Republican Assault on Democracy and March Towards Fascism

[Bact PhD]

Another summation of “We’re all for free markets* (except when they clash with our other closely held ideals)”:

www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/07/12/republicans-threaten-wall-street-over-climate-positions/

Despite the headline, the piece goes into the drive against other “woke corporate” positions as well.

This jumped out at me (bold mine). It was A-OK for these same institutions to “collude” when it all worked in favor of them and tbeir fossil fuel buddies, amirite?:

Peter Bisbee, executive director of the Republican Attorneys General Association, said the Republicans were seeking to “protect consumers from the collusion of these woke institutions who are jeopardizing the retirement accounts of millions of Americans for the sake of pleasing woke environmental zealots, while also creating dangerous instability within our financial markets.”

[indy]

I guess republicans are now all for using the state to insulate people from the consequences of their own actions if it suits their political agenda, which at this point is just to adopt any position that caters to their angry and irrational base.

[LFC]

This could go under the Republican vote suppression thread but it's so blatant that I view it as another (goose) step in the GOP's rush towards fascism. I'm pissed that they're being threatened with a lawsuit. They should be arrested and tried.

More GOP-controlled county election boards are flouting state law by refusing to certify election results — this time in Pennsylvania.

The Pennsylvania Department of State and acting Secretary of the Commonwealth Leigh Chapman filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against the boards of elections in Berks, Fayette and Lancaster counties. All three are controlled by Republicans and have refused to certify undated mail-in ballots in the state’s May 17 primary elections.

“Three boards of elections refuse to execute their mandatory duty to certify the results of the 2022 primary election based on a full and accurate count of every lawfully cast vote,” the officials wrote in the court document, which was filed in the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania, per CNN.

Lancaster County officials remain defiant, claiming in a statement that “The Commonwealth’s demand is contrary to the law or any existing court order.

“The County will vigorously defend its position to follow the law to ensure the integrity of elections in Lancaster County,” the statement continued.

The standoff comes over a month after the Supreme Court ruled that Pennsylvania elections officials are allowed to include undated ballots –- that is, mail-in ballot that don’t have the date written on the return envelope as required by Pennsylvania law –- while tallying election results.

The issue of undated ballots in Pennsylvania was at the center of the state’s GOP Senate primary between now-nominee Dr. Mehmet Oz and rival David McCormick, who filed a lawsuit demanding that the ballots be included in the hand recount in the razor-thin race. McCormick ultimately conceded to Oz before the recount was completed.

Vigorously defend its position? YOU ... F***ING ... LOST, you MORONS!

[goldenvalley]

Jul 13, 2022 15:53:51 GMT LFC said:

This could go under the Republican vote suppression thread but it's so blatant that I view it as another (goose) step in the GOP's rush towards fascism. I'm pissed that they're being threatened with a lawsuit. They should be arrested and tried.

More GOP-controlled county election boards are flouting state law by refusing to certify election results — this time in Pennsylvania.

The Pennsylvania Department of State and acting Secretary of the Commonwealth Leigh Chapman filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against the boards of elections in Berks, Fayette and Lancaster counties. All three are controlled by Republicans and have refused to certify undated mail-in ballots in the state’s May 17 primary elections.

“Three boards of elections refuse to execute their mandatory duty to certify the results of the 2022 primary election based on a full and accurate count of every lawfully cast vote,” the officials wrote in the court document, which was filed in the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania, per CNN.

Lancaster County officials remain defiant, claiming in a statement that “The Commonwealth’s demand is contrary to the law or any existing court order.

“The County will vigorously defend its position to follow the law to ensure the integrity of elections in Lancaster County,” the statement continued.

The standoff comes over a month after the Supreme Court ruled that Pennsylvania elections officials are allowed to include undated ballots –- that is, mail-in ballot that don’t have the date written on the return envelope as required by Pennsylvania law –- while tallying election results.

The issue of undated ballots in Pennsylvania was at the center of the state’s GOP Senate primary between now-nominee Dr. Mehmet Oz and rival David McCormick, who filed a lawsuit demanding that the ballots be included in the hand recount in the razor-thin race. McCormick ultimately conceded to Oz before the recount was completed.

Vigorously defend its position? YOU ... F***ING ... LOST, you MORONS!

Sounds like nullification of the Supreme Court decision...complete refusal to follow or honor the judicial system's reading of the law.  

[pnwguy]

Jul 13, 2022 16:34:42 GMT goldenvalley said:

Sounds like nullification of the Supreme Court decision...complete refusal to follow or honor the judicial system's reading of the law.  

Only until the GOP gets to ramrod their own activist justices on the court.  After that happens, then any finding of the court will be Orders Straight From God.

[LFC]

Jul 13, 2022 18:41:48 GMT pnwguy said:

Only until the GOP gets to ramrod their own activist justices on the court.  After that happens, then any finding of the court will be Orders Straight From God (TM).

FIFY

[pnwguy]

Jul 13, 2022 19:06:19 GMT LFC said:

Jul 13, 2022 18:41:48 GMT pnwguy said:

Only until the GOP gets to ramrod their own activist justices on the court.  After that happens, then any finding of the court will be Orders Straight From God (TM).

FIFY

Does TM stand for Trumpicus Magesticus ? 

[LFC]

Dear Conservatives Who Did This: Thanks but it's really too little, too late.

A group of conservatives, including prominent lawyers and retired federal judges, issued a 72-page report on Thursday categorically rebutting each of the claims made in court by former President Donald Trump and his supporters over the 2020 election results.

The report, "LOST, NOT STOLEN: The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election," looked at more than 60 court cases Trump and his supporters filed and lost in six key battleground states. It reached the "unequivocal" conclusion that the former Republican president's claims were unsupportable -- which Trump's own Department of Homeland Security as well as election officials nationwide debunked days after the 2020 election.

The report was released as the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol has been holding public hearings that have connected Trump's involvement in efforts to overturn the 2020 election to the attack that disrupted Congress from certifying Joe Biden's victory. Trump is considering an early 2024 presidential run announcement, CNN has previously reported.

"There is absolutely no evidence of fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election on the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any state, let alone the nation as a whole. In fact, there was no fraud that changed the outcome in even a single precinct," the report says.

The report is signed by retired federal appeals court judges Thomas B. Griffith, J. Michael Luttig and Michael W. McConnell, former Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, former US Sens. John Danforth and Gordon H. Smith, longtime Republican election lawyer Benjamin L. Ginsberg and veteran Republican congressional chief of staff David Hoppe. Several of them are longtime Trump critics.

"Even now, twenty months after the election, a period in which Trump's supporters have been energetically scouring every nook and cranny for proof that the election was stolen, they come up empty. Claims are made, trumpeted in sympathetic media, and accepted as truthful by many patriotic Americans. But on objective examination they have fallen short, every time," the report says.
The report warns that it's "wrong, and bad for our country, for people to propagate baseless claims that President Biden's election was not legitimate."

[LFC]

I know somebody here (maybe jackd?) has cautioned that we don't know what the DOJ is doing but some former DOJ officials are worried about what they fear is a lack of urgency over a literal coup and insurrection. Of course we still don't know what's really going on but I continue to worry.

For all the powers given to federal prosecutors — including grand jury access and FBI cooperation, to name a few — a House committee increasingly appears to have them beat.

In April, federal prosecutors went to the House Jan. 6 Committee with a request: could it have transcripts of interviews that the panel had conducted in the course of its investigation?

It was an unusual query, given the many investigatory tools available to federal prosecutors. Since then, reports from the New York Times have suggested that prosecutors working the Jan. 6 investigation learned new information from Cassidy Hutchinson’s televised testimony at the same time as the public, and were just as surprised.

Those reports — combined with an impression that DOJ started with a narrow focus on January 6 itself, sidestepping the broader attempt to overturn the election — have shocked some former DOJ officials, and left others questioning what might be going on.

Some feel that the department has moved lackadaisically on what’s arguably one of the most important criminal investigations in American history: an open and brazen attempt to subvert the results of a democratic presidential election.

“The DOJ’s approach to this case seems to be entirely defensive and backward,” Paul Pelletier, a former acting chief of the fraud section in the DOJ’s criminal division, told TPM.

In recent days, Andrew Weissmann, a former fraud section chief and Mueller prosecutor, has also suggested that the DOJ’s investigation into Jan. 6 has proceeded aimlessly.

“We’re in a very unusual situation where you see Congress doing a really, really good job and being out in front of, by all accounts, the federal government in many ways in terms of understanding and investigating what happened in terms of trying to undermine the last presidential election,” Weissmann told Politico on Tuesday.

He added that he did not believe the Garland DOJ began with the goal of investigating the conduct of Trump and others in the White House, and instead saw their case as focused on the narrower issue of the riot and those who participated in the violence.

[LFC]

Idaho's GOP is the latest Republican entity to go all in on The Big Lie. Texass preceded it as did several more local level Republican Party organizations.

The Idaho Republican Party is about to follow in its Texas counterpart’s footsteps – and then take it several steps further.

During its three-day convention in Twin Falls, which began on Thursday, the Idaho GOP will vote on adopting a resolution that falsely claims President Joe Biden didn’t really win the 2020 election and refers to Biden as “acting president.”

Per the Associated Press, the language of the resolution is almost identical to that used by the Texas GOP, whose resolution that was approved last month declares: “We reject the certified results of the 2020 presidential election; and we hold that acting president Joseph Robinette Biden was not legitimately elected by the people of the United States.”

But Idaho’s version is reportedly even more extreme.

Not only does it assert that Biden’s victory was illegitimate, it also includes a blatant lie claiming that Republicans’ sham 2020 election audits in Wisconsin and Arizona found evidence of fraud, which they absolutely have not.

The Texas GOP’s resolution hasn’t inspired just Idaho Republicans: County GOP committees in Arizona (Maricopa County), Wisconsin (Langlade County) and Montana (Ravalli and Lewis and Clark Counties) are either considering or have already passed similar platforms denying the 2020 election results.

[LFC]

Here comes the polling place terrorists, complete with badges, guns, and authority.

A half dozen sheriffs from across the country addressed a far-right conference focused on bogus claims of voter fraud this week.

The event, hosted by the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, featured speeches from several Republican state lawmakers as well as fringe election deniers including MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, ex-Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, and Jovan Hutton Pulitzer, a former treasure hunter who’s claimed without evidence to have developed a technology that uses microscopic imaging to root out cheating in elections.

The sheriffs and other speakers at the event pushed discredited voter fraud allegations from the documentary “2000 Mules,” which asserts evidence of a vast network of illegal vote smugglers based on vague cellphone data and clipped surveillance footage. And attendees announced an effort to fundraise for additional surveillance cameras and other tools to allow sheriffs to watch voters as they cast their ballots.

I love that they call themselves "Constitutional" and then profess a belief that has nothing to do with the Constitution. Even the most rigid states' rights scholars (i.e. people with actual knowledge, not idiots like these guys or intentional results oriented partisan hacks like we have in SCOTUS) grasp that our republic has never allowed for localities to overrule the state their in. These asshats are nothing more than wannabe' mini-dictators who are above any and all laws.

The “constitutional sheriffs” movement, which convened the conference, holds that sheriffs are the supreme law enforcement authorities in their jurisdictions — above even state and federal authorities — and also that sheriffs have a duty to ignore laws they view as unconstitutional. That logic has, in recent years, been applied to gun control measures and pandemic health precautions.

[LFC]

Wealthy, secretive donors continue to fund the fascist movement.

Turning Point USA, the conservative organization that parlayed culture war activism on college campuses into major influence in U.S. politics, enjoyed a financial windfall during the pandemic, according to newly filed tax records.

The nonprofit organization reported $55 million in revenue in its 2020 fiscal year (June 2020 through June 2021), a 40% increase over the previous year. Contributions to its political arm, Turning Point Action, increased from $2 million to $11 million over the same period.

Turning Point USA, which received just $8 million in contributions in 2016, has raised $138 million over the last five years, according to the organization’s Form 990, a tax document filed by nonprofit groups. And while the organization’s reach continues to grow, its funding base remains relatively small. Roughly half of its 2020 income came from 10 anonymous donors.

[pnwguy]

Jul 15, 2022 16:42:32 GMT LFC said:

Roughly half of its 2020 income came from 10 anonymous donors.

Well, don't these donors have the Right to Privacy?  Doesn't the Constitution uphold a right to privacy? 

Wait......oh, sorry.....never mind....

[LFC]

The fascist party continues to be supported by big business. Hey, there are profits to be made. Who cares if democracy dies as long as it doesn't hurt the bottom line?

Over the weekend, the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) hosted a private retreat for corporate sponsors in Palm Beach, Florida to ostensibly raise money for its sweeping assault on abortion access, according to an exclusive report by CNBC.

The swanky dinner reportedly featured C-suite executives from the likes of Comcast, General Motors, Walmart, Match Group, Anheuser-Busch, Juul Labs, Johnson & Johnson, Koch Industries and Lowe's, according to a list obtained by the outlet.The luxurious event will reportedly took place over the course of three days at the Breakers resort, an oceanfront five-star hotel, where rooms start at roughly $830 per night. It reportedly involved a golf outing, a cigar and whiskey reception, tennis, and deep sea fishing.

[pnwguy]

Democracy is inefficient and messy. Oligarchs thrive in authoritarian dictatorships. Anything besides shareholder profit is not their concern.

[LFC]

Republican fascists in Arizona have censured their state House Speaker for telling the truth. Of course they claim that's not the reason.

The Arizona Republican Party’s executive committee voted Tuesday night to censure Arizona state House Speaker Rusty Bowers (R), who recently testified at one of the House Jan. 6 Committee’s public hearings.

Arizona GOP chair Kelli Ward announced the censure decision late Tuesday night, saying that Bowers is “no longer a Republican in good standing.” She called on GOP voters to oust Bowers in the state’s upcoming primaries, where he is running for Arizona state Senate.

Neither Ward nor the censure mentioned Bowers’ testimony, during which the GOP leader described how then-President Donald Trump tried to pressure him into helping him attempt to steal the 2020 election (a scheme Ward herself was involved in).

Instead, the language of the censure argued that the party’s rebuke was prompted by Bowers’ votes on legislation: that he voted and/or sponsored bills for funding education and making sexual orientation and gender identity a protected class, and opposed legislation that would establish only two genders on government documents and permanently reinstate the Pledge of Allegiance in schools.

The censure also accused Bowers of “killing all meaningful election integrity bills.”

Additionally, the party claimed Bowers has “not been forthright in his interactions between others in legislative leadership, Republican Party leadership, his dealings with Maricopa County bureaucrats, lobbyists, consultants, [and] the liberal media.”

Bowers has “demonstrated he is unfit to serve the platform of” the GOP, therefore the censure aimed to “encourage all registered Republicans to expel him permanently from office in the impending primary election.”

[LFC]

Ever the victims. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZzhole) is a whiny little piece of shit. Tuckums jumped right in, of course. Yes, they'd excuse thousands who actually were involved in an insurrection as well as the people who planned an actual coup but they're ready to lash out at a survivor of a mass shooting who gives them a little butthurt. How fascist.

During a House Judiciary Committee debate Wednesday on proposed gun control legislation, school shooting survivor David Hogg accosted Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) and was then ushered out of the room. Later that night on Fox News, Biggs suggested that Hogg’s actions were serious enough for a Jan. 6-type committee to investigate and for him to be charged accordingly.

The Judiciary Committee was considering a bill that would restore an assault weapons ban, which was previously on the books from 1994 until 2004, when Congress failed to renew it. Fox host Tucker Carlson claimed that this ban “did nothing to reduce violent crime” and that the government “has 10 years of data that prove it.” (The Fox host did not cite any of this data.)

Carlson then fretted that law-abiding gun owners are being unfairly targeted by the newly proposed ban, and claimed that Biggs, who “grateful[ly]” received the NRA’s endorsement in 2020, “made that point” on Wednesday.

Carlson showed a clip where Biggs says that assault weapons could be used at the southern border for protection against an “invasion,” at which point he was interrupted by Hogg. “You are reiterating the points of mass shooters in your manifesto. The shooter at my high school: antisemitic, anti-Black and racist. The shooter in El Paso described it as an invasion,” he shouted. Hogg later tweeted a video of the encounter, writing that “the shooters were inspired by racist, anti-Black, anti-immigrant manifestos that rhyme with GOP talking points.”

[LFC]

This Axios piece is a bit long but filled with detail. Basically Trump and his merry band of fascists are still preparing to rip the guts out of the federal government, replacing potentially tens of thousands of career government employees with loyalists sycophants. In addition to being an actual creation of a "deep state" it would also send the gov't into turmoil as we've seen the lack of capabilities for actual work and the abilities for grift and corruption from those Trump likes.

Former President Trump’s top allies are preparing to radically reshape the federal government if he is re-elected, purging potentially thousands of civil servants and filling career posts with loyalists to him and his "America First” ideology, people involved in the discussions tell Axios.

The impact could go well beyond typical conservative targets such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Internal Revenue Service. Trump allies are working on plans that would potentially strip layers at the Justice Department — including the FBI, and reaching into national security, intelligence, the State Department and the Pentagon, sources close to the former president say.

During his presidency, Trump often complained about what he called “the deep state.”

The heart of the plan is derived from an executive order known as “Schedule F,” developed and refined in secret over most of the second half of Trump’s term and launched 13 days before the 2020 election.

The reporting for this series draws on extensive interviews over a period of more than three months with more than two dozen people close to the former president, and others who have firsthand knowledge of the work underway to prepare for a potential second term. Most spoke on condition of anonymity to describe sensitive planning and avoid Trump’s ire.

As Trump publicly flirts with a 2024 comeback campaign, this planning is quietly flourishing from Mar-a-Lago to Washington — with his blessing but without the knowledge of some people in his orbit.

Trump remains distracted by his obsession with contesting the 2020 election results. But he has endorsed the work of several groups to prime an administration-in-waiting. Personnel and action plans would be executed in the first 100 days of a second term starting on Jan. 20, 2025.

Their work could accelerate controversial policy and enforcement changes, but also enable revenge tours against real or perceived enemies, and potentially insulate the president and allies from investigation or prosecution.

They intend to stack thousands of mid-level staff jobs. Well-funded groups are already developing lists of candidates selected often for their animus against the system — in line with Trump’s long-running obsession with draining “the swamp.” This includes building extensive databases of people vetted as being committed to Trump and his agenda.

The preparations are far more advanced and ambitious than previously reported. What is happening now is an inversion of the slapdash and virtually non-existent infrastructure surrounding Trump ahead of his 2017 presidential transition.

These groups are operating on multiple fronts: shaping policies, identifying top lieutenants, curating an alternative labor force of unprecedented scale, and preparing for legal challenges and defenses that might go before Trump-friendly judges, all the way to a 6-3 Supreme Court.

It's all based around recategorizing up to 50,000 employees so he can shit-can anybody he wants.

Trump signed an executive order, “Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service,” in October 2020, which established a new employment category for federal employees. It received wide media coverage for a short period, then was largely forgotten in the mayhem and aftermath of Jan. 6 — and quickly was rescinded by President Biden.

Sources close to Trump say that if he were elected to a second term, he would immediately reimpose it.

Tens of thousands of civil servants who serve in roles deemed to have some influence over policy would be reassigned as “Schedule F” employees. Upon reassignment, they would lose their employment protections.

New presidents typically get to replace more than 4,000 so-called “political” appointees to oversee the running of their administrations. But below this rotating layer of political appointees sits a mass of government workers who enjoy strong employment protections — and typically continue their service from one administration to the next, regardless of the president’s party affiliation.

An initial estimate by the Trump official who came up with Schedule F found it could apply to as many as 50,000 federal workers — a fraction of a workforce of more than 2 million, but a segment with a profound role in shaping American life.

Trump, in theory, could fire tens of thousands of career government officials with no recourse for appeals. He could replace them with people he believes are more loyal to him and to his “America First” agenda.

Even if Trump did not deploy Schedule F to this extent, the very fact that such power exists could create a significant chilling effect on government employees.

It would effectively upend the modern civil service, triggering a shock wave across the bureaucracy. The next president might then move to gut those pro-Trump ranks — and face the question of whether to replace them with her or his own loyalists, or revert to a traditional bureaucracy.

[Bact PhD]

Jul 22, 2022 20:36:44 GMT LFC said:

This Axios piece is a bit long but filled with detail. Basically Trump and his merry band of fascists are still preparing to rip the guts out of the federal government, replacing potentially tens of thousands of career government employees with loyalists sycophants. In addition to being an actual creation of a "deep state" it would also send the gov't into turmoil as we've seen the lack of capabilities for actual work and the abilities for grift and corruption from those Trump likes.

Former President Trump’s top allies are preparing to radically reshape the federal government if he is re-elected, purging potentially thousands of civil servants and filling career posts with loyalists to him and his "America First” ideology, people involved in the discussions tell Axios.

The impact could go well beyond typical conservative targets such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Internal Revenue Service. Trump allies are working on plans that would potentially strip layers at the Justice Department — including the FBI, and reaching into national security, intelligence, the State Department and the Pentagon, sources close to the former president say.

During his presidency, Trump often complained about what he called “the deep state.”

The heart of the plan is derived from an executive order known as “Schedule F,” developed and refined in secret over most of the second half of Trump’s term and launched 13 days before the 2020 election.

The reporting for this series draws on extensive interviews over a period of more than three months with more than two dozen people close to the former president, and others who have firsthand knowledge of the work underway to prepare for a potential second term. Most spoke on condition of anonymity to describe sensitive planning and avoid Trump’s ire.

As Trump publicly flirts with a 2024 comeback campaign, this planning is quietly flourishing from Mar-a-Lago to Washington — with his blessing but without the knowledge of some people in his orbit.

Trump remains distracted by his obsession with contesting the 2020 election results. But he has endorsed the work of several groups to prime an administration-in-waiting. Personnel and action plans would be executed in the first 100 days of a second term starting on Jan. 20, 2025.

Their work could accelerate controversial policy and enforcement changes, but also enable revenge tours against real or perceived enemies, and potentially insulate the president and allies from investigation or prosecution.

They intend to stack thousands of mid-level staff jobs. Well-funded groups are already developing lists of candidates selected often for their animus against the system — in line with Trump’s long-running obsession with draining “the swamp.” This includes building extensive databases of people vetted as being committed to Trump and his agenda.

The preparations are far more advanced and ambitious than previously reported. What is happening now is an inversion of the slapdash and virtually non-existent infrastructure surrounding Trump ahead of his 2017 presidential transition.

These groups are operating on multiple fronts: shaping policies, identifying top lieutenants, curating an alternative labor force of unprecedented scale, and preparing for legal challenges and defenses that might go before Trump-friendly judges, all the way to a 6-3 Supreme Court.

It's all based around recategorizing up to 50,000 employees so he can shit-can anybody he wants.

Trump signed an executive order, “Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service,” in October 2020, which established a new employment category for federal employees. It received wide media coverage for a short period, then was largely forgotten in the mayhem and aftermath of Jan. 6 — and quickly was rescinded by President Biden.

Sources close to Trump say that if he were elected to a second term, he would immediately reimpose it.

Tens of thousands of civil servants who serve in roles deemed to have some influence over policy would be reassigned as “Schedule F” employees. Upon reassignment, they would lose their employment protections.

New presidents typically get to replace more than 4,000 so-called “political” appointees to oversee the running of their administrations. But below this rotating layer of political appointees sits a mass of government workers who enjoy strong employment protections — and typically continue their service from one administration to the next, regardless of the president’s party affiliation.

An initial estimate by the Trump official who came up with Schedule F found it could apply to as many as 50,000 federal workers — a fraction of a workforce of more than 2 million, but a segment with a profound role in shaping American life.

Trump, in theory, could fire tens of thousands of career government officials with no recourse for appeals. He could replace them with people he believes are more loyal to him and to his “America First” agenda.

Even if Trump did not deploy Schedule F to this extent, the very fact that such power exists could create a significant chilling effect on government employees.

It would effectively upend the modern civil service, triggering a shock wave across the bureaucracy. The next president might then move to gut those pro-Trump ranks — and face the question of whether to replace them with her or his own loyalists, or revert to a traditional bureaucracy.

…completing our return to the Gilded Age (or thereabouts).

[LFC]

Interesting analysis of Peter Thiel. Short summary is that he's a straight up fascist who very much believes in superior vs. inferior classes as the natural order of things.

Peter Thiel is a fascist. There’s really no better word for what he is. For some reason, people have a lot of trouble grasping this or just coming out and saying it.

In his biography of Thiel, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power, Max Chafkin writes, “The Thiel ideology is complicated and, in parts, self-contradictory, and will take many of the pages that follow to explore, but it combines an obsession with technological progress with nationalist politics—a politics that at times has seemingly flirted with white supremacy.” Let’s see, we’ve go some futurism, nationalism, maybe a little bit of racism here and there…hmm, what does that all add up to? What a mystery this guy is!

In a recent piece for the Washington Post about Thiel’s support for populist candidates like Greg Sargent writes:

At first glance, it’s hard to discern why Thiel is heavily investing in them. Thiel is sometimes described as a radical libertarian, while Masters and Vance represent a form of conservative populism that is supposedly hostile to libertarianism and envisions the robust use of state power to fight liberal cultural enemies wherever necessary.

Where to begin? First of all, yes, Thiel’s libertarianism is about freedom—freedom for him and people like him, the entrepreneurial elite of the capitalist class. He’s openly antidemocratic. In an essay for the Cato Institute, Thiel once wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible…” Why? Because if you empower the demos, they will eventually vote for restrictions on the power of capitalists. and therefore, restrictions on their “freedom.” He continues, “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy‘ into an oxymoron.” In that 2009 essay, Thiel imagines a kind of futurist program of utopian projects “beyond politics” in cyberspace or “seasteading,” but it’s clear now he’s returned to believing in politics, or at least an anti-political form of politics.

The brand of radical libertarianism favored by Thiel and his crony Curtis Yarvin has long looked to crackpot authoritarian solutions that would enable unalloyed capitalist domination. In the ’90s, Murray Rothbard, who took his primary political inspiration from the America First movement, conceived of a “Right-Wing Populist” strategy that envisioned a Trump-like figure who could “short-circuit” the political establishment and smash the remnants of the New Deal order. He also made common cause on occasion with holocaust deniers. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Rothbard’s protege, has advocated monarchism and “covenant communities” organized on essentially totalitarian basis. His book Democracy: The God That Failed divides humanity into producers and subhuman, parasitic “pests.”

But being anti-democratic is one thing, but how could the libertarian, the defender of individual freedom, the believer in the market ever really be a fascist, an ideology that celebrates the collective masses and the state? I think part of the problem is that there is still a very cartoonish notion of what actually-existing fascism looked like.

[LFC]

Merrick Garland says the DOJ is investigating and calls it "the most wide-ranging investigation" in the agency's history. He also said Trump is not immune from prosecution. We'll see.

The Justice Department plans to prosecute anyone who was “criminally responsible for interfering with the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to another,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said Tuesday, speaking more expansively than he has previously about a federal criminal investigation that appears to have moved far beyond the rioters who attacked the Capitol.

In an exclusive interview with “NBC Nightly News” anchor Lester Holt, Garland said that the televised hearings by the House Jan. 6 committee highlighted “the truth of what happened … and what a risk it meant for our democracy.” And he acknowledged that Justice Department investigators learned things from the congressional testimony.

“Look, the Justice Department has been doing the most wide-ranging investigation in its history,” he said. “And the committee is doing an enormously wide-ranging investigation as well. It is inevitable that there will be things that they find before we have found them. And it’s inevitable that there will be things we find that they haven’t found. That’s what happens when you have two wide-ranging investigations going on at the same time.”

“The indictment of a former president, and perhaps a candidate for president, would arguably tear the country apart,” Holt said. “Is that your concern as you make your decision down the road here, do you have to think about things like that?”

Garland replied: “We intend to hold everyone, anyone who was criminally responsible for the events surrounding Jan. 6, for any attempt to interfere with the lawful transfer of power from one administration to another, accountable. That’s what we do. We don’t pay any attention to other issues with respect to that.”

[LFC]

A bit of a look at the philosophy driving the Republican Party towards autocracy and the clown who has been pushing it for a long time.

President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election were brazenly antidemocratic. Yet Trump and his supporters nonetheless justified their actions under the dubious pretense of preserving American democracy – as a matter of getting the vote right, of reversing voter fraud.

There’s a good reason they took this approach. Authoritarianism has long been rejected across the political spectrum. Democrats and Republicans routinely lob insults like “dictator” or “fascist” to describe politicians of the other party who are in power.

But in recent months, a strand of conservative thought whose adherents are forthright in their disdain for democracy has started to creep into GOP politics. It’s called “neoreaction,” and its leading figure, a software engineer and blogger named Curtis Yarvin, has ties to at least two GOP U.S. Senate candidates, along with Peter Thiel, a major GOP donor.

In my years researching the far right, I see this as one of the more significant developments in right-wing politics. Someone who calls himself a monarchist isn’t being relegated to the fringes of the internet. He’s being interviewed by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and has U.S. Senate candidates repeating his talking points.

A political philosophy is born

In 2007, Yarvin launched his blog, “Unqualified Reservations.” Writing under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, he produced a prodigious corpus of political philosophy.

In his writings, Yarvin cites his political influences. They include the 19th-century political philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who disdained democracy and thought it could too easily veer into mob rule; American 20th-century political theorist James Burnham, who became convinced that elites would come to control the country’s politics while couching their interests in democratic rhetoric; and economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who, in his 2001 book “Democracy: The God That Failed,” wrote of how all organizations – irrespective of size – are best managed by a single executive.

Yarvin is perhaps best known for his concept of “the cathedral” – his term for the U.S. ruling regime. Yarvis argues that virtually all opinion-makers, most notably those in academia and journalism, are essentially “reading the same book.” In an essay for Tablet Magazine, Yarvin wrote that what’s often characterized as the “marketplace of ideas” is actually a “monoculture” that props up an oligarchy.

The cathedral is self-reinforcing: Individual journalists and professors are rewarded when they follow the ruling ethos. Those who do otherwise risk being punished or at the very least face diminished career prospects.

Another important neoreactionary figure is Nick Land, whose main contribution to the philosophy is the concept of accelerationism. In essence, accelerationism is based on Vladimir Lenin’s notion that “worse is better.” The Russian revolutionary maintained that the more chaotic conditions became, the greater the likelihood that his Bolshevik party could accomplish its goals.

Analogously, right-wing accelerationists believe that they can hasten the demise of liberal democratic governments by stoking political tension.

[pnwguy]

This is a long interview and Q&A with Malcolm Nance. If you're not as interested in his perspective of the Ukraine war, from his position as a volunteer in the fight, skip to about the 20 minute mark. But the bluntness of his view of where the US is, in terms of the furies Trumpism has released, is both enlightening and alarming.

[LFC]

Jul 28, 2022 14:41:48 GMT pnwguy said:

This is a long interview and Q&A with Malcolm Nance. If you're not as interested in his perspective of the Ukraine war, from his position as a volunteer in the fight, skip to about the 20 minute mark. But the bluntness of his view of where the US is, in terms of the furies Trumpism has released, is both enlightening and alarming.

Man, his opinion on Merrick Garland (starting at 1:01:22) is unsparing.

I followed up by watching another interview with him and he was even more brutal about Garland. You can pick up at 2:50 for his laying out of the DOJ. Here's my transcript of the first part.

"The problem is we have a governmental system right now that is so institutionalized, has set it back as an institution, and I'm speaking of you the Justice Department, that what should have been emergency, emergency, investigations into a conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States should have already been out bringing people in before grand juries and issuing indictments.  The urgency of the defense of American democracy went out the window with the appointment of Merrick Garland. And I know he's going to get a lot of grief but we find out from reporting from MSNBC in the last day that he sent a memo saying that very thing; he will not carry out investigations as elections are coming in. That means you have stopped the wheels of American justice. You have stopped it in deference to people who tried to overthrow the American government."

He follows up with good reasoning why he doesn't believe Garland is moving.

"I can only say, from what I see, if there are lawyers at Justice who are neck deep in going out and running secret grand juries then this is the tightest ship in the history of the United States over at the Justice Department. I don't believe that for one second. None of the American public who are watching this believes it for one second."
Here's that interview.

[LFC]

I put this here because hostage taking and hurting unrelated people for revenge are tools of fascism. (In full due to paywall.)

The modern GOP’s sheer level of political cynicism is simply remarkable. I noted this morning that in retaliation for Dems outwitting Mitch McConnell with their climate bill House Republicans voted against the semiconductors bill most of them actually support. In the event, 24 House Republicans bucked their leadership and voted for the bill. All Democrats voted for the bill save for one who voted “present.” Now we hear from Susan Collins that Dems’ legislative coup now likely means Republicans won’t allow a vote on the bill to protect same sex marriage rights. “I just think the timing could not have been worse and it came totally out of the blue,” Collins HuffPost, explaining that it will now be much harder for her and other GOP moderates to secure GOP votes.

Politics ain’t beanbag, as they say. Certainly it’s not unknown to condition support for one piece of legislation on the passage or blockage of another. But same sex married couples in the United States should either have protections or they shouldn’t. In the most brass tacks sense Democrats have what they want here. They managed to pass the CHIPS bill which actually has deep bipartisan support. They are also on their way to passing a health care and climate bill, though I would not consider it a done deal until it’s actually a done deal. Killing the marriage bill doesn’t undo either. The Schumer-Manchin compromise may still come apart. But it won’t be because Senate Republicans decided to stick it to same sex couples to make a point. If anything, it is likely a marginal political advantage for Democrats to be able to take the issue to the voters in November. The move really amounts to saying, “Don’t screw with us. Because we’ll hurt people if you do.”

There is a revealing assumption in our current politics, widespread and bipartisan though not often stated in so many words, that it is up to Democrats to handle things that are in the normal course of decency or responsibility. Republicans need to get something in return. That, after all, was what so many legislative hostage takings and debt ceiling dramas have been about. This sounds on its face like the kind of overheated partisan rhetoric one often hears from both sides of the political aisle about the other. But this one is really true. Not a few Republicans really believe that same sex marriages are wrong or at least shouldn’t be put on an equal par by the state with opposite sex marriages. But clearly at least ten Republicans don’t believe that and would have been fine with allowing this bill to pass. But now that may be off because of this climate bill. The CHIPS bill itself is hardly something that excited progressive partisans. It’s more about macroeconomics and reducing US dependency on China, both in economic and national security terms. But Republicans were ready to scuttle it unless Democrats agreed not to pass completely unrelated legislation with their own votes.

That’s just how it is. That’s how they operate.