Tag Archives: right-wing grift

As I mentioned a couple of weeks back, there’s always a push from centrists, moderates and “sensible” people in the Democratic Party to push against the left. Just compromise on abortion. Or stop worrying about the special problems of blacks, gays, Hispanics and women. That’s how to win!

The current incarnation of this theory, Jamelle Bouie writes, is that the moderates in the party are complaining that the left winger such as A-OC are alienating moderate and conservative voters. As Bouie points out, though, moderate politicians such as Biden and Pelosi currently dominate the party. They’re setting the policies; if they’re not connecting, they should take the blame.

Of course, as NMMNB pointed out recently, it doesn’t matter how moderate Democrats hew. Republicans will always paint them as ultra-extremists, as in all the claims I’ve seen that Biden is converting America into a communist state or that sure, Biden’s fine but Kamala Harris is his evil commie puppet-master! She pulls the strings! Moderation won’t change that (more discussion in this thread).

Case in point: after 9/11 Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, both major players in Republican politics, said God let it happen to punish America for something or other (I don’t remember which hobbyhorse they were riding that day). So did Sen. James Inhofe. On the Democratic side, the Republicans had to dig up Ward Churchill, a professor at a Colorado university who thought the attack was a reaction to America’s Mideast policies. Conservative voices held him up as proof of how liberals hated America and he wound up getting much more attention than Falwell, Robertson and Inhofe did (IIRC at least).

Similarly, although liberal cancel culture is a blatant right-wing lie,millions of mainstream voters have bought into the myth of woke political correctness ruining careers and suppressing discussion (more here). Typhoid Ron DeSantis has just announced, a la Texas’ abortion laws, allowing private citizens to sue schools for teaching critical race theory (presumably anything short of “white people are god’s favorite” will qualify) but that won’t get the same outrage. Nor will Louisiana anti-vax attorney general Jeff Landry demanding LSU punish a professor for calling Landry’s assistant a flunkie.

For another example, Clinton ran as a centrist and adopted a variety of centrist policies (as Bouie points out). Welfare reform. NAFTA. Tough on crime laws. Said abortion should be safe, legal … and rare. He was still the ultra-liberal, pot-smoking, draft-dodging president (at the time a lot of Republicans pretended they couldn’t stomach a draft dodger, but they were fine with W, and with Trump mocking the military). His sensible welfare reforms, cutting back most federal programs if you weren’t working, were supposed to end welfare as an issue — nobody could complain now about welfare queens getting handouts! The results were people wound up worse off but the right-wing remained adamant that nobody but them should receive any government help.

I don’t mean that if the Democrats support left-wing policies they’ll win over Republican voters, let alone win office. I support them because in many cases (“left-wing policies” is obviously a very broad label) they’re the right policies. As one former congressman said recently, only a small fraction of America will ever have the power the members of Congress do — use it for more than winning re-election. Former Stockton mayor Michael Tubbs offers an example.

Watching the march of Republican Stalinism is certainly depressing. In Michigan, Republican activist Nancy Tiseo wanted Trump to declare martial law in 2020. She’s now an election canvasser. I have a strange feeling she may not be impartial in her work.

It’s tempting to just assume Republican totalitarianism is inevitable, but that’s partly because Republicans work to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Matt Gaetz, for example, claiming that the far right will take over the House in 2022. But the truth is, except for 2004 Democrats have won the popular vote in every election of the past 30 years. That doesn’t count for as much as it should in our messed up electoral system but it’s not inconsequential. Whether it will be enough to overcome Republican fascism is unknown — but it’s worth trying. I’ve started reading up on ways to encourage turnout and do other things to contribute. More than I contribute by blogging.

I think No More Mr. Nice Blog is right about this: Republicans and their right-wing media machine work to make any liberal with a bad opinion the embodiment of all liberals and Democratic policies, everywhere. Democrats don’t make the counter-argument that everyone still in the Republican Party supports Trump and the coup. “The result is that the Republican Party is a party that’s run by extremists but is perceived as moderate, while the Democratic Party is run by moderates but is perceived as extremist.” Similarly they’re an anti-American party that successfully paints Democrats as opposing American values. That’s something I can push back against, though obviously I have a very small platform. But I’ve always believed pointing out the right-wing emperor has no clothes is worth doing, just to put an alternative view out there.

Another problem, WaPo‘s Dana Milbank says, is that press coverage of Biden is as negative or worse than Trump got in the middle of the pandemic. LGM adds commentary. LGM also cites the Afghanistan withdrawal as an example: the coverage was negative despite the lack of any alternative beyond “stay there forever.” Just as the media’s take is often “the economy is tanking” when jobless claims are at record lows. And now we’re having complaints — not at all influenced by sexism, I’m sure — that Kamala Harris doesn’t use bluetooth enough. This kind of thing can definitely affect the election so it’s one more hurdle to keeping our democracy.

Now, some links:

Republicans remain committed to no gun control measures of any sort, which is damn extremist. But it seems Sen. Chuck Grassley considers school shootings like the recent one in Michigan less horrifying than inconveniencing gun owners. So we teach kids active shooter drills or close the schools. But never mind, Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro explains that the teachers not stopping the kid is because they’re liberals (see what I mean about blaming our side for everything?).

It is of course bad to prosecute political adversaries purely out of politics. The people involved in the Jan. 6 coup attempt deserve prosecution but Merrick Garland ain’t having it.

An ICE program to enlist sheriffs across America to report dangerous immigrants unsurprisingly generated racism, profiling and abuse.

Two lawyers who filed Stop The Steal lawsuits will have to pay more than $100,000 to cover the legal fees of people they sued. Even outside Stopping the Steal Sidney “the Kraken” Powell remains an incompetent grifter. However she’s very successful at raising cash from suckers.

A right-winger criticized his school and got coddled by the legislature. Minority students got much less sympathy.

“How can you detain an enemy combatant when there’s no war going on?”

Cop shows have obsessed for years about guilty suspects getting off through legal technicalities. What happens when innocent people stay in jail because of technicalities?

“Corruption is bipartisan. Support for anti-corruption measures is less so.” — a look at a new Biden administration paper on fighting corruption.

Florida’s Education Department has removed an anti-bullying page with links to LGBTQ resources. No surprise: the right-wing has a history of opposing anti-bullying efforts because then they can’t push around gays.

Starting in the 1980s, the right-wing has been screaming “political correctness” every time they got criticized. It’s fine for them to tell gays and trans people they’re disgusting but it’s PC thought policing to punch back up at them. More recently it’s cancel culture — never mind that very few people are actually canceled over saying something politically incorrect, it’s an effective rallying cry.

It works for pouty right-wingers who feel they should be able to scream racist insults without any blowback, but it also works with a lot of mainstream people. Somehow the fact that the right-wing are the ones currently banning books doesn’t register. I don’t know why. Is it that, as Ta-Nehisi Coates once said, white grievance is automatically assumed to be valid? Or that the left are supposed to be tolerant so it disturbs people more when we do it? But either way it’s annoying as hell that we can’t seem to rouse the same reaction against the right.

Bari Weiss has built her brand on fighting cancel culture. She coined the phrase intellectual dark web to pretend that unremarkable right-wing ideas — identity politics are bad, men and women are fundamentally different — as stuff nobody can say in the mainstream without getting canceled. Of course people say that stuff all the time, but apparently the shtick works well for her. She signed the briefly notorious Harper’s letter and complaining that people are being terrified into self-censorship. Which even if true, is meaningless without context. If they’re terrified of saying the N-word or discussing how Biden’s cabinet has too many Jews, I’m fine with them not wanting to say that crap aloud.

Now Weiss has found a new angle, trying to launch a new university because academic freedom! Except as noted at the link, she’s recruiting founders who oppose academic freedom (more discussion here). One of them is a conservative Catholic who specifically says freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry are NOT the highest goals of  college education. Weiss’s response is that she knows — that’s why she wants him on board! I presume the point is, unlike liberals she embraces FREEDOM so much, she even supports people who oppose FREEDOM! Except when they’re liberals; she’s not making any attempt to find anyone on the left who doesn’t like free speech (admittedly there’s a lot fewer) just as their mission statement doesn’t discuss Republican attacks on said freedom.Weiss is, as usual, full of shit. Here’s more about one of the grift organizers.

Sean Turnbull is a conspiracy theorist who makes a good living out of it (see this post for more examples): he warns his fans to BUY GOLD, and takes ads from companies that let people invest in gold. And he has no qualms about using anti-Semitic bullshit about a “Zionist banker international cabal” run by the Rockefellers and Rothschilds. Turnbull says he’s “hopeful” QAnon is true, which is kind of hair-raising — as Fred Clark of Slacktivist puts it, nobody should be hopeful there’s a network of Satanic pedophiles running part of the government.

Here we have a Fox News weasel argument, regarding right-wing lies that the U.S. Women’s Soccer team turned their backs on a man playing the Star Spangled Banner. It isn’t true but Fox talking heads claim people’s willingness to believe it is “a sign of where we are.” This is bullshit a former friend of mine played during Obama’s presidence: confronted with evidence of right-wing paranoia, he argued, quite smugly, that the real issue is what Obama did to make people distrust him so much.

Texas Republicans can’t stand the idea that the Texan war of independence was about slavery (see here). Heck Kayleigh McEnany, who recently explains she’s too good a Christian to lie, lies and claims the Founding Fathers all opposed slavery.

Most Ivy League college women say they wouldn’t date a Trump supporter. According to National Review, that’s yet more proof how conservatives are oppressed.

Someone once said the one good thing about Trump is that he’ll always backstab his inner circle. Case in point, he’s now refusing to pay Giuliani’s legal bills.

Speaking of legal, Trump’s filed a class-action suit against social media for censoring him (a topic I’ve covered here). In the same spirit as Steve Turnbull, the ex-president is raising funds for the lawsuit that will be channeled to other projects. Trump and Republicans have a history of scamming voters into recurring donations and Republican fund-raisers are shocked and appalled Democratic attorney generals are now investigating.

More legal: A judge rips into The Kraken and Trump’s other lawyers for filing bullshit lawsuits (“The judge noted that one observer stated in an affidavit that she believed she saw election workers switching votes from Trump to Biden. Parker asked whether any of the lawyers had spoken to the witness and inquired what exactly she saw that led her to believe that votes had been switched. She was greeted with silence.”).

Taylor Swift called out Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn on her politics back in 2018 and said she was voting for the Democratic candidate. Blackburn’s response: Marxists won’t allow women to sing in public so Swift better vote Republican! In the same spirit Colorado Republican Ken Buck claims Google stole 15 million Trump votes by “flipping the algorithm … it absolutely happened!”

The Former Guy hid in his bunker and threatened death for any protesters who got past the White House security. But he’s shocked that Ashli Babbitt, Jan. 6 insurrectionist, died attacking this country. Right-wingers, some of whom celebrated when unidentified cops kidnapped people on Portland (“Don’t let the left dox them!”) are outraged the cop who shot her hasn’t been identified. Of course Trump continues lying that the Sedition Day crowd was peaceful and loving.

Having deleted his old anti-Trump tweets, J.D. “Hillbilly Elegy” Vance is running for office in Ohio. Some reporters are thrilled, possibly because they want a classier Trump.

Marko Kepi, a Trump-supporting NYC city council member, has been accused of forging ballots to win his seat (though he’s only under investigation at this point — it’s fully possible he’s innocent).

It’s a law in Texas that schools teach “the history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong.” Republicans object. As Rick Perlstein says, the spirit of the far right is never far from mainstream Republican thought.

And remember despite all the arguments of “well Dems do it too,” Democrats are not as enthused about inflicting pain on their enemies as Republicans.