Month: April 2021

It’s really rare that I learn something for someone’s clever “take” on politics, but it happened today when I looked at Jonathan Last’s latest column for The Bulwark. The lattice of the piece is a look at the company Red Bull. It turns it, this world famous company is 100 percent dedicated to marketing. That’s why you don’t just see their logo on soccer jerseys but see soccer teams named the “Red Bulls.” They don’t actually produce the energy drinks. That job is subcontracted out to an Austrian juice company. The Red Bull corporation spends all its energy getting attention for the brand.

While this is interesting in itself, Last uses this novel business arrangement as a metaphor for Republican lawmakers like Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn. In fact, he uses it as a metaphor for the entire Republican Party. He even goes further by comparing the consumers of Red Bull to the consumers of right-wing messaging.

The thing is, this has surprising explanatory power.

Last talks about a post-scarcity economy, meaning an economy where people’s basic needs are met so they’re more interested in buying feelings. Politically, this means that folks no longer want anything tangible from government. They don’t want health care or a stimulus check or something to be done about climate change. Of course, at least half the people in this country don’t fit this description, and most of them are Democrats.

But Last correctly points out that Democrats do not understand the post-scarcity folks at all.

Does it matter to his future political prospects that Matt Gaetz doesn’t advance legislation? Does it matter that Madison Cawthorn staffed up his office with comms people? Does it matter that Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn’t have committee assignments?

Well, these quirks would matter in a system where legislative accomplishments influenced voter behavior. But the preponderance of evidence suggests that Republican voters don’t care about tangible government outcomes.

They don’t care whether or not a border wall is built, or who would have (theoretically) paid for it. They don’t care about whether or not the government fails to manage a global pandemic, killing hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens. They don’t care if unemployment is up—or down. They don’t care about stimulus checks. Or the national debt.

It’s a little bit like—check that—it’s exactly like Red Bull.

What Last means is the both the company Red Bull and the people who buy Red Bull care very little about what is in the can. They’re selling or buying a feeling. What matters is that the purchase is made and the emotion is felt, but the quality of the drink is almost wholly beside the point. If people chose Red Bull over its competitors for its superior taste or energy-producing effects, then the marketing model would be much different. The company understands what drives sales and it is not substance.

Likewise, Republican lawmakers now realize that real power doesn’t come from delivering on political promises but from getting attention. The way to get attention is to make a lot of people feel a certain kind of way. Madison Cawthorn, the wheelchair-bound freshman congressman from North Carolina, doesn’t have policy people on his staff. His staff is designed to make him famous. That’s it. And he can get famous by pissing liberals off.

That’s the model for acquiring power in the Republican Party because the majority of Republican voters don’t have anything they want from the federal government. Sure, they might want abortion outlawed, but you may have noticed that confirming judges is about the only thing the congressional Republicans did during Trump’s term in office. Neither their general inactivity nor their failure to deliver on abolishing Obamacare and building a border wall had any noticeable depressive effect on the base’s enthusiasm for Trump’s reelection. The Republicans actually gained seats in the House and nearly kept control of the Senate.

Democrats are different.

Democrats do not seem to understand this new development in Republican politics, perhaps because they do not live in a post-scarcity political world. There are still a great many legislative outcomes that Democrats want from government. So they think that the governing matters more than getting attention.

That’s why Joe Biden won the nomination in a walk, even though he was practically allergic to attention. Instead, Democrats wanted a president who could deliver at least part of a long list of legislative outcomes: Vaccine distribution; closing the loophole on Obamacare’s subsidy cliff; creating a public option; granting statehood to the District of Columbia; creating a federal slate of voting rights protections; using the power of government to decrease carbon emissions; and so on.

It’s an essential point that Biden won the nomination and, especially, the election while doing very little campaigning. He was lampooned for hiding in his basement, but it was not far from the truth. The Republican model works, but it’s merely a competitive model, not some magic trick. A lot of people still want and expect things from the federal government–either for themselves, for other people, or for the future of humanity. Biden is one of those people and he’s operating politically as if pleasing those people is important not just on the merits but for maintaining power.

Both sides can be correct about what works politically, and I think that’s the case here, at least for the moment. We’re living in a battle between feelings and substance.

This helps explain why the Democrats get so little traction by delivering on health care or other major political promises. The people who reward those results were already voting for them. To make real inroads into the Republican base, they need to create a more direct connection to people’s lives. In the past, this came through union membership, but something needs to replace that to make people feel like the Democrats are on their side.

My best guess is that the solution need to be architectural. It won’t happen through fighting within the news cycles but by rebuilding the structural relationship between people and their government. The truth is, most Republicans aren’t actually living in a post-scarcity world. The most solidly red areas of the country and also the most hollowed out economically. They’re hollowed out by global competition that has closed their factories but also by monopoly power that has crushed their entrepreneurial spirit and options. Amazon, Wal-Mart and deunionization have done more to radicalize the communities than any woke liberal.

The modern media environment certainly plays a major role in creating an attention economy and an attention politics, but there’s no obvious quick fix for that. The answer must be slower and with a look to gradual transformation. If you can change the substance enough through patience and diligence, eventually substance will matter to these folks again. First they need to see and believe that you’ve given them something they need and that they need you to protect it for them. When the Republicans talk about privatizing Social Security or taking away people’s health care, that’s when they lose support from their base. People need to add more items to this list. Real antitrust enforcement is promising not because it will excite people in the short-term but because it will open up opportunities that folks will want protected in the future.

Similar things can be said about promoting alternative energy or battery-powered cars. As those industries grow, so will the political will and consensus to protect those industries.

So, the future for the left isn’t to do a better job marketing but to build a new architecture that ties people to the government and the government to the people.

According to Steve Hilton, host of The Next Revolution on Fox News, the biggest threat facing this country is “wokeism.” That means that it beats out things like climate change, income inequality, fascism, and even the latest obsession among conservatives…China.

Before delving into what Hilton had to say about “wokeism,” lets keep in mind that he’s also the one who picked up a conspiracy theory from WorldNetDaily which claimed that the coronavirus was created by research tied to Dr. Fauci.

https://twitter.com/NikkiMcR/status/1354234931656974339?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1354234931656974339%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fimmasmartypants.blogspot.com%2F2021%2F04%2Fon-right-wings-attempt-to-cancel-wokeism.html

That is a lie.

On Sunday, Hilton suggested that wokeism is America’s new religion.

This new religion is Wokeism. It has core beliefs like “the world is out to get you,” “victimhood is sainthood,” “if you are not a straight, white male you are oppressed.”…

Wokeism has its own version of 10 commandments: “Thou shalt not think for yourself,” “thou shalt not hold an opposing view,” “thou shall definitely hold false witness against a neighbor if thy neighbor is not woke.”

The punishment for nonbelievers: Canceled, cast out to the wilderness, financial and social ruin.

Like most arguments from conservatives these days, that is clearly a massive projection. But he did manage to get the right’s favorite new word in there: “canceled.”

I’m going to guess that from there, Hilton might have lost his Fox News audience when he became positively academic in reciting his version of the roots of wokeism. He traces it back to a group of Marxists (of course) in the early 20th century from the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt. They developed something called “critical theory,” which eventually led to “critical race theory.” The original is an approach to social philosophy that critiques society and culture in order to reveal and challenge power structures. According to its early theorists, it “may be distinguished from a ‘traditional’ theory according to a specific practical purpose: a theory is critical to the extent that it seeks human ’emancipation from slavery,’ acts as a ‘liberating … influence,’ and works ‘to create a world which satisfies the needs and powers of’ human beings.” But according to Hilton, it’s nothing more than “an effort to tear down the values, ideals, and freedoms this country was built on.”

In their view, family, faith, and culture were their building blocks of bourgeois society used by the elite to keep the masses oppressed, so they invented a new theory that explained all this and how to dismantle it — Critical theory.

So according to Hilton, an effort to satisfy the needs and powers of human beings is seen as an attack on family, faith, and culture. But let’s be perfectly clear. He’s talking about a white patriarchal view of family, faith and culture. I was reminded of something Derrick Jensen wrote about how hatred becomes masked.

Several times I have commented that hatred felt long and deeply enough no longer feels like hatred, but more like tradition, economics, religion, what have you. It is when those traditions are challenged, when the entitlement is threatened, when the masks of religion, economics, and so on are pulled away that hate transforms from its more seemingly sophisticated, “normal,” chronic state—where those exploited are looked down upon, or despised—to a more acute and obvious manifestation. Hate becomes more perceptible when it is no longer normalized.

I’m also reminded of a profound comment from an anonymous blogger who went by the name keres.

In 2018, when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated Joe Crowley, the presumptive next-in-line after Nancy Pelosi to be Speaker of the House, it was reminiscent of Virginia Republican Dave Brat’s 2014 unseating of then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. Brat rode a wave of Tea Party support, while Ocasio-Cortez was a darling of the progressive left.

Progressives weren’t united behind AOC, however. Crowley had the endorsements of New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, the Working Families Party, NARAL, Planned Parenthood, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, the Sierra Club, and many union leaders. He also enjoyed institutional backing from Pelosi, Governor Cuomo, Senators Schumer and Gillibrand, and most members of the state’s congressional delegation. It was a true David and Goliath story. After securing the Democratic nomination, the general election was a formality in her Queens-Bronx district, as she beat the Republican 78 percent to 14 percent.

There are some parallels to the story of Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, but also some important differences.

One difference is that Greene originally intended to run for Georgia’s 6th congressional seat where she lived, but decided to change course and run in the 14th congressional district after the incumbent Tom Graves announced his retirement. For another, Greene’s endorsements were even sparser. She was backed by far-right U.S. representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio and Andy Biggs of Arizona, as well as the House Freedom Caucuses’ political action committee. Her most significant supporter was White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

The Republican establishment was generally appalled by Greene but only House Minority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana had the cojones to openly support and raise money for her Republican primary opponent, physicist John Cowan. This is in spite of Greene appearing on the campaign trail with a Grand Klaliff of the Ku Klux Klan and revelations about her racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim and conspiratorial social media postings.

AOC did nothing comparable to create controversy during her campaign, and while there was some national buzz about her prior to the primary election, she wasn’t a major national story like Greene. Still, both races were held in heavily partisan districts. Greene was effectively unopposed in the general election because her Democratic opponent dropped out. Still, she was so toxic that she carried only 74 percent of the vote.

Once in office, Ocasio-Cortez joined up with several other freshman women of color to form “The Squad,” and individually and as a group they began to stir a bit of controversy. As her fame rose, so did her fundraising. In the first quarter of 2019, AOC raised a staggering $728,000, mostly for small admiring donors.

By contrast, Greene’s behavior in the Capitol was so radioactive, and her past social media postings, which continued to be unearthed, were so deplorable, that she was quickly stripped of all her committee assignments. This didn’t put off former President Trump, however, as he hosted her at Mar-a-Lago in late-March. Evidently, it didn’t put off the Republican base either.

Freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), the controversial MAGA firebrand, raised over $3.2 million in the first three months of this year, according to a source close to her campaign. That eye-popping haul came from over 100,000 individual donors, for an average donation of $32.

This is more than four times what AOC raised.

What’s interesting is that Greene is still treated as an outcast, or at least someone operating on the far periphery of the Republican Party. AOC, on the other hand, is increasingly seen as a future leader within the Democratic Party and even as a somewhat plausible primary challenger to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. It’s widely accepted that Ocasio-Cortez is charismatic and gifted at using modern social media tools to communicate her message. That’s not how Greene is typically depicted.

Yet, by the numbers, it appears that Greene is significantly more stimulating to the conservative base than AOC is to the progressive base.

Both Greene and AOC have been highlighted by the other party as extremists, which undoubtedly helped each of them raise money. Both have branded themselves as insurgents looking to shake up a stale and timid party leadership. Yet, AOC has proved to be a practical politician–too practical for some of early supporters, in fact. Greene has been the opposite of practical, unless you consider raising money to be the goal of getting elected.

The bottom line is AOC promotes some socialistic policies and a very bold effort to combat climate change, and these policies make some elected Democrats uncomfortable. But she’s not a pariah or embarrassment for the party, despite the Republicans’ best efforts. Greene is much more popular despite her record, which is among the most shameful of any recently elected member of Congress.

This is really instructive for considering the present condition of the two major parties.

Hi everyone! Welcome back to the frog pond. Set a spell.

I thought I’d begin with an Oblique Strategy that seems perfectly appropriate for the middle of the week, or really any time of a week, month, or phase of life:

https://twitter.com/dark_shark/status/1379601088664379392

Although the original deck of cards was developed by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt primarily as a means of breaking creative blocks experienced by musicians, I find them helpful as a non-musician. I’ve never seen any of the original decks that were printed in the 1970s (if you can find them, they fetch a high price), but I’ve seen versions of Oblique Strategies pretty much since the start of the Worldwide Web back in the 1990s. I think I saw the first random Oblique Strategies generator online around 1996 or 1997. That website of course is long gone. Turned out to be useful as I worked to complete a graduate program.

A friend of mine created a shiny app of the Oblique Strategies right before 2020, and highly recommend it. The interface is very minimalistic, which is ideal from my vantage point.

Anyway, I just thought I’d share just a bit more of what makes your friendly neighborhood Cafe/Lounge host tick. I’ve been an Eno fan since I purchased my first David Bowie LP (Lodger) back around the start of 1980, and I’d learn about Oblique Strategies a little bit later. Enjoy your favorite beverage, and if you’re in a bit of a creative jam, draw an Oblique Strategy and see where it leads.

The bar is open, and the jukebox is working. Stay safe and stay well.

Cheers!

An obvious rejoinder to my previous piece can be found in the results of a new study of the January 6 insurrectionists, conducted by political scientist Robert Pape of the University of Chicago think tank, Chicago Project on Security and Threats. Pape discovered that most of the 380 people who were arrested for their participation in the storming of the Capitol were from areas where the share of the non-hispanic white population is in decline.

Thus, he concludes that cultural stress and fear of status loss explains their radicalism and propensity for violence far more than any economic insecurity or hangover from the Great Recession. But, of course, this is the kind of dichotomy I’ve been warning against. It comes about when a decision is made to explain “deplorable” behavior as wholly explained by either economics or racism, as if the reality isn’t inevitably a combination of the two. For example, the Washington Post reported back in early February that financial troubles were highly correlated with unlawful participation in the Capitol riot.

Nearly 60 percent of the people facing charges related to the Capitol riot showed signs of prior money troubles, including bankruptcies, notices of eviction or foreclosure, bad debts, or unpaid taxes over the past two decades, according to a Washington Post analysis of public records for 125 defendants with sufficient information to detail their financial histories.

This country has a consistent history of welcoming immigrants but also enduring a backlash based in both culture and economics. The Know-Nothing Protestants didn’t like waves of Irish Catholic immigrants, but it wasn’t just because of their religion. The newcomers competed for low-wage jobs and quickly accumulated political power in urban areas. This happened again with Italian immigrants, and it northern migration of blacks was a key factor in rise of the Ku Klux Klan outside the South. When the economy has gone south, the reaction against immigrants has intensified.

A key factor is how this plays out is in how the left responds. The left has always taken the side of the immigrant, which is why the ethnic urban machines arose and functioned inside of a Democratic Party that was dominated by southern segregationists. The party shouldn’t be that elastic today, and it would fail even if it made the effort. But it should recognize that you can’t maintain the political and social cohesion of the country if you allow this to be a clean two-sided fight. To get consensus for the legitimacy of political outcomes, the losers have to accept the results.

For more thoughts on this, I recommend Daniel Block’s new article in the Washington Monthly on the potential for a nationwide conflict not seen since the Civil War.

I really enjoyed Perry Bacon Jr.’s article for FiveThirtyEight on the Republicans’ refusal to do an autopsy on the 2020 election cycle. It was very thorough and even where I thought Bacon was missing the script, he soon pivoted to cover those points, too. It’s a fine piece of analytical work and I highly recommend it.

If there’s anything that Bacon omitted, it’s the meaning of this right-wing intransigence for the rest of us. His article is very much a picture of the present, with little effort to game out where things might be headed or to find historical precedents or parallels.

The present is clear enough. Republicans just lost the trifecta, meaning the presidency and control of both the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. Yet, despite this, they aren’t having a conversation about how adapt or change strategies. Instead, they’re focused on suppressing left-wing votes. Bacon correctly identifies several factors that help explain this. For one, the elections were close and the Republicans actually exceeded expectations in House and Senate races, while also doing very well on the state level. For another, an autopsy usually involves a corpse, but Trump sounds like he wants to run for president again. This isn’t like 1988 when the Democrats had been shellacked in three straight presidential elections and had no obvious standard bearer. Back then, the left had to concede to the center that their way wasn’t producing results. Today, the right feels no similar compulsion to make concessions to the moderate wing.

Bacon also points out that neither the funders and operatives at the Heritage Foundation and the Club for Growth are clamoring for change. They’re still getting fealty on tax cuts and regulations, and they’ve long been comfortable with white/Christian identity politics. Likewise, the Republican base is still strongly supportive of Trump and the significant minority of dissenters has no organ to voice their views.

Although Bacon frames his point differently, he also states something I’ve said repeatedly over the sixteen years I’ve been blogging about American politics. The conservative movement arose at a time when the GOP was in permanent minority status on the congressional level, and they’re more comfortable being in the opposition than having the responsibility of governing. Given the option of swapping conservative beliefs for power, they’ll stick with their beliefs every time.

In theory, political parties are principally focused on winning elections, since that is how they gain power to implement their agendas. So why aren’t these activists and elected officials changing gears out of sheer self-preservation? One reason is that they are doing pretty well electorally without such changes. (More on that in a bit.)

But just as importantly, many of the key people and institutions in the Republican Party might prefer a risky and often-losing strategy to one that would really increase their chances of electoral victories. The path to Republicans becoming a majority party in America probably involves the GOP embracing cultural and demographic changes and pushing a more populist economic agenda that is less focused on tax cuts for the wealthy. But some of the most powerful blocs in the GOP are big donors who favor tax cuts, conservative Christian activists who are wary of expanding LGBTQ rights and an “own the libs” bloc exemplified by many Fox News personalities and elected officials such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who are very critical of immigration and the Black Lives Matter movement. The big donors and conservative Christian activists have policy goals that are fairly unpopular but that they are deeply committed to (such as overturning Roe v. Wade) — so they aren’t going to bend for electoral reasons.

The frenzied focus on voter suppression in response to the 2020 elections really highlights this point and adds to it. Given a choice between democracy and changing their conservative beliefs, they’ll jettison democracy.

And that gets to the real heart of the matter. The conservative movement can operate within a fair representative system only so long as they have a fighting chance of winning a decent percentage of the time. But, faced with the prospect of having to change in order to compete, they will storm the Capitol and attack its police force rather than accept their fate.

At heart, this is a fascist movement, and the drift toward being a “working class” party both underscores this point and demonstrates the danger. For the right, “working class” means primarily “white” folks who are struggling economically in a changing economy. Conservatives appeal to these folks based on familiar fascist themes which rely on nostalgic ideas of national greatness, military prowess, and their centrality in the character of the nation. They aren’t clamoring to provide more economic security or opportunity to this segment of the electorate. That’s how the left organizes the working classes, regardless of race.

When the left doesn’t deliver adequately, it creates a vacuum that the fascists can fill. You can see the power of this in the fact that Trump actually improved his performance with working class blacks and Latinos in 2020 despite running the most unapologetically racist White House since Woodrow Wilson left office. Right-wing populism, even when it is geared heavily to the majority ethnic group is still populism, and it can and will peel off working class support for targeted minority groups.

I imagine there was a statistically detectable minority of German Jews who were proud when Hitler reclaimed territory from French control, orchestrated the Anschluss and won concessions from Neville Chamberlain at Munich. Left-wing elitism can alienate people of any color and anti-elitist messaging can make inroads where we least expect it. The danger is that people will go along with a political movement until it’s too late. In our present case, what’s at stake is the integrity of the electoral system itself. If the January 6 insurrection didn’t make this clear, it should have.

The way to disable this movement is to win over the support of working class voters. That’s what the New Deal accomplished, and it’s why America didn’t embrace fascism in the 1930’s. Back then, the left got a major assist from organized labor. Today, it’s being attempted in a different way, mainly through massive government spending on health, education and infrastructure. Hopefully, this will soon be followed up with strong antitrust enforcement that can help small town America regain its entrepreneurial potential.

If the left cedes populism to the right, we won’t have a democracy for long. I’ve warned about this for a decade now, but I feel like after January 6 it’s easier for people to understand my point. We’re not free to adopt a politics based mainly on identity and social issues and think we’ll avoid a fascist backlash. And we cannot assume we’ll prevail in that kind of fight.

The conservative movement is facing demographic death but they will not adapt or concede, so we must take preventative measures to safeguard the country rather than thinking we can roll right over them and keep the country running on schedule. That begins with not ceding the title of working class party to the Republicans.

The January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was the result of a months-long disinformation campaign that falsely alleged that Donald Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election. Now the events of January 6 themselves are the subject of disinformation, and we can see the results in a new Reuters/Ipsos poll. Importantly, one result is that Trump’s electoral viability is stronger than it should be with the Republican base.

Three months after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol to try to overturn his November election loss, about half of Republicans believe the siege was largely a non-violent protest or was the handiwork of left-wing activists “trying to make Trump look bad,” a new Reuters/Ipsos poll has found.

Six in 10 Republicans also believe the false claim put out by Trump that November’s presidential election “was stolen” from him due to widespread voter fraud, and the same proportion of Republicans think he should run again in 2024, the March 30-31 poll showed.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was a passive bystander in the lead-up to the insurrection, although he did denounce the lies just as the Capitol was being stormed. That classic example of too-little-too-late should be fresh in his mind, but he’s just issued a press release that shows a striking shortness of memory about how irresponsible rhetoric can lead to unfortunate consequences.

McConnell is angry that the leaders of major American corporations, including Major League Baseball, have come out forcefully against a new election law in Georgia. He accuses them of “not just permit[ting] themselves to be bullied, but join[ing] in the bullying themselves.” Baseball’s decision to relocate it’s All-Star Game from Atlanta is supposedly an example of this.

The story McConnell spins is its own form of disinformation, however, even as it’s presented as a corrective against the lies of the left. Opposition to the Georgia law isn’t reliant on any single provision of the law but more on it’s overall intent and likely effect.

The intent can be surmised not just by what’s in the law but also by what was only stripped out under heavy pressure. As Eugene Scott of the Washington Post reported in February, Georgia’s Republican state legislators originally wanted to eliminate all early voting on Sundays in a clear effort to suppress the effect of black churches leading “souls to the polls.” McConnell stresses that “plenty of Democrat-run states allow fewer days of early voting than the new Georgia law requires,” which is true. But, as I said above, people aren’t fooled about what this law is supposed to do.

The single most dangerous provision of the new law is explained well by Vox:

Under current law, key issues in election management — including decisions on disqualifying ballots and voter eligibility — are made by county boards of election. The new law allows the State Board of Elections to determine that these county boards are performing poorly, replacing the entire board with an administrator chosen at the state level.

At the same time, the bill enhances the General Assembly’s control over the state board.

It removes Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who famously stood up to Trump’s attempts to overturn the election results in Georgia, from his role as both chair and voting member of the board. The new chair would be appointed by the legislature, which already appoints two members of the five-person board — meaning that a full majority of the board will now be appointed by the Republican-dominated body.

To simplify: The state board, which now will be fully controlled by the Republican legislative majority, is unilaterally empowered to take over (among other things) the process of disqualifying ballots across the state. Given that Georgia Republicans have helped promote false allegations of voter fraud, it’s easy to see why handing them so much power over local election authorities is so worrying.

The greatest area of concern here for Democrats is Fulton County, home to Atlanta and a disproportionate number of Black voters. Republicans have baselessly alleged that this Democratic bastion was a major site of fraud, citing (among other things) a purported video of ballot-stuffing in the county. Though official investigations, court cases, and independent fact-checks found no evidence of such fraud — in the video or otherwise — the myth that it happened persists.

The new bill would allow Republicans to seize control of how elections are administered in Fulton County and other heavily Democratic areas, disqualifying voters and ballots as they see fit.

If this were the only election “reform” in the bill, it would be sufficient to merit an international outcry. President Trump could potentially go to jail for asking Georgia election officials to wrongly declare him the winner, but these changes would allow the legislature to do exactly that if they don’t like the results of a future election. The law is supposed to restore confidence in the integrity of the state’s electoral system, but does so by telling the people of Atlanta that their elections can be taken over and adjudicated by a Republican-controlled legislature.

McConnell doesn’t address this criticism at all, and instead focuses on how many days of early voting are allowed. This allows him to argue that corporate pressure is unmerited:

“Our private sector must stop taking cues from the Outrage-Industrial Complex. Americans do not need or want big business to amplify disinformation or react to every manufactured controversy with frantic left-wing signaling.

“From election law to environmentalism to radical social agendas to the Second Amendment, parts of the private sector keep dabbling in behaving like a woke parallel government. Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside the constitutional order. Businesses must not use economic blackmail to spread disinformation and push bad ideas that citizens reject at the ballot box.”

This is the new line from the Republican Party. To them, they’re on the wrong end of “cancel culture,” which is a bullying effort to punish conservative belief systems through non-governmental means. This could be an individual citizen who is banned from a social media platform or it could be a state legislature that is punished for enacting a “popular” law.

That’s a debate we can have, but the Georgia election law is controversial because it’s transparently anti-Democratic and singularly focused on helping Republicans win elections even when they lose. Since McConnell is willing to ignore this and offer a completely dishonest explanation, he’s setting Republican voters up for another rude clash with reality.

Fewer than 100 days removed from almost being lynched by a MAGA mob, you’d think he would know better.

Here’s the official position of the editorial board of the National Review which very much does not want Georgia Republicans to bend to corporate criticism and undo their new voter suppression reforms:

A variety of factors have led to the capture of America’s major corporations by the social-justice-warrior wing of the Democratic Party. Corporate C-suites and legal and human-resources departments are increasingly staffed by products of woke university educations. The “diversity and inclusion” business sector is now itself an $8 billion a year industry. Corporate managers who are not themselves left-wing culture warriors are easily pushed around by a vocal minority of their employees or customers brandishing boycotts, lawsuits, and Twitter mobs. This is especially prevalent in sports, entertainment, and journalism, where prominent employees wield outsized public platforms.

How’s that for erudition?

William F. Buckley had his problems with liberal groupthink at elite universities, but he didn’t speak with this level of broad contempt for higher education.

As far as the magazine’s well-educated editors, they see pressure from elites as undesirable on every issue.

One result is that sports leagues, Hollywood, and big business have gotten into the habit over the past decade of threatening to pull their business from states whose legislatures pass laws that do not meet the approval of the cultural Left.

We have seen this pattern over and over with laws in Indiana, Arizona, North Carolina, South Dakota, and other states that addressed hot-button topics ranging from immigration to religious liberty to transgenderism to same-sex marriage. What has followed, in nearly every case, is that state governors have folded like a cheap suitcase rather than stick up for the democratic right of a free people to pass laws through their elected representatives, chosen in free and fair elections.

It’s true that Buckley opposed the Civil Rights Movement on the theory that white southerners, as the more “advanced race,” had the right to maintain their culture even by undemocratic means. But he eventually joined the 20th Century. Today, his magazine is defending discrimination against gays and demonization of foreigners as “religious liberty.”

They’re unlikely warriors against corporate influence, especially in defense of know-nothing populism. It’s also rich that they insist on a system where the people get to choose their elected representatives in “free and fair” elections ,but they’re doing it in a piece that rationalizes the lack of free and fair elections in Georgia.

So the National Review sounds just like every other Trumpist media organ, demanding that ultra-conservative culture warriors stand tough against scolding from big Georgia employers like Delta Air Lines and Coca-Cola that are unhappy with voter disenfranchisement.

Since NR published this article, Major League Baseball made an announcement:

Major League Baseball announced Friday that it is moving the 2021 All-Star Game out of Atlanta in response to a new Georgia law that has civil rights groups concerned about its potential to restrict voting access for people of color.

The 2021 MLB draft, a new addition to All-Star Game festivities this year, will also be relocated.

In a statement, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said the league is “finalizing a new host city and details about these events will be announced shortly.”

Presumably, this underscores rather than undermines the Editors’ argument, which is that “the best medicine for corporate overreach is for state officials to stand their ground and call the companies’ bluff.” Except, it looks like the Georgia legislature had the losing hand.

It’s not like the state’s Republicans didn’t try to follow NR‘s advice. Before recessing for Easter on Wednesday, the Republican-controlled House retaliated against Delta’s CEO Ed Bastian by eliminating a jet-fuel tax break.  They were angry about Bastion’s public criticism of their new election law. But the state Senate took no action, so who was bluffing?

Now they have no All-Star Game, and it’s wholly because the Georgia legislature doesn’t want people who look like they might play for the Atlanta Braves to have ballot access. They want to be able to throw their votes out with phony signature checks. They want the legislature to overrule state election officials and declare the loser the winner of an election if it suits their interests.

The U.S. Congress may pass an election protection bill that overrides Georgia state law, but until then the Republicans can call as many bluffs as they like. They’re not fooling anyone. Today, Major League Baseball pulled the plug. Tomorrow it could be Delta. It’s not a sign of virtue that you support anti-democratic legislation, and the National Review isn’t even convincing as a populist advocate for narrow minded bigotry. They sound ridiculous in this role.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be starting a new painting. It is a castle scene that I found on the web. The photo that I’m using is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 8×8 inch canvas panel.

I started my sketch using my usual grind, duplicating the grid I made over a copy of the photo itself. Over that I have covered my outline in blue paint. Note the intersecting reflection and shadow in the photo. Next week I will start to fill things in.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

Here’s a curious thing I want you to think about for a minute:

Virginia’s Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that the city of Charlottesville can remove statues of two Confederate generals, including one of Robert E. Lee that was at the center of a deadly white nationalist rally in 2017.

The court overturned a 2019 Circuit Court ruling that the statue of Lee and a nearby monument to Stonewall Jackson could not be removed because they were protected by state law.

The Charlottesville City Council approved a resolution to remove the Lee statue in 2017. A group of citizens filed a lawsuit opposing the move, and white nationalists rallied in the city in August 2017 to protest the effort. White nationalists clashed during the rally with counterprotesters, one of whom was killed when a car driven by an Ohio man plowed into a crowd.

This originated with the Charlottesville, Virginia city council deciding that they wanted to remove statues of Confederate generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. Most of the town’s citizens presumably supported this idea, but many others were opposed to it. There were good faith arguments to be made on both sides of the issue. It’s unclear why the Confederacy should be celebrated and the statues are offensive to a lot of people. Yet, the history of Virginia can’t be disentangled from slavery, the most decisive battles of the Civil War, and the legacy of Jim Crow. Should Virginia hide that history or seek to contextualize it?

Yet, you’ll notice that the folks who strongly objected to taking down the statues were not normal people. They’re weren’t even necessarily Virginians or citizens of Charlottesville. They were first and foremost, white nationalists. They didn’t want contextualization. For them, the significance of the Confederacy isn’t a matter for historians to decide. The Confederacy is a live issue for them. They want it back. They want white supremacy back.

The Confederate statues aren’t worshipped exactly, but they’re inspirational. And their mere presence is a testimony to the persistence of the idea of the Confederacy.

This, of course, is one of the main arguments for removing them. They’re not passive even if they’re inanimate. Just standing there in a public space, they do positive harm, and not merely because they hurt some people’s feelings.

In the simplest formulation, the statues should go because white supremacists are willing to commit violence to prevent them from going. That’s the proof of harm.

Now, I’m not in favor of erasing the Confederacy or tearing down every reference to their side of the Civil War. I’m not in favor of teaching a completely one-sided version of history where the victors are completely virtuous and the defeated are unalloyed evil. But I do think it’s reasonable to set a basic standard that anyone who took up arms against the federal government in the defense of slavery should not stand on a pedestal in a public park or square. They can be treated like a full human in a museum setting where people can learn about their lives before and after the war, their reasons for taking the side they did, and whether or not they ever repented.

What shouldn’t be left open to interpretation is that they were wrong and their cause was wrong, and that war to preserve white supremacy and human bondage should never be replicated. When we teach about the Civil War, we should not be debating whether the right side won. Beyond that, the whole era is fascinating and ripe for every kind of debate. The suffering and sacrifice that went into winning the war will always merit memorials and celebration. But this serves to reiterate the point that the slavers’ revolt was irredeemably unjustified and irresponsible. A statue of a Confederate general doesn’t advance that goal, and that’s why modern-day slavers want to see them remain in place.

Down in Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, they will soon remove the giant statue of Robert E. Lee that sits on a 40-foot pedestal on Monument Avenue. All that remains is for the final appeals to play out.

But given how it’s been defaced by protestors, I doubt the white supremacists will miss it and I almost wish it would remain in its present state. As it currently stands, it’s sending exactly the right message.

But, truthfully, insulting the statue only works because we know it will ultimately succumb and be removed.

It’s also worth remembering that these monuments were erected in an act of defiance rather than is some solemn and respectful remembrance of those on the Southern side who fought bravely or who lost their lives in the war. In Charlottesville, the Jackson statue went up in 1921 and the Lee statue was erected in 1924.

Membership in the Ku Klux Klan peaked in 1925, at about five million members, including roughly 30,000 in Virginia. It’s not possible to segregate the original intent of these monuments from their enduring meaning.

Several of the Klaverns established within Virginia used the name of notable individuals to represent their respective chapters. The Roanoke Klavern, as well as the Graham, Virginia Klavern used Robert E. Lee as their namesake. Lee, a Virginian by birth, was the most famous Confederate general who commanded the Army of Northern Virginia during the American Civil War.

The Albert Pike Klavern was established in Norfolk. Pike was a Confederate Brigadier General and cavalry officer who led a group of American Indians during the War. Following the War, Pike moved to Memphis and became a member of the original Klan.

The John W. Daniel Klavern was established in Lynchburg in 1921. Daniel was a Major in the Confederate Army and was injured at the Battle of the Wilderness. Daniel would later serve as a member of the United States House of Representatives for one term and the United States Senate during the period of 1887 through 1910.

The William Byrd Klavern, No. 99 in Richmond, was established in 1925. Byrd, a wealthy slaveholder, is credited as being the individual who founded the City of Richmond in 1733.

I’m particularly appalled that Baltimore, Maryland erected Confederate monuments in 1948, the year President Truman desegregated the army. Many more Marylanders fought for the Union than the Confederacy, and even in the late-1940’s Baltimore was a heavily black city. This was always a campaign about the future rather than preserving history. General Lee never took Baltimore and erecting a statue of him there never made any historic sense. It was a signal put out by white nationalists.

Removing the monuments is a defeat for them for the same reason that putting them up was a triumph for them. Charlottesville will go ahead with their plans now. Richmond will soon follow.