Speaking Of Lunatics…

Third-party candidates in two-party America share several characteristics, one of which might be called a martyr complex. After all, application of elementary logic leads to the inevitable conclusion that–while such a candidate might manage to be a spoiler depriving one of the major party nominees of success–he or she has zero chance of actually winning.

That logic explains why so many of these “spoiler” candidates are–to put it mildly–less than rational. While some social activists probably run simply to make a point or to bring attention to a pet issue–Ralph Nader comes to mind–  others come to us straight from their private fantasy-lands.

This year, for example, Robert F. Kennedy’s quixotic candidacy comes directly from an alternate universe. If this sad, deluded man was not a member of a storied political family, he’d have been escorted off the public stage a long time ago. As an article in Mother Jones recently pointed out, his distance from reality isn’t limited to his anti-vaccine beliefs, and far too much of the media coverage of his campaign has served to normalize this very abnormal man.

He’s a conspiracy theorist who has made a lot of money pushing baseless or disproven notions about vaccines, Covid, and other hot-button subjects. At the start of his 2024 presidential bid, the media reported his history as a disinformationalist on multiple fronts. Yet now he’s largely covered as another character in the ongoing presidential horse race.

Most of the recent stories about him focus on his standing in the polls, what voters he’s attracting, and speculation regarding his potential impact on the outcome. In such pieces, his extreme conspiracism is often not conveyed fully and sometimes not even mentioned. A recent Washington Post story on Kennedy family members endorsing President Joe Biden noted in mild fashion that  RFK Jr. “has embraced controversial, unfounded claims on issues including vaccines and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.” A Wall Street Journal article on chaos within his campaign merely said Kennedy “has promoted conspiracy theories—in particular on vaccines—and espouses political views from across the spectrum.” A New York Times piece referred to him as a “vaccine skeptic” who has promoted “vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories about the government.”

The article proceeded to focus on one of Kennedy’s many conspiracy theories–one that has received minimal coverage– noting that “He is much further around the bend than [the media] indicates. With his advancement of unhinged and outlandish conspiracy theories, RFK Jr. is in the league of Alex Jones.”

The author noted RFK, Jr.’s evidently fervent belief that a “global elite led by the CIA had been planning for years to use a pandemic to end democracy and impose totalitarian control on the entire world,”  a claim he has repeated at public events and on podcasts, and for which he has claimed to have proof. That “proof” revolves around something called “Event 201.” During one interview, Kennedy told listeners who might be skeptical of his description of that event to “do the research. The meeting is still on YouTube.”

As the Mother Jones article notes, the video of Event 201 does indeed remain on YouTube—”as does an entire website devoted to the exercise—and it in no way matches Kennedy’s description. Not even close.”

The remainder of the lengthy article takes each description of that event offered by JFK, Jr. and patiently and thoroughly debunks it.

Other claims made by Kennedy have been shown to be equally unfounded/unscientific/looney. He has asserted that chemicals present in water sources cause transgender identity, has repeatedly endorsed the idea that the increase in mass shootings is due to heightened use of antidepressants, and has accused the CIA of assassinating his uncle. Just last June, in an interview with the Washington Post, he reaffirmed his belief that Republicans had stolen the 2004 election, and that John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, had really won.

In his defense, it is likely that Kennedy (unlike con artists like Alex Jones) actually believes these things. That is sad. It is sadder still that many Americans tell pollsters they plan to vote for him, in most cases not because they agree with any of his bizarre assertions, but because they are unaware of how demented he really is. The only thing they know about him is his name, and that he is the nephew of the former President.

If MAGA’s devotion to Trump hadn’t already proved the extent of American political ignorance and hostility to reality, the fact that a meaningful percentage of voters claim to be supporting this very troubled man should conclusively prove the point.

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What They’re Really Attacking

Most readers of this blog are familiar with the famous Martin Niemoller quote, uttered as the Nazis solidified control of the German government:

First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak outBecause I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.

The reason that statement remains so powerful is because it focuses on an essential truth: a government that can pick and choose among its citizens, a government that can empower some while disenfranchising or mistreating others, is a government incompatible with–and threatening to– basic human liberties.

As a former president of the ACLU put it, “Poison gas is a great weapon until the wind shifts.”

And that gets me to my frequent warnings about the real danger posed by the MAGA worldview–a worldview shared by autocrats like Trump and theocrats like Alito. As I have repeatedly noted, the Dobbs decision didn’t just target women’s rights–it undermined the constitutional principle that prevents government from invading everyone’s individual liberties and dictating all personal behaviors.

It isn’t just Dobbs. 

Axios recently reported that Indiana is one of a number of Red states that is refusing to follow a federal regulation meant to protect the civil liberties of LGBTQ+ youngsters.

The U.S. Department of Education expanded protections for LGBTQ+ students under Title IX last month — but Indiana has told its schools to ignore the guidance.

Why it matters: Indiana is one of many states that passed legislation in recent years targeting the LGBTQ+ community, particularly children.

  • A 2023 law requires schools to alert parents if their child requests a change to their name or pronoun, which teachers fear could force them to out transgender students, and earlier legislation blocked transgender girls from participating in girls’ school sports.

Driving the news: Indiana’s Department of Education advised schools “not to change their existing policies” in a memo last month, as first reported by WFYI.

  • “IDOE is currently working with legal counsel to review these new regulations, which among other things expands the definition of “sex” in Title IX,” the department said. “At initial review, these draft regulations will undoubtedly have major implications for Indiana schools and students and will likely be subject to legal challenges.”

The fine print: The federal guidance adds protections against “discrimination based on sex stereotypes, sexual orientation, gender identity and sex characteristics.”

  • The deadline for schools to adopt the rules to remain compliant for federal funding is Aug. 1.

There will undoubtedly be a lot of criticism focused on the fact that this rebellious noncompliance threatens critically-needed federal funding for public education. But it threatens far more than that. It is yet one more assault on the rule of law. It reinforces the Rightwing conviction that disagreement with a law constitutes an entitlement to violate it.

People who don’t believe women should have the right to control their own bodies, who view LGBTQ+ folks as “sinners” or worse, who remain convinced that Whites are superior to other races–in short, people who find it appropriate for government to “come for” some category of “Other”–fail to understand that a government empowered to award or deny privileged status is a government inconsistent with individual liberty and the rule of law.

At the end of the day, that is what is at risk in the upcoming elections. If would-be theocrats like Mike Braun and (especially) Jim Banks prevail (and worse, if their fellow Christian Nationalists should return Trump to power), we will see these persistent attacks on disfavored minorities used to further erode everyone’s individual liberties.

If we look honestly at American history, it becomes obvious that “states’ rights” always meant allowing state governments to privilege some citizens at the expense of others. When Braun says he wants to return the question of inter-racial marriage to the states, when Banks proposes federal legislation to ban abortions with no exceptions, they are just saying the quiet part out loud.

If people like Braun and Banks and Trump are elected, the wind will shift in a profoundly unpleasant direction. And unless you’re a White Christian guy, the government will eventually be empowered to come for you.

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Hoosiers For Democracy

I’ve been getting intellectual whiplash looking for political omens.

Polls aren’t cutting it: as I have previously noted, contemporary obstacles to accurate measures of candidate strength are immense, and the various efforts to compensate for low response rates and to develop meaningful “likely voter” screens have proved inadequate. When Trump routinely underperforms his poll results by some ten points, it seems safe to ignore click-bait headlines about this or that poll.

I have also shared my conviction that victory in the upcoming elections will depend almost entirely on turnout. I don’t understand what get out the vote campaigns do to generate turnout, but then I don’t understand people who think political participation is irrelevant to their lives, so my lack of comprehension is probably due to that mystification…

All that said, despite living in Indiana– often dismissed as an irremediably deep-Red state– I’ve recently stumbled across some interesting and very positive omens.

One of those is Hoosiers for Democracy, a newly-formed group that describes itself as “a growing movement of Indiana citizens who are concerned about the erosion of democratic norms, the continual drumbeat of extremism and the persistent undermining of our democratic institutions.” I know the founders of the group, and I consider them informed and politically savvy. They’ve done their homework, and are focused on demonstrating that Indiana–even rural Indiana– is considerably less Red than the state’s reputation suggests. 

Hoosiers for Democracy publishes a thoughtful Substack newsletter, and is working with other grass-roots organizations–partisan and bipartisan– concerned about the GOP’s lurch into far-Right extremism. 

Relatively few Hoosiers have heard of Hoosiers for Democracy so far–it’s new, and just building its network. (I encourage Indiana readers to sign up for its very thoughtful newsletter at the link.) But more recently, I was astonished to discover the existence of several statewide organizations with a longer timeline. The Nasty Woman Project began as an Instagram account; it was born out of Trump’s expressions of fury in November 2016 and began a series of self portraits by self-proclaimed Nasty Women. Since then, it has grown into a women’s collective that “throws events, raises money for charity, makes waves, and puts smiles on people’s faces.” 

I was even more astonished to learn that the organization has more than seven thousand members across Indiana. (I was especially surprised because–according to my youngest son–I am a Nasty Woman. In the wake of the 2016 election, he even had a t-shirt that identified him as a “Bad Hombre raised by a Nasty Woman”…)

Indiana’s Nasty Women organization has a FaceBook page describing itself:

We are INDIANA NASTY WOMEN; because we believe in love, acceptance, equality, kindness, respect, and the POWER of our voices. Through this consortium of like-minded women, with an overall vision to do whatever we can to help transform Indiana into, at the very least, a purple state.

This will take different forms, including but not limited to: being dedicated to political activism… helping to create & support liberal and progressive political candidates into office at all levels (national, state, and local).

Educate fellow Hoosiers so they become more informed voters.

Increase the number of likeminded voters in Indiana.

I couldn’t help wondering how many other grass-roots political efforts might be underway and essentially underground, devoted to efforts to highlight the dangers of MAGA extremism and the capture of the Republican party apparatus by Christian Nationalists. I get a large number of political publications and thanks to being older than dirt and a lifetime Hoosier, I know a lot of people here in Indiana, yet I’d never heard of Indiana Nasty Women.

Nor, it turned out, had I heard of at least fifteen other Indiana organizations working to turn out the sanity vote.

In a recent meeting with progressive activists, I was astonished–and gratified–to learn of multiple Indiana organizations formed since 2016. They’re working to educate voters about issues like reproductive rights, voting rights and the threat MAGA poses to democracy.

Several were surprisingly large. Most are run entirely by volunteers, and they overwhelmingly focus on encouraging Hoosiers to vote for Democratic candidates– from Joe Biden and Jennifer McCormick on down the ballot.

I’d never heard of any of them.

Bottom line: I’ve seen data suggesting that MAGA’s strength in Indiana “tops out” at 37%. That’s a very worrisome percentage, but it isn’t a majority. Hoosiers for Democracy, Indiana Nasty Women and these numerous other voluntary, under-the-radar organizations are immensely hopeful omens, especially since several are mounting grass-roots campaigns to turn out Hoosier voters–especially Democratic-leaning voters with spotty voting records.

In November, Hoosiers might be able shed our reputation as a northern Mississippi– a state firmly in thrall to MAGA’s assorted bigotries. 

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Will The Real Republicans Please Stand Up?

In MAGA land, no insult is more cutting–or more numerous–than “RINO,” an acronym for “Republican in Name Only.” It is routinely hurled by the extremists who have remade a once-mainstream, center-right party into a racist, misogynistic cult of personality.

The Republicans with whom I worked back when I was one of them have mostly responded by leaving the GOP. Interestingly, however, some of those “RINOs”–more accurately described as traditional Republicans–have chosen to fight, to try to retake their party, and in Idaho, of all places. According to the Washington Post, the rebellion is taking place in an area with a history that has informed the effort.

Locals prefer not to talk about the hate that took root here a generation ago, when the Aryan Nations and other militants built a white supremacist paradise among the tall pines and crystal lakes of North Idaho.Community activists, backed by national civil rights groups, bankrupted the neo-Nazis in court and eventually forced them to move, a hard-fought triumph memorialized in scenes from 2001 of a backhoe smashing through a giant swastika at the former Aryan compound just outside of Coeur d’Alene, the biggest city in this part of the state.

For much of the two decades since, civic leaders have focused on moving beyond the image of North Idaho as a white-power fiefdom. They steered attention instead to emerald golf courses and gleaming lakeside resorts where celebrities such as Kim Kardashian sip huckleberry cocktails.

Now, however, North Idaho residents are confronting that history head-on as a new movement builds against far-right extremism.

Northern Idaho’s traditional Republicans are reacting to the current leadership of the local Republican Party, which they say has lurched to the right, especially on matters of race, religion and sexuality, giving the bigotry of the past mainstream political cover.

A group of disaffected, self-described “traditional” Republicans has spent the past two years planning to wrest back control from leaders who they accuse of steering the local GOP toward extremism, a charge the officials vehemently deny.

Those officials may “vehemently deny” the charge, but quotations from several of them in the Post tended to support the accusation. (One politico insisted that women should be required to carry a rapists baby to term…)

The linked story was published prior to Idaho’s primary, which took place last Tuesday.  On Wednesday, I googled to assess the success of the traditional rebellion. The slate of challengers backed by the North Idaho Republicans won 30 spots on the central committee, but they needed 36 seats to secure a majority.

I also learned that 15 incumbent GOP state legislators lost their primary races. I was initially hopeful that the successful challengers represented traditional Republicans; however, further investigation indicated that, at the state legislative level, far-Right conservatives took control. (If anyone from Idaho has further information, please confirm or correct my impression.)

The effort in Idaho illuminates the challenge facing a once-responsible political party: Can genuine conservatives–voters and operatives holding center-Right policy positions on economic and social issues–take back the GOP, and return the racists and culture warriors to the fringes? If not, where will thoughtful, respectable Republicans go?

In the short term, an extremist GOP can win elections by deploying its demonstrable skills at voter suppression, abetted by the various mechanisms of the American electoral system that give rural voters and a handful of states disproportionate power, but–absent a wholesale takeover that includes revising/ignoring the Constitution– that dominance will have a limited shelf-life. The once Grand-Old-Party will either turn away from the White Christian Nationalists who currently control it (and who represent a distinct minority of Americans), or a new center-Right party will rise from its ashes.

That result, of course, is long-term. The short-term crisis we face is the November election.

If the GOP manages to retake the White House or Congress, all bets are off. A second Trump administration is publicly committed to removing any remaining legal or constitutional guard-rails, setting America on a path to autocracy and chaos.

The sanity vote has never been more important.

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How Today’s Media Fails Us

As I have frequently noted, at the very root of America’s–and the world’s–current dysfunctions are the failures of today’s information environment.

How we behave–as friends, as parents, as voters, as humans–ultimately depends upon our understanding of the world we inhabit. And that understanding, that view of what constitutes reality, is a product of the information we access and trust. In the United States–the society with which I am most familiar–the human family confronts two massive informational challenges: bias (both intentional and not) and fragmentation.

Unfortunately, there is little we can do about the Internet’s fragmentation of media sources, which allows citizens to occupy distinctly different realities. When the voting public accesses “alternative facts,” the incoherence of public opinion is understandable.

The failures of traditional media sources are especially troubling, both because they add to the incoherence and because they are the result of mistaken notions of journalism’s most important function–which is to provide an accurate description of the subject matter, irrespective of who or what that accuracy benefits.

Jennifer Rubin is one of the pundits who has been clear-eyed about the persistence of a journalistic worldview that prevents otherwise reputable news sources from avoiding a distorted equivalency.

After missing the significance of the MAGA movement in 2016, innumerable mainstream outlets spent thousands of hours, gallons of ink and billions of pixels trying to understand “the Trump voter.” How had democracy failed them? What did the rest of us miss about these Americans? The journey to Rust Belt diners became a cliché amid the newfound fascination with aggrieved White working-class Americans. But the theory that such voters were economic casualties of globalization turned out to be false. Surveys and analyses generally found that racial resentment and cultural panic, not economic distress, fueled their affinity for a would-be strongman.

Unfortunately, patronizing excuses (e.g., “they feel disrespected”) for their cultlike attachment to a figure increasingly divorced from reality largely took the place of exacting reporting on the right-wing cult that swallowed a large part of the Republican Party. In an effort to maintain false equivalence and normalize Trump, many media outlets seemed to ignore that the much of the GOP left the universe of democratic (small-d) politics and was no longer a traditional democratic (again, small-d) party with an agenda, a governing philosophy, a set of beliefs. The result: Trump was normalized and a false equivalence between the parties was created.

There was a reason Fox News chose “fair and balanced” as its (highly misleading) slogan: most Americans–including too many students of journalism–have been acculturated to believe that “balance” is fairness, that exhibiting similar respect for all sides of an argument is an essential element of reporting. This has led–as one wag put it–to a reportorial stenography that faithfully reports person A’s assertion that it’s raining and person B’s that it isn’t, when what the reporter ought to be doing is looking out the window to see who’s right.

As Rubin noted,

Even as Trump shows his authoritarian colors and his rants become angrier, more unhinged and more incoherent, his followers still meekly accept inane assertions (e.g., convicted Jan. 6, 2021, rioters are “hostages,” magnets dissolve in water, wind turbines drive whales insane). More of the media should be covering this phenomenon as it would any right-wing authoritarian movement in a foreign country.

The proliferation of propaganda sites facilitating confirmation bias is troubling enough, but as Rubin writes, the problem with disinformation is compounded when mainstream outlets spend “far too little attention on why and how MAGA members cling to demonstrably false beliefs, excuse what should be inexcusable conduct and ignore Trump’s obvious and growing mental illness and decline.

Outlets should routinely consult psychologists and historians to ask the vital questions: How do people abandon rationality? What drives their fury and anxiety? How does an authoritarian figure maintain his hold on followers? How do ideas of racial purity play into it? Media outlets fail news consumers when they do not explain the authoritarian playbook that Trump employs. Americans need media outlets to spell out what is happening….

The race between an ordinary democratic candidate and an unhinged fascist is not a normal American election. At stake is whether a democracy can protect itself from a malicious candidate with narcissistic tendencies or a rational electorate can beat back a dangerous, lawless cult of personality. Unfortunately, too many media outlets have not caught on or, worse, simply feign ignorance to avoid coming down on the side of democracy, rationality and truth.

Humans can only form opinions and base behaviors on the information they rely upon. When that information is unreliable– or simply wrong– “do the right thing” becomes meaningless.

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