So Predictable

  • Trumps lies, or evades, or misrepresents;
  • Conservatives blame everyone they don’t like for the California wildfires;
  • Anita Bryant dies; she was an outlier in her time, but now typical of MAGA;
  • Heather Cox Richardson on the California fires;
  • How Jimmy Carter lost evangelical support for his anti-racism and support of gays;
  • How perhaps some US states should join Canada.
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CNN, 9 Jan 2025: Fact check: As wildfires rage, Trump lashes out with false claims about FEMA and California water policy

Another natural disaster, another series of false claims from President-elect Donald Trump.

For years, Trump has littered his statements on California wildfires and other disasters with inaccurate assertions. He did it again on Wednesday as wildfires raged in Los Angeles County.

Here is a fact check.

On four main points. His calumny against Newsom was something about not saving enough water because he tore down the dams so the Indians could fish salmon? Or was it to save the snail darter? I’ve heard different versions of this. Trump and his fans are missing the point. The difficulty in fighting the fires isn’t because there isn’t enough water, it’s because of the difficulty in moving needed water around the city. Those reservoirs are hundreds of miles away.

These Trump claims include exaggerations, inaccuracies and an overarching false narrative. Most notably, experts on California water policy said Wednesday that there is no basis for linking the existence of the Southern California fires or challenges in the firefighting effort to the water that is kept in the north of the state to protect the smelt and other species and ecosystems. Southern California does not have a shortage of water for fighting the fires. Mount [a “a senior fellow in the Water Policy Center at the Public Policy Institute of California think tank”] said Trump’s claims in the social media post don’t make “any sense” and that “none of it is true.” He said the debate related to water in the northern Delta “has nothing to do with the fires in Southern California. There’s nothing.”

Either Trump is simple-minded and doesn’t understand this, or, more likely, he whips together plausible mis-representations of the facts that his fans will believe, in order to demonize his political enemies.

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Another round from aggregate site JMG, about what the crazies are saying. So predictable.

I’m beginning to think all these people are not just intellectually challenged but would be more at home insane asylums among their fellow paranoid crackpots. Except that there aren’t any left; Reagan dismantled them.

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Phrase I saw quoted, unattributed, on Facebook today:

Why will they never abandon him? Because he gives them permission to be the worst version of themselves.

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Have conservatives always been thus? I didn’t have that impression when I was growing up, or as a young adult. My main impression then was that conservatives were regressive, racist, and, well, a little dim. Given to simple-minded solutions for complex problems. See my discussion of Ronald Reagan, from 1980, in this 2020 post.

Because people like this were outliers in the 1970s.

JMG, 9 Jan 2025: BREAKING: Anti-Gay Hater Anita Bryant Dead At 84

Quoting Variety:

Anita Bryant, a former beauty queen and pop singer of the 1960s whose career led her to become a spokesperson for Florida oranges in the early ’70s and an evangelical crusader against gay rights later in that decade, died Dec. 16 at age 84, her family announced Thursday.


During her heyday as a public figure, Bryant was one of the most polarizing celebrities in America, vilified by much of the show business community for campaigning against what she viewed as a gay takeover of American culture, while being embraced as a hero by many religious conservatives.

And now people like her are mainstream MAGAites.

There’s something deeply primitive about these racist and anti-gay attitudes, which might fairly be aligned to religious conservatives. On the one hand, gays and transgenders and other atypical people have been around as long as humanity has; just read history. On the other hand, the primitive human mindset, evolved in a tribal setting, grew to be most effective to the extent that it demonized anyone outside the tribe (thus racism) and anyone whose behavior did not contribute to expanding the tribe (thus animus against anyone not actively heterosexual and in the business of raising children) and anyone who triggered a response of disgust, or anti-purity (thus again, anyone whose sexual practices and interests were different from yours). But this primitive human mindset will never go away, in at least a portion of the population.

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And here is a portion of Heather Cox Richardson’s take on the California wildfires and the attendant reactions. She covers the facts of the situation, Biden’s response, and Trump’s blaming of Gavin Newsom with something about reservoirs in northern California.

Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson, 8 Jan 2025: January 8, 2024

Los Angeles water doesn’t come from northern California. It comes from an aqueduct east of the Sierra Nevada, from groundwater, and from the Colorado River. Right now, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California has more water stored than it has ever had before, according to Mark Gold, a board member. “It’s not a matter of having enough water coming from Northern California to put out a fire,” he told Alastair Bland of CalMatters. “It’s about the continued devastating impacts of a changing climate.”

Hydroclimatologist Peter Gleick told Taryn Luna, Liam Dillon, and Alex Wigglesworth of the Los Angeles Times that Trump’s linking of water policy to the raging fires was “blatantly false, irresponsible and politically self-serving.”

And more about making Greenland great again and the Gulf of America. Sigh.

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The funeral today of former president Jimmy Carter brought about this commentary, with a point about evangelicals.

Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 9 Jan 2025: How Jimmy Carter’s so-called betrayal of evangelicals led to MAGA, subtitled “Evangelicals loved Jimmy Carter — until his anti-racism turned them against him”

Opening:

Today’s funeral for former President Jimmy Carter follows nearly two weeks of reminiscence about the legacy of the Georgia Democrat who held the White House for one term in the late ’70s. Some of it has been hagiographic, especially in light of the dramatic contrast between Carter’s genuine faith decency and Donald Trump‘s sociopathy and obviously fake Christianity. But much of the remembrance has been refreshingly nuanced, reflecting both on Carter’s failures in office alongside his many accomplishments, many in his post-presidency. One of the most important legacies he’ll leave behind is a complex one, though it is rooted in one of Carter’s best traits, his commitment to anti-racism. During his presidency, Carter inadvertently revealed a fundamental truth about white evangelical culture: its guiding star is not faith or morality, but racism.

Hard as it may be to believe, Carter won the majority of evangelical voters in 1976. Being a white evangelical Christian from the South, he read to many as one of theirs. Things shifted in 1978, however, over an issue that seems obscure now, but was a big deal to white evangelicals at the time: school desegregation.

Marcotte goes on with details about the battle between Bob Jones University and the IRS, which we read about in that Prothero book (review here, see under Chapter 5), which triggered the contemporary culture wars.

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One more for tonight.

Boing Boing, Rob Beschizza, 9 Jan 2025: What if California, Oregon and Washington state joined Canada instead?

The interesting point here is that Trump has no idea what bringing Canada into the US would result in. Not to mention that Canadians don’t want to become part of the US; they prefer the universal health plan, among other things, thank you very much.

As many point out, this makes no sense constitutionally for his party, as the State of Canada would have some 50 U.S. Representatives and 60 electoral college votes. The House and presidency would turn a maple shade of Blue for a generation. If Canada entered the U.S. as several states—reasonable given that it has 10 provinces—the Senate would turn likewise.

But of course Trump is dumb and doesn’t understand the potential consequences. Or: he presumes he can simply ignore all the constitutions and laws and declare things by fiat, and deny, or declare invalid, all the political consequences. Canadians don’t have the vote, or whatever.

Yet I have to wonder: while not well-read in history, I have the impression that previous political cataclysms of this nature happened by similar fiats. Yet the nature of the United States, and its Constitution, was to design a system of checks and balances that would prevent such autocratic shifts from happening. This matter of Trump wanting to claim Canada and Greenland (and the Panama Canal) will be an indication of whether that system will endure.

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