How It Reads

The indictment is a True Crime Story in four parts (hat tip = Driftglass)

1) A gang shows up at the bank examiner's office (in the middle of an audit) and they say, "The money in that bank belongs to us - tell them to hand it over."

The bank examiner tells them to fuck off.

2) The gang members dress up like bank employees and try to convince the bank manager to take their IOU, and hand over about 20% of the money so they can "count" it.

The bank manager tells them to fuck off.

3) Gang members get several meetings with the head teller and try to pressure him into delaying the audit long enough to let the gang figure out another way to steal the money.

The head teller tells them to fuck off.

4) Gang members get a crowd together at City Park, whip 'em into a rich creamy lather, and send them to ransack the bank.

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.

Rivets

More bad news about the mass extinction mess we've gotten ourselves into.



Insects are in dramatic decline in Colorado, 35-year-long study reveals

62% fewer insects were trapped in a pristine meadow near Gothic, a loss correlated with less winter snowfall, less summer rain and warmer temperatures

Nora Underwood, a Florida State University professor of ecology and evolution, sweeps her net for grasshoppers in a study plot at the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab in Gothic, Colorado on July 28, 2023. Underwood, her husband, Brian Inouye and father-in-law David Inouye, research the affect of climate change on the insect and flower species populations in the mountains near Crested Butte. (Dean Krakel, Special to The Colorado Sun)

Dramatic insect declines previously reported around the world are also occurring in Colorado. Researchers with the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, or RMBL, report that flying insects in the mountains outside of Crested Butte have declined more than 60% since 1986.

The current research, published in the scientific journal Ecosphere, is noteworthy for the length of time covered and the relatively undisturbed mountain environment where it was conducted. The declines correlated with drier and warmer weather, suggesting an impact of climate change.

“Increasingly we are seeing insect declines in places that are more pristine, which is much more alarming,” said Julian Resasco, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado.

While historically seen as agricultural pests and personal nuisances, insects and other invertebrates (no backbone) are increasingly recognized for the vital services they provide in nature: pollination, pest control, nutrient cycling and sustenance for birds and other animals higher on the food chain. The continued decline of insect populations could have profound consequences for the environment, humans and other animals.

“We rely on insects for ecosystem services. We need them to be abundant and diverse,” Resasco said.

Concern about declining insect populations surged in 2017 after researchers reported that flying insects in Germany had declined by more than 75% over 27 years. That was followed by several studies mostly, but not uniformly, reporting alarming declines in insect populations around the world. The reality and the causes of insect decline are ongoing debates among entomologists.

For their study, the RMBL researchers set up a tentlike trap in the middle of a 27-acre meadow at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, 9,500 feet above sea level near the abandoned mining town of Gothic. Surrounded by the peaks and meadows of the Elk Mountains, the setting is stunning — and far removed from intensive agriculture, urban growth, pesticide use and other human activities that have been blamed for insect declines.

“We thought that it was important for us to look at a site that is free from all those influences,” said David Inouye, co-author on the research paper, and a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland.

Two days a week, the researchers capture flying insects — mostly bees, wasps and flies. They count and dry the insects, weigh them and divide them into several broad groupings. Since 1984, researchers have captured and recorded data about the insects every week of every subalpine summer for 40 years.

“If you want to see a long-term trend, you need decades of data,” Inouye said. Insect populations can fluctuate several fold from year to year. Data collected over a longer period helps identify less dramatic long-term trends. The current study is the longest controlled study of insects in Colorado and one of the longest in the United States.

The project has lasted so long that it has relied on three generations of scientists. Authors on the paper include the now-deceased originator of the work, Michael Soulé; David Inouye, who is spending his 53rd season at the laboratory this summer; and David’s son, Brian Inouye, and daughter-in-law, Nora Underwood, both professors of ecology and evolution at Florida State University.

The paper analyzes 35 years of data, from 1986 through the summer of 2020. The researchers documented a 62% decline in the number of insects captured and a 49% decline in their total weight over the period. The insect decline was correlated with less winter snowfall, less summer rain and warmer temperatures.

Average annual snowfall at the laboratory fell sharply during the study period, to 344 inches per year from 463 inches. Abundant winter snow cover provides protective insulation to overwintering insects. Average summer rainfall did not change significantly during the study’s 35 years, but years of low summer rainfall had fewer insects. Summer rainfall promotes plant growth that feeds many insects. Average temperature rose about 2 degrees Fahrenheit during the study period and was correlated with the insect decline, although less so than precipitation.

“Changes in precipitation and warmer temperatures are expected to continue under climate change,” the researchers wrote in their report. “Thus, continued insect declines might be expected even in relatively undisturbed habitats.”

“We should be concerned,” Underwood said. “There are a lot of cascading effects of insects.”

Fewer insects can mean less food for other animals, fewer flowers pollinated and fewer nutrients recycled through the environment. Underwood does have faith in the resilience of nature and is not predicting an imminent insect apocalypse or deserts in the mountains. But she notes that the study documents big changes occurring to important players in the environment with likely, but unknown, impacts occurring as climate change continues.

Underwood invokes the rivet hypothesis by famed biologist Paul Ehrlich, for whom both she and Brian worked during summers when he came to RMBL. An airplane has thousands of rivets holding it together. You can remove one rivet without causing any trouble. But if you keep removing rivets — or insects — eventually the plane will fall apart and crash. No one knows which is the crucial rivet, and maybe it is best to keep as many as possible.

David Inouye believes the insect declines in Colorado and around the nation may have already rippled through the environment. In 2019, researchers reported an alarming 29% decline in North American birds, a net loss of 3 billion birds, since 1970. Birds that feed on insects were a prominent portion of those losses. Around the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, researchers have likewise documented a striking decline in white-crowned sparrows, an insect-eating bird whose distinctive call is heard less often than in past years.

Insects and white-crowned sparrows are just one of several changes that David Inouye has observed in his decades at the laboratory. Moose and fox now live there year-round, and a Wyoming ground squirrel has moved up from lower-elevation Almont, to Crested Butte and now the laboratory. Ticks and mosquitoes that can carry West Nile virus have also appeared around the laboratory in recent years. Wildflowers are blooming earlier.

“I think in the long term, most people are going to find those changes undesirable,” he said.

Podcast

The indictment reads like a well-written novella, or a play in 4 acts. A crime story perfectly framed, telling the story of how a gang of criminal idiots tried to knock over a casino.

• First they try some straight-up cheating
• Then they dress up in phony uniforms and try to pass themselves off as having authorization to go in thru the back and steal the money
• Then they try to convince the door man that has the authority to walk into the vault, take the money, and hand it over to the gang members
• Then, once all their other plots didn't work, they decided to shoot their way in and blow the place up

A Sketch

So ya wanna be a teacher

A Score Card

With Mike Pence finally coming out and showing us a bit of actual courage - joining Chris Christie as pretty much the only well know Republicans to go openly against Trump, we start to think maybe there's hope for the GOP to reclaim its honor.

Yeah no - prob'ly not. But a guy can dream, can't he? I mean it is a sign of hope, right?

WaPo has kind of a breakdown on the State Of The Indictment



5 things Trump’s Jan. 6 indictment week tells us about the 2024 election

The first former president of the United States to be indicted has now been charged a third time. This historic event capped a week that tells us a few things about the 2024 presidential race, in which the former president remains the overwhelming GOP favorite.

Here’s what we’ve learned from the past five days.

1. No candidate can escape the specter of Jan. 6

Republican Party leaders have spent much of the past two years hoping to just move on from Jan. 6 — and urging Trump (in vain) to stop talking about the 2020 election.

This week made clear that nobody can escape it.

Trump faces a criminal trial over his role in efforts to overturn the election that culminated in the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. And former vice president Mike Pence, who was invoked more than 100 times in the indictment, has been forced to lean into making the Jan. 6-centric case he had long declined to emphasize.

(Imagine you were told a month ago that Pence would be selling merchandise based on Trump’s indictment — new gear features the slogan “too honest,” which is what Trump allegedly called Pence as Pence declined his entreaties to help overturn the election.)

The party as a whole and all its 2024 contenders will feel a newfound onus to weigh in, too.

The GOP has done its best to avoid a detailed accounting of Trump’s actions and his false claims of mass voter fraud. It acquitted him at his post-Jan. 6 impeachment trial based on a technicality. (Key senators said you can’t impeach someone who has left office.) Then it pulled out of a deal for a bipartisan Jan. 6 commission.

But this indictment has landed when Trump is again the focal point of American politics. There is no waving it off because he’s out of office. And 2024 opponents who have carefully massaged and triangulated their messages about Trump’s legal peril will risk being left out of the major topic of conversation if they don’t engage.

Oh, and Trump has signaled he is going to make all of this very uncomfortable for the GOP by using it to re-litigate the 2020 election and his false claims that it was “stolen” from him.

2. Trump may be losing control of the clock

Trump’s legal team has made clear it would prefer his federal criminal cases don’t go to trial before the 2024 election. While that remains possible with the classified-documents case in Florida — set for trial in May but subject to delay, in part thanks to the new superseding indictment and the care required in handling sensitive material — the Jan. 6 case in Washington, D.C., may be a speedier affair.

Special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment appears built for speed. For a start, he charged Trump solo. If he charges Trump’s alleged co-conspirators, it will apparently be separately. And he kept the indictment narrowly focused on four charges, one count each. Then Smith announced at a news conference that “my office will seek a speedy trial.”

He might get his wish. A magistrate judge said Thursday that a trial date will be set at the first hearing, on Aug. 28, which isn’t always how it’s done. Trump lawyer John Lauro has said it’s “absurd” to try to conduct the trial in accordance with the Speedy Trial Act, which would mean starting the trial within 100 days.

Also remember that, unlike the classified-documents case, this one doesn’t feature a Trump-appointed judge who has in the past ruled in his favor in controversial ways. And it does feature a fact pattern that has been chewed over extensively for more than two years.

3. Ron DeSantis is running out of ideas

July was not a good month for the Florida governor. The presidential race was actually mostly static for his first month as a candidate, but since then he has gone from trailing Trump by nearly 30 points in the Republican primary to trailing by nearly 40 points. He’s now competing just to be in second place in states like Iowa and South Carolina, after polling close to Trump as recently as February, before he was officially running.

Hence the campaign shake-up.

What’s got to be particularly frustrating for DeSantis is that he’s even losing badly to Trump among voters who might logically be in his corner, like those who emphasize fighting “woke” corporations, a DeSantis signature issue. And his supposed retooling of his message hasn’t exactly borne fruit.

So what’s left for him to do to arrest the backsliding? Well, this week DeSantis sent Vice President Harris a letter seeking a meeting to discuss his state’s controversial slavery curriculum (she declined). And he just agreed to a one-on-one debate with California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), which Newsom proposed nearly a year ago.

The combined picture is a campaign more focused on stunts than anything else, because the “anything else” has roundly failed.

4. Trump’s woes have not helped Biden

Despite all the legal drama surrounding Trump, polls this week suggested that the GOP might be as competitive as ever in the 2024 general election.

A New York Times/Siena College poll showed Trump and Biden tied at 43 percent in a prospective matchup, despite most recent quality polls giving Biden a small edge.

A CNN poll, meanwhile, showed that encouraging signs about the economy and inflation really have yet to give President Biden much of a boost.

Finally, the CNN poll included a somewhat remarkable finding. It asked whether people had more confidence in Biden or congressional Republicans to deal with major issues. While Americans in December picked the GOP by two points, they picked it by nine points in this poll.

All of which might help explain why Barack Obama felt the need to give Biden a reality check about Trump’s potential to defeat him in 2024.

• About the only thing the polling data shows is how ubiquitous and dangerous wingnut propaganda is. Press Poodles always miss the point on this one, and that blind spot always shows them to be unaware of (or deliberately ignoring) the single most important angle they should be reporting on.
• As the village is being wiped out by an avalanche, WaPo tells us all about property damage and the human toll, while carefully omitting any reference to one party's denial of gravity, friction, and slope failure - making it impossible for normal people to prevent the catastrophe.

5. Republicans won’t desert (or vouch for) Trump

There has been little in the way of a merit-based defense of Trump after this latest indictment, as was the case after the previous two. And relatively few Republicans have actually gone to bat for him in any significant way — at least compared with the way they did when the federal government searched Mar-a-Lago a year ago.

But in this case, the tepid pushback is arguably more pronounced.

The idea is that Trump is being politically targeted.

The idea is that there is a two-tiered system of justice.

The idea is that Trump was entitled to free speech and may even have believed his falsehoods.

Virtually none of the Republican defense argues that Trump was actually right and that his actions were warranted. This lack might be considered rather patronizing, because it implies that he wasn’t, and they weren’t. Why not just argue that what he said and did was substantiated?

Because they can’t. It’s in some ways an extension of what happened after the 2020 election. Republicans by and large didn’t echo Trump’s obviously false claims of mass voter fraud, because they seemingly knew they were ridiculous. They instead made process arguments about voting rules that changed during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, supplementing Trump’s objections with these to at least seem like they were on the same page.

Some seemed to think that was the smart play and it would all just blow over. Then Jan. 6 happened.

Nearly three years later, Republicans get to keep dealing with it, right into the middle of the 2024 election.

BTW - Pence (and a shit load of notable others) ignored congressional subpoenas. But they've all complied with the subpoenas from Jack Smith's office. Maybe we should be doing something about the little problem of people cherry picking which laws they will and won't obey. Seems like we need just a bit of a change.

Thinking

1. There
2. are
3. no
4. simple
5. 10-word
6. answers
7. to
8. the
9. important
10. questions

There's a floor to how simply the truth can be stated, and still be the truth.

Falsehoods don't have that. There is no limit to how simple an idea can be when it doesn't have to conform to reality.

à la Driftglass

You had to know David Brooks would eventually be tasked by Mr Sulzberger to put up one of his classic passive-voiced laments about how terrible it is that we find ourselves mired in this fucked up mess (that was largely engineered by the GOP, and not only silently condoned, but actively promoted by wingnut apologists like David fucking Brooks).

They pay the guy large piles of dollars for this shit.

Of course, the piece starts out - as it always does - with a "sharp critique" of the flawed conservative approach that's been taken.

That's intended to lull us into an agreeable mood. Call it Political Rohypnol - they need to spike the water with a euphoric numbing agent so we don't notice how they continue to shove the Overton Window towards the extreme right.

Because, also of course, he's slipped a razor blade into the apple. This time, he buries that razor blade way down in the 11th paragraph, where he basically blames Obama for the shitty state of affairs we find ourselves saddled with.

Us:         Some asshole just ran a stop sign and t-boned me.

Brooks:  Well, you were out there driving too -

                maybe you should take some of the responsibility

Nope - not buyin' it, Dave.

What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?

Donald Trump seems to get indicted on a weekly basis. Yet he is utterly dominating his Republican rivals in the polls, and he is tied with Joe Biden in the general election surveys. Trump’s poll numbers are stronger against Biden now than at any time in 2020.

What’s going on here? Why is this guy still politically viable, after all he’s done?

We anti-Trumpers often tell a story to explain that. It was encapsulated in a quote the University of North Carolina political scientist Marc Hetherington gave to my colleague Thomas B. Edsall recently: “Republicans see a world changing around them uncomfortably fast, and they want it to slow down, maybe even take a step backward. But if you are a person of color, a woman who values gender equality or an L.G.B.T. person, would you want to go back to 1963? I doubt it.”

In this story we anti-Trumpers are the good guys, the forces of progress and enlightenment. The Trumpers are reactionary bigots and authoritarians. Many Republicans support Trump no matter what, according to this story, because at the end of the day he’s still the bigot in chief, the embodiment of their resentments, and that’s what matters to them most.

I partly agree with this story; but it’s also a monument to elite self-satisfaction.

So let me try another story on you. I ask you to try on a vantage point in which we anti-Trumpers are not the eternal good guys. In fact, we’re the bad guys.

This story begins in the 1960s, when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam, but the children of the educated class got college deferments. It continues in the 1970s, when the authorities imposed busing on working-class areas in Boston, but not on the upscale communities like Wellesley where they themselves lived.

The ideal that “we’re all in this together” was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here, and everybody else is forced into a world down there. Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.

The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy. We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.

Daniel Markovits summarized years of research in his book “The Meritocracy Trap”: “Today, middle-class children lose out to the rich children at school, and middle-class adults lose out to elite graduates at work. Meritocracy blocks the middle class from opportunity. Then it blames those who lose a competition for income and status that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win.”

The meritocracy isn’t only a system of exclusion; it’s an ethos. During his presidency Barack Obama used the word “smart” in the context of his policies over 900 times. The implication was that anybody who disagreed with his policies (and perhaps didn’t go to Harvard Law) must be stupid.

Because we can't allow this to be anything but a Both Sides thing, now can we?

Over the last decades we’ve taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out. When I began my journalism career in Chicago in the 1980s, there were still some old crusty working-class guys around the newsroom. Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession, we’re an elite-college-dominated profession. Only 0.8 percent of all college students graduate from the super elite 12 schools (the Ivy League colleges, plus Stanford, M.I.T., Duke and the University of Chicago). A 2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at the beloved New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.

Writing in Compact magazine, Michael Lind observes that the upper-middle-class job market looks like a candelabrum: “Those who manage to squeeze through the stem of a few prestigious colleges and universities in their youth can then branch out to fill leadership positions in almost every vocation.”

Or, as Markovits puts it, “Elite graduates monopolize the best jobs and at the same time invent new technologies that privilege superskilled workers, making the best jobs better and all other jobs worse.”

But god forbid we allow a little Critical Power Theory (or its cousin, Critical Race Theory) to help us unfuck our fucked up perception of things, right guys?

Members of our class also segregate ourselves into a few booming metro areas: San Francisco, D.C., Austin and so on. In 2020, Biden won only 500 or so counties, but together they are responsible for 71 percent of the American economy. Trump won over 2,500 counties, responsible for only 29 percent. Once we find our cliques, we don’t get out much. In the book “Social Class in the 21st Century,” sociologist Mike Savage and his co-researchers found that the members of the highly educated class tend to be the most insular, measured by how often we have contact with those who have jobs unlike our own.

Armed with all kinds of economic, cultural and political power, we support policies that help ourselves. Free trade makes the products we buy cheaper, and our jobs are unlikely to be moved to China. Open immigration makes our service staff cheaper, but new, less-educated immigrants aren’t likely to put downward pressure on our wages.

Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others. Using words like problematic, cisgender, Latinx and intersectional is a sure sign that you’ve got cultural capital coming out of your ears. Meanwhile, members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells, because they never know when we’ve changed the usage rules, so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired.

We also change the moral norms in ways that suit ourselves, never mind the cost to others. For example, there used to be a norm that discouraged people from having children outside of marriage, but that got washed away during our period of cultural dominance, as we eroded norms that seemed judgmental or that might inhibit individual freedom.

After this social norm was eroded, a funny thing happened. Members of our class still overwhelmingly married and then had children within wedlock. People without our resources, unsupported by social norms, were less able to do that. As Adrian Wooldridge points out in his magisterial 2021 book, “The Aristocracy of Talent,” “Sixty percent of births to women with only a high school certificate occur out of wedlock, compared with only 10 percent to women with a university degree.” That matters, Wooldridge continues, because “The rate of single parenting is the most significant predictor of social immobility in the country.”

Does this mean that I think the people in my class are vicious and evil? No, most of us are earnest, kind and public spirited. But we take for granted and benefit from systems that have become oppressive. Elite institutions have become so politically progressive in part because the people in them want to feel good about themselves as they take part in systems that exclude and reject.

It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault — and why they’ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class. Trump understood that it’s not the entrepreneurs who seem most threatening to workers; it’s the professional class. Trump understood that there was great demand for a leader who would stick his thumb in our eyes on a daily basis and reject the whole epistemic regime that we rode in on.

If distrustful populism is your basic worldview, the Trump indictments seem as just another skirmish on the class war between the professionals and the workers, another assault by a bunch of coastal lawyers who want to take down the man who most aggressively stands up to them. Of course, the indictments don’t cause Trump supporters to abandon him. They cause them to become more fiercely loyal. That’s the polling story of the last six months.

Are Trump supporters right that the indictments are just a political witch hunt? Of course not. As a card-carrying member of my class, I still basically trust the legal system and the neutral arbiters of justice. Trump is a monster in the way we’ve all been saying for years and deserves to go to prison.

But there’s a larger context here. As the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell wrote decades ago, “History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.” That is the destiny our class is now flirting with. We can condemn the Trumpian populists all day until the cows come home, but the real question is when will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable.

• Classic David Brooks. Always leave it hanging in the air.
• Never allow a clear perception of "conservative" fuckery.
• And always always always make it "Trumpism" and never "Standard & Traditional Republican Strategy".

Let's be clear:

Trump did not remake the GOP in his own image.

He's the perfect reflection of what the Republican Party has been morphing into for decades.

Today's Keith

• Un-indicted Patsy #1
• Nothing gets scared-er faster than a billion dollars 

"Leadership"

The Republican Conference in the US House of Representatives is what you get when you allow the radical libertarian anti-government hyper-individualist "philosophy" to run itself out to the logical extreme.

It's the Geejy Bird up close and personal.