Random Blogging – Page 32

A Partisan Political Pitch

Warning: the following is a partisan political screed….

As many of you know, I left the Republican Party in 2000, when I foolishly believed that the GOP had hit bottom with George W. Bush. (If you’d told me that twenty years later I would look back on George with something approaching fondness, I’d have said you were crazy…)

In the intervening years, I’ve all too often found myself voting for Hoosier candidates I considered the lesser of two evils–people running for Governor or Senator who were at least not crazy.(I know–low bar.) But this year–okay, really next year–I am in a very different place. There are Democratic candidates for both offices that I am enthusiastically supporting, and I am especially involved with and supportive of Marc Carmichael’s campaign for the U.S. Senate.

Last night, I was one of several co-hosts for a fundraiser for Marc, and I introduced him to an unusually large turnout for what was a relatively high-ticket event. As I explained to a crowd of some eighty attendees, sometime in late July, I’d read an announcement by a guy I’d never heard of, named Marc Carmichael. He was running for U.S. Senate, and his announcement listed his top twelve priorities.

I agreed with every single one of them.

In a conversation about the upcoming elections, I told a friend of mine what I’d read. I’d have left it there, but he said we should meet this person, and he arranged a lunch for the three of us–something that would never have occurred to me.

We lunched.

We met a down-to-earth, engaging man with an excellent grasp of the issues–and, importantly, a politically savvy man with significant elective and legislative experience, who very clearly understands the challenges that face Democrats in Indiana. (You can read about his priorities and experience here.)

As those of you who are regular readers of this blog already know, I was hooked.

Jim Banks, who will be Marc’s Republican opponent, is a male version of Margery Taylor Green. He is one of the crazy Right-wingers currently threatening to shut down the government–a pro-gun, anti-abortion (with no exceptions!), anti-“woke” MAGA culture warrior who has endorsed Trump and called President Biden “corrupt.”

Hoosier voter’s choice is clear: sane and hardworking versus crazy and embarrassing.

In his speech at our fundraiser (interrupted several times by applause), Marc said he wanted to go to Washington to actually do the job. That line reminded me of something my own political experience has taught me: some people pursue public office because they want to do something–the job– and others just want to “be someone.” Marc has thrown his hat into this particular ring because, like many of us, he has grandchildren and he wants to leave them a habitable planet and a country in which they can flourish.

It is so refreshing to work for a candidate you can respect and admire, rather than someone you support because he or she is the lesser of two evils. Defeating Banks would certainly provide me with political motivation, but defeating him with a first-rate candidate would be icing on the cake.

So, I’m all-in on this campaign, and I am convinced that–assuming Marc can raise enough money to get his message out–he can win, even in Red Indiana.

Here’s my partisan pitch: go to the linked website, or to my previous post on Marc’s priorities. If you agree that he’s the “real deal,” and you share my opinion that Banks is appalling, volunteer or send money.

About the money: Marc doesn’t need to match the Club for Growth and Banks’ other far-right funders, but he needs enough to get his message out. The data I’ve seen confirms that most Hoosiers agree with that message–but they need to hear it. Marc has been out of elective office for many years, and when voters hear his name, they need to know who he is, what he’s done, and what priorities he will support.

Send him money.

If you are a reader of this blog who sees the world as I do, I’m asking you to trust me on this, and to put your money where our common political hopes and aspirations are.

Candidates in places more purple than Indiana won’t have trouble raising enough money to compete in 2024. We Hoosiers need to fund a repeat of 2008 –when Barack Obama won Indiana– by funding and electing Democrats as Governor and Senator in 2024. It’s time.

We CAN do this!

This blog will return to its usual preachy-ness on the issues tomorrow…..

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It’s Still Kool-Aid

Trying to figure out social trends while you are living through them is sort of like being in the eye of a hurricane and trying to predict which way the wind’s blowing.

Since the 2020 elections, media mentions of QAnon have abated. Those of us who shook our heads over gunmen raiding pizza parlors and “patriots” attacking the U.S. Capitol have been inclined to breathe a sigh of relief, assuming that lack of sightings meant diminishing numbers of believers.

Of course, it’s never that simple, as a recent article in the Guardian explained.

QAnon appeared in 2017 and quickly spread through the far right, before beginning to wane in the wake of Joe Biden’s inauguration.

But it hasn’t disappeared entirely, and understanding the conspiracy theory’s rise and fall – and the awful legacy it has left us – reveals a great deal about the modern landscape of partisan paranoia. It also offers some clues on how best to fight back.

QAnon seized the public’s imagination in 2017, exploding from an anonymous forum on one of the internet’s most notorious websites and becoming a popular conspiracy theory. The figure of “Q” first appeared on the message board 4chan – a website where anonymous users posted hardcore pornography and racial slurs – claiming tobe a high-level intelligence officer. (Later Q would move to the equally vile site 8kun.)

QAnon posited a conspiracy by the so-called deep state–composed, in several versions, of Democratic pedophiles who drank children’s blood. (The child trafficking had to involve sexual abuse and ritual murder so that the participants could harvest a chemical “elixir of youth,” called adrenochrome.) The deep state was intent upon undermining the presidency of Donald Trump – but that dastardly effort was being countered by someone called Q and other “patriots.”

I think I hear the music from “Twilight Zone”….

QAnon borrows heavily from the rhetoric of the End Times–a rhetoric that evidently prompted something in 1844 called the “Great Disappointment”–so named because thousands of people had prepared themselves for the Second Coming of Christ. It’s also in the apocalyptic fiction of the Left Behind series.

In the days before the 2020 election, a Yahoo News/YouGov poll found that fully half of Trump’s supporters believed that top Democrats were “involved in an elite child sex trafficking ring” and that Trump was working to “dismantle” that same Democrat-led conspiracy. And despite the ludicrous and defamatory nature of the conspiracy theory, Trump seemed to embrace it; during a town hall event in October of 2020, NBC’s Savannah Guthrie repeatedly offered him a chance to denounce the movement and Trump refused.

Speaking of “Great Disappointments,” it became harder to sustain the QAnon fantasy after Trump was removed from office. As one pundit noted, “unleashing the purge of the deep state over Twitter doesn’t really work when he’s not the president any more, and he’s not on Twitter any more.” But..

even as the original storyline “came to a natural end”, there was immediately “the emergence of the stolen election movement, and they found their next thing. It really went really seamlessly from one thing to another.” The movement no longer needed “the codes and the drops and the props and the cryptic stuff”. And without the mystic clues and portents, many of the ideas that first gained strength through Q drops have gone mainstream. They have percolated into the public discourse, embraced by many in the Republican party, and no longer need to involve any actual reference to Q or 4chan.

People who were vulnerable to QAnon idiocy are now part of the MAGA mainstream, and elements of the conspiracy theory have been absorbed into Rightwing talking points.

Last week, the Florida governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis told supporters at a barbecue in New Hampshire: “We’re going to have all of these deep state people, you know, we are going to start slitting throats on day one.”

While such violent rhetoric is primarily directed at Democrats, the article reminds readers that “QAnon, like many other conspiracy theories, traffics heavily in antisemitism: tropes about “puppet masters” controlling everything, along with constant references to George Soros and the Rothschild family.”

Karl Popper coined the term “conspiracy theory” in the 1940s, explaining that it is a quasi-theological outlook.

While a shadowy cabal controlling your every action from behind the scenes may seem terrifying, it offers a narrative and an explanation for the way the world works. And this is what QAnon was and continues to be to its believers: proof that there’s a plan (even if not entirely divine), which in turn gives them hope, and meaning.

As the article concludes, “That’s a far more powerful drug than adrenochrome, and weaning adherents off of it will take real work.”

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Flooding The Zone

Times are tough for us Free Speech defenders ….

It’s bad enough that so few Americans understand either the protections or the limitations of the First Amendment’s Free Speech provisions. Fewer still can distinguish between hate speech and hate crimes. And even lawyers dedicated to the protection of our constitutional right to publicly opine and debate recognize the existence of grey zones.

When the Internet first became ubiquitous, I celebrated this new mechanism for expression. I saw it as a welcome new development in the “marketplace of ideas.” What I didn’t see was its potential for the spread of deliberate propaganda.

Color me disabused.

Steve Bannon coined the phrase that explains what we are seeing: “flooding the zone with shit.” Rather than inventing a story to counter explanations with which one disagrees, the new approach–facilitated by bots and AI– simply produces immense amounts of conflicting and phony “information” which is then uploaded to social media and other sites. The goal is no longer to make people believe “story A” rather than “story B.” The goal is to create a population that no longer knows what to believe.

It’s a tactic that has infected American politics and made governing close to impossible–but it is not a tactic confined to the U.S. It’s global.

Heather Cox Richardson has summed up the resulting threat:

A report published last week by the European Commission, the body that governs the European Union, says that when X, the company formerly known as Twitter, got rid of its safety standards, Russian disinformation on the site took off. Lies about Russia’s war against Ukraine spread to at least 165 million people in the E.U. and allied countries like the U.S., and garnered at least 16 billion views. The study found that Instagram, Telegram, and Facebook, all owned by Meta, also spread pro-Kremlin propaganda that uses hate speech and boosts extremists.

The report concluded that “the Kremlin’s ongoing disinformation campaign not only forms an integral part of Russia’s military agenda, but also causes risks to public security, fundamental rights and electoral processes” in the E.U. The report’s conclusions also apply to the U.S., where the far right is working to undermine U.S. support for Ukraine by claiming—falsely—that U.S. aid to Ukraine means the Biden administration is neglecting emergencies at home, like the fires last month in Maui.

Russian operatives famously flooded social media with disinformation to influence the 2016 U.S. election, and by 2022 the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) warned that China had gotten into the act. Today, analyst Clint Watts of Microsoft reported that in the last year, China has honed its ability to generate artificial images that appear to be U.S. voters, using them to stoke “controversy along racial, economic, and ideological lines.” It uses social media accounts to post divisive, AI-created images that attack political figures and iconic U.S. symbols.

Once upon a time, America could depend upon two large oceans to protect us from threats from abroad. Those days are long gone, and our contemporary isolationists–who refuse to understand, for example, how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could affect us–utterly fail to recognize that opposing our new global reality doesn’t make it go away.

The internet makes it possible to deliver disinformation on a scale never previously available–or imagined. And it poses a very real problem for those of us who defend freedom of speech, because most of the proposed “remedies” I’ve seen would make things worse.

This nation’s Founders weren’t naive; they understood that ideas are powerful, and that bad ideas can do real harm. They opted for freedom of speech–defined in our system as freedom from government censorship– because they also recognized that allowing government to decide which ideas could be exchanged would be much more harmful.

I still agree with the Founders’ decision, but even if I didn’t, current communication technology has largely made government control impossible. (I still recall a conversation I had with two students at a Chinese university that had invited me to speak. I asked them about China’s control of the Internet and they laughed, telling me that any “tech savvy” person could evade state controls–and that many did. And that was some 18 years ago.)

At this poiint, we have to depend upon those who manage social media platforms to monitor what their users post, which is why egomaniacs like Elon Musk–who champions a “free speech” he clearly doesn’t understand–are so dangerous.

Ultimately, we will have to depend upon the ability of the public to separate the wheat from the chaff–and the ability to do that requires a level of civic literacy that has thus far eluded us….

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Left, Right And The Need For Certainty

I have a theory.

Way back when, when I was in college, a distant cousin of mine earned the opprobrium of the rest of our large, extended family by joining the university’s Young Socialist organization and participating in protests that received significant negative media coverage and prompted politically motivated and ultimately dismissed criminal charges. Interestingly, at the time, and despite the fact that I was one of the clan’s most politically conservative members, I was a lonely voice defending his exercise of his constitutional rights…

Fast forward some thirty plus years, and that cousin had morphed into an equally enthusiastic–and dogmatic– right-winger. He’d become a rightwing caricature. (I haven’t seen him in years, so don’t know whether he went “all the way” and embraced Trump and MAGA.)

I thought about that cousin’s ideological transformation when I read Michelle Goldberg’s recent review of Naomi Klein’s book “Doppleganger.” Klein traced the similar political turn of Naomi Wolf, with whom Klein has often been confused. Wolf, for those who are unfamiliar with her, was a once-liberal feminist icon who turned into an anti-vax Steve Bannon sidekick.

Klein and Wolf, both brown-haired middle-aged Jewish women writers, are often mistaken for each other. That became a growing problem for Klein as her reputation was tainted by Wolf’s escalating lunacy. Trapped at home by the pandemic, Klein became increasingly obsessed by Wolf’s transformation into a heroine of Covid truthers.

That obsession, in turn, guides Klein into an examination of what she calls “the Mirror World,” the vertigo-inducing inversion of reality common to contemporary far-right movements. Think, for example, of Vladimir Putin claiming that he’s liberating Ukraine from fascism or Donald Trump howling that his multiple prosecutions are a racist plot to subvert a presidential election. When I spoke to Klein recently, she described how jarring it was to watch protests against Covid measures appropriating left-wing language — common slogans were “I can’t breathe” and “My body, my choice” — making them “this weird doppelganger of the movements that I had been a part of and supported.”

Klein’s book explores this “upside-down” world, attributing the exchange of beliefs largely held by those on the political left to an equally firm adherence to those on the right, to

a half-joking formula to explain onetime leftists or liberals who migrate to the authoritarian right: “Narcissism(Grandiosity) + Social media addiction + Midlife crisis ÷ Public shaming = Right wing meltdown.”

I have a somewhat different take on these transitions, undoubtedly influenced by my observation of the U-turn taken by my cousin. If there are any psychiatrists or other mental health professionals reading this, I’d welcome your reaction to my theory.

Here’s my analysis.

We live–as we all recognize–in a time of rapid social change. Those changes challenge the various verities with which most of us were raised, and with which we have become comfortable. Every day, it seems, we encounter evidence questioning–or worse, disproving– things that we have believed to be fact. We are absolutely marinating in ambiguity–we live in a world that is increasingly painted in shades of gray, and in which we enounter proliferating evidence that what we knew wasn’t really so.

Some people can cope with that growing lack of certainty. Others cannot. It has nothing to do–again, in my humble opinion–with intellect or its lack.

Think about the number of highly intelligent, prominent people who began as Conservatives and now are Liberals–and those who have migrated in the other direction. (I’ll exclude politicians–like Ronald Reagan–whose transitions might be attributed to political advantage.) Lefties who, like my cousin, became right-wingers include people like Irving Kristol, Jean Kirkpatric and David Horowitz…

None of these people are dummies. But if I was a wagering woman, I would bet that all of them share a profound need for certainty and a corresponding terror of ambivalence and ambiguity– a deep need for a world that can be understood in shades of black and white, right and wrong, correct and erroneous.

When emerging realities fundamentally challenge beliefs held by people who are uncomfortable with ambiguity, those peoople are much more likely to substitute a different, equally firm belief system than they are to accept the complications and confusions that accompany uncertainty. The content of the ideology is ultimately less important than its function, which is to provide a predictable, permanent foundation for encountering and interpreting the world around them.

Sometimes, as Klein notes, that “exchange” of belief systems is prompted by negative events. In Wolf’s case, it was evidently negative publicity over inaccuracies in a book.

Whatever the trigger, a deep-seated need for orthodoxy–for a firm belief system to cling to– explains a lot….

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This!

As regular readers of my daily rants know, I’m not a fan of organized religion–quite the contrary. And I’m definitely not a fan of the faux “Christianity”– more properly identified as Christian Nationalism–that permeates the MAGA movement.

But I am a fan of some actual Christians–especially the members of the clergy desperately working to remind their colleagues and congregants of the basic messages of the Christian faith. I have several personal friends who fall into that category, and I follow a couple of others on social media. One of the latter is John Pavlovitz, and I was so impressed with a recent “sermon” he delivered via the Internet that I’m going to quote rather copiously from it.

The title of the piece was “No, I Won’t Agree To Disagree About You Supporting Trump. You’re Just Wrong.” The ensuing message did two important things: it underlined the ways in which MAGA Republicanism is inconsistent with traditional Christian teaching; and it explained what all those nice people who want to bridge American political disagreements fail to understand–these arguments aren’t political. They are deeply moral–and accordingly, unbridgeable.

As Pavlovitz writes, we can’t simply “agree to disagree” because that would be tantamount to a declaration that “we both have equally valid opinions, that we’re each mutually declaring those opinions not so divergent that they cannot be abided; that our relationship is of greater value than the differences”–and as he says, that really isn’t an accurate description.

We are not simply declaring mismatched preferences regarding something inconsequential. We’re not talking about who has the best offensive line in the NFL, or whether Van Halen was better with Dave or Sammy, or about what craft beer pairs best with a cheesesteak, or about the sonic differences of CDs and vinyl. On such matters (though I will provide spirited debate), I can tolerate dissension.

We’re not even talking about clear misalignments on very important things: how to best address climate change or what will fix our healthcare system or how to reduce our national debt or what it will take to bring racial equity. Those subjects, while critically important, still have room for constructive debate and differing solutions. They are mendable fractures.

But this, this runs far deeper and into the marrow of who we each are.

At this point, with the past few years as a resume, your alignment with the former president means that we are fundamentally disconnected on what is morally acceptable—and I’ve simply seen too much to explain that away or rationalize your intentions or give you the benefit of the doubt any longer.

Pavlovitz understands what allegiance to Trump and MAGA tells us about those loyalists: that they don’t value the lives of people of color or women, that they distrust/dismiss science, and that they are willing to distort and betray the faith they loudly profess.

I now can see how pliable your morality is, the kinds of compromises you’re willing to make, the ever-descending bottom you’re following into, in order to feel victorious in a war you don’t even know why you’re fighting.

That’s why I need you to understand that this isn’t just a schism on one issue or a single piece of legislation, as those things would be manageable. This isn’t a matter of politics or preference. This is a pervasive, sprawling, saturating separation about the way we see the world and what we value and how we want to move through this life.

Agreeing to disagree with you in these matters, would mean silencing myself and more importantly, betraying the people who bear the burdens of your political affiliations— and this is not something I’m willing to do. Our relationship matters greatly to me, but if it has to be the collateral damage of standing with them, I’ll have to see that as acceptable.

Your devaluing of black lives is not an opinion.
Your acceptance of falsehoods is not an opinion.
Your defiance of facts in a pandemic is not an opinion.
Your hostility toward immigrants is not an opinion.
These are fundamental heart issues.

As he concludes:

I believe you’re wrong in ways that are harming people.
You’re wrong to deny the humanity of other human beings.
You’re wrong to justify your affiliation with this violence.
You’re wrong to embrace a movement built on the worst parts of who we are.

Pavlovitz refuses to “agree to disagree” about such profound moral differences.

To which this atheist says: AMEN.

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