CNN is now reporting that special counsel Jack Smith has granted limited immunity to "at least" two of the individuals who signed their name as fake Donald Trump "electors" in the Republican attempt to throw out the results of the 2020 presidential election that Biden won.

That's the short version, but the details are much more interesting. The two fake electors who were given immunity in exchange for their grand jury testimony last week are Nevada state Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald and national committeeman Jim DeGraffenreid, who had refused to answer questions posed by the House Select Committee investigating the scheme. It doesn't sound like there were negotiations involved. "In the situations where prosecutors have given witnesses immunity, the special counsel’s office arrived at the courthouse in Washington ready to compel their testimony after the witnesses indicated they would decline to answer questions under the Fifth Amendment," reports CNN.

It appears that the Nevada Republican Party chair and committeeman had "arrived" fully prepared to refuse to testify to the grand jury, only to have Smith and team surprise them by forcing the immunity deal on them and sitting them down in the big chair without the Fifth Amendment to fall back on. And that almost certainly means that Smith's team knew that McDonald and DeGraffenreid had testimony that would be damning for someone much higher up the ladder in the fake electors scheme than they were, and that Smith was fully prepared to let these two clowns skate if it meant the grand jury would get to hear about that.

That makes perfect sense. We know that the push to get state Republican officials to certify themselves as the "real" electors in states that Trump had lost were being pursued inside the White House, and by Donald Trump himself. It was Trump attorney John Eastman (now facing likely disbarment for his role in the scheme) who was pushing the fake electors plan to Trump's inner circle. The whole scheme revolved around smuggling the fake electors into the Jan. 6 joint session of Congress convened to count and certify the election results. Then-Vice President Mike Pence could point to the fake versions, declare that there was a supposed conflict, and throw it to the assembled lawmakers for an argument as to whether the Biden-won states should have their electoral votes counted at all.

That was the scheme everyone from Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz to Trump "lawyers" like Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman were counting on, and it only fell apart when Trump's own vice president refused to be part of an obvious coup attempt, either because of some shred of remaining decency or because he and his lawyers saw a possible firing squad on the tail end of the resulting events and wanted to steer themselves well clear of it. It’s also of note that two of those names, Cruz and Eastman, clerked together in the 1990s and are reportedly still close. The judge they clerked for? Retired U.S. Appeals Court Judge Michael Luttig—who was one of the informal Pence advisers who warned him off the scheme as a “Constitutional crisis” in the making.

So yes, a great number of people inside the White House or in direct communication with Trump himself might have reason to worry about what McDonald and DeGraffenreid testified to once Smith handed them both a piece of paper that erased their plans to remain silent. We know that there was a concerted push to get these fake electors signed on, and we know it was coming from Trump's core legal team. It was coming from Giuliani, from Eastman, from Bernie Kerik, from Christiana Bobb, and from Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

It's likely Smith might agree to quite a few immunity deals if it means the grand jury would get to hear about pre-Jan. 6 communications between Republican fake electors and any of those names.

There's a new Rolling Stone story about the infighting inside Fox News studios in the aftermath of Tucker Carlson's firing, and whether it's funny or just pathetic probably depends more on your mood than on the circumstances.

The lede of the piece is that some of the "top" Fox News talking heads are worried that they're going to be next to find they no longer have a job at the studio. Before you get too excited about that, however, know that the two hosts who have expressed worry about that, according to the "two sources," are Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro. They both played feature roles in pushing the 2020 election conspiracy theories that are now forcing Fox News to pay out $787.5 million to settle defamation claims brought against it by Dominion Voting Systems, and with fellow voting equipment manufacturer Smartmatic now stepping up to the plate for its own similarly-sized lawsuit it would be hard to imagine Bartiromo and Pirro's jobs not being in danger.

Any actual "news" company would probably have launched the pair out of the building years ago, given their longstanding penchant for bizarre claims and, for one of the pair, way too much online debate over how much of their on-air commentary can be blamed on [makes drinky-drinky gesture here]. So ... yeah. One would imagine "cost the boss three quarters of a billion American dollars" will be coming up in the performance reviews.

That said, neither they nor we have reason to be holding our breath here. Top-ranking Fox host Tucker Carlson appears to have been fired not for his behind-the-scenes efforts to make sure the Fox News division left the Republican election hoaxes undebunked, in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6 coup attempt, but because Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch thought he was getting too big for his britches. Nobody's ever gotten fired at Fox News for lying to the public on-air. Lots of people have been fired from Fox News because Rupert Murdoch has come to believe that they're endangering the company profit.

The much funnier allegations in Rolling Stone's story are that some Fox executives have "have grilled certain staff about whether they or their teams had recently blabbed to the press about Carlson’s abrupt dismissal," and that Fox staffers have been "changing journalist contacts to fake names" on their phones in order to hide who might be calling them, if the phone rings in the presence of management or "spies" who might "snitch" to management.

Fox executives aren't in a lather because their fact-averse incompetence just cost the company three quarters of a billion dollars. They're worked up because somebody inside the news company might have been talking to real reporters about Tucker's canning.

And if you work for Fox News, there's nothing worse than management learning you've once talked to a real reporter. Imagine the inquisition that would result, if a Fox reporter's phone rang and the name displayed was that of an actual journalist. Heads would roll!

The news, then, is that if we believe the story's inside-Fox sources (and they are very anonymous, because reasons), Fox offices are in an uproar of late, with angry questionings and surreptitious phone calls and members of the alleged journalistic institution muttering bitterly about snitches who might tell management about their own awful behaviors.

Another likely source of turmoil goes unsaid, however. What we've learned from both the Dominion lawsuit and the lawsuit against Fox News filed by a former Fox News producer is that Fox News working conditions are grotesque, with rampant misogyny, harassment, antisemitism, and workplace retaliation inside network offices. Rolling Stone's Fox News sources don't appear to have anything to say about that, but it seems more than likely that part of what's most roiling Fox offices is the thought of snitches who might come forward to level new charges of harassment and abuse.

In all of Fox News, is there really more than a handful of people who have to worry about management finding the phone numbers of outside journalists on their phones? Compare it to the number of Fox employees who were perfectly aware of the illegal workplace behaviors inside the company and who might have themselves engaged in some, and you can be why the current mood inside the building is more grim than just the firing of one ever-pompous wealthy fascist could account for.

Last week the Iowa Senate became the latest legislative body to endorse Republicans' now-nationwide project to roll back child labor protections. The Senate bill, passed in the predawn hours, must now be approved by the state House, and it's a doozy.

The new would-be law "allows 14-year-olds to work six-hour night shifts, allows 15-year-olds to work in plants on assembly lines moving items up to 50 pounds, and allows 16 and 17-year-olds to serve alcohol," reported Iowa's Who13.

The Des Moines Register gives the more detailed version. The Iowa Department of Education and Iowa Workforce Development agency would have the power to create "exceptions" allowing 14- to 17-year-old children to work in industries in which child labor is currently banned; all that is necessary is that the job be designated part of a supervised "approved training program."

In practice, that means factory jobs, farm jobs, jobs requiring heavy lifting or other roles that ban child labor due to dangers inherent in the job will be open to 14 year olds and up, so long as somebody involved can call it job "training." 14- to 15-year-olds will be able to work up to 6 hours a day, until 9pm during the school year, with 16- to 17-year-olds being subject to no hourly caps.

Never let it be said that Republicans didn't compromise, though; the passed version of the bill allows children injured in the workplace to seek benefits under Iowa workers' compensation laws. It also clarifies that while 16- and 17-year-olds can now serve alcohol at restaurants, with written permission from a parent, they're still not allowed to work in bars or strip clubs.

Also, the bill was revised so that rather than 14-year-olds being allowed to get a special driver's permit for going to and from their factory jobs, a committee will only study the possibility of making that happen.

If you're driving on an Iowa highway, just know that the Republican Party's new utopia envisions you sharing the road with 14-year-olds heading back at 9:00pm from their six hour shift of heavy labor before propping themselves up to do their nightly homework. Safe driving, everybody!

The motivation for these new rules is largely self-evident. The labor markets are very tight right now, much too tight for employers' preferences, and a peculiar side effect of the COVID-19 pandemic is that American workers began to abandon the worst-paying, highest-risk jobs most of all. Since raising wages is seen as only a scant step away from Satanism, the only available solution is to expand the pool of workers.

If young adults don't want to fend off drunken advances while waiting tables at Applebee's, the obvious solution is to get 14-year-olds to do it while calling it "job training." You can pay child workers much less than adult workers, which depresses wages industry-wide, and child workers may not have the same ability to object to unsafe or toxic working conditions as their adult counterparts.

The dangers aren't theoretical, either. U.S. farms alone see 27,000 child injuries and 100 child deaths per year even with child labor restrictions.

The Washington Post followed up on the Iowa Senate's passage of the bill with a look at the nationwide conservative push to weaken child labor laws. It will surprise exactly nobody to learn that these laws are being crafted pushed by a conservative think tank devoted to scaling back social programs while promoting, well, child labor.

The "Foundation for Government Accountability" is the hash-named cutout between legislatures and conservative donors who really, really need pubescent teens working in their meatpacking or automotive plants, and the Post reports that much of its success comes from pushing the bills quietly, under the radar of news organizations and the general public. Many of the laws Republicans are passing in states like Arkansas, Missouri, and elsewhere turn out to be quite unpopular with the public! Rather than not pass the unpopular bills, however, Republicans and their lobbyist groups are simply being more careful to pass the bills before the public can weigh in.

There are two particular points in the Post story that stand out. The first is that loosening of child labor laws is quite definitely going to impact workplace safety; the new Arkansas law eliminating the need for work permits for children younger than 16 makes it much harder for state officials to oversee child safety. "Not knowing where young kids are working makes it harder for [state departments] to do proactive investigations and visit workplaces where they know that employment is happening to make sure that kids are safe," notes University of Arkansas School of Law’s Human Trafficking Clinic Director Annie B. Smith.

It doesn't matter, then, if "penalties" for abusing child laborers are boosted, as sheepish Arkansas legislators attempted after widespread public outrage at their bill. Arkansas Republicans have made it much, much harder to find those violations to begin with.

The other point noted both in the Post and in the Des Moines Register's writeup of Iowa's new bill is a superficial, almost sneering talking point of "parental rights." That's the talking point that's been chosen to make the grossly unpopular sentiment of "let's push 14 year olds back into factory jobs, neatly scrubbing a near century of child labor laws" into something that conservative lawmakers can better argue for.

But really? Parental rights? The argument for weakening child labor laws is that it should be a parent's right to force their child into taking a restaurant, farm, or industrial job? That's the conservative talking point these hacks are selling?

It is! The Register even quotes Gov. Kim Reynolds waxing on about her own experience "babysitting" and "waiting tables" as a child:

"That’s good experience. You know, it teaches the kids a lot and if they have the time to do it and they want to earn some additional money I don’t think we should discourage that. [...] Ultimately, parents and kids will decide if they want to work or not."

There's a world of difference between taking babysitting jobs as a 14-year-old and working with heavy machinery in an industrial plant. There's not a lot of "good" things that waiting tables will teach anybody, except to have a healthy loathing for all of humanity. Perhaps little Kim's first experience with wage theft was a learning experience. Maybe the teens are supposed to learn how to speak drunken Boomer.

But the notion that it is between "parents and kids" to decide? That's ... not the noble talking point the pro-child-labor crowd wants it to be. Historically child labor restrictions have been put in place not necessarily to foil young go-getters who really, really want to work in a meatpacking plant before their 15th birthday, but to prevent 14-year-olds from being forcedinto meatpacking plants at that age.

Sometimes forced takes the form of human trafficking. And sometimes, historically, it's parents doing the forcing for the sake of extra income.

Weakening child labor restrictions with an explicit notion that the state doesn't need to step in because a child's parents have the "right" to assign their child a potentially dangerous job if a parent wants to—that's tossing out a large chunk of the impetus for child labor laws to begin with.

Children coming from abusive households may have very little say, when accepting job "training" that comes with six hour evening shifts or proximity to dangerous equipment. That is the point of restricting child labor to certain hours and certain industries.

The "parental rights" crowd is always very big on the "right" of parents to keep unsecured guns, or the "right" of parents to push Timmy into farm work, or the "right" of parents to keep their teenager from hearing that LGBTQ children exist. But they don't have a word to say about the "right" of children to not be gunned down in their schools, or the "right" of children to not be exploited as cheap, not necessarily willing labor, or the "right" to be LGBTQ without having the full wrath of the conservative state coming down on their heads.

"Parental rights" is rapidly becoming an identifying feature of "groomers." If someone's talking about parental rights above child rights, they are sketchy.

Speaking of sketchy, there's one other bit of Iowa news that drives home how sketchy Iowa Republican lawmakers are being when they sneer about parental rights and the supposed desires of their state's children. On Monday, Iowa students are planning a noon protest in the Iowa Capitol Rotunda.

The protest is a condemnation of Iowa Republican efforts to weaken state gun laws in the wake of recent mass shootings.

What do the children of Iowa want? They want lawmakers to protect them from being murdered in their schools, that's what they want. But you won't hear any conservative think tank or whining family-"values" Republican taking up that cause, in between efforts to weaken labor rules so that the state's children can work 6-hour factory shifts.

It never ends. The Washington Post is now reporting yet another oddity on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' legally mandated financial disclosures. Since 2006 Thomas has reported somewhere between $270,000 and $750,000 from a family real estate company called Ginger, Ltd., Partnership.

That's a good chunk of change, and the catch? Thomas and his wife shuttered Ginger, Ltd., in 2006. It doesn't exist. Thomas has earned up to $750,000 over the last 17 years from a ghost company.

The Post is able to explain what's likely happened here. In 1982, Ginni Thomas' now-deceased parents formed Ginger, Ltd., as a Nebraska real estate company, collecting rent from two residential developments. That company ceased to exist in 2006; a new company named Ginger Holdings, LLC was formed with the same business address, with Ginni Thomas' sister Joanne Elliot listed as the manager. The assets of the former company were transferred to the new one.

Ginni Thomas, notably, "is not named in state incorporation records" for the new company, reports the Post.

That's where the Post's answers end and the questions begin. Contacted by the Post, Joanne Elliot suggested the reporters call Ginni Thomas for information about the company "before hanging up," which is an odd response from the alleged head of the company. So what's going on?

The most obvious presumption would be that the company was restructured into an LLC for mercurial legal reasons, closing shop and reopening with Joanne Elliot as the manager while distancing sister Ginni Thomas.

Ginni continued to make regular profits from the company. Justice Thomas, however, never bothered to update the new company status—and hasn't updated it in the nearly 20 years since the original company shuttered.

If that sounds familiar, it's because it is. The Post notes that this error is "among a series of errors and omissions that Thomas has made on required annual financial disclosure forms over the past several decades," ones that "raised questions about how seriously Thomas views his responsibility to accurately report details about his finances to the public."

That's not a great use of the raising questions trope, from the Post. There aren't "questions" to be had how Thomas views his legal responsibilities in public reporting his financial dealings while on the bench.

Thomas, a sitting justice of the Supreme Court, did not disclose the sale of his mother's Georgia home to a hard-right Republican billionaire who has been plying that justice and his wife with lavish vacation getaways for years. He did not disclose that billionaire Harlan Crow literally purchased from Thomas the house his mother resides in, or that Crow spent a five-figure sum on renovating the property, or that Crow appears to have let Thomas' mother remain in the house despite the sale, or that Crow reportedly purchased the property with the intent of building a museum honoring Thomas.

There's no plausible way that Clarence Thomas can claim that he believed a real estate transaction in which notorious Republican political activist Crow purchased property from him for the purposes of building a museum about him didn't require legal disclosure. The whole point of judicial disclosures is to publicly ensure wealthy Americans are not tipping courtroom scales by doing expensive favors for the justices deciding each issue; "purchased my home to build a museum celebrating how great I am" is about as overt a favor as it's possible to imagine.

It's not a question of whether Thomas is taking his legal disclosure responsibilities seriously. He self-evidently isn't. Thomas has continually misrepresented income or flat-out omitted it from his disclosures and, when caught, continually claims either incompetence in filling out the forms or sniffed that the lavish vacations and other perks offered to him free of charge are not disclosable gifts because he and the billionaire Republican political activist are pals.

Clarence Thomas is ostensibly a justice of the Supreme Court. If there is anyone in America with access to legal advice about how government forms ought to be filled out, it is him. If it is truly beyond him to fill out a few legally mandated government forms without making countless mistakes, he has no business writing up judicial decisions in which he decides what U.S. laws mean for everybody else.

As we have all seen, Supreme Court justices are held to lower ethical standards than anyone else in government—or, at least, these current nine are. It is almost literally impossible for a justice to break ethics rules, and yet somehow Thomas continues to brazenly ignore one of the few remaining ethical requirements.

"The wealthy political activist who pays for my vacation getaways purchased a house from me in order to build a museum to me" is out of bounds even if Crow wasn't letting Thomas' mother keep living in the place. That's comic book levels of crooked. I mean, for f---s sake.

Twitter's attacks on NPR shows no signs of stopping.

Last week, billionaire Elon Musk-owned Twitter slapped a "state-affiliated media" label on NPR's Twitter account, despite NPR not being a candidate for such a label according to Twitter's own definition of the term. Twitter's Help Center specifically singled out NPR as an example of a corporation that wouldn't meet the definition.

"State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy," the Help Center document said.

Musk, however, Twitter's owner and CEO, responded to a tweet about the new "state-affiliated" label, saying, "Seems accurate."

After news pieces pointed out that Twitter's own Help Center said NPR didn't meet the definition, Twitter deleted the use of NPR as its Help Center example. NPR itself expressed outrage that Musk was falsely lumping it in with the foreign state-sponsored propaganda outlets that the Twitter label is meant to warn users about and announced that they'd no longer be posting on Musk's site until the label was removed.

NPR receives fewer than one percent of its annual budget from federal government sources, according to its website.

"NPR stands for freedom of speech and holding the powerful accountable," NPR CEO John Lansing said in a statement. "It is unacceptable for Twitter to label us this way. A vigorous, vibrant free press is essential to the health of our democracy."

Yoel Roth, who led Twitter's trust and safety department for seven years, criticized Twitter's decision to relabel NPR. Roth resigned from Twitter last year.

"Twitter's decision to label NPR as a state media outlet flies in the face of years of research, all evidence about NPR's funding and governance, and Twitter's own policies and principles," Roth told NPR. "Establishing a false equivalency between public broadcasters and editorial control of media by government is misleading, and undermines the essential work of providing transparency about state-backed propaganda efforts around the world."

Twitter's decision to label NPR state-affiliated may have an impact on how visible its content is on the platform. The social media platform's policy says, "In the case of state-affiliated media entities, Twitter will not recommend or amplify accounts or their Tweets with these labels to people."

Faced with criticism, Twitter engineers changed NPR's designation to read "Government Funded Media."

NPR is not "state-affiliated" or materially "government funded." NPR is a nonprofit corporation that gets somewhere around one percent of its funding from government grants and relies on donations, grants, and station dues for the rest. As politicians have groused repeatedly over the years, the federal government has no ability to dictate NPR's news coverage.

Oh Lord, this is going to be a thing. There's really no story in America that can't be made worse by simply adding one phrase to it, and that phrase is "Rand Paul weighed in."

Rand Paul weighed in on Wednesday to brownnose billionaire trollboy Twitter owner Elon Musk in Musk's still-unexplained and one-sided battle against ... NPR, of all things. Earlier in the week Musk had, after getting through his previous top priorities of stripping The New York Times of its "verified" Twitter status and replacing the Twitter logo with a "doge" meme, told the site's engineers to add a "state-affiliated media" warning label to NPR's site account.

He did this despite NPR plainly and factually not qualifying for that "state-affiliated" tag according to Twitter's own declared rules—which became awkward when journalists and internet meanies alike took screenshots of those rules in which Twitter itself had used NPR as a named example of a media account that wouldn't qualify for the tag. Twitter eventually removed NPR as its example, but didn't change the public rules it had presented.

Twitter itself explains that the "state-affiliated" warning label is meant to designate media sites "where the state exercises control over editorial content," such as Russian media site RT. It's a designator to warn Twitter users against propaganda sites sponsored by foreign governments.

The American government does not have any means of controlling the editorial content of NPR, however—it can apply no pressure other than by whatever regulatory pressures it might use against any other media organization. NPR doesn't get any significant direct funding from the federal government. It was created by Congress a half century ago, but in its current incarnation receives its funds from sponsorships, foundational grants, donations, and "membership" fees paid by public radio stations that broadcast NPR-produced shows like Morning Edition or All Things Considered. Those public radio stations themselves get the vast majority of their funding through sponsorships and pledge drives, but they do get some federal grants. These come from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which ... is not NPR.

So Elon, whose companies rely extensively on government money and have been repeatedly saved from bankruptcy due to that federal money, is just flat-out wrong on this one. If anyone cares.

That brings us to Rand Paul weighed in, that canker sore of a phrase that never makes anything better. Perennial twit and sitting Sen. Mike Lee weighed in to be even wronger than Elon was.

"To be clear, NPR is state-funded media," Lee tweeted with a link to the story.

Nope! Calling it "state-funded" is much, much wronger than Elon's "state-affiliated" label is. Mike Lee, who has been in the Senate long enough to know how to look these things up, is just lying.

But Rand Paul can do better! "If @NPR doesn’t want to be state-run media, we could always cut off their federal taxpayer funding…" Rand tweeted.

See now, that's just a flat-out lie and then some. Calling NPR "state-run" is disinformation. It's simply a hoax. NPR was spun off from a congressional edict a half century ago, and the "state" has not a damn speck of influence in NPR's programming. If NPR lost all of its "federal taxpayer funding" tomorrow, it would be ... just fine. Absolutely fine. The same cannot be said of Tesla or of SpaceX; government subsidies and contracts are the stuff that keeps Elon Musk's companies from collapse.

If SpaceX stopped getting federal money they'd be well and truly screwed, but you're not going to get Elon Musk or his "conservatism except with legal weed" fanboys to admit that. And heaven knows the white supremacists and neo-Nazi groups Elon is nurturing into site prominence aren't going to have a peep to say about it.

While it is tempting to believe that Paul and Lee are sucking up to Musk on Musk's website because they are spineless little weasels looking for his attention, it's probably more accurate to say that this is about Republicanism's hostility towards the news media in general. Musk is not alone in his belief that any media story questioning his extreme alleged brilliance amounts to a conspiratorial hit piece against him; this has been the stuff of Republican whines for decades before Musk became rich enough for his tantrums to matter.

Paul, in particular, has been fuming at the media for not going along with his disinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic. Paul is quite convinced that Anthony Fauci helped China build COVID-19 in a Chinese laboratory, or something (?) like that, and he is peeved that neither scientists nor the free press is buying what he’s trying to sell.

Again, though, what's going on here is that a narcissistic billionaire has bought himself a social media mini-empire so that he himself can spread disinformation against his perceived enemies, and high-profile Republicans like that very much. That's precisely what they've wanted all along. If the news makes you look bad, goes the Republican mantra, call it fake and invent a "better" version of the news that makes you look better.

Couple this with Elon Musk's new efforts to boost the known state-sponsored propaganda sites that Twitter used to police, and Twitter's turning into quite the Elon Musk-centered free-for-all. Musk is just fine with disinformation on the site. His only concern is how to best monetize it.

Eeeesh. I still say this ends with Elon either selling Twitter for a massive loss or with the site simply crashing and staying crashed due to a lack of anyone left who both knows how to fix it and gives a damn, but Musk is getting into weird Howard Hughes territory with this obsessive need to retaliate against news organizations that report on him. It's not going to be long before he's using his Twitter powers to change news account icons to dog pictures or sneaking into the system to write "I love Elon Musk" tweets from the accounts of The Washington Post or other high-profile accounts that have pissed him off.

Our planned Ukraine episode will have to wait, as Donald Trump is being arraigned in New York City for his role in falsifying records to hide hush money paid to Stormy Daniels. This is the first of a potential slew of indictments coming Trump’s way, and we are here for a celebration of karmic justice—and to talk about what happens to the Republican Party after this.

Stewing in not-quite-indicted-but-almost semi-exile in his for-profit home and club, the coup-attempting Donald Trump has had plenty of time to think about what he should have done differently with his four years in the most powerful office in the nation. But Donald Trump is now surrounded exclusively by violent batshit cultists of the worst sort; his retinue has been filtered down exclusively to those Republicans who have no problem with mounting a violent attempted coup, if that's what it takes to keep their own leaders in power.

There's nobody left to temper Trump's stupidest and most illegal ideas, and that's probably a good chunk of the reason Donald now thinks most of the major errors he made during his administration were because he kept getting talked down from implementing his stupidest and most illegal ideas. Like, for example, a military invasion of Mexico.

No, we're not joking here. Rolling Stone reports that Donald Trump has been asking his remaining policy advisers to draft up military options for striking Mexican drug cartels—with or without the cooperation of the Mexican government. The options range from Special Forces raids on suspected cartel targets to full-on military campaigns that "include elements of the Marines, Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard."

That's one of the options that the fascist Center for Renewing America has been publicly boosting, but the number of Republicans in or around Trump's circle who have been advocating for military strikes on Mexican cartels is large; Rolling Stone cites Reps. James Comer, Dan Crenshaw, Michael Waltz, Marjorie Taylor Green, Beth Van Duyne, former attorney general Bill Barr, Sens. Lindsey Graham and John Kennedy, and sedition-backing Trump official Chad Wolf among those who had expressed support for a military campaign inside Mexico or regretted that Trump didn't launch them when he had the chance.

There is deep Republican support for waging war inside Mexico, at least from the wing of the party that already considers an attempted coup to be a reasonable option here at home. They're not too keen on the United States providing weapons to Ukraine to fight off an invasion by Russian kleptocrat Vladimir Putin, but they're itching to show Mexico some neoconservative shock and awe.

We can't say, then, that Donald Trump is a fringe figure. To be sure, he's been formulating a new "presidential" campaign with planks that include public execution of drug dealers, military bombings of suspected international cartels, and presidential pardons for insurrectionists that attempted to overthrow the U.S. government on his behalf—but none of those things are far outside of "mainstream" fascist Republicanism as it's expressed by any of those other names up above. On the contrary, it's the seditionist wing of the party that's egging him on.

The justification for mounting military attacks on targets inside Mexico is the Republican usual. The Center for Renewing America (fascist!) cites "the mounting bodies of dead Americans from fentanyl poisonings," which Republicans insist is Because Mexico.

But House Republicans are also quick to point out that the fentanyl that comes through Mexico is actually mass-produced in China; Mexican importers then press it into counterfeit pills for the illicit U.S. markets.

It would seem more efficient to mount military strikes on the Chinese factories producing the stuff—oh, but China is a military superpower, or at least a good percentage of one. Mexico isn't. So there's your answer.

What isn't being said here is that when push comes to shove comes to bombing things, the Mexican government has as much reason to mull military attacks on the United States as the Trumpites have to wage war in Mexico. It's the American markets that are providing such enormous quantities of cash to Central and South American crime syndicates as to render them into something of pseudo-governments in regions under their control. And it's not as if we don't know who's doing the importing.

In San Jose, California, this week, the Department of Justice charged the head of the San Jose Police Union with attempted opioid smuggling, part of a larger Homeland Security investigation into San Francisco Bay region drug smuggling.

Far-right U.S. militia and white supremacist groups have long used international drug smuggling as a key means of funding their expensive insurrection fetishes; this week saw the arrest of 24 people linked to a white supremacist prison gang and the seizure of "more than 1.9 million doses" of fentanyl—in addition to 177 guns and over 230 pounds of methamphetamines.

If Mexico wanted to do serious damage to Mexican drug cartels, special military operations targeting ultraviolent U.S. crime syndicates would leave the cartels without most of their major sales channels. It is possible, as the Center for Renewing America (very fascist!) might itself acknowledge, that the U.S. government that's proven unable to corral these criminal gangs would object to a Mexican military incursion aimed at bombing U.S. traffickers into oblivion, but you can't say the Mexican government wouldn't have reason to do it. U.S. drug importers are responsible for destabilizing their nation's government; if Mexico knows where to find these Americans, wouldn't that make them plausible military targets?

It's not likely that Dan Crenshaw, Lindsey Graham, or any of the other advocates for military action against foreign crime rings would be willing to agree with that, and it's not because the Republicans itching to send our military to yet another new target are sticklers when it comes to international human rights agreements.

Again: Donald Trump is carving his new campaign into something much more vicious than either of his previous two, and it's not because he's been wallowing in narcissistic self-pity to such an extent that it's broken his brain. The Republican aides, officials, and policy advisers he's surrounded himself with have continually been pushing for extreme-right national policies, but now any Republican not on board with things like "attempted coup" or "military invasion of Mexico" has self-defenestrated and headed for the Liz Cheney wilderness. It's an aggressively fascist brand of "Republicanism" that's pushing Trump to extremism; it's not Trump pushing the party into it.

Will Ron DeSantis now adopt "bomb Mexico" as a new policy stance? Will it be written into the Republican Party platform, assuming the Republican Party ever again produces a platform that isn't just a one-page vow to support whatever Dear Leader blurts out? The odds are better than half, because this whole damn party went off the rails long before Donald J. Trump came along.

The House Republicans' sedition caucus has been engaged in a sternly worded letter-war with Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg of late. It started with Republican committee chairs Jim Jordan, James Comer, and Bryan Steil demanding Bragg turn over all documents pertaining to his probe of Donald Trump's possible campaign finance or corporate fraud violations associated with Trump's 2016 hush money payments to an adult film actress—a blatant attempt to dig through the evidence Bragg has found so that it can be leaked to Trump's lawyers or so witnesses can be publicly identified, demonized, and threatened.

Bragg's team responded with a letter essentially suggesting Jordan and company go fornicate themselves, which led to the Republican trio reiterating and doubling down on their demands in a new letter dated March 25.

Most of it's just a repeat of the previous Republican bellowing, but Andrew Feinberg spotted an intriguing new claim by the Republican trio. Now Jim Jordan and Trump's other House saboteurs are claiming they need all of Bragg's information about the Trump investigation not just so the House can prove that Bragg is a big stupid poppyhead, but because House Republicans are looking to write a new law banning former presidents from being indicted for anything, ever.

[B]ecause the federal government has a compelling interest in protecting the physical safety of former or current Presidents, any decision to prosecute a former or current President raises difficult questions concerning how to vindicate that interest in the context of a state or local criminal justice system. For these reasons and others, we believe that we now must consider whether Congress should take legislative action to protect former and/or current Presidents from politically motivated prosecutions by state and local officials, and if so, how those protections should be structured. Critically, due to your own actions, you are now in possession of information critical to this inquiry.

That's right, the party of Lock Her Up now wants to write new laws saying that Actually, people who become president can commit as many crimes as they like and nobody's allowed to do anything about it.

Shoot someone on 5th Avenue? If a former president does it it's legal.

Sex trafficking? Rape? Bank fraud? Building an explosive device in your spare bedroom? All legal now, if you're a president or have ever been one. You can run down fifty people in your custom limousine and state prosecutors won't be able to lift a finger. That's what the Republican Party stands for.

Rep. Jim Jordan may have become the most visible House Republican due solely to the aggressiveness with which he covered up his past coverup of college athlete sexual abuse, but he's on to bigger and better things now. House Republicans have apparently decided that Donald Trump has committed so many likely crimes that rather than sabotage just one or two cases, it's more efficient to just pass a new law saying nobody can indict him for anything, in any state, for any crime.

The rest of the letter is mostly unsubstantial. Bragg's team correctly noted in their own letter that Congress has no authority to dip into active criminal investigations by state prosecutors and grand juries, not even if Congress wants to do some super-important witness tampering or leaking or what have you; Jordan and crew are now responding with a new supposed reason they need all of Bragg's records, which is that (and you can almost hear the gears grinding away in House Republican heads as they come up with this stuff) they need to examine Bragg's records so that they can take "legislative action" to protect presidents from being arrested not just now, but forever.

Jim Jordan is a pathetic, pathetic man. At some point Donald Trump is going to shuffle off his mortal coil; what will Jim Jordan do with his life then, when his every waking moment isn't devoted to protecting Dear Orange Leader from everything from impeachment to fraud to bad hair days?

If you're wondering? No. No, this supposed legislation will never pass, and it almost certainly will never even be seriously proposed. Jim Jordan and his collaborators are Making Shit Up. Nobody's going to vote for a new law immunizing former presidents from committing crimes, because none of these human sporks could stomach a world in which Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden could go around breaking Republican kneecaps with golf clubs while flashing a presidential immunity card at anyone who tried to get in their way.

Jim Jordan is just lying to Bragg, flat out. As usual. House Republicans may have oozed into Dear Leader-worshipping fascism, but that doesn't mean that they've suddenly gained any brain cells—or even a thin thread of integrity. Jordan wants to know if there's any witnesses he needs to tamper with or any justice that needs to be obstructed, and all of the rest of the House Republican argument is slapped together as means to that end. It's sad, it's pathetic, and it's business as usual for the crooked seditionists Republicans now revere as their most important figures.

There is some unfortunate news to report today. Sadly, I have died. My cause of death was, as I always knew it would be, The New York Times. Seldom do we talk about the ongoing dangers presented by the Times, which is the unregulated gas stove of newspapers, but anyhow I read this new Times focus group piece talking to yet another band of unrepentant Trump voters and it caused me to immediately die. It's a damn shame, but I probably had it coming.

The premise of the piece is the same premise used for each of its one hundred million previous incarnations: The Times gathered up a dozen average-Joe Republican Americans it had previously talked to and asked them yet again what they thought about seditious coup conspirator Donald Trump, about the Republican Party, and about oh right the Jan. 6 insurrection and subsequent hearings publicizing what investigators have been able to learn about the origins of the violence.

What you get, when you ask any random dozen Americans to weigh on any subject not in their personal wheelhouse, is almost certain to be a train wreck every single time it is attempted. We know this. We have always known this. The whole genre is mostly an exercise for the press to find out how badly the press has f*cked up its own public responsibilities, and in specific it really can't be anything more than a parlor-game premise in which we attempt to deduce, knowing nothing at all about the handful Americans corralled for public display, which news channel their television most frequently ends up on.

Most. Americans. Do. Not. Pay. Attention. To. Politics. They know only what they have heard thirdhand. The most useable quotes almost always come from the volunteers who are the least informed but the most hardheadedly confident in themselves, a bad combination that never gets any better than absolutely awful.

This is a very useful exercise if you want to lose all hope in America. It's one of the best approaches possible if your paper is looking to collect all its readers who do pay close attention to politics for the purpose of killing them all off at once.

When it comes to actually collecting useful information about anything other than the relative reach of various television and radio programs, however, the assault-every-diner approach is useless. So it must be that the Times really did intend to kill readers. They are serial killers. Their depravity knows no bounds. The murder weapons? Quotes from Americans still willing to say they support Republicans even after the party egged an attempted coup into being, Americans who have been selected for inclusion based explicitly on their utter disinterest in any politics that cannot be sloganed onto a hat.

(Sandy, 48, white, Calif., property manager) Well, I think Republicans are our only option as far as getting us out of this mess that the Democrats have started with inflation and all that. Do they have a plan at this point? Doesn’t look like it. But are they organized? Doesn’t look like it. But there is hope there.

See, I don't want to write about politics anymore. I just don't. I want to write stories about elves and dwarves and dragons, stories in which the dwarves and elves are at each others throats because elves think trees should exist and dwarves can only find joy in extraction-based industries, and both are competing for control of a fantasy legislative body but they're evenly matched and can't make progress but then a collection of mountain trolls begin to run for office as well, and the mountain trolls argue that since the main reason for electing dwarves is that dwarves really hate elves, well then mountain trolls hate both elves and dwarves so that makes them even more qualified for office.

Anyway, it would all end with the head dwarf, whose name is Kevli or whatever, bargaining for the trolls' support by allowing them to eat both of his legs, one of his arms, both ears, and five dwarven legislators to be named later. It's all a mess, and while the dwarves are all arguing over who to feed to the trolls in order to keep Kevli from looking like a complete dork here the Dark Lord Braendoen is gathering his forces to give everybody slightly cheaper insuli—I mean, potions. Slightly cheaper potions.

I don't have to write about politics. I've got a vivid imagination that could, like, totally nail a story about racist dwarves that conspire with even more racist mountain trolls to keep anyone from getting cheap insuli-I mean, health potions.

But no, here I am, a corpse, because the Times had to kill me before I even had the chance to switch careers in self-defense.

Q: Is there a particular idea or value that you’d like [Republicans] to stand up for?
(Judi, 73, white, Okla., retired) Honesty.

See, I'm dead now. Everything you're hearing from me after this point is just gas escaping.

(Andrea, 49, white, N.J., executive assistant) Just start putting things back on the right track. It makes me scratch my head that the country never did better than when Trump was president — never. You know what I mean? The gas prices were low. The border was under control. Everything was just great. And he got run out of town just because he sends mean tweets and has a big mouth. They’d rather elect a nice guy and have the country in the toilet.

Andrea, a MILLION PEOPLE DIED and you're f*cking on about cheap gas prices? THERE WAS A COUP, ANDREA. How the hell did The New York Times ever even find you, how is it that you even became aware that something called The New York Times even existed and wasn't just a phishing effort aimed at getting hold of your Social Security number?

(Alissa, 29, Latina, Fla., procurement) Just thinking back to how well we were doing as a country when [Trump] was running it, I would love to see that again. I think he’s strong. I thought he was a great president. If DeSantis decides to run, I might turn a little bit. It depends.

What Donald Trump brought to America was hats. That's it. There's not a damn thing he actually did except the hat thing. And public belligerence. And being a rapist who bought an entire beauty pageant brand so that he could see teen girls change in the dressing rooms. Oh, and the international extortion bits. And the complete upending of American standing overseas, selling out allies while prodding enemies to open up new beach resorts. And using the presidency of the United States as a reason to mark up cocktail prices in his Washington hotel.

It's the hat thing, isn't it. The exchange Donald Trump made with America is that he gets to ignore laws and be roundly incompetent and kill off so many people that we’re stuffing bodies in refrigerated trucks for lack of other places to put them, but in exchange the sh*ttiest people you know all get the opportunity to buy Chinese hats with a meaningless slogan on them. I mean, who wouldn't go for that deal.

Q: Is there anything about [Trump] that’s turned you off over the last year or that you sort of lost steam on?
(Judi, 73, white, Okla., retired) Well, when Covid started, I think he was swayed into the vaccine thing. He listened to the wrong people. I’ll leave it at that.

Yeah, that's when I died the second time, becoming double-dead. So far I cannot report any meaningful differences from just being the usual kind of dead. This must be what it's like to be a cat.

(Lorna, 60, white, Mo., customer service representative) I think it’s ridiculous people want to put him in prison. For what? And look at Biden and his son.

Again, there is only one reason why any journalistic outlet should ever do any of these diner-inspired stories about The Common American. It is a window into which news outlets they consume and nothing else. There is not one glitteringly enf*ckened thing Lorna, 60, of Missouri could tell us about the relative legal jeopardy of Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, or Beefystevo Biden that would be the slightest bit informative or useful.

And I do mean that: You could concoct an entirely fictional Biden son named "Beefystevo," ask 12 Republican voters about Beefystevo's crimes, and at least eight of them would insist that Beefystevo has done many, many crimes, all very bad, some of them in Ukraine and some of them in Narnia, and they will tell you that The New York Times is crookedly covering up the very existence of Beefystevo Biden in coordination with Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and a giraffe in Texas that looks kind of similar to Bill Gates.

I dare you to ask your focus groups about Beefystevo and his crimes. I dare you, New York Times. You know what will happen, and I know what will happen. Do it, you diner-hounding cowards.

(Sandy, 48, white, Calif., property manager) I want DeSantis to run. He’s just like Trump. He’s just as cantankerous, but I think he’s a little bit more refined. For example, you have Jack Daniels, or you have Gentleman Jack. Gentleman Jack is a lot smoother, but it’s still whiskey.

Thank God we finally have someone willing to be honest about Republican politics. That's the word that comes to mind when you think about Florida's Ron DeSantis: Refined. The man is refined, in that you can either suck on what he's selling or what Trump's selling and both will get you nice and politically sh*tfaced but the DeSantis version goes down smooooother. It's probably because Ron DeSantis doesn't have as much golf-course bunker sand in his shoes. It might be because the DeSantis bottle is spiked with 20% hydroxychloroquine siphoned from an early-pandemic Florida stockpile DeSantis is still trying to get rid of.

Hey, so do any of our fine Normal Republican Americans want to revise or extend their past remarks about the 2020 presidential election being stolen just because a traitorous crapsack and his eight syphillitic reindeer shouted about it way back when? Anyone want to walk that back, or not walk that back?

Was Trump, glorious figurehead who raised American life into the highest tier of awesomeness that has ever been, "cheated" out of winning his pandemic economic-crisis post-(first)-impeachment election?

(Andrea, 49, white, N.J., executive assistant) Cheated as in ballots — truckloads of ballots showing up in the middle of the night. There’s videos of it. There is proof. [...]
(Sandy, 48, white, Calif., property manager) I know the videos that Andrea is talking about. It’s well documented, but the media doesn’t want to cover that type of stuff.
(Judi, 73, white, Okla., retired) No, I still think [Trump] won the election and that he should still be our president. He should be our president right now.

Truckloads! Truckloads of secret vaccines! I mean, ballots! It's all on video! It's streaming in 5G from every maple tree, but the government doesn't want you to know! It is very important that we, the readers of The New York Times, are exposed to the free and unfettered opinions of our nation's most thickheaded and source-agnostic of opinion havers, because reasons! How would America know that one specific retired Oklahoma vaccine skeptic believes Joe Biden is not the legitimate president if The New York Times did not create an entire "interactive" web feature highlighting this important f*cking information? How could the readership survive if we did not contact these people not once, but a second time so that they could rub their curlicue opinions in our eyeballs twice instead of once?

What about the whole coup thing? You know, the attempted coup, the one in which Trump advertised for a rally coinciding with the certification of the United States presidential election, got angry when his security forces tried to deprive the mob of their weapons, and told them all to march to the Capitol during a joint session of Congress as means of threatening Congress if they did not overturn the election's results? That whole thing? The thing that should have made any decent person look for an exit sign, rather than being thought a supporter of a genuine bona-fide traitor to the nation?

(Andrea, 34, biracial, N.H., I.T. support) The internet was just ablaze. I made a post in support of it, and a lot of people came to attack me in the comment section. That day was really crazy. [...]
When I saw videos of everything that happened, I was pretty embarrassed. I was like, 'Oh, no. We’re going to hear about this forever.' It did look very chaotic and violent. I knew it was going to come down to blaming Trump somehow, saying that he was a ringleader and he’s responsible, he riled everybody up.

Ah, the very American view of "you make comments supporting one violent riot and everybody gets on your case about it" followed by "oh jeez, this turned out very f*cky, now we're all going to be stuck hearing about it." Can't kill me any more than twice, New York Times. Not in a single day, anyway.

What about all those congressional hearings detailing what investigators found out about the coup's organizers, allies, and origins? Any minds changed over here in the Republicans Who Don't Pay Attention To Politics ballpit?

(Sandy, 48, white, Calif., property manager) If anything, I think my views have become more solidified. If you look, they made a big thing out of it in the media. They didn’t cover Black Lives Matter, antifa. I mean, you talk about Jan. 6 being planned. Antifa, throughout the whole summer of 2020, I mean, those things were planned, organized. The media didn’t cover it.

I cannot emphasize how enraging it was that the media kept covering things that did happen while ignoring things that did not happen. You know who else planned, well, not the violent overthrow of our nation's government but, like, other stuff? Antifa, probably! But no, instead everybody made a Big Damn Deal out of a Republican-led attempt to erase a constitutional United States election. Gawd.

Please tell me any of these Informed Public Voices at least watched the hearings they're now being asked to opine on?

(Barney, 72, white, Del., retired) I didn’t see anything live. It was a waste of $3 million.

I cannot emphasize this enough, but I mean this in kindness: There is no amount of government money that could be spent that would not be a waste of money, when it comes to convincing Barney of Delaware, retired, to have an opinion other than the one he wants to have. This is indeed a terrible waste of government resources.

But the crowd Donald Trump gathered to march on the Capitol was a pretty violent bunch, at least we can all agree on—

(Alissa, 29, Latina, Fla., procurement) No, I don’t think it was. I’ve personally been to Trump rallies. They’re very peaceful. So I don’t think what happened that day had anything to do with Trump. I think it was planned.

EVERYBODY FORGOT TO ASK ALISSA WHETHER TRUMP’S JANUARY 6 CROWD WAS VIOLENT, I BET YOU POLICE OFFICERS ALL FEEL PRETTY STUPID NOW.

Surely the news of an attempt to violently overturn the results of a U.S. election have left at least some small impression on Republican Jus' Folks.

(Lorna, 60, white, Mo., customer service representative) Well, a couple of people locally here were arrested. So of course, they’d show them every news clip, on every channel. It just got old. It was just a waste of taxpayers’ money, in my opinion.

I mean, that's the thing about failed violent coups, they're just so boooooring and everybody keeps going on about them all the time and it makes channel surfing sooooo tedious. Thank you again, New York Times, for exposing us to the very important views of that class of Americans that tries very hard to know nothing about politics and gets bitter and resentful when you shove it onto their television channels anyway.

Because, you know, the Jan. 6 hearings were a farce to begin with. How the hell would the United States Congress know more things than Andrea of New Jersey does? How would anyone in the White House know more about Trump’s actions than Andrea does, or Barney does? They wouldn't, so that means this was all a set up.

(Andrea, 49, white, N.J., executive assistant) I 100 percent agree with what Barney said. I think they testified because they weren’t part of the cool kids anymore or bribes. I’m not really sure what it is, but to make up blatant stories like that, there’s got to be some kind of underlying 'What’s in it for me?' kind of thing, I think.

Well, we've rediscovered a core Republican voter tenet so we can't say this was a total waste of time. Ask pretty much anyone in the Republican Party, from the common voter to your average sex-crime-covering-up Republican lawmaker, and they'll tell you that there's no possible reason anyone would want to offer evidence about a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol unless there was something in it for them. The idea that anyone would be sincerely shaken by, say, a mob of pole-wielding cop-beating weirdlings hunting down Trump's political enemies in the halls of the Capitol is utterly foreign to Every Single Republican. The notion eludes them. It is not a concept that can wiggle into their smooth and proud brains.

If people are going to jump in to "testify" every single time an armed mob beats police officers inside the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to hunt down the vice president then where will it end? It's all very suspicious. They probably just want to make the coup guy look bad.

I really wish I hadn't died. Well, I suppose it's more accurate to say I really wish The New York Times hadn't gone out of its way to write an interactive fancy-pants feature specifically intended to kill me, because it seems like a jerk move every time they've tried it and yet they just keep pushing.

Bring us home, Timesy. Show us that any of these people have opinions even an onion-skin thickness above the buzzword generic. Show us that you have gathered up a small crowd who, while admirably anonymous and no doubt chosen according to best dice-throwing the editorial staff of the Times can provide, is worthy of national attention because these dozen people have at least thought about any of this stuff long enough to have any opinion that could not be more efficiently produced by an artificial intelligence exposed only to the opening monologues of weekday Fox News opinion hosts.

Show us, please show us, that you have not just gathered a collection of cranks who are angry that government keeps feeding children and trying to prevent polio and keeps blocking very profitable companies from pumping skin-dissolving toxic soup directly into your home's plumbing. That these are people who have put thought into this, and are not simply reactionary faux-libertarian crackpots spooning the wisdom of gum wrappers and fortune cookies into everyone else's tired, tired brains.

Q: Sandy, what would be a sign that our democracy is healthy?
(Sandy, 48, white, Calif., property manager) I would say getting back to the basics, sticking with the Constitution. There’s just too much government interference in everything. We’ve got so many regulations, taxes and controls and spending and everything. Get back to the fundamentals. Less government involvement. We should have an army, a military. That’s about it. Otherwise, just stay out of the way.
(Michael, 65, white, Utah, retired) I tend to agree with Sandy, just hoping that we could start letting the Constitution be the Constitution and let us have our rights with freedom of speech and just start living the way that they did hundreds of years ago, when they believed in our country.

There you go. How wonderful. I am so, so glad I didn't live to see that.

Donald Trump and Republican candidates held a Nevada rally on Saturday. Thanks to the speakers, there was no attempt to misdirect or moderate the speeches. What was on display was the heart of Republicanism's new fascism. Racism; paranoia; hoax promotion; a focus not on winning elections, but on winning the power to administer and subjugate them. Highlights of the event come via Acyn.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville delivered unabashed racism:

A bit of climate denial was thrown in as well, part of the party's now-widespread anger at science and intellectualism in all its forms:

From Jim Marchant, the party's Big Lie-endorsing and sedition-backing secretary of state candidate in Nevada, we got a definition of what taking our country back means, to Republicans. It means controlling the mechanisms of our elections.

But what are the secretaries of state supposed to do, once the offices are in Republican control? Apparently their role will consist not only of monitoring elections, but facilitating criminal acts from the party?

Criminal acts such as preparing and delivering forged documents purporting to be legitimate presidential electors based on groups of individual Republicans simply declaring themselves to be so:

Glorifying the reign of Dear Leader, mainly by fictionalizing it, was on the agenda:

After the crowd had been pummeled by delusionists for long enough, it was time for the traitor whose lies led to deaths in the Capitol to bellow his own versions. Donald Trump, a traitor, wants you to remember the good times of unabated pandemic death.

A proper fascist leader might have dug up the corpse of pandemic casualty Herman Cain and rigged it to applaud when Trump spoke that line, but we can't have everything. Trump left office a seditionist, a crooked traitor who betrayed the country in a dozen slovenly ways, but that was only after incompetently handling a national crisis to the tune of half a million deaths. But this was a crowd of Republicans willing to support such a traitor; while many of them likely had family members who died in large part because this buffoon refused to support even masking, much less other protections, those family members are long forgotten. What is important is that the shit-skulled traitor be properly cheered.

We moved on to, of course, demands that those who were not seditionist traitors be locked up.

While glorifying Trump's own acts to overthrow the government.

A bit of fever dream was added in, as the traitor's mind wandered to his more current problems:

But Trump took time out of his own fascist delusions to promote a foreign dictatorship. The Republican Party has fetished murderous Russian kleptocrat Vladimir Putin, even as Putin faces the world exposed as a fraud, a thug whose reign has so decimated his country that his own military has collapsed from the corruption. Ukraine is currently routing Russian armies, threatening to take back Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia for nearly a decade.

Trump, who consistently sought to undermine Ukrainian sovereignty at every turn during his time in office for reasons we can still only speculate on, took a moment to promote new Russian demands that Ukrainians halt their destruction of the army that sought to occupy them.

Republicanism is hardening into a fascist movement steadily, and with no significant pushback. In just one event we see assertion of white supremacy, a barrage of false propaganda meant to glorify the movement and deny its failures, the now-omnipresent contempt for book-learning in all its forms, the glorification of violence to assert party dominance, assertions that the nation can be saved only if the party itself administers its elections, and the seeds of likely future violence. The party became a fascist party when it backed the January 6 coup attempt, both on the day itself and for these two long years afterwards as it both obstructed all attempts to investigate Trump's actions during the coup and glorified, to their base, the alleged patriotism of the seditionists themselves.

We are now at the point where the movement believes even state national security secrets do not belong to the state, but belong to Donald Trump personally, by the rules of finders keepers. It is fascist, fascist, fascist. Look at the crowd, in those images. They are proud to be white supremacists, to rally around hoaxes, and to back the attempted overthrow of their own government. They are having so much fun, as they cheer for it all and hold up their pre-made signs.

On CNN this morning, Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts tossed aside the evasions his Republican Party used to rely on to assure American women that Republicans would not, in fact, force them to give birth to the babies of their rapists. No abortion exceptions for incest or rape, said Ricketts. None.

Under Republican government in Nebraska and elsewhere, a 12 year old girl raped by her father will carry that pregnancy to term.

It's a position that is almost required, if one truly believes in the "personhood" of a fertilized egg with no organs or nervous system. Pete Ricketts knows not a damn thing about medicine, but has strong religious convictions that he believes should override medical knowledge—not for him, but for every last American of every religion or no religion, in any circumstance, enforced by the powers of the state.

This is what is coming. Republicans have vowed they would do it ever since racist evangelical leaders of past decades latched onto abortion as a means of galvanizing support for a Christian nationalism-premised erasing of the last half-century of gained civil rights. The leaked news that the Supreme Court the Republican Party packed exclusively with theocrats is on the cusp of ending federal abortion rights means that Pete Ricketts and other Republicans like him will now use their power to implement whatever faux-religious rules their base demands of them.

Republicans are done being coy about what's coming next. They don't believe they need to play those games, now that they have a Supreme Court that will back their theocratic moves every step of the way.

There's now another big leak from The United States Supreme Court, and this one's being unapologetically linked to the court's conservative wing. The Washington Post has a new story in which multiple sources describe how Chief Justice John Roberts was planning to further carve away at Roe v. Wade by giving the court's approval to the Mississippi law banning abortions after 15 weeks, but wanted to dodge overturning Roe completely.

The Supreme Court's other conservatives, however, essentially told him to pound sand. They wanted a full end to Roe, which is Justice Alito got the plum role of writing a hard-edged, theocratic-premised decision declaring federal abortion rights to be dead based squarely on the premises of his own personal religion and the rantings of an infamous 17th century misogynist and witch hunter.

This is not new news: That Roberts was not on board with the full ramifications of what the Alito wing of the court is pressing for was evident from Alito's draft opinion, which would not exist if Roberts was in the majority because Roberts would never have assigned the most controversial decision of his tenure to the archconservative crackpot Alito to begin with. Alito is known for authoring spite-riddled opinions riddled with dishonesty and omissions to get to his desired end point, which is often simply a long-winded declaration that my personal religious beliefs are supreme and your religious traditions are invalid. He is the voice of the reactionary Republicanism that justifies coup attempts and declares that laws mean different things based on whether a Republican or a non-Republican will be inconvenienced by them. An extremist, through and through.

What's more interesting is that now the court is leaking again, and this time it's quite obviously an intentional leak by conservatives to either prop up Roberts' fast-eroding dignity or to further brag of the conservative wing's willingness to erase Roe outright.

"But as of last week, the five-member majority to strike Roe remains intact, according to three conservatives close to the court who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter," reports the Post. Oh, so now numerous people "close to the court" are leaking information about the court's private deliberations and politics—and we're even allowed to know that it is in fact "conservatives" close to the court who are doing the leaking.

"A person close to the court’s most conservative members said Roberts told his fellow jurists in a private conference in early December that he planned to uphold the state law and write an opinion that left Roe and Casey in place for now. But the other conservatives were more interested in an opinion that overturned the precedents, the person said."

That's a pretty huge leak! (In the before times, it would have been considered such an abhorrent breach of current deliberations that the Post would seek out a conservative crank like Michael Luttig to moan about the "historic" and "tragic" breach of the "confidential deliberative process"—which the Post does, at the end of the piece, so Luttig can say those things about the original Alito leak but not this one. Conspicuously: Not this one.)

So now we've got a whole set of conservatives privy to the court's internal deliberations who are all coming out at once to assert that Roberts wanted to again sabotage Roe by chipping away at its foundations, allowing Mississippi to enact an encompassing 15-week ban despite Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, but he was unanimously rejected by the court's other conservatives who all voted to erase Roe entirely.

The motive that comes easiest to mind, when wondering why so many people close to the court are willing to leak deliberations to the press even as John Roberts orders an investigation into the leak of the Alito draft, is legacy-polishing. Roberts may be pressing this new leak himself, in an attempt to distance himself from the extremists and signal to Republican powerbrokers in the Senate and elsewhere that no, he indeed tried to stop his fellow conservatives from doing the most election-rattling thing, and he is still committed to his own brand of judicial activism that knocks away precedents incrementally rather than all-at-once. It is an approach that has allowed Roberts to claim plausible deniability even as the extremism of the opinions themselves keep getting ratcheted up, and one that has damped public anger at his party's reactionary actions by premising each one on an assortment of caveats that muddle the true scope of the outcome.

In this scenario, it's Roberts who is pressuring his allies to leak to the press for entirely self-serving reasons. He's long been devoted to preserving the alleged independence and dignity of the court—even as Republican presidents and senators stuff his court with new members who don't give a damn about those things but instead were chosen for their willingness to embrace extremist opinions—and could be pushing this story as pushback to calls to expand the court, impose term limits, or make other reforms to bring the court into something even vaguely resembling the modern era.

But that's a pretty weak reason for once again shattering the supposed all-important prohibition against leaking internal court decision-making, and there's another possible motive for the leak, from other possible leakers. It is possible the Alito draft was leaked by some conservative close to the court, perhaps some conservative anti-abortion extremist and activist who is married to one of the most conservative justices and who has already shown a willingness to break the laws in any manner the extremists desire, or maybe even not that person, and it is possible that this new leak featuring multiple "conservative" court sources is a simple case of bragging.

The court's most extremist members won, and there's not a damn thing anyone on the court or off it can do about it, and because of that one of the defining culture wars of the last half century is about to be "won" by its devoted soldiers. It doesn't require much imagination to believe that the court's conservatives have been bragging mightily among themselves and to their allies about this outcome, and it doesn't require much imagination to believe that those they've bragged to—are even now gearing up for very gaudy victory celebrations.

So yes, perhaps those allied with the court's most reactionary justices would be quite happy to leak to the press that John Roberts tried everything in his power to keep the extremists from taking the "boldest" possible action, and not only did the reactionaries reject him, the group even assigned the ever-nasty Alito to write the nastiest majority opinion he and his clerks could muster.

We now know for a fact that multiple "conservatives" close to the court are leaking like the Moskva. Will condemnations again roll in? Will Roberts launch a second investigation to parallel the first?

Well, no. But we still know that it's court-connected "conservatives" doing the leaking because that's how they're willing to identify themselves to us. We just don't know whose boots they're trying to polish by doing it.

You might have expected that Republican lawmakers would have been giddy last night with the leaked news that the newly far-right Supreme Court is on the cusp of granting their half-century-old dream, the dream of erasing abortion rights that was the very reason the party began putting forth those new archconservative nominees to begin with. Nope. Republican lawmakers were and continue to be absolutely furious, alleging that the rare (but hardly unprecedented) leak from the court is an outrage that must not be allowed to stand.

And so a parade of willing seditionists, defenders of corruption, and those who keep voting to block investigations into any of it in order to advance Republican power have spent the last 24 hours screaming about the norms while saying little to nothing about the raw cruelty of Alito's leaked far-far-right opinion, or its hints that the Trump-packed court intends to use the Alito framework to undo rights ranging from LGBT marriage to contraception to anti-"sodomy" laws.

No, the Republican Party that both mounted an attempted coup and is still working, to this day, to block the investigations into who organized the effort and who they had help from—they're very mad about the Alito-written draft opinion getting leaked. It didn't even take an hour for that to become The Talking Point.

The Senate’s two most visible insurrection backers weighed in, of course. Sen. Ted Cruz was outraged by the “blatant attempt to intimidate the Court through public pressure rather than reasoned argument,” which you know is bullshit because insurrection. At the same time, Sen. Josh Hawley immediately went weird conspiracy crank because apparently not even history-shaking reality is as exciting as the theories in his own head.

There’s no part of that that makes sense, which is how you know Josh Hawley wrote it himself. He also has a solution: The Libs Made Me Fascist Harder!

Elsewhere in Team Active Sedition, we find that same “intimidating,” coupled with a “radical left.” It’s not attempting to overthrow the U.S. government or packing the courts with unqualified hardliners that’s radical; it’s some clerk or technical worker inside the Supreme Court leaking the end of abortion rights in this nation before Team Sedition’s justices have fully crossed the t’s and dotted the i’s.

The man who broke the court himself, Mitch McConnell, repeats the notion that the real “mob rule” is a random leaker inside the Supreme Court. “Escalation,” “radical left,” “attack,” and “intimidate” are all used, giving the impression of coordinated violence akin to, say, insurrection to describe reporters getting a leaked document from an unknown government source.

What’s important here, however, is to remember that McConnell is the most prolific liar in all of government now that Trump is gone. He literally gives speeches like this on a daily basis, all explaining that “the left” are the real radicals and that he is a man of high principle who would never do the things he just did. Mitch McConnell invented new rule after new rule to make sure the Supreme Court slid to the current archconservative dismantlers even as America continued to vote for Democratic presidents to undo it. There’s nobody who’s been more radical; a press leak may be embarrassing, but it’s neither an insurrection nor a spate of new laws blocking Americans from their ballots.

Yeah. Yeah, that’s it. Alito’s hyper-cruel opinion must be hidden from the public lest Alito feel vulnerable about it. Every theocratic fascist is secretly a wilting flower, which is why we’re getting all these new laws banning books that make people like Sam Freaking Alito feel bad.

OH MY GOD I’m just going to start filtering out any tweets or news stories that so much as mention Susan Collins’ name. Susan Collins could be replaced with a potted plant and it would make absolutely no difference in anyone’s lives, ever. Imagine basing a whole political career on the theme of being the single most gullible person in America—and getting reelected for it.

But the talking point is the talking point, and it’s still going.

Hey, it’s Guy Who’s All About Projecting Dignity While His Party Collapses Into Fascism:

Also Sen. Lindsey Graham said something, and I don’t even care. Lindsey saved his top career meltdown for the purpose of railroading a serial sex predator through the confirmation process rather than abide testimony against him. We all already know what he thinks about the “dignity” of our court systems.

Instead, here’s another reminder that this other guy remains neck-deep in the attempt to nullify an American election rather than recognize the right of Americans to pick non-Republican winners:

What a toad this guy is. But the notion that “a Supreme Court leak is the real insurrection” has gotten a lot of traction among the people who … don’t think actual insurrections are bad.

All right, that one’s simply amazing. It should come with its own theme song.

There is a distinct link between the curtailing of abortion rights and rising fascism, by the way.

There are two things to note that make Team Sedition’s posturing here even more grotesque than it first appears—aside from the uncanny link between restricting reproductive justice and authoritarianism/fascism. The first is that we sincerely don’t know who could have leaked this opinion or why, and we probably won’t know for a long time. There’s just as much reason to expect a conservative abortion opponent inside the court leaked the document to blame a secret liberal inside the court; if conservative justices were feeling uneasy about the sheer magnitude of what Alito intends to unravel, leaking the document would paint a target on whichever conservative justices were threatening to back out.

So it’s yet again the case that the Republicans insisting that their enemy, “the left,” are responsible for the latest crimes against Washington decency are basing those claims on fictions inside their own heads. They don’t know who leaked any more than the rest of us do, and they don’t know why.

The other detail that Republican outrage is conveniently ignoring is that while Supreme Court leaks are rare, they’re far from unprecedented. And leaking about Roe, in particular, is quite precedented!

Unlike an attempt by House and Senate Republicans to nullify an American presidential election based on false claims and party-pushed hoaxes, leaks from the Supreme Court are not, in fact, unprecedented assaults on our democracy.

One can even make the case that our Supreme Court justices might behave a bit better if there were more leaks into how they arrive at their decisions, given this new court’s unwillingness to even issue written explanations of some of their most radical orders. Perhaps we would learn more about why the wife of a Supreme Court justice felt so confident about her own role in an attempted pro-Trump coup, and why that justice voted to block further evidence from coming to light. Perhaps we would learn why the court is currently pretending, very very hard, to be confused over whether constitutionally protected rights can be scrubbed out by any state willing to hire private bounty hunters to do it for them.

Perhaps we’d learn why Alito’s opinion leans so heavily into arguments that not just abortion rights need to be erased, but that civil rights legislation needs to be rolled back by several generations—back to the days when American women couldn’t open bank accounts without their husband’s permission, much less have control over their own human selves. Perhaps, though, we’d just learn that the current Supreme Court is just as devoted to forcing Republican rule onto the rest of us as the Josh Hawleys of the party are. They just don’t have to explain themselves when they do it.

It’s time again to check in on the American companies that promised to end campaign donations to elected Republican officials who, compelled by obvious hoaxes and paper-thin conspiracy theories, supported an attempted overthrow of the United States government. How’s that going? How are anti-coup companies faring in their efforts to, at the bare minimum, not provide future election aid to politicians who, rather than accept Donald Trump’s not-even-close second-place finish, tried to nullify the last American presidential election?

Not great! When we last visited the issue, it turned out that some companies had resumed donations, breaking their promises almost immediately because political corruption in the United States is so omnipresent that pro-sedition politicians felt free to openly threaten companies that didn’t keep forking over checks. Companies also have been dodging promises to cut off pro-sedition politicians by instead funneling the money through political action committees. Apparently, they believe their customers are too dimwitted to put two and two together if the company checks go through passthrough accounts first.

A new Politico review of some of the largest companies that promised to end political donations to pro-coup politicians now identifies another barely covert workaround. Even though massive corporations like Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Google have ostensibly promised not to prop up those who attempted to erase a presidential election, that money hasn’t dried up. Instead, the lobbyists for those corporations have been writing “personal” donations to the same coup supporters.

Why? Again, it’s not a mystery. Those tech companies, along with other big firms like “Allstate, Toyota, Nike, and Dow Chemical Company,” have a lot of profits at stake with every new tweak to specific U.S. laws. Any lobbyist whose career relies on coaxing those laws into versions more favorable to their employing company knows full well that they’d better show up with campaign funds in their pocket if they want any of the crooked lawmaking kleptocrats to give them the time of day. So here we are again: saddled with House and Senate members so transparently corrupt that the people who deal with them most don’t believe they can cut off payments even after those members attempted to erase the next U.S. administration outright.

That’s how crooked our political systems currently are, and that’s how unwilling corporate lobbyists are to band together to shut out even the worst of the coup’s supporters. It’s the prisoners’ dilemma, brand name edition: If every company agreed to stop supporting pro-sedition crooks, those crooks could be purged from office. But if every company is not to agree to that, then you’d better be on Team Bribe rather than Team Patriotism—because the political crooks who don’t get ousted will be gunning for any company that took itself off Team Bribe.

Politico reports $28,000 in “personal” lobbyist donations to lawmakers who voted to nullify the 2020 election results, representing 13 ostensibly pro-democracy companies, which should again underline just how little money it takes to influence a crooked House member these days. The outlet also reports that “most” of the companies had no comment about the donations. The companies that did respond noted that, since it was lobbyists’ personal money, they didn’t break their corporate promises.

Which, again, is just another version of the passthrough dodge. Even companies still claiming to not support lawmakers who engaged in an attempted coup insist that, if their corporate money makes it into pro-coup hands—whether through donations to political action committees or their hired lobbyists’ personal accounts—that money doesn’t count.

We get it, we really do. It has been excruciating for companies caught between democracy and the grifting corruption of Washington’s business as usual. The great majority of them have been no doubt endlessly debating just how fluid their pro-democracy values can be without jeopardizing a system of government hand-built to cater to corporate whim at the expense of nearly everything else. Even companies with boards that are absolutely adamant about saving American democracy don’t want to get out over their skis just in case the coup-plotters are more successful the next time around. It’s not good business to make political enemies, and the more openly corrupt a political system is, the worse an idea it gets.

But lobbyists are a dime a dozen, and each of these companies could indeed extend their corporate promises to clarify that they will not give campaign money to pro-coup lawmakers who voted to erase an election and will also not use the services of lobbyists or legal firms who do support anti-democracy forces.

There are, somewhere out there, business professionals who know the difference between glad-handing and acting as willing conspirators against our democracy. Perhaps give them a call instead?

Republican Party leader and traitor to the nation Donald Trump continues to test new rally waters in anticipation of a repeat presidential bid. On Saturday the delusional narcissist made no particular effort to hide his disgust for the law and for those who would hold him to it, delivering an ugly, unhinged, and unabashedly fascist speech to a crowd of like-minded traitors.

His most newsworthy proclamation was a vow to pardon the seditionists of the January 6 insurrection. "If I run and I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly."

"And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons. Because they are being treated so unfairly."

It is not immediately clear if the traitor, who gathered and incited a crowd to "march" to the U.S. Capitol on that day and hour as part of a multi-pronged plan for his Republican Party to nullify his presidential election loss while using "emergency" presidential powers to either militarily oversee a "new" election or simply declare himself the legitimate winner, is promising a blanket pardon of all those involved in the violence. He may also be vowing to use presidential pardons to erase legal consequences for only his own inner circle of co-conspirators, just as he used it to immunize those allies when he last had the power to do so.

The intent of the message is clear either way. Trump is allying himself with those that helped him carry out his seditious—and deadly—insurrection, and is dropping promises of "pardons" as encouragement to his allies to keep fighting to block probes into the violence. Stonewall the prosecutions and refuse to cooperate with investigators, the traitorous criminal hints, and he will make your troubles go away again when he is returned to power.

But Trump went even farther. Citing the (many) investigations against him for crimes ranging from the previous insurrection to the pressure on Georgia officials to "find" new votes to a lifelong pattern of financial fraud, the fascist leader pushed his fascist supporters to respond to any potential indictment against him by taking to the streets.

"If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protest we have ever had in Washington D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere, because our country and our elections are corrupt. They're corrupt."

It is the hallmark of a fascist leader and his party: The claim that prosecution of his own crimes, or the crimes of his violent supporters, proves only that the whole nation was "corrupt" and needed to be remade. Trump is wedging racist in there because, both in Georgia and in New York, the head investigators of his crimes are Black.

Far from being deterred by the violence of his attempted insurrection, Trump is simultaneously promising to erase the crimes of those who attempted to topple the government on his behalf and pressing his Republican followers to mount even "bigger" street actions to keep his own criminal behind out of a prison cell. The man continues to betray his country in every way it is possible to betray it, and all of it is centered only around himself and his own desires.

In his previous rounds of presidential pardons, Trump pardoned those who committed war crimes; those who treated immigrants with illegal cruelty; those who obstructed investigations on his behalf; those who acted as agents of foreign powers. His pardons were all aimed at neutralizing prosecutions of those who did illegal things in service of racist, xenophobic, or Trump-promoting ends.

The Republican leader's promise to "pardon" those who engaged in violent insurrection on his behalf made barely a ripple on the Sunday shows or among the Republicans still loyal to that insurrection. Trump is overtly thumping for future seditious acts, and the Republican Party, purged of anyone who is not a willing accessory to even violent crimes, has little to say about it.

As gutless as ever, Sen. Lindsey Graham will only allow that it is "inappropriate" to promise pardons for insurrectionists. But only that; he will go no farther, lest he say something too bold and lose favor with the pro-fascist base.

And as spineless as ever, Sen. Susan Collins—one of the few Republicans who dared vote to impeach Trump after the insurrection, will only allow that she is "very unlikely" to support Trump as future presidential candidate.

So not even orchestrating an attempted coup is sufficient reason to fully and completely rule out support for the plotter? Truly, there may never be another political figure as relentlessly rudderless as this one.

More of the Sunday show debate was spent on allowing the defenders of insurrection to sniff about the alleged impropriety of Biden's promise to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court than was spent on asking those same Republicans to stand against Trump's visions of mass riots and promised pardons for insurrection.

The Sunday shows are still pointedly neutral when it comes to the choice between peaceful democracy and violence-led fascism. They do not care. Nobody involved cares. They will book the same guests to tell the same lies and support the same crimes from now until the end of the republic, and not a single host will stand against such violence if it means losing interview access to those backing it.

Trump's latest rally speeches are clear-cut attacks on the very fabric of the nation. He insists that elections are "corrupt," leading the entire Republican Party into similar rejections of our democracy's validity. He insists that those who investigate his alleged wrongdoing—up to and including violent insurrection—are "corrupt," and promises to immunize those who ally with them against the institutions that would prosecute them for such crimes.

He is a fascist-minded, mostly-delusional traitor to the republic. All those who cheer for him are the same. Trump himself appears to believe that it would be better to plunge the nation into a new civil war than recognize either the validity of his last election loss or the validity of a new one, and he has nearly all Republican Party officials and lawmakers as allies in the effort.

It is impossibly corrupt, all of it, and historians continue to scream that this is precisely how democracies are toppled. With a lazy, dull-witted press; with a party that emphasizes good corruption over bad prosecution; with a base that does not give a damn about any of it, because they are single-mindedly obsessed over the notion that the nebulous other is oppressing them and for that, must be punished.

There is no way this does not end in a tidal wave of political violence. And that, too, will likely be downplayed by Sunday show hosts looking to book those who would ally with it.

From the beginning of the pandemic, Spotify has been a go-to site for false statements about the threat represented by COVID-19, the steps to take in fighting the spread of disease, and the effectiveness of vaccines. All the while, the streaming service has responded to complaints about the propagation of not just misinformation, but deliberate disinformation, with claims that they have a “consistent policy” designed to help. But a look at those policies shows that they’re not designed to halt the spread of disinformation. Spotify’s policies are designed to protect and encourage lies, rather than lives.

“We have detailed content policies in place,” says a repeatedly published statement from the company. They also claim to have “removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic.” But what those policies actually might be, Spotify refused to make public. In fact, the actual details of this policy seemed invisible, even to the service’s content providers.

In the last few weeks, the pressure on Spotify to address this issue has increased, as rock legends Neil Young and Joni Mitchell have protested having their music on the same service that carries such constant agents of disinformation as podcaster Joe Rogan. Now tech and entertainment site The Verge has gotten a look at Spotify’s actual policies. And what they found is a system expressly designed to leave holes large enough to drive truckloads of horse-dewormer through.

The Verge obtained screenshots from an internal conversation with Spotify’s head of global communications and public relations Dustee Jenkins. From those screenshots, these are Spotify’s actual COVID-related policies. Spotify says it doesn’t allow content that “promotes dangerous false or deceptive content” which it defines using the following terms:

• Denying the existence of AIDS or COVID-19
• Encouraging the deliberate contracting of a serious or life threatening disease or illness
• Suggesting that consuming bleach can cure various illnesses and diseases
• Suggesting that wearing a mask will cause the wearer imminent, life-threatening physical harm
• Promoting or suggesting that the vaccines are designed to cause death

What’s amazing is that every one of these policies is worded to allow, if not outright encourage, a wide range of lies. And they are all designed to weave around, rather than block, the most harmful disinformation about COVID-19.

For example, under the first policy it may be not permissible to say that COVID-19 doesn’t exist, but it would be perfectly okay to say that it’s a disease that has killed almost 900,000 Americans is really “no worse than flu.” It would even be okay to say that COVID-19 hasn’t actually caused any of those deaths.

The second policy would seem to condemn content that encourages COVID-parties. However, it leaves the door wide open for suggestions for every possible variation on “natural immunity” and various attempts to reach herd immunity by refusing to engage in any steps designed to slow the spread of disease.

The third policy specifically calls out bleach, but doesn’t make any kind of broader definition of unsafe, harmful, or simply ineffective treatments. Under this rule, Spotify content can encourage the use of colloidal silver, hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, miracle oil, miracle dirt, and a host of other “treatments” that at best don’t work, and at worst, are actively harmful. And all of the above have been recommended on Spotify programs.

The fourth policy is a perfect example of how to apply enough adjectives to make a rule worthless. Under this policy, Spotify content can’t say “if you wear a mask, you’ll die immediately,” but could still say “masks kill more people than COVID-19,” because that doesn’t include a claim that the threat is “imminent.” Claims could also be made that masks cause any kind of mental health issue, because that’s not a “physical” threat. Or that masks cause debilitating illness, so long as it’s not “life threatening.”

The final rule opens the same kind of holes for discussing vaccines. Spotify providers can still make claims like vaccines cause sterility, or that vaccines contain aborted fetal cells, or even that vaccines have killed more people than the disease. All those are perfectly fine, so long as they don’t say that the vaccine was designed for that purpose. Oh, and the policy also leaves plenty of room for saying that the vaccines mutate your DNA, include nanotechnology, or are the creation of a secret Jewish cabal.

These aren’t policies designed to stop COVID-19 misinformation. Every one of these policies could have been simpler, more direct, more easily enforced, and much more effective in ending deadly lies. The way that Spotify has formed these policies shows the extent to which they have gone out of their way to preserve and promote false claims about the pandemic.

These are policies designed to encourage disinformation. They’ve all been made in ways that carefully skirt around the real issues, creating a pretense of taking action while actually providing a screen of protection for propagandists who are doing widespread, physical harm. People are going to their graves citing disinformation propagated by Joe Rogan and other Spotify podcasts.

And Spotify is taking extraordinary steps to make that possible.

he New York Times got a lot of attention this weekend, none of it good, for their latest zoological profile of pro-Trump, anti-democracy voters. The Times did not go the sleepy small-town diner route this time, but instead profiled Jan. 6 insurrectionists who marched to demand the toppling of our government but, like, did it less violently than some of the others. People who didn't enter the U.S. Capitol building, but only took a few flashbangs from the officers trying to defend the building. People who didn't bring guns, but who now regret not doing so. To overthrow the government. Because Donald Trump wanted them too.

There's a whole lot to be said about this, but the Times itself continues its tradition of elevating extremist, anti-democratic, pro-sedition voices while almost completely ignoring the origins of their beliefs, the dangers they pose, or whether or not attempting to end democracy on a madman's turgid whim might be bad. Whether democracy lives or dies in this country is emphatically not something the Times wants to take sides on inside of individual stories. The opinion side of the paper might pipe up with it (alongside, of course, conservative columns arguing the opposite) but identifying the larger frameworks in which fascism is not just growing, in America, but is able to pose a genuine threat to government—that's right out.

What's especially galling is that the Times freely uses the word insurrection to describe the events of Jan. 6. The Times is able to identify the goal of the extremists who marched that day just fine. So what does that make the people who marched to do it?

Oh, you know. Jus' folk. Can't draw any conclusions here.

What's maddening about the Times story is how far the paper goes, in fact, to not draw any conclusions about the gaggle of conspiracy cranks, far-right extremists, and willing seditionists that it holds up for reader perusal. It is like going to a zoo in which all the animals are wrapped in burlap sacks; do you want to know what this creature looks like? Then figure it out yourself, dear visitors, this is how each animal was delivered to us and we're not going to the work of unwrapping them. Trying to determine how each of these specimens fits in the grand ecosystem of "people who want to end American democracy rather than abide a single election loss" is left entirely as an exercise to the reader. It's a fascism-agnostic sudoku puzzle.

We open the piece with the tale of Paul Treasonguy—we don't need to give him the publicity of using his real name, the Times is already giving him all the advertising he could ask for—who is not at all sorry about his participation in a march to topple the government at Trump's behest. "It definitely activated me more," says Paul, and "it gave me street cred." Paul is now promoting himself as an anti-vaccine "lawyer for patriots," using his support for sedition as launching pad, a way to devote himself to far-right causes professionally rather than just as hobby.

Why is the Times helping him? Very good question, but our Texas-based insurrection marcher is quite pleased that they did.

But what does this American mean by "activated"—a word conspicuously out of place, one associated more commonly with cults, extremist groups, and militias? Being identified as a pro-insurrection marcher, getting fired from your job and being dumped by a fiancee gives street cred on what particular street?

We are told that, in interviews, the insurrection has "mutated into an emblem of resistance" that is a "troubling omen should the country face another close presidential election." We are told that "many" of the insurrectionists have slipped smoothly into anti-vaccine resistance, now citing "Mr. Biden's vaccine mandates as justification for their efforts" to nullify the election.

Mostly we learn that none of these people appear to be regretting a single damn thing about the insurrection. Mostly.

"Most everybody thinks we ought to have went with guns, and I kind of agree with that myself," says Oren Treasonguy, a landscaper. And "I think we ought to have went armed, and took it back." He admitted to bringing a baton and a Taser with him when he travelled to the insurrection but "did not get them out," which is evidently why he is in in the profile of "nonviolent" seditionists. But he doesn't sound nonviolent. He sounds like he thinks the crowd's nonviolence was the main problem of the day.

And he's not shy about saying that the goal of the insurrection was to "take" the election results "back." He, like the rest of the crowd, intended their actions to be an insurrection.

The next mini-profile is of a Jeff Treasonguy. Jeff is now running for public office—another case in which the violence of the day is being used to boost the conservative "cred" of those who participated. Jeff, along with his adult son, "took two flash bangs" during the crowd's drive that "pushed Congress out of session." "I'm hurt but we accomplished the job."

Jeff believes "Covid-19 was a bioweapon meant to convert the United States to socialism," among other things. Jeff is par for the course, among this group. He talks a lot about Jesus, is quite proud of destabilizing the country, and would "absolutely" do it again.

Okay, but Jeff here is undeniably a member of a seditious conspiracy to overthrow the government based on batshit theories scraped off the insides of a fever dream. Why are we hearing from him at all? What purpose does it give to parade a series of unrepentant and paranoia-obsessed backers of a violent insurrection before the nation but yet beat so thoroughly around the bush on what it means?

Now we go to Greg Treasonguy, a Michigan city councilman who is meant to demonstrate the "sense of community" among those that attended Trump's "march" to erase a United States election rather than abide the embarrassment of losing. We learn that Greg "found solidarity, he said, in similar men's groups growing in Hungary and Poland" and hold right the hell up, this man voluntarily pipes up with admiration for the democracy-toppling, authoritarian far-right groups of Hungary and Poland because "men got to step up" in service to masculinity?

How, exactly, does one form a positive view of the pro-authoritarian far-right movements of Hungary and Poland? What newsletter is Greg here getting that endorses the pro-authoritarian, xenophobic, eliminationist far-far-right looking to scrub out democracy in their own countries? Is it Tucker Carlson? Is it a militia group? Greg here is tapped into the zeitgeist of American fascism to enough of an extent that he knows he should be emulating Hungary's malevolent thugs, but we don't get any explanation of that? He just drops that bomb into the conversation and the Times thinks well, that's as good a closer as any?

Huh.

The word insurrection is used repeatedly in the Times piece. Words not used: Insurrectionist. Sedition. Authoritarian. Anti-democratic. Conspirator. The premise of the piece is an examination of the nonviolent—or at least, less violent—Americans who responded to Trump's call to overthrow the government, and while we are told that the group tends towards conspiracy theories, remains enamored with Trump's particular conspiracy theories, and has taken up the anti-vaccination cause like they were born for the moment, but the central trait that ties them all together is a belief that democracy should be nullified if democracy is unwilling to ensconce them, personally, as social victors.

The Times, however, is quite willing to portray them in their own terms—as supposed patriots, and portray the central goal of their fight, the nullification of elections that do not end with conservative victors, as a social choice.

The problem with all of this is that, yet again, we have a major media outlet using the conventions of neutrality to obscure the severity of the moment rather than clarify it. The facts now all conclusively point to the same determination: This was an insurrection, it was intended as an insurrection, those that boosted it did so as part of a very real plan to capture government, there was a propaganda campaign to encourage and justify it, the propaganda campaign continues, and the Republican Party is behind all of it. The people who were summoned by Trump that day do not regret their actions—except for when asked by a federal judge, immediately before that judge is to decide whether or not to throw them in prison for a spell—and, if anything, are restructuring their lives around their new authoritarian devotions.

What is this new movement that the Times has found, then? It is a movement based incontrovertibly around false propaganda intended to discredit United States elections by claiming that they have been corrupted by an imaginary other. It is a movement that seeks partisan control over elections, including the ability to overturn results that go against them. It focuses on a need for national renewal, or "saving" the country from their enemies. The enemies list includes immigrants, nonwhite citizens, the sexually "deviant," universities, schoolteachers, journalists, scientists, and a supposed secret cabal of elites responsible for all of it. It insists that a loss of "masculinity" is responsible for the world's ailments; it features demands that its political enemies be jailed as central rhetorical planks, not just in the chants of a know-nothing rabble but in vows from top party leaders.

And it celebrates the use of violence as a path towards that national "renewal," with top party voices insisting that those who participated in an attempted insurrection be freed—and honored.

These are the traits of a fascist movement, down to the individual details, the performative religious bent, and the focus on a central, buffoonishily hyper-"masculine" leader and the supposed savior who will make the rest of it come to pass.

So why are readers led through a series of mini-hagiographies that glance through each trait example-by-example, but left to their own devices to ponder out what actual "news" can be gleaned from it?

What do you call people who were willing to attack police officers in an attempt to nullify an American presidential election rather than abide by results they did not like? Insurrectionists; seditionists; coup participants.

What do you call people who assembled that day to demand the nullification of an American election, but who only provided bodies to fill out the crowd, leaving it to others to do the actual fighting while they took advantage of whatever crimes were committed to get closer to their goal? Insurrectionists. Seditionists. Coup participants.

What do you call people who assembled that day to demand the nullification of an American election, timed to coincide with the constitutional acknowledgement of that election, even if they did not enter the Capitol at all? Insurrectionists. Seditionists. Coup participants.

But what if they were tricked into it, and only wanted to topple the legitimate United States government because they were told the government was invalid and needed to be toppled?

Then they are insurrectionists. Seditionists. Willing allies of a hoax-premised coup.

Anyone who gathered that day to demand the erasure of an American election, violent or not, allied themselves against their country to side with a hoax-spewing, toxic buffoon. That goes for those in Congress who allied with the effort and helped promote the hoax used to incite the crowds; that goes for the lawyers who tossed countless false statements towards judges with full knowledge that they were promoting nonsense. Anyone who brought a "baton" or a "Taser" to Washington, D.C., in case violence was needed to erase an election is a seditionist. Anyone who waved a Trump flag and screamed their agreement when he told the crowd that his defeat was invalid and should be overturned chose the ravings of a belligerent clown over loyalty to their own nation. Anyone who called elections workers to threaten hangings based on hoaxes that they need no evidence to believe.

None of these people need to be understood. It should be enough for them that most will not be imprisoned. The press should be exposing them as dangerous, not providing publicity for their new anti-democracy ventures. It is indeed news that many or the majority of those that participated in an act of sedition remain eager to do it again—but that makes them enemies of their nation, not subjects for wispy examinations of sedition as new social fad.

If journalism intends to ally itself with democracy, it is both reasonable and necessary to portray those who would topple the country in service of growing fascist beliefs as unreasonable. As not just odd characters, but willfully dangerous. It is not necessary to feign neutrality on a fascist coup or those currently running for small-time office or staking new legal careers on ambitions of being more successful the next time around.

It is a fascist movement. It consists of people who have demanded and are still demanding that democracy either bend to it or be erased. They believe paranoid and delusional things—paranoid and delusional things that should not be spread in national newspapers as merely alternative belief systems, but should be highlighted as dangerous hoaxes promoted by propagandists and embraced by fools.

It is fine and reasonable to condemn those that want to end democracy and have already proven willing to take action to do it. Journalistic neutrality does not mean that those that attack the country and those that protect it should be given equal respect. Do not respect them!

The Times continues to drift through political events with practiced unawareness, unwilling to commit itself to standing for anything in particular. Reading through its pages is like wandering into the foyer of a particularly unambitious natural history museum, with individual bones of current historical changes bolted together haphazardly into skeletons that may or may not look anything like the creatures they are supposed to represent. We are allowed to gawk, but there are no curators who can tell us anything or who can differentiate between a ancient femur and a rusty 6 iron—and we get sniffed at if we even ask.

It is unremarkable for a newspaper to ally itself with democracy and to assert, in its pages, that those that would erase it are doing harm. This is not a high bar. The Times knows full well how close the coup came to succeeding, and how the individuals it profiles are retooling things to allow a near-future version to more efficiently trundle over the obstacles that stalled it the last time around. For the love of God and country, stop hiding the danger of the moment behind gauzy profiles of democracy's self-declared enemies.

As Fox News continues to degrade from propaganda to fascist propaganda to fascist burn-everything-down nihilism, the unfortunate souls at Media Matters for America are tasked with watching much of what the network produces so that it can be fact checked, or at least catalogued, or so that priests can be dispatched to perform the relevant exorcisms. It is grueling work, and anyone who can watch more than 10 Tucker Carlson rants without needing permanent hospitalization is a tougher soul than you or I.

As Fox News continues to claim, falsely, that ol' Tucker is not a white nationalism-promoting conspiracy-promoting violence-inciting anti-vaccine anti-safety weaselfaced liar with an actual pandemic body count to his name, Media Matters set out to catalog all of Tucker's mentions of vaccines during the Biden administration. There were 114 episodes of his Fox show that featured a segment about vaccines, reports Media Matters.

Of the 114 episodes, Tucker or his guest pushed anti-vaccine claims in 113. During 112 separate shows, either Tucker or his invited sockpuppets promoted conspiracy theories about the available vaccines, made false or unproven statements about vaccine side effects, claimed that the vaccines were less effective than the data shows them to be, stoked fear about the supposed oppression of vaccine requirements, or otherwise encouraged his viewers to believe false vaccine claims.

A special hat tip needs to go out to the show that compared vaccine mandates to "forced sterilization," though. Look, Tucker, if it's a quote you need, I for one would think America would be an infinitely better place if nobody who willingly watched your show could ever reproduce. Given the Fox News demographics, however, it's a problem that largely takes care of itself.

Carlson has been benefiting from a new Fox willingness to push even the most dangerous conspiracy theories out to viewers, a stance that coincides with the rise of Rupert Murdoch offspring Lachlan into the top executive role. Under old management, there were still some lines you could not cross, and those lines were drawn strictly for the benefit of the network's bottom line. Glenn Beck was allowed to sketch out convoluted, ludicrous conspiracy theories targeting everyone from George Soros to minor liberal enemies no Fox News viewer had previously heard of, but after Beck's rants resulted in an attempted domestic terrorist attack against one of his more obscure targets, the network—or rather, its advertising and legal teams—began to lose their stomachs for a show largely premised around making false claims about Republicanism's enemies so as to incite viewers into acting out against those enemies.

That was then, this is now, and if anything, Lachlan Murdoch's statements have suggested that he, personally, thinks that promoting fake propaganda to incite white nationalist or pro-fascist violence is a bit of a hoot. Tucker's been given free rein to demonize public health experts tasked with ending the pandemic, vaccine developers and manufacturers, and political figures willing to abide by previously uncontroversial pandemic safety plans like "you should obviously wear a mask to protect against an airborne disease, you brickheaded assholes."

The important context here, of course, is that the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States has morphed solidly into a pandemic that is most severe in Republican-voting, Republican-governed regions of the country. That doesn't mean non-Republicans aren't getting sick and dying, but the vast majority of deaths are among the unvaccinated in places where vaccination rates are low and safety measures are often ignored.

The Americans who are dying in droves, in other words, are Fox News viewers. There's no guess as to when or if this will ever cut into Fox's own bottom line—having shed most of its advertisers, the network is more reliant than ever on "carriage fees" it charges to cable and satellite companies that feel compelled to offer it to their subscribers—but so far, network hosts are going pedal to the floor with an approach that maximizes viewer outrage towards pandemic restrictions while minimizing viewer willingness to have, you know, basic human decency.

That's an approach that both Lachlan and the Fox News board have given a stamp of approval to, even if the horrific amorality of leading your own viewers into mass death has caused several of the network's top "straight news" stars to leave the network rather than share airwaves with Tucker and his ilk.

But here's the data, in any event. When Lachlan Murdoch claims his hosts aren't promoting pandemic misinformation or making false claims about the vaccines that offer the best (only?) path towards the pandemic's eventual end, he's lying. Straight-up lying, and he knows it. Fox News may not be paying attention to what their own broadcasts are claiming, but other people are. And those other people have the goods, Lachlan.

It's the second winter of the nation's COVID-19 pandemic and once again: We're boned. The New York Times seven-day average of new COVID-19 cases has spiked to the highest level ever recorded, topping last January's worst surge numbers with 267,000 new cases. The continuing surge caused by the delta variant is now being itself overwhelmed by new omicron cases, and we're not yet at whatever peak might happen after the holiday travel season wraps up.

What we don't yet know is what proportion of these new record numbers are in vaccinated versus unvaccinated Americans. So far we're seeing that vaccinated Americans can generally cope with an omicron infection without needing hospitalization, and Americans who have gotten a recent booster have a near-zero risk of death. But if these new cases match each of the recent surges, the majority of cases are spreading among those who have not been vaccinated. The outlook for those patients isn't nearly as rosy.

This new spike also comes as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revises its self-quarantine period for positive but asymptomatic cases from 10 days down to five. In theory that's because the data says most recently infected people are only contagious for a small period of time. In practice, however, the agency is facing accusations that the move is meant to relieve widespread labor shortages caused by the surge in new cases—shortages that could be eased somewhat if quarantine periods were lower.

The agency is denying those charges, and there's no evidence they're true. But the CDC didn't do itself any favors with a series of cringeworthy statements from its director suggesting that the new guidelines are an attempt to balance what the science says should be done with what skeptical Americans are willing to tolerate.

Call it a marketing problem, a nod to socioeconomic realities, or something else, but the CDC has more generally sought a reputation for scientific straight-talk that other agencies and voices could use before, possibly, coming up with their own social "compromises." A suggestion that the CDC itself is backing down on what the best scientific approach to quarantining would dictate in order to makes those compromises is only going to further confuse Americans who don't know what the CDC is thinking or why they're thinking it.

Medical experts online seem most put out by the CDC's omission of any testing protocols when advising how long a person should remain isolated after a positive COVID test. Common sense would suggest that you need to stay isolated until you test negative for several days in a row. The CDC guidelines of "five days if you're asymptomatic, or five days after your last symptoms disappear" instead relies on a more nebulous self-diagnosis of what your "symptoms" are.

The new record number of COVID-19 cases in America should be infuriating, because it is entirely unnecessary. We now have very good information about how the virus spreads, information that we did not have in the early days. We know it's airborne, and we know which sorts of masks are able to block the virus. We know the types of activities that are most likely to cause viral spread: Indoors is much, much worse than outdoors, and indoor exercise, singing, or other activity that causes deeper breathing spreads the virus more readily than activities such as shopping or waiting in line. We now have multiple vaccines effective against the virus—and its current variants—and know what percentage of the population needs to be vaccinated to reach a "herd immunity" that will shrink transmission rates down to nearly zero.

We know all of this, but are going into the winter with more cases than we've ever had before because not taking steps to bring the pandemic to a close is now the central culture war of conservatism, with Republican governors, state lawmakers, national leaders, party officials, and party-allied news outlets all working to push vaccine skepticism, resist public masking, promote utterly fraudulent supposed "cures," and stoke public fury at the medical experts tasked with keeping the nation safe. None of it had to happen. All of it happened because the most self-centered, egotistical, ignorant, cowardly, and sociopathic Americans were easily convinced that their "freedom" to endanger others was of far more import than their neighbors' "freedom" to not die. It is gutless, pompous cowardice, and we still do not show even half of the contempt towards these Americans as we properly ought to.

In a rare bit of "good" news, as COVID-19's omicron variant rapidly takes hold through the country and officials warn that we're in for a bleak pandemic winter, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have released updated guidelines for how long those who have tested positive for COVID-19 but have no symptoms should stay isolated, now cutting the recommended quarantine time from 10 days to just five.

The most important point: This is for asymptomatic cases. After that five-day period of isolation, those who have tested positive should continue to wear a mask when around others for another five days afterward.

In another change, those who have been exposed to an infected person can now forgo self-quarantine only if they have received a COVID booster and self-mask around others for 10 days after that exposure. If you haven't received your booster yet, you don't count as "fully" vaccinated under those guidelines.

The reason for the changing guidance is, as always, new data. The CDC says that those who have tested positive for COVID but who are feeling no significant symptoms tend to be contagious for only a short period of time—and given the likelihood that many of those infected were contagious a day or two before they managed to get tested, a five-day period still grants a few days of leeway. While some skeptics have expressed worry that the shortened isolation time presents risks, the data generally supports a reduced isolation period. In the rarer cases in which a person remains contagious longer than those five days, strict adherence to masking should mitigate what risk remains.

In October, the accelerating U.S. economy ran up against corporate supply chain problems as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic shredded "just-in-time" manufacturing pipelines. Closed factories, shortages of components, and shortages of labor have been features of the pandemic since the beginning—the most famous example in the United States probably being a run on toilet paper in the first months of the pandemic as offices closed. Paper manufacturers were caught flatfooted with warehouses of "office-quality" stuff that nobody who loved their family would dare buy.

The new supply chain problems were more intricate, with a lack of individual electronic components shuttering car manufacturing lines, a lack of spice-sized glass bottles, and similar headaches, but the biggest problem wasn't that the products couldn't be made. It was that Americans began to buy so much that American ports couldn't handle the massive surge of traffic.

Republicans and the political press were outright giddy at the prospect of being able to hammer the not-Trump president over pandemic-caused chaos, but you'll notice that something happened between then and now. Or specifically, something didn't happen between then and now: The predicted crisis of bare store shelves and wailing giftless children didn't happen. The fears, as the New York Times just put it, "turned out to be wrong."

Well, whoops. That's a bit awkward. Yes, even as Americans are so inundated with stories of supply problems, inflation, and hiring problems that consumer confidence polling is down in the dumps, the actual U.S. economy has been roaring. Employment is up, unemployment is down, and a 7% spike in economic output means that American ports are handling about 20% more than they did in pre-pandemic 2019. It's an economic boom, even though the pandemic is not only still with us, but likely to produce new deaths among the unvaccinated that may top even last winter's surge.

So what's going on here? Where'd the supply chain crisis go?

The short answer is that it's being dealt with, which is precisely what governments are supposed to do. Rather than announcing that somebody's son-in-law has now been put in charge of it or having a spokescreature bellow that the ports are only crowded because it is a conspiracy by crane operators who hate our freedoms, the Biden administration and the agencies they oversee sought to address the actual problems to be fixed. The problem was that Americans began to purchase so much more stuff than corporate planners expected, along with an easing of some previous supply chain snarls, that the nation's ports (1) couldn't offload the containers fast enough, (2) didn't have anywhere to put those containers if they did, and (3) didn't have enough willing truck drivers to cart it all off.

All of those are long-term, systemic problems that have arisen from our national inability to (say it with me) modernize our infrastructure and reform our labor laws to help solve such problems. But they could be ameliorated by federal, state, and port action, so that's what happened. The feds prodded west coast ports to move to round-the-clock operations. Local regulators gave emergency exemptions allowing container cargo to be stacked higher in offsite lots, freeing up space—at the temporary expense of spoiling a few harbor views for the neighbors, but if that's the worst your family fares in a national crisis you probably don't dare complain much. The threat of steep, per-day fines for shippers who left containers parked at the port spurred businesses to pick up their products faster even if it meant extra work needed to be done to find drivers and space, allowing new containers to be brought ashore faster.

And experts gave Americans sufficient warning: Experts gave Americans warning: Do your holiday shopping early this year, so you don't contribute to a last-minute crush. That's what Americans did, says the Times. Reopening stores mean more shoppers have been buying in person rather than relying on mail delivery, which in turn has eased holiday congestion for both the U.S. Postal Service and its competitors. We're still in, ahem, a deadly worldwide pandemic that everybody needs to be paying attention to rather than pretending all of this is back to normal—but a lot of moving parts were oiled up to make sure we got to a passable approximation of normal.

Biden was even willing to brag a bit about it today when meeting business leaders. "The much-predicted crisis didn't occur. Packages are moving, gifts are being delivered, shelves are not empty."

What's important to remember, and don't worry because there's not a chance in hell the press is going to take Biden's boast lying down and some outlets are already framing the administration's seasonal win in terms as negative as can be mustered, is that we are in a pandemic, world factories continue to be slammed by that most irritating of all business complications, mass worker deaths, and our infrastructure problems won't go away after everybody's holiday gifts are delivered. The United States still needs a more robust infrastructure strategy than the current version, which can be best described as build another highway lane and let God sort it out.

A great deal of our transportation and delivery woes are due to labor exploitation practices that make delivering those products a more terrible job than most people are willing to put up with. Another large chunk is because corporate supply chains are so very long and complex, as the largest companies outsource their most vital components to contractors in whatever nations are themselves most willing to exploit their laborers, that a single Texas cold snap, South Asian storm, or even one damn boat stuck sideways in a major shipping canal can bring the whole manufacturing process to a standstill for lack of a Plan B.

A more ambitious infrastructure plan that seeks to truly modernize our most vital national concerns is essential. Republicans are not going to do that, because the competing Republican plan proposes that all of that infrastructure be sold off, upon which corporate ambition will miraculously solve all of it. But Democrats could, if they could gain the support of a handful of preening self-absorbed jackasses. At some point. Eventually.

Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace, inflicted on us by the state of South Carolina, has been running a bold new online ad condemning Democratic plans to boost funding for the Internal Revenue Service. Why, you might ask?

"Biden's policy will double the size of the IRS at the cost of billions of dollars in unpaid taxes. We should stabilize our nation's economy first."

While @z3dster has done us the solid of parsing out what the hell Mace's word shrapnel was meant to actually mean, it's still worth stewing on that odd language. "At the cost of billions of dollars in unpaid taxes?" At the ... cost? But going after tax cheats is widely recognized as being a net federal win, because just a little money allocated to investigating the most prolific tax-dodgers results in much larger revenues when the dodged taxes actually get paid, so—ooh. Ooooooh.

Right.

What the House Republican is saying here is, of course, boosting IRS capabilities will "cost" the wealthiest tax dodgers in the country billions of dollars, and forcing rich tax cheats to pay what they owe will harm the economy so very much that we shouldn't even think about it until we've "stabilized" everything else first.

You've heard of trickle-down economics? This is trickle-down tax fraud. If we don't let rich Americans who have more offshore bank accounts than you have spoons get away with their current level of financial crimes it is all of you who will suffer, because that money being paid in taxes won't be going to buying new yacht chandeliers, or underwater television sets, or the spiffy new uniforms the upper classes want you to wear while hunting you for sport.

Instead, that money will be going to the government, and the government will probably waste it on stupid things like rebuilding roads in places you don't live, or saving coastlines you don’t visit, or giving you better childcare options after your name comes up in the to-be-hunted-for-sport lottery.

In any event, what Mace is suggesting is that American financial criminals have been hiding so very damn much money that attempting to collect it could destabilize our nation's very economy. Shouldn't be done! Too dangerous!

Oooookay?

See, our problem here is that we're taking a Republican message literally instead of treating as the propagandistic word salad it is intended as. It’s not meant to make sense. Mace may or may not distance herself from the premise of her own self-promoted statement after she's gotten sufficient mockery for it, but it was crafted not to make an actual argument but to burp scary-sounding words at Republican base members primed to react to them without thought. "At the cost of billions" is meant to invoke the notion that it will be costing the nation money, rather than bringing it in. "Stabilize" is meant to invoke the notion that the nation's economy is currently not stable, when all the facts and figures suggest that the economy is now actually in pretty darn good shape.

Things are so good, in fact, that ports are being clogged with the stuff Americans are now wanting to buy and (mostly anti-labor) economic grumps are warning that if we keep raising wages and recovering from pandemics then we'll summon the Inflation Monster, so central banks need to start taking a few good golf swings at worker knees before things get out of hand. And that’s all while the pandemic is still raging around us.

The "Biden's policy" bit is also rote party schtick: While nigh-on everybody who is not personally evading taxes or being lobbied by people who do all agree that returning IRS funding to something approaching normal is both necessary to curb now-rampant tax dodging by the wealthy and an enormous government gain, calling it "Biden's policy" is intended to portray the move as partisan rancor, or spreading socialism, or otherwise controversial.

It's all gimmick. Republicanism may no longer have policies of its own, but each new congresscreature is in tune with the larger movement's dictionary of cult phrases and contrarian phrasing. Going after tax dodgers will "cost" you money. Doing the "Biden policy" on anything will further "destabilize" the glorious f--king paradise of corpses and lines for toilet paper gifted to us by Dear Crabby-Ass Leader in his final year.

Rep. Nancy Mace may be new to town, but she and every other newly elected House Republican gained their current position by telling the ever-outraged base whatever they wanted to hear. She's in a bit of hot water over that at this precise moment, in fact, being roundly mocked for a particularly comical Sunday show circuit that saw her both undermining vaccination efforts on Fox News while claiming to support them on CNN.

It's all a game; there is little effort being put into attempting to discern what policies would best serve the nation here, and flopsweat-level effort being put into selling the base on the nation that whatever policies actual experts come up with are most certainly an effort at "socialism," an attempt to abridge your "freedoms," or a flat-out conspiracy to harm you because the "elites" will do nigh-on anything to oppress you, whether it be bamboo-laced ballots or firefly chemicals in your vaccines or arresting "patriots" whose only crime was attacking the U.S. Capitol during a joint session of Congress in a seditious attempt to cancel the results of a United States election.

All that said, we're not going to get anywhere if we ignore it all and let the Maces of new Republicanism fire off chaff meant to invoke primal reaction while breezily evading the part where nothing they said made any actual sense. So we're all ears, Rep. Nancy Mace.

You say going after tax cheats will "cost billions"—who ya aiming that statement at, representative?

Because the only people who will see a "cost" when going after prolific tax fraud are the folks doing the actual crimes. Is that who you're going to bat for here? Did they send someone to your office to make that case?

And you're saying American tax cheats are costing the rest of us so much money that making them actually pay it would threaten to destabilize the entire economy?

Oh, do tell. That one's worth a floor speech. We all really want to hear you explain that going after institutionalized tax evasion by people who can hire more lawyers than the IRS has available investigators would threaten our very way of life. There haven't been many Republicans with the guts to make that argument in public, but you made it a sponsored online ad.

Please explain, representative. Give it your best shot.

During his 2018 run for the Senate, Republican Mike Braun was getting a lot of attention for a campaign strategy that relied on self-funding, sweetheart loans from allies, and "creative" accounting to dodge federal election laws. Over three-quarters of his campaign war chest consisted of "loans" to the campaign; he'd continue to prop his campaign up with his own money until the campaign's end.

Braun has been in the Senate for two years now, and the Federal Election Committee (FEC) has finally managed to come to some conclusions on which parts of that were illegal and which weren't. The answer? The Braun campaign's accounting wasn't so much "creative" as it was outright shoddy and improper. Over $8.5 million in "loans"—a massive chunk of Braun's total spending—that violated campaign finance laws, including $1.5 million in "loans" from Braun's own company. Millions more in donations and disbursements were misreported, as well as six-figure repayments to Braun himself afterwards.

If it looked crooked during the campaign, surprise! The FEC agrees with you, and is demanding the Braun campaign answer further questions about all of it.

Braun is now flailing a bit in his response, as might be expected. His campaign's defense was to claim to the FEC that their campaign treasurer, Travis Kabrick, had suddenly up and vanished on them. Sorry, he "has not been able to be located since the end of 2018." So ... sorry?

You see where this is going, right? Of course you do. The Daily Beast looked into this claim, and The Daily Beast found Travis, quote, "within minutes." They were able to call his current place of work, find his social media accounts, and get his contact information.

"His mother said in a phone call that she would pass along a request for comment," reports the Beast.

While it is very good news that a single news outlet was able to help out Mike Braun and his campaign after their multiyear battle to hunt down the man they're now attempting to pin all the shenanigans on, the scope and egregiousness of the violations would seem to make the campaign's claims nonsensical. It wasn't the treasurer who arranged an allegedly illegal $1.5 million "loan" from Braun's self-owned company to Braun's political campaign. It wasn't the treasurer who cashed checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars in reimbursements for supposed "self-funded" donations. And it wasn't the treasurer who was making the calls when companies associated with Braun's top allies were providing $7 million in unusual and conspicuously unsecured campaign "loans."

So Braun himself is in more than a little hot water here, and the campaign's going to have to answer for campaign finance "mistakes" that point not so much to accounting errors from an unskilled finance team as they suggest a truly massive improper funding operation from Braun and his political allies.

Will anything come of it? Who the hell knows. We've gotten used to lawmakers breaking whatever campaign finance laws they want to and, at worst, paying a few fines after the fact. But the "me and my corporate friends are going to finance the majority of my Senate campaign with corporate 'loans' provided with no collateral or assurance of repayment" is not an accounting error. It's buying a Senate seat. It's the sort of overt corruption that all of the laws were designed to prevent, and Mike Braun seems to have just waltzed right over the law to do it anyway.

As his ally Ted Cruz launches another conservative crusade against a freakin' puppet, Sen. Josh Hawley, most famous for abetting an attempt to topple our nation's government, announces his own new political theme will be "masculinity."

Yes, this is Josh Hawley we're talking about. Yes, this is the campaign theme he's going to adopt after he claimed in a speech that more men are watching porn and playing video games these days because of "years of being told" that "their manhood is the problem."

We still don't know how that might work, by the way. One might think that current generations are playing more video games and watching more porn these days (if they actually are) due to the notable trend of The Internet Exists. Apparently, though, conservatives believe their menfolk are drowning themselves in Mario Cart and internet porn because the local Costco refused to take "three wicked flexes, five grunts, and one opening of a really tight screw-on cap" in lieu of payment.

Or something. "Our manhood is under attack" is one of those weird conservative tics that is both so omnipresent and so poorly described that it's become something of a chupacabra to the rest of us. Maybe it exists, maybe it doesn't, all we know is that in conservative circles it's known for marathoning PornHub while whining about how unappreciated it feels.

In an AXIOS interview, Hawley attempted to explain what the hell he's on about:

"Well, a man is a father. A man is a husband. A man is somebody who takes responsibility."

Yeah, okay. That narrows it down. Not quite the crack narration of "man, woman, person, camera, TV," but it definitely qualifies as a series of words. Feels a bit like the first-pass lyrics to a Disney Mulan song?

"I think you put together lack of jobs, you put together fatherlessness, you put together the social messages that we teach our kids in school, I think we've got to confront that and its effects."

Conservative men are watching porn because they're sad about what their kids are learning in school? Okay, now you've really lost me. I'm beginning to think Hawley arrived at his new theme of "masculinity" by picking words out of a hat.

Now, there is something that's a bit troubling about Sedition Josh's gravitation toward "masculinity" as his own self-chosen political theme. Josh Hawley is widely known to be very ambitious. Hawley has already taken multiple actions to ally himself with the Big Lie, claiming election fraud that doesn't exist in service to an attempt to nullify a U.S. election to allow a would-be strongman to retain power regardless of the vote totals.

And the movement Hawley has been attempting to wedge himself into the leadership of considers hyper-masculinity to be a very important thematic element. Paranoia over supposed lost masculinity both helped create and helped sustain European fascism of the last century, a sort of "brittle manhood" widely acknowledged by scholars as a central theme of fascist thought.

Donald Trump was a spectacularly unlikely exemplar of that "new man" idolized by the fascist right. He may have been an out-of-shape golf cheat who couldn't masculine his way down a flight of stairs, but he was unrelentingly crude, was openly contemptuous and cruel toward women, and personified the sort of crass belligerence that the conservative far-right idolizes as a path toward restoring male dominance over the too-uppity womenfolk. The man may have been the first president to hint at his own penis size during a televised presidential debate.

Who are the avatars of conservative masculinity today? Thickheaded bullies who don faux-military apparel and storm government offices while waving flags in support of people who are worse. Hawley wants to insert himself into that discussion as he did the Big Lie itself, latching on as a way of convincing the common rabble that whatever they believe, he's willing to shout about it.

But Hawley may, ahem, be misunderstanding what his supporters are yelling. You're going to climb up in front of a crowd of male Trump supporters and tell them the problem is that they're watching too much porn these days? Really?

Ehhhh. Well, good luck with that.

Really, though, while it once may have been uncanny how Donald Trump and his team managed to bumble into each of the core themes of fascism solely, or at least it seemed at the time, due to his own uncontrollable narcissism and insistence on surrounding himself with conservative C-listers, there is nothing bumbling about the Republican adaptation of each of those themes one after another, polishing them, assembling them, and marketing them as what the party now stands for—the beliefs that its candidates must abide by to remain in good standing with the movement. The explicit propaganda of the Big Lie, claiming that the last American presidential election was "rigged" or "stolen" as means of undermining a democratic vote that the party knows well and true that it lost, has now become party mandate. The themes of a great replacement jeopardizing American greatness (and whiteness), "attacks" on white conservative masculinity, and above all the growing belief among the Republican base and their pundits that violence is both justified and may now be required to reform American according to their beliefs—these are all overtly fascist themes.

It is not likely that Hawley will be that new fascist avatar, no matter how much he wants it. His performances are too insincere. His contempt for the other is too obviously pantomimed, not at all like the true guttural hate that Trump and his top allies revel in. Hawley may be a prep-school version of a hoodlum, but the movement wants the real thing.

Here's an entire New York Times story about a genuinely bad, malevolent person. It's not framed that way, of course, because Neutrality, but the Times tossed a reporter in the direction of Great Falls, Montana, to give us another report from the Trumpian underbelly of America and once again, it's a paranoid, conspiracy-obsessed, strategically dishonest sh-tshow that explains a lot about why the True Americans nesting comfortably in Trumpism have steadily been gravitating toward fascism as a matter of natural course.

The Times story is a long explainer about Rae Grulkowski and her quest to keep local civic-minded Montana residents from getting a token amount of federal funds by designating a chunk of the state a "national heritage area." It's a largely meaningless designation that provides minor federal funds to help preserve local points of interest and boost history-minded tourism. A bunch of Montana folks got a bee in their bonnets about it, part of the general True American suspicion that the federal government is evil and just out to trick people (thanks again, Ronald Jackass Reagan), and it became the local version of critical race theory, and hydrocorto-whateveritall, and ingesting horse dewormer because some friend of a friend of a cousin of an Online Influencer said horse paste cures gunshot wounds or whatever the latest version of that theory is.

But here's the thing: Rae Grulkowski—hero of the paranoid Montana class and partial impetus for Montana's reporter-attacking Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte's theatrical ban on the federal government from creating any such heritage designation in the state—attacked the civic-minded proposal by lying her ass off, constantly, inventing or perpetuating a web of fabricated claims that the tourism designation would, in the Times' telling, "forbid landowners to build sheds, drill wells, or use fertilizers." It would ban septic systems! It would raise taxes!

And it was all utter bullshit. As the Times noted and gave evidence of, Grulkowski was lying about all of it.

It was a local campaign dependent on crafting outright propaganda against something she didn't personally like, disseminating it to people who didn't give a damn whether it was true or it was false, rallying a crowd of like-minded liars to attack the opposition with furious disinformation, and turning it into the next Farm Bureau and Republican paranoia campaign in which allies compared the National Heritage Area program to Hitler and nobody involved can stammer their way through any plausible defense of the nonsensical claims they're making.

So then, what are we to make of this? Well, Grulkowski and her allies are flat-out liars, that's for sure. They have disseminated provably false information as a political strategy, and local Republican (Trump) voters snorted it all up like ideological cocaine. Team Lying Bullshit has done its level best to make the lives of those evil civic do-gooders miserable.

It's only in the very last quarter of the story that we get to the kicker that explains all the rest of it: Rae Grulkowski is apparently a "QAnon" devotee, according to The New York Times. She claims to believe in conspiracies about "child trafficking that leads to everything," and believes that Donald Trump won the November election even though he most demonstrably got flattened, and thinks Black Lives Matter supporters were the actual culprits behind the Jan. 6 insurrection, and there we go. She appears to be someone who read a lot of hoaxes on Facebook and turned them into a personality, just one of a new "movement" of Americans radicalized by a single company's eagerness to monetize the nation's most deep-seated paranoias.

Well of course someone who believes an assortment of the most malevolent, antisemitic, racist, pro-fascist conspiracy theories being passed around the internet is going to be similarly loose when inventing anti-government reasons to oppose whatever her neighbors are doing. But—and this is the crux of the Times story and the lesson to be taken from all of this—it worked.

It worked, because of course it did. The propaganda effort was overwhelmingly successful, enough to gain the support of conservative state lawmakers who did not give a damn whether the claims were true. Nobody involved appears to have given a damn whether they were promoting lies. The invention of propaganda was the core strategy: taking a minor civic issue and turning it, through lies, into a new conservative touchstone.

The lying part is the most consequential "value" at play here. "Heritage" designations have nothing to do with any of it. Nobody gives a flying damn whether or not local historic landmarks get new plaques or whether they don't. The important part is for local Republicanism to stick it to anyone who tries to do an inch of good by inventing whatever lies are necessary to do it.

In battling a largely meaningless recognition of the area's rich history, Grulkowski was following the playbook of Steve Bannon, and Stephen Miller, and Donald Trump himself. It is the fascist playbook: If the facts are against your beliefs, ignore those facts and lie. Create new "facts" that will galvanize the movement despite their fraudulence; rather than seeking the consent of the governed by explaining why the movement's ideas will solve current problems, manufacture a new reality in which the "problems" are whatever hoaxes the movement needs to produce in order to justify taking whatever actions the movement wants to take.

We are in a world of danger when flagrant political lies can so swiftly result in success rather than condemnation. That is the endgame to all of this. If a government can be established that governs the nation through fraud—and it is happening, in each Republican-held state using provably false election hoaxes to justify new voting restrictions, and in the establishment of Facebook as the nation's new news source, one in which false information is treated by the company as marketable entertainment rather than a poison, and in the pre-disgraced thug of a Montana governor adopting an anti-government propaganda campaign to attack a federal government program instituted by Ronald Reagan himself as a supposed secret attack on True American rights—then elections are already irrelevant.

Central to battling all of it, however, is to recognize that Rae Grulkowski disseminated lies in order to attack an action she didn't like; she did so while wallowing in an absolute sea of other lies. She succeeded in mustering a populist revolt against better people and better ideas by lying, outright, about the thing she was fighting against. Now, says the Times, she has further political ambitions, given that her equally toxic and cowardly neighbors proved to be so furiously supportive of her campaign of lies.

This is a person who should be scorned. This is a person who should be shunned, boycotted, considered a crackpot, and treated with universal contempt. This is a person who is attacking democracy itself, by attacking it at its root premise: Whatever civic challenges are presented to the voters, they must be based on truth. Democracy is meaningless, is absolutely meaningless, if each election is a competition not of competing solutions to civic problems but of the inventiveness of each campaign in creating new hoaxes and convincing the governed to believe them.

Instead, we get national debates over whether some of the most infamously dishonest people in government have been treated too roughly if private restaurant owners do not want to serve them. The pressure is not to shun liars as anti-American, anti-democracy propagandists seeking to manipulate public opinion through rampant dishonesty, but whether we are allowed to direct any scorn their way at all.

How did it come to this?

The short answer might be Bernard Goldberg. Goldberg was one of those who made a name for himself insisting that American journalism was intrinsically "biased" against conservatives, a claim which is now taken as a central movement tenet because it fits pleasingly with every other movement theme of displacement and victimhood. The evidence for this "bias," even decades into the claims, was almost always an assertion that because conservative ideologues were not given exposure equal to actual issue experts, it amounted to oppressing the conservative "side" of an argument.

Ideological claims, in other words, were being shortchanged because journalists were looking to scientists, medical experts, historical data, and other providers of hard facts rather than letting lobbyists, think-tank heads, and other professional political provocateurs speak with equal authority and at equal volume.

From there conservatism moved to a very successful crusade to reformulate "news" so that facts were always debatable, so long as there was a single professional spinner who could be paid to claim they were. The cable networks, especially, transitioned from that into new forms that rarely gave scientists or other experts a voice at all, preferring instead to pit one pre-determined ideologue against another for orchestrated spats in which nobody could be proven to have lied because the segment would be over before any actual journalist or expert could even phone the studio.

We moved on to public bellowing about "the elites must respect my beliefs," where "beliefs" consisted of believing that climate scientists were sabotaging world government or, eventually, that livestock dewormer was a miracle cure for a pandemic hospitals themselves could not keep up with.

But it was the Goldberg camp that insisted that liars and propagandists should not just be heard from but also treated with respect. That if there was a conflict between facts and conservatism, then it was biased to highlight one over the other. It was treated as a given, from the beginning, that conservatism was a counter to scientific and policy expertise. It was treated as a given that conservatism was the rightful and just opposition to such expertise.

We have reached that conservative promised land. All of the news now follows the formula of pitting ideologue against ideologue, the facts wedged in somewhere—or not, depending on the journalist—but with no reproach given to those who insist that the facts are something else. The paid propagandists and crafters of outlandish, impossible lies are now treated with impeccable respect by the media. The American people are taught to treat professional liars as dignified combatants—nay, true Americans, speaking powerful emotions in the face of uncomfortable, irritating data.

And, after hounding media relentlessly into giving respect to professional fraudsters, the conservative movement itself has now shed from itself everything but the professional fraudsters. The lies are the movement; the movement is defined by the lies, and shifts as rapidly as required to adopt new ones.

You need not look at anything beyond the last election to see that. Respecting, or actively propagating, the anti-American hoax that claims Republicans secretly "won" the last election only to have it stolen by invisible forces, is now a requirement inside the so-called "conservative" movement. Trump lied constantly, about everything, in genuinely malevolent ways, and he was a product of both Bernard Goldberg's insistence that sneering know-nothings be given media respect and the shouter who finally erased all further attempts to pretend Republicanism was anything but a collection of spite-based antipathies and hoaxes.

But Rae Grulkowski is, genuinely, a bad person. Steve Bannon is a liar, a propagandist, and a hack. Stephen Miller is a white nationalist who crafts propaganda demonizing immigrants to justify brutality against them. Mitch McConnell is a relentless liar, one who flaunts his absolute contempt for whatever ideal he blustered about a month, a week, or a day beforehand in order to invent an entirely opposing one. Sarah Huckabee Sanders promoted fraudulent information as a professional, and ideological, career move. Donald Trump is quite possibly the most loathsome sack of malignant neuroses to ever have shuffled through Washington and that is saying something.

Creating hoaxes for the purpose of manipulating public opinion is contemptible, evil behavior. It deserves fury. It deserves the scorn of the entire nation; journalism, and political media especially, should have such seething contempt for the propagandists that exposure of each lie and value judgments about those that perpetrate them should be, as they once were, the profession's central ambition.

It is not enough to point out that this or that person is fabricating a hoax in order to deceive their fellow Americans into holding a new political position. Those that do so are enemies of democracy. They are, in the true sense of the word, anti-American. They are frauds. They are doing direct harm to their neighbors, their towns, their states, their nation. They are ideological soldiers seeking to do harm to the government by taking, from the public, the ability to use their vote as means of steering that government. They are anti-civil rights. Their propaganda is stealing democracy by stealing votes by stealing political debate itself so that voters simply cannot discern what government is doing, what the parties are doing, what the issues are, where the dangers are, and where the future catastrophes lie.

These are all bad, evil, rotten people who need to be shunned with ferocity. They do not warrant respect. They do not warrant civil treatment. They do not warrant malicious burbles about how dare Americans seek consequences for their fraud; newspaper editors should be devoting themselves to identifying each face and name and lie and treating them as public enemy, not both sides denizen.

These are the footsoldiers that will end democracy, if we cannot throw them from our civic spaces and treat them with the contempt that hoax promoters deserve. These are not the days of tar and feathers, but they can certainly be the days of belittlement, consequences, and public reproach. These are the vapid, self-serving cowards whose lies spur domestic terrorists to violence, and who kill Americans by the thousands by pushing fraudulent information about a deadly pandemic. These are not people who lie of happenstance or impulse, but people who specifically seek to bend government through a pattern of anti-American deceit.

There is no neutrality to be had in reporting like this. Someone who manipulates American politics by lying to the American public is acting with malevolence; reporters should feel a civic duty not just to expose them, but to strip them of the usual deference and pleasantries. Treat propagandists with more scorn than those who craft financial hoaxes to prey on the elderly, or those who hide the deadly effects of a product so that they may sell more of them. The propagandists are attacking the soul of our very democracy. To hell with them. Shun them and those who enable their plots out of greed, ideology, or apathy.

Conservatism has now reached Bernard Goldberg's promised land in which facts and malevolent fictions are treated as equals. The movement itself has become a mass of hoaxes cowering under a red hat. If it cannot be condemned as a fraud, it will grow in power until it strips all truth from around us.

On one of the now unwatchable Sunday "news" shows, Meet the Press host Chuck Todd introduced a segment on the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic by—I'm just kidding. It wasn't about the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a segment about the most favorite of all Sunday show segments, and indeed largely the only segment any of the Sunday shows ever do: How will This Thing, the major news of the day, Affect Mah Politics?

"The economy's inability to fully recover from the shock of COVID-19 is both an economic story and a political one," intoned Todd.

The economy's inability to fully recover from the COVID-19 pandemic is in large part due to anti-distancing, anti-mask, vaccine-skeptical, pro-virus-spreading policies from Republican politicians who have been using conservative frustration with safety measures as a rallying cry for their own careers, resulting in a new wave of overwhelmed hospitals and dead victims that was entirely preventable if sociopathic politicos had not turned pandemic crisis protocols into the latest spite-riddled "culture war."

"All those economic problems add up to a big political problem for the president. Is all of this his fault? Of course not, but it is now his responsibility. And he and fellow Democrats are in real danger of suffering some serious political consequences. Mr. Biden ran on a promise of a basic return to normal—or at least a path to normalcy. But with the midterm elections just over a year away—"

Stop. Just stop. Fine, we get it. We're doing this again. Republicans continue to get their constituents killed at elevated rates; let's now turn to our panel of experts to determine what the political implications of Republicans killing off their constituents will be for the Democrats who, uh, failed to convince them not to die to own the libs.

"Whadda think, Bob? Think all those surviving family members are gonna punish Democrats in the midterms?"

"I dunno, Steve, but between that and Americans quitting their dangerous bullshit pandemic poverty-wage jobs to look for better ones, there's real chaos out there on the streets. And it doesn't look good for anyone waiting for a Tickle-me-Elmo toy because the container ships are real backed up over on the left coast. And what if Republicans decide to start shooting constituents in the face? That'd look real bad for Joe Biden, who's run on a platform of not shooting people in the face."

And it ain't just that. Another of the Todd segments scraped up another entry in the "obsessively arch-right fascist Trump supporters still like Trump" press compulsion. Hey, the guy may have attempted to end our democracy through hoaxes and violence, but a bunch of Jesus-punchers think, if anything, that just makes him even more awesome.

We've been here before. This ain't new, and Matt Negrin, in particular, has brought all the necessary receipts and then some to show that Chuck Todd's Meet the Press, in particular, is a relentless promoter of Republican frames, one that uses the "panel" format to mix hard-right Republican strategists and figures in with neutral journalists while studiously avoiding Democratic guests. Most insipidly, Todd has been a prime rehabilitator for the Republican supporters of an election hoax that led to a violent insurrection.

Why? Is that "neutrality"? Is it "news"?

The problem with Meet the Press is the problem with all political journalism: It shouldn't exist. It's lazy. It's cheap, hackish, phone-it-in programming cobbled together because doing journalism is hard but talking about the "political implications" of any news story is easy. Ask how the ongoing mostly Republican-state COVID-19 crisis is affecting social programs and you'll have to do research to find out. Ask whether the stance of anti-mask politicians like Ron DeSantis is morally defensible and you'll have to expose your own moral convictions.

Ask how the widespread death and economic chaos will affect the political winds when whatever-the-next-election-is rolls around, though, and you don't need to know a damn thing. It's easy. It's trivial. Pick out whichever guests will most reliably say something "exciting" and you've got yourself a show.

"Hey, Trump campaign spokesguy Jason Miller, the price of chicken went up by ten cents over the last six months. How do you think that's gonna play among [spins wheel] Evangelical voters in [throws dart] Wyoming?"

"I think this is great news for Donald Trump, and I'd also like to mention here that Wyoming Evangelicals are also very worried about Joe Biden's surrender to the mole people that happened last Thursday but that nobody here is reporting. Also, Joe Biden eats children."

"Thanks, Jason, we'll have to leave it there."

Anyone can opine about politics. It requires no expertise. It requires little thought. On television, where nobody in front of or behind the cameras gives a particular damn whether or not a guest just lies outright to the nation because they'll already be three lies beyond that one before anyone else can get a word in edgewise, there is absolutely no penalty for being wrong. Or lying. Or undermining democracy. Or egging on violence. Or anything else.

The Sunday shows are the worst thing politics can be: no-stakes. It is all just a game, a little game among the wealthy professional class to fill time while questions of morality and decency are pooh-poohed as the naive domain of the common rabble. True political journalism covers democracy and fascism as neutral ideological combatants; considers death ancillary to poll numbers; judges economic policy based on the analysis of whoever has the most money to spend on analysis; considers false propaganda to be Reasonable, if it can be made Effective; and, above all, dodges all policy considerations in favor of meta-debate about which political figures will most have their images buffed or tarnished from the policy's defeat or acceptance.

Would it be economically wise to avoid a worldwide climate catastrophe that sinks Florida, burns much of the West to a cinder, causes widespread crop failures, and renders certain parts of the globe literally uninhabitable if the air conditioners fail? There's not even a question! Set aside every moral and environmental question, and you're still left with the unambiguous case that moving national energy policy toward less-polluting alternatives will save the country from unfathomable economic costs in the decades to come.

We're not going to get that conversation on Meet the Press, ever, because no non-journalist booked on Meet the Press knows a damn thing about it. We're not going to get the kind of hard-edged reporting that the profession idolizes in fictional stories but shudders with contempt at providing itself, reporting in which political figures are confronted about their astonishing ineptitude in managing this or any other of the existential issues of the day.

We will get an unending parade of professional know-nothings to discuss how Joe Manchin's posturing or Bernie Sanders' gruffness might bump off-year poll numbers in the span between now and the future crisis, because that's the sort of talk that allows charlatans who don't believe in anything to have opinions on everything.

I'm tired. We're all tired. These shows are astonishingly tired, shambling along like brainless zombies wandering past thickets of political violence, environmental cataclysm, mass disease, widespread government failure, and the alteration of the nation's democratic discourse into, literally, an arena of professional hoax-promotion. The old formats were designed for sleepier times when the nation could coast along, ineffective and only a little bit corrupt, with no wars that affected the Important People or economic tragedies that the Important People could not weather. Now that we have passed through decades of ambivalent puttering to come face-to-face with genuine crisis, we learn that none of the shows are built to grapple with crises. They were a child's toy, a little playground in which the powerful could snip playfully at each other on camera before going to eat in the same tony restaurants and golf at the same posh resorts. They were not meant to tackle true problems—only to provide small, timed skits showing what tackling problems might look like, according to the fictions of the day, while making sure that none of it ever truly solved anything or even moved the conversation forward.

Those are not the formats in which a nation can grapple with a pandemic that will likely kill a million of its citizens. It would be farcical in the case of, say, a predicted asteroid strike or supervolcano eruption. It would be rendered so grotesquely absurd, if God Himself were to saunter down with a message or if alien life punched a hole through dimensions to invite us to dinner, that it would pass only as low comedy. Nobody on these shows gives a damn if the nation falls or the atmosphere burns. It was only meant to be a club for idle banter, nothing bold enough as to even scrape the lines of are laws based on overt bigotries bad or just a cultural choice, the sort of vapid dorm room debates on "are seat belts good" or "does unleaded gas represent government tyranny" that nobody involved would give two shits about, on their way home from the studio.

Meet the Press found itself confronting an actual insurrection—and folded. It couldn't cope. It had no tools for the job. So Chuck Todd invited the insurrectionists onto the program and helped redeem even election hoaxes, party-backed propaganda and candidate-organized insurrection as a reasonable political choice to be made. Not because he or anyone else involved gave a particular damn either way, and not because they did not, but because there is no Sunday morning format that can handle violent insurrection except as fodder for the professional know-nothings to banter aimlessly about. It was never meant to have actual stakes. Nobody, in any of the network executive suites, even knows what such a thing would look like.

We have noted in the past that the "QAnon" movement is not a set of new conspiracy theories, but a recasting of some of the most popular neo-Nazi, white supremacist, antisemitic themes of the last century for broader conspiracy consumption. Nazi-era antisemitic conspiracy theories declared that "Jews" were secretly controlling the world, that they were working to undermine governments and cultures, and that they drank the blood of children in secret rituals.

QAnon's version is identical: A shadowy cabal of "globalists" is secretly controlling the world, is working to undermine governments and cultures (for example, through a "great replacement" of Americans with new nonwhite immigrants, as supposedly funded by wealthy Jewish American George Soros), and is secretly trafficking children to harvest compounds from their blood. The most bizarre of Nazi and neo-Nazi themes have found eager new homes in the brains of supposed "real" Americans who have invariably settled on the same targets and solutions as their neo-Nazi enablers: Round up the "globalists"—meaning liberals, socialists, Democrats, those who fight for LGBT rights, those who treat immigrants with decency—and jail them. "Lock them up." Purge them.

The "everyday" Americans who have adopted QAnon beliefs as their own, insisting that the "child trafficking" or blood "harvesting" or something-something George Soros conspiracies are real, are Good Nazis. They are the sort of citizens who made Nazi Germany tick. They are sweet, patriotic parents of somebody, or children of somebody, and all they know in life is that their enemies must be defeated, even if defeating them means toppling democracy and/or supporting the most incompetent of tax-dodging lying rapist perverts.

Whether they can be reformed once they've gone down that rabbit hole is a subject for others to engage. Myself, I expect not. Human beings do not accidentally fall into believing their not-white or not-Christian or not-Republican neighbors are barely human saboteurs plotting behind the scenes to do whatever evil you might imagine. They started out that way, then fell into conspiracy holes that were pleasing because they ticked off all the boxes their previous paranoias needed to tick off.

The movement itself, however, has been drifting back to the rawer antisemitism that first crafted it.

VICE News reports that John Sabal, the influential QAnon promoter who will this week host a major QAnon conference at which four aspiring Republican lawmakers are scheduled to speak recommended on Sunday to his followers a notorious neo-Nazi conspiracy film blaming Jews as the architects of communism, World Wars I and II, and the sabotage of Naziism. "The most important historical film of all time," Sabal touted.

The posts were removed after they were "highlighted by extremist researchers," reports VICE—and Sabal claims through his partner that he never actually watched the film or knew that it was antisemitic. And yes, this is the "QAnon" provocateur with enough clout to collect Republican candidates from across the nation.

This isn't an isolated incident. VICE reports that other QAnon figures have similarly embraced the film, though none as prominent as Sabal has been. The "Q" movement is also attracting much attention and support among German neo-Nazis, who after all have a closer connection to many of the Q-adopted tropes now being exported by American conspiracists.

It hasn't stopped national Republicans from courting conspiracy leaders and allied militias, either.

QAnon may have taken some of its heaviest hits from being uniformly and absurdly wrong in all its preelection and post-election predictions about, well, everything, and from its top founder and likely Q pretender Ron Watkins, who distanced himself slightly after Trump's loss. (He's now running for Congress himself—in Arizona, of course.) That doesn't mean it's dead.

It's unclear, however, if QAnon believers are becoming more enamored with antisemitism than they once were or if the movement is sloughing off now-bored, less-radical Americans, leaving behind a more radical, neo-Nazi-adjacent core. Conservatism in general is increasingly flirting with antisemitic speech and candidates: In Idaho, a Republican with a long history of antisemitic speech, one who claims "all Jews are dangerous," is enjoying his local party's support for joining the local school board.

Extremist rhetoric in general is being rewarded rather than scorned by Republican voters. It's probably not surprising that the Republican slide into fascism could not help but stoke the same antisemitic sentiments that past versions have relied on. The QAnon, Trump, and Republican movements are all coalescing into one ball of hate and hoaxes; in the House and Senate, party leaders are at worst helping to promote the conspiracies, and at best remaining silent in efforts to ride the hate to new election victories.

Back in July, we learned that the joint promotional tour of Rep. Matt Gaetz (linked to a Florida sex trafficking operation that led to the indictment of a key ally) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (booted off all House committees by her fellow Republicans for promoting sedition-based violence) was hemorrhaging money, bringing in a mere $60,000 after spending $300,000 to get it. Now we know that it's not just their nationwide self-promotion jaunt that's bleeding money: Their overall campaigns aren't faring much better.

Could it be that while their base, the frothingest far-right of the far-right, is willing to defend sex trafficking and violent rebellion, they're not willing to put their wallets where their mouths are? Maaaaaybe.

A new Mother Jones report highlights the latest financial reports from the two campaigns, and none of it looks good. As for that joint promotional tour and PAC, Mother Jones reports that the latest filings show it to be "nearly broke," with only $13,000 left in its accounts. It probably didn't help matters that the pair found themselves regularly being thrown out of venues after event center organizers got cold feet about hosting them, either.

But it's the campaign records that are more intriguing. In Greene's case, she's still bringing in significant cash, but it's how the cash is coming in that's getting alarming. For the last three months, 70% of Greene's fundraising haul went right back out to the people and companies doing the fundraising; it appears Greene's campaign is now fully mired in the sort of sketchy high-cost, low-reward fundraising pushes that have plagued other, similarly sketchy Republican campaigns. Greene "spent more than $1 million to haul in $1.5 million," reports Mother Jones. That's big money, but it's mostly big money for the direct mail consultants and others sucking up most of the cash Greene's remaining donors are willing to contribute.

Gaetz, though, is another story. It appears that the fringe Republican base has decided that promoting insurrectionist lies is less bad than being an accused sex trafficker, because Gaetz's fundraising has been dismal. Gaetz's fundraising numbers have gone into the red, with $527,000 raised in the last three months on $627,000 of expenses. His campaign fundraising, in other words, lost him $100,000.

Despite Gaetz continuing to enjoy the steadfast support of fellow congressional perverts—sorry, "House Republicans"—such as Jim Jordan and the like, there are signs that Gaetz's actual voter base is losing interest in propping up the not-yet-indicted, still-insufferable sleazeball. All three of Gaetz's most prominent fundraising channels have crashed and burned in recent months, with his Greene-partnered Sex and Violence fundraising tour going bust, his recently released book absolutely tanking, and now his campaign itself in a nosedive.

And it's not like Gaetz can count on the Republican Party to boost his book sales with one of their infamous bulk book buys. They're waiting this one out. The number of people who want to see books by accused sex traffickers in their party gift bags are already low, and if he's indicted it will be lower still.

This is all fine and good, but what does it mean for Greene and Gaetz's actual reelection chances? It's too early to say. At minimum, it means the national Republican base is growing cold on both of them; while being a violence-adjacent, crime-adjacent, or overall performatively gross person used to have a bit of cachet for the base, that description now applies to so many new Republican stars that Greene and Gaetz barely register anymore. They're expendable figures to a base being overrun with fundraising requests from dozens of other would-be Republican leaders who have similarly impeccable credentials when it comes to Dear Leader worship, advocacy for sedition, or being a dumpster fire of humanity's worst compulsions.

If either of the pair find themselves in a real cash squeeze, they won't necessarily find the party running to come help. Both, however, have the advantage of coming from two of the most deplorable-friendly districts around. Greene may yet find that her pro-sedition, violence-suggesting stances are now her Republican Party's mainstream position come 2022, and coast back to office for her bravery in suggesting her political opponents be met with force before it became the default party position. Gaetz's local voters may be tiring of giving him cash, but when push comes to shove most of those Florida Republicans would gladly put even a convicted sex trafficker back in Congress if the alternative was, well, anyone even marginally less gross.

There's not really much chance that their Republican voters will abandon either of the two, and it's entirely possible that the more desperate and paranoid the pair act, the more the deplorables of the fringe right will rally to them. From these most recent fundraising totals, however, we can see that neither Greene nor Gaetz are really "inspiring" that nationwide deplorable base like they once did. There are other sex traffickers the far-right can rally around. There are plenty other fascist rabble-rousers. There are online Ponzi schemes to invest in, and gold coins to buy, and "survival buckets," and all the other products conservative mailing lists bombard their readers with.

Maybe the Greene-Gaetz base spent all their money on ammo and survival buckets and just don't have anything left to give?

The New York Times has a new story about the Trump administration's lax policies on foreign gift-giving, and it may not surprise you to know that Team Griftabout was just as indifferent to this particular bit of the Constitution as they were all the others. Accepting gifts from foreign leaders (or foreign anybodies) is strictly barred in the Constitution if you're an elected official, due to its close proximation to bribery; as such, the process of receiving such gifts is complex and bureaucratic and requires either paying for the things received (seldom done) or handing them over to the federal government as official federal government property.

You can see immediately why these rules would especially grate for the team of unapologetic grifters and grubbers that make up Trump's inner circle. And family. And general reason for existing. True to form, the Times reports the last administration was frequently sloppy about the whole process. Yes, yes, we'll all need a minute to recover from the shock. Have you recovered yet? Good, let's move on.

There are two tidbits the Times sussed out that are particularly intriguing. The first deals not with gifts from foreign leaders but gifts intended for foreign leaders. You might remember that Trump was originally scheduled to host a G7 summit at Camp David last year; that summit had to be canceled due to the runaway COVID-19 pandemic. In preparation for the meeting, the government prepared "gift bags worth thousands of dollars" to present to each foreign leader, the sort of high-value knickknacks that pass as diplomatic flattery in these circles.

In the last days of the Trump administration, "many" of those still-undelivered bags, as well as other presents, were missing. Allegedly, "career officers" in the State Department "saw their departing colleagues leave with" them.

However, the Times reports that at least some of the contents of the gift bags featured Donald or Melania's signatures, which probably drops their actual value to approximately that of a Mars Bar or a half-finished coffee. Who's going to want a "marble trinket box" with Donald Trump's name plastered on it? It's like a little coffin of shattered dreams.

Anyhoo, all of this is building up to the good part, and there is a good part and we're only getting to it now because we all know it's coming but needed to get in a comfy spot so we can savor it properly. Amongst the more problematic gifts received by Donald Trump and associates was an approximate crapload of swag given by the Saudi royal family in appreciation of Donald making Saudi Arabia the destination of his first foreign "presidential" trip.

Featured in the haul were "three robes made with white tiger and cheetah fur," as well as a dagger that "appeared" to have an ivory handle. Very illegal! Not good! The United States does not allow the trafficking of materials made out of endangered species!

Naturally, the Trump administration did jack-squat with this information, failed to properly disclose them as required, and eventually handed them over to the General Services Administration on Trump's last full day in office. (Why it couldn't have been done before then is a mystery; was the Trump team still looking for ways to keep the furs, along with the presidency, even on the team's very last day?) The Times reports that the gifts were eventually (properly) seized by U.S. Fish and Wildlife this summer, and that—good news, everybody!—it turns out they were fake.

Yeah, that's right. The Saudi royal family, the ultra-wealthy murderous dictators whose lifestyle consists of extravagant spending and a bunch of other things that they consider it illegal for anyone to bring up, gave Donald Trump fake tiger and cheetah pelts. It was a dye job.

And this is perfect. Couldn't possibly have ended in a better way.

What is Donald Trump, after all, other than a fake rich person? He is a reality show host whose incompetent burbles were famously edited into a reality show about bein' rich and bein' decisive, but the man's wealth is a small fraction of what he claims it to be, and his idea of "luxury" appears to be eating Big Macs inside rooms that have been spray-painted gold and adorned with plaques claiming imaginary things happened there.

They didn't give Trump the expensive pelts of endangered big cats. They gave him expensive-looking fakes, knowing he'd be pleased as punch with expensive-looking fakes. (And it's not clear the "ivory" dagger is actually ivory, either.)

Sure, then. We'll go with that. Finally, a bit of good news: There are at least two endangered animals out there that were not killed for the sake of this now-sedition-backing buffoon's pleasure centers. It was all fake, like Trump himself was.

Not the most important thing in the world, to be sure. But it's fun to remind ourselves that even the foreign leaders who were most obsequious towards Trump had his number from day one. Faker.