Sometimes the antics of the tribalists are on the front page of the New York Times, two days in a row. Though that shouldn’t be surprising, given that they’re half the population. Today’s topics:
- Trump’s latest attacks against Harris;
- How tribalists lie, through deepfake videos;
- And MAGA’s loose grip on reality, with their accusations about demons and the apocalypse;
- And Radiohead’s “Sail to the Moon”.
NY Times, Adam Nagourney, 2 Aug 2024: Not One of Us: Trump Uses Old Tactic to Sow Suspicion About Harris, subtitled “Politicians have long cast their opponents as outsiders. But Donald J. Trump has taken the strategy to the next level against Kamala Harris.”
The print title was “Trump Paints His Opponent As an ‘Other’: Old Tactic Tries to Sow Suspicion About Harris”
Subtext: anyone not in our tribe is to be feared, is perhaps unhuman.
She is not one of us.
When former President Donald J. Trump challenged Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity at a public forum on Wednesday — and again on social media the next day — that was the message at the core of his remarks.
It is a tactic that has long been part of the underside of American politics: presenting an opponent as somehow “other” or “not one of us” — someone who cannot be trusted or truly known.
But while this has been a recurrent theme in American campaigns for at least a century, Mr. Trump has taken it to a new level, historians and analysts said. What has often been a subtext or a whisper campaign driven by surrogates is, in Mr. Trump’s hands, a central message of his campaign — projected on screens at a rally, promoted on social media and reinforced by his running mate.
Mr. Trump has personally led the effort, explicitly falsifying the biography of his opponent and invoking race and gender in ways no modern major-party leader has done before. Even as a noncandidate in the 2008 election, he deployed such tactics against Barack Obama, demanding to see Mr. Obama’s birth certificate and claiming that Mr. Obama — who went on to be the nation’s first Black president and was born in Hawaii — was not born in this country.
And:
NY Times, Matt Flegenheimer, Aug 2024: How JD Vance Thinks About Power, subtitled “Mr. Vance has been blunt about wanting to break norms and test constitutional limits to execute his ideas: ‘We have to get pretty wild, pretty far out there.’ ”
Print title: “To Vance, Gaining Power Means Breaking the Left: Trump’s Pick Is Blunt on Wanting to Rip Up Norms and Test Constitution’s Limits”
Subtext: norms and principles and even the Constitution are for weenies, especially if it interferes on our winning, because we deserve to win.
In September 2021, JD Vance offered two predictions about former President Donald J. Trump and one piece of advice.
Mr. Trump would run again in 2024, Mr. Vance said. He would win.
And when he did, Mr. Vance counseled, he needed the right people around him this time.
“Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” Mr. Vance said on a podcast.
He continued.
“Then when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did,” Mr. Vance said, citing a (possibly apocryphal) quotation long attributed to America’s seventh president, “and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
In his U-turning path from anti-Trump author to MAGA-approved Ohio senator and running mate, Mr. Vance has developed a reputation for being ideologically pliable — open-minded, supporters say; core-less, critics counter.
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Also from the tribalist playbook: Lying. There is no truth, only tribal competition. Do anything to win.
Mother Jones (via JMG), Julianne McShane, 4 Aug 2024: Elon Musk’s X Is Spreading Deepfakes of Kamala Harris, subtitled “Two phony videos seen by tens of millions of users appear to violate X’s own terms of service.”
A video known as a “deepfake” that was posted on X on Saturday appears to show Harris repeating herself over and over again, using a crude audio rendering made to seem like Harris is struggling to finish a complete sentence. The altered video uses footage from an appearance by Harris and President Joe Biden following Friday’s historic prisoner swap that freed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and others. The video is obviously manipulated and easily debunked by viewing the unaltered footage (you can watch that here at about the 1:30 mark), which shows Harris speaking smoothly, without repeating the same words and phrases as portrayed in the doctored video.
…
The video appears to be in violation of X’s terms of service, which prohibit the sharing of “synthetic, manipulated, or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm.” (It also appears to violate Truth Social’s terms of service, which requires that posts “are not false, inaccurate, or misleading”—a tall order, perhaps, given that platform’s owner.)
(Elon Musk has become nearly as contemptible as Donald Trump.)
Also:
Washington Post, 4 Aug 2024: Secretaries of state urge Musk to fix AI chatbot spreading false election info, subtitled “Grok, the AI search assistant on Musk’s X platform, suggested that Kamala Harris had missed the ballot deadline in nine states. She hasn’t.”
Also: hypocrisy.
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How MAGA Republicans have a loose grip on reality. And are terribly afraid of the world they live in.
MSNBC, Anthony L. Fisher, 4 Aug 2024 (via AlterNet): Kamala Harris has MAGA world freaking out about demons and the apocalypse, subtitled “From comparisons to biblical spirits to accusations that she’s an ‘extinctionist,’ top pro-Trump voices see a Harris presidency as the end of the world.”
It’s always the end of the world for the Make America Great Again movement. Ever since Donald Trump’s escalator ride in 2015, there’s been zero nuance to the MAGA message. “Only I can fix it,” the leader roared to thunderous applause upon accepting the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.
But especially since Vice President Kamala Harris became the likely Democratic nominee, MAGA messaging has gone from overwrought and hyperbolic to absolutely hysterical and apocalyptic.
Trumpists wave off any and all criticism as unworthy of discussion, bad-faith accusations from minds afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome. And yet, deranged is the only appropriate descriptor of the rhetoric emanating from MAGA land’s loudest megaphones. It’s Trump and some of his closest allies and most prominent boosters who have been speaking of an imminent totalitarian government, end times and literal biblical demons.
Then again, taking the bigger picture: humans have a contentious relationship with reality. Humans have survived for hundreds of thousands, or millions, of years, through social groups that build bonds through shared mythologies that have only adjacent relationships to reality. Over and over again, throughout history, the discoverers of reality have been suppressed, usually by the church, usually meaning the Catholic Church. Modern politics is just the latest instantiation of this conflict.
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I think Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief is their best album. It manages to meld their signature weirdness a bit of pop vibe. Here’s one of the album’s best songs.
I see it described at this link as “a lullaby to a child who’s parent knows is going to grow up in a worse world and just hopes he’s wrong.”
The lyrics are very sparse. Here’s the key passage:
Maybe you’ll
Be president
But know right from wrong
The album was released in 2003, when George W. Bush was president.
