Heather Cox Richardson

People who are well informed (legacy press, "progressive" media, etc) voted 3-to-1 for Harris, while people who're fed a diet of mis-information and conspiracy fantasies (Twixter, DumFux News, OAN, Reddit, News Max, etc) voted almost 2-to-1 for Trump.

The audience for Wingnut Media approaches twice that for "Liberal" media.

The arithmetic is pretty simple on that one.

Out of 100 people watching DumFux News, 65 voted for Trump.

Out of 60 people watching MSNBC, 45 voted for Harris.

Don't tell me Harris failed, and that you know exactly why. She didn't, and you don't. So fuck you, James Carville.

The Dems ran a really good campaign. Americans were bamboozled into electing Trump and his MAGA clowns.

Consider a few anecdotes via AOC, who put up a constituent Zoom call, asking how people came to vote for both her and Trump.

Voter 1:

"You're both strong advocates for working people."

Voter 2:

"I was a little apprehensive about voting for Trump, so I voted for you to keep him from going too far."

 

Voter 3:

"You both care about me."

 

The main problem is:

knowing enough about something

to believe you're right,

and not enough

to know you're wrong.

Don't obey in advance

Today's Keith

Forever Dunning Kruger - every one of them is an idiot who fancies himself a genius.

Unless the GOP Normies find their balls, this can only end with bullets and cyanide capsules in the White House bunker.

From Facebook

Today's Brian & Glenn

I think I get it - gotta be careful about setting precedent, and you don't wanna hand the bad guys a weapon they can use against you later (assuming of course we actually find our way outa this fucked up mess), and we have to interpret the law, and apply the law, and not try to make the law on the judiciary side - etc etc etc. I'm there. I get it.

But goddammit - I'm so fucking sick of rich people stomping around in smarmspace manufacturing loopholes - using and abusing the courts to duck responsibility.

Here's a thought: Obey the fucking law. Could we try that for a while?

Overheard

Stay alert,

and work the problem.

Because one day

we'll wake up

to his obituary.

Today's Jen

The politics of disgust.

"They just won - why are they still mad?"

Because we haven't been wiped out. And that may be the key.

MAGA hired this guy to annihilate us. So as long as we're still here, he's failing.

Unfortunately, since their side owns the power right now, they'll likely expect some pretty nasty things be visited upon us to get us to knuckle under.

Jen Rubin and Robert P Jones

What White Christians Have Wrought

Like other social scientists and scholars, I’ll spend the next weeks and months scouring pre-election data, the exit polls, and the first wave of post-election surveys trying to understand how a majority of American voters chose to return Donald Trump—a twice-impeached convicted felon and adjudicated sexual abuser who incited a violent insurrection when he lost the last election—to power.

Because elections are won and lost at the margins in a deeply divided nation such as ours, most of that analysis will rightly focus on which subgroups (like Latinos and young men) shifted most significantly away from the Democratic Party’s winning 2020 coalition. But that focus, while strategically important, will obscure the deeper peril facing our nation. Authoritarianism, when it blossoms, emerges from the deeper soil at the center.

With the Republican presidential candidate regularly spewing racist, misogynistic, and even Nazi ideology (such as claims that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country), the most remarkable thing about this election is not which groups shifted marginally in his direction, but which groups continued to provide him with supermajority support. Namely, we must talk about how thoroughly Christian nationalism has infected mainstream white Christianity.

Trump’s Electoral College victory in 2016 was made possible because, as noted by the Pew Research Center’s validated voter study, 77% of white evangelical Protestant Christians, along with 57% of white non-evangelical Protestants and 64% of white Catholics, lent him moral legitimacy and gave him their votes. Even after watching Trump implement cruel policies such as separating migrant children from their parents and putting them in cages, even after witnessing his impeachment for abusing the power of the presidency to try to get a foreign leader to interfere in the 2020 election, white Christians continued to support him. White evangelical Protestant support for Trump in the 2020 election ticked up to 84%, while non-evangelical Protestants and white Catholics generally held steady (57% each).

As Trump staged his political comeback in 2023 and 2024, white Christians had the benefit of witnessing a second Trump impeachment for inciting a violent insurrection in an attempt to remain in office after losing that election, four criminal indictments and a felony conviction, and the most overtly racist presidential campaign since George Wallace (who also held a fascist-style rally in Madison Square Garden in 1968).

Despite all of this, in stark contrast to 2016, there were virtually no major dissenting voices among the leaders of Trump’s most stalwart supporters. Just two weeks before the 2024 election, American evangelical Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, explicitly petitioned God for Trump’s election at a Trump rally in Concord, NC. “There’s a spiritual element that’s at work here. There are dark forces that are arrayed against this man. They’ve tried to put him in prison; they’ve tried to assassinate him twice; he’s attacked every day in the media,” he lamented. “We pray for our nation and, Father, if it be thy will, that President Trump will win this election. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.”

According to the 2024 National Election Pool exit polls, 8 in 10 (81%) white evangelicals once again declared their allegiance to Trump, as did 60% of white Catholics and similar numbers of white non-evangelical Protestants. (Note: While there are no publicly available exit poll numbers for white non-evangelical Protestants, pre-election polling from PRRI suggests 6 in 10 once again supported Trump).

If we put white Christians’ strong support for Trump into context, we can clearly see their singular contribution to his power. Overall, more than two thirds (68%) of white Christians favored Trump over Harris—a mirror image of the rest of the country, including Christians of color (33%), followers of non-Christian religions (30%), and the religiously unaffiliated (28%). While the proportion of white Christians in the country has been declining over the last three decades, they remain 41% of the population and an even higher percentage of voters. Even a modest decline in the overwhelming level of support for Trump among white Christians would have denied him the Republican nomination or the presidency.

Most disturbingly, this time, white Christians, who once proudly called themselves “values voters,” knew exactly who and what they were voting for. With Trump abandoning the Republican Party’s longstanding support of a national ban on abortion and no Supreme Court justices left to appoint, the fig leaf of abortion fell away, exposing the uglier elements that have always tied white Christians to Trump.

PRRI’s surveys have consistently found strong support among white Christians for the racial grievance and xenophobia that is the deeper DNA of the MAGA movement. Majorities of white Christians agree that “today discrimination against white Americans has become as big a problem as discrimination against Black Americans and other minorities.” And three quarters of white evangelical Protestants, along with 6 in 10 white non-evangelical Protestants and white Catholics, say they favor even the most extreme parts of Trump’s mass deportation scheme, described in the survey as “rounding up and deporting immigrants who are in the country illegally, even if it takes setting up encampments guarded by the U.S. military.”

But numerical support for Trump is only one facet of what white Christians have wrought in our nation. Historically, we know that all authoritarian leaders need a mechanism for projecting moral legitimacy, particularly as they accelerate efforts to consolidate power and undermine democratic norms and individual freedoms.

Nearly a century ago, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi movement coopted the German Evangelical Church. Today we are seeing similar uses of the Orthodox Christian churches in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Catholic Church in Viktor Orbán’s so-called “illiberal democracy” in Hungary—contemporary models both Trump and white evangelical leaders have praised.

Over the last decade, many white Christians have not just selfishly supported a dangerous, narcissistic man who promised to restore their waning influence; they have now willingly blessed the advent of a new American fascism that threatens our democratic future. They are principally responsible for Trump’s rise and return to power—and for everything that is coming for all of us in its wake.

Peak Dunning Kruger

"Strategic Voting".

When you think you're being clever and savvy, but the effect is that you're being a total fucking idiot.

 

"The problem is knowing enough to believe you're right,

but not enough to know you're wrong."

Today it's Danielle Moodie

Some of the smartest commentary I've heard in a while.

If you define your best interests - even subconsciously - as WhiteCentric, then your interests align pretty closely with MAGA.

And you've got all the cover you need - again - as the media generously hands you the convenient rationalization of "Inflation Fears" (this year's version of "Economic Anxiety").

Today's Gina

Nick Fuentes is not a man. An honorable man doesn't behave the way he does, and without honor, you're simply not a man.

When a guy is so hateful towards everybody he thinks doesn't comport with his ideals, it always means that deep down, he hates himself. He'll reject everybody and everything that doesn't prop up his nearly non-existent ego - so he won't have to face his own internal demons.

And when his cover is stripped away, he'll move to burn everything down just to keep from having to tell himself the truth.

A Rant

I don't know this guy - he's new to me. Good rant tho.

Off_JaWaggon

How Great I Art