Monday, October 17, 2022

Links - 17th October 2022 (2 - Trump)

The Trump vote is rising among Blacks and Hispanics, despite the conventional wisdom - "Perceptions of Trump as racist seem to be a core driving force pushing whites toward the Democrats. Why would the opposite pattern be holding among minority voters — i.e. the very people the president is purportedly being racist against? It may be that many minority voters simply do not view some of his controversial comments and policies as racist. Too often, scholars try to test whether something is racist by looking exclusively at whether the rhetoric or proposals they disagree with resonate with whites. They frequently don’t even bother to test whether they might appeal to minorities, as well.  Yet when they do, the results tend to be surprising. For instance, one recent study presented white, Black and Hispanic voters with messages the researchers considered to be racial “dog whistles,” or coded language that signals commitment to white supremacy. It turned out that the messages resonated just as strongly with Blacks as they did with whites. Hispanics responded even more warmly to the rhetoric about crime and immigration than other racial groups. That is, on balance, these “racist” messages seemed to resonate more strongly with minorities than whites! Across racial groups, most did not find the messages to be racist or offensive— despite researchers viewing these examples as clear-cut cases of racial dog whistles. As I pointed out back in 2016, another key factor for understanding minority support for Trump may be that minorities often hold antipathy toward other minority groups... Academics generally avoid examining bigotry among members of minority groups — focusing nearly exclusively on anti-minority sentiment among whites. And they often approach politics in intersectional terms: Campaigns to assist Muslims, poor people, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, LGBTQ Americans, women, etc. are viewed as fundamentally interconnected — part of the same overarching struggle for justice and equality... anti-Black sentiment is common within many Arab, Hispanic and Asian communities in the United States.  Anti-Semitism, meanwhile, is significantly more prevalent among Blacks and Hispanics than among whites. Moreover, many Black and Hispanic Christians are highly distrustful of Muslims. Many American Hindus feel the same way. This antipathy is not just a matter of attitudes. According to FBI statistics, roughly a third of all hate crimes seem to be committed by racial and ethnic minorities. Intergroup tensions are also expressed in terms of policy. Overall, Black Americans are more supportive of limiting immigration than any other bloc of the Democratic coalition. And Hispanics actually tend to be more concerned about illegal immigration than are whites or Blacks. Hispanics are generally supportive of legal immigration... In other words, far from alienating minority constituencies, Trump’s messaging on immigration, law and order and cultural conservativism may be an important source of his appeal to many voters of color — even as it leads many whites to distance themselves from him... Democratic attrition of minority voters predates Trump. The Big Tent party has seen losses with Hispanic and Black voters for virtually every midterm and presidential election since 2008"
From 2020
Clearly, it's internalised white supremacy
Once again, it's only liberals who see dog whistles everywhere

No Matter the Liberal Metric Chosen, the Bush/Cheney Administration Was Far Worse Than Trump. - "That the liberal belief in and fear of a Trump-led fascist dictatorship and violent coup is actually a fantasy — a longing, a desire, a craving — has long been obvious.  The Democrats’ own actions proved that they never believed their own melodramatic and self-glorifying rhetoric about Trump as The New Hitler — from their leaders joining with the GOP to increase The Fascist Dictator’s domestic spying powers and military spending to their (correct) belief that the way to oust The Neo-Nazi Tyrant was through a peaceful and lawfully conducted democratic election in which vote totals and, if necessary, duly constituted courts would determine the next president.  The motives for concocting this Wagnerian fantasy about coups, dictatorship, concentration camps and civil war are numerous. Politics is boring, and your life unspectacular, if it’s dedicated to a goal as banal and uninspiring as empowering a septuagenarian career-politician — the centrist-authoritarian author of the 1994 Crime Bill, the credit card industry’s most loyal servant, and key Iraq War advocate — along with his tough-on-crime prosecutor-running-mate who always seems as if she just left a meeting of the Aetna Board of Directors where massive hikes in deductibles were approved.  Glory is available only if one can convincingly herald oneself as a front-line warrior risking it all to courageously battle unprecedented evil and a Nazi-like menace. But working to do nothing more than elect Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and the rest of the painfully ordinary and mediocre corporatist and imperialist Democratic Party politicians through a standard American election? There’s no glory residing in that, no courage needed for it, to put it mildly... Then there’s the multi-pronged profit that the Trump-as-Hitler motif has generated for virtually every institution of American authority. Numerous media outlets that in 2015 were sputtering if not collapsing, and numerous television personalities about to be fired because nobody was watching them, were first rescued and then propelled into the stratosphere by The Trump Show. “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” said the network’s then-CEO Les Moonves in 2016 about Trump TV. Of course media outlets don’t want to declare the 2020 election over: they will milk the abundant Trumpian cash cow until the very last drop has been monetized. The frightening spectre of a Dictatorial Menace also led liberal advocacy groups such as the ACLU to drown in previously unimaginable quantities of #Resistance cash, frenetically donated in the name of stopping Trump’s incomparable evil. Rotted and discredited institutions like the CIA, NSA and FBI re-branded themselves as patriotic guardians of liberal democracy and stalwart protectors of a besieged population. Leaders of those security state agencies went from toppling governments, engineering clandestine coups, disseminating disinformation campaigns, illegally spying on citizens, and entrapping young Muslims in manufactured terror plots to being lavished with book deals and cable news contracts and celebrated in liberal parlors as saviors rather than destroyers of democratic institutions and Enlightenment values. But the most potent incentives for this warped fairy tale have been the whitewashing of recent U.S. history, the maintenance of American Exceptionalism, and most of all the reputational and career rehabilitative value it bestowed on all those pre-Trump officials, apparatchiks and myth-disseminating journalists who committed great evils and left a raft of violence, lawlessness, destruction and death in their wake but now get to claim, and have others believe, that, no matter their sins, at least they weren’t authoritarian white supremacist neo-Nazi pathological-lying fascist dictators like Trump and therefore deserve to be embraced by (and gainfully employed in) the Family of Decent Society. That’s the deceitful framework that has led to two of the most mendacious and amoral War on Terror neocons, David Frum and Bill Kristol, being elevated to their new status as among the most beloved-by-liberals Trump-era pundits with a new massive social media platform and frequent MSNBC appearances... How can people with this much blood on their hands, this much admiration of tyranny, this much support for lawlessness and corruption, and with a record of so many lies to obscure and justify it all, possibly find career success and public adoration again? We see the answer in its stark efficacy: they manufacture a never-before-seen monster who poses unprecedented dangers and embraces incomparably evil beliefs, and then they position themselves as the necessary and uniquely suited vanquishers of this New Nazi Evil... I began writing about politics in 2005 as a reaction to the lawlessness, executive power transgressions and authoritarian Article II theories imposed by Bush/Cheney officials in the name of fighting terror. They claimed the right to violate Congressional statutes restricting how they could spy, detain, or even kill anyone, including American citizens, as long they justified it as helpful in the fight again terrorism... In early 2009, The New York Times’ reporter Charlie Savage — in an article entitled “Obama’s War on Terror May Resemble Bush’s in Some Areas” — detailed how many of the worst authoritarian excesses implemented by Nicolle Wallace’s bosses would be continued and perhaps even expanded by the new Democratic president... If Trump is responsible for “killing 235,000 Americans” because they died of the coronavirus while he was in office, can the same be said of the governments of France and Spain which, despite much smaller populations, presided over almost 40,000 deaths each, or the governments of Belgium, Peru, Argentina, Mexico and Chile which have comparable or higher per capita death rates from the coronavirus than the U.S., or WHO officials who told people not to wear masks even when the CDC said the opposite?  And what moral calculus allows deaths from a pandemic, even if the by-product of negligence and mismanagement, to be placed on the same moral plane as deaths from bombs, drones, tanks and bullets, or the displacement of tens of millions of people from the War on Terror, or the slave markets and anarchy that still persist after the NATO bombing of Libya championed by Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, or the world’s worst humanitarian crisis from the U.S.-supported bombing campaign of Yemen that began under Obama? As for the claim that it is Trump’s lying that makes him some singular figure of evil, that would come as a great shock to the pioneering left-wing independent journalist I.F. Stone, whose skepticism of government pronouncements was captured by his signature phrase: “all governments lie.” It would also likely come as a surprise to James Clapper (now of CNN) who got caught lying to the Senate about programs of mass surveillance aimed at the American people, and John Brennan (now of MSNBC), who got caught lying about the CIA’s spying on the Senate’s investigation of torture and the number of innocent people killed by U.S. drones."

Now woke activists are burning books – and it's become a frightening gamble to write one - "One man who lives without fear is Donald Trump, hence he spent the 20th anniversary of 9/11 not in prayer but at a boxing match. He also skipped official ceremonies to visit fire and police departments where, I have to admit, he got a good reception. It’s hard to believe George W Bush was once the pious face of American conservatism whereas now it’s Trump, and the journey from A to B has not been adequately explained.  Though I will say this: three of the presidents at the commemoration pursued wars. Trump did not (give Joe time). Do you want a leader who says the right words but does the wrong thing? Or one that fails to show due respect yet keeps the troops safe?"

Oikophobia on the rise after Trump win: Glenn Reynolds - "How crazy has the reaction to Trump’s impending presidency gotten? So crazy that Democratic operatives are scared of plumbers, and I don’t mean the Watergate kind.  No, really. Ned Resnikoff, a “senior editor” at the  liberal website ThinkProgress, wrote on Facebook that he’d called a plumber to fix a clogged drain. The plumber showed up, did the job and left, but Resnikoff was left shaken, though with a functioning drain. Wrote Resnikoff, “He was a perfectly nice guy and a consummate professional. But he was also a middle-aged white man with a Southern accent who seemed unperturbed by this week’s news.”  This created fear... What do you call the irrational fear of an American, by an American?... another piece on reacting to the election, by Tim Kreider in The Week, is titled "I love America. It's Americans I hate." Writes Kreider, “The public is a swarm of hostile morons, I told her. You don't need to make them understand you; you just need to defeat them, or wait for them die. . . .  A few of us are talking, after a couple drinks, about buying guns; if it comes to a fascist state or civil war, we figure, we don't want the red states to be the only ones armed.”... I’ve been reading Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, and this categorization of lower and working-class whites as (to coin a word) “deplorables” goes way back.  And we’ve certainly seen it before this election. Angelo Codevilla wrote in 2010: “Its attitude is key to understanding our bipartisan ruling class. Its first tenet is that ‘we’ are the best and brightest while the rest of Americans are retrograde, racist, and dysfunctional unless properly constrained.” Most ruling classes think that sort of thing about the ruled, of course, but as Codevilla notes, it sits poorly with American notions of equality. And in a notorious Yale Law Journal article, feminist law professor Wendy Brown wrote about an experience in which, after a wilderness hike, she returned to her car to find it wouldn’t start. A man in an NRA hat spent a couple of hours helping her get it going, but rather than display appreciation for this act of unselfishness, Brown wrote that she was lucky she had friends along, as a guy like that was probably a rapist. Another law professor, Douglas Laycock, wrote an article in response entitled, appropriately enough, Vicious Stereotypes In Polite Society. In polite society, expressing fear of unknown blacks is unacceptable; expressing fear of working-class white men, on the other hand, is not. “It is useful to consider how the story would have been told if Professor Brown’s car had broken down in Harlem instead of in the mountains. Suppose her benefactor had been a young black male with a radical political button. ... I am confident that her report of the encounter would have been very different.”"
From 2017
Actually they don't really hate Americans in general - just white ones, and especially white men

Video shows police officers being housed in Trump's Washington hotel lobby on Inauguration Day - "The video was posted the same week that National Guard troops were relegated to sleeping in a parking lot after securing the inauguration... Governors across the country also expressed outrage after hearing that the Biden administration was investigating the backgrounds of National Guardsmen overseeing the inauguration."

Donald Trump Is a Liar, but He’s Not a Hypocrite - "A liar says x is true when she knows x is false or vice versa. A hypocrite casts shame and expresses intense moral condemnation about people for engaging in behavior in which she herself engages behind closed doors. People dislike liars, but they loathe hypocrites...
'Hypocrites are actually more misleading than liars, because their condemnation is perceived as such a strong signal that they personally behave morally. We provide evidence for the theory that the reason people dislike hypocrites is that their condemnation sends a “false signal” about their personal moral conduct, deceptively suggesting that they do not transgress.'...  
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz’s Everybody Lies analyses mountains of data from Google searches, dating sites, pornography sites, Facebook, and other sources, to show that people tend to be more honest when using the Google search bar than at just about any other time, including while filling out anonymous surveys, within real relationships and—especially—on online social platforms. He refers to the Google search bar as a “digital truth serum.”  Dipping into that data well produces some amusing insights—like the disparity between the percentage of people who say they’ve read a whole book or article versus the data which reveals how many actually have completed it, or the amount of sex men say they are having versus the revealed reality of condom purchases, or the truth that the romantic dream vacation to Fiji you witnessed on Instagram was littered with Google searches like Why won’t my wife have sex with me? and How do I tell if my husband is cheating?... One common response to this is to get depressed at the digital glimpse of all the skeletons in closets lurking behind the friendly smiles at the grocery store. But there is a much more hopeful and encouraging lens through which to view this data: Oh hey, I guess I’m not the only one struggling with that! This is an opportunity for all of us to dismount from our moral high horses for a minute and realize we’ve all been down in the dirt all along...   Jordan’s study introduces another variant of Becky, whom the researchers call the honest hypocrite. This Becky tells her friend that she thinks it is morally wrong when people download music illegally, but that she sometimes does it anyway. This honest hypocrite version of Becky actually scores quite high on the good person scale—even higher than the regular liar...   So, why do so many people seem not to care that Donald Trump lies? Why don’t we all just cut him off? (Please, don’t ask him if he’s read all of Moby Dick). My theory is that he is not perceived to be a hypocrite by his base. In fact, he calls out hypocrites, constantly reminding people that there is a bigger enemy in the room... Google searches for nigger tend to be just as frequent in areas with high Republican as in areas with high Democrat populations."

Hillary Clinton: If Trump Wins in 2024, It 'Could Be the End of Our Democracy'
Weird how him winning in 2016 was supposed to be that too

Curt Schilling says AIG canceled his insurance policy over pro-Trump social media profile - "World Series champion pitcher Curt Schilling says his insurance company canceled his plan due to his social media posts, which have recently praised President Trump."

U.S. priority should be American chipmakers, not TSMC: Intel chief - Nikkei Asia
Economic nationalism is only wrong when Trump does it

Trump's 'unclimbable' border wall is taking a grim toll - The Washington Post - "In the trauma wards of this city’s major hospitals, patients from the border have arrived every day with gruesome injuries: skull fractures, broken vertebrae and shattered limbs, their lower extremities twisted into deranged angles.  The patients have fallen from new 30-foot segments of President Donald Trump’s border wall, a structure he touted as a “Rolls-Royce” that “can’t be climbed.” His administration built more formidable barriers in the San Diego area than anywhere else along the southern border, with miles of double-layer steel fencing, but that has not stopped more and more migrants from trying to scale it. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials say they do not tally deaths and injuries resulting from such falls. But new statistics published Friday by University of California at San Diego physicians in the journal JAMA Surgery provide one of the first attempts to measure the toll.  Since 2019, when the barrier’s height was raised to 30 feet along much of the border in California, the number of patients arriving at the UC San Diego Medical Center’s trauma ward after falling off the structure has jumped fivefold, to 375, the physicians found. Falling deaths at the barrier went from zero to 16 during that time... The falling incidents are a subset of the soaring number of injuries, deaths and rescues occurring all across the southern border, where immigration arrests have reached an all-time high under President Biden. Migrants attempting to evade capture have drowned in the Rio Grande, died of exposure in South Texas and Arizona, and disappeared into the Pacific Ocean during smuggling attempts at sea.  What’s different is that the border wall is a man-made obstacle that poses a lethal danger and public health challenge where one did not exist previously... Border crossings have increased sharply despite the completion of the 30-foot barrier, records show. San Diego border agents made 16,660 arrests in March, roughly four times as many as they averaged monthly before 2019."
Weird. I thought walls didn't work?
I wonder what changed between 2018 and March 2022. Apparently the logic is that the wall made more illegal migrants come over and it had nothing to do with an administration seen as welcoming illegal immigration

Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts | Facebook - "While Trump is very flawed leader, his style and beliefs sometimes bring advantages as well. A businessman and not a diplomat, he sees clearly that countries ultimately behave in their self interests — which he’s made a point of applauding.  In the case of the Middle East, which is made up of intermingled tribes and interests, Trump has had better success than the last generations of diplomats.  Instead of trying to appease Iran into playing nice, Trump assumes the country will continue its course of trying to turn the region into a theocracy, so he bleeds it dry of funds and other resources to conduct terrorist activities. Trump then appealed to the self interest of Arab countries to align against the Persians and normalize trade with the regions’s economic and military powerhouse — Israel.  This increases stability in the Middle East and reduces the need of American intervention at the same time."

Biden plan to stop border wall construction bump up against what Trump has already built - "Biden vowed in August that “there will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration.” However, the already-funded projects could leave border security in good shape even if no more wall is built, according to Heritage Foundation’s Vice President of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies James Carafano.  “The administration was very smart in the way they did this,” said Carafano. “They really made sure that they covered the really important smuggling corridors. So, I think the dirty little secret is, they probably really built the wall they need, in both the capabilities that it has and also where it needs to be. It’s kind of an easy thing for Biden to say, ‘We’re not going to build any more wall,’ when, essentially, he has the wall he needs.” Much of the completed wall has been in places that had significantly shorter barriers that were easy to cross. Although 1,000 miles of the 2,000-mile border is still wall-less, the portions completed have largely been in populated areas where illegal crossers could quickly blend into communities. The unsecured areas are remote spots, often with no access to roads on either side of the border... Biden would be the first president in decades not to build any new border barrier, a break from the past five administrations, Bolter said. Carafano warned that Biden’s refusal to put up barriers, even as Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama did, will not leave the U.S. helpless but will be tested if a migration surge unfolds in 2021."
Weird. I thought the wall was supposed to be useless
Prescient

Macaulay Culkin Supports Digitally Removing Trump From 'Home Alone 2' - "Fans of Home Alone have called for Donald Trump to be digitally removed from Home Alone 2: Lost In New York."
"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute"

Despite Trump, African immigration is fastest rising to USA — Quartz Africa
Why would black people want to move to a white supremacist country with a white supremacist president?

Porn star Stormy Daniels ordered to pay Trump $300,000 in legal fees after court rejects defamation case | The Post Millennial - ""As I have stated many times throughout the years, I never had an affair with Stormy Daniels, nor would I ever have wanted to. The ruling was a total and complete victory and vindication for, And of me"... Daniel’s lawyer Michael Avenatti was found guilty of stealing $300,000 from Daniels, who said he was owed the money for writing a book about her alleged encounter with Trump."
Stormy Daniels refuses court order to pay Trump’s legal bills: ‘I will go to jail before I pay a penny’
The TDS people will just ignore that yet another wild accusation has been proven false

Those 'White Supremacy' Narratives About Trump are Deeply Problematic - Musa al-Gharbi - "In Coates’ depiction, white Americans rose up in 2016 to dismantle the legacy of America’s first black president, Barack Obama—and to reclaim what is rightfully “theirs.”  Let’s set aside the fact that many of the white voters who proved most decisive for Trump’s election actually voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012.  It turns out that Trump did not mobilize or energize whites towards the ballot box either: their participation rate was roughly equivalent to 2012 (and lower than in 2008). In fact, whites actually made up a smaller share of the electorate than they did in previous cycles, while Hispanics, Asians and racial “others” comprised larger shares than they had in 2012 or 2008.  This wouldn’t, in itself, be devastating for the ‘white supremacy’ hypothesis had Trump won some kind of unprecedented share of the whites who did turn out to vote. He did not. Trump didn’t even exceed Romney’s 2012 numbers with whites overall. However, he did outperform his predecessor with blacks and Hispanics.  These are very inconvenient truths: If Trump was the white supremacy candidate, why was such a pivotal component of his base drawn from those who previously voted for Obama (often twice)? Why didn’t far greater numbers of whites turn out for Trump than Romney? Why did fewer whites vote for the Republican in this cycle than they did in the last? Conversely, why did Trump win a larger share of blacks than any Republican since 2004? Why did he outperform Romney among Asians and Hispanics as well?  To understand these realities it is important to look at the larger picture: there has been a broad and consistent trend away from Democrats, cutting across virtually every imaginable demographic category, for the better part of a decade. From this perspective, 2016 was not so much an outlier as the culmination of long-running trends. In other words, the most recent election might have been more about Americans rejecting the Democratic Party and their candidate rather than embracing the Republicans or Trump... “if both racism and authoritarianism were less appealing to white Trump voters than to previous Republican constituencies–is there some other omitted variable that may explain the voting preferences of Trump voters even better?”   My informed guess is that one factor that would likely predict support for Trump over Clinton far better than racism or authoritarianism would be something like, “opposition to the status quo” or “opposition to the political establishment” or “desire for major social change” or “distrust of major social institutions.”  But of course, social researchers overwhelmingly identify with the left. And progressives usually think of opposition to the political establishment or status quo as positive traits. As a result, most are not particularly disposed to test whether a group of people they despise (Trump voters) might actually be motivated by some trait they admire.  As a Muslim who studies jihadists, I am much more comfortable living with the paradox of others evoking causes I find noble (such as promoting God’s will on Earth) to justify actions I find reprehensible (such as…basically anything ISIS does). Indeed, social research fields could benefit immensely by being less hostile towards religion and people of faith.   But I digress.  In far too many instances, it is just assumed that Trump voters must be motivated primarily by some “bad” factor (ignorance, authoritarianism, racism, sexism, etc.); the task of social researchers is reduced to merely nailing down which of these morally-contemptible traits best explains the data. Dr. Wood’s essay was an exemplar of this genre."

Doxed on social media for Trump support, Kirkland homeowner films vandals - "A Kirkland resident named Jed Darland joined the Todd Herman Show on Thursday to explain the bizarre attacks his household has undergone after he planted some flowers in a pattern that read “MAGA.”"
Love Trumps Hate

Techno Fog on Twitter - "Clinton allies used sensitive data from the Office of the President to push false Trump/Russia claims to the CIA Why did they risked jail to link Trump to Russia? Maybe because the origin of their fraud was the "Russian hack" of the DNC."

The Cut on Twitter -  "Fox News and Donald Trump have given blonde hair a new chapter: Now, it is the color of the right, for whom whiteness has become a hallmark"
Replies: "The left really does have a pathology about blond hair."
"Whatever you say *5 CNN hosts with blonde hair"

Nancy Pelosi will Not Release Taxes Unless She Runs for President
Hakeem Jeffries on Twitter - "The Supreme Court has ruled. America is not a monarchy. Trump is not a King. There is no doctrine of absolute immunity from Congressional subpoenas. The American people WILL get to see the President’s tax returns one way or the other."
Hakeem Jeffries on Twitter - "The Supreme Court majority has zero legitimacy. Ghosts of the confederacy are alive and well."

'Words of a dictator': Trump's threat to deploy military raises spectre of fascism - "The president suggested the US could use troops against Americans – true to the instincts of a man surrounded by sycophants"
National guard troops to be deployed in DC as trucker convoy protests loom

The Trump talisman doesn’t work anymore - The Spectator World - "Glenn Youngkin’s victory over Terry McAuliffe is a loud wake-up call for the Democrats, who attempted to fuse the GOP candidate for Virginia governor to Donald Trump’s hip and failed miserably... Reason’s Robby Soave summed it up perfectly: “The Democrats need Trump more than the Republicans do.”...   It is precisely this way of thinking that has led us to a place where political operatives from the Lincoln Project felt the need to bolster its missing quintessence of Trumpism by manufacturing it with the most stirring visuals possible – assembling a group of five young people dressed in khakis and sunglasses and sending them to clutch tiki torches in front of Glenn Youngkin’s campaign bus in Charlottesville, Virginia. Could there be a more visceral way to reinforce the not-so-subliminal message linking Youngkin to Trump and white supremacy?  The entire stunt backfired when internet sleuths revealed that it was a set-up, forcing disgraced Lincoln Project operatives to admit their involvement and excusing it as an exercise in civic virtue to “remind Virginians about Charlottesville and the Republican Party’s embrace of those values.” Of course, the mea culpa came long after McAuliffe’s campaign staff had retweeted the photo as fact and his spokesperson Christina Freundlich had declared that “this is who Glenn Youngkin’s supporters are.”...   Instead of examining why McAuliffe’s popularity was tanking, the Dems contented themselves with making Youngkin out to be an avatar of Trump. As a result, they dismissed what turned out to be a key issue for Virginia voters — whether critical race theory is or should be taught in schools — as yet another moral panic 3-D printed to perfection in a Republican strategist’s lab. McAuliffe’s revealing gaffe during the governors’ debate where he said that “parents shouldn’t be telling schools what they should teach” was the final condescending nail in the coffin of his campaign.  Parents could only stand by and watch as the media framed their valid concerns over what their children were being taught in school as “code for white race politics.” This eventually morphed into the prevailing elite consensus that a vote for Youngkin was merely a vote for whiteness and racism and white supremacy, all things now synonymous with Trump. In the end, voters refused to accept that framing and voted for Glenn Youngkin, who took their grievances seriously. The Democrats are unable to win on issues alone right now, as President Biden’s legislative agenda stalls in Congress through opposition from within, and progressive policies in many US cities have failed to deliver on good governance. Biden’s disapproval rating is, at this point in his term, the highest than all others save one — Donald Trump’s... Trump himself is neither in office nor on social media, which makes it easier for voters to sense that the invocations of his name reeks of desperation and a desire to distract from the substantive issues plaguing America today."

Hans Mahncke on Twitter - "So here's where we're at: Clinton advisor feeds story to Danchenko. Danchenko feeds story to Steele. Steele feeds story to Fusion. Fusion feeds story to media. Media accuses Trump of Russia collusion."

1,500 rabbis accuse ADL of 'grossly misplaced charges of anti-Semitism' in attack on Tucker Carlson - "“The Coalition for Jewish Values, which represents over 1,500 traditional, observant rabbis in American public policy, is distressed by grossly misplaced charges of antisemitism made by your organization,” the letter stated, addressing Greenblatt. “Your recent attack on Tucker Carlson of Fox News, calling it ‘white supremacist’ to question whether particular policy choices enable illegal immigrants to nullify the votes of American citizens, is merely one example.”"

Meme - sarah lugor! @sarahlugor: "If trump wins I will literally cry and walk my black ass to Canada from Vegas... fuck trump."
sarah lugor! @sarahlugor: "the trump supporters saying they're gonna go to another country... y'all are exactly what everyone hates about america good riddance and good luck!! PM"

Meme - Frederick Joseph @ @FredTJoseph: "Everyone underestimated Hitler and the Nazi party as many are with Trump and the Republican Party.... #RIPAmerica"
Frederick Joseph @ @FredTJoseph: "Elon Musk deleted a tweet comparing Justin Trudeau to Adolf Hitler over Trudeau's opposition to the trucker protest in Canada. I wish I could find the words to capture how disgusting this is."

Meme - BrooklynDad_Defiant! @mmpadellan: "Without firing a single shot, Rocket Man defeated #DotardDonnie. And I'm loving it. #Dotard"
BrooklynDad_Defiant! @mmopadellan: "For the record, if you're rooting for Putin against America, you're a pathetic traitor."

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