Items today:
- 12m people support violence to keep Trump in office;
- Kari Lake threatens violence to keep Trump in office;
- Florida wants immigrants to stay and work, despite the state’s anti-immigrant policies;
- Families in Florida who feel unsafe are leaving the state;
- DeSantis posts fake videos about Trump and Fauci;
- Heather Cox Richardson quotes Chip Roy about Republican priorities that they are not actually enacting;
- Obit of Pat Robertson, who lent a looney-tunes, deeply superstition, aspect to the religious right;
- And in contrast with all of the above, Fareed Zakaria on how American’s foundational strength enables it to withstand such fringe loonies;
- And concluding thoughts.
The Guardian, 9 Jun 2023: 12m Americans believe violence is justified to restore Trump to power, subtitled “University of Chicago research finds support for violence to achieve political goals and general distrust of democracy”
Two and a half years after the January 6 attack on the Capitol, an estimated 12 million American adults, or 4.4% of the adult population, believe violence is justified to restore Donald Trump to the White House.
The article doesn’t try to characterize who those 12m are, in terms of race or politics. (It’s easy to speculate.) It does cite some equally alarming statistics, a few of which I’ll bullet-point.
- A quarter of Americans believe in the ‘great replacement’ theory
- 10% of Americans believe the government is run by Satan-worshiping pedophiles
- A quarter of Americans believe in the ‘great replacement’ theory
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Along the same lines,
Salon, Kelly McClure, 10 Jun 2023: Kari Lake takes wild leap in Trump’s defense, threatening gun violence against DOJ and Biden, subtitled “‘Most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA. That’s not a threat, that’s a public service announcement'”
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Despite its anti-immigrant policies, Florida needs the immigrants to do the work that need to be done.
NPR, 7 Jun 2023: To keep immigrants from fleeing, Florida GOP focus on immigration law loopholes
Florida Republicans who voted to pass the state’s imminent anti-immigration law are trying to curb a potentially disastrous mass exodus of undocumented residents by touting the legislation’s many “loopholes.”
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While giving many people reasons to flee the state.
Washington Post, 10 Jun 2023: Florida anti-LGBTQ laws prompt families who feel unsafe to flee
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Republican politicians lie and their constituents don’t care.
Daily Beast, 8 Jun 2023: DeSantis Uses A.I. Generated Images of Trump Embracing Fauci in New Ad
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Heather Cox Richardson, June 6, 2023
Her letter this day triggers off the debt-ceiling crisis. She quotes:
Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) said: “The end game is freedom, less government, less spending.”
Heather goes on to compare the Republicans on the economy since Reagan in 1980, with Biden’s of the past three years.
While the Republicans since 1980 have claimed that tax cuts and deregulation would spur private investment in the economy, it appears that Biden’s policy of public investment to encourage private investment has, in fact, worked. So far, during his term, private companies have announced $479 billion in investments under the new system, while the government has directed more than $220 billion towards roads, bridges, airports, public transportation, addressing climate change, and providing clean water. The website locates and identifies the more than 32,000 new projects underway.
…
While President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are returning to the traditional idea—embraced by members of both parties before 1980—that investing in the country benefits everyone, much of the Freedom Caucus has thrown in its lot with former president Donald Trump, who calls the Democrats’ ideology “communism.” So convinced were Trump’s supporters that Democrats should not be allowed to govern that they tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Of course, most people don’t do policy or statistics, they do political/tribal allegiance. So no amount of evidence of how Biden’s policies are working better than traditional Republican policies will ever change anyone’s vote.
But what attracts me in this piece is that Chip Roy comment and how blinkered it is. “The end game is freedom, less government, less spending.” Freedom for who? Not for those whose rights are being curtailed by all the new laws in Texas and Florida and elsewhere. Less government? Again, how about all those new laws in Texas and Florida, specifically designed to curtail the freedoms of people the MAGA folks don’t like. What happened to the conservative ideal of keeping the government out of peoples’ lives? Less spending? But Republicans will never in a million years cut the military, no matter how over-bloated it is. They leave spending cuts to the discretionary programs they mostly disapprove of.
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And then there’s another region of the fringe right, which has been on the ascendancy since the era of Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly, Rush Limbaugh… and Pat Robertson.
NY Times, 8 Jun 2023: Pat Robertson, Who Gave Christian Conservatives Clout, Is Dead at 93, subtitled “A Baptist minister and a broadcaster, he turned evangelicals into a powerful constituency that helped Republicans capture Congress in 1994. He earlier ran for president.”
For all his power and influence —
Whether in the pulpit, on the stump or in front of a television camera, Mr. Robertson could exhibit the mild manner of a friendly local minister, chuckling softly and displaying an almost perpetual twinkle in his eye.
— you don’t have to read very far into any of his obituaries to find stuff like this:
But he was also given to statements that his detractors saw as outlandishly wrongheaded and dangerously incendiary.
He suggested, for example, that Americans’ sinfulness had brought on the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States, and that the earthquake that devastated Haiti in 2010 was divine retribution for a promise that Haitians had made to serve the Devil in return for his help in securing the country’s independence from France in 1804.
He said that liberal Protestants embodied “the spirit of the Antichrist” and that feminism drove women to witchcraft. He called for the assassination of President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. He maintained that his prayers had averted hurricanes. And he condemned homosexuality as “an abomination,” linking it at one point it to the rise of Hitler and declaring that it provokes God’s wrath, as manifested in natural disasters and even the death and destruction of 9/11.
And *this* is the kind of thing that gave Christians, especially the conservative evangelical ones, the reputation for being looney-tunes, ever since the 1980s. Granted, you hear leaders of other faiths say similar things — Jewish rabbis blaming the recent Turkey earthquake on the gays (e.g. at random from a Google search, here) — which to me just demonstrates that fundamentalist religions are the bastions of ignorance and prejudice and superstition, and will always be with us, and will always have followers.
Another obit (not pay-walled):
Vox, 9 Jun 2023: Pat Robertson’s influence over conservative culture spanned decades, subtitled “Pat Robertson was a cartoonish figure. He was also one of the most powerful men in conservative America.”
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At the same time, Fareed Zakaria (whose books I reviewed) provides some valuable perspective. He suggests that it’s the relative strength of the US, in so many ways, that makes possible to endure a certain percentage of zealots and crazies.
Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria, 26 May 2023: Opinion | U.S.’s political madness takes place against a backdrop of astonishing strength
Opening,
The United States’ debt ceiling crisis is, once again, provoking the usual commentary about the country’s presumed dysfunction. But the truth is that this unprovoked madness, causing self-inflicted wounds, is taking place against a backdrop of astonishing strength.
The facts cannot be disputed. The United States has recovered from the coronavirus pandemic faster than any major economy in the world. As Bloomberg’s Matthew A. Winkler recently pointed out, unemployment is stunningly low. Gross domestic product growth has grown at three times the average pace as under President Donald Trump, real incomes are rising, manufacturing is booming, and inflation has eased for 10 straight months. Even the budget deficit, which was at 15.6 percent of GDP at the end of the Trump presidency, has dropped to 5.5 percent of GDP at the end of last year.
The picture is even better when viewed more broadly. The United States remains the world’s leader in business, especially in cutting-edge technology. Scholars Sean Starrs and Stephen G. Brooks found that, looking at the globe’s top 2,000 companies, Chinese firms come first in shares of global profits in only 11 percent of sectors, but U.S. firms are ranked first in 74 percent of sectors.
With further examples about A.I., finance, energy production, the military, and immigration. (“We still take in more than 1 million legal immigrants per year on average. China and Russia are both facing demographic declines that are almost impossible to reverse, and which will put a long-term damper on their growth.”)
And concluding,
Could it be that it is precisely this backdrop of strength that allows Washington’s politicians — and the Republican Party in particular — to indulge in this crazy political theater? For most countries, the price of playing games with one’s creditworthiness would be sharp and severe, and that would act as a disciplining mechanism. But in Washington, the country’s enduring strength has become a license for irresponsibility.
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Taking the bigger picture, as always, I have to wonder, how many such “crackpots” are really out there? More than I realized, in the pre-internet, pre-Facebook era; now there are so many videos on YouTube of people on the street who can’t answer very basic questions like, who’s the president? what’s the capital of the United States? what’s six multiplied by seven? Really–people on the street, especially along beaches, who cannot answer these questions.
Of course, these are very selective videos showing an extreme minority of uninformed people. There are similar ones, on Facebook, that show interviews with attendees at MAGA or Trump rallies, with people who spout crazy conspiracy theories, or who can’t explain how it is exactly that the election was overturned.
Somehow in my naive youth I assumed that most everybody had a basic education about how the world worked, while religion and political matters were private opinions
I’ll admit I’m given to motivational thinking as anyone; I tend to look at sites that show me such things. Sites like Right Wing Watch and Joe.My.God that have staff searching for such things every day.
Still, I also look at sites that represent world news. If conservatives in the US think Biden is incompetent and corrupt, no one around the world does; the *world* sees that Trump is incompetent and corrupt.
