#partisan blame shifting

[alwaysbewoke]

i have to remember not everyone in florida voted for these people in power because it's hard to feel sorry for them sometimes. really hard (watch til the end smfh)

and she's going to turn around the vote for him AGAIN smfh

[bugsbenefit]

hellfire in s5, and how it's Really not looking good for the members

the hellfire club is, in my opinion, one of the most obvious set ups for s5 and i never see enough people acknowledge how blatant the show actually is with it. because it's a directly addressed ongoing issue that slowly worsens over time and directly threatens three main characters (Dustin, Lucas, and Mike), at Least

there's a clear structured progression of the threat getting worse, with a major part of the s4 Hawkins plot being only Jason and his team chasing Eddie down, and by the last episodes of the show the rest of the town sides with them and joins the objective. however, we never get any consequence of the town agreeing with Jason, aside form the kids parents getting reaction shots looking insanely worried. the only thing even resembling partisan participation is a dogwalker (the same man that agreed with Jason first and then caused every other member in the town hall to also agree) informing Jason and co about there being someone in the Creel house. a single character ratting someone out is not pay off for a scene that rallies the entire town with anger and fear. especially because he was the First one to agree with Jason, arguably the next reaction, in parallel to the town house scene, will have everyone else also involve themselves

and everything Jason actually said in the town hall looks INFINITELY worse by the end of the season because he not only died the same day (how odd that must look), the town was also hit by a severe earthquake. (and hell-gates open in town but we don't know how people will react to that yet, or if it will even be immediately obvious to them)

like. it's a Terrible look. and with Eddie being dead now, the main target that represented the hellfire club in s4 and got the primary share of blame is now officially un-prosecutable

s4 also goes out of it's way to associate Lucas, Dustin and Mike explicitly with the hunt on Hellfire, ages before the whole town gets involved

Lucas is put on edge by the basketball's team hostility towards his friends constantly and has to actively lie his way out of the line of fire multiple times. the basketball team is also looking for Dustin to question him about Eddie's whereabouts, even going to his house where a confrontation only doesn't happen because he's not home. and they even manage to go out of their way to drag Mike into it despite him being out of town, when Jason starts a conversation with Nancy specifically to threaten her and then asks about Mike right after

which leads to the other thing; not only are all the kids already on Jason's radar, he's also getting more and more direct with the fact that he doesn't just want to have a nice chat with them (culminating in actually physically attacking Lucas by the last episode)

and if them setting all of the kid members of hellfire up for a bad time wasn't obvious enough, it's also fascinating to see the posters of hellfire we get over the season also show a clear shift in focus

when we see the hellfire club year book photo for the first time the focus is on Eddie. he's who Jason sees as the main culprit and when we get a close up of the burning poster we see Eddie

but when we see the hellfire club photo again 4 episodes later the focus isn't on Eddie anymore. not in dialogue and not visually

the shot is from the Wheeler's pov (Karen's specifically), and the only part of the picture that's in focus is the far right corner, with Mike and Lucas. (makes sense that's her son that's currently being implicated in satanic murders). Eddie never gets unblurred, he's not who the audience is supposed to look at in this shot. verbally Jason is also explicitly blaming the whole club now. it's not just Eddie who's "crazy" and killed Chrissy, it's the whole club who's responsible (it's also very notable that he's handing out yearbook photos of the whole club, not just Eddie. a really distinct prop choice. everyone in town now not only thinks hellfire is directly responsible for multiple ritualistic murders, they also know Exactly who's in the club)

and looking back at the season in hindsight, there's actually more than enough instances that would make the members of Hellfire look kind of guilty, or shady at best, even if someone were to do some research. there's multiple instances of hellfire members lying to the basketball team about hellfire member's whereabouts which definitely doesn't make them look more innocent in the team's eyes. not only do Eddie's band members try to brush them off, Nancy pretends to not even know about Hellfire when Jason asks about Mike, and Lucas goes out of his way to keep Dustin and Eddie's locations from them by deliberately lying and sending them to wrong locations

and that's on top of the entire montage of Dustin and Mike trying to find a substitute player for a single game on the same day a student with no previous affiliation to Eddie Munson dies at his trailer? that looks Horrible in hindsight. especially with them asking pretty much every other student, from almost every club, while both prominently wearing hellfire shirts. if anyone actually remembers them and thinks about the events post Chrissy's death they could definitely make some assumptions

it's just bad looks all around. and that's not even mentioning how they have the potential to look even worse in s5. if it got out Lucas was with Max when she somehow died and broke all her bones? would look horrible. or Dustin now associating with Eddie's dad? and we don't even know how he'll fulfill Eddie's wish to "look after the little sheep"

and even Mike, who didn't even have the chance to attract suspicion post e1 due to being out of town has a whole thing going on with his image paralleling Eddie, with being the other DM and having his s4 style be directly in reference to Eddie's looks

while there's building hostility towards the hellfire members, and the focus (both visually and vocally) switches more to the members Other than Eddie, by the end of the season there just hasn't been a chance for the townsfolk to respond to Jason's speech yet. they all agreed with him, but everything immediately went to shit the same night. however, even the last few minutes of the show, that always have the most direct foreshadowing for the next season, include a shot focusing on the rise of religion and the fearmongering that started with Jason's speech

which serves as a great reminder that the entire town hall just agreed with Hellfire being a satanist cult they need to stop

s4 ends with the hellfire set up being one of the most explicitly obvious plot threads that are about to be a problem for multiple main characters in s5. like the few other obvious established about-to-be struggles: the gates opening, Vecna still being alive, Max being "gone"; we've gotten a full set up there but no payoff yet

and then there's obviously the question of what the people would even DO in s5? they all agreed that Hellfire needed to be stopped, so... what now?

on one hand there's the interesting concept of the town refusing to help the protagonists but they could also be acting as a hostile force against them

say anyone tried to warn the town about the upside down or it's creatures, the chances of people listening to them talk about actual "demons" and reacting in any positive way is probably near 0. even if you saw a Demogorgon nibble on your neighbour an hour ealier, would you really listen to someone you think intentionally opened the Hellgate that let the creatures through in the first place?

but then there's of course the active antagonistic angle they could also take. Jason was calling for Hellfire to be actively opposed and stopped, not passively. and the show Does go out of it's way to show the overcrowded weapons store in multiple shots post Jason-speech

we're supposed to know these people are armed going forward. whether they're buying them to go hunting, or wanting to go shoot Eddie Munson, the weapons are there now... also ignore the 7 separate hellfire wanted posters in the opening shot of the store alone 💀(it's actually 9, i didn't circle the two that are cut off in the bottom corner. that whole board is just plastered with that one photo)

(the implication of what the guns are for couldn't be more obvious if they tried. again, also the scene where Jason tries to intimidate Nancy and directly asks about where Mike is. also the scene where Erica and co try to hide from the basketball team members in the store. the scene features, guns, hellfire posters everywhere, and characters specifically asking about the whereabouts of a member while other people are actively hiding)

and the weapons could play out in a positive way in s5 too, say the lady from next door gets hands on involved and takes shots at the Demobats in her front yard

but the reactionary, scared, and angry town that blames a specific small group of people for everything that's happening could also lead to MCs having to actively worry about getting shot by someone they've seen at the supermarket for 10+ years on top of the supernatural threat

TLDR: re Hellfire, none of these members will have a good time in s5

Edit (because i forgot to include these images and am silly)

Hellfire even makes it on the local news by the end of the season

and in line with the focus shifting from Eddie to the other hellfire members, the news anchor then goes to say that Eddie Munson is presumed dead after the earthquake but that that isn't enough for the town. the news even mentions the conspiracy theory that the hellfire murders CAUSED the earthquake. so anyone who hasn't heard Jason's speech, now they're getting it from a "reputable" source too. call that high quality journalism, let's throw the local highschoolers under the bus

we're supposed to remember the fear of the "satanic cult killing children" that Jason spread to the town. it's still there. and it's not just in the local town hall anymore, its being broadcast on live television. so just in case you didn't catch wind of who caused a "gate to hell" to open in your suburban neighbourhood the first time, the news anchor thankfully tells you who everybody Says is responsible, it's the 14-18 year old satanist serial killers duh

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

MAGA is more than a political movement—it’s a symbolic system that answers dislocation with identity, confusion with clarity, and loss with belonging. If we want to push back, we need more than critique. We need a new story—and the civic infrastructure to support it.

When we talk about MAGA, the temptation is to simplify—reduce it to ignorance, racism, authoritarianism. And while those elements are undeniably present, that simplification blinds us to the layered reality of what we’re facing. MAGA is not a single ideology. It’s a fractured but potent worldview, stitched together out of fear, loss, and an offer of belonging.

There are openly authoritarian factions: white Christian nationalists, neo-Nazis, and political opportunists who see democracy as an obstacle to power. There are loyalists who have traded constitutional principle for partisan control. But beyond that are millions of Americans drawn in by something less clear-cut: a sense that the ground beneath them has shifted and that no one in power seems to notice. For many, MAGA isn’t about policy at all—it’s about feeling seen.

From an anthropological perspective, MAGA functions as a symbolic system. Its power lies not in legislative detail, but in ritual, narrative, and identity. Flags are flown not just in support of a candidate, but as declarations of meaning. Rallies become performances of grievance and imagined redemption. Slogans operate like shared prayers. It’s not politics in the traditional sense. It’s belonging in the face of dislocation.

This dislocation isn’t imaginary. It’s rooted in real structural shifts. The collapse of industrial jobs, the erosion of social mobility, the fragmentation of public education, the disappearance of local media—all contribute to a pervasive sense of loss. Add to that climate disasters, housing precarity, and the stripping of rural and working-class communities by extractive economics, and you get fertile ground for stories that promise a return to order—even if that order is cruel.

The “stolen America” narrative—amplified by cable news, talk radio, and algorithmic social media—offers a simple explanation: you are losing because others are taking what’s yours. It’s a lie, but a compelling one, because it replaces confusion with clarity. It locates blame. It gives identity to those who feel erased.

If we want to counter this narrative, we need more than facts. We need a coherent, grounded, and emotionally resonant alternative—one that offers a place to stand, not just something to reject.

That counter-narrative might begin like this:

You matter—not because of your income, education, or politics—but because you are part of a shared society whose future depends on all of us.

This country has been sold out by those who put profit before people—by corporations and political elites who abandoned communities while insulating themselves from the consequences.

The struggle isn’t between neighbors. It’s between those who extract and those left to carry the cost.

Democracy isn’t about shouting the loudest. It’s about showing up—for your neighbors, your community, and the shared spaces that hold us together.

Patriotism isn’t about who you exclude. It’s about what we build together, and who we refuse to leave behind.

But a story is only as strong as the infrastructure that supports it. And this is where we’ve fallen short. Over the past four decades, many of the institutions that once mediated American life—unions, local newspapers, public schools, even churches—have been defunded, privatized, or politically captured. Into the vacuum stepped commercial media, political spectacle, and ideological silos. The storytellers changed—and so did the story.

We can’t rebuild a democratic culture without restoring its civic infrastructure. That means supporting local organizations that build trust, not division: libraries, mutual aid groups, community centers, labor cooperatives. It means creating spaces where people participate in shared projects that don’t rely on political affiliation—repairing parks, planting gardens, running food banks.

Rebuilding democracy also means widening the circle of belonging. Authoritarian movements draw power by narrowing it—by telling us who counts and who doesn’t, who belongs and who must be cast out. But if we are serious about renewal, we need a deeper ethic. One that recognizes the interdependence of all people, communities, and even the living world we inhabit. A culture grounded in care—across lines of race, class, faith, geography, and species—isn’t idealistic; it’s necessary. We cannot meet this moment with sharper divisions. We need a broader sense of connection, one that makes solidarity feel not just moral, but natural.

It also means recognizing who carries informal authority in our communities. Teachers, nurses, veterans, clergy, small business owners—these are the people who can reach across narrative divides, not with slogans, but with lived credibility.

We must also shift what we reward. Our current information economy privileges outrage and spectacle. But social capital can be directed elsewhere. Let’s elevate those who mediate, who mentor, who build—those who quietly embody the kind of society we say we want.

Democracy doesn’t live solely in Washington. It lives—or dies—in every community. In school boards and union halls, neighborhood councils and library basements. It thrives when we practice it, and withers when we stop showing up. If we want to resist authoritarian narratives, we can’t wait for national leaders to save us. We have to rebuild the culture and practice of democracy from the ground up—not just as an ideal, but as a lived experience.

This doesn’t mean everyone can be reached. Some are too deeply invested in grievance, or too entangled in conspiratorial thinking, to engage in good faith. But many others are simply trying to make sense of a world that no longer feels coherent. For them, the challenge isn’t persuasion—it’s providing another path to belonging.

The story of America is contested, as it always has been. But the storytellers have changed, and the stage has fractured. What we’re witnessing is not just a political fight—it’s a cultural realignment. The real battle is over meaning: who belongs, who decides, and what kind of future is worth building.

If we want to meet this moment, we need more than policy proposals. We need a public narrative rooted in dignity, care, and shared responsibility—and we need the material conditions that make that story believable. The vision is already out there, scattered across movements, communities, and everyday acts of solidarity. The task now is to gather those pieces, name them clearly, and begin again.

James Greenberg

Understanding MAGA: Rebuilding Democracy

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Amanda Marcotte at Salon:

People are saying if you have a conservative family member, don't invite them to Thanksgiving or Christmas. Like, stay away from them," TikToker Brooker Tee Jones complained. "If that is happening, the devil is definitely winning."  After the November election, a rowdy debate erupted in online spaces over whether it's acceptable to cut off family and friends because of how they voted. Supporters of Kamala Harris expressed a range of views, from a reluctance to burn bridges to a "screw 'em all" mentality. "It's okay to shame someone for doing something shameful," feminist writer Jessica Valenti argued on Instagram. Shunning those who voted for Donald Trump, she added, was "a reasonable response by those of us who are disgusted, anxious, and afraid."

Some on the "Hysteria" podcast agreed with Valenti. But guest Megan Gailey said, "If you think you can bring them over, bring them over." Errin Haines agreed: "We cannot give up on our friends, our family. I think there was too much of that, frankly, after 2016." But that's a liberal podcast, so of course the panelists also offered reassurances that it's OK to disown family members if their Trump vote is "a symptom of larger issues." On the Trump-voter side of the debate, the sentiment has been nearly unanimous: It's an outrage if "woke" friends and family stop speaking to them. The only real disagreement among that cohort is whether this trend is literally the devil's work, or merely liberal "intolerance." One TikTok video that went viral featured a woman crying about being cut off and saying, "I'm completely heartbroken about my family taking it how they are. I never did this to them when Biden won." Conservatives have coined the phrase "vote-shaming," which seems to equate political and ideological conflict with personal choices regarding diet or sexuality. 

Estrangement has always been part of being human, but in recent months, we've seen a deluge of press coverage of the phenomenon. Most stories ignore the question of politics or mention it only in passing, instead blaming the seeming rise in family estrangement on social media, therapy culture and shifting cultural norms that prioritize individual happiness over familial duty. Yet an undercurrent of political tension rumbles right under the surface, a suspicion that this is tied to the increasing partisan polarization driven by the MAGA movement. Perhaps America's most famous estrangement story is the one involving Trump super-donor Elon Musk and his daughter Vivian Wilson, who has publicly denounced her father for refusing to accept her trans identity. Former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger, who served on the House Jan. 6 committee, has repeatedly spoken out about members of his family disowning him over his opposition to Trump, who has threatened to throw Kinzinger in prison.  "On the day after the election, I had several calls from clients that they need to have an appointment as soon as possible," Dr. Farnoosh Nouri, a clinical assistant therapist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, told Salon. She reports that colleagues across the state are reporting the same. "One colleague had 33 calls the day after the election, new clients who wanted to come in." Before 2016, Nouri said, she had not witnessed this kind of political stress on families. After Trump's first win, she saw a spike in college students "struggling with going back home for Thanksgiving holidays, for Christmas holidays." Now the fear and stress are ramping up again. Across social media, the stories are mounting, both from liberals who wonder whether it's time to go no-contact with MAGA parents and from Trump voters who complain about "childish" offspring who no longer speak to them. Nouri's experiences are backed by new statistics from the Public Religion Research Institute, which found that "Democratic voters (23%) are nearly five times as likely as Republican voters (5%) to say they will be spending less time with certain family members because of their political views."

Salon posted a request on Reddit to interview adult children who factored politics into their decision to go no-contact with parents. The response was overwhelming. Contrary to the stereotypes that adult children who make this decision are being callous, impulsive or foolish, the respondents — many of whom said they were in therapy — spoke eloquently about what was often described as a long and emotional decision-making process. 

"I literally thought being a Democrat was a sin"

“I don't know anybody who's gone no-contact with their family just because of politics.” In saying that, a woman Salon will call Ellie echoed a sentiment that came up in nearly every interview with children who have cut off right-wing parents: It's not fair to reduce the dispute to mere political differences. (All adult children and parents interviewed in this article are identified by pseudonyms to protect their privacy.) Ellie's parents, she said, were "extremely, extremely religious" and "very physically violent." This is not uncommon in fundamentalist Christian households, where the biblical proverb about "sparing the rod" is regularly wielded to justify corporal punishment.  The problem, Ellie said, is that in many cases it's not possible "to separate what people believe in politically with their values as a whole." She argued that "Donald Trump and his administration and all these Republicans have been justifying abuse forever," which she compared to the ways her family used religion to rationalize abuse. 

"Children who choose to estrange themselves aren't making a little decision on a whim," explained Joshua Stein, a researcher who tracks online trends, especially those that intersect with psychology and bioethics. Stein has been collecting data on the online discourse about estrangement and says that many children who were raised according to the fundamentalist teachings of James Dobson and Michael Pearl "are now adults and are estranged from their parents." For many such adult children, he says, "It's not the fact that the person is MAGA. It's the fact that you do not feel that it is safe to be around them." Maureen was also raised by parents she describes as devotees of Dobson, a famous proponent of spanking children. "I literally thought being a Democrat was a sin," she said, laughing. "I was very encouraged to get married young, to an older man," she said, but found herself becoming more liberal over the years and eventually left him. Trump's election further strained her relationship with her parents. "I was raised with all the shame, like having sex before marriage was bad," but "then my family was just completely willing to embrace Donald Trump." "All the things that they told me Christianity stood for? No longer matters," Maureen said. Like many of the adult children who spoke with Salon, she went full no-contact with her parents during the COVID pandemic. 

[...]

Blaming "woke ideology"

"I was not invited to my daughter's wedding," Darlene told Salon. "That's how sick these people are, because how do you do that to a mom?" Quite a few parents who have become estranged from their children expressed interest in speaking with Salon, but most declined after learning they would be asked questions about their political views. Darlene was the exception. Like the adult children interviewed, she also saw a connection between politics and her personal situation.  "There's a mindset, there's an entitlement" in younger people, she said, which she believes has led to the government being "out of money." She added, "I don't have beaucoup bucks to just throw it out so that somebody else can make the decision as to how it gets spent, when it's not on the same values that I have." Darlene's daughter is a practicing nurse and aspiring country singer. Darlene says she gave her daughter money to start her band and record an album, but believed that "I was to have no say in how we went about promoting" the music and managing the band. Things turned out differently, in her view: "I just was to give the money and she was at will to do whatever she wanted with it." Darlene also blamed her son-in-law, whose family is "more left" and "very controlling," she believes. (Her daughter did not respond to a request for comment.) She felt that her daughter's unwillingness to speak with her was indicative of a larger social problem: "What's happening to this country if you can't sit down and have a civil conversation?” She felt that Americans are not "discussing what's actually happening to this country" or "trying to find solutions," but "keep raising taxes" instead. Similarly, she said her daughter would not "sit down with me and discuss what was happening with the money," but implied that "I was just to be quiet" when it came to her daughter's music career. 

[...]

Authoritarianism starts at home

Most estranged children and their defenders use intuitive arguments to defend their belief that the personal and political are intertwined. Social science, however, backs them up. One of the best predictors of authoritarian political beliefs — and likely Trump support — is how a person answers questions about the most desirable traits in children:

independence vs. respect for their elders

curiosity vs. good manners

self-reliance vs. obedience

being considerate vs. being well-behaved

People who prefer obedience over curiosity, independence or consideration tend to have authoritarian personalities. As political scientist Matthew MacWilliams found, authoritarians are more likely to be strong Trump supporters. This linkage makes sense, MacWilliams told Salon, because authoritarianism is all about in-group versus out-group thinking. In that worldview, children are expected to "conform to in-group norms, be obedient, be orderly, be disciplined."  MacWilliams added that it's not surprising to see politics become intertwined with personality issues in family estrangement cases. He characterized authoritarianism as a "worldview, a predisposition" more than an ideology, adding that "values and worldview drive politics," not the other way around. Authoritarian values, he said, are the "poison root" from which far-right politics and regressive attitudes on child-rearing both flow.  In her new book "Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America," journalist Talia Lavin devotes the second half to exploring the widely-read marriage and parenting manuals of Christian nationalist subculture. These books or websites explicitly argue for hierarchical relationships, with women and children chastened to live their lives in unquestioning submission to patriarchal authority. As Lavin lays out in painful detail, this worldview is frequently enforced through violence, at least on children. The parenting manuals treat physical discipline not merely as an aspect of parenting, but as a parent's main tool. 

[...] Similar logic is echoed throughout anti-estrangement articles, such as the New York Times noting that "estranged children are likely to lose access to financial and emotional resources." No equivalence is drawn the parent side, even though it's also true that a parent who refuses to make peace with an adult child runs the emotional risk of losing that relationship permanently. Once again, the implicit assumption is that the lower-status person has a duty to maintain or restore harmony.  It is clearly true, as Coleman has argued, that the growth of individualistic values and greater economic freedom have created a context in which adult children can cut off contact with their parents, something that was often impossible for earlier generations. It doesn't follow, however, that such people have given up on "connectedness and interdependency and mutual reliance," as Coleman told NPR.

Most adult children who spoke with Salon did not seem lonely or disconnected from life. Most cited strong relationships with friends, other family members and romantic partners as giving them the strength to separate from parents they felt were harmful. Many spoke warmly of Reddit, which provided connections to other people in similar situations. On the estranged-parent forums, the term "found family" is sometimes uttered with evident contempt. Many of the adult children say they have simply found community. 

Could going no-contact with MAGA cultist parents be the right thing to protect your sanity?

See Also:

Everything Is Horrible: It May Not Be Safe to Remain Friends With MAGA

[dragoneyes613]

In the fall of 2022, the left-leaning mainstream media did almost everything they could to help the flagging senatorial candidacy of John Fetterman. Nearly three years later, liberal corporate outlets seem to be intent on destroying him with reports claiming to detail his aberrant behavior, questionable health and devastating comments from former staffers, and even from his wife, Gisele Barreto Fetterman.

What’s behind the change in their attitude?

One thing known for sure is that it’s not the ostensible issue driving a flood of stories casting doubt on Fetterman’s state of mind and fitness for office. And, just like the same outlets’ disgraceful cover-up of former President Joe Biden’s mental incapacity—something that became obvious during his disastrous presidential debate with Donald Trump in June 2024—ended once it was clear that he couldn’t win re-election, the turn against Fetterman is devastating evidence of the media’s lack of credibility. The shifting narrative about the senator is an object lesson in how to read the contemporary liberal press. It’s why even those most reluctant to write off legacy media as partisan propaganda outlets need to acknowledge that 21st-century journalism is broken beyond repair.

The same outlets now skewering him as a sick man who has lost control of himself and hinting at the need for him to resign were singing a far different tune in 2022, when they steadfastly stuck to the story that there was nothing wrong with a man who had suffered a devastating stroke only days before he won his party’s nomination for a Pennsylvania U.S. Senate seat. That support from liberal outlets required some journalists to blatantly lie about his condition, alleging that any reporting to the contrary about his health was Republican disinformation. This helped him win that November, though a lot of the credit for his victory also belongs to the dismal, out-of-touch performance of his GOP opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz.

The liberal press never budged from that line even after Fetterman took office in 2023, endured some difficult first weeks on Capitol Hill and was then hospitalized for depression. He recovered and returned to his regular duties, albeit still relying on digital devices with closed-captioned technology as a result of what he said was a temporary speech impediment related to the stroke. Anyone who questioned whether a U.S. senator ought to rely on this method to conduct conversations and listen to speeches was damned as a bigoted “ableist” opponent of the disabled.

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But by the end of his first year in office, the cheerleading and/or covering for Fetterman ceased. Why was that? The answer can be summed up in one word: Israel.

Standing with Israel

Fetterman reacted to the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab terror assaults on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, not just with anger and horror. Unlike most Democrats, who spent the subsequent months demanding a ceasefire that would allow the Hamas terrorist organization to emerge as the victor of the war it started, Fetterman was having none of that. He immediately made it clear that he was determined to support the Jewish state’s efforts to defeat and eradicate Hamas, and that blame for all of the casualties in the post-Oct. 7 war belonged to the Islamist group and not the Jewish state.

Indeed, Fetterman has become a hero to the pro-Israel community in the last 19 months for his unwavering support, which is undiluted by any willingness to pay lip service to the left’s false claims that the Jewish state is committing “genocide” in the Gaza Strip. Along with Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), he is among the few Democrats who have stood by Jerusalem during the crisis without wavering. Nor has he talked out of both sides of his mouth, damning the Israelis for “overreacting” to the events of Oct. 7 or praising the idealism of the pro-Hamas mobs on college campuses, as did former President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

To say that his stand on Israel has come as a shock to fellow Democrats, especially the left-wing activists who carried him to victory in a May 2022 Pennsylvania Democratic primary against a credible moderate alternative and an attractive representative of the African-American community, is an understatement. It’s hard to imagine any Pennsylvania Democrat, including Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish (Fetterman is not), trolling pro-Hamas demonstrators at his office and home by waving an Israeli flag while they chanted about “genocide.” Or by hanging outside the door of his Washington office posters of men, women and children of different nationalities who were kidnapped by Hamas and murdered there or along the way, or held captive for days and months. Even more to the point, as numerous accounts make clear, Fetterman’s staff and even his wife have become outraged by his support for Israel, a position that marks him as an outlier in his party.

Fetterman has shown some other signs of moderation since Oct. 7, notably his willingness to meet with President Donald Trump after his November 2024 election victory and to vote for a couple of his cabinet appointees. But on the whole, he’s stuck to his liberal positions on a host of other economic and even social issues, such as his support for trans rights, and voted against most of Trump’s choices. That stance even started a boomlet among some pro-Israel Democrats, proposing Fetterman as a long-shot possibility for the 2028 presidential nomination in which he would be the centrist alternative in a party increasingly dominated by supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

Pro-Israel stands as a form of mental illness?

That unlikely prospect aside, it is his supposed “apostasy” about Israel that is driving the anger against him from the progressive wing of his party. This is the only explanation for liberal journalists’ volte-face on the question of his health and fitness for office.

The story that started the tsunami of negative coverage of Fetterman was a lengthy profile in New York Magazine, titled: “All by Himself: John Fetterman insists he is in good health. But staffers past and present say they no longer recognize the man they once knew.”

The main on-the-record source for the piece was his former chief of staff, Adam Jentleson, a veteran left-wing Democratic operative. Like most Democratic congressional staffers on Capitol Hill, Jentleson is an opponent of Israel, who thought the Biden-Harris ambivalent stand on the post-Oct. 7 war was insufficiently hostile to the Jewish state. He ultimately resigned and, along with others who didn’t speak on the record, is at pains to hint that Fetterman’s backing for Israel and refusal to play along with Hamas talking points signify signs of his mental instability.

That story spawned other articles in outlets like The New York Times, The Atlantic, Politico, NBC News, CBS News in which Democrats—both anonymous and on-the-record—shaded Fetterman and depicted him as a deeply disturbed and unstable person in need of medical care. And, they say, he has no business being in the Senate.

Is there a possibility that they are at least partially correct about Fetterman’s health? Maybe.

Press hypocrisy

As someone who cast doubt on his fitness for office when liberals were pretending that there was nothing to see, I’m prepared to accept that some of the current reporting about his health might be accurate. But I also know that the sudden interest in his well-being on the part of the liberal press has nothing to do with any alleged change for the worse in his condition.

While he may still be impaired, as journalists like Salena Zito have reported, since his hospitalization in early 2023, he has managed to do his job for the past two years as reasonably well as most of his colleagues. Though, admittedly, that is a pretty low standard by which to judge anyone.

As such, it’s blatantly obvious that the motivation for the media offensive against Fetterman is about politics, not health. The reason that the same publications, networks and journalists that spent four years declaring that there was nothing wrong with Biden are now sounding the alarm about the senator is because he isn’t useful to them anymore. If he were behaving like other left-wing Democrats and criticizing Israel, the odds that New York magazine, the Times or any of the other outlets seeking to depict him as unworthy of a Senate seat would today be ignoring any concerns about his condition.

While this single demonstration of the media’s corruption and utter lack of credibility is disturbing in and of itself, it’s just another instance of why so much of what the mainstream corporate media publishes should be read with a truckload of salt. Media bias is nothing new, but it’s gotten to the point where stories that are clearly part of a partisan information operation are the norm rather than unusual. As Ruthie Blum wrote in JNS about a recent media attempt to sow dissension between the Trump administration and the Netanyahu government in Israel, this sort of thing is now ubiquitous. At least in America, we have come to the point where it’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that much of what is printed in the mainstream press must be discounted as nothing more than political disinformation.

In the meantime, regardless of concerns about his health, Fetterman still deserves the applause and gratitude of voters for his courage in standing up against the political fashion of his party when it comes to the war against Israel. Whatever else you might think of him, he is an authentic, if eccentric character (his penchant for wearing hoodies and shorts to work is something that has angered his Senate colleagues) who connects with ordinary working-class voters in a way that most Democrats cannot. While he may well face a tough left-wing primary challenge when he runs for re-election, those who underestimate his political appeal in a state and a country sick of partisan ideological polarization do so at their own peril.

Liberals tolerated an infirm and incapable president simply because they thought it helped keep Trump out of the White House. Friends of the Jewish state should therefore be forgiven for being willing to put up with an irascible and moody senator from Pennsylvania who needs technological assistance to do his job but has shown integrity and character when it comes to the post-Oct. 7 surge of antisemitism that other members of his party have either tolerated or encouraged.

[bopinion]

2025 / 20

Aperçu of the week

“Hope dies last”

(German proverb that probably goes back to the saying “Dum spiro spero” - As long as I breathe, I hope - by Cicero)

Bad News of the Week

The internationally renowned human rights organization Amnesty International has been banned in the Russian Federation. The Russian state news agency Interfax reported that the Prosecutor General had declared it an “undesirable organization”. This means that Amnesty must cease all work in Russia. According to a law passed in 2015, participation in such organizations is a criminal offence. Anyone who cooperates with or supports them can also be prosecuted. And will be prosecuted, there is no doubt about that.

Amnesty International describes the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine as a violation of international law. And documents the most serious human rights violations and war crimes committed by Russian soldiers. Founded in London in 1961, the organization is one of the best-known and most established NGOs in the world and has 10 million members. AI has never shied away from calling a spade a spade with regard to and in Russia. Not only in the context of Ukraine, but also against a wide range of other human rights violations. This will not stop in Russia - but we will hear much less about it.

There will always be shining lights like Alexei Anatolyevich Navalny or Pussy Riot, who make it into all the media abroad and at least into alternative media in Russia. And who convey hope on both sides. Abroad, that not all Russian citizens can be taken for fools, let alone that they are convinced Vladimir Putin fans. And in Russia, that you don't have to accept everything, but that you can also stand up - even if that requires incredible heroism. And sometimes costs lives.

With ever fewer organizations that actually have the means to be heard, it will be difficult. Because the Kremlin's propaganda machine is always beating loudly. There are already (independent!) surveys that show that the majority of the Russian population nowadays believes that Ukraine with its Nazis at the top is to blame for the war. I very much hope that the Russian opposition will remain strong and not lose courage and hope. And that Amnesty International does not give up - but rather goes underground.

Good News of the Week

Last Sunday, elections were held in three European countries. And in all three there were results that a democrat can live with. Even if, of course, things have been better in the past. But these days, as we all know, you have to be happy if an arch-conservative populist doesn't come to power. Let's take a quick look at the three elections.

First of all, there is Romania. The new president of this northern Balkan country was elected after an election that was annulled due to massive electoral interference. The non-partisan math professor Nicusor Dan was originally a protest candidate, but turned into a liberal reform politician. As a pragmatist completely unconcerned by the usual accusations of corruption, he beat the radical right-wing George Simion in the run-off election with a pleasing increase in voter turnout. So the people got their act together and consciously made an undogmatic, rational decision.

Then there were parliamentary elections in Portugal. Here, the conservative incumbent head of government, Luís Montenegro, at least managed to retain a relative majority against the shift to the right. As the Socialists are at least just ahead of the right-wing radicals of Chega (“Enough”), a progressive policy that has to organize a majority from project to project is at least possible and also likely.

And finally, the presidential election in our neighboring country Poland. And this could still be really exciting. It is important to note that the country has been more or less at a standstill for a year and a half now. Although the convinced European Donald Tusk won the parliamentary elections with a liberal party alliance under the leadership of his PO (Platforma Obywatelska / Civic Platform), he was unable to push through practically any legislation. This is because President Andrzej Sebastian Duda of the right-wing nationalist PiS (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość / Law and Justice) simply refused to give his obligatory signature on any laws.

In the first round of voting, the liberal-conservative candidate Rafal Trzaskowski from the government camp has a two percent lead over PiS representative Karol Nawrocki, but the second round is wide open. Either Nawrocki succeeds in uniting the votes that have so far gone to two other right-wing parties behind him. Or the population mobilizes and consciously decides against a relapse to the right by voting for Trzaskowski. The Romanian model, so to speak.

Either way, the crossroads of the general shift to the right could be over, at least in Europe. First, the right-wing election winners were no longer able to form a government like Geert Wilders in the Netherlands or Herbert Kickl in Austria. And now there are fewer and fewer right-wing election winners. For me, these are candles of hope that have now started to burn. As I said, a democrat can live with that.

Personal happy moment of the week

After going to a Vietnamese restaurant for my daughter's birthday, it was time for my son's birthday - not even a week later (but originally more than five years) - at an Indian restaurant. Not only was it delicious, but the atmosphere was also unexpectedly relaxed. For one thing, the grandparents were also able to attend, even though my mother still has to contend with considerable motor impairments. And secondly, there were no confrontations between the divorced parents and guardians. So I was able to enjoy the good food without any restrictions.

I couldn't care less...

...the absurd overreactions that occur in the USA out of fear of repression from above. In Georgia, a 30-year-old woman is on artificial respiration and “kept alive”, even though she was declared brain dead three months ago. Because she is pregnant. And the clinic fears that it will violate the US state's abortion law if it turns off the machines.

It's fine with me...

...that a rainbow flag flied over the Reichstag on May 17, even with a right-wing majority in the German Bundestag. That's because it's International Day against Homophobia, which dates back to 1990, when the World Health Organization (WHO) decided to remove homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses. That makes me happy. Even if I think 1990 was alarmingly late.

As I write this...

...I am pleased that the gardening season has begun. Yes, now the neighbors are mowing again and always when I have to concentrate in my home office. And the farms around us are also getting louder and louder too. But before that, an entire house was demolished on a neighboring property. Compared to that, it almost seems like meditation music to me now.

Post Scriptum

The liberal German party FDP (Free Democratic Party) is probably in the biggest crisis in its history. After being kicked out of the Bundestag, it is in danger of falling into insignificance. The party is already familiar with this, as it happened once before in 2009 - but with less political competition back than. Christian Lindner then became party leader (for a record eleven and a half years), re-entered parliament in 2013 and finally joined the government in 2021. Then the so-called “traffic light” coalition of the red Social Democrats, the yellow Liberals and the Greens collapsed. Mainly because of Christian Lindner.

He has now resigned from office and was bid farewell by the party with much positive emotion. The new leader is called Christian again - this time Dürr. And was previously head of the parliamentary group. Hopes are now pinned on him. Not mine any more. Because although I think a lot of liberals, the FDP is no longer a liberal party. The liberal ideas have long since ceased to apply to society or justice, but only to the economy - and against the state, just like the Republicans in the USA at the moment. Fortunately, we still have a liberal party in Germany, as their extremely mature handling of the special funds for security and infrastructure has shown lately: the Greens.

[truthdogg]

I think our national media can’t see the forest for the trees here. And many democrats seem to be missing it as well.

This Republican-led process is supposed to be a sham. The point is to make impeachment proceedings, all impeachment proceedings, look like a partisan tool. This is a deliberate and necessary part of the 2024 presidential campaign for Republicans.

When independent voters are polled about Trump and his impeachments are mentioned, that distinctly and consistently lowers his support. His impeachments are a serious weakness with voters, and the GOP knows it. They can’t un-impeach him, of course, but what they can do is to pretend that the trials were partisan (they were not), over policy (they were not), and that this is always the case.

They are counting on Americans forgetting what a clown show Trump’s entire presidency was. And frankly, it might work. Few people want to remember what those four years were like; they were awful in a whole variety of ways and most of us have gladly blocked it out.

Many Republicans also truly do believe that impeachment is a sham process in general and to be used as a political tool. They’re not entirely wrong, since it’s a political process. But the main problem with their approach is that corruption or truth doesn’t matter to them, it’s only about putting points on the scoreboard.

In this case, impeaching the DHS secretary does get them bonus points, even if that is not the main goal. It adds to confusion regarding border policy, and it potentially makes the DHS less effective. These are important outcomes when they’re trying scuttle any sort of solution to problems there as long as Biden is in office. This circus also potentially shifts the blame from Congressional Republicans for not funding the bills they’ve passed onto Mayorkas for not doing them, and away from Abbott for blocking the DHS rom the Texas border.

It’s all about deflection. Never about solutions. When Democrats claim this impeachment is about policy differences, they’re giving Republicans way too much credit. Policy isn’t important to them; this is about power.

[mythserene]

My Beatles Biases

Since I want everyone else to state their biases up front, I will too.

I want to say something about the John/Paul dynamic. I came into the Beatles story very late, didn’t understand all this John/Paul “leader” internecine struggle, and by the time I did understand it, it was too late and I loved them both too deeply to be too partisan. But to place myself somewhere on that well-known scale, I really feel for Paul in the breakup and instinctively like him and want to defend him. Yet I can be almost knee-jerk protective of John. He screws up a lot, but I am very quick to make excuses for him. (And I think I’m right because he’s hurt.) I think the evidence shows that Paul was probably pretty full of himself near the end. I don’t blame him for “bossy” but I think he held breaking up over their heads more than we acknowledge, and there’s a fair deal of evidence for that that we dismiss too easily. I am also more sympathetic with John than I think most of the Paul team is. I do think the loss of his mom was more impactful than Paul’s mom was because he was more alone. But just as a rational human with eyes and a brain I think the whole “John was the leader” position is the most untenable I’ve ever seen. There is simply no way to make it believable. It goes against all the evidence. And last, I think the biggest problem right now is cutting George out too entirely. He’s the third leg of the table and he wasn’t always the bitter dude that he was after the breakup. I agree that the main artery of The Beatles was John and Paul, but George is always the tiebreaker. (Yoko realized and utilized that power he held well in the Allen Klein fight.) He was a factor in the shifts of power every step of the way, and basically the most important voter. (Plus, I have a soft spot for him.) Since I want everyone else to state their biases up front, I will too.

[anthonybialy]

Record-Setting Biden, In His Way

Recency bias leads those nursing welts thinking present pain must be the most agonizing.  Yet many equipped with memories remain aware of what happened five minutes earlier, which shocks liberals who are baffled every time their hideous nonsense harms humanity again.  Give it a few years, which will offer the context of realizing their world-healing garbage really was dreadful.  Historians who want to wrap up their shifts before lunch don’t have to wait to render a verdict on someone who has failed in every regard.  Joe Biden sucks.

Exhibit sophistication in a way a grabby dolt never illustrates by analyzing just how badly he’s performed on individual issues.  Biden’s status as contender for the worst president ever is not an outlandishly partisan suggestion or hyperbole exacerbated by experiencing present woe.  The agonizing task’s greatest challenge of narrowing an abundance of examples is precisely unlike a list of his accomplishments.  Coming up with things that have improved under Biden’s watch is like finding a valuable dollar.

Life is even more treacherous than usual either by design or putzing.  Political scientists can explain to unsophisticated voters why their suffering is occurring.  The difference may not register.  

Which of the two regrettable styles of Democrats is the incumbent?  The man who misses hiding in the vice president’s office isn’t really an Obama-style schemer dedicated to tearing down from the inside in order to control decline to his liking.  This term is more like fixing a flat tire with duct tape.  The inscrutable question is fitting for such a fascinatingly enigmatic president.  We may never learn Biden’s favorite cereal mascot.  The box featuring the Froot Loops bird is an unobtainable luxury.

Pondering how a prototypical nursing home resident got to be head of state out of millions of American options will only deepen depression.  That’s fine with this president, who’s a drug dealer getting customers hooked by making life miserable.  I suppose it’s good for business, although it’s not like he owns the government.  He certainly wasn’t going to invent his own enterprise.

Please enjoy some corruption to distract from ineptness.  There’s no other way to find peace presently, so enjoy what your caring president hands you.  Thinking every other rich person is the same is the most irritating assumption made by grifting politicians.  The only thing worse than unhinged cynicism is imposing it on everyone else.

Punishing the successful in a way they never do illegal immigrants or legal felons has provided exactly the incentives expected by everyone but White House staffers.  As with every other wretched notion joyless nitwits believe, the fact they must impose their ideas never tips them off to their inherent lousiness.  Public office-holding embodies such nobility that you shouldn’t ask them to empty their pockets.  Biden loves the self-checkout line.

Ruining everything by coercion is as noble as it gets.  We’re all to blame, thanks to those who roped in everyone else by law.  The type of politicians who dream of control want none of the credit, which sure is selfless of them.  Molesters of your rights really believe in collective action.  We are truly all in this together.

This nation is blessed to be equipped with a president who tells us how to live.  Velcro doesn’t fasten itself, which nobody knows better than Biden.  People couldn’t possibly provide child care or know what kind of cars will make it out of sight of the driveway without collective action.  Someone else gets to decide what action gets to be collective.

A snotty demand for selflessness based in taking what belongs to others could be deliberately ironic in the right hands, which means it’s not.  Your authorities never ponder just why so many people need help under their rule.  Commonplace poverty must be the fault of villainous conglomerates who spurred inflation to somehow profit off potential customers not being able to muster up funds.

Being this bad on purpose seems like it’s too tricky for the present temp staffer.  The paranoid notion makes sense if you realize who’s filling the chair.  A conniving plan to screw up with government in order to save us with more of it may have been engineered by nefarious underlings with IQs higher than room temperature.  The executive is out.

Life is surely going well if debate revolves around whether this woeful branch has been attempting to seize your choices as strategy or just does so in response to whatever they wrecked yesterday.  The net result is the same if anyone feared the only thing that could cause damage is a pernicious ideology.

Overusing power can only get worse if the stupidest jerk is in charge.  It’s not like this White House turned life into a trip to Disney World.  It only feels like a Magic Kingdom trip in the modern woke version where visitors spend 783 dollars on lunch in order to endure a lecture about sanctimonious tolerance.  Can we just wait in line for Space Mountain?

Democrats finally got the popular vote they wanted.  Circumventing states is not the only way they want to ruin the nation.  Contempt for being left alone motivates every decision by a White House that we wish couldn’t be bothered.

There can’t possibly be anyone enjoying this.  Scheduled monthly praising of pathetic job growth is a fake joy that’s fact-checked back into depression.  Russian soldiers and Iranian centrifuge technicians appreciate career opportunities, but they haven’t crossed the border yet.

Perspective makes agonies like this presidency worse.  A ceaseless irritation is not going to improve over time, which is fitting in its way.  Biden’s ironically shown himself to be an expert over time on not thinking ahead.  The lasting contribution will be unintentional, namely perfect example of why abused and overextended authority is limited.  Biden makes the case against Biden.

[cogitoergofun]

In the northwest corner of Wisconsin, the 73rd Assembly District used to be shaped like a mostly rectangular blob. Then, last year, a new map drawn by Republican lawmakers took effect, and some locals joked that it looked a lot like a Tyrannosaurus rex.

The advent of the “T. rex” precipitated dark times and perhaps extinction for local Democrats.

The new map bit off and spit out a large chunk of Douglas County, which tended to vote Democratic, and added rural swaths of Burnett County, which leans conservative.

The Assembly seat had been held by Democrats for 50 years. But after the district lines were moved, Republican Angie Sapik, who had posted comments disparaging the Black Lives Matter movement and cheered on the Jan. 6 rioters on social media, won the seat in November 2022.

The redrawing of the 73rd District and its implications are emblematic of the extreme gerrymandering that defines Wisconsin — where maps have been drawn in irregular and disconnected shapes over the last two decades, helping Republicans seize and keep sweeping power.

That gerrymandering, which stands out even in a country where the practice is regularly employed by both major parties, fuels Wisconsin power dynamics. And that has drawn national attention because of the potential impact on abortion rights for people across the state and voting policies that could affect the outcome of the next presidential election.

The new maps have given Wisconsin Republicans the leeway to move aggressively on perceived threats to their power. The GOP-controlled Senate recently voted to fire the state’s nonpartisan elections chief, Meagan Wolfe, blaming her for pandemic-era voting rules that they claim helped Joe Biden win the state in 2020. A legal battle over Wolfe’s firing now looms.

The future of a newly elected state supreme court justice, Janet Protasiewicz, also is in doubt. Her election in April shifted the balance of the court to the left and put the Wisconsin maps in peril. Republican leaders have threatened to impeach her if she does not recuse herself from a case that seeks to invalidate the maps drawn by the GOP. They argue that she’s biased because during her campaign she told voters the maps are “rigged.”

“They are rigged, period. Coming right out and saying that. I don’t think you could sell to any reasonable person that the maps are fair,” she said at a January candidates forum.

She added: “I can't ever tell you what I’m going to do on a particular case, but I can tell you my values, and common sense tells you that it’s wrong.”

Given the usually staid campaign statements associated with state-level judicial races, her comments stood out.

But, by any number of measurements made by dispassionate researchers, the maps have, in fact, proven to be extreme.

The Gerrymandering Project at Princeton gives the Wisconsin redistricting an F grade for partisan fairness, finding Republicans have a significant advantage, as do incumbents. “Wisconsin’s legislative maps are among the most extreme partisan ones in the country,” the project’s director, Sam Wang, said in an email to ProPublica.

Wang argues that Wisconsin’s GOP has gone further than most states and engineered “a supermajority gerrymander” in the Senate. Republicans control 22 of 33 Senate seats, giving them the two-thirds required to override a gubernatorial veto. (In the Assembly, the GOP is still two seats short of a supermajority.)

“The resulting supermajority, immune from public opinion, can engage in extreme behavior without paying a price in terms of political power,” Wang warned in a Substack article.

In the two decades before the Republicans configured the maps to their advantage, the state Senate, in particular, was more competitive, and Democrats at times controlled it.

The state’s maps changed dramatically beginning in 2011 when the GOP gained control of the Legislature and Republican Scott Walker became governor. The party redesigned the maps again in 2021, further tweaking the successful 2011 template.

“The current maps, as currently constituted, make it virtually impossible for Democrats to ever achieve majority party status in the legislature,” said Democratic strategist Joe Zepecki of Milwaukee. “Even if they win statewide by like 10 points.”

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

The New York Times

By Charlie Savage

May 30, 2025

President Trump appears to be declaring independence from outside constraints on how he nominates judges, signaling that he is looking for loyalists who will uphold his agenda and denouncing the conservative legal network that helped him remake the federal judiciary in his first term.

Late Thursday, after a ruling struck down his tariffs on most imported goods, Mr. Trump attacked the Federalist Society, leaders of which heavily influenced his selection of judges during his first presidency.

“I am so disappointed in The Federalist Society because of the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations,” Mr. Trump asserted on social media. “This is something that cannot be forgotten!”

Hours earlier Thursday, the Justice Department severely undercut the traditional role of the American Bar Association in vetting judicial nominees. A day before, Mr. Trump picked a loyalist who has no deep ties to the conservative legal movement for a life-tenured appeals court seat, explaining that his pick could be counted on to rule in ways aligned with his agenda.

Together, the moves suggest that Mr. Trump may be pivoting toward greater personal involvement and a more idiosyncratic process for selecting future nominees. Such a shift would fit with his second-term pattern of steamrolling the guardrails that sometimes constrained how he exercised power during his first presidency.

But it could also give pause to judges who may be weighing taking senior status, giving Mr. Trump an opportunity to fill their seats. Conservatives have been eyeing in particular the seats of the Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas, who will turn 77 next month, and Samuel A. Alito, 75.

“Conservative judges are going to be much more open to stepping down if they’re confident that their replacements will be high quality,” said Ed Whelan, a conservative legal commentator and former lawyer for the Bush administration. “Trump’s bizarre attack on his judicial appointments in his first term doesn’t inspire confidence.”

Mr. Trump and his allies have expressed increasing anger at the federal judiciary as courts have blocked his actions, including his aggressive claim to wartime powers to deport migrants without due process and his efforts to freeze grants and dismantle agencies without going through Congress.

On Thursday, the U.S. Court of International Trade handed Mr. Trump his latest defeat. A three-judge panel unanimously struck down his invocation of emergency powers to impose import taxes on goods imported from nearly every country in the world. Two of the three judges were Republican appointees, one named to the bench by Mr. Trump. (A higher court has temporarily paused the ruling.)

Notably, the Trump appointee on the trade court was not a Federalist Society archetype. Congress structured the court to require a partisan balance, so presidents make sets of nominees from both parties. The judge had worked for a Democratic lawmaker before becoming an aide to one of Mr. Trump’s first-term trade officials.

Yet Mr. Trump lashed out at the Federalist Society, blaming it for bad advice on whom to appoint to judgeships. He singled out Leonard Leo, a former longtime leader of the Federalist Society who helped recommend his first-term nominees and who exemplifies the conservative legal movement.

“I was new to Washington, and it was suggested that I use the Federalist Society as a recommending source on judges,” the president wrote. “I did so, openly and freely, but then realized that they were under the thumb of a real ‘sleazebag’ named Leonard Leo, a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America, and obviously has his own separate ambitions.”

Mr. Leo and Mr. Trump had a falling out in 2020, but the personal attack was a sharp escalation. In a statement, Mr. Leo said, “I’m very grateful for President Trump transforming the federal courts, and it was a privilege being involved.”

Still, Mr. Trump’s tirade strained an already uneasy relationship with traditional legal conservatives.

Many share the president’s goals of strengthening border security, curbing the administrative state and ending “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs, said John Yoo, a conservative law professor. But, he added, they dislike some of Mr. Trump’s methods, whether that is prolifically invoking emergency powers or insulting judges who rule against his administration.

And Professor Yoo, who wrote memos advancing sweeping theories of presidential power as a Bush administration lawyer, said Mr. Trump’s attacks on Mr. Leo were “outrageous.”

“Calling for the impeachment of judges, attacking Leonard Leo personally and basically calling him as traitor as far as I can tell — Trump is basically turning his back on one of his biggest achievements of his first term,” he added, referring to the reshaping of the federal judiciary.

Earlier on Thursday, Attorney General Pam Bondi notified the American Bar Association that the administration would impede its traditional role in vetting judicial nominees. That work involves interviewing their colleagues, reviewing their cases and writings, and rating them for integrity, professional competence and judicial temperament.

The bar group says it does not consider politics in such vetting, but conservatives have long accused it of liberal bias. (It rated all three of Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court nominees as well qualified, and deemed only three of his 54 appeals court nominees to be not qualified for the positions.)

In 2017, the first Trump administration stopped the bar group from assessing potential nominees before any final decision. But it permitted the group to vet them after their names went to the Senate. Nominees signed waivers so the group could have access to nonpublic bar information, filled out A.B.A. questionnaires and sat for interviews.

In a significant escalation, Ms. Bondi said in her letter that Mr. Trump’s second-term nominees would not be instructed to sign waivers, nor would they fill out questionnaires or sit for interviews. The A.B.A. declined to comment on the move.

While Mr. Trump was out of power, a schism emerged between traditional legal conservatives and MAGA-style lawyers. The latter decided that politically appointed executive branch lawyers had constrained Mr. Trump in his first term, and began making plans to appoint a more aggressive breed of lawyer. But that conversation was largely about selecting executive branch lawyers, not judges.

During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump had essentially made a deal with the conservative legal movement. In exchange for its support, he would outsource his judicial selections, like the Supreme Court seat left vacant by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, to movement adherents.

Throughout his first term, Mr. Trump nominated appellate judges and Supreme Court justices cut from the mold of the conservative legal movement. He accepted the recommendations of his first White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, a Federalist Society stalwart, with significant input from Mr. Leo.

This month, Mr. Trump announced the first appellate nomination of his second term, Whitney Hermandorfer, a lawyer in the Tennessee attorney general’s office, for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. A former Supreme Court clerk to Justices Alito and Amy Coney Barrett, she appeared cut from the same cloth as his first-term selections.

According to people briefed on the selection process, Trump officials including Stephen Kenny, a lawyer working for the White House counsel; Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff; and Sergio Gor, the director of the White House personnel office, were involved in those deliberations. Mr. McGahn, now in private practice, is also said to have weighed in on Ms. Hermandorfer.

But Mr. Trump’s second appellate pick, announced on Wednesday as the nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, was different: Emil Bove III, a Justice Department official and former criminal defense lawyer for Mr. Trump.

Mr. Bove does not fit the mold of the sort of lawyer who has spent years frequenting Federalist Society conventions to discuss judicial restraint and originalism. But he has shown a willingness to aggressively use power in ways that Mr. Trump likes, including carrying out politically charged purges.

Mr. Bove also forced out an interim U.S. attorney after she balked at his demand to drop a corruption case against New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, when the administration wanted his help for mass deportations. The prosecutor, Danielle Sassoon, a Federalist Society member who had clerked for Justice Scalia, portrayed the request as unethical.

In naming Mr. Bove, the president put forward an openly politicized and outcome-based rationale. His nominee, he said on social media, would “do anything else that is necessary to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. Emil Bove will never let you down!”

The choice has set off a debate among conservative legal circles.

Mr. Whelan said a “very conservative appellate judge” had told him that he would not retire because of concerns over whom Mr. Trump would pick as a successor. In National Review, he warned of the “danger that Bove, if confirmed, would leap to the top of Trump’s list for the next Supreme Court vacancy.”

But Mike Davis, a former Republican nominations counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee, predicted and welcomed similar picks ahead. “President Trump will pick even more bold and fearless judges in his second term,” he wrote on social media. “And Emil Bove is one of the most bold and fearless of them all.”

Michael A. Fragoso, a former nominations counsel to Senator Mitch McConnell, defended Mr. Bove’s credentials. But he also said that “regardless of what Mr. Trump is saying, the pool of candidates that he is picking from, and should be picking from, is still Federalist Society people.”

Professor Yoo said the purpose of the conservative legal movement was to get presidents to stop treating judicial appointments as patronage and instead advance ideological goals. If Mr. Trump deviated from that path, he cautioned, the president risked the revolt President George W. Bush faced when he tried to appoint his friend and the White House counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court two decades ago. Mr. Bush ultimately backed down.

No matter the shared goals of the conservative legal movement, Professor Yoo added, its members had a limit.

He said they would not support “him calling for the impeachment of judges or wanting to appoint judges who are not the best and the brightest, but instead are people getting personal rewards from the president — which is how it was before the Federalist Society.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/us/politics/trump-judges-nominations.html

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

More accurate ....

* * * *

TRUMP OPENS FIRE ON THE MEDIA

TCinLA

Dec 17, 2024

The point is not necessarily winning. The point is fear. Now that Disney has surrendered and paid their initiation fee, Trump is ready to commit more extortion, er, I mean start more lawsuits.

In his rambling fact-challenged press conference yesterday, Trump targeted Bob Woodward, CBS, and the Pulitzer Board for awarding its 2018 Prize to the New York Times and the Washington Post for their coverage of Trump’s campaign, the Steele Dossier, and the Mueller investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 election. Trump also described recent visits from Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and other tech barons. “In the first term, everyone was fighting me. In this term, everyone wants to be my friend.”

On Monday night, less than 48 hours after securing a $15 million settlement from ABC News, Trump filed a lawsuit in Iowa District Court accusing venerated pollster Ann Selzer and her polling company - and well as The Des Moines Register and its parent company, Gannett - of “brazen election interference” and “consumer fraud” over her November 2 poll showing Kamala Harris winning by 3 points in Iowa.

Whether Seltzer’s polling error constitutes an “election-interfering fiction,” as the suit alleges, is now the question before a Polk County court. Iowa lacks an anti-SLAPP law, a protection that gives judges the ability to swiftly toss out frivolous attacks on free speech. Trump’s newest legal adventure leans on an extremely aggressive reading of Iowa’s consumer fraud law intended to prevent businesses from making misrepresentations to deceive purchasers.

Selzer’s spent three decades in the polling business and boasts an A+ rating from Nate Silver, Her sterling reputation was the main reason why many in Washington and the media took her startling Iowa result at least somewhat seriously. Even among veteran political operators who wrote off the Harris +3 number as an outlier, the prospect that pollsters might be significantly undercounting Democratic votes fomented a temporary media narrative that Kamala’s campaign had crucial momentum heading into the final days of the race.

Two weeks after the election, Selzer announced she would be retiring from the polling business to explore “other ventures and opportunities,”a decision she said she made last year. “Would I have liked to make this announcement after a final poll aligned with Election Day results? Of course,” she wrote in a guest essay for The Des Moines Register. “It’s ironic that it’s just the opposite.”

Trump was still fuming over the last-minute narrative shift that the poll generated. He now appears eager to run up the score.

Ahead of filing the lawsuit Monday evening, Trump previewed his plans in an afternoon press conference. “We have to straighten out our press,” he said. “Our press is very corrupt, almost as corrupt as our elections.”

Besides the ABC News suit, Trump is suing CBS News for $10 billion for the way it edited Bill Whitaker’s 60 Minutes interview with Harris - claiming the edited broadcast amounted to “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference.” He is now pursuing a case against the Pulitzer Prize board for awards to journalists from The New York Times and Washington Post who investigated his ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign.

Never before has a candidate sued a pollster for setting off a negative news cycle. Typically, if a pollster is wrong, their reputation suffers, but they are rarely blamed for damaging a campaign.

The Des Moines Register said they stand by their reporting and believe a lawsuit would be “without merit.” It will be interesting to see what Gannet does here - they are a major company in the news business without other corporate interests.

As with Trump’s other lawsuits against media organizations, the objective isn’t to win but to intimidate.

Litigation is expensive for all parties, especially in high-profile cases such as those involving a former and future president, even if the suit is ultimately found to be frivolous. There is also the burden of the discovery process, which is always invasive and frequently ugly. Already, nervousness is spreading, with media companies preparing for litigation targeting journalists, including charges like defamation or even violations of the Espionage Act. Axios recently told its staff to expect an increased number of lawsuits from the Trump administration.

The fact that Trump has filed litigation against Selzer, and 60 Minutes could undercut his argument he’s too busy as president-elect to shoulder the burdens of civil litigation.

The two dominant theories about ABC’s surrender are that either Trump has unearthed potentially damaging information or correspondence at ABC News that Disney doesn’t want revealed, or that this is CEO Bob Iger’s gesture to Trump to avoid his vengeance and the lightning-rod spectacle of a public trial against a sitting president. Iger, since he returned to Disney, has been willing to placate the right to keep the company out of its crosshairs He knows he can’t give $1 million to Trump’s inauguration without causing an internal firestorm, and he hasn’t made his own tail-between-legs pilgrimage to Mar-A-Lago. But he knows this settlement is a way to buy some insurance for the next four years. The question is how much goodwill it actually buys. If Trump sees an opportunity to benefit from attacking Disney, he’ll do it, regardless of Disney’s surrender.

Michelle Goldberg wrote of these events, Collectively, all these elite decisions to bow to Trump make it feel like the air is going out of the old liberal order. In its place will be something more ruthless and Nietzschean.”

Anne Applebaum, an expert on descents into authoritarianism, said, “Many people assumed in the past that the news media in the United States was too big, too diverse, and too complex to be intimidated.”

So much for that cornerstone of democracy.

“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” - Edmund Burke

“You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war.' - Winston Churchill

[TCinLA]

[sambinnie]

Due to illness and ageing and natural and unnatural river states, we’ve barely swum for the last six weeks, so between Christmas and New Year’s we take ourselves to a lake and dip in near-freezing water, crystal clear and smooth as the pond it is. I make it all the way to the first buoy and nearly back before I’m shivering in the water, which I’ve never experienced before, not even when we had to kick our way through the river-ice and dip in the truly freezing non-flow. But the lake is a drive away, so instead of running home in wet kit, we’re on heated seats in a heated car, eating leftover panettone and shortbread slices, which somewhat dilutes our connection to nature but does a great deal for plummeting core temperatures. I wouldn’t give up the river while I can, but a change is as good as a heated, cushioned rest. 

The year has kept me from nihilism, at least as I look immediately around and behind. Ahead, I’ve been feeling alarm, until I watched this (long, be warned, by Instagram standards) video from Martha Beck, an author who by any measure I should back away from with my fingers in my ears — she’s a life coach, she’s published a book involving the word ‘starlight’, she’s got her own podcast. But she also worded exactly the growing feeling I’ve had for the last five or ten years in such a neat and clear way: that our insistence on individualism and prioritising wealth as a marker of ‘success’, or indeed ‘goodness’, is damaging us beyond words, and that if we make the mental shift away from ego and towards collective thinking, we’ll thrive en masse. 

I feel too old to give any credence at all to anything remotely hippyish (unless you couch it as witch-based, then I, like any middle-aged woman who daily sees more than a handful of trees, am fully in), but the inverse makes our current position even clearer, like this Thread which says, ‘2024 isn’t “a weird time in history”, we’re living through the inevitable conclusion to doing everything wrong’ which, yes, is exactly the feeling I’ve had, that almost all of us are having day by day. 

So far, our attitude has been: Privatise everything, give more money than is possible to spend in a lifetime to a handful of people, ensure politics becomes a circle-jerk of super wealthy individuals protecting other wealthy individuals, or, at best, good-hearted individuals only able to make the most short-term of decisions because politics is cripplingly partisan and no one is able, practically, financially, politically, legally, narratively, to make any longterm plans that might pinch this week but will help us all a year or more down the road. Make our environment worse, make our poorest poorer, make our health services barely functional, make every news story about how This Group is to blame; normalise violent porn and telling children that the distress they feel about this weirdo world is because their bodies are sinful, or wrong, or broken; remove art and poetry and serendipity from people’s lives, tell them every hobby should be monetised as a side-hustle, or maybe just remove the chance for hobbies at all because they probably should be working multiple jobs to afford just to eat and pay rent; remove Third Spaces and tell people that connections should be on their phones, not in person; teach us all that women and men are enemies, all the time, and we should be afraid of each other, in different ways, and remind us that enemies have nothing in common; make tech addictive, and use it to terrify people so we’re too anxious to come off it but we’re also scared constantly at everything we’re shown on there; make wanting more things all the time so important that we pay beautiful randos online to tell us that we want this thing now, and aren’t they our friends so can’t we trust them? Make war the most profitable business in the world, and make young men and women kill each other, plus kill old men and women, plus children, because business is great, isn’t it, and it helps shore up our valuable economies, even though it destroys lives and countries and land and water and generations. (I mean, we know all this stuff, don’t we? This is not groundbreaking Human Existence content.) 

As someone said on twitter several years ago, ‘The modern condition is mostly trying to do things on your own that people have historically achieved with a large support network and wondering why you’re tired all the time.’ Quite. Or a more recent summary of AI: ‘No one has satisfactorily answered the fundamental question of why I should bother reading something you couldn’t be bothered to write’, or on the terrible, terrible existence of crypto, from a few years ago: ‘Cryptocurrency is literally like an eight-year-old’s concept of an evil businessman. He just plugs his pollution machine in and gets money for it. It doesn’t make anything, it just. Pollutes. And makes money. Like a fucking Captain Planet villain’. 

We don’t, as we’ve established, want to give art and culture over to AI so we can work more hours in a shitwork job enabling global enshittification; we want to work fewer hours and still be able to make art, or enjoy it, or share it, or laugh with our friends, or make a meal together, or dance in public without worrying that our gullible volunteer Stasi won’t film us and make us the Internet’s character of the day. (Do you know that’s real? That hordes of youth won’t go out to clubs/discos/parties because they’ve seen how people can be filmed anywhere, everywhere, by anyone, and turned into an online figure forever? If you read that in a book thirty years ago that would definitely have been a dystopian novel, wouldn’t it? But we’ve just let it become normal somehow, like live-tweeting strangers’ conversations as if we’re breaking the news on an International political scandal, rather than just chipping away at our collective humanity for the sake of a thumbs-up from an internet @-sign?) Also, did you know that Pokemon Go, that fun way to take our Covid walks, was actually a tool for geomapping the entire planet, especially paths that cars couldn’t get to or inside buildings, of which a cleverly placed Pokegym could lure players into getting full images? Tech is great! And not at all sinister in almost every Neo-capitalist manifestation! Tech is for the people, and in no way purely for increasingly the profits of the shareholders and normalising the collapse in personal privacy and security! You are a person with a spirit and a legacy, not just a data-heap with a face they’ve scanned for later use! We’ll send you a personal discount code to prove it! 

Which is all to say: I think we need a shift, and I see, thank god, that feeling everywhere. In Martha Beck’s video, in this jokey post from Cassie Wilson, with her “Outs” for 2024 including cancelling at the last minute, AI dating apps, celebrity gossip, “I asked ChatGPT to—”, binge watching, and her “Ins” for 2025 including craft nights, flirting, familial lore, dusting your room, and going outside before 3pm every day. We’re beginning to recognise, little by little but also more and more, that we all feel shit because this world isn’t built for our needs. We need challenge, and quietness; we need collective celebrations and collective action; we need to recognise our biological connection to Nature and what our psychological disconnection from humanity feels like, when we sit on screens all day, and we need to stop being trained to find violence and malicious error in evveerrrrythiiiing. Isn’t that called getting past your teens? We need movement and music — I went to a Taylor Swift gig this summer and my god, I finally get religion, I would join her cult in a heartbeat, and I know cults are by their nature bad and no person is perfect and should be worshipped and no one individual should have the pressure of being worshipped but at the same time thousands of people singing together, dancing together, in special clothes we’d chosen for this occasion, I get it, I get it, I kept weeping for weeks afterwards every time I remembered certain moments and I see how humans love this stuff when it’s the thing that clicks for you — and we need to do things we don’t want to do for the benefit of the greater good. 

I see this shift, these new questions, in the feed the terrible internet has curated for me. In an interesting episode of Search Engine on ayahuasca and the ego we’re currently not only driven by, but encouraged to foster until it’s big and strong like a spoiled toddler, and in Strong Message Here, where Armando Iannucci and Helen Lewis discuss how ‘everyone shouting in the Twitter town square means you end up with a wrestling heel as president’, and also how when words mean absolutely everything, when words can be ‘literal violence’, you end up losing sight of real reality, with sunlight and caring responsibilities and laundry and meals and how much money you get in your bank account for doing a full week’s work, and in The Rest is Entertainment, when Marina Hyde observes how the three biggest entertainment products at the moment are Traitors, Squid Game, and Beast Games, and how they’re essentially the same thing: a programme about betrayal, about being the worst person you can be in order to win against hundreds (or thousands) of others in a terrible, hopeless, anything-for-the-win society. No collective betterment, no improving of the many, no realist narrative, just disconnection in order to sell more product. It makes me think of that dull crushing modern mantra, ‘You’re born alone, you die alone.’ One may or may not technically die alone, but we 3,000,000% do not get born alone. Every single one of us is carried by a woman for nine months, who nourishes us and keeps us safe before giving birth to us in various methods ranging from a bit sore and achy to actually lethal, and if she’s made it through then she’ll continue to feed and care for us for months, years more, just like she was birthed by mothers before her, mother before mother before mother, all the way back to the start of the human race. In the same way that we don’t make it on our own further down the line either: we drive down roads others built wearing clothes others made, drinking water others have piped to our homes, taking medicine others have created, walking down streets others keep clean, using computers others have designed and manufactured, eating food others grew and packaged and delivered. There is not a single thing we do that is untouched by the hand of someone else, and to pretend otherwise is so egotistical it’s either wilful blindness or actual mental illness. 

As always, it comes back to Mad Men. Slight spoilers, but it’s been ten years and really you should have at least started by now: in the series finale, Don Draper, handsome, brilliant, wealthy, successful, realises that he is nothing. After taking himself off and experiencing essentially a breakdown/breakthrough, he telephones the people who mean the most to him: his ex-wife and mother of his children, his equally brilliant protégée, and his daughter, as wilful and sharp-minded as he’s ever been. He’s not calling them as service animals, to care for him as they perhaps had always seemed to do at distant points in his past; he’s calling for connection, to try and remind himself that they are the best thing about his life, that his money, career skill and looks count for nothing if he can’t connect again with the people who know him best. The episode is called, of course, Person to Person, and it ends with the clearest possible portrayal that it’s the most humble person to person connections we have to choose, ultimately, if we want to find happiness. 

I think of all the things I don’t like perhaps much more than I ought to do, and the things I do like maybe more than I ought as well — perhaps I should be creating more and appreciating/envying less — but I do know that for all the popular things I don’t like (Breaking Bad, E.T., Gladiator, most John Hughes films, Ghostbusters (except the Melissa McCarthy one), cosmetic surgery, putting your life on social media) my tastes are hardly art-house niche; I don’t spend my Saturday nights being the sole member of the audience at a drag interpretation of Brecht’s least-known play in a room above a pub, so my likes almost certainly overlap with yours somewhere. In fact, if you take the most die hard super-fan of Breaking Bad, Ridley Scott and botox, I bet there’s still more than a handful of things that we have in common, because generally people like loads of stuff, it’s just that the internet likes to make us feel otherwise. I like most food, for instance! I like to hear about the history of most sports, even thought I’ll never be a sports fan, so tell me about your team and the long-running rivalry they’ve got with whoever! Tell me about how you built something! Let’s talk about the best colours there are! Let me make you some soup, and we can debate the greatest soups we’ve each had! Describe your favourite Breaking Bad episode to me, because I’ll probably even like that! 

If you want to enjoy any of the things I’ve enjoyed this year that aren’t soup-chat or favourite colours, here you go: rewatching the whole of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was incredible. Despite Whedon’s best attempts to really fuck it up for all of us, it remains staggeringly good in the main, and even the worst bits (the boyfriends, fat-shaming) are valuable lessons for teen girls; The Body makes me in awe of the writers, in capturing not just grief, but the weirdness of death, so well. Rewatching Spaced, too; you never know how deeply something will embed in your consciousness, but I can still recite vast swathes along with it (and you can imagine how much my housemates love that). The Rehearsal was amazing, weird and unexpected; I had to beg my fellow watchers to stick with it but they were glad they did, and I still think about it regularly. 

Paul Mescal performed the triumvirate for me, between Aftersun (beautiful, quietly devastating), All of Us Strangers (beautiful, loudly devastating, will reshape your brain into a wondrous flower) and this musical number from SNL, the highlight of the year for the only one of my housemates to have watched both Wicked and Gladiator. The Fall Guy was great cinema, fun and funny and the mid-tier film they don’t make anymore (and probably won’t make anymore, goddammit), A Quiet Place: Day One was far better than it had any right to be, thanks to Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn; Heretic likewise, with Hugh Grant grinning and sighing ruefully and having the greatest time of his life in this slight, immensely fun horror film. 

In older films, I watched Laurence of Arabia for the first time and was silenced for several hours after by its beauty and power; Cabaret will, sadly, probably never not be relevant, as well as being painful and gorgeous and bleak; Fried Green Tomatoes may always be my favourite lesbian romance film/menopause power flick; Matt Reeves’ The Batman is the first Batman film I’ve liked since 1989, and Pattinson somehow captured the broken, dissociative nature of the figure for the first time, for me. I also rewatched The Prestige for the first time in at least a decade, and wondered both at how perfect a film it is, with the constant chronological leaping (around one timeline jump per minute of movie, according to IMDb) always crystal clear, and echoes between characters and plots and subplots forming the most perfect jewel-box, but also how Nolan has become such a meandering self-indulgent filmmaker in latter years (opinion: maybe Inception was his last good film, and I had to rewatch that at home because I couldn’t hear one single word in the cinema). 

Books-wise the only two that stand out are Love & Let Die, by John Higgs, a marvellous analysis of two great twentieth century shapes: James Bond and the Beatles, one standing for death and sex and the old ways, and the other for life, love and new possibilities. It’s funny and clever, and I listened to most of it on audiobook, read by the author, as I painted seemingly infinite walls an eye-achingly bland white this autumn, and didn’t mind at all. I’d loved British Summer Time Begins last summer, by Ysenda Maxtone Graham, so read her Terms & Conditions this summer, a wonderful history of girls’ boarding schools from 1939-79. It’s full of beauty and cruelty, friendship and injustice, larks, nature, freezing cold and terrible food, and it made me wish we could all just have a year without smartphones and see how all our children might turn out after those twelve months. 

Other things: I saw the Barbie exhibition at the Design Museum with the housemates, and seeing the Barbies I’d played with, hand-me-downs I now realise from the release dates, and a very similar house to the one I was given by my godfather, I wept and felt like a dip-dyed Marcel Proust. It was physical, this sense of time tunnelling between the Now, of forty-something women taking pictures with their iPhones, and my tall, amused housemates watching my reactions to these toys, and the Then, of holding these dolls, dressing them, their lives being my life, their clothes becoming the outfits I would generally gravitate towards even now (recent discussions with a school friend made me understand my dress-code thirty years on as half-Angela Chase, half-Rayanne Graff, but this exhibition made me realise it’s actually two thirds My So-Called Life, one third Crystal Barbie). I also went to Whitstable with friends to visit other friends, and the Whitstable friends took us to the sauna by the sea in October, and both sea and sauna were the best versions of those things I’ve ever experienced. Highly recommend, but I won’t link because maybe those host friends may not want more people in there and might refuse to take me there ever again. Finally, the podcast The 99% Invisible Breakdown: The Power Broker, hosted by two of my favourite podcast hosts, Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan, who took twelve months and several hours each episode to go through the entire enormous book by Robert Caro about the man who built and shaped New York in the twentieth century. It’s funny and fascinating, and the way history repeats itself when it comes to power, those who want it, those who have it, and those who’ll do anything to stop others getting it, is worth reminding ourselves about even at the best of times, let alone at the tail end of centuries of mostly terrible political, cultural and social decisions. 

I hope our shared 2025 will be full of hard work that rewards us, of connections that might be tricky but make our lives better, of dancing if you like it, and not if you don’t. Let’s diminish our egos and eat more fruit and walk outside every day, and refuse to use AI and band together in a global movement that removes grotesque wealth from billionaires and enables everyone to feed themselves and their families, and to read books and build their community. Let’s prioritise long-term political thinking, making art and not being reactive online, reshaping global thinking and chatting less on our phones in public and making each other laugh more, and reteaching ourselves critical thinking and media and cultural literacy, and re-embracing collective action that we on the left seem to have abandoned in favour of self-care. I hope we can remember all the things we have in common, and stop letting people tell us all the things that we don’t. I hope we remember the things that make us behave better. I hope, I hope, I hope. 

[lighthousenewsnetwork]

WASHINGTON D.C. - A tremor ran through the political landscape this week as a bipartisan bill, the "National Stapler Replenishment and Redundant Acronym Elimination Act" (NSRAEAE), unexpectedly sailed through both houses of Congress. Lawmakers, still reeling from the shock, are scrambling to find someone to blame for this unprecedented act of unity. "It's like a unicorn stampeded through the Senate chamber," said bewildered Senator Bartholomew "Bart" Hacklesby (R-Deep Pockets). "One minute we're arguing about the strategic placement of flagpoles in Guam, the next we're allocating funds for a national stapler reserve. It's enough to make a seasoned politician question the very fabric of reality." The NSRAEAE, a bill so dense it could double as a doorstop, tackles the nation's most pressing yet overlooked issues: ensuring a consistent supply of standard-issue office staplers and eliminating redundant bureaucratic acronyms. While seemingly mundane, the bill represents a monumental shift in the political climate, where bipartisanship has become a relic of bygone eras. Theories about this legislative anomaly abound. Some, like Congressman Farley "Fast Eddie" Fingers (D-Shady Acres), suspect a daring communist plot to lull the nation into complacency with office supplies. "This bill is a Trojan horse," he boomed from the House floor, waving a slightly-used Swingline stapler aloft. "They'll lull us with staplers then hit us with, oh, I don't know, universal healthcare!" Others point to a rogue intern, a college sophomore disillusioned with partisan gridlock, who may have accidentally uploaded the wrong bill to the voting system. "He was probably fueled by lukewarm coffee and existential dread," mused political analyst Penelope "Penny" Pinpoint, "a potent combination that can lead to anything, from binge-watching reality TV to, apparently, bipartisan legislation." Meanwhile, conspiracy theorists have a field day. Popular internet personality "QTipAnon" claims the bill is a coded message from a secret cabal of moderate politicians, tired of the constant bickering. "Don't you see?" he rants in a pixelated YouTube video, "The staplers are a metaphor for unity, the redundant acronyms for the bloated bureaucracy! Wake up sheeple!" The public's response has been equally chaotic. Confused citizens are bombarding social media with questions. #"StaplerGate" is trending nationwide. Memes comparing politicians to malfunctioning staplers flood the internet. Some view the bill as a beacon of hope, a sign that even the most divided branches of government can find common ground over a good stapler. Others are terrified, convinced that this sudden bipartisanship is a harbinger of an alien invasion or the robot uprising they've been warned about in countless B-movies. In a shocking turn of events, during a tense press conference, Senator Hacklesby and Congressman Fingers, once sworn political enemies, emerged arm-in-arm. "We may not agree on everything," Hacklesby conceded, "but a nation cannot function without a reliable supply of staplers." Fingers nodded solemnly, adding, "And let's be honest, those acronyms were getting out of hand. FOMO? SMH? These kids today!" The revelation that the NSRAEAE was actually a collaborative effort between a Democrat and a Republican has plunged Washington D.C. into even deeper disarray. Accusations of betrayal fly, trust is shattered, and theories of a Manchurian Candidate situation are whispered in the halls of power. One thing's clear: the political landscape has been irrevocably changed. While the long-term consequences of this bipartisan anomaly remain unknown, one thing is certain: Americans can finally breathe a sigh of relief knowing they'll never run out of staplers again. However, as the nation grapples with the implications of this unexpected unity, a new question emerges: What will they argue about now? Call to Action: In the wake of this unprecedented event, we urge you to contact your representatives and

demand answers! Is this a sign of hope, or a slippery slope to a nightmarish world of bipartisan cooperation? Let your voice be heard! Also, maybe stock up on some extra staplers. You never know what the future holds.

[faith-in-democracy]

The rise in polarization and negative sentiments in the United States

This is a multifaceted issue influenced by various factors, including media dynamics, political rhetoric, social media proliferation, and foreign interference.

Media Dynamics:

Media outlets play a significant role in shaping public opinion. Some critics argue that certain networks, including Fox News, have adopted partisan perspectives that contribute to societal divisions. The emphasis on sensationalism and opinion-based programming over objective journalism can exacerbate misunderstandings and foster distrust among different groups.

Political Rhetoric:

Political leaders and commentators may use divisive language to mobilize support, sometimes prioritizing short-term gains over long-term unity. This approach can deepen societal rifts and promote an “us versus them” mentality, making constructive dialogue more challenging.

Social Media Influence:

Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and others have transformed how information is consumed and shared. Algorithms often amplify content that elicits strong emotional reactions, which can include anger or fear. This environment can accelerate the spread of misinformation and reinforce echo chambers, where individuals are exposed primarily to views that align with their own.

Misinformation and Disinformation:

The spread of false or misleading information contributes significantly to societal tensions. Disinformation campaigns can distort facts and create confusion about important issues. Being critical of information sources and verifying facts through reputable outlets is essential in combating this problem.

Foreign Interference:

There is evidence that foreign entities, including Russia, have engaged in disinformation efforts aimed at influencing U.S. public opinion and elections. According to investigations by U.S. intelligence agencies, these campaigns seek to exploit existing divisions and undermine trust in democratic institutions. While foreign interference can aggravate tensions, it operates within a landscape where domestic issues already exist.

Socioeconomic Factors:

Economic disparities, cultural shifts, and changing demographics can also contribute to feelings of uncertainty or resentment. When people face economic hardships or perceive threats to their way of life, they may be more susceptible to divisive messaging.

Conclusion:

Addressing the increase in negativity and division requires a comprehensive approach:

• Media Literacy: Educate the public on evaluating information critically and recognizing biases.

• Responsible Journalism: Encourage media outlets to prioritize accuracy and balanced reporting.

• Constructive Political Discourse: Promote dialogue that focuses on solutions rather than blame.

• Community Engagement: Foster local initiatives that build bridges between different groups.

• Addressing Root Causes: Tackle underlying socioeconomic issues that contribute to division.

By acknowledging the complexity of these challenges and working collaboratively, it is possible to reduce hostility and strengthen societal cohesion.

[darkmaga-returns]

Harris is distancing herself from her record, misrepresenting her past, and shifting blame for policy failures onto Donald Trump, creating a disconnect between her actions and campaign messaging.

By Victor Davis Hanson

October 14, 2024

Increasingly, little if anything remains real about the Harris campaign.

Take ideology and the issues.

It is now well known that Kamala Harris was rated as the most left-wing of all current senators, including Bernie Sanders—according to GovTrack, a non-partisan compiler of evaluators in Congress. The Voteview project found her voting record the most liberal of all senators of the 21st century, except for radical Elizabeth Warren.

Harris as vice president in a 50/50 Senate has proven the decisive passing vote on more deadlocked bills than any other vice president in history—all thirty-three of them proudly progressive legislation. She has done more to ensure left-wing government at the national level than any prior vice president.

Indeed, Harris, as both a California state official and its senator, and as vice president, has for some thirty years championed almost every issue dear to the left—Medicare for all, an end to private health care plans, banning fracking, mandatory EV requirements, unrestricted abortion, wealth taxes, income and inheritance tax hikes, defense cuts, price controls, open borders, ending the border patrol, stopping all deportations, opposition to a border wall, mass amnesties, free transition surgeries for illegal aliens, and mandatory buyback of semi-automatic firearms.

In most of these cases, Harris not only voiced support but did so proudly and emphatically in front of hard-left constituencies. She has declared that she is a radical and woke.