conclusion in Trump’s favour. However, as the data shows clearly, it is still too close to call. We believe that adopting a similar hero-voter approach could make a vital difference, just as it did here in the UK.
“The start point is to identify and understand Harris’s hero voters – undecided voters who have considered Trump and live in the handful of the most crucial battleground states.”
Mattinson and Ainsley were invited by the Democratic thinktank the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), with which Ainsley has been working since leaving Starmer’s team in late 2022.
Recently, they have been polling among US voters and conducting focus groups to try to understand what will win them over and which groups matter most.
“The context is very different but the parallels are almost uncanny,” they write. “This group – who in the US self-define as middle class rather than working class, as the same group might in the UK – is struggling.
“Its members believe that the middle class is in jeopardy, out of reach for people like them, denied the dream of homeownership that previous generations took for granted, unable to cover the essentials, and hyper-aware of the cost of groceries, utilities and other bills. Many work multiple jobs just to keep afloat.”
Among those that the two former Starmer aides are likely to meet are Megan Jones, the senior political adviser to vice-president Harris, and Will Marshall, founder of the PPI, who had dealings with top New Labour figures, including Tony Blair, when the party was trying to learn from the electoral success of Bill Clinton’s Democrats in the early to mid-1990s, before the 1997 general election.
Mattinson and Ainsley say they had far more time to plan their strategy in detail than have members of the Harris campaign. But they suggest that fine-tuning the Democratic strategy could help sustain recent momentum and give the party a better chance of crossing the finishing line victorious.
“From the point where we defined our hero-voter focus, we had three years to mainline the thinking through party activity. Team Harris has less than three months. But looking at what they have achieved in the past few weeks, success now looks within reach. Hero voters may just help to close that gap.”
Finally, Dems are leaving that malign party in droves. Just trying to steer them away from Trump and toward the Greens, but Trump is the one benefitting from this landslide collapse.
