These Fuckin' Guys

Republicans have alleged:

The FBI went after conservative parents at school board meetings.

(That’s entirely baseless)

FBI Director Chris Wray, a registered Republican, personally sicced the FBI on conservatives.

(Wray called this “insane”)

FBI has eagerly persecuted Trump.

(The FBI is rule-bound and cautious)

FBI plants incited the Jan6 attack.

(The central evidence of this has collapsed)

Opinion

The MAGA persecution complex is eating itself to death

Stephen K. Bannon, a spiritual leader of the Trumpist right, infamously declared in 2018 that the secret to political warfare was “to flood the zone with s--t.” For many observers, this quote continues to capture the perils of our “post-truth” moment: Our democratic culture remains deeply vulnerable to being swamped by disinformation.

But with Donald Trump out of the presidency and his allies in Congress mired in infighting, we’re now seeing what happens when the zone gets so flooded with excrement that it threatens to drown the MAGA movement itself.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) chaired a House Judiciary Committee hearing last week that purported to expose the FBI’s “weaponization” against conservatives. But GOP lawmakers floated so many allegations and conspiracy theories that the spectacle devolved into a haphazard, scattered mess with no storylines developed in meaningful depth.

After months of these hearings, it’s painfully clear they lack anything close to the focus of the congressional investigations into the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, during Barack Obama’s presidency. As a result, these proceedings are unlikely to produce the political benefits that the Benghazi hearings did.

Blame it on the “MAGA persecution complex” — the vast array of outlets in the right-wing media ecosystem that incentivizes GOP lawmakers to pander to conservative victimization and grievance. It’s feasting on so many claims of persecution that it’s essentially eating itself to death.

At last week’s hearing, Republicans alleged that the FBI investigated conservative parents at school board meetings. (That’s entirely baseless.) They insisted FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, a registered Republican, personally sicced the FBI on conservatives. (Wray called this “insane.”) They claimed the FBI has eagerly persecuted Trump. (The FBI has actually been rule-bound and cautious.) They railed that FBI plants incited the Jan. 6, 2021, attack. (The central evidence of this has collapsed.)

Republicans even insisted the FBI is riddled with anti-Catholic bias based on a field-level memo about radical right-wing Catholics that is indeed problematic. But Wray admitted to a serious error, declaring it subject to internal review. Presenting one example of abuse at a huge agency as proof of another vast conspiracy is silly.

The barrage of these allegations and others — the FBI is covering up President Biden’s bribery, it’s investigating would-be GOP informants, it’s colluding with social media giants to censor conservatives — is dizzying. Storylines eclipse each other before any can gel into something coherent.

“Good oversight may start with a theory, but it gathers facts before reaching conclusions,” Brendan Buck, a former senior House GOP leadership aide, told me. “These committees are starting with conclusions and then trying — and mostly failing — to find facts to support them.”

Republicans are trying to tell one story about the persecution of conservatives that has fractured into a thousand subplots. By contrast, once the GOP-controlled House hit on Benghazi, the focus on that story was far tighter.

Kurt Bardella, a former House GOP communications adviser who has turned on the party, points out that at the time, lawmakers had fewer incentives to seek viral moments by hijacking specific narratives for themselves. Hearings could be more coordinated toward influencing mainstream news coverage.

“Nowadays, if you want to have a moment, you say something outlandish, put it up on social media,” Bardella told me. “All the right-wing platforms will amplify it for you.” That encourages freelance messaging and disunity, he noted.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton — the central character in the Benghazi hearings — was widely distrusted by reporters (to catastrophically unfair effect) at the outset. It’s hard to quantify the impact of those hearings, but a years-long drumbeat about vague corruption, amplified in mainstream coverage, probably took a toll.

Contrast that with today. Yes, the public is sour on the FBI. The agency did make serious mistakes during the Trump years. But voters are being asked to hate a villain that’s far more baroque and insidious than “mistakes were made.” The enemy is either absurdly nebulous (the “deep state”) or fantastical (thousands of federal officers conspiring against conservatives).

It also clashes with how the FBI has long been perceived in mainstream culture, noted Tim Weiner, author of a history of the agency. It’s a “very White, very male, very conservative law enforcement agency,” Weiner told me, and Republicans are trying to portray it as “antifa in a Brooks Brothers suit.”

That’s a tough sell. But as Bloomberg’s Jonathan Bernstein notes, this conspiratorial rhetoric has become party-wide dogma. Repeating it earns party approval, creating a self-reinforcing effect.

Also, mainstream media outlets appear inclined to cover Trump-aligned conspiracy-mongering with more skepticism than the Benghazi hearings. Matt Gertz has detailed for Media Matters that attacks on the FBI have taken on a Keystone Kops quality: New whistleblowers and revelations are forever promised to reporters and never materialize.

Finally, Jan. 6 sharply illustrated the true stakes of the situation: Many on the far right did commit serious crimes against the country. While Trump-loyal Republicans are handwaving it all away, law enforcement is meting out appropriate accountability. This probably inclines news organizations to cover right-wing attacks on law enforcement more harshly than Benghazi.

But no matter: The zone-flooding conspiratorial antics will keep on coming. The MAGA persecution complex requires no less.

Today's Today

Donald Trump will be arraigned on a boatload of federal felony charges today, and I have to go out on a limb right here and say I don't expect the kind of MAGA shittiness that lots of people (ie: Press Poodles) have been angsting about.

With almost a thousand arrests, trials, &/or convictions stemming from that mess on Jan6, I have to believe the chill is on. For some, doing time in a federal lock-up reinforces their belief that they're being victimized by 'da gubmint', but for most, it tends to focus your mind on how stupidly you've behaved as you begin to realize that Trump is the one who made you a victim in order to serve his own venal ambitions.

That's not to say some of those idiots aren't planning some more shit - there's always enough assholes around who get themselves, and each other, whipped into a rich creamy lather and decide they need to go fuck something up. I'm just saying government has responded the way I expect government to respond, in getting organized and doing what they can to meet the threat.

BTW, there have been times I've hated the feds for getting organized and moving against people like me when I thought I was doing things what normal citizens are supposed to do.

But this is not the same. There is no equivalence on this.

I was politicking against Bush43 and his fucked up war in Iraq; I was doing nothing like plotting violent action; and while there were some shitty things being done to peaceful protesters, most of our worst paranoia was unfounded. (most)

Now we've got non-peaceful protesters, who are plotting violence, and a government taking mostly appropriate action. (mostly appropriate - never ever put your full trust in people who wield governmental power)

So anyway, Trump will be arraigned today and it'll be a big Circus Of The Stoopid, and some of the more rabid of the MAGA rubes will tumble and stumble and rock the jungle - and nothing will happen except that a crooked ex-POTUS will continue his long slow fall that's been coming since the King Of The Tiny Dick Flimflammers was born.

Today's Brian

Ask the Trump-humpers why they're loyal to DumFux News, and lots of them will tell you it's because guys like Tucker Carlson understand the struggles of "the real America".

"He gets me."

"He tells the truth that the mainstream liberal media hides from us."

Brian Tyler Cohen points out the Face In A Crowd moment - which will likely have no negative effect on the distilled and purified evil at the core of the MAGAvolk.

These people are re-programmable meat bags (thanks Driftglass).

• Carlson calls them great, they crow about being great.
• Hillary calls them a basket of deplorables, they crow about being deplorable.
• They're told to hate empathy - they hate it.
• They're told to love everything that's the opposite of love - they do that.
• Point out that they're not behaving like the Christians they claim to be, and they say you don't understand because you're not a "real Christian".

We're looking at a near-perfect example of the main Daddy State objective:

The goal is to dictate reality to us.

"... wait for my post-menopausal fans to weigh in ..."

Guns Today

Small wonder that the MAGA people, and the Jesus people, and the gun people all seem to coalesce in the middle of a Venn diagram.

They share a common bond, which is basically the willingness to abandon any healthy skepticism they claim to have, in favor of a cult mindset that allows them to go along with the nonsense being peddled by very shrewd and very cynical manipulators.

"First we sell them a phony disease,

and then we sell them a phony cure."

Jen Psaki with Jordan Klepper

They're never ready for the followup question.

MAGA Update

File this one under:

"The whole world is fucked up except for you and me - and you're making me wonder about you."

Cults like MAGA will always become death cults, and will eventually self-destruct. Unfortunately, as we watch for it to play out, good people will have to fight, and bleed, and die in the process.

Let's save everybody a lot of time and heartache by skipping forward to the part where the leader commits suicide in a bunker, and all his henchmen are put on trial, and either die in prison or at the end of a rope.

So fuckin' sick of this shit.

MAGA fans turn on former Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis with 'sexist and vulgar' insults

One-time Trump attorney Jenna Ellis, who was a leading figure in pushing falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election, is now being attacked by some prominent Trump supporters for being insufficiently loyal to the MAGA cause.

Writing on Twitter, Ellis posted screen shots of some recent posts from top MAGA influencers lobbing a number of crude insults against her.

Included among them was a post from failed Florida congressional candidate Laura Loomer, who mocked her for being "disowned by Trumpworld" and trying to ingratiate herself with Ron DeSantis' campaign by offering herself up as "sloppy seconds."

Fellow Trump supporter Preston Parra took a similar line of attack and accused her of being a "for hire escort for Ron DeSantis."

And MAGA fan Alex Bruesewitz referred to her as "Jebba Ellis" before going on to describe her as a "D-list reject goon."

Ellis bitterly complained about the treatment she's received from the former president's fans.

"I was called a lot of things and had a lot of leftist hit pieces trying to destroy my credibility while I represented Trump," she wrote. "But I never saw a media outlet or journo use the blatant sexism and vulgarity that “MAGA influencers” do now. And I don’t even work for DeSantis. Telling."

To Reiterate

Knowing you voted for Trump -

and that you've supported the whole

America First and MAGA thing -

is like knowing you fucked my dog.

You can say you're sorry,

swear you'll never do it again,

I can forgive you,

and we can move on.

But that doesn't change the simple fact

that you were going around

fucking

people's

dogs.

Either It Is Or It Isn't

Plain old everyday common sense tells us two contradicting notions can't be true at the same time ... but hey - Quantum Politics, anyone?

Mike Lindell says he had to borrow $10 million last year to keep MyPillow afloat — and is running out of cash, too

• MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell told Insider he had to borrow $10 million in 2022 to keep MyPillow afloat.
• Lindell said he'd also sold a building for $2 million and borrowed a further $2 million for himself.
• Lindell says he's burning through $1 million dollars every month on causes related to voter fraud.

MyPillow CEO Says Company Is Going Broke Defending Election Fraud Claims

MyPillow Founder and CEO Mike Lindell claims the company has had to borrow almost $10 million to keep the lights on. The MyPillow guy has been embroiled in a series of lawsuits brought by voting machine manufacturers who allege Lindell defamed them by spreading conspiracies regarding their role in the 2020 election.

“The machine companies continue to sue us for billions of dollars, and we had to borrow almost $10 million at MyPillow,” Lindell told far-right radio host and former Trump advisor Steve Bannon on Wednesday.

- and -

Mike Lindell Backtracks on Claims MyPillow Is Going Broke

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell says his company is in great shape, just hours after telling Steve Bannon it was going broke due to political pressure.

“I invented MyPillow2.0 and it is doing great!” Lindell told The Daily Beast on Wednesday night.

Despite trying to claim that his business was the victim of a political vendetta earlier on Wednesday, Lindell was quickly peddling a different story.

“Over 1/2 the loans are already paid back! MyPillow2.0 is manufactured 100% by MyPillow in Minnesota! You must have seen the ads in all TV stations across the country,” he said, referencing his collaboration with QAnon podcasts and web shows that are selling MyPillow products in a significant profit-sharing deal.

Lindell has been entangled in a number of lawsuits brought about by voting machine manufacturers after he spread unfounded conspiracy theories based on the “stolen” 2020 election. Lindell is a diehard Trump supporter.

The full scope of financial crisis is unclear, however, in January, he told WCCO that MyPillow had lost $100 million in retailers and that “we are not up 30-40%—we are down. We are down. I had to borrow money.”

Lindell told former Trump adviser Steve Bannon on Wednesday: “The machine companies continue to sue us for billions of dollars, and we had to borrow almost $10 million at MyPillow.”

Lindell declined to say whether MyPillow is currently losing money, instead telling The Daily Beast that “MyPillow had to spend millions on lawsuits and the last 2 years lost 30 box stores and shopping channels.

- more -

Opinion

It seems pretty important that at least some of the Press Poodles are behaving more like the Newsy Bulldogs we need them to be by speaking very openly and explicitly about the prospects of MAGA fucking things up on purpose, and with malice of forethought.

MAGA partisans grasp these stakes with perfect clarity. One well-known Trumpist operative has been frantically warning that a liberal majority on the Wisconsin state Supreme Court would spell doom for “election integrity.” That’s MAGA code for saying it would complicate efforts to illicitly subvert a MAGA loss in 2024. And it’s true: If liberals control the court, that will be largely out of reach.

Greg Sargent isn't exactly the epitome of a leftie looney, although he fits the wingnuts' description pretty well.

What catches my eye is not so much his willingness to call the MAGA shit for what it is - and not equivocate on it - but the fact that something this straightforward made it past the editors at a news outlet that has a 40-year tradition of being a very Both-Sides-y kinda joint.

Maybe I'm overstating it, but this is not normal, and it carries a measure of hope that doesn't come along all that often in USAmerica's Commercial Establishment Press.

Opinion
This sleeper race could wreck MAGA’s 2024 dreams

Wisconsin looms large in the MAGA transformation of American politics. Of the three “blue wall” states that Donald Trump flipped in 2016, Wisconsin was the toughest for Democrats to take back in 2020. Winning there — more than Michigan or Pennsylvania — is the most likely starting point for Trump or another MAGA presidential candidate to assemble an electoral majority in 2024.

That’s why a race for Wisconsin state Supreme Court — Election Day is April 4 — has extraordinarily high stakes. A Democratic win would deal a big blow to the MAGA movement’s 2024 hopes, underscoring its dramatically weakened hold on must-win territory once dominated by Trump. That outcome would give liberals a 4-3 majority on a court that could thwart any rerun of Trump’s 2020 effort to overturn his loss by legal chicanery.

The conservative candidate for the court seat — Republican lawyer Daniel Kelly — has sterling MAGA credentials. He was reportedly involved in discussions about a “fake electors” scheme to overturn Trump’s loss in the state. Last year, he helped lead “election integrity” events that suggested the state’s 2020 voting was suspect.

In private polls, Kelly is trailing the liberal candidate, Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz, and Democrats are outspending Republicans in the race. A liberal court could overturn a state abortion ban, so Democratic ads are highlighting Kelly’s support from anti-choice groups, hoping abortion can deliver another win after driving many 2022 victories.

But this race is also about the future prospects of MAGA — on multiple levels.

A loss for Kelly would effectively constitute a third strike for MAGA in the geographic heart of the movement’s effort to transform U.S. politics. Trump’s 2016 Rust Belt victories were driven by supercharged margins among non-college-educated White voters disproportionately concentrated in that region, which hinted at a long-term MAGA-driven realignment of the electoral map.

But since then, not only did Joe Biden win back Wisconsin (and the other “blue wall” states) in 2020, but in 2022 Democratic Gov. Tony Evers triumphed over a Trump-backed GOP candidate. While GOP Sen. Ron Johnson was reelected there in 2022, Evers’s clear majority win provided vivid evidence of MAGA’s waning influence.

A third Democratic triumph in Wisconsin would suggest the MAGA transformation is proving far less durable than its proponents hoped. Wisconsin has a slightly higher percentage of blue-collar White people than either Pennsylvania or Michigan, so another win would be a big morale booster for Democrats heading into 2024.

“The whole Trump-MAGA strategy is to run up the score with rural voters and White voters without college degrees,” Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler told me. “That describes most voters in Wisconsin.” What’s more, Wikler added, “MAGA can’t win in 2024 without the Badger State.”

MAGA partisans grasp these stakes with perfect clarity. One well-known Trumpist operative has been frantically warning that a liberal majority on the Wisconsin state Supreme Court would spell doom for “election integrity.” That’s MAGA code for saying it would complicate efforts to illicitly subvert a MAGA loss in 2024. And it’s true: If liberals control the court, that will be largely out of reach.

To be fair, one of the court’s current conservative justices did not side with Trump’s efforts to overturn results in 2020, notes election law expert Richard L. Hasen. So even a one-seat conservative majority might not do its worst. But if 2024 comes down to Wisconsin, the pressure would be intense to greenlight dubious efforts to overturn a loss, and a conservative majority joined by Kelly would be “much more risky,” Hasen said.

“A liberal court would make it much less likely that lawsuits meant to disenfranchise voters or subvert election results would get a serious hearing,” Hasen told me.

To the surprise of many observers, Democrats won in 2022 by running as defenders of both abortion rights and democracy, enabling them to defeat election-denying candidates across the country. That combination proved to be Kryptonite to MAGA among swing voters, including in Pennsylvania and Michigan.

In addition to running ads on abortion, Democrats in Wisconsin are also putting big money behind a spot that is entirely about the threat to democracy posed by conservative domination of the state Supreme Court. A win there would once again show the potency of that joint message — against MAGA candidates in particular.

Yet even if Democrats prevail, it would be folly to be overly confident that MAGA’s efforts to realign the region are fully extinguished. As Ronald Brownstein notes for the Atlantic, Democratic performance among non-college White people in 2020 and 2022 improved only marginally relative to 2016, so relying on educated voters alone won’t keep the “blue wall” states in the Democratic column.

But when it comes to MAGA’s dreams of retaking the Rust Belt in 2024 — or even of stealing the election in Wisconsin if the GOP candidate can’t win fairly — a Democratic victory in April would make those hopes a whole lot dimmer.

Today's Beau

Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column

"It was always a lie. The whole thing was always a lie. And it was a lie meant to rile people up."

--Dan Crenshaw R-TX02

GOP Congressman Dan Crenshaw says election deniers know they’re lying

The representative from Houston said fellow Republicans admitted behind closed doors that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen, and he warned that such messaging could dangerously mislead voters.

Members of Congress who contested the 2020 election results admitted behind closed doors that they know their cause is false, U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Houston, said on his podcast published Wednesday, offering his sternest rebuke yet of his party’s rejection of President Joe Biden’s win.

Speaking with former congressional candidate and election reform advocate Nick Troiano on his podcast, “Hold These Truths,” the Texas Republican said fellow members of his party were merely trying to signal their disapproval of former President Donald Trump’s loss but knew there was no real mechanism to overturn it. Still, he warned that messaging could dangerously lead to voters losing faith in the electoral process.

“It was always a lie. The whole thing was always a lie. And it was a lie meant to rile people up,” Crenshaw said, deriding some of his peers as “political personalities” rather than “politicians.” He did not name the members he was referring to.

“People just need their last hurrah. They just need to feel like they fought one last time,” he added. Other members told him, “‘Trust me, it’ll be fine.’ And I was like, ‘No, it won’t! That’s not what people believe and that’s not what you’re telling them.’”

Trump has been widely expected to run for office again in 2024, and Axios reported Friday that the former president could formally announce his bid on Nov. 14, shortly after the midterm elections.

Crenshaw was among a handful of Texas Republicans to vote against GOP objections to the results of the 2020 presidential election. Although the objections delayed the certification of the results, culminating in the violent attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the effort was always doomed to fail with a Democratic majority in the House.

Members of both parties have since advanced legislation to make objecting to election results more difficult, including increased thresholds for lawmakers to file an objection and clarifying the vice president’s role in certifying elections as purely ceremonial. The measures have so far enjoyed wide bipartisan support. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, was the only holdout on the Senate Rules Committee to oppose the bill. Cruz continues to decline to say that President Joe Biden was legitimately elected, though he has come to terms with the current occupant of the White House.

Crenshaw has spoken frequently against members of his party who he said focus primarily on projecting conservative soundbites over serious legislating, calling them the “woke right.” That arm of the party, he said, will likely only keep growing with more hardline Republicans in toe with Trump running in favorable districts this year. Republicans are widely expected to win control of the U.S. House in the next Congress.

“This extreme willingness to say the most extreme things just to grab people’s attention and then the people’s willingness to believe some of it,” Crenshaw said on the podcast. “There just doesn’t seem to be a limit to how far some people are willing to go.”

There was no evidence of widespread voter fraud that would have undermined the reported results of the 2020 presidential election, and the Trump administration implicitly acknowledged Biden’s victory by kicking off, though belatedly, the presidential transition in mid-November that year.

Storm Talk

"It's tough to make predictions - especially about the future." --Yogi Berra

There's an awful lot of what I think right now is not much more than loose talk (equivocate much, Mikey?)

There's all kinds of tough-guy posturing - which prob'ly has about a 15% chance of leading to anything but lots of drunk MAGA rubes sitting around grumbling and muttering and pissin'-n-moanin', which is what they do best after they've raged themselves silly with their highly practiced bluff & bluster.

Of course, this could be wishful - even magical - thinking on my part.

But if these barstool warriors couldn't muster themselves to do anything but shit in the rotunda at the Capitol - when they had at least one weapons stash in Virginia, and guys with boats to ferry them across the Potomac - why am supposed to buy all this bullshit now?

Boats? Really?

Trump and QAnon and Bannon and the pillow guy and a host of others have been making threats and predicting big things for years now, and nothing happens. Nothing ever happens.

That's not to say there won't be incidents. There will be incidents. Because these assholes are going to drag this thing out, hoping to get enough rubes amped up to spark the revolution. I'm not convinced that'll play out, but we're going to see plenty of examples of how Stochastic Terrorism works.

Expect better, and prepare for worse.

Jordan Klepper

JK: That's how the democratic process works - sometimes the person you want to win doesn't get enough votes, and you accept it and you move on.

 

MAGA: Yes

 

JK: Who do yo think won the last election?

 

MAGA: Trump

Proof Of What He Said

Possibly the one thing Trump said that wasn't a flat-out lie: "I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes."

(pay wall)

Opinion
Trump lets the truth slip about the MAGA base — and today’s GOP

Donald Trump has long harbored a tendency to confess to his sins in public. Now he’s done it again, revealing a large truth about today’s Republican Party in the process: He declared that his lies about the 2020 election are instrumentally useful in motivating GOP base voters.

Trump raised this in a call with Blake Masters, the Republican nominee in the Arizona Senate race, that was captured in a new Fox News documentary. Trump faulted Masters for saying at a debate that he didn’t see evidence of a rigged 2020 election, and urged Masters to be “stronger” on that point.

“You’re going to lose that base,” Trump told Masters, citing Kari Lake, the GOP candidate who might win the state’s governor’s race: “Kari’s winning with very little money. And if they say, ‘How is your family?’ she says the election was rigged and stolen.”

Trump is not always right about this. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp will likely win reelection despite publicly defying Trump’s pressure to steal the 2020 election. Glenn Youngkin became Virginia governor while carefully couching his appeals to the base’s anger about 2020 in scripted, anodyne terms.

But it is unavoidably clear that many Republican elites have decided that adhering to or merely humoring Trump’s 2020 lies is essential to feeding that anger — and that they view these lies as a critical mobilizing tool in the midterm elections.

Trump singled out Lake, and she illustrates the point perfectly. Lake echoes Trump’s lies about 2020, but has also refused to commit to accepting a loss herself, insisting voters “don’t trust” the integrity of our elections.

Lake’s own state recently passed an onerous voter suppression bill in the name of “election integrity.” Yet she keeps citing mistrust of elections to justify the potential treatment of future losses as nonbinding. As Steve Benen notes, no amount of election integrity legislation is likely to ever get people like Lake to accept losses as legitimate.

In Trump’s own telling, GOP base voters must be told that when they lose, they’ve been robbed — the outcome is illegitimate by definition. Scores of other GOP candidates are running for positions of control over elections — while essentially vowing to treat future elections as subject to nullification — which makes Trump’s point harder to deny.

Similarly, we recently learned that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) believed the mob assaulting the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, might kill him. Yet even though McCarthy blamed Trump for inciting the riot, McCarthy publicly patched things up with Trump, then spent the next year helping cover up his insurrection.

Why? Trump has supplied a plausible answer: Planting yourself squarely on the wrong side of Trump’s lies about 2020 might risk demobilizing or alienating the base, which could have imperiled McCarthy’s hopes of winning the House. What’s required instead is treating Jan. 6’s underlying cause as in some sense just.

The fate of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) illustrates the point. Cheney demanded that Republicans as a party unequivocally renounce Trump’s insurrectionism, even if it costs them Trump voters. This is precisely what required her purging from the party.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has been very clear on exactly this point. In a telling moment last year, Graham said of Cheney: “She’s made a determination that the Republican Party can’t grow with President Trump. I’ve determined we can’t grow without him.”

Now Trump has said the same thing in his own way: The GOP needs his voters to succeed; keeping his voters in the fold requires telling them that when they lose elections, it doesn’t count.

All this creates an unstable dynamic. This insurrectionist spirit is highly unpopular with the broader electorate: A new NBC News poll finds that 57 percent of voters say they are less likely to vote for a candidate who says Trump won in 2020. Only 21 percent say they are more likely.

Yet a very large block of election-denying GOP candidates will win anyway. A FiveThirtyEight analysis predicts that well over 100 such Republicans could ascend to House seats.

How to reconcile these facts? First, as FiveThirtyEight notes, most of those Republicans will win in solidly red districts. Not many election deniers are running for seats that are regarded as toss-ups. But also, the fate of democracy doesn’t rank high among voter concerns.

The paradoxical result: A large number of new lawmakers will be adherents of an ethos built on hostility to democracy at its very foundation. That’s a deeply fringe position, yet it will exercise a powerful gravitational pull on the party that at a minimum will likely control the House and at least one key new swing-state governorship after 2022.

We don’t know how damaging this will prove over time. But one thing is clear right now: In saying that large swaths of the GOP base are energized by that ethos, Trump is very likely right.

Not Alpha

It's revealing that MAGA rubes and other highly annoying hyper-macho types still insist on referring to themselves as "alpha males".

Their "thinking" is years out of date, and given the new information - which isn't new at all - they're telling us basically that they're captive and subdued, while seeing themselves as (ie: pretending to be) wild and free.

   (from 6 years ago)

There's no such thing as an alpha male

Eric Trump recently suggested that when his father, Donald Trump, bragged about grabbing women's genitals without consent, it was an example of "two alpha guys in a thing."

In addition to shedding some light on how Trump's son views his father and manhood, it's also interesting because "alpha males" aren't actually a thing.

As the writer Saladin Ahmed pointed out, the concept of "alpha male" wolves that assert dominance over their pack through aggression comes from a debunked model of lupine social groups.

David Mech introduced the idea of the alpha to describe behavior observed in captive animals. Alphas, he wrote in his 1970 book "The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species," win control of their packs in violent fights with other males.

But, as he outlined in a 1999 paper, he's since rejected that idea in light of research into the behavior of wolves in the wild.

In nature, Mech writes, wolves split off from their packs when they mature, and seek out opposite-sex companions with whom to form new packs. The male and female co-dominate the new pack for a much simpler, more peaceful reason: They're the parents of all the pups.

Mech writes on his website (with the lovely title Wolf News and Info) that his original book is "currently still in print, despite my numerous pleas to the publisher to stop publishing it."

Another Twitter user, Mike Westphal, pointed out another paper on the misuse of the phrase "alpha males" to describe breeding roosters.

In the 2003 book "Sexual Selections: What We Can and Can't Learn about Sex from Animals," the biologist Marlene Zuk points out that social groups of hens do have "pecking orders." That is, hierarchies among the females with dominance asserted through pecking.

But roosters are not part of those social groups, Zuk writes, and the idea that the top hen is somehow an "alpha male" bizarrely misgenders the dominant bird.

All of which is to say: Humans who enjoy the idea of "alpha males" might want to keep in mind that there isn't really any such thing. And to the extent the term has any meaning at all, it describes the behavior of captive, lonely creatures.

Some Anecdotal Turning

Don't get happy. Don't get cocky.

Get together and get busy.

"...they're just really loud about their stupidity."

MAGA Manipulation

Sometimes, The Young Turks are a little over the top - sometimes they're a lot over the top.

I don't think that's the case with this one.

Max Burns - MAGA morons have no idea what's going on

Both Sides Don't

It's not a big stretch to hear Greg Sargent somewhat mildly scolding the Press Poodles for setting it up to be the usual horse race. He's come out with some pretty decent criticism.

It is a little odd that he's not more adamant about it - like he's only recently heard about these rabid idiots, and he's not quite made up his mind yet.

(pay wall)

Opinion

The hidden danger posed by a MAGA takeover of the House

With Republicans favored to win the House, you’re already hearing a mind-numbing refrain: Once in the majority, Republicans plan to pursue “retribution” against President Biden and Democrats. How? By launching all kinds of investigations as payback on Donald Trump’s behalf.

This idea is already getting reproduced uncritically by major news organizations. The result is to create the impression that Republicans are merely telegraphing plans for some conventional political tit-for-tat.

But that obfuscates what is more likely the real story: Republicans are pre-fabricating a fake rationale to abuse their investigative powers in a way that isn’t remotely comparable to anything Democrats are doing. Such GOP spin deserves much more serious skepticism.

This reality is pressed on us by a new report in the New York Times that documents just how extreme some of this cycle’s House GOP candidates are.

As the Times notes, any GOP majority will probably be narrower than appeared likely earlier this year. A slim majority — plus the fact that the Trump-loyal America First Caucus is likely to grow — means GOP leaders will struggle to control their ranks. The Times hints at government shutdowns, debt-ceiling defaults and impeachments of everyone from the president down to (who knows?) even the aide who oversees the White House Easter egg hunt.

But the threat of a MAGA House takeover is even worse than this. That’s because a MAGA-fied House will have another, underdiscussed tactic at its disposal: using its fiscal and investigative powers to try to defund or hobble any and all investigations and prosecutions involving Trump.

How might this work? Here’s one way: A GOP majority could reinstate an obscure House rule permitting Republicans to use spending bills to zero out salaries of specific federal officials, or nix blocks of federal employees, functionally killing specific programs.

For instance, it might attempt to kill the salary of Attorney General Merrick Garland. Or it could try to defund — or cancel — any ongoing law enforcement investigations of Trump.

We need to distinguish this tactic from defunding the FBI, which GOP members such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia have demanded. In a more MAGA-fied House, that effort might find support, but most Republicans probably wouldn’t back a wholesale dismantling of federal law enforcement.

By contrast, a more targeted attempt to defund specific officials or investigations could be harder for voters to understand and thus more politically inviting for Republicans.

“It is likely that they would use this process to block investigations and prosecutions of Trump,” congressional scholar Norm Ornstein told me. Indeed, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) recently floated exactly this idea. It’s being talked about. It’s real.

Obviously, such an effort would be opposed by the White House and the Senate (if Democrats keep it). But a faction of House Republicans could threaten to shut down the government while demanding those targeted cuts protecting Trump, Ornstein says.

Even worse, they could use debt-ceiling fights to try to leverage those Trump-protecting cuts. “They could say, ‘We’ll let this whole country go into default unless you stop all these probes of Trump,’” Ornstein told me.

This becomes harder to avoid when you look at GOP candidates likely to win House seats. As the Times details, they include numerous people who are already vowing to use their powers to continue contesting Trump’s 2020 loss with sham investigations, among other tactics.

Here’s another threat: Such Republicans might try to influence the 2024 election. If a corrupt GOP governor were to take over a swing state — say, Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania — and were to certify electors for Trump or an imitator in defiance of the popular vote, a House GOP majority in thrall to Trump could count those electors. Without reform of the Electoral Count Act, that would mean chaos.

A lot will turn on whether as speaker, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) would defy the Trumpist bloc and seek majorities with Democrats. Ornstein’s view: “McCarthy won’t do anything to block or counter the crazies.”

There will be a strong temptation to treat these threats as the tea party redux. While crazed opposition to President Barack Obama drove that era’s chaos, it was aimed at discernible policy goals such as repealing Obamacare or forcing spending cuts. This time will be different.

The threats of chaos won’t be about realizing fiscal priorities in any meaningful sense; they will more likely be cultishly devoted to preserving one man’s absolute impunity. A sizable bloc of House Republicans may well see it as a higher mission to put Trump beyond the reach of accountability and above the law.

With the House Jan. 6 select committee, Democrats are running a legitimate congressional investigation into Trump’s incitement of a mob assault on the U.S. seat of government. The Justice Department search warrant for Mar-a-Lago followed lawful processes and was approved by a judge.

If and when GOP plans in response come into sharper focus, let’s not uncritically describe this as “revenge” or “retribution.” Such words take it as given that GOP conduct will be in some meaningful sense retaliatory for — or even equivalent to — those actions, as if everything is political all the way down, and we can’t ever distinguish between good-faith government conduct and flagrant bad-faith abuses of power.

There’s no reason to capitulate in advance to that framing.

Thanks, Joe

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Today's Beau

madisoncawthorn

When the establishment turned their guns on me, when the Uni-party coalesced to defeat an America First member very few people had my back. This list includes the lion share of figures that came to my defense when it was not politically profitable. These are honorable men and women who are the type of friends anyone yearns to have. “At the beginning of a change the patriot is a rare and hated man.” These are those rare and hated men/women. There are other National figures who I believe are patriots, but I am on a mission now to expose those who say and promise one thing yet legislate and work towards another, self-profiteering, globalist goal. The time for genteel politics as usual has come to an end. It’s time for the rise of the new right, it’s time for Dark MAGA to truly take command. We have an enemy to defeat, but we will never be able to defeat them until we defeat the cowardly and weak members of our own party. Their days are numbered. We are coming.

Fascism out in the open - everybody ready for a little Night Of The Long Knives action?

Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column