What I will be looking for in today’s election results

Election day has finally arrived, which I am sure is a relief to all those who have been plagued for the last few weeks, if not months, with TV ads, mailings, and online fundraising pitches that describe in apocalyptic terms the disasters that will inevitably unfold if the opponents win, something that can only be averted if you send money immediately. In the past, the fear was that Republicans would implement policies that were anti-choice, xenophobic, anti-poor, anti-minorities, and anti-LGBTQ. Now the fear is that they will actually subvert future elections, an even more ominous prospect.

For me, the main item of interest is to see how many people will vote for candidates who have signed on to the insane idea that the last election was rigged and that Trump won, along with all the other accompanying QAnon conspiracies. These people have got a lot of attention and this election will be a good measure of how far this mass delusion has actually spread. There are undoubtedly many traditional Republican voters who do not believe all that nonsense. The question is whether they are disgusted enough by this attempt to subvert democracy that they abandon their party loyalty and vote against such candidates or whether their party loyalty is so strong that they are willing to overlook the very real danger of electing such dangerous people to high office.
[Read more…]

Watch out! Dark MAGA is coming for you!

When Madison Cawthorn was elected to Congress from North Carolina for the first time in 2020 at the age of 26, he was hailed as a future leader of the Republican party. But during his first term he has been involved in all manner of things that have generated negative publicity.

Those included intra-party blowback over his cocaine-orgy podcast comments, twice carrying a firearm while going through airport security, driving with a revoked license, and the various news reports featuring sexually-suggestive photos and videos of Cawthorn.

That claim that senior members of the Republican party were engaged in drug-fueled sex orgies was a bridge too far for the party establishment and they pulled out all the stops in favor of his opponent so that Cawthorn lost his primary race on Tuesday.

If the party leaders thought that they had got rid of a troublesome nuisance and that Cawthorn would simply go away, they were mistaken. He seems to be hopping mad at what he sees as a betrayal by the party and is vowing vengeance on those whom he feels stabbed him in the back, saying that he is going to unleash the ‘Dark MAGA’ on them.
[Read more…]

A long overdue event

Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed by the US senate on a 53-47 vote to fill the vacancy on the US Supreme Court that will be created when retiring justice Stephen Breyer steps down in July. It is quite incredible that it has taken so long to have a woman of color on the bench. I have not blogged about it because it was almost certain that she would be confirmed and there was nothing about her nomination that was controversial, as she was very much in the legal mainstream and had no skeletons in her closet.

But the Republican party of Trump decided to make up outlandish stuff about her . Why? Because that is what they do. And their task of persuading their rabid base that Jackson was unqualified and even evil was made easier by the fact she was a woman and a person of color because we know that white men have the best legal minds and that everyone else must be an imposter, right?
[Read more…]

“Vote for us now. Learn our plan later”

It is usually the case that political parties each lay out some form of manifesto before an election to help voters decide whom they plan to support. The Republican party seems to have decided to reverse that practice.

The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, has been reluctant to release details of what Republicans would do should they retake Congress in the midterms, with McConnell saying only an agenda will be revealed “when we take it back”.

…

“If we’re fortunate enough to have the majority next year, I’ll be the majority leader,” McConnell told reporters. “I’ll decide in consultation with my members what to put on the floor.

Got that? He’s saying to vote for them first and after the election they will tell you what their legislative agenda is. Although this is a perversion of what politics should be, it makes for a kind of cynical sense and McConnell is as cynical as they come.
[Read more…]

Jordan Klepper visits the Canada trucker protesters

As part of his ongoing series of videos where he talks to those who are part of the anti-vax, right-wing, QAnon, Trump-supporting movement, he went to Ottawa in Canada and finds that the people who are blockading the city center say pretty much the same things that people who attend the Trump rallies in the US say, which is mostly nonsense veiled in rhetoric of freedom.


[Read more…]

The full sordid web of Jeffrey Epstein is still to be revealed

Branko Marcetic writes that while the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell did not blow the lid off the whole sordid Epstein saga due to the prosecutors being cautious in their efforts to secure a conviction, the process did produce quite a lot of information that did not get much media attention, that showed the web of high profile people who were part of his circle and traveled around with him. He concludes:

The Jeffrey Epstein saga is the story of the world’s most prolific child sex trafficker who operated more or less unhidden for decades, but was able to consistently escape media scrutiny, legal punishment, and, finally, justice by dying before he went to trial. In a normal world, this tale of sprawling criminality and public corruption would be the subject of an intense, wide-ranging government investigation that would expose the conspiracy’s full scope and the identities of those involved.

Instead, information about the case continues to come in dribs and drabs, thanks only to the work of a few dogged reporters and the occasional fortuitous legal disclosure, limited in this most recent trial by the judge’s order to avoid “needless” naming of names, and prosecutors’ decision to leave tens of thousands of photos seized from Epstein’s home by the FBI unreleased. The public may end up having to wait for the civil suit against Prince Andrew or for Maxwell herself to strike some kind of deal to learn more.

Just as with the John F. Kennedy assassination, obscuring the full truth of the crime has only fed the growth of disreputable nonsense like QAnon, which serves to launder and distract from the intimate involvement of elites like Trump in Epstein’s crimes, turning them into yet another culture war sideshow. This is the double tragedy of Epstein’s death: it’s denied many of his survivors full justice, and turned the terrible truth of his crimes into a shield for his fellow perpetrators.

Marcetic thinks that the Prince Andrew case, if it ever goes to trial, may reveal more details.

Child abuse at an evangelical summer camp

The sexual abuse of minors is an extremely ugly thing that rightly arouses great anger among people. This is likely one reason why the QAnon movement has latched on to that topic to recruit followers, by claiming that there is a vast pedophile ring operating at the highest levels of government and celebrity culture. Once they are hooked, they can be drawn iton the vastly bigger conspiracy theory. But curiously, they do not target institutions that have well-documented cases of rampant pedophilia, such as the Catholic church and the Boy Scouts, probably because they are not considered part of the ‘elites’ and thus do not fit into the broader narrative that QAnon seeks to promote.

Now David French and Nancy French have a very disturbing article in the conservative Christian publication The Dispatch that discusses in graphic detail the sexual abuse of children that took place over many years in an evangelical Christian summer camp known as Kanakuk, where the people in charge of the camp did little to stop it despite being alerted to the problem by some parents. The article says that although the main perpetrator Pete Newman was sent to prison ten years ago, the people in charge then, especially Joe White, are still in charge.
[Read more…]

Escalating cult behavior

I have written before that many of the followers of Donald Trump seem to resemble members of cults. While these cult members seem to be easily persuaded to believe the most bizarre things and even to commit reckless and pointless acts of defiance such as invading and vandalizing the Capitol building on January 6th, they do not seem (at least so far) to exhibit the more extreme forms of cult behavior, such as being willing to take actions on the command of their leader that could lead to their own deaths. One the most extreme examples of such cult behavior was the Jonestown massacre in Guyana where in 1978 over 900 people died, many of them because they took cyanide poison on the command of their leader Jim Jones, that he ordered after his guards killed a visiting US congressman and four of his entourage.
[Read more…]

The origins of the lizard people theory

I must admit that hearing that some people believe in the existence of ‘lizard people’ took me by surprise, even though you would think that by now I would have become accustomed to hearing that people believe in all manner of fantastical ideas. So what is this theory and how did it originate? Cultural historian Lynn Stuart Parramore walks us through this strange world that has anti-Semitic roots. She says that while the theory is undoubtedly bonkers, it is definitely not harmless.

The world-ruled-by-lizard-people fantasy shot to prominence in recent years in part through the ramblings of David Icke, a popular British sports reporter-turned-conspiracy theorist known for his eccentric ideas.

Icke would have you believe that a race of reptilian beings not only invaded Earth, but that it also created a genetically modified lizard-human hybrid race called the “Babylonian Brotherhood,” which, he maintains, is busy plotting a worldwide fascist state. This sinister cabal of global reptilian elites boasts a membership list including former President Barack Obama, Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and Mick Jagger.

[Read more…]

When bonkers beliefs lead to murders

The internet is awash with examples of people in the US who believe in the craziest things. Even without seeking them out, my casual websurfing throws up so many that I have become somewhat numb to the examples that I find that demonstrate deep stupidity. But once in a while, I come across things that really boggle the mind, the more so when the perfectly normal way that people start out talking give you no warning that they are about to say things that are completely bonkers.

Take this woman who rose to speak at a school board meeting in Kansas where they were debating whether to require students to wear masks.

[Read more…]