The Weekly Sift

One of the uncomfortable truths that you find in the dark corners of our history is that fascism happens, recurrently. Movements and demagogues and media figures and elected officials promote elements of fascism: antisemitism, hatred of minority groups and immigrants, worship of strongman leaders, wishing for the end to elections, the end to rule by law — it comes up, repeatedly. It has a certain appeal to a certain percentage of the country, in a fairly dependable way.

– Rachel Maddow
Ultra, episode 8

This week’s featured posts are “Is Club Q just the beginning?” and “Two Glimpses into the Future“.

This week I staked out some turf on Mastodon: @DougMuder@newsie.social

The Weekly Sift Twitter account has been used almost entirely to announce new posts, so at least in the beginning I plan to use Mastodon the same way. I’m also going to stay on Twitter for the time being.

This week everybody was talking about mass shootings

The Wal-Mart shooting in Virginia followed the Club Q shooting in Colorado so quickly that the public didn’t really have time to process Club Q. So I try to do that in one of today’s featured posts. I wanted to make a clear point in that article — the campaign of anti-LGBTQ lies and particularly anti-trans lies is so vicious that it looks designed to set off a pogrom — so a lot of auxiliary details got left out.

Club Q is an LGBTQ club in Colorado Springs, which is a stronghold of the religious right. In 2021, MinistryWatch identified six different conservative Christian organizations with annual revenue over $100 million that have headquarters there, including James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. As far back as 2005, NPR’s All Things Considered portrayed Colorado Springs as “a Mecca for Evangelical Christians”. (Not long afterward, mega-church pastor Ted Haggard, who figured prominently in NPR’s piece, fell in a drugs-and-gay-sex scandal. He then started another church in Colorado Springs, which also eventually asked him to leave. He then started a third church that met in his home. I don’t know how that’s going.)

---

In his recent successful reelection campaign in Florida, Senator Marco Rubio answered questions from survivors of the Parkland shooting by pointing to his support for red-flag laws rather than a ban on assault weapons. But the Club Q shooting points out one problem of red-flag laws in the current political environment: The local sheriff is one of many in Colorado who refuse to enforce Colorado’s red-flag law. El Paso County is a “2nd amendment sanctuary”.

So if you’re a violent crazy person and you want to keep your guns, Colorado Springs is the place for you. The citizens must be so proud.

---

Assault-weapon bans work. The WaPo’s Robert Gebelhoff supports that idea, and adds five other things that work:

• Keep guns away from kids.
• Stop the flow of guns
• Strengthen background checks.
• Strengthen red flag laws.
• Treat guns like we treat cars.

Each of Gebelhoff’s points is turned into specific proposals, complete with evidence to support the idea that it will make a difference in the number of gun deaths.

and the incoming GOP House majority

It’s still not clear how Kevin McCarthy is going to get enough votes to become speaker, or what he’ll have to promise to who.

I keep wondering when a dozen or two moderates will realize they could probably cut a better deal in coalition with the Democrats. That has happened in the Alaska legislature.

Meanwhile, the Democrats still have control for the next five weeks. Let’s hope they pass something that takes the debt ceiling off the table for a long time. Having a debt ceiling at all is kind of like having an easily-triggered self-destruct button on your car.

and Twitter

The claim that Elon Musk was going to create a “content moderation council” to decide who gets banned or reactivated was always just for show. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick elaborates:

For years, tons of people have believed, falsely, that it was the CEOs of these social media companies making the final call on what stays up and what stays down. … Indeed, part of the reason those same folks got so excited about Musk taking over, was that they believed (falsely) that he was going to get rid of all the moderation and so they’d be “freed.” Instead, what they have is exactly what they falsely feared was happening before: an impulsive, moody, vindictive billionaire, enforcing his own personal views on moderation. It’s deeply ironic, but his supporters will never recognize that Musk is doing exactly what they falsely believed Dorsey was doing before.

It’s also deeply stupid, because no CEO should be engaged in such day to day decision making on content moderation questions. The flow of questions is absolutely overwhelming.

---

Conservatives often claim that social media algorithms are biased against them, and that was one reason Elon Musk cited for wanting to take over Twitter. But it’s worth pointing out that people who have done research on the topic have found the exact opposite:

Our results reveal a remarkably consistent trend: In six out of seven countries studied, the mainstream political right enjoys higher algorithmic amplification than the mainstream political left. Consistent with this overall trend, our second set of findings studying the US media landscape revealed that algorithmic amplification favors right-leaning news sources.

I can think of two reasons for both the actual algorithmic bias and the inverted public perception of it:

• The purpose of social-media algorithms is to generate responses and keep people engaged. The industry understands that negative emotions like anger and fear serve that purpose better than empathy and good will. Since the MAGAverse also emphasizes anger and fear, their interests align. I mean, what’s more likely to keep you clicking: AOC explaining the difference between pardons and expungements, or MTG speculating about Jewish space lasers?
• When you think of people who have been banned from social media, the names that pop to mind are high-profile conservatives like Trump and MTG, rather than equivalently high-profile liberals. But that’s because no equivalently high-profile liberals have misbehaved to the same extent. For example, none of Biden, Obama, and Clinton have ever used Twitter to incite a riot that got people killed, as Trump did prior to January 6. Twitter’s then-CFO said, “Our policies are designed to make sure that people are not inciting violence.”

That second point is supported by this study:

In sum, these data indicate that the tendency of Twitter users to share links to misinformation sites prior to the 2020 US election was as predictive of post-election suspension as partisanship or ideology – because users who were Republican/conservative were much more likely to share low quality information than users who were Democrat/liberal.

---

If you subscribe to TPM, read Josh Marshall’s “Elon Musk and the Narcissism/Radicalization Maelstrom“. He documents Musk’s rapid radicalization in recent weeks.

He’s done with general “free speech” grievance and springing for alternative viewpoints. He’s routinely pushing all the far right storylines from woke groomers to great replacement.

Marshall makes an apt comparison to Donald Trump, who had vague “dark political impulses and beliefs going back decades,” long before the 2016 campaign. But during that campaign he filled in his views to move to where the applause was loudest and the worship the most intense, i.e., the far right. Musk is doing something similar, but at light speed.

If you’re not a TPM subscriber, check out “Elon Musk has gone full authoritarian” by Dustin Rowles, which covers much of the same ground.

---

Found on Mastodon: “50 Ways to Leave Your Twitter” by Jon Reed

You just pin your last tweet, Pete …

From there it kind of writes itself.

and protests

Iranian soccer players didn’t sing their national anthem at the World Cup, apparently in support of the protests that have been going on in that country for the last two months. A girls’ basketball team posted to Instagram a team photo in which none of them wore hijabs.

---

Chinese protesters want the Covid quarantines lifted. It doesn’t seem to be working. China recently had a record 31K new infections in a day, which is actually not that bad by American standards. (We’re averaging about 42K per day, with a much smaller population.) But our cases are less serious because of our vaccines. China relied on a homegrown vaccine, which was never as effective as the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, and hasn’t been updated for Omicron.

In America, the point of lockdowns was to buy time for vaccines to arrive. It pretty much worked.

but I’d like to talk about two recent books

One of the featured posts discusses Yascha Mounk’s The Great Experiment and Douglas Rushkoff’s Survival of the Richest.

and you also might be interested in …

Rachel Maddow’s 8-episode podcast Ultra is complete now. You can binge the whole thing rather than parcel it out week-by-week. It’s the story of American fascists, some directly allied with the Hitler government, who plotted to overthrow democracy in the 1930s and 1940s. The pro-Nazi effort included a couple dozen members of Congress, as well as armed militias in various parts of the country.

Rachel’s theme, which she obviously intends as a lesson applicable to the present, is that the justice system by itself was not able to deal with these plotters, who had enough resources and behind-the-scenes influence to stymie prosecution even after the plot was uncovered. The big names in the plot — Senator Burton Wheeler of Montana and Rep. Hamilton Fish III of New York — never went to jail. (And yes, the Hamilton Fish Bridge on I-84 is indeed named after him and his son, Hamilton Fish IV. I’ve driven over it.) But they did get voted out after the scandal came to light.

yes, the courtroom might have maybe been a more satisfying place for these members of Congress to face consequences for what they had done. But the voters did it instead once they had the information they needed about what those members of Congress had been up to. It’s not jail-time accountability, but it is political accountability.

I’m sure she intends Ultra to be an argument against a let-Jack-Smith-do-it attitude towards Trump and our current crop of fascists. We need anti-fascist and pro-democracy activity at all levels.

What was required then, in the 1940s, was all of it. It was the plucky, creative, heroic efforts of clever, brave Americans, journalists, activists, lawyers, people of faith, citizens of all stripes who came to democracy’s aid when it needed them the most. That is what got us through back then. And now, almost a full century later, we get to learn from what they left us. We inherit their work.

---

Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system took weeks to produce final results, but they’re in: Democrat Mary Peltola held the House seat that she won in a special election earlier this year, once again defeating Sarah Palin. Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski held her seat against a Trump-backed challenger.

In spite of the delay, I’ve become a fan of Alaska’s system. They hold a jungle primary where all candidates are on the same ballot. The top four vote-getters move on to the general election, where voters are allowed to rank them. Votes are then tabulated in rounds. In each round, the lowest vote-getter is eliminated and his/her votes are distributed according to the voters’ rankings. After at most two rounds of redistribution, somebody has a majority.

There are grounds for criticizing this system. For example, a candidate who was the second choice of literally everyone could be eliminated for not getting enough first-choice votes, even though the preferences might indicate that the eliminated candidate would have won one-on-one races against each of the other three. (Something like this appears to have happened to Republican Nick Begich in the special election.) But no system is perfect; there’s an actual theorem that proves it. This system seems better than most, and is a real improvement over the way elections work almost everywhere else.

The major benefit is that a moderate candidate can win by getting support from people of both parties plus independents, even though that candidate would have lost either party’s primary. That’s what Murkowski appears to have done this time.

---

New York magazine’s Intelligencer explains the FTX crypto collapse at many different levels of sophistication. I’ll let you find your own level.

The thing I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around is that Sam Bankman-Fried’s net worth was estimated at $16 billion earlier this month, but more recently “Bloomberg Billionaires Index considered Bankman-Fried to have no material wealth.” Seems like he could have tucked a few hundred million under a floorboard somewhere.

---

Josh Marshall nails something in this tweetstorm about guys who label themselves “alpha males”, like conservative author Nick Adams.

An Alpha, to the extent the term has any meaning, is the guy who the other guys get behind. Girls are into him. Charisma. Big man on campus, etc. … Back in the real world, being alpha can’t ever be a “hard job” since that’s basically the opposite of what being an alpha is – dominant, powerful, assertive and – critically – the ability to pull those things off. … If you’re going around constantly saying you’re an “alpha” and how it’s just getting harder and harder to do and things are tough all over and everyone’s being such dicks to the “alphas” and wow inflation is so high I can’t afford the chicken wings at Hooters… well, you’re pretty clearly doing it wrong.

In other words, alphahood isn’t a lifestyle you can choose. It’s something that either shows up in your life or it doesn’t.

---

The NYT published its annual assault on my ego: The 100 Notable Books of 2022. Usually I’ve read one or two of them, but this year it’s zero. The WaPo lists ten best books, which I have also read none of.

and let’s close with something that saves time

I’ve closed before with John Atkinson’s cartoons, particularly his radically condensed versions of classic novels. As we enter into the Christmas season, it’s a good time to recall Atkinson’s retelling of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.