Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label daddy state. Show all posts
Showing posts with label daddy state. Show all posts

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Trump Lies Update

During his 4 years in office,
very credible sources
have estimated that Trump
mis-led
or
dissembled
or
Straight up fucking lied
over 35,000 times


The false claims that Trump keeps repeating

Tracking President Trump's false and misleading claims

The Fact Checker has evaluated false statements President Trump has made repeatedly and analyzed how often he reiterates them. The claims included here – which we're calling "Bottomless Pinocchios" – are limited to ones that he has repeated 20 times and were rated as Three or Four Pinocchios by the Fact Checker.


Daddy State Awareness


THE BASICS:

  • The Daddy State lies as a means of demonstrating power.
  • The lies have practically nothing to do with the subject of the lies.
  • Lying about everything creates chaos, which helps condition us to stop thinking, and look to them for "guidance".
  • Once we're totally dependent on them, we'll accept the premise that they can do anything they want.

The goal is to dictate reality to us.

Monday, February 05, 2024

Today's Beau

Remember - it doesn't make sense because it's not supposed to make sense.

House Republicans are intent on squashing the Border Bill even though it has everything they want - but if they pass it now, they lose the "crisis at the border" issue they're counting on to get them re-elected.

I just want an estimate, fellas - how far up Trump's ass do you intend to crawl?



  • The Daddy State lies as a means of demonstrating power.
  • The lies have practically nothing to do with the subject of the lies.
  • Lying about everything creates chaos, which helps condition us to stop thinking, and look to them for "guidance".
  • Once we're totally dependent on them, we'll accept the premise that they can do anything they want.

The goal is to dictate reality to us.

Thursday, February 01, 2024

Classic Projection

Trump is always squawking about how it's all rigged - because he wants it rigged in his favor.

He touched on it in one of the debates in 2016. Hillary slammed him for dodging taxes because the system favors rich people, and he said, (paraphrasing) "Of course I use the system to my advantage - it cuts in my favor - why would I not take advantage of it?"


Friday, January 26, 2024

On Guns And Politics

One of the mainstays of Daddy State politics is playing the Opposites Game - a slight variation on 'Every accusation is a confession'.

It's very useful to make sure your audience is distracted and fooled so they don't see the impossible contradiction inherent in the propaganda.

Case in point: Guns.

"We need our guns in case it becomes necessary to fight an oppressive government!"

What if the oppressive government is actually made up of the people who are telling you to fight? What if they're co-opting you into fighting on behalf of the oppressive government they intend to install once you've killed enough of your neighbors to impose their will on all of us?


Just a thought.

Wednesday, January 10, 2024

Today's Daddy State

Daddy State Awareness


THE BASICS:

  • The Daddy State lies as a means of demonstrating power.
  • The lies have practically nothing to do with the subject of the lies.
  • Lying about everything is a way to condition us - to make us accept the premise that they can do anything they want.

The goal is to dictate reality to us.

7a. The law is my sword, but not your shield.
7b. The law is my shield, but not your sword.


Sunday, December 17, 2023

But It Won't Stick - Prob'ly

When Romney did basically the same thing in 2012, it kinda stuck - partly because Romney had a tiny smidgen of honor, so he tried to spin it.

Trump will likely keep doing what he always does - ie: "I was joking". But it's just as likely he'll also go with another of his usual things where he simply denies it, declaiming it as "fake" or "it's a deep fake" or whatever his Daddy State instinct tells him he should do.


4. They change the meaning of words to suit their needs.
a) if it's false but it works in my favor, then it's true
b) if it's true but it works against me, then it's false

5. They change the historical record.
“you didn’t see what you saw"
"what happened isn’t what happened"
“you didn't hear me say what you heard me say”


Monday, December 11, 2023

Let's Get Serious


  1. Do not obey in advance. Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You've already done this, haven't you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.
  2. Defend an institution. Follow the courts or the media, or a court or a newspaper. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you are making them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions don't protect themselves. They go down like dominoes unless each is defended from the beginning.
  3. Recall professional ethics. When the leaders of state set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become much more important. It is hard to break a rule-of-law state without lawyers, and it is hard to have show trials without judges.
  4. When listening to politicians, distinguish certain words. Look out for the expansive use of “terrorism” and “extremism.” Be alive to the fatal notions of “exception” and “emergency.” Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.
  5. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that all authoritarians at all times either await or plan such events in order to consolidate power. Think of the Reichstag fire. The sudden disaster that requires the end of the balance of power, the end of opposition parties, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Don't fall for it.
  6. Be kind to our language. Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. (Don't use the Internet before bed. Charge your gadgets away from your bedroom, and read.) What to read? Perhaps The Power of the Powerless by Václav Havel, 1984 by George Orwell, The Captive Mind by CzesÅ‚aw Milosz, The Rebel by Albert Camus, The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, or Nothing is True and Everything is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev.
  7. Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy, in words and deeds, to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. And the moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.
  8. Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.
  9. Investigate. Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on your screen is there to harm you. Learn about sites that investigate foreign propaganda pushes.
  10. Practice corporeal politics. Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them.
  11. Make eye contact and small talk. This is not just polite. It is a way to stay in touch with your surroundings, break down unnecessary social barriers, and come to understand whom you should and should not trust. If we enter a culture of denunciation, you will want to know the psychological landscape of your daily life.
  12. Take responsibility for the face of the world. Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate. Do not look away and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.
  13. Hinder the one-party state. The parties that took over states were once something else. They exploited a historical moment to make political life impossible for their rivals. Vote in local and state elections while you can.
  14. Give regularly to good causes, if you can. Pick a charity and set up autopay. Then you will know that you have made a free choice that is supporting civil society helping others doing something good.
  15. Establish a private life. Nastier rulers will use what they know about you to push you around. Scrub your computer of malware. Remember that email is skywriting. Consider using alternative forms of the Internet, or simply using it less. Have personal exchanges in person. For the same reason, resolve any legal trouble. Authoritarianism works as a blackmail state, looking for the hook on which to hang you. Try not to have too many hooks.
  16. Learn from others in other countries. Keep up your friendships abroad, or make new friends abroad. The present difficulties here are an element of a general trend. And no country is going to find a solution by itself. Make sure you and your family have passports.
  17. Watch out for the paramilitaries. When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching around with torches and pictures of a Leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-Leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the game is over.
  18. Be reflective if you must be armed. If you carry a weapon in public service, God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things. Be ready to say no. (If you do not know what this means, contact the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and ask about training in professional ethics.)
  19. Be as courageous as you can. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die in unfreedom.
  20. Be a patriot. President Trump is not. Set a good example of what America means for the generations to come. They will need it.

Friday, December 08, 2023

Taylor Swift




I've never heard a Taylor Swift recording. All I know about her is that she consistently sells out 70,000 seat concerts, she's sold over 100 million album units, she's a legit billionaire, and she's dating an NFL star.

Oh yeah - and she's moved many many thousands of 18-to-34-year-olds to get registered.

All of  which is making the MAGArubes crazy - crazy enough (I guess) to think that attacking her and trying to tear her down won't piss off all those newly registered voters to the point where they'll never vote Republican. Ever.



MAGAdorks are so addicted to contrarian horseshit, they need their "thought leaders" to turn everything upside down and inside out so they can get a good red pill fix before they Jones out. It's like whoever comes up with the craziest Shutter Island-style fantasy is the one everybody follows - today - it'll be different tomorrow - or in an hour or two.

And I'll harp on it some more - this shit fits with the Daddy State mold perfectly.

Sunday, December 03, 2023

Today's Tweext


He contradicts himself almost in the same breath. This is The Daddy State on meth.

Monday, November 13, 2023

The Wolf Is At The Door

It's not coincidence.

It's not just bluff-n-bluster aimed at keeping a few of the more rabid supporters in line.

He's been kinda subtle about telling us who and what he is for years, but now he's out in the open because he knows the whole thing is slipping away and he has to be much more forceful and direct with it.

Saturday, November 04, 2023

A Bullet To Dodge


Another long one. Project 2025.

Some bullet points:
  • Implement the Unitary Executive doctrine
  • Replace 20,000 federal employees with MAGA loyalists
  • Dismantle and privatize (or assign to the states) as much of the federal government as possible
According to the "New Conservatism" (aka: Radical Libertarianism) government should perform only three basic functions:
  1. Defend commercial interests abroad
  2. Keep the domestic peace
  3. Settle contract disputes

Inside the Next Republican Revolution

Whether Trump wins or not, the GOP plans a renewed assault on his nemesis, the “deep state.”

Can conservatives train enough loyalists to actually get the job done?

Paul Dans points to a massive book prominently displayed on a table in his Capitol Hill office — written, Dans says, “in the sweaty summer of 1980.” Yellowing and torn at the edges, it is a 1,091-page manifesto of conservative governance titled A Mandate for Leadership. “That book really became the bible of the Reagan Revolution. That’s kind of what we’re working from,” says Dans, a tall, MIT-educated lawyer who is leading a team of former Trump officials preparing a new “America First” agenda for the next Republican president — whether it’s former President Donald Trump or not.

In truth, the program laid out by Dans and his fellow Trumpers, called Project 2025, is far more ambitious than anything Ronald Reagan dreamed up. Dans, from his seat inside The Heritage Foundation, and scores of conservative groups aligned with his program are seeking to roll back nothing less than 100 years of what they see as liberal encroachment on Washington. They want to overturn what began as Woodrow Wilson’s creation of a federal administrative elite and later grew into a vast, unaccountable and mostly liberal bureaucracy (as conservatives view it) under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, numbering about two and a quarter million federal workers today. They aim to defund the Department of Justice, dismantle the FBI, break up the Department of Homeland Security and eliminate the Departments of Education and Commerce, to name just a few of their larger targets. They want to give the president complete power over quasi-independent agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies that have been the bane of Trump’s political existence in the last few years.

And they want to ensure that what remains of this slashed-down bureaucracy is reliably MAGA conservative — not just for the next president but for a long time to come — and that the White House maintains total control of it. In an effort to implement this agenda — which relies on another Reagan-era idea, the controversial “unitary theory” of the Constitution under which Article II gives the president complete power over the federal bureaucracy — Dans has formed a committee to recruit what he calls “conservative warriors” through bar associations and state attorneys general offices and install them in general counsel offices throughout the federal bureaucracy.


The Project 2025 team is scouring records and social media accounts to rule out heretics — effectively administering loyalty tests — and launching a so-called Presidential Administration Academy that tutors future MAGA bureaucrats with video classes in “Conservative Governance 101.” Dans says 17 lectures have been prepared (with titles such as “Oversight and Investigations” and “The Federal Budget Process”), with another 13 in production, and nearly a thousand potential new bureaucrats recruited from around the country are already in training. These efforts are intended to ensure that the chaos and high-level defections of Trump’s first term never happen again, along with prosecutions like the ones the ex-president now faces.

The broad outlines of this agenda — which build on efforts begun toward the end of Trump’s first term — have been known for some time. But it is only recently that many of the details have emerged, as well as how far-reaching these aims are. It has also become clear that, even more today than in 2016, Trump’s personal agenda has become the party’s agenda, despite all the Republicans who have defected from him. And that the new GOP establishment is using his populist insurgency to resurrect — in fact, entirely reconceive — its old Reaganite assault on the federal government. In its current formulation, this has less to do with sheer size — as Nikki Haley bravely pointed out at the Aug. 23 debate, Trump himself “added $8 trillion to our debt” — than on restoring “accountability” to government.

“It’s not just about 2025. It’s about ’29 and ’33 and ’37,” adds Brooke Rollins, Trump’s former domestic policy chief, who is now CEO of the Trump-endorsed America First Policy Institute. Rollins, like Dans and others who consider themselves aligned with the goals of Project 2025, believes the training program amounts to a new front in the conservative movement. In the past, she says, “the business of governing and process was not our strong suit.”

That’s going to change, says her associate Doug Hoelscher, former director of Trump’s White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, who recently took over the America First Transition Project at AFPI, which is rolling out a similar agenda of its own. “Biden put about 1,200 people in the field on Day One. President Trump put in about 500,” Hoelscher says. “That shows how unready the right has been historically to govern.”

While they have a willing vehicle in Trump — not to mention the support of most of his primary opponents — many conservatives recognize they will have to compensate for Trump’s built-in liabilities. If they truly want to dismantle the “deep state” they believe they have to create, almost from scratch, a workforce that won’t sacrifice competence to Trump’s obsession with loyalty above everything else.

⬆︎ That may be the big flaw - the contradiction that makes it all unworkable. Fierce loyalty and high competency are generally not found in the same person. Throw in the kind of rank paranoia that's requisite for being a 'good little Daddy Stater' and you've got something destined for the ash heap - after the inevitable fiery destruction of an awful lot of good things and people along the way.

“This is a coming-together of the movement that has never been seen before,” says Dans, who keeps on his desk a replica of Reagan’s burgundy leather plaque inscribed in gold lettering, “It CAN Be Done.” Dans gained prominence in the latter stages of the Trump term when he joined John McEntee, the former body man for Trump who rose to head of the Presidential Personnel Office at age 29. They ousted alleged disloyalists such Dale Cabaniss, who ran the Office of Personnel Management, which manages benefits and retirement issues for the federal government’s civil service. Now McEntee is on board at Project 2025 and what he started in 2020 is the GOP template for the future. Together, with James Sherk (another former Trump official) they are seeking to resurrect “Schedule F,” an executive order Trump adopted in the last weeks of his administration–and Biden later rescinded--to expand the number of federal workers he could fire from the usual 4,000 or so political appointees to 20,000 or more who occupy key policy-making positions.

The exact number being targeted is still being decided, says Russell Vought, Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget, who has been tasked with implementing the Project 2025 policy program. But ultimately the goal is to remove what Dans calls the “tenured class of political high priests.”

President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump arrive for his acceptance speech to the Republican National Committee Convention on the South Lawn of the White House in 2020.
If Trump manages to make it back to the White House, his first target would almost certainly be the Department of Justice and the FBI, the two agencies he has long viewed as overtly antagonistic to him. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo

Some engaged in the 2025 project say they intend to move beyond what Vought calls “updated Reaganism” and the “post-1950s National Review fusionism” that supplied the intellectual construct for the conservative movement in the mid-to-late 20th century.

“I love Ronald Reagan. But it’s not the 1980s, it’s 2023. It’s not just a big government we’re up against but a weaponized one,” says Vought, who is now head of the Center for Renewing America — one of some 75 conservative groups, many formed in just the last year or so, that have signed onto Project 2025. Too many executive branch agencies are no longer answerable to the president, he says, and constitutional oversight has morphed over the decades into unconstitutional control by an “imperial Congress.”

If Trump manages to make it back to the White House his first target would almost certainly be the Department of Justice and the FBI, the two agencies he has long viewed as overtly antagonistic to him.

But that’s only a start.

“We think it’s more systematic than it is just about Trump. We have political prisoners in America for the first time I can remember,” Vought says, referring in part to those convicted for their roles in the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. “We have people that are in jail that are no threat to their community and no flight risk, that are being mistreated in jail. The court system has adopted a paradigm that they are a threat to democracy.”

As a result, Vought says, “We have to be thinking mechanically about how to take these institutions over.” Vought is reassembling his old team at the Trump OMB and describes his role as drafting fresh executive orders, playbooks and memoranda for cabinet secretaries to be “ready on Day One of the next transition. Whatever is necessary to seize control of the administrative state is really our task.”

‘Experts at killing bureaucracies’

For Trump personally, of course, this is a live-or-die agenda, and Trump campaign officials acknowledge that it aligns well with their own “Agenda 47” program. Trump’s public career has been marked by his ferocious conviction that he has been victimized by one element of the “deep state” or another since the start of his presidency — the Defense Department wouldn’t follow his orders, the FBI tried to undermine him with Russiagate, no one built his wall fast enough and so on. And Trump is in danger of becoming a “political prisoner” himself if he’s convicted of one or more of the 91 criminal counts listed against him in four separate indictments. “Either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state,” the former president declared at his first campaign rally in March.

Dans and others involved in Project 2025 concede that their assault on the “administrative state” is not going to focus on politically delicate entitlements such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, Veterans Administration programs and retirement plans, unemployment compensation and agricultural price support programs — all of which amount to about half the $6.3 trillion federal budget. “That is not going to be on the front burner,” Dans says.

Out on the campaign trail, other leading GOP candidates such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy are trying to outdo each other by openly embracing — rhetorically at least — the agenda of taking down a federal government “weaponized” against conservatives. The top target for all of them is the same as Trump’s — the DOJ. Earlier this month, Ramaswamy declared he wants to slash nearly half of the non-defense federal workforce, amounting to a million employees, and to eliminate the Department of Education, the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the IRS and the Commerce Department. As for DeSantis, his spokesperson Bryan Griffin told POLITICO Magazine that he’s been out ahead on the issue, saying: “Ron DeSantis is the only candidate for president who can break up and rein in the bureaucracy.”

Trump, of course, contends that it’s all his idea: “Everyone knows his America First agenda actually works, which is why many are copying him,” his spokesperson Liz Harrington said in an email. Trump’s Agenda 47 platform includes “a ten-point plan to dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption” and pledges to achieve what he failed to do in his first term by moving up to 100,000 government positions out of the “Washington swamp.”

Dans is somewhat vague when asked about specific efforts to inject Project 2025 into the GOP presidential race. He and others want to avoid getting entangled in the ugly war of words on the Republican campaign trail. But the new conservative coalition has been “in touch with every major candidate” about these plans, says Hoelscher. POLITICO Magazine has learned talks have been ongoing with officials as high as Susie Wiles, Trump’s senior advisor, and David Dewhirst, a top aide to Ron DeSantis (Dewhirst also recently joined the project as a senior consultant). Project 2025 has also reached out to Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who’s been hinting at an independent run, as well. And Dans has set up a legislative outreach committee to garner GOP champions on Capitol Hill, though he admits that “is really in the beginning stages right now.”

Dans says that while the new movement is seeking to ensure the elimination of dissident bureaucrats like Sally Yates, the former acting attorney general who refused to implement Trump’s travel ban on Muslims in 2017; and Alexander Vindman, the former NSC official who in 2019 accused Trump of perfidy over Ukraine, the Covid-19 crisis proved to be the best illustration of the problem of an unaccountable federal “priesthood.”

“The archetype of what we want to end in a bureaucrat is none other than Dr. [Anthony] Fauci,” Dans says. Many conservatives believe that Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, helped cost Trump a second term by allegedly overreacting to the Covid crisis without taking directions from the president and helping to shut down the economy unnecessarily.

“No bureaucrat should have an action figure made of him,” jokes Dans. “Fauci had 50 years on the job in one of the most technically demanding and ever-changing professions in bio-science. Either the person is a genius on the order of Einstein or is Machiavellian in terms of keeping power. I would submit the latter.”

Anti-intellectualism/Anti-expertise is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes.

Vought says his team is also working on a slew of detailed plans on the DOJ in particular that would allow the White House to “defund a lot of functions.” One proposal would require Congress to start with a 25-percent cut in FBI funding to eliminate the bureau’s intelligence capabilities, which have transformed it “from a law enforcement agency to a domestic intelligence agency.” Another proposal would gain White House control of the solicitor general and bring Justice Department attorneys into line with the president’s wishes, as well as allow them to raise legitimate questions about election “fraud” without fear of retribution.

A Justice System that can operate independently from the Executive is absolutely essential to a functioning democracy.

Two key figures involved in Project 2025 were both recently indicted along with Trump in Georgia: former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, who’s head of the Conservative Partnership Institute; and Jeffrey Clark, who is working for one of the groups aligned with Dans, the CPI-launched Center for Renewing America. Clark, an environmental lawyer who almost precipitated a mass resignation by Justice Department attorneys in December 2020 when Trump threatened to make him acting attorney general, is seeking to implement Trump’s first-term wish to eliminate any independence by the DOJ. In a paper published in May by the CRA, Clark argued the idea the Justice Department “is or should be independent” is unconstitutional.

Furthering the Trump agenda, CRA is also working on a paper that will take classification decisions out of the hands of deep-state bureaucrats. It is developing other plans to allow a president to halt congressionally mandated funding at his pleasure, as Trump did when he held up foreign aid to Ukraine allegedly to pressure its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to investigate President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, eventually touching off the impeachment crisis.

All such efforts, Vought insists, would respect the principle of checks and balances and restore constitutional order as the Founders intended. “It’s more trying to get back to the Founders’ understanding of the executive branch,” Vought says.


And, of course, this is Politico, so here comes a small bit of their usual Both Sides shit:

Indeed, the irony of all this — and it’s a bitter, almost unresolvable irony — is that both sides of the political spectrum are now holding up the “Constitution” as the thing they most want to preserve, and yet they remain utterly opposed about how to do it. For Democrats it’s about holding Trump accountable under the Constitution; for Republicans, it’s about taking down the unconstitutional administrative state they believe is after Trump. No negotiations between the two sides are planned.

Many of the key players in this ambitious program openly acknowledge that their efforts were doomed in the first Trump term because they didn’t know what they were doing; it was no contest confronting a Democrat-stuffed “deep state” (as well as all those RINOs Trump brought in), and conservatives have never been good at translating movement ideology into action going back to Reagan and the “triumph of politics.”

Along with Meadows, one of the godfathers of the new conservative insurgency is Dans’ boss, Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, which came of age in the Reagan era and is now reinventing itself as the main mouthpiece of Trumpism, overseeing Project 2025.

“What we’ve never gotten right in the modern conservative movement, even under Reagan, was having a network of right of center professionals who were ready to go,” says Roberts. “To get 10,000 to 20,000 names into this database who are not only submitting their resumes but also being vetted to some extent, and who, depending upon the classification of the position we think they’re suitable for, are going through these training modules — that’s the part that’s never been done before.

“Do we have conservatives who are experts at killing bureaucracies?” Roberts says. “No. The conservative movement has not developed this capability. But we’re going to as a result of Project 2025.”


‘Republicans still don’t like the idea of expertise’

Little of the Project 2025 agenda is likely — even remotely likely — to happen, of course.

In recent decades, a few small agencies have been privatized, some powers ceded to states and localities. But the growth of the federal bureaucracy generally goes in one direction, history teaches, as demonstrated over the decades by the GOP’s spasmodic efforts to eliminate the Department of Education — now viewed as the evil font of “wokeism” — which Reagan declared on the 1980 campaign trail to be a “bureaucratic boondoggle.”

Moreover, while the orneriness of the Pentagon and military leadership were a problem for Trump — and a particular target of the new agenda — the Trumpists also want to be hawkish on China. And that’s going to present a huge problem if they want to bring the military-industrial complex — which everyone involved in Project 2025 agrees is the most out of control — into line with White House wishes.

One of the few generals who hasn’t abandoned Trump — and works for the America First Policy Institute — is retired Army Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, who complains in an interview that Biden is going too easy on Chinese President Xi Jinping. “Eventually we’re going to have to draw the bright line. And this administration hasn’t drawn it yet,” Kellogg says. His proposal is to resurrect something like NSC-68, the founding strategy for the Cold War adopted under Harry Truman in 1950. “Give me an NSC-68 for China,” Kellogg says. The problem: NSC-68 created the modern national security state — and a new one will almost certainly make the Pentagon and defense industrial complex even more unwieldy since external threats tend to enlarge the national security apparatus. Just look at the Department of Homeland Security. And recall that Reaganite attempts to dismantle the Department of Education were abandoned after its 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, suggested that the U.S. could lose the Cold War in the classroom.

Moreover it strains credulity to describe Congress as “imperial” when in so many respects, critics say, Congress has actually neglected its duties or kicked them over to the White House — avoiding such issues as new Authorizations for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), for example.


Some conservative scholars and government experts say that Project 2025’s grand plans to transform the federal bureaucracy are often comically naïve. Not only are they unworkable, critics contend, but if they’re implemented they will likely only render the federal government even more incompetent than conservatives now say it is. And certainly more chaotic and amateurish than in Trump’s first term.

“What it totally reminds me of is the Iraq occupation: 21-year-old kids who just came out of Patrick Henry College running a country into the ground,” said Geoffrey Kabaservice, author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, “That sounds like their vision for America.”

Kabaservice, a conservative himself who works for the libertarian-oriented Niskanen Center, concedes many of the Project 2025 plans for reform are “legitimate.” One chapter of the new Mandate for Leadership, co-authored by Dans, Donald Devine and Dennis Dean Kirk, sounds anodyne enough. It calls for a better examination-based hiring system, pay for strong performers along with cuts in what they see as a too-generous pension system, and easier ways of dismissing poor performers. But “Schedule F,” Kabaservice says, is nothing less than “an attempt to eviscerate government and replace it with Trump stooges.”

In many ways, the notion that one can replace decades of on-the-ground experience — say in running a health care bureaucracy or policing the border — through a video training program is very Trumpian. Who better to hire legions of unctuous but untried newbies, after all, than the man who declared, “I alone can fix it,” and who routinely used to say — whether the subject was Covid-19 or nuclear weapons — that he knew more than the scientists and generals.


The deeper problem, Kabaservice says, is that “Republicans still don’t like the idea of expertise. They actually seem to believe all you need to know about running a country that underpins the global order is something you can know by being a mom.”

Dans dismisses these criticisms by recalling William F. Buckley’s famous quip: “I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”

“I would trust a mom coming back into the workforce who had just successfully raised four kids to be able to manage an agency,” says Dans. “We have a lot of faith in our common man. We are the party of the forgotten man, the citizen farmer, the folk who really make this country run. I think a lot of it is intuitive, respectfully. We live in a modern society where an entire class of managers have managed to insert themselves and make it increasingly complex and intermediate all these points to the extent where no one actually understands the functioning.”

Kevin Kosar, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, has also argued that conservatives need to create a pipeline of people good at governing. But he says they’ve had so little experience at legislating in the post-New Deal era — with minor interludes of power such as the mid-80s and ’94 Newt Gingrich takeover of the House — that they don’t really know how to accomplish government reduction. He says the biggest problem with this grandiose new agenda is just how murky it really is, not to mention its end goal. “It’s entirely up for grabs. What if they get the White House? OK, boom. They get Schedule F. Boom. Does that mean we no longer have a weaponized government? Is it fine now?”

The Trumpers involved in Project 2025 say they realize they can’t replace everybody — and they don’t want to. Vought says he wants “career number crunchers” at OMB who possess “the continuity of expertise” to stay on — only to add more political appointees to keep them in line.

But the project’s authors are the first to admit that implementing most of it will require enormous political power that they do not currently have. “Yes, this is daunting, there is no doubt about it,” says Roberts. “It requires not just a plan and it doesn’t just require the personnel. This requires controlling not just the White House but both chambers of Congress.”

Dans pooh-poohs such concerns and says he’s focused on the long term. “This is all about bringing newcomers to Washington. This land is your land, this federal government is your federal government. It’s not just the sole province of people in the metro D.C. area,” he says. “I believe that within 350 million Americans we can find conservative warriors who are at the top of their game.”

‘I know the good ones. I know the bad ones.’

But can they? For people who have focused mainly on the headlines in the last few years — currently dominated by Trump’s fourth indictment and the nasty repartee on the GOP campaign trail — it may look like a second-term President Trump would have some difficulty implementing such plans. Certainly, he might have trouble finding experienced, nationally known people to stock his Cabinet.


After all, since the end of Trump’s last term and especially the Jan. 6, 2021 uprising, a parade of high-level former officials — starting, of course, with his vice president, Mike Pence who is now an opponent in the primary — have vociferously broken with him. These include the most senior members of his cabinet — his former attorney general, secretary of state, U.N. ambassador (another current opponent) and several ex-defense secretaries and national security advisers. Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, has called him “the most flawed person I have ever met in my life.” As his criminal trials at the federal, state and local levels move forward — especially in the Georgia case with its 18 co-defendants — more former acolytes may be “flipped” to turn against him.

But a large phalanx of loyal Trumpists remains in Washington — most of them scattered in conservative action groups on Capitol Hill and Pennsylvania Avenue — and few of them seem to care whether Trump runs as a convicted felon or not. Among them are the directors of the AFPI, sometimes described as a Trump “cabinet in waiting”: Larry Kudlow, the former chair of CEA; Rick Perry, Trump’s secretary of energy; Chad Wolf, former acting DHS secretary and former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who heads the Center for a Healthy America at AFPI; Kellogg, who could run the Pentagon (another possibility is Chris Miller, Trump’s last acting defense secretary); and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who implemented Trump’s neo-protectionist policies and writes in his new book, No Trade Is Free, that Trump will go down as “a great president, truly one of the greatest.”

Others who would likely be in line for senior jobs are Vought, former national security adviser Robert O’Brien and Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration pit bull, who has formed yet another aligned group under CPI, America First Legal, that is challenging nearly every Biden executive order in court. A second-term Trump also could bring in his many loyalists on Capitol Hill, like Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chair of the House Judiciary Committee.

One former Trump official, Troup Hemenway, said all the disaffections from Trump have made things easier. “Folks actively opposed have kind of revealed themselves and they’re not going to be invited back,” he said.

The candidate himself, speaking in Iowa in March, seemed to agree. “When I went there [to the White House], I didn’t know a lot of people; I had to rely on, in some cases, RINOs and others to give me some recommendations, but I know them all now,” Trump said, referring to “Republicans in Name Only.” “I know the good ones. I know the bad ones. I know the weak ones. I know the strong ones.”

Perhaps. But the biggest mystery — and challenge — will be determining who the new loyalists will be. For the America First Policy Institute, which is helping to implement Project 2025, its grandest ambitions lie in soliciting governors and state attorneys general to the cause, among others. AFPI will soon launch America First “state chapters.” Adds Rollins, AFPI’s CEO: “What AFPI is building is very much an outside of Washington D.C. approach. There is so much talent and so many really incredible people currently in college or in the private sector who would love to come in.”

Another challenge will be training and vetting the right people to do what conservatives have traditionally hated to do — deploy the power of the federal government — without themselves becoming the new enemy. “That’s the most expensive part,” says Roberts. “It’s probably 75 percent of the costs of this project — building the conservative ‘LinkedIn’ as we like to call it. There is vehement agreement that this is the most important part of the project.”

"Conservative LinkedIn" - sounds pretty elitist to me. 🤔

‘A furious reaction against elites of all stripes’

However that plays out, it is hardly an accident that so much public outrage exists against Washington elites, that Project 2025 has leapt to embrace it, and that Trump has so effectively exploited it over the past six years. Indeed, if one sets aside the outrages committed by Trump — and a lot of the other craziness now possessing the GOP — Project 2025 very likely has a substantial political base. One that isn’t going away.

Why? For the last several decades both political parties have offered up lesson after lesson in misdirection: from the folly of deregulating markets and skewing taxes to favor multinational companies and capital gains-earners at the expense of the working class to launching one of the least-justified and costliest wars in modern history in Iraq, one that had a disproportionate effect on working class families who make up the bulk of the armed forces. This created deep anger and resentment over the crushingly unequal society the United States has become, feeding populism not only on the right but the left as well. (Recall how the once obscure socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) nearly defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primaries on the strength of his own populist agenda.)

In his new book, Lighthizer even makes a point of thanking labor leaders and Lori Wallach — perhaps the most respected trade expert in the progressive movement — as “a longtime friend and co-conspirator who was a constant advisor and liaison with many on [Capitol] Hill.” The rage against Washington also extends to Trump’s last Defense chief, Chris Miller, a career special forces soldier who views, like most of the new Trumpian right, the Iraq invasion as a monumental disaster based on lies and “wants to fire most of the generals at the Pentagon, slash defense spending by half, shut down the military academies, break up the military-industrial complex,” according to an intimate profile of Miller by Peter Maass published in March.

As a result, the intellectual conservatism of Buckley and other conservative thinkers has been transmuted into its virtual opposite, and the Project 2025 team has embraced it. As Matthew Continetti writes in his 2022 book The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism: “What began as an elite-driven defense of the classical liberal principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States ended up, in the first quarter of the 21st century, as a furious reaction against elites of all stripes.”

Some critics believe this is all rhetorical window dressing for what would be, in a second Trump term, four years of personal vengeance at any cost. Kabaservice says the new concept of “national conservatism” embraced by the Project 2025 crowd — code for Trump’s odd, ungainly blend of neo-protectionism, neo-isolationism and Reaganite trickle-down economics — is merely an “attempt to intellectually retrofit a rationale for Trumpism.”

But it would be a mistake to think that even if Trump somehow goes away — either into retirement or into prison — Republicanism will change with him gone. That’s because Trump’s success in merging the conservative movement with his political persona is really an extension of the mistrust of elites in Washington, and that sentiment won’t subside any time soon. As Continetti writes: “Untangling the Republican Party and conservative movement from Donald Trump won’t be easy.”

The new right, and now national conservatives, are in “a condition of fracture and flux” and it has become hard to tell any longer who belongs on the Right and who doesn’t, Continetti says.

Now Trump’s acolytes are filling the vacuum. But it is possible that, as happened in Trump’s first term, the new conservative revolution will eventually eat its own. After all, starting with the saga of Jeff Sessions — the ultra-conservative senator who was one of the earliest Trump backers and then found himself ousted as attorney general — the Trump administration was characterized by loyalists who were never loyal enough for him.

One present and growing danger, Vought concedes, is that “an uncomfortable number of former Trump folks” aligned themselves with DeSantis, beginning last fall before the Florida governor’s campaign began to tank. Some like Vought say they are worried that too many former Trump devotees are removing themselves for consideration for positions in a second term.

Dans says this new Republican revolution is trying hard to “learn from the mistakes” of the old one — which is one reason the Project 2025 team is, like Reagan, avoiding threatening people’s entitlements. But it is also true that if they succeed with even a small part of their ambitions, Reagan could end up looking like a milquetoast middle-of-the-roader left behind on the ash heap of history.

It all sounds pretty nutty,
but we dismiss it at our peril.

Tuesday, September 26, 2023

A Small (ish) Win


Republicans continue their mighty struggle to beat back the forces of creeping democracy.

Seriously - I can't think of a shittier thing to do than to say you're serving the interests of your constituents by doing things that take away their right to choose their leaders - degrading democracy and claiming you're protecting it.

Our little experiment in democratic self-government seems to be hanging by a thread, even as we get a few faint glimmers of hope from a SCOTUS that has also seemed inclined to fuck us over.

But I'll take a win anywhere any time.


US Supreme Court won't halt ruling that blocked Alabama electoral map

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday denied a request by Alabama officials to halt a lower court's ruling that rejected a Republican-crafted electoral map for diminishing the clout of Black voters, likely clearing the way for a new map to be drawn ahead of the 2024 congressional elections.

The court's action leaves intact a Sept. 5 decision by a federal three-judge panel in Birmingham that the map approved by the state's Republican-led legislature to set the boundaries of Alabama's seven U.S. House of Representatives districts was unlawfully biased against Black voters and must be redrawn.

That map was devised after the Supreme Court in June blocked a previous version, also for weakening the voting power of Black Alabamians.

President Joe Biden's fellow Democrats are seeking to regain control of the House in next year's elections. With Republicans holding a slim 222-212 majority, court battles like this one are helping to shape the fight for control of the chamber.

Black people make up 27% of Alabama's population but are in the majority in only one of the seven House districts as drawn by the state legislature in both the maps it has approved since the 2020 census.

Electoral districts are redrawn each decade to reflect population changes as measured by a national census. In most states, such redistricting is done by the party in power, which can lead to map manipulation for partisan gain. Voting rights litigation that could result in new maps of congressional districts is playing out in several states.

The Supreme Court's 5-4 June ruling affirmed a lower court order requiring state lawmakers to add a second House district with a Black majority - or close to it - in order to comply with the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting. Black voters tend to favor Democratic candidates.

Following that ruling, the legislature adopted a plan that increased the portion of Black voters in a second House district from around 30% to 40%, still well below a majority. The three-judge panel ruled that this new map failed to remedy the Voting Rights Act violation present in the first map and directed a special master - an independent party appointed by a court - to draw a new, third version of the map ahead of next year's elections.

The latest Republican-drawn map drew swift objections from Black voters and civil rights activists. They said the plan failed to fix the Voting Rights Act violation identified by the Supreme Court, and that it raised concerns under the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection under the law.

The Alabama map concentrated large numbers of Black voters into one district and spread others into districts in numbers too small to make up a majority.

The Supreme Court's June ruling was authored by conservative Chief Justice John Roberts and joined in full by the court's three liberals, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the judgment in a separate opinion.

Conservative litigants had succeeded in persuading the Supreme Court to limit the Voting Rights Act's scope in some important previous rulings.

The Supreme Court's 2013 ruling in another Alabama case struck down a key part that determined which states with histories of racial discrimination needed federal approval to change voting laws. In a 2021 ruling endorsing Republican-backed Arizona voting restrictions, the justices made it harder to prove violations under a provision of the Voting Rights Act aimed at countering racially biased voting measures.

Wednesday, September 06, 2023

Today's Wingnut



Daddy State Awareness Guide

Rule 1:
Every accusation is a confession.

Rule 3:
Every prediction of some dire consequence is a veiled threat.
Whatever terrible thing they're "warning" us about is something they intend to make happen - usually in an attempt to coerce us into doing something they want.

When Huckabee "warns" us about what Biden is doing, he's telling us what Republicans will do if returned to power.


Listen To What They Don't Say



First, you accomplish nothing by trying to shame them. You can't shame someone who's deliberately and studiously abandoned their principles. These people have no honor - they've traded it away in order to gain power.

When "conservatives" talk, they're saying a lot that we don't hear.

And that's kinda the key. Listen for the subtext. Take whatever their literal pronouncement is, and flip it - or turn it inside out - in order to hear what they're really saying.
  • They're not looking to avoid a constitutional crisis - they're trying to create one
  • They're not saying we can't have someone as president who's constantly under investigation - they're saying you can't investigate the president (as long as that president is Republican of course)
  • They told us the Dems were engaged in political theater when they impeached Trump for legit reasons, and then when they got a majority in the House, they went completely into theater mode like it's their fucking college major
They're playing the same dangerous game they've played for 50 years. ie: just keep hammering away with "government sucks". "They're all liars". "You can't trust the media".

There will be plenty of rubes who swallow every little turd you float down to them, but the main thing is to destroy the middle. Make that big squishy faction that thinks they're immune to the hype feel pure disdain for the whole mess. Get enough of them apathetic enough to withdraw from the process, and all you have to do is make sure your little gang of 20% - the rubes, the devotees, and the bluff-n-bluster thugs who keep the mob amped up - get them to show up, make lots of noise, and vote the way you need them to vote.

It's long been a ridiculous thing about American elections: on average, 50-60% of people eligible to vote can't be bothered to take part in a democratic system that they either pretend to be knee-jerk proud of, or who've swallowed the propaganda that it's all a sham anyway so why bother.

And voilà - all you need to "win" the election is 20% + 1.

Wednesday, August 30, 2023

Monday, August 14, 2023

Retrospect

Because we (progressives, liberals, etc) don't tune in to DumFux News, we don't hear what guys like Lindsey Graham say. And so we don't hear the threats.



Daddy State Awareness Guide - rule 3:
Every prediction of some dire consequence is a veiled threat.
Whatever terrible thing they're "warning" us about is something they intend to make happen - usually in an attempt to coerce us into doing something they want.



 

Sunday, August 06, 2023

Confirming My Bias

... but if my bias is the good kind of bias - eg: a preference for hard facts over conspiracy fantasies - then I should be looking for (and favoring) information that confirms it.

That doesn't mean I look at only the points of view that jive with my own. It just means I try to test the information for reasonableness and, if need be, adjust my world view accordingly.


Cynical manipulators (mostly Republicans these days) are convinced they can throw dust and glitter in the air, and while we're all busy fighting about whether it's red glitter or blue dust or some such bullshit, they have a free hand to go on picking our pockets.

But what if the rubes start to get hip to the tricks?


Are G.O.P. Voters Tiring of the War on ‘Wokeness’?

New polling shows national Republicans and Iowa Republican caucus-goers were more interested in “law and order” than battling “woke” schools, media and corporations.


When it comes to the Republican primaries, attacks on “wokeness” may be losing their punch.

For Republican candidates, no word has hijacked political discourse quite like “woke,” a term few can define but many have used to capture what they see as left-wing views on race, gender and sexuality that have strayed far beyond the norms of American society.

Gov. Ron DeSantis last year used the word five times in 19 seconds, substituting “woke” for Nazis as he cribbed from Winston Churchill’s famous vow to battle a threatened German invasion in 1940. Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, speaks of a “woke self-loathing” that has swept the nation. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina found himself backpedaling furiously after declaring that “‘woke supremacy’ is as bad as white supremacy.”

The term has become quick a way for candidates to flash their conservative credentials, but battling “woke” may have less political potency than they think. Though conservative voters might be irked at modern liberalism, successive New York Times/Siena College polls of Republican voters nationally and then in Iowa found that candidates were unlikely to win votes by narrowly focusing on rooting out left-wing ideology in schools, media, culture and business.

Instead, Republican voters are showing a “hand’s off” libertarian streak in economics, and a clear preference for messages about “law and order” in the nation’s cities and at its borders.

The findings hint why Mr. DeSantis, who has made his battles with “woke” schools and corporations central to his campaign, is struggling and again show off Mr. Trump’s keen understanding of part of the Republican electorate. Campaigning in Iowa in June, Mr. Trump was blunt: “I don’t like the term ‘woke,’” he said, adding, “It’s just a term they use — half the people can’t even define it, they don’t know what it is.”

It was clearly a jab at Mr. DeSantis, but the Times’s polls suggest Mr. Trump may be right. Social issues like gay rights and once-obscure jargon like “woke” may not be having the effect many Republicans had hoped

“Your idea of ‘wokeism’ might be different from mine,” explained Christopher Boyer, a 63-year-old Republican actor in Hagerstown, Md., who retired from a successful career in Hollywood where he said he saw his share of political correctness and liberal group think. Mr. Boyer said he didn’t like holding his tongue about his views on transgender athletes, but, he added, he does not want politicians to intervene. “I am a laissez-faire capitalist: Let the pocketbook decide,” he said.

When presented with the choice between two hypothetical Republican candidates, only 24 percent of national Republican voters opted for a “a candidate who focuses on defeating radical ‘woke’ ideology in our schools, media and culture” over “a candidate who focuses on restoring law and order in our streets and at the border.”

Around 65 percent said they would choose the law and order candidate.

Among those 65 and older, often the most likely age bracket to vote, only 17 percent signed on to the “anti-woke” crusade. Those numbers were nearly identical in Iowa, where the first ballots for the Republican nominee will be cast on Jan. 15.

Mr. DeSantis’s famous fight against the Walt Disney Company over what he saw as the corporation’s liberal agenda exemplified the kind of economic warfare that seems to fare only modestly better. About 38 percent of Republican voters said they would back a candidate who promised to fight corporations that promote “woke” left ideology, versus the 52 percent who preferred “a candidate who says that the government should stay out of deciding what corporations should support.”

Christy Boyd, 55, in Ligonier, Pa., made it clear she was no fan of the culture of tolerance that she said pervaded her region around Pittsburgh. As the perfect distillation of “woke” ideology, she mentioned “time blindness,” a phrase she views as simply an excuse for perpetual tardiness.

But such aggravations do not drive her political desires.

“If you don’t like what Bud Light did, don’t buy it,” she added, referring to the brand’s hiring of a transgender influencer, which contributed to a sharp drop in sales. “If you don’t like what Disney is doing, don’t go. That’s not the government’s responsibility.”

Indeed, some Republican voters seemed to feel pandered to by candidates like Mr. DeSantis and the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, whose book “Woke Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam,” launched his political career.

Lynda Croft, 82, said she was watching a rise in murders in her hometown Winston-Salem, N.C., and that has her scared. Overly liberal policies in culture and schools will course-correct on their own, she said.

“If anyone actually believes in woke ideology, they are not in tune with the rest of society,” she said, “and parents will step in to deal with that.”

In an interview, Mr. Ramaswamy said the evolving views of the electorate were important, and he had adapted to them. “Woke” corporate governance and school systems are a symptom of what he calls “a deeper void” in a society that needs a religious and nationalist renewal. The stickers that read “Stop Wokeism. Vote Vivek” are gone from his campaign stops, he said, replaced by hats that read “Truth.”

“At the time I came to be focused on this issue, no one knew what the word was,” he said. “Now that they have caught up, the puck has moved. It’s in my rearview mirror as well.”

Law and order and border security have become stand-ins for “fortitude,” he said, and that is clearly what Republican voters are craving.

(The day after the interview, the Ramaswamy campaign blasted out a fund-raising appeal entitled “Wokeness killing the American Dream.”)

DeSantis campaign officials emphasized that the governor in recent days had laid out policies on border security, the military and the economy. Foreign policy is coming, they say. But they also pointed to an interview on Fox News in which Mr. DeSantis did not back away from his social-policy focus.

Along with several other Republican-led states, Florida passed a string of laws restricting what G.O.P. lawmakers considered evidence of “wokeness,” such as gender transition care for minors and diversity initiatives. Mr. DeSantis handily won re-election in November.

“I totally reject, being in Iowa, New Hampshire, that people don’t think those are important,” he said of his social policy fights. “These families with children are thanking me for taking stands in Florida.”

For candidates trying to break Mr. Trump’s hold on a Republican electorate that sees the former president as the embodiment of strength, the problem may be broader than ditching the term “woke.”

As it turns out, social issues like gender, race and sexuality are politically complicated and may be less dominant than Mr. Trump’s rivals thought. The fact that Mr. Trump has been indicted three times and found legally liable for sexual abuse has not hurt him. Only 37 percent of Republican voters nationally described Mr. Trump as more moral than Mr. DeSantis (45 percent sided with Mr. DeSantis on the personality trait), yet in a head-to-head matchup between the two candidates, national Republican voters backed Mr. Trump by 31 percentage points, 62 percent to 31 percent.

The Times/Siena poll did find real reluctance among Republican voters to accept transgender people. Only 30 percent said society should accept transgender people as the gender they identify with, compared with 58 percent who said society should not accept such identities.

Insisting on a collective societal right to determine your identity - sexual or any other - is absolutely in conflict with conservatives' long-professed dedication to an individual's freedom to make their own decisions about such things.

Hypocrisy,
thy name is Republican
(not that it matters to them)

But half of Republican voters still support the right of gay and lesbian people to marry, against the 41 percent who oppose same-sex marriage. Fifty-one percent of Republican voters said they would choose a candidate promising to protect individual freedom over one guarding “traditional values.” The “traditional values” candidate would be the choice of 40 percent of Republicans.

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, responded simply: “Americans want to return to a prosperous nation, and there’s only one person who can do that — President Trump.”

Mr. Boyer, who played Robert E. Lee in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” bristled at having to make a choice: “It’s hardly an either-or: Why wouldn’t I want someone to fight for law and order and against this corrupt infiltration in our school systems?” he asked.

But given a choice, he said, “the primary job of government is the protection of our country and there’s a tangible failure of that at our border.”

Maybe the rank-n-file GOP voters are beginning to see the culture war malarkey for what it is, but we need to remember that all that culture war malarkey grows directly out of the Law & Order malarkey they're trying to reassert. It's another kind of rhetorical sleight of hand, intended to disguise a predilection for Daddy State authoritarian rule.