Random Blogging – Page 19

About Those “Outsiders”

In Indiana, Republican candidates for Governor and Congress are spending megabucks on increasingly horrifying political ads. (Forget “dog whistles”–the ads for Governor, especially, are blatantly racist). Although it’s difficult to choose the very worst, a candidate for Congress in Indiana’s Fifth District probably wins that close vote: he faults the incumbent for sending tax dollars to Ukraine when we have an enormous problem in the U.S.– trans women competing in women’s sports.

Glad he has a sense of proportion…

Interestingly, the gubernatorial candidates’ attacks on each other have been for taking the few positions with which I actually agree, a tactic that certainly shows what they believe their base Republican voters think. If they’re correct, those voters are “base” in both senses of the word.

If there is a “through line” in these awful ads, however, it is the repeated claims to be “outsiders” rather than “career politicians.” It’s a laughable label for most of them: Braun has been a Senator for six years (granted, an undistinguished one, but it’s been six years) and he was a state legislator before that; Crouch was a County Auditor, served nine years in Indiana’s legislature and is currently Lieutenant Governor; Brad Chambers–who has really leaned on his “outsider” status–was Indiana’s Secretary of Commerce. Etc.

Not only are these claims to outsider status bogus, they’re stupid. Would you hire a job applicant who proudly proclaimed ignorance of your business and emphasized a prior lack of experience?

James Briggs recently addressed this issue, somewhat tangentially, in a column for the Indianapolis Star. Briggs was talking about his opposition to term limits–an opposition I share–but his reasoning is pertinent to the posturing of these “outsider” candidates. As he wrote:

State Rep. Chuck Goodrich, a Republican running in Indiana’s 5th District primary against Rep. Victoria Spartz, recently bragged about signing a term limits pledge, adding, “It’s time to break the grip of career politicians & ensure elected officials serve the people, not their own interests!”

That’s completely wrong.

A 2006 National Conference of State Legislatures report looked at states with legislative term limits and concluded “high turnover and relative inexperience create a steep learning curve for committee chairs and members, who are often less knowledgeable than their predecessors,” which “can result in increased influence by staff, bureaucrats and lobbyists.”

Essentially, term limits take power from the career politicians and hand it over to people who are less accountable to the public.

In Congress, the “newbies” are inevitably dependent upon and influenced by Congressional staff, who are familiar with the arcane rules of that body– and unelected by and unknown to the voting public.

Much like term limits, it’s popular to say the government should run like a business. I can’t think of any other economic sector where you’d find strong agreement for the statement, “The more experience you have, the worse you must be at your job.” We have a lot of job openings at IndyStar and I can assure you no one is running around yelling, “Find me some journalism outsiders!”

Briggs points out what most of us know: a professional body is more effective when it’s run by people who know what they’re doing.

The longer lawmakers serve in those jobs, the more they can learn how to navigate complex webs of rules and systems. They can also gain policy expertise, which is helpful for creating laws affecting virtually every part of people’s lives. They can develop relationships to help advance their goals.

The problems we face with government, especially in Indiana, aren’t a result of legislative longevity: they are a result of gerrymandering and low voter turnout. Briggs is dead-on with this paragraph:

Obviously, some elected officials don’t deserve to stay in office forever. The ills attributed to unlimited elected terms can more appropriately be linked to partisan gerrymandering, which creates safe spaces for ineffective, lazy and corrupt officials to win election after election. Yes, term limits would eventually knock those people out. So would competitive elections.

Let me repeat that last sentence: So would competitive elections.

I miss “career politicians” like Dick Lugar and Lee Hamilton. Joe Biden has been able to pass transformative legislation because he is a “career politician” who understands how government works, and how to get things done. I don’t know which of Indiana’s “know-nothing” Republicans will wind up on the general election ballot, but this year, for once, the Democrats have an unusually strong state ticket featuring experienced public servants who actually know how government works and what the positions they’re running for entail. They are also right on the issues.

Vote Blue, and make the GOP candidates actual outsiders.

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The “Great Replacement” Fixation

I first encountered the “Great Replacement” theory when I read about the neo-Nazi, “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville. The marchers–bearing tiki torches–reportedly chanted “Jews will not replace us.” (Those chanting were subsequently called “very fine people” by then-President Donald Trump.)

Since I never watch Fox News, I’d missed Tucker Carlson’s full-throated endorsement of that particular conspiracy theory, but as time as passed, I’ve come to understand its roots, and the reason it appeals to White Americans terrified by the prospect of losing cultural dominance. America’s demographics are changing, and it is probable that Whites will be a minority population within a few years. Meanwhile, legal and cultural changes have allowed women and minority folks–Blacks, Jews, Latinos, LGBTQ+ citizens–to become more prominent. Television anchors, elected officials, movie stars and various other celebrities increasingly come from groups that have been previously marginalized.

It’s no longer possible to ignore these changes.

The result is a palpable panic on the part of those Whites–mostly men, but also some women–who believe that their rightful place in society has been usurped. And that fear of replacement, that realization that they will need to share status with people they disparage, requires a villain. It can’t simply be an accident that “those people” are gaining in numbers and influence. It must be a plot!!

Jamelle Bouie recently wrote about Elon Musk’s obvious fascination with and belief in the “Great Replacement Theory.” Musk recently elevated a slick propaganda film pushing the theory on X (formerly Twitter), confirming the devolution of that site into a cesspool of far-Right anti-Semitism and racism.

Musk is especially preoccupied with the racial makeup of the country and the alleged deficiency of nonwhites in important positions. He blames the recent problems at Boeing, for example, on its efforts to diversify its work force, despite easily accessible and widely publicized accounts of a dangerous culture of cost-cutting and profit-seeking at the company….

Is diversity the problem at Boeing, or is it a shortsighted obsession with maximizing shareholder value at the expense of quality and safety? Musk, a wealthy shareholder in various companies — including his own, Tesla, which is being sued by Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for allegedly allowing racist abuse of some of its Black employees — says it’s diversity.

Bouie goes on to discuss Musk’s “current obsession” with the “great replacement,” the far-right accusation that liberal elites are “deliberately opening the southern border to nonwhite immigration from Mexico, South and Central America in order to replace the nation’s white majority and secure permanent control of its political institutions.”

The “great replacement” was part of the centerpiece of Tucker Carlson’s message to viewers during his time on Fox News. It is touted by a number of anti-immigrant, white nationalist and white supremacist groups. It was featured prominently at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, where neo-Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us.” And it has inspired at least four separate mass shootings, including the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh (11 killed), the 2019 Christchurch shootings in New Zealand (51 killed), the El Paso shooting the same year (23 killed) and the 2022 supermarket shooting in Buffalo (10 killed).

It should go without saying that the “great replacement” is idiotic. There is no “open border.” There is no effort to “replace” the white population of the United States. Racial diversity is not a plot against the nation’s political institutions. And the underlying assumption of the “great replacement” — that, until recently, the United States was a racially and culturally homogenous nation — is nonsense.

Not only does acceptance of the theory require people to ignore inconvenient facts, it rests–as Bouie points out–on a fundamental fallacy: that racial and ethnic identity also and inevitably translates into political identity. In other words, it assumes that Blacks and Latinos will always vote for Democrats.

I think Bouie has identified the most consequential flaw of today’s GOP.

Republicans used to understand that politics is the art of addition–that winning a political contest requires reaching out to independents and others–including minorities– who haven’t previously voted for you. Instead, MAGA Republicans are doubling down on subtraction; not only do they fail to reach out to members of minorities who might consider supporting their candidates (the Black community, for example, is overall fairly socially conservative), they are even doing their best to expel “RINOs” –including anyone who dares to criticize Trump– from what has become a defensive cult.

The irony is that the GOP is hastening the day when a replacement will actually occur–the replacement of the GOP with a sane center-Right political party.

A large enough defeat in November will speed that process.

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Both/And

A former student sent me a blog post by the singer Carrie Newcomer that coincided with an observation of my own that I’d recently discussed with my husband. (I should note here that this wasn’t a student from my “professoring” days–he’s a student from my high-school English teacher days who still keeps in touch! Talk about making this old lady feel appreciated!!)

Newcomer’s post was titled “Holding the Both/And of Human Possibility,” and began with her description of a trip she’d taken to a small town. Her plane had been delayed, and when she got to the airport, the rental car agencies were closed, the town’s only taxi service was closed for the night, and her hotel was a half-hour drive away. She’d reconciled herself to spending the night in the airport with her coat as a blanket, but then the last couple at baggage claim asked her if she had a ride.

They looked at one another (they had been on my same late flight) and said they would be happy to give me a ride to the hotel. Relief rolled down my shoulders and I told them I would be eternally grateful for their help. So as the last lights were dimming in the airport we packed up the back of their car with our things and headed into town. We talked about that region of the country in the springtime, family, music and traveling and I discovered they were returning home from a trip to Australia. With all the weather delays they were more than thirty hours into traveling, but were heading home right after they dropped me off. They were lovely people. When we reached the hotel I offered to help pay for gas (which they graciously refused) and I gave them as many CDs as they would accept. As they were about to leave I mentioned how grateful I was for their help and grateful that my hotel was on their way home. The woman chuckled and the fellow said, “well actually we live about 45 minutes the other direction” and I realized they had added a full hour to their already brutally long travel day —to help out someone they didn’t know who was going to have to sleep in an airport alone until morning.

Newcomer went on to contrast that kindness with a recent speech in which Trump had made fun of people with various disabilities, and reminded her readers that it was far from the first time “this man has used the dangerous tools of authoritarianism to marginalize, demonize or dehumanize entire groups of people (immigrants, persons of color, women, persons with disabilities, and others).”

The rest of the post is a thought-provoking meditation on how we should live in a world where we inevitably encounter both kinds of people. I encourage you to click through and read the entire post, because it is thoughtful and inspiring–and absolutely true.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I read Newcomer’s essay just after I had shared a similar observation with my husband. After we downsized, we moved into an apartment building in the center of Indianapolis’ downtown. The vast majority of other residents are a very diverse population of young professionals–and I do mean young. And they have been unfailingly kind and considerate. They open doors for us, offer to help us with packages, wish us a good day…From what I can tell, those courtesies extend to each other, even though they represent a very diverse mix of ethnicities, races and even nationalities.

They give me hope.

And then I turn on the news, and see what Carrie Newcomer described so movingly. As a commenter here noted a couple of days ago, it isn’t just Trump. His MAGA supporters are evidence that there are many fearful, limited people who have channeled those fears and limitations into grievance and hate. Worse still, there are so many candidates willing to pander to that hate and encourage those bigotries. (One of the Republican candidates for Indiana Governor is currently running an ad in which Tucker Carlson characterizes Black Lives Matter members as “cop killers.” He ran a previous ad featuring an African student he’d helped, so I presume he thought it inoculated him against charges of racism…)

Both/And…

As Newcomer says, we live at a time when all our daily actions matter for lifting up the potential for goodness. Read the essay.

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Ever Wonder Where MAGAs Get Those T-Shirts?

As regular readers of this blog know, I read a lot of stuff from a lot of very different sources. Mostly, I do so in order to find material to post about, but I also do so because I’m retired, curious and have time but no hobbies– and I’m not much for movies and television viewing.

I mention this because, as I’ve continued to skim available media, I have slowly come to a very concerning conclusion: the MAGA, far-Right takeover of this country is a lot farther along than most normal Americans realize. I alluded to that when I posted about the Heritage Foundation’s willingness to put its appalling Plan 2025 in writing, evidently confident that any blowback to its profoundly anti-democratic, anti-American proposals would be offset by the embrace of millions of committed culture warriors.

Once you look around, you can identify numerous examples of just how far MAGA has penetrated. Trump and McConnell accelerated its capture of the federal courts. Faux News and its proliferating clones provide alternate realities to MAGA folks offended by verifiable facts. Americans continue to retreat into selected tribes. In much of Red America, Christian Nationalism has been normalized.

Then, of course, there’s the considerable cowardice of most Republican office-holders; as Liz Cheney recently said, most of the GOP members of Congress know that Trump is a liar and a danger to the Republic, but they are terrified of his supporters–the current base of the Republican Party.

I’ve recently come across more pedestrian examples, and in a way, I find them even more chilling.

The New Republic recently published a column describing Rightwing business startups. These are businesses that deliberately gear their appeal to the MAGA “tribe.” We’ve evidently come a long way from the time that businesses avoided political identification like the plague, believing that “weighing in” on contested political issues posed an unacceptable risk to their brands. (That belief was so BT: before Trump.) The article focused on two companies: the Black Rifle Coffee Company (intended to become the “Starbucks of the Right”) and Nine Line Apparel.

Black Rifle got seed money from one Brandon Herrera,

a gun YouTuber and DIY machine-gun manufacturer known as the “AK Guy.’” Two weeks ago, after forcing the Republican congressman representing Uvalde, Texas, Tony Gonzales, into a runoff after he dared vote for a gun safety bill, Herrera tweeted, “Texas is done with RINOS. The war starts now.”

It also turns out that a“black rifle” is not a rifle that is black. It’s an AR-15 assault rifle.

You may have seen Black Rifle’s logo–Kyle Rittenhouse was photographed in the company’s t-shirt after bailing out of jail for fatally shooting a Black Lives Matter demonstrator. Or maybe you saw it on pictures of the “Zip Tie Guy” during the January 6th insurrection–the guy who was going to use his zip ties as tools to hog-tie “treasonous” senators–who wore a baseball cap featuring a Black Rifle product.

The linked article suggests that Black Rifle is just the leading edge of “a trend of brands that make fascist aesthetics into a central part of their business strategy.”

ONE COMPANY ORGANIZED ON THE BLACK RIFLE MODEL is both more modest (it booked an estimated $36 million in annual revenue in 2023, compared to BRCC’s $300 million) and more immoderate. None of Evan Hafer’s crisis communications–style hedging for Nine Line Apparel. After visiting their website, my feed immediately began filling up with ads picturing images like the Christmas card trollingly circulated by Gen. George S. Patton’s son, also a general, after the revelation of the My Lai massacre. Beside the inscription “Peace on Earth,” it depicted a stack of Vietnamese corpses. He also passed around a picture of himself posing with a polished skull with a bullet hole above the eye. Dad bods can now sport stuff like that on a hoodie for the low, low price of $47.99, less if you join Nine Line’s “Patriots Club.”

Among Nine Line’s products: a Spartan helmet done up in Darth Vader black above the legend “I’m a patriot. Weapons are part of my religion,” a Blue Lives Matter flag identifying the stripe in the center as the “Barrier between community and lawlessness,” and t-shirts proclaiming that “Family/Faith/Friends/Flag/Firearms” are “5 Things You Don’t Mess With” and an Air Force number that boasts “Dropping warheads on foreheads since 1947.”

As the article correctly notes, these enterprises are further confirmation of the willingness of many Americans to divide the moral universe into “two incommensurate categories—us, who are blamelessly pure, and them, who are dangerous pollutants of that purity.”

Or in the inimitable words of their Lord and Savior Donald Trump, they are “vermin.”

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Technology And Speech: A Conundrum

Americans have always engaged in disinformation. Political foes have historically disparaged each other; activists of the Left and Right have used pamphlets and newspapers, then radio and television, to spread bile and bigotry. Those of us committed to the principles of free speech have argued that–whatever the damage done by propaganda and lies (Big and small), allowing government to censor the marketplace of ideas would be a greater danger.

I recently posted a relatively lengthy defense of that belief, which I continue to firmly hold.

Nevertheless, It’s impossible to ignore the fact that today, technology–especially the Internet–has vastly increased the ability to disseminate lies, misinformation, disinformation and propaganda, and I suspect I am not the only free speech purist who worries about the growth of widely-used sources that enable–indeed, invite and encourage– inaccurate, malicious and hateful communication.

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now “X”) is a prominent example. Musk dispensed with the site’s previous content moderation policies, invited Trump to return, and recently welcomed back the far-right Austrian who received donations from and communicated with the Christchurch terrorist before the 2019 attack. Since Musk purchased the social media site, such far right users have proliferated.

The founder of the so-called Identitarian Movement, Martin Sellner, who preaches the superiority of European ethnic groups, was banned from Twitter in 2020 under the former management along with dozens of other accounts linked to the movement amid criticism over the platform’s handling of extremist content.

He’s back.

As Max Boot recently wrote in the Washington Post, “X (formerly Twitter) has become a cesspool of hate speech and conspiracy-mongering.”

The problem became especially acute following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel when the platform was flooded with antisemitic and anti-Muslim misinformation. It’s like watching a once-nice neighborhood go to seed, with well-maintained houses turning into ramshackle drug dens.

That deterioration of the neighborhood has been confirmed by organizations tracking digital bias:

The Center for Countering Digital Hate reported a surge of extremist content on X since Musk took over in 2022 and fired most of the platform’s content moderators. The center found tweets decrying “race mixing,” denying the Holocaust and praising Adolf Hitler. The thin-skinned tech mogul responded by filing suit; early indications are that the federal judge hearing the case is skeptical of X’s claims.

The focus of Boot’s article wasn’t on the Free Speech implications of bigotry spewed by widely-used social media platforms, but on the fact that taxpayers are essentially subsidizing this particular cesspool.

What galls me is that, as a taxpayer, I wind up subsidizing X’s megalomaniacal and capricious owner, Elon Musk. His privately held company SpaceX is a major contractor — to the tune of many billions of dollars — for the Defense Department, NASA and the U.S. intelligence community. He is also chief executive of Tesla, which benefits from generous government subsidies and tax credits to the electric-vehicle industry.

Musk needs to decide whether he wants to be the next Donald Trump Jr. (i.e., a major MAGA influencer) or the next James D. Taiclet (the little-known CEO of Lockheed Martin, the country’s largest defense contractor). Currently, Musk is trying to do both, and that’s not sustainable. He is presiding over a fire hose of falsehoods on X about familiar right-wing targets, from undocumented immigrants to “the woke mind virus” to President Biden … while reaping billions from Biden’s administration!

Musk is a “front and center” example of the conundrum posed by “Big Tech.” His obvious emotional/mental problems make it tempting to consider him a singular case, but his misuse of X in furtherance of his narcissism is simply a more vivid example of the problem, which is the ability of those who control massive platforms to distort the marketplace of ideas to an extent that has previously been impossible.

I have absolutely no idea what can or should be done to counter the threat to democracy, civic peace and reality that is posed by social media platforms and propaganda sites masquerading as “news.” Wiser heads than mine need to fashion regulations that require responsible moderation without infringing upon the genuine exchanges of opinion–even vile opinion– protected by the First Amendment. Figuring out how to walk that line is clearly beyond my pay grade.

One thing that government can do, however, is refrain from financing people who, like Elon Musk, are using our tax dollars to create division and foster bigotry. The First Amendment may protect his cesspool from sanctions, but it certainly doesn’t require financial support. As Boot concludes, Musk

can espouse views that many Americans find abhorrent, or he can benefit from public largesse. He can’t do both — at least not indefinitely.

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