The Right's Assault on Facts, Data, and Reality

[goldenvalley]

Here's an interesting interview with Jonathon Rauch found in The Atlantic.  Agree with him or not, it's worth reading someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about where we are today.

I called him recently to talk about his book, and about polarization, epistemic disruption, and the blast radius of Donald Trump, whom Rauch describes as “a genius-level propaganda operative.” The Republican Party has become “an institutionalized propaganda outlet,” he argues. But we also talk about the dangers of so-called “cancel culture” and the left’s “totalistic ideology,” what cognitive psychology can teach us about politics, the writers who have shaped his political sensibilities and philosophy, his pivotal role in the gay-rights debate and his concerns about where it’s heading, his thoughts on atheism and Christianity, and his aspirations as a writer and a public intellectual.

[LFC]

The Chair of the Virginia Republican Party goes full metal GOP and accuses a UVA professor of what they themselves are doing. His sin? He told the truth about Trump. I'm happy to see that the university told the Republicans to go pound sand. Welcome to Republican cancel culture.

On Thursday the Chairman of the Republican party of Virginia asked the University of Virginia, the state’s flagship public university, to open an investigation into Professor Larry Sabato for violating the University’s code of ‘Professional Conduct and Ethics’ with his “bitter partisanship.” UVA responded telling the Virginia GOP, in so many words, to STFU.

The most obvious and but also merited thing to say would be to castigate Rich Anderson, Chairman of the Virginia GOP, for his comical level of hypocrisy. After all this is the party currently defining itself as the party of ‘free speech’ trying to muzzle a highly respected senior professor and public commentator over what amounts to a few mean tweets. But let’s be honest. Hypocrisy is the closest thing the Trump Era GOP has to a defining brand. It doesn’t matter that I do it because your side did it worse! I’m the victim. Rinse and repeat. Blah, blah, blah …

But there’s something more worth saying about this nonsensical story.

Years ago – and in some case until quite recently – there was a group of commentators who the prestige news shows relied on for non-partisan, “both sides” commentary on the politics of the day. Two of the most visible – especially on shows like The NewsHour were Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann, two think tank political scientists from AEI and Brookings respectively. Another was presidential historian Michael Beschloss. Another was Larry Sabato. Ornstein and Mann tended to focus on the function of Congress; Beschloss, the presidency; Sabato, federal elections. But they each covered the full terrain of contemporary politics. If you go back through 20-plus years of my writing the Editors’ Blog you’ll probably find some criticism of each of them, almost certainly precisely because of this studious effort to see the country’s two political parties in equal terms and treat them as such, even as the evidence for that perspective steadily dwindled.

[LFC]

Pentagon Rebuffs Faux GOP Outrage Over Defense Sec’s Critical Race Theory Remarks

The Pentagon on Thursday pushed back at Republican lawmakers who claimed that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin issued misleading remarks when denying that the department does not have an agenda to teach critical race theory — an academic and legal concept that conservatives have appropriated and hijacked as one of its many faux culture wars.

Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby hit back at the right-wing outrage to Politico on Thursday.

“There is no contradiction here. The Secretary’s comments stand,” Kirby told Politico. “That a professor at an academic institution such as the Air Force Academy teaches a given theory as part of an elective course does not in the slightest way signify some larger effort by the Department to teach, espouse or embrace said theory.”

“We expect our professors to challenge the minds of future leaders, and we respect their academic independence,” Kirby added.

Last month, Austin told lawmakers that the department does not teach critical race theory, nor does it “embrace” the academic and legal concept.

“And I think that’s a spurious conversation,” Austin told lawmakers last month. “We are focused on extremist behaviors, and not ideology, not people’s thoughts, not people’s political orientation.”

I see signs that more people are willing to speak up against Republican lies. It's about frickin' time. If you can't stand up to their screeching fascism now then you're simply complicit.

[LFC]

Jul 11, 2021 17:55:45 GMT LFC said:

The Chair of the Virginia Republican Party goes full metal GOP and accuses a UVA professor of what they themselves are doing. His sin? He told the truth about Trump. I'm happy to see that the university told the Republicans to go pound sand. Welcome to Republican cancel culture.

More details on the Republican screeching and attempts at exercising their own brand of cancel culture.

The Republican Party of Virginia has publicly criticized the social media posts of University of Virginia politics professor Larry Sabato as partisan lambasting of former President Donald Trump and requested the university investigate them.

Sabato called the criticism “silly but predictable,” and a university spokesman said the professor’s opinions are protected free speech.

Rich Anderson, chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia, wrote a letter to UVA on Thursday, saying eight of Sabato’s tweets from the past year appear to violate the university’s mission statement and faculty code of ethics. Anderson called them examples of “bitter partisanship.”

The dispute comes amid a growing national debate over academics’ right to express their opinions and the consequences that follow. Nikole Hannah-Jones, who received a Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for her work on The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, recently turned down a belated tenure offer from the University of North Carolina and accepted a position at Howard University.

On June 3, Sabato tweeted that he agreed with a New York Times reporter who wrote that Trump believed he would be reinstated to office. “Of course it’s true,” Sabato wrote. “Trump, who governed on the edge of insanity for four long years, has gone over the edge. Yet millions of people and 90%+ of GOP members of Congress, still genuflect before this false god.”

In December, Sabato wrote, “I’m watching President-elect @joebiden’s press conference. It’s so refreshingly NORMAL. After 4 years of the bizarre and the disturbing, we really are going to have a return to normalcy.”

Following a presidential debate in September, Sabato said, “CANCEL THE REMAINING PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES. It is impossible to have an orderly, productive exchange with Donald Trump. Stop pretending otherwise. #Debate2020”

In other tweets, Sabato mentioned Trump’s endorsement of Virginia GOP gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin, Trump’s taxes and the former president’s use of the song “YMCA” at a rally during Pride Month.

Offering a response to Anderson’s criticism, Sabato tweeted Thursday night: “Thanks to the Republicans for the hearty laugh you’ve given me...There goes my reserved seat at your next #insurrection.”

[LFC]

Every time you scratch Congressional Republicans you find another nutjob. Note his subcommittee appointment.

A video posted online Thursday shows GOP Representative Ken Buck claiming Google changed its algorithm "to disadvantage Donald Trump and to advantage Joe Biden" during the 2020 presidential race.

Buck—the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law, which is investigating Big Tech—also said of Google, "They chose the winner."

Lauren Windsor of the web show The Undercurrent posted the video on Thursday. In it, the Colorado Republican is speaking at an event in late June hosted by Patriot Voices, a conservative group founded by former GOP Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.

In the video clip, Buck talks about the baseless claim regarding Google amending its algorithms to favor Biden over Trump. He said he's asked "people that own newspapers" about the issue and was told that "'it's just a technical thing. We don't know what the result was; we just know that...a technical person did this.'"

Buck added: "Nonsense! They chose the winner. They can move the estimates. They moved 15 million votes."

[jackd]

So he agrees that Biden actually did get the votes!

[indy]

Jul 12, 2021 18:30:10 GMT jackd said:

So he agrees that Biden actually did get the votes!

Yes, but only because Google apparently used subtlety in their approach. Only the sledgehammer to your skull approach used by Fox is allowed!

[jackd]

But the transition is informative, isn't it? First it was vote fraud. Then it was miscounting. Then it was fixed voting machines, and now it's Google persuaded people to vote the wrong way.

[RichTBikkies]

Jul 12, 2021 19:26:40 GMT jackd said:

But the transition is informative, isn't it? First it was vote fraud. Then it was miscounting. Then it was fixed voting machines, and now it's Google persuaded people to vote the wrong way.

Welcome, my esteemed interlocutors, to the post-truth society.

[LFC]

Jul 12, 2021 19:26:40 GMT jackd said:

But the transition is informative, isn't it? First it was vote fraud. Then it was miscounting. Then it was fixed voting machines, and now it's Google persuaded people to vote the wrong way.

I don't see a a transition. I see them collecting the whole set. They're the kind of children that never give up on their toys.

[jackd]

Well, the pattern isn't perfect but it does follow a general movement from one claim to another as each is either disproven or been terminally ridiculed or, in the case of the voting machines, the subject of a serious lawsuit.

[LFC]

Jul 12, 2021 20:39:57 GMT jackd said:

Well, the pattern isn't perfect but it does follow a general movement from one claim to another as each is either disproven or been terminally ridiculed or, in the case of the voting machines, the subject of a serious lawsuit.

I'd say the fear of a serious lawsuit is the only one that's truly valid. The lack of reality doesn't seem to even slow them down. Hell, they're still talking about vast election fraud, the dangers of the COVID vaccine, the deep state, and on and on. Sometimes they just jump to the new toys but it's virtually impossible to nudge them back towards reality no matter how much evidence you have.

[LFC]

This TPM piece called We Are All Propagandists Now describes the death of persuasion as propaganda and how outrage has consumed the political conversation.

The U.S. is in an information war with itself. The public sphere, where Americans discuss public issues, is broken. There’s little discussion – and lots of fighting.

One reason why: Persuasion is difficult, slow and time-consuming – it doesn’t make good television or social media content – and so there aren’t a lot of good examples of it in our public discourse.

What’s worse, a new form of propaganda has emerged – and it’s enlisted us all as propagandists.

[LFC]

This is an interesting take from a TPM reader on Trump and the beliefs of his followers.

From a TPM Reader …

Watching anti-vaxx harden into a MAGA/GOP loyalty test reminds me, yet again, of an important insight into: Trump’s is a follower of the right-wing irreality, not its leader. And the way we know this to be true is that, if Trump had the power to sway (and not simply surf) the conservative outrage mob, it would have been in his interest to claim credit for developing the vaccines. He can’t because he doesn’t have that ability to do so. Trump is good at getting his name on things that he didn’t build. That’s the best way to understand Trumpism, too.

This isn’t totally right. But there’s a lot in it that is right.

I think there's a lot that's right as well. Yes, Trump manufactured the election fraud dogma out of thin air but he also desperately wanted credit for creating the vaccine. The fact is that he barely makes a statement today about the lead-up to the release of them. He doesn't continually brag about inventing the vaccine (since that's what he'd claim). He's always market testing his lies and taking credit for the vaccines is just one that doesn't test well in MAGAt World.  What we're seeing is just him marching across the ground that Faux News and their ilk have spent decades preparing.

[goldenvalley]

 It was too late for him to use the announcement of the vaccine development in the election season.  The moment passed quickly and he was deep into the Big Lie already.

[LFC]

Josh Marshall posted WTF Is Going On Here? and WTF Is Going On Here? Part II in response to the Faux Newsers and even Rep. Steve Scalise promoting the COVID vaccine. BTW Scalise was JUST got vaccinated this weekend. Marshall is pondering about bad polling, bad feedback, or some other self-serving reason but just can't pin it down. It really does sound like some marching orders were given from someplace.

Fox News hosts go full vaccine.

Hannity Monday night: “I can’t say it enough. Enough people have died. It absolutely makes sense for many Americans to get vaccinated. I believe in science, I believe in vaccine science.”

Chris Ruddy, owner of Newsmax, announces Biden is doing a totally awesome job with the vaccines which are great.

After months of stalling Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R) gets vaccinated, calls it “safe and effective.”

Right wing homunculus Ben Shapiro: “Get vaxxed. I did. My wife did. My parents did.”

I think my colleague Nicole LaFond get at the heart of what’s going on here in this passage below.

Then a few hours later, Fox host and anchor Bill Hemmer opened the door for one of the network’s top medical contributors, Marc Siegel, to hype the efficacy of the vaccine.

“The vaccine works, right? We haven’t budged on that, have we, doc?” Hemmer asked.

“The vaccine works extremely well even against the delta variant, preventing infection in 90 percent of cases,” Siegel said.

We’ve always been the vacciniest network ever, right? RIGHT, MARC?

This all has a bit of the feel of the about face Fox and the other networks did when Dominion and Smartmatic started initiating legal proceedings against everyone in conservative media. Fox and the others didn’t just shift their party line they tried to pretend they had never really claimed that the voting machines had been tampered with. But as karmically just as it might be, no one has a cause of action against Fox. No one can sue. So what is going on?

I really don’t know.

[goldenvalley]

They realize their viewers are the ones dying of Delta variant.    

[pnwguy]

Soon they will call it "My Trump Miracle Vaccine".

[LFC]

Jul 22, 2021 0:52:49 GMT pnwguy said:

Soon they will call it "My Trump Miracle Vaccine".

If only it was oral they could call it "My Pill."

[LFC]

Rep. Madison Cawthorn again. What a worm.

U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) is attacking Dr. Anthony Fauci, saying House Republicans will "prosecute" the esteemed immunologist and director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), as a "pawn of the Chinese Communist Party" and for lying to Congress.

[goldenvalley]

Jul 22, 2021 21:05:21 GMT LFC said:

Rep. Madison Cawthorn again. What a worm.

U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) is attacking Dr. Anthony Fauci, saying House Republicans will "prosecute" the esteemed immunologist and director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), as a "pawn of the Chinese Communist Party" and for lying to Congress.

I wonder when his 15 minutes of fame will expire.

[pnwguy]

Jul 22, 2021 23:15:38 GMT goldenvalley said:

Jul 22, 2021 21:05:21 GMT LFC said:

Rep. Madison Cawthorn again. What a worm.

I wonder when his 15 minutes of fame will expire.

He's vying for a cabinet position in the Trump Restoration.  No matter that his state is one of the leading states now for Covid deaths.  Time to yell "Squirrel!"

[LFC]

Lies, lies, and more lies. Meanwhile they let their citizens die from a preventable disease.

In a filing in federal court Monday, the state of Texas argued that Gov. Greg Abbott (R) was justified in ordering state troopers to pull over anyone they thought was driving undocumented immigrants — because of one family’s meal at a Whataburger in South Texas.

Immigrant families, the state said, posed a deadly threat to Texans.

“Consider, for example, a family of migrants released in La Joya, Texas,” lawyers for the state wrote. “The family went to a public restaurant and began ‘coughing and sneezing without covering their mouths.’” The family in question told police they had COVID-19, the filing noted.

The federal judge handling the case, a Bush appointee, wasn’t convinced. On Wednesday, she temporarily paused Abbott’s order, saying that it was the governor’s order, not immigrants, that risked “exacerbating the spread of COVID-19.”

The fury over the Whataburger meal conveniently ignores some key issues in Texas, including that localities are still forbidden by the governor from instituting mask mandates, and that Texas’ vaccination rate lags behind the rest of the country. As the Washington Post reported recently, “what the hardest-hit states do have in common is relatively low vaccination rates,” not large numbers of new arrivals.

Nonetheless, that singular meal has now become a national anti-immigrant talking point.

On Thursday, the columnist Laura Hollis cited the Whataburger meal in a column describing immigration as “a government-sponsored invasion” and “an existential threat.”

Since last Tuesday, the meal has been mentioned more than a dozen times on Fox News, including on Tucker Carlson’s program, seen by millions of viewers.

“The Biden administration is still shuttling foreign nationals throughout our country without checking to see if they’ve been vaccinated against COVID,” Carlson said, introducing the story. “Some of them carry it.”

Separately on Fox News, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) and Abbott himself have all addressed the Whataburger scare.

“That’s exactly why I issued this executive order,” Abbott said after describing the La Joya case.

Local health officials in the area have tried, so far unsuccessfully, to push back against the anti-immigrant rhetoric.

[LFC]

Matt Lewis, TDB's pet right-winger, is in a meltdown because Biden and the Democrats are playing the same game Republicans have been playing for decades. Suddenly that's now "trashing American norms." It's almost like this guy stopped following politics in the 80s and just jumped back in.

For all the talk of being moderate, Joe Biden and the Democratic Party have spent considerable time trashing American norms by bending (or sometimes breaking) the rules.

The latest example is a fast-approaching budget resolution that CNBC describes as “a massive investment in social programs and climate policy.”

Whether or not that is good or bad policy and whether or not we can afford it, the problem is the manipulative way Democrats are using the reconciliation process to bypass “regular order” to remake America. As Politico notes, this “marks Democrats’ first step toward bypassing the filibuster in order to pass their party’s massive social spending plan, which envisions higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy in order to fund initiatives like expanded Medicare, free community college and green cards for some immigrants.” But it won’t be their last.

Just last week, we saw perhaps an even more egregious example of overreach, after White House American Rescue Plan Coordinator Gene Sperling announced that the administration had “quadruple-checked” whether Biden could issue a moratorium on evictions and was “unable to find the legal authority.” But under pressure from the Squad and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who lacked the votes to pass a law but demanded the White House “get better lawyers” and do their work for them, Biden issued a new rent freeze anyway—never mind that pesky legal authority.

Meanwhile, Biden is currently being pressured by Elizabeth Warren and others to cancel $50,000 in student debt per borrower, so who knows where this will end?

Now, the public, as far as I know, has not fully litigated, much less endorsed, the notion of living in someone else’s home debt-free, free community college, or canceling student debt, but who cares? Remember: Biden already got away with steamrolling Republicans on the COVID-relief package and also chose to undermine good-faith assumptions by pairing the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill Republicans agreed to with passage of this $3.5 trillion budget resolution—which will be introduced “immediately” after the infrastructure bill passes Congress.

That’s right, even as the bipartisan infrastructure bill is speeding toward passage, Biden and the Democrats are showing Republicans (and the rest of us) that bipartisan cooperation will not assuage their appetite for progressivism; they want to ram through their partisan agenda using any means necessary.

This is what happens when human nature transcends the constitution—and public opinion. Nobody wants to accept the paradoxical messiness and stasis of democracy where some anachronistic document, much less arbitrary filibuster rules, prevents politicians from taking decisive action on issues their base deems critically important.

No acknowledgement of the multiple unprecedented hikes in the use of the filibuster by REPUBLICANS over the decades. No acknowledgement of the McConnell/Boehner marching orders to REPUBLICANS that they MUST obstruct anything Obama was for. No acknowledgement of unprecedented blocking of judicial nominees and court packing by REPUBLICANS for decades. No acknowledgement that only the REPUBLICANS have weaponized shutting down the government as a form of blackmail and are currently threatening to do it again.

Lewis might not be an utter nutter but he's clearly clueless on the reason American politics is what it is today. BTW he threw in a little false equivalence at the end which is actually and pathetically a step up for a conservative these days. My bold of a massive strawman that he pulled somewhere out of deep in his ass.

The larger takeaway is that democracy is in trouble. While Democrats would surely scoff at the comparison, progressives clearly want their president to violate the constitution to “protect millions of families,” just as the right’s infatuation with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán speaks to their yearning for a strongman to impose their version of the “common good.” In a country where the Senate is divided 50-50, everyone wants a powerful strongman to push their agenda—and rationalizes that it’s necessary because their agenda is so virtuous, the game is so rigged, and the other side is so evil (on this last point, at least, both sides have a compelling point).

Does anyone really think that Joe Biden was elected to unilaterally advance a progressive agenda, rather than to restore normalcy to our system of government and our daily lives?

I know I don’t. But progressives want their own strong man. And, ironically, they are strong-arming Biden into becoming El Jefe.

Who the f*** thought Biden would be able to unilaterally restore normalcy to our system of government when the Republican Party is clearly 100% dedicated to tearing it apart? You'd have to be an idiot, completely ignorant of politics, or both. BTW, Matt, much of that "progressive agenda" is extremely popular with over 60% of Americans. Look it up, along with a LOT more you clearly don't know.

[LFC]

Josh Marshall discusses the Republicans using anti-mask / anti-vax sentiment as a campaign tool. The problem is that there are a lot of vaccinated people that are pretty pissed at the willfully unvaccinated and blame them (and rightly so) for the current setback. It may not play well politically after all.

As we’ve discussed a number of times, Republican leaders made a clear decision over the winter of 2020-21 to embrace and cater to anti-vax, anti-mandate sentiment to supercharge their midterm election odds. I’ve seen some debate over whether GOP elites convinced GOP voters or GOP voters dragged along the elites. I think it’s a bit of both but mainly a non-issue. Unsurprisingly, elected officials and voters in a political party tend to think in similar ways. They decided to become the anti-vax party and thus helped usher in the fourth COVID wave.

But something happened on the way to the party: the Delta variant.

Not that that this wasn’t a very bad, sociopathic decision to start with. After all the great majority of GOP elected officials were, like Tucker Carlson, at the front of the line to get vaccinated themselves. But the consequences became far more acute. Three months ago many people believed that in the US COVID was basically over. You could cater to anti-vax sentiment and reap the electoral rewards while free-riding off the vaccinated herd. There was no downside – at least no political one. Whether that was ever going to be true, Delta clearly made it not true.

Today our team is reporting on two current manifestations of this dynamic. Republican governors with national political ambitions are not only maintaining a lax approach to mitigation they are courting anti-vax and anti-mandate sentiment by forbidding local governments to take decisions to protect their own localities. This is playing out in bans on school districts mandating masks in schools. Schools are a unique case since despite children generally having mild outcomes, most children aren’t vaccinated and children under 12 can’t be vaccinated.