Trump – Sheila Kennedy

How Conspiracy Theories Work

I have a confession to make. In the aftermath of the attempt on Trump’s life, my first reaction was suspicion that he’d arranged the whole thing. After all, it would be just like him to produce a scenario where he could play the brave victim…and with the death of the shooter, there would be no evidence…

Okay–not my finest moment. But a cursory scan of my FaceBook page provided evidence that I wasn’t the only person open to similar fantasies, and that, in turn, led me to consider just how America got to the stage where conspiracy theories have more force and impact than facts.

An interesting experiment sheds some light on that inquiry: a while back, The New Republic ran an article detailing a “prank” that illustrated how such theories spread. The article began:

Bird propaganda is everywhere, once you’re trained to recognize it. Since the Cold War, children have eaten their breakfast cereals with Toucan Sam and spent their after-school hours learning at Big Bird’s oversize feet. Television has streamed into our homes and onto our smartphones under the strutting sign of NBC’s rainbow peacock. Penguins gaze out at us from our bookshelves. Eagles, the government insists, are patriotic symbols of strength and freedom. Duolingo uses an earnest but irritating green owl to engineer our digital behavior and shame us into learning rudimentary Portuguese.

As you catch your breath from this unnerving revelation, you should also know that there is a growing movement online determined to reveal the truth: that none of this is benign, none of it accidental. That Americans are being birdwashed into docility and obedience.

Calling itself Birds Aren’t Real, this group of primarily Gen Z truthers swaps memes and infographics on social media (the official accounts boast more than 800,000 followers on TikTok and 400,000 on Instagram), challenges the powers that be with combative media appearances, and holds rallies across the country. They explain that the U.S. government secretly ran a “mass bird genocide” starting in the late 1950s, replacing the real avian population with sophisticated surveillance-drone look-alikes. Bird-watching now goes both ways.

The group’s leaders even published a book, in which they “revealed” that the government’s bird genocide plot was hatched by “notorious CIA director Allen Dulles—when he wasn’t spearheading the MK-Ultra mind-control program.” They provided “evidence” of the complicity of presidents from Eisenhower to Biden, and a field guide for recognizing bird-drones in the “wild.”

“Birds Aren’t Real” was an elaborate prank, what the article calls “a knowing satire of American conspiratorial thinking in the century of QAnon–an experiment in misinformation. And it demonstrates the elements needed for a successful conspiracy theory. First of all, it offers a “theory of everything”—a way for people to make sense of the world’s complexity and contradictions, to tie up all the loose ends. Good conspiracy theories offer “arguments by adjacency,” meaning that arguably related credible facts are used to “prove” wilder claims, “offering just enough truth to make you wonder.”

Finally, successful conspiracy theories are able to perform a kind of psychic alchemy for their followers. On the one hand, they drain pleasure from everyday life. Nothing can be innocent; everything is wrapped up in the plot. QAnon supporters pull away from friends and family, convinced that the people they most love have become satanic cultists. Birds Aren’t Real tells you that you can’t enjoy simple joys like nature walks and bird-watching, family Christmases (eating turkey is “ritualized bird worship”), or even your pets. People with birds at home are advised “to calmly pack your things in the middle of the night and leave. Make sure your bird does not see you leave.” Your pet bird never loved you, for it was merely a government drone-robot, but at least now the imminent danger has passed.

The article notes that conspiracy theories offer people agency in a world that seems fallen to pieces, and it reports and analyzes the efforts underway to combat them. It’s a fascinating–albeit somewhat depressing–read.

When I thought about the elements needed for wide acceptance of a conspiracy theory, I realized mine lacked them. My reaction was more a suspicion than a theory–it didn’t explain everything (like why anyone sane thinks Trump is fit to be President); the only available “argument from adjacency” is that Trump, who lies constantly, is demonstrably capable of inventing and spreading misinformation. And my theory would hardly offer agency to those of us who are shocked and saddened by realizing that large numbers of our fellow Americans are drinking Trump’s Kool-Aid.

There’s probably a lot of overlap between MAGA folks and those who believe that Birds Aren’t Real….

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Losing My Faith

I used to have faith in the good will and common sense of my fellow citizens. Over the past several years, I’ve lost that faith.

Good will?? The MAGA zealots who have taken over a previously normal political party routinely engage in outlandish accusations and escalating calls for violence. As David Frum recently wrote,

When a madman hammered nearly to death the husband of then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump jeered and mocked. One of Trump’s sons and other close Trump supporters avidly promoted false claims that Paul Pelosi had somehow brought the onslaught upon himself through a sexual misadventure.

After authorities apprehended a right-wing-extremist plot to abduct Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Trump belittled the threat at a rally. He disparaged Whitmer as a political enemy. His supporters chanted “Lock her up.” Trump laughed and replied, “Lock them all up.”

Fascism feasts on violence. In the years since his own supporters attacked the Capitol to overturn the 2020 election—many of them threatening harm to Speaker Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence—Trump has championed the invaders, would-be kidnappers, and would-be murderers as martyrs and hostages. He has vowed to pardon them if returned to office. His own staffers have testified to the glee with which Trump watched the mayhem on television…

Common sense??? Chris Lamb is a journalist professor at IU-Indianapolis who has documented (at length) the ridiculous “facts” that Republicans have to believe in order to cling to their insistence that the 2020 election was stolen.

Lamb began by referencing the Washington Post’s compendium of Trump’s lies–over 30 thousand of them– during his four-year presidency, and linked to the newspaper’s accessible data base of those lies. And as he reminds us, that figure was restricted to public statements.

There is no point fact-checking Trump because he uses no facts.

There is as much evidence that Donald Trump led American troops on D-Day as there is evidence that he won the 2020 Presidential Election.

And yet, as he points out, two-thirds of Republicans say Biden’s win of that election was illegitimate. In a post replete with links to sources of his evidence, Lamb deconstructs that claim, and enumerates the multiple ridiculous assertions that must be accepted as true in order to believe it.

The post points out what should be obvious: for one thing, that the massive award against Fox News for defamation could not have been won had there been any probative evidence of election fraud. (As he writes, “It’s worth noting that the truth is an absolute defense in libel suits. If news sites – and I use that word loosely – told the truth they would have been immune from defamation lawsuits”). He also points out that a significant number of the sixty-plus cases dismissed for lack of any evidence were heard–and dismissed–by judges Trump appointed.

Lamb’s post provides a meticulous and documented list of the claims MAGA folks have embraced, and copious evidence of their falsity. I won’t recite that whole list–which I encourage you to click through and read–but to say it is discouraging is an understatement.

The unanswered question, of course, is: what percentage of the American population actually believes these things? How many of my fellow Americans have listened to both Biden and Trump, to Democratic and Republican political figures, and actually concluded that Democratic rhetoric has stoked violence? What percentage of American voters truly thinks the 2020 election was stolen, despite a total and complete absence of any corroborating evidence?

And what is wrong with that cohort? Why do they cling to beliefs that are so clearly unsupported by reality?

So yes, until relatively recently, I was confident that most people in this country were people of good will and common sense. Yes, we have always had fringe elements–the bigots of the far Right and far Left, the discontented, fearful and well-armed “Second Amendment” contingent, the scary theocrats like Beckwith and Banks– but I used to believe those people constituted a relatively small part of our body politic.

In the age of MAGA, It’s harder and harder to believe that.

I tell myself that these deluded souls really are a minority; that it is only because they are so loud and “in our faces” that they seem so numerous, but it gets harder and harder to convince myself that the sort of people with whom I regularly interact (on this site and in “real life”)–people who are, by and large, normal, measured and evidence-based –are the real majority.

If they aren’t–if the hordes of angry MAGA Christian Nationalists return Trump to power–the rest of us will lose more than faith in our fellow Americans. We will lose America.

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The Prosecutor And The Felon

Yesterday, Joe Biden dropped out of the Presidential race and endorsed Kamala Harris.

My thoughts–in no particular order:

I love Joe Biden. He has been a transformational President– an incredibly consequential one. Much as I admired and supported Barack Obama, Biden–calling on a long career of public service, and political savvy deepened by experience–accomplished far more. His legacy will be both an important and a sterling one.

That said, he is old (younger than I am…but let’s not go there…) and his decline was becoming obvious. His continued campaigning allowed the MAGA cultists to focus public attention on that decline, rather than on the existential threat to America presented by Trump and his racist cult. They will now be deprived of that tactic.

One of the constant complaints I’ve heard about the Democratic campaign the past weeks has been that the party has failed to hammer home the multiple, significant accomplishments of the Biden administration. One consequence of yesterday’s announcement has been that it has introduced the ability of the pundits and Democratic officeholder to engage in a hagiography of sorts: people commenting on Biden’s decision have used his announcement that he is backing out as a cue to celebrate a Presidential term that has been truly transformational–and to remind the American public of the multiple accomplishments of that term.

That’s all to the good. But going forward–and assuming Kamala Harris will be the nominee–what I think we will see is, in a very real sense, a fascinating, contemporary replay of the Civil War. (Hopefully, with less bloodshed, although with MAGA, one never knows.)

Kamala Harris will pledge a continuation of Biden’s policies, and those policies are infinitely more popular than those of Project 2025, which–as someone has noted–poll like Ebola. But what MAGA will find intolerable is that Harris is female and Black, and–worse still–has a Jewish husband.

Let’s be honest: absolutely no one looks at Donald Trump, a self-engrossed ignoramus who knows nothing about government and cares about nothing but himself, and sees someone competent to occupy the Oval Office. What they see–and what the research amply confirms–is someone who gives them permission to hate out loud. MAGA is a racist cult. It is today’s Confederacy, today’s war on Black people. The only difference between the original Civil War and the one taking place today (aside from the lack of muskets and powder-horns or whatever the arms of the day looked like) is that brown people, gay people, Muslims, Jews–anyone who isn’t a fundamentalist White Christian–is now part of those “Others” that MAGA folks insist cannot be “real Americans.”

The replay of the Civil War will be a nod to the past. But Kamala Harris has been a prosecutor, and what will be a far more contemporary facet of the upcoming campaign will be the face-off between a Prosecutor and a convicted felon.

Prosecutors are charged with upholding and applying the rule of law. Those of us who are lawyers of any kind have been appalled by a series of rogue decisions by a Supreme Court dominated by justices appointed by Trump. That Court has discarded any pretense of following precedent, and for lawyers serving in government jobs–prosecutors and public defenders, counselors to government officials–the destructive effects of Trump’s judges on the legal system have been incredibly painful. The prospect of electing a convicted felon to the highest position in American government is unthinkable to anyone who understands the importance of equal justice under the law. As a former longtime prosecutor, Harris is in a position to emphasize just how unthinkable that prospect ought to be.

So–here we are. Democrats now will have a youthful, dynamic and highly intelligent candidate, versed in the law, who will represent a successful administration that has passed important and popular domestic legislation and internationally has secured worldwide respect. The Republican cult will remain in thrall to an elderly candidate who is an increasingly incoherent convicted felon who consistently reinforces his lack of both civility and sanity, and whose potential victory terrifies leaders of the world’s democracies.

Joe Biden may have saved America. He deserves our gratitude and undying respect.

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More On Project 2025

In a weird way, it really doesn’t matter who heads up either the Republican or Democratic national tickets–because this election is rapidly becoming a referendum on the U.S. Constitution and what it means to be an American.

If Republicans win the Presidency and Congress, we are very likely to jettison the Constitution in favor of the provisions of Project 2025. The forces that produced Project 2025 represent the real power structure of today’s GOP; its members see Trump as a convenient “front” because he is ignorant, stupid (those aren’t the same thing) and interested only in garnering attention–thus easily manipulated. Should he be replaced at the top of the ticket, it would either be with someone equally malleable or with a Project 2025 true believer.

Fortunately, the Democrats–unlike the Borg (look it up)–don’t believe that resistance is futile. As Joyce Vance has recently reported, Democrats have created a task force to combat what can accurately be described as an extension of the January 6th coup attempt. The task force has been created by California Congressman Jared Huffman, who described its formation and purpose.

We started by getting leaders from groups across the political spectrum of our House Democratic Caucus to sign on – Progressives, New Dems, CHC, CBC, API, Pro-Choice, Labor, LGBTQ Equality, and, of course, the Congressional Freethought Caucus I co-founded with Jamie Raskin! From there, several other members signed on, including two from leadership (Joe Neguse and Ted Lieu). Our ranking Appropriator, Rosa DeLauro, just joined us this week, bringing the Task Force to 15 members, including some of the most effective communicators in Congress.

We’re working closely with experts from more than a dozen leading advocacy groups, including Accountable.US, Democracy Forward, Center for American Progress, ACLU, Protect Democracy, Court Accountability, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and more.

Our work plan starts with over half a dozen subject matter briefings for Task Force members and staff by the end of August. We’ve already had the first two: last week on messaging/communications, including some recent polling on Project 2025, and this week, an ominous briefing on how the various elements of Project 2025 link together in a very strategic attack on democracy and civil liberties. As we complete these “deep dive” briefings, we’re developing and pushing out messaging materials for Task Force members, outside partner groups, and the media. In September, we will have a big, congressional hearing-like event where we publicly roll out highlights of the various briefings in conjunction with the outside groups. The hearing will feature testimony from leading experts and different Task Force members will take the lead in presenting different parts of Project 2025. We believe this event will get a lot of attention and will distill Project 2025 for the American people in a way that helps them understand how radical and destructive it is, why it must be taken very seriously, and how we can stop it.

After added discussion about the task force plans, Huffman addressed the central issue: what would the enactment of Project 2025 mean for the American experiment?

As Huffman explained, Project 2025 is a sweeping attack on democracy and fundamental American freedoms–an attack on health care and reproductive liberty, social justice, the livability of our planet, and much more.

It aims to systematically dismantle our democratic checks and balances and consolidate unprecedented power in a second Trump presidency. It’s truly a roadmap to make Trump, already an aspiring dictator, into a real one, and to impose a radical social/religious order on all of us. It exudes an “any means necessary” philosophy, including the explicit embrace of dystopic authoritarian measures like domestic military deployments, detention camps, mass deportations, an unprecedented political purge of the federal workforce, political weaponization of federal law enforcement, and more. These are my greatest concerns because they would end American democracy as we know it.

There are certainly other worrisome parts of Project 2025, including dramatically weakening public education (with a goal of ending secular public education), sweeping attacks on the environment and rollbacks of climate action, clear threats to our social and retirement safety net, and privatization schemes and other reckless giveaways to powerful special interests.

Rick Wilson has said that Project 2025 “polls like Ebola,” which explains why Trump is suddenly trying to dissociate himself from it, but Heritage worked with over 100 extreme Rightwing groups that are at the heart of Trump’s political base, along with several of the most loyal (and scary) members of the prior Trump administration –- Mark Meadows, Stephen Miller, Peter Navarro, and several others.

The GOP roadmap that is Project 2025 is breathtakingly clear. Those of us who want to keep the Constitution need to ensure that voters know where that roadmap would take us.

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So Long, America–It Was Nice Knowing You…

The New York Times summarized the rogue Supreme Court’s immunity ruling in a sentence: “the Supreme Court has extended sweeping legal protections to presidents that apply to no one else in the country.”

In other words, in the most recent of a string of appalling and unprecedented rulings, this disgraceful Court has eviscerated the essence of the rule of law: that no one is above the law. Sources close to the Rightwing extremists behind Project 2025 immediately began planning how to use the Court’s decision to help them implement their unAmerican policy agenda, and Trump immediately called for jailing his political opponents.

The Court has demonstrated the naiveté of those Republican voters who justified sticking with Trump because “there are guardrails–laws that will keep him from doing the craziest shit.” Not anymore, there aren’t.

Toto, we aren’t in Kansas anymore.

I have never been so afraid for my country. Lest you think I am over-reacting, I will turn the rest of this post over to the considered reactions of people I respect.

There were the pundits, of course, many of whom bring solid legal credentials to the discussion. I can sum up their reactions by citing to Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, whose opinion piece was titled “God Save Us from this Dishonorable Court” and was subtitled “An egregious, unconscionable ruling on presidential immunity from the Supreme Court.”

But the most incisive and horrified analyses came from the scholars.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote:

This is a profound change to our fundamental law—an amendment to the Constitution, as historian David Blight noted. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said that a president needs such immunity to make sure the president is willing to take “bold and unhesitating action” and make unpopular decisions, although no previous president has ever asserted that he is above the law or that he needed such immunity to fulfill his role. Roberts’s decision didn’t focus at all on the interest of the American people in guaranteeing that presidents carry out their duties within the guardrails of the law….

There is no historical or legal precedent for this decision. The Declaration of Independence was a litany of complaints against King George III designed to explain why the colonists were declaring themselves free of kings; the Constitution did not provide immunity for the president, although it did for members of Congress in certain conditions, and it provided for the removal of the president for “high crimes and misdemeanors”—what would those be if a president is immune from prosecution for his official acts? The framers worried about politicians’ overreach and carefully provided for oversight of leaders; the Supreme Court today smashed through that key guardrail…

Today, observers illustrated what Trump’s newly declared immunity could mean. Political scientist Norm Ornstein pointed out that Trump could “order his handpicked FBI Director to arrest and jail his political opponents. He can order the IRS to put liens on the property of media companies who criticize him and jail reporters and editors.” Legal analyst Joyce White Vance noted that a president with such broad immunity could order the assassination of Supreme Court justices, and retired military leader Mark Hertling wrote that he was “trying to figure out how a commander can refuse an illegal order from someone who is issuing it as an official act.”

Lawyer and legal scholar Robert Hubbell minced no words:

Today, the Supreme Court overthrew the American Revolution and anointed the US president as a modern-day king. Their betrayal of the American revolutionaries, Founders, and Framers is all the worse because they did so to promote the most corrupt, dangerous, depraved person to disgrace the office of the presidency…

Trump v. United States will be overruled. The decision is so bad it will not stand. Like Dred Scott (holding that enslaved people are not citizens entitled to judicial protections), Plessy v. Ferguson (upholding segregation), Koramatsu v US (upholding the Japanese internment camps), today’s decision will be overturned by the acclamation of history in due course. It will be remembered as a mark of shame for the Roberts Court just as Dred Scott tarnishes Chief Justice Taney’s legacy to this day.

It may take a few years or decades to overturn Trump v. US, but the American people are the ultimate power under the Constitution. Majorities in the House and Senate can pass a bill to expand the Supreme Court, and a Democratic president can sign it. The reactionary majority can be overwhelmed by the appointment of four new justices, although expanding the Court by eight or more would be appropriate given the nearly hundred-fold growth in the US population since six justices were appointed in 1789.

The problem is, if Donald Trump wins in November–or if MAGA neo-fascists control either the House or Senate– there won’t be a United States in which the judicial process can self-correct.

America as we’ve known it will be gone.

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