However, what remains a taboo subject everywhere except out here in
disreputable wilds of whatever is left of the Liberal blogosphere is
how exactly the Republican base came to be such a aggregation of
unsalvageable garbage people that they would nominate this degenerate monster
for president three times and elect him twice.
How is it that no one but us dirty hippies noticed or cared about the monstrous cancer that was growing in plain sight at the heart of the GOP until it was far too late to stop it?
Newsmax to pay $67M to settle defamation lawsuit from voting machine
company The settlement averts what promised to be a high-profile trial.
The conservative cable news channel Newsmax will pay $67 million to
settle a defamation lawsuit brought by the voting machine company
Dominion over baseless claims that the 2020 presidential election was
rigged, according to a new regulatory filing.
The settlement averts what promised to be a high-profile trial.
Newsmax and Dominion Voting Systems agreed to the settlement on Friday,
according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. The payments
will be made in three installments by January 2027, the filing
said.
“We are pleased to have settled this matter,” a Dominion spokesperson
said in response to a request for comment...
Who know? Employees might even be facing unpaid furlough days in
their future, just like we in management had to take when I worked for the
City of Chicago and times got lean.
So, is that the end of the story?
Of course not.
Watch as the Newsmax spokesnazi predictably invokes the Magic Conjure Words
which the legacy media itself created long ago and invested with the power absolve themselves of their own crimes against truth and
journalism. With emphasis added just for kicks.
In a statement, Newsmax said it “believed it was critically important
for the American people to hear both sides of the election
disputes that arose in 2020.”
“We stand by our coverage as fair, balanced, and conducted within
professional standards of journalism,” the company added in part.
Where did this wretched hive of scum and villainy learn to invoke the
legacy media's own "Expelliarmus!" to disarm and deflect?
From, among others, the good, gray pages of The New York Times.
Will this break Newsmax and show them the error of their ways?
Of course not.
Newsmax deals in lies, conspiracies, racism and rage the
way a meth dealer deals in, well, meth. It is an extremely profitable
enterprise staffed and run by the kind sociopaths who have no qualms about
wrecking the country as long as they make a buck.
But just maybe it'll make 'em just the tiniest bit gun-shy next time, and
these days I'm taking my wins where I find them.
Don't bother looking for the video on the MSNBC website. It has outlived its usefulness.
In case you were wondering what Greta The Great is up to now, no surprise that she's gainfully employed by Newsmax, and out there hyping Trump just as hard as Rachel Maddow once hyped her.
I know a sales pitch when I hear one. Lord knows, across the span of my checkered past I've made dozens of
them myself. So I realize that, in the end, what I'm watching (below) is
a long pitch for the Lincoln Project, where the tactical use of "we" during the
pitch is meant to make you think that the Lincoln lads had anything to do with
Trump losing in 2020.
Spoiler: They did not. What they did was sop up tens of millions
of dollars from credulous Liberals which they used to hire themselves
and their friends to crank out very slick ads which one low-born wag referred
to (repeatedly) as political Pornhub for credulous Liberals. It
tickled Liberal pleasure centers and got the Lincoln Lads lots of free
publicity on MSNBC (which came back to bite them when various sexual and
financial scandalscame to
light), but there is no evidence that any of that moved the electoral needle one
iota.
However, when you subtract the product pitch that Stuart Stevens is
making here from the story he is telling, I think you end up with one of the clearest
and most honest personal, political inventories of anyone in the Never Trumper
universe. I have always respected his candor, and his book --
"It Was All a Lie" -- sits proudly on our bookshelf at
home.
The story he tells is miles and miles away from Tom Nichols' brittle, angry,
and ultimately pathetic Jake Blues-like string of excuses and deflections:
His
"None of what happened had anything to do with me/ No one could have seen
this coming/ Whatabout Abbie Hoffman? Huh! Huh! Smartass!
Liberals aren't blameless here!" reaction every time anyone manages sneak a little GOP history into his
timeline (which is immediately followed by being blocked.)
Which is why, I think, media appearances by Stuart Stevens are so much rarer
than virtually any other Never Trumper in the media, and when he is brought in
it's usually to talk about what a monster Trump is (true) and strategies for
going forward. Not to expound on how the his former party
came to be what it is now, and definitely not to debate any
other recently-former Republican on that issue.
Because Stevens' unexpurgated history of the moral collapse of the Republican
party exactly matches -- beat for beat and milestone for
milestone -- the longstanding Liberal critiques/warnings about the trajectory of
the Republican party (about which
a lot more here.) The inconvenient truth that Trump did not hijack the GOP, he exposed it
for what it had been all along. The Republican base was not suckered into supporting Trump, the base manifested Trump.
And all of that is diametrically opposed to the story that legacy media and
the Never Trump media wants to tell. In their tale, the base of the party
were like unto the innocent child Maria in James Whale's 1938 masterpiece Frankenstein. The base just read Edmund Burke, sang little peasant songs and and toss flowers into
the water. And in their fictionalized history of the GOP, Trump is the destroyer. Trump is the
despoiler. Trump is the lumbering monster, built in a lab by a mad
scientist, who Maria foolishly trusts and who Trump ends up drowning.
And, to carry the analogy a little further, the Never Trumpers are Ludwig, shocked and saddened, bearing Maria's
corpse through the town, believing that such an unbearable outrage will rouse
the party leadership and the good people of the town to action.
However, despite the fact that this "history" is the lie
which the legacy media and the Never Trumpers have all agreed on, I am morally
obliged to be the buzzkill guy who points out that isn't what happened at all.
Maria isn't the base of the Republican party. Maria is the legacy
media's and the Never Trumper's comforting delusion of what the Republican party was. However, to
quote Stuart Stevens, it was all a lie.
The base didn't fear Trump as a destroyer. They greeted him as a
liberator. He didn't have a bad brain. He had an
awesome brain! Because his brain is just like their brain!
It turns out that real base of the party -- the peasants of
the town -- had always hated Maria and Ludwig and their whole sanctimonious
family. They're glad that bitch is dead! They danced on her grave
singing Hallelujah! It turns out, they were jubilantly pro-monster, so
fuck that weepy old Ludwig, and fuck Jeb! and, while we're at it, Hang Mike
Pence!
And, being politicians with their damp fingers forever testing the direction
of the prevailing wind, the town's leading citizens, the mayor and the
burghers (Republican elected officials), all figured this out real
quick. A few of them raised a few objections, but they were quickly
chased out of town by peasants with pitchforks and torches. And now,
with the party base and the party leadership united in reverence of the
monster, they made it their king and gave it the power of life and death over
everything in the kingdom.
And the terrible secret that dare not speak its name and that Never Trumpers carry in their hearts is that the monster wasn't built by some mad
scientist in a faraway lab at all. The truth is they built it. It was Ludwig
all along. It was all of them. A group effort carried out by
elite Conservatives, Republican leaders, Conservative media and the legacy
media. They created the monster, but in their hubris they thought they
could control it. And as long as they controlled it, no one
objected to it.
Consider that, just this very week, unreconstructed Conservative evangelical
and New York Times op-ed guy, David French, spent an entire column
explaining how Donald Trump bamboozled the otherwise noble and righteous
Conservative evangelical movement into abandoning their faith in Republican
Jesus, and investing it instead into an manifestly unchristian monster like
Trump.
French spends the first 13 paragraphs (ominous biblical number, that 13)
laying out the biography of one particularly odious Conservative evangelical
preacher named Douglas Wilson.
Then two paragraphs of #NotAllEvangelicals
In a religious movement as large and multifaceted as American
evangelicalism, you can — of course — find all kinds of people and
pastors, from the most compassionate and kind to the most self-righteous,
zealous and even violent.
To say that a pastor like Wilson exists no more condemns all of
evangelical Christianity (indeed, Wilson faces vigorous opposition in the
evangelical church) than to say that the existence of radical imams
condemns all of Islam. A better question is to ask whether a person this
cruel and extreme has real stature and influence — and whether his
influence is on the wane or on the rise.
And then:
There are many reasons for Wilson’s rise, but one of them is squarely
rooted in politics. When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, he
inherited a recent Republican tradition: The Republican president isn’t just
a political leader — he’s a de facto religious leader as well.
Yadda, yadda, yadda. Dubya Bush was awesome. Obviously no mention
of Iraq. Or Katrina. Or Teri Schiavo. Or running for
reelection on a gay-bashing platform of which David French fully
approved. Or any of it. Just Dubya Bush was awesome.
And then:
Bush is a devout Christian. Those words, to put it mildly, are not how
one would describe Trump.
And yet, each election cycle, Christians were told it was a spiritual
imperative to vote Republican, and that imperative did not change even
when the party’s positions — and its people — profoundly did.
But while the policies of the Republican party may have shifted around, the
basic themes -- the bones of the Reagan Revolution -- are still right there in
the Trump regime for anyone with honest eyes to see. From The Guardian:
Did Reagan pave the way for Trump? ‘You can trace the linkages,’ says biographer
...a critically praised biography of Reagan challenges these assumptions,
balancing recognition of Reagan’s strengths with a close examination of
his glaring weaknesses on inequality, race and the Aids pandemic. Its
introduction poses a provocative question: “Did Reaganism contain the
seeds of Trumpism?”
And the book comes not from a progressive Democrat but a former
foreign policy adviser to the Republican presidential campaigns of John
McCain, Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio. Max Boot is himself an immigrant: he
was born in Moscow, grew up in Los Angeles, gained US citizenship and is
now a senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on
Foreign Relations thinktank. ...
“Even more fundamentally, Reagan’s policies truly favoured the wealthy
and increased income disparity in the United States. You can argue that
those policies, whether it was the tax cuts, lack of anti-trust,
anti-union activity, all the rest, by widening those income disparities
opened the way for populism in America, both from the left and the
rightwing populism that Trump exploits today.”
Ultimately, Boot
argues, Reagan paved the way for Trump. “He was addicted to faux facts. He
would often cite apocryphal quotes and anecdotes and statistics that
weren’t really true but would keep citing them anyway, even when it was
pointed out that he didn’t have any basis for doing so. You can argue that
acclimated the Republican party to the fire hose of falsehoods that you
see from Trump.
For the record, Boot does mention Reagan's chilling refusal to take the AIDS
epidemic seriously (maybe it was God's will?) but doesn't mention Reagan's
cynical use of racism to get himself elected.
In the end it comes down to this: Republican elites and donors believe
in tax cuts, period, full-stop. And all the culture war garbage -- from
hating gays to hating women, to hating brown people, to hating
Liberals, to hating science -- has been deployed tactically, election after election, as a means
to get enough pliant Republican meatheads elected to pass the massive tax
cuts, which is all the Republican elite ever cared about.
And it worked: that culture war garbage was the hook that brought white,
Conservative evangelicals squarely into the heart of the Republican
party. But right here -- where French says that both the "party’s positions — and its people" profoundly changed -- this is where he palms the card and
hopes you will not notice. Because while Republican policies may have changes,
the white, Conservative evangelicals at the dark heart of the GOP have not.
Having lived through the same history as you and me, David French should fucking well know better. Which means, like so many other Never Trumpers, French is either lying outright about the history of the modern GOP to cover his own ass, or is so terminally delusional about the modern history of the GOP that his opinions are worthless.
We remember Ronald Reagan welcoming America's most hateful and bigoted white,
Conservative evangelicals into the Republican party, back when Donald Trump was just another sleazy New York real estate crook.
We even remember Falwell's slanderous attacks on Norman Lear all the way back
in the 1980s.
We lived through clinic bombings and "Tiller the Baby Killer" becoming Bill
O'Reilly's mantra on Fox News, until someone actually killed Dr. Tiller.
We remember Falwell and Robertson, in the hours after 9/11, blaming everyone
the Right hates for the attack. Because for white evangelical Christians
scumbags like Falwell and Robertson, every catastrophe was
ordered by God and therefor must be divine punishment for not hating women,
minorities and the ACLU hard enough.
And yet, Republican leadership didn't grab these scumbags collar and belt and
throw them out of the Party of Lincoln, because by then it was no longer the
Party of Lincoln. It was well on it's way to being the Party of
Jefferson Davis: hateful, bigoted, White, stupid, superstitious and drunk on
holy vengeance.
Which is why, by 2004, we saw Bush the "devout Christian" getting
out the Conservative evangelical vote by running an explicitly gay-bashing
campaign in order to get himself re-elected.
Which is why, by 2008, we saw John "Maverick" McCain publicly reverse his
scathing 2000 criticism of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as
"agents of intolerance" who represented the
"outer reaches of American politics" and head down to Liberty
University to kiss Falwell's ass.
Because McCain wanted to be president and he fucking well understood where the
power center of the Republican party was located.
And let's not forget that as late as 2019, Never Trump Resistance Hero #1, Liz Cheney, was out there blithely leveling the most grotesque lies against Democrats and calling people like you and me "the face of pure evil". Because slander like that has been the Mother Tongue of the GOP since David French was in short pants.
This is the bamboozle that David French is trying to run. The White
Conservative evangelical base of the GOP didn't vote for McCain or Romney
because they had
joy, joy, joy, joy down in their hearts over the idea of a McCain or Romney administration. They
settled for McCain and Romney because the alternative was a
Democrat, and they had been lectured -- over and over again by their pastors,
for decades and from the sanctity of the pulpit -- that Democrats are all
commie, baby-killing servants of Satan.
That anyone on the Right is better than everyone on the Left.
In 2016 we saw Donald Trump win them over by promising to deliver what both
Bushes had failed to deliver and what everyone knew neither Romney nor McCain would ever
have been able to.
These people firmly believe in a Heaven where they will live forever with
Republican Jesus, and a Hell, where you and me and most everyone else will
fry for eternity. The thought of this delights them, but to get there
they have to bring about the end of the world, which is why the elimination of
Roe was never going to be enough. Moving the American embassy to
Jerusalem would not be enough, nor would terrorizing trans people or rolling
back gay marriage, because as the Henry Drummond says in
Inherit the Wind, "Fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy and needs
feeding."
These people are shooting for a Year Zero. The end of history. A
world cleansed of scum like us, and remade in the image of their radical
perversion of Christianity.
These are also people whose whole theology depends on dismissing objective
reality, believing in giant, global conspiracies being run by Satan and a
bone-deep certainty that they are a cruelly oppressed minority in an America which was designed to be an explicitly Christian country, but which has been stolen from
them by godless Liberals.
...in order to win elections and rake in vast fortunes, the Conservative brain caste has painstakingly created the perfect feeding-ground for con men and demagogues like Trump, the louder and more bombastic the better.
And because we Liberals believe in facts, and not bullshit, self-absolving
alibis, you are not obliged to just take my for any of this. There are
plenty of former evangelicals who have left the cult who will tell you the
same.
You could check out Tim Alberta's
"The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of
Extremism."
Or you could check in with Frank Schaeffer, the author of
"Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the
Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back"
Which is why, in a world of pious frauds like David French and grouchy charlatans like Tom Nichols, those of us on the side of the angels should cherish and celebrate the Stuart Stevenses and the Frank Schaeffers in this world.
What Major General Alfred Terry and Rear Admiral David Porter did with shot
and shell to take Fort Fisher in January 1865, we must do to the Trump
administration with words, pictures, music, video, formal speeches, letters to the editor, protests, signs, buttons and votes in the House, the Senate and statehouses across the country.
It's fair to say that, since we began this blogging journey together more than 20 years ago, there are two major themes on which this blog has focused more attention and expended more words than any others, Themes which we also carried over to The Professional Left Podcast more than
15 years.
And they are, false equivalence and memory. Or, in our own parlance, "Both Sides Don't" and "No Fair Remembering Stuff".
So when I saw Republican scumbag Doug LaMalfa get shouted down when he tried
to whip out the Both Sides Do It lie, in the heart of the reddest district in
California (R+12) at the first town hall he's held in eight years... it felt
like something important might finally be getting into the ground water of
American politics.
And, once the crowd had been calmed, when I heard one citizen yell
"We'll never forget!" that gave me a little bit of hope that, just
maybe, ordinary citizens might be unlimbering the greatest Liberal superpower
of all, remembering stuff, and turning its awesome power against the American fascist
party.
