The Weekly Sift

I don’t want to talk about polls this early in the campaign. One reason I began blogging in the first place was to fight the news media’s fixation with horse-race coverage of political campaigns. News reports ought to be giving voters the information they need to make their decisions, but instead they create a hall-of-mirrors effect where voters learn about what voters think, rather than about the underlying situation or the candidates’ plans, visions, and records.

But this week an outlier poll came out showing Trump with a ten-point lead over Biden — most polls show a neck-and-neck race — and it seemed to be all the weekend news shows could talk about. At a moment when Trump is pushing House Republicans to shut down the government and impeach President Biden, nobody is talking about that. Instead they talk about polls. It’s crazy.

Anyway, though, I sense that we’re all worrying, so we might as well talk: What about those polls? Should we be anxious? Is there any point to fretting over them? That’s the topic of this week’s featured post: “About the polls”, which should be out around 10 EDT.

The weekly summary has substantive issues to cover: the looming shutdown, new corruption stories about Senator Menendez and Justice Thomas, Rupert Murdoch’s retirement, and a new opportunity for the Supreme Court to crash the country. That should be out around 11.

In this morning’s featured post, I try to find the bright side in the ridiculous complexity of the Trump trials: four criminal indictments, additional civil suits, various numbers of co-conspirators, nearly 100 counts, state vs. federal procedures, civil vs criminal procedures, does the 14th Amendment ban him from running, and so on.

What a legal education we’re getting, eh?

I find myself turning into something of a law nerd. So this week I loved federal Judge Steve Jones’ denial of Mark Meadows’ motion to remove his case from Georgia state courts to federal courts. Jones took something I’d seen lawyers arguing about on TV and explained it in a way that actually makes sense. And Fani Willis’ explanation of federalism in her well-researched takedown of Jim Jordan’s attempt to intimidate her? Priceless!

I think that’s the attitude we need to take: For the next year or so, we’re not going to be able to follow the news without learning a bunch of law, so let’s try to see that as a feature rather than a bug. That’s the attitude I try to take in “We’re all in law school now”, which summarizes this week’s far-flung Trump legal developments. It should be out maybe around 10 EDT.

As for the weekly summary: The biggest news this week is the Moroccan earthquake, but I’m not equipped to cover it. So I’ll just remind you about it and point you somewhere else. The ongoing Covid resurgence looks manageable if you use common sense and get the updated vaccine when it comes out. But of course folks like DeSantis are urging their followers not to do either. I’ve finally decided I can’t ignore Tommy Tuberville any longer, so I’ll state my opinion: His promotion blockade isn’t about abortion at all, it’s about his outdated notion of masculinity. And Climate Change Summer appears to be rolling into Climate Change Fall. Elon Musk is blaming the Jews for his Twitter blunder. Right-wing indoctrination is continuing its creep into red-state public schools. And I still have to come up with a closing.

Let’s say that posts sometime after noon.

Wednesday, even I couldn’t make myself watch the Republican presidential debate. But I did eventually read the transcript, and what struck me was how the candidates are struggling to dress up their most unpopular position: banning abortion. They actually have a strategy, and it could work if nobody confronts them with the facts. So this week’s featured post will be “Republican candidates think they’ve found a way to pitch abortion bans”. It should be out between 9 and 10.

The weekly summary has to cover what was everywhere this week: Trump’s mug shot, the first one his career of crime has produced. The week’s other big story was in some sense the most predictable: Putin rival Yevgeny Prigozhin died in a plane crash. I don’t pretend to know what that portends for Russia’s future, but I’ll link to some people trying to figure it out.

Then there was the Republican debate in general, where a number of topics other than abortion were covered. This led to the bizarre ascent of Vivek Ramaswamy, who was on all the talk shows this weekend, saying all manner of absurd things. Ramaswamy is a challenge to our news system: He’s intentionally saying outrageous things to get attention, and it’s working. I’ll try to tell you what you need to know about him without falling into that trap. (Wish me luck.)

Also, a number of significant things are happening in the Trump trials this week, and especially today.

This week’s news calls for a goofy closing, so I found one: an amusing collection ways people have posed with statues and other famous landmarks. The Leaning Tower of Pisa, for some reason, is especially popular.

This week downtown Lahaina, which I visited many years ago, burned to the ground in a wildfire that started in dry grass and was driven by hurricane-force winds. It was the most devastating event yet in our Climate Change Summer, emphasizing yet again that we cannot simply go on this way.

The Sift leaves breaking news to organizations that have the resources to cover it, and information about the disaster is still coming out. (And the death toll is still rising.) So if I don’t say a lot about Maui, that doesn’t imply I don’t see the seriousness of the situation there.

Instead, my attention was caught this week by something that may seem trivial by comparison. In July, the Authoritarian State of Florida approved videos by the right-wing non-university Prager University for use in public elementary schools. PragerU Kids videos constitute precisely the kind of “indoctrination” Governor DeSantis claims to be against. They are slickly produced and probably quite effective at distorting kids’ views of history and the world we live in today.

One video in particular stood out for me: Two time-traveling kids from the present go back to 1852 to talk to Frederick Douglass about abolition, and come back with a negative view of Black Lives Matter protesters today. The Douglass in the video seemed nothing like the Douglass of history, and yet I know the Prager style: They cherry-pick and deceptively reframe history, but seldom lie outright. So how did they do this?

Via the internet, I took my own trip back to the 1800s so I could listen to Douglass (or at least read his speeches). What I found emphasizes (at least to me) how tricky the Prager people really are, and why it’s so dangerous to give them this kind of access to American children. The post “How Frederick Douglass became a conservative spokesman” should appear before 10 EDT.

That leaves the weekly summary a lot to cover: Maui, of course, but also developments in Trump’s various trials, a victory for reproductive rights in the red state of Ohio, other disturbing things we’re learning about Florida education as the new school year approaches, that viral brawl in Montgomery, and a variety of other news. That post should appear before 1.

We remain on indictment watch. Trump has received a target letter from Jack Smith, and has refused the invitation to tell his side of the story to the DC grand jury investigating January 6. An indictment could come any day. It’s tempting to speculate about what that indictment will say, and lots of commentators are giving in to that temptation. As I’ve often said before: Go ahead and speculate if that activity engages you, but you could also just wait and see.

Today’s two featured posts are sort of similar: They both involve me reading a document so you don’t have to. The documents are (1) the new Florida standards for teaching African-American history, and (2) the “Common Sense” booklet outlining the platform of the No Labels Party.

The Florida standards have gotten a lot of well-deserved criticism this week for a couple of egregious lines, but the real problem is in the document as a whole: It wants to tell a no-villains story of American history. So it presents racism as a vague, amorphous, impersonal force, against which heroic Americans of all races have been struggling for centuries. Who exactly they struggled against — other Americans? surely not! — is a big empty spot.

I’ll explain that in more detail in the first featured post, which should be out soon.

A lot of my readers will probably wonder why I’m wasting their (and my) time on No Labels. I believe most of you are on the progressive side of the progressive/moderate split in the Democratic Party, so you’re probably not tempted at all by a group that plans to run to Joe Biden’s right. But the false-equivalence argument that both parties are equally bad appeals to a lot Americans, and I think we’re going to need to understand it during the 2024 campaign.

So the second featured post dives into the No Labels proposals. My conclusion is that their target voter is a moderate Democrat who watches too much Fox News. So they have very real disagreements with MAGA Republicans (about gun control, global alliances, and immigration), and more-or-less imaginary disagreements (about things like the Twitter files, cancel culture, and voter fraud) with Biden. That should be out around 11 EDT.

The weekly summary will cover the actual news (as opposed to speculation) related to Trump’s legal situation, the culture-war skirmishes over “Try That in a Small Town” and the Barbie movie, and a number of consequential things happening in other countries: Russia attacking Ukraine’s wheat exports, Israel preparing to disempower its supreme court, and a few other things. That should be out between noon and 1.