On the day Trump is expected to announce he’s running for the White House again in 2024, the Guardian is reporting that Rupert Murdoch really won’t be backing Trump any more. And some guy who is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute has an op ed in the Washington Post blaming Trump for a whole lot of losses in competitive House districts.

Based on what I’ve seen so far, I’m predicting the Republican party as a whole will not learn a thing from last week’s election results and will likely double down on the crazy in 2024. They might or might not move away from Trump himself. They appear to be doing that now, but we’ve seen this dance before. With or without Trump, however, the GOP is still going to be the party of culture wars and grievance in the foreseeable future.

Former Republican David Frum writes at the Atlantic that Republicans refuse to learn anything.

The question after the 2022 midterms is: Can conservatives learn?

Through the Trump years, the Republican Party has organized itself as an anti-learning entity. Unwelcome information has been ignored or denied.

Trump lost the popular vote in 2016, and by a worse margin than Mitt Romney had in 2012? Not interested: It was a historic landslide victory.

Trump never rose above 50 percent approval (in any credible poll) on any single day of his presidency? Not interested: All that matters is what his base thinks.

Republicans were crushed in 2018 in the highest midterm turnout of eligible voters since before the First World War? Not interested: The result showed only that voters wanted more Trump and more Trumpiness.

Trump got swamped by a margin of 8 million votes in 2020? Joe Biden won the second-highest share of the popular vote than any presidential candidate since 1988, next only to Barack Obama’s blowout win in 2008? No need to pay attention: After all, Rudy Giuliani and Dinesh D’Souza said the election was stolen! Besides, check out those Latino votes for Trump.

Democrats won two Senate seats in formerly bright-red Georgia after winning the state’s electoral votes in the presidential contest? Only a temporary setback; wait ’til next time. By then, Trump will have helped get elected a bunch of “America First” secretaries of state who will rewrite the rules so that a Democrat can never win again.

In contrast, Frum wrote, Democrats after 2016 took a remarkable interest in what red state voters were talking about in diners. Democrats didn’t like what happened, but they wanted to understand it. Of course, we mostly ended up arguing with each other about what really motivated Trump voters, and there was much unfair blaming of Bernie Sanders, but at least Democrats engaged in some degree of self-reflection. Can Republicans do the same now?

Probably not. Frum continues,

In their anti-learning culture, conservatives have come to view everything that happens, however unwelcome, as proof simply that the most extreme people were the most correct. In the state of Florida, Republicans are proceeding postelection with more of the draconian anti-abortion laws that cost their colleagues so dearly across the country. Conservative pundits are gamely insisting that they did not really lose the 2022 elections but were once again cheated by a rigged system.

Should conservatives start noticing that they lag among unmarried women and the young? No, instead: Ridicule and insult unmarried women, especially the young. Having hooted and jeered Mitt Romney, John McCain, and George W. Bush, and pushed Liz Cheney and other principled Republicans out of Congress, the right now expresses bafflement and outrage that those rejected leaders did not rally to help candidates who condoned the January 6 insurrection and opposed aid to Ukraine.

A bedrock chunk of the right-wing psyche is a certainty that most Americans believe the way they do, no matter what the polls or election results say. Of course, “most Americans” in their minds are not necessarily “most Americans” as reflected in the census. “Americans” by their definition are people like them, not those other people who are different, so of course there’s broad agreement within their demographic.

For example, here are some numbers Republicans don’t want to know about: “Exit polls show 72 percent of women ages 18-29 voted for Democrats in House races nationwide. In a pivotal Pennsylvania Senate race, 77 percent of young women voted for embattled Democrat John Fetterman, helping to secure his victory.” Not a surprise.

I dimly remember, sometime during the Bush II years (probably after the 2006 midterms) Republicans were complaining about the quality of voters. What they were offering as a party was not the problem; voters were just too clueless to appreciate them. I’m starting to see something like that now. For example, do see this guy on the right-wing site American Greatness.

Where did Republican messaging stumble? The party, perhaps, could have been more affirmative about what they support. But they cannot be blamed for betting that voters would recoil at the ugliness of the alternative. Even the Democrats are surprised by their success. The choice here was pretty stark: “You can vote for more crime, child mutilation, and toddlers in masks, or you can vote for us, but you have to give up your abortions.” There was a rational choice, and the people didn’t make it. 

Those expecting a thundering rebuke of tyrannical COVID restrictions, Biden’s incompetence, the border crisis, and economic mismanagement underestimated the passivity of the people.

Passivity? In several battleground states voter turnout broke the previous midterm record. This was not passivity. People really didn’t want what the Republicans were selling, and they got their asses to the polls to vote against it.

But how can you reason with someone who considers mask orders during a deadly pandemic to be tyranny but thinks women with unwanted pregnancies, including from rape, including those with life-threatening complications, should just suck it up and gestate? You can’t. There is no reasoning with these people. You might as well try to explain astrophysics to a tree stump.

And don’t expect the Wall Street Journal or Fox News to send reporters to cafes in blue states to listen to what voters are saying. They aren’t capable of listening to us and aren’t about to change anytime soon.

Here’s another one, This guy at Townhall at least understands that it’s time for Trump to step aside, although he can’t bring himself to admit that the 2020 election was not rigged.

The midterm clusterfark has drawn plenty of hot takes and instant analyses that range from insightful to self-serving to unbelievably stupid. But now that we have gotten past the initial blasts of the flamethrower, perhaps we should take a breath and sit down, and think about where we are as a movement and what we need to do as a party for 2024. There’s a lot to talk about, from procedural questions like how we intend to cope with the new world of extended mail voting to substantive imperatives like how we must repeal the 19th Amendment as it applies to single, liberal women who vote for their Democrat Daddy in appalling numbers. We need to ask questions about candidate selection, money, issue choices, and a bunch of other stuff. And we need to answer the question of what to do about Donald J. Trump.

Again, he’s blaming “single, liberal women who vote for their Democrat Daddy in appalling numbers” rather than asking himself why it is women, including a lot of married ones, might feel strongly that they don’t want the government to have a say in their reproductive choices. This is called “still not ready to face reality.”

Republicans lost the close “battleground” states because the real majority of “most Americans” disagree with the Right. See Election deniers lose races for key state offices in every 2020 battleground.

Voters in the six major battlegrounds where Donald Trump tried to reverse his defeat in 2020 rejected election-denying candidates seeking to control their states’ election systems this year, a resounding signal that Americans have grown weary of the former president’s unfounded claims of widespread fraud.

It looks as if the GOP will have a tiny single-digit majority in the House. Don’t expect the “freedom caucus” tribe to modify their plans to turn the House into a retribution machine to punish Democrats. They’ll still want to impeach President Biden and Merrick Garland and Anthony Fauci and Hunter Biden’s laptop and everyone else who ever pissed them off, never mind that Fauci is retiring, as well as hold the debt ceiling hostage to force cuts in Medicare and Social Security. Let’s hope they don’t have the votes to do any real damage. Let’s hope that at least a few Republicans will be willing to vote with Democrats on critical issues, so that the House isn’t completely shut down as a governing body.

I think most voters are done with culture wars, with drama, with endless hate speech from the Right. They want the government to be a government, not a reality show. They want issues they care about addressed soberly and sensibly, and they want an end to the endless pubescent whining and gaslighting. And the hard-core Right is no where close to understanding that. Because pubescent whining and gaslighting is what they live for.

(Update: See also Josh Marshall, Abortion, Democracy and The Bogey of Issue Literalism.)

Chris Hayes explains the election results.

Update: One more example — the headline on Hugh Hewitt’s column at the Washington Post:

Classic. Here’s the column if you want to read it. Note that he doesn’t mention “Trump” even once.

Dems are keeping the Senate, and it’s probably going to be a few days yet before we have the final House results. I am trying to catch up on what else has been going on this past week.

And was it ever a bad week for boy genius billionaires. Truly, however much your life may or may not suck, at least you’re not Sam Bankman-Fried. (Well, unless you are. Sorry about that, Sam.) SBF is a 30-year-old crypto currency guy who lost $16 billion last week. Seriously.

CNN reported, “Based on net worth calculations by Bloomberg, Bankman-Fried was worth about $16 billion at the start of the week. But as his crypto exchange, FTX, collapsed, the value of his assets was reduced to zero in what Bloomberg called ‘one of history’s greatest-ever destructions of wealth.'” I almost feel sorry for him. Also, “At least $1 billion of customer funds have vanished from collapsed crypto exchange FTX, according to two people familiar with the matter.”

The Financial Times reports, “Sam Bankman-Fried’s main international FTX exchange held just $900mn in easily sellable assets against $9bn of liabilities the day before it collapsed into bankruptcy, according to investment materials seen by the Financial Times.”

I’ll leave it to other people to decide whether SBF was trying to pull off some kind of Ponzi scheme or if he just made some bad decisions.

And then there’s Mark Zuckerberg, age 38, of the company formerly known as Facebook but which is now Meta. Last week Zuckerberg laid off 11,000 Meta employees and announced the company would stop developing smart displays and smartwatches. Fast Company::

The news out of Meta couldn’t get much worse, with hundreds of billions in value already lost this year followed by the announcement of massive layoffs at the company. Despite deep pockets and unfathomable reach, there suddenly seems to be little hope for Meta’s future right at the very moment that Mark Zuckerberg needs us to believe in the technology that he claims is his company’s (and our) future.

I comprehend the Metaverse somewhat better than I understand crypto. Maybe someday it will be something lots of people can’t live without. But right now, not so much. And I understand investors are not investing.

And then there is Elon Musk, still boyish at age 51 but no longer a wonder.  In October Musk was considering charging all verified Twitter accounts $20 a month. Then he reconsidered and decided to make it $8 a month. The paid service would be called Twitter Blue. Then Twitter added a free gray verification checkmark that Musk killed a few hours later. On November 9 Twitter Blue was officially launched. On November 11 Twitter Blue was suspended after a wave of impersonators took over the platform.

From two days ago on CNN:

The world is watching the world’s richest man single-handedly destroy one of the world’s most powerful and important communication platforms, just weeks after acquiring it for $44 billion. And of course, the world is watching the dramatic spectacle unfold on — where else? — Twitter.

It’s hard to succinctly summarize the absolute chaos that has consumed Twitter over the last 12 hours as Elon Musk continues to wreak havoc on the Silicon Valley company. “It feels like the beginning of the end, honestly,” one recently laid-off Twitter employee said Thursday evening, describing the company as the “Titanic” with “everyone looking for lifeboats.”

I’ve seen reports that Musk plans to bring Twitter Blue back as soon as the kinks are worked out. I’ve also seen reports saying that since buying Twitter Musk has sold almost $4 billion in Tesla stock, presumably to keep Twitter afloat. And bankruptcy may be an option.

See also Elon Musk heads to court over Tesla pay that made him the world’s richest person and The tech CEO spending millions to stop Elon Musk.

They’re all starting to resemble one of the great boy wonders of history, Napoleon Bonaparte, who was 45 years old when he lost at Waterloo.

As I write this the Dems are one seat away from keeping the Senate, and keeping the House is not yet mathematically impossible. I’m still reading post-mortems. The answer to the question of why Republicans didn’t do better seems to be that in several states — not all of them — where abortion rights had been shut down and a bunch of MAGA election deniers were running as Republicans, more independents and some centrist Republicans voted for the Democrats. So while people may have said they were mostly worried about the economy, a lot of them were voting abortion rights and saving democracy. Here’s a New Yorker article that explains this pretty well.

Dan Balz writes at WaPo that the elections turned into a kind of dual referendum on both Biden and Trump, and Trump lost. Balz also noted that congressional incumbents are mostly keeping their seats. Voters weren’t demanding big changes in Congress. I suspect what they want more than anything else is some stability. We’ve had enough drama. Some states flipped from red to blue, however.

Anyway, the anti-abortion nutjobs and Trump cost Republicans big time, and I suspect a lot of them are smart enough to realize that. Unfortunately for them, there is no way Trump will be persuaded to step aside graciously.

Update: Catherine Cortez Masto wins in Nevada, so Dems keep control of the Senate. Mitch is shut out once again.

I’m still digesting the midterm post-mortems. Item one: The polls. I understand the better quality polls were mostly accurate, or respectably close. Yet before the midterms we kept hearing that Democrats were just about facing extinction. Dana Milbank addressed this:

The headlines coming into Tuesday’s elections almost uniformly predicted a Democratic wipeout. … I was baffled. What were they seeing that I and, more important, the Democratic operatives I spoke to weren’t seeing? Back in mid-August, I wrote a column titled “Why that red wave might end up a ripple.” I noted that Democrats had pulled even on the “generic ballot” — which party voters prefer for Congress — at a time in the cycle when the incumbent president’s party is almost always losing ground. Democrats’ standing receded slightly since then, but the contests remained extremely tight. The races were stable, both in public polling and in the private polling I had seen.

So, one, the headline writers and a whole lot of pundits were snookered by the junk GOP polls in the closing weeks of the campaign. And of course they were looking to history and the fact that the President’s party nearly always loses big in the midterms. “They were also swayed by some reputable polling organizations that, burned by past failures to capture MAGA voters, overweighted their polls to account for that in ways that simply didn’t make sense. And reporters fell for Republican feints and misdirection, as Republican operatives successfully created an artificial sense of momentum by talking about how they were spending money in reliably blue areas,” Milbank wrote.

They might also have been thrown off by the betting markets, which were spectacularly wrong. Basically, groupthink and conventional wisdom were just certain that the Republicans would have a roaring success last Tuesday, and few people were thinking out of that box. Instead, we had Catherine Rampell of WaPo, who was far from the worst offender, scolding the Democrats for drowning in denial. I’m still looking forward to her next column.

Item Two: Regarding Donald Trump, today there are oceans of headlines calling Trump the “biggest loser” and blaming him for GOP losses. Jonathan Chait declared that the Republican elite are ready to move against Trump. And I don’t doubt that the Republican elite would really like Trump and his whole misbegotten family and hangers-on to disappear. At this point he’s only going to be in the way. But I agree with Josh Marshall on this one:

Moving away from Trump, though, will be a lot harder than it looks.

To state the obvious, Trump will not go quietly. In recently days he’s become increasingly bold and threatening toward DeSantis. This isn’t a matter of strength. He clearly feels threatened by DeSantis. And he should. He has announced what will likely be a campaign announcement for November 15th. He wants to make it explicitly clear before any more time goes by that any moves DeSantis makes toward the nomination are moves against Trump. Republicans have to choose sides.

I don’t discount the possibility that DeSantis could beat Trump for the 2024 nomination. I don’t think it’s likely. But I do think it’s very possible. But if DeSantis can beat Trump, Trump can also inflict a huge amount of damage on DeSantis and the whole Republican party. Do we really expect Trump to go quietly? To have his last chapter be one of ignominious defeat? I doubt it.

So many times the Republican leadership has made noises about moving on from Trump and then gone running back to him. Having him around is bad for their party, but pushing him away might be even worse. He’ll burn down the whole circus if he doesn’t get to be the headline act. I suspect a lot of them secretly are counting on Trump being wiped out by criminal and civil indictments and suits over the next few months, which would get him out of the way before the 2024 primary campaigns get off the ground. They can talk into microphones that it’s just terrible what those Democrats are doing to Donald Trump, and then walk away.

Item Three: It turns out that crime, inflation, and border security weren’t the sure-fire winning issues Republicans thought they were. Inflation was a primary concern for a lot of voters and inspired them to vote for Republicans, especially in House races. But abortion was still on a lot of voters’ minds.

To the obvious surprise of the on-air talent, abortion came in a close second to inflation: 31% said inflation was their top issue but 27% said abortion was. Despite late pre-election polls showing abortion sinking to third or fourth place or disappearing, there are several reasons why the issue never really went away.

The “several reasons” mostly boil down to women voting in larger numbers than men, and a majority of women voted for Democrats. Abortion criminalizers did badly in a lot of states, although there are exceptions. The GOP elites might want to reconsider staying in bed with the anti-choice crew.

Now there’s somewhere I need to be, so I’ll post what I’ve written so far. There’s a lot to discuss.

The first headline I saw this morning was about the red wave that wasn’t, so I figured it was safe to check returns. (Congratulations John Fetterman!) As I write this there are four Senate contests that are still too close to call — Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and Alaska. Dems need win only two of those to keep the 50-vote majority. Of course, a 52-vote majority would be even better. Some of these states still have a lot of votes to count, and the Georgia contest might go to a runoff, so we probably won’t know about the Senate today.

The House is still up for grabs, too. I’m reading that Republicans will likely end up with an 8- to 15-seat majority, a big comedown from what they expected. Which brings me to the gripe that 17 Republican incumbent House members ran unopposed yesterday. What’s up with that? I realize these probably are considered “safe” seats and not worth wasting money contesting, but some of them were in “purple” states, like Pennsylvania. And it’s always possible some “safe” Republican candidate will be caught with his pants down, and the “safe” seat is suddenly not so safe. Every seat matters.

Yesterday Missouri passed a referendum (by 53% of the vote as of this morning) legalizing marijuana for recreational use. This was not a big surprise; the surprise was that there was hardly anything said about this issue either in news media or television advertising over the past several weeks. I bet a lot of voters didn’t know the referendum was on the ballot. I am guessing the Republicans who run the state wanted to keep it quiet, thinking that a person who votes for legal pot might also vote for Democrats. But that doesn’t excuse news media.

Last week we got an absolutely hilarious robo-call from my MAGA U.S. representative, Jason Smith, in which Smith was ranting that legalizing pot would lead to teaching Critical Race Theory in schools. I am not kidding. Smith currently has 76% of the vote, with 56% of votes counted. And this is why we can’t have nice things.

I have no idea when legal pot goes into effect, but I hope it’s before the next election.

Big Loser last night was Donald Trump. His anointed candidates were mostly responsible for dragging down Republican wins.  Aaron Blake writes at WaPo that Trump cost Republicans the Senate in 2020, and it looks like he will cost them the Senate again this year.

Republicans gave Trump a pass after the 2020 Georgia runoffs, seemingly in part because the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by his supporters (which transpired the next day) so abruptly shifted the focus and because they decided the impeachment process that followed demanded a united front. And they no doubt fear what Trump could do to the party if it turns on him, which will temper any true reckoning with what Trump has wrought in the 2022 election.

But in 2020, Trump became the first president since the Great Depression to lose the House, the Senate and the presidency in a single term. And you’d think ushering the party to a potential loss of a very winnable Senate majority and a subpar midterm election might cause certain people to decide maybe this isn’t working for them.

My plans for today are to go vote and then do things utterly unrelated to politics the rest of the day. Like laundry. And I found a recipe for baked parmesan zucchini I plan to try. I also intend to avoid tonight’s election return extravaganza starring Steve Kornacki on MSNBC, which I would normally be glued to. Many of the most critical races won’t be called until tomorrow, or Thursday, or maybe next week. Georgia could go to a runoff. I’ll peek at news on my laptop from time to time to see if there is any indication which way the wind is blowing, but otherwise I’ll probably be streaming a movie. You’re welcome to leave comments here, of course.

In the past three or four days I’ve seen no end of articles about how the polls could be completely wrong, because for multiple reasons it’s much harder to put together genuine representative samplings than it used to be. So anything is possible. I’ve also seen several articles blaming Democrats for screwing up the midterms and offering advice on how they can do better. That seems a tad premature.

Well, good luck to us.

You’d think everything in the world had stopped and nothing is going on but midterm polling and campaigning. It’s hard to find not-midterm news. Here’s the best I can do:

Justice Jackson has issued her first opinion, a dissent. She and Justice Sotomayor thought a death row inmate deserved a new trial. The rest of the Court disagreed.

This is only sorta kinda midterm news. The feud between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis is getting hotter. Greg Sargent writes that DeSantis released a television ad that claimed he was chosen to God to save Florida. It’s way over the top. I apologize for reposting from Twitter, but I couldn’t find the ad on YouTube.

I love you, Ron.

On behalf of millions of people, never stop fighting for freedom. pic.twitter.com/5wcopo041U

— Casey DeSantis (@CaseyDeSantis) November 4, 2022

Apparently Trump is pissed because only he gets to be Jesus in this town. So Trump is calling DeSantis “DeSanctimonious,” which is clever by Trump standards. Someone else must have thought it up. See Greg Sargent interview Sarah Posner about the whole messianic thing.

The Stewart Rhodes trial is ongoing. The prosecution has rested, and on Friday Rhodes testified on his own behalf. Amanda Marcotte writes that “their argument seems to be that Oath Keepers can’t be guilty because they’re just a bunch of harmless kooks. Also they claim they can’t be racists who rioted to install a fascist leader in the White House because — yep, they went there — they have Black friends.”

So I guess Rhodes was just kidding when he said, “My only regret is they should have brought rifles. We could have fixed it right then and there. I’d hang [f******] Pelosi from the lamppost.” See also A jovial Stewart Rhodes tries to woo jurors at Oath Keepers seditious conspiracy trial.

If anything else happens that’s not about the midterms, please let me know.

Here I am, still avoiding midterm election news and commentary. Here’s what’s left over.

A whole lot of expensive gifts given by foreign powers to the Trumps during the Trump administration are missing. It’s believed the Trumps still have them, even though keeping them violates the emoluments clause. I know you’re shocked.

The eclectic list ranges from golf clubs given to Trump by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to a 2018 World Cup soccer ball gifted by Russian President Vladimir Putin, a gold-plated collar of Horus, the falcon-headed ancient Egyptian god, given by Egypt’s president, a large painting of Trump from the president of El Salvador, and a $6,400 collar of King Abdulaziz al Saud, a ceremonial honor from Saudi Arabia, according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. …

,,, The sprawling request sent to the Archives also includes an antique framed signed photo of Queen Elizabeth II; a marble slab commemorating the opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem; dresses from Oman; a bust of Mahatma Gandhi; an Afghan rug; a crystal ball; and various pieces of jewelry including diamond and gold earrings, according to the person familiar with the request.

I bet the bust of Mahatma Gandhi was just misplaced, or else somebody broke it. Anyway, the rules are that the Trumps could keep the stuff if they paid for it; otherwise all gifts were supposed to have been turned over to the National Archives. Apparently they weren’t. I take it they were also required to report any gifts they received, but that wasn’t done, either. So someone is apparently trying to figure out what gifts the Trumps were given through other sources.

Moving on … Philip Bump writes, The big-stack-of-paper strategy comes to House Judiciary Republicans. The Republican minority on the House Judiciary Committee released a “1,000 Page Report” on alleged politicization of the FBI and the Justice Department. And the Republicans indeed trotted out a 1,000 page stack of paper. But the report itself was less than 50 pages long. The rest was just filler, letters (much duplicated) the committee members had written to people, and pages and pages of signatures on the letters.

They used to pull crap like this whenever Republicans wanted to claim they had a new health care plan. They’d trot around in front of cameras with big stacks of paper while somehow never releasing an actual plan beyond their usual half-baked ideas about tax credits and reinsurance and what not.

So what’s in the 50 pages? Kate Riga tells us at TPM:

The other 50 pages are a who’s who of Fox News-flavored grievances and conspiracy theories, dinging the FBI for everything from the “unprecedented raid” of Mar-a-Lago to going easy on Hunter Biden to supposedly targeting parents for resisting “a far-left educational curriculum” to inflating domestic violent extremism stats. 

Many of their gripes and allegations are old — that Hillary Clinton was given “kid-glove treatment” in comparison to Donald Trump — and animated by perpetual, ongoing right-wing complaints, including that “big tech” is censoring conservative viewpoints. 

So, they got nothin’. But if they hate big tech they should be thrilled that Twitter may not last longer than a lettuce. Elon must enjoy the thrill of burning money.

The author Thomas Cahill died recently, and I’ve been re-reading his 1995 book  How the Irish Saved Civilization. If you haven’t read it, the book is about how Irish monks were copying and preserving the books of antiquity — Virgil, Plato, etc. — while the rest of Europe was dealing with the end of the Roman Empire and the early Dark Ages.

Cahill’s descriptions of the barbarians sacking the Roman Empire are kind of darkly fascinating. What’s striking is how long the Romans managed to not admit what was happening. I suppose a lot of historians have commented on this, but I haven’t seen it expressed so vividly before. Rome had been hollowing itself out with income inequality — seriously, the whole system was rigged to benefit the wealthy —  and corruption for a very long time. And so it lost the ability to defend its borders against the barbarians. But even as Visigoths were sacking Roman villas, other Romans were using the chaos to snap up titles, or whatever they used for ownership records, to the sacked villas. As if titles were going to mean anything after there was no government any more.

President Biden’s remarks last night made me think of those clueless Romans. I appreciate what the President said. But I doubt most people understand the danger we’re in right now.

People who aren’t seriously plugged in to political news probably are just confused. They’re hearing conflicting stories about everything. They’ll believe whatever it is most of their friends and neighbors believe. But so much of it is lies.

Greg Sargent wrote,

In 2020, Donald Trump’s lies about voter fraud provided a fake pretext to overturn his presidential election loss. Now that has metastasized: Many Republicans in the MAGA vein are employing “big lies” on numerous fronts, but their purpose has taken a dark new turn: It’s as if all the lying is becoming an assertion of power in its own right, a kind of end in itself. 

Then Sargent reviews all the lies being spread about the attack on Paul Pelosi.

Democrats have responded to all this with outrage, shaming and fact-checking. But that’s about as effective as shooting spitballs at a balloon.

This is partly because the falsehoods have spread wildly through a right-wing media ecosystem that has been constructed to be impervious to outside challenge, as Matt Gertz details at Media Matters.

I think this is exactly right. The political Right in the U.S., the MAGAs and most of the Republican Party, are engaging in one long collective temper tantrum against objective reality. The are demanding that the world shape itself as they want it shaped, so they can hang on to white supremacy and the vision of white American exceptionalism that goes with it. If they need to believe that public school students are using litter boxes if they identify as furries, as ridiculous as that is, then that’s what they’ll believe. Whatever it takes to stop social progress.

The whole Christian nationalism thing is just one layer of that. In the two-part post I wrote for Patheos (Part I and Part II) I argued that “political operatives and interest groups over more than a century have gained support for their right-wing causes by linking them to Christianity. And now we’ve reached a point at which many people associate Christianity with right-wing politics.  The Christian nationalist movement is the fruit of that association. Its members sincerely believe that only right-wing self-identified Christians — who may or may not know the Beatitudes from a toaster — are entitled to govern the United States.”

Seriously, there’s been a striking change from the Reagan-era evangelicals, who at least still had some connection to some school of Christian doctrine or another, and the current crew, most of whom probably couldn’t pass a pop quiz on Jesus’ parables or define dispensationalism to save their lives.

So, yeah, the barbarians are here already.

On that cheerful note — In other news, you’ve probably heard that Kash Patel has been granted immunity so that he can be compelled to give testimony to a DoJ grand jury on the documents case. That’s a pretty good indication, I think, that they really do want to prosecute Trump. See also Ankush Khardori, The Secret Court Battle That Threatens Trump After Election Day: Prosecutors are obtaining potentially crucial testimony about January 6.