The Weekly Sift

Back in 2015, many of us struggled to find a label that captured how Donald Trump was different from other “conservative” candidates. With some trepidation, we dusted off the word fascist, which in recent years had mainly been used as a hyperbolic insult. Before re-introducing and applying the word, it seemed necessary to lay out exactly what you intended it to mean. I did that in November, 2015 in a post “The Political F-Word“, which I think stands up well in hindsight.

At the time, this use was widely disputed, and it remained controversial throughout Trump’s administration. As he campaigns to be restored to office, though, Trump has increasingly been imitating Hitler’s rhetoric. (Immigrants “poison the blood of our country”. His enemies are “vermin” he wants to “root out”.) Alarming plans continue to leak out of his campaign and its allied think-tanks: vast detention camps for immigrants and the homeless, invoking the Insurrection Act on Day One, replacing the civil service with loyalists, pushing executive power to its limits, and so on.

Consequently, many who had been reluctant to use fascist are changing their minds. That’s the subject of this week’s featured post “Revisiting the fascism question”. That should appear by 10 EST.

The weekly summary has a lot to cover: developments in the Israel/Gaza War, averting a government shutdown, Biden’s summit meeting with China’s President Xi, the ethics report on George Santos, a Colorado judge’s ruling on whether Trump is eligible to run for president, and more. That should appear a little after noon.

This is America, so you don’t get a chance to process one mass shooting before there’s another one. Saturday night in the Ybor City neighborhood of Tampa, two were killed and at least 18 injured when a dispute between two groups devolved into gunfire. This follows Wednesday’s single-shooter rampage in Lewiston, Maine. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court may be about to trash state red-flag laws that keep guns away from dangerous people. I haven’t decided yet whether to cover our gun problem in a featured article or in a very long note in the weekly summary.

What I know I’m writing a featured article about is the ascension of Mike Johnson to the speakership. Initially, Johnson was covered as just another MAGA extremist, but in fact it’s worse than that: He’s a follower of Christian Nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton. That post should appear maybe around 10 EDT. If there’s a gun article, it will follow around 11.

The weekly summary will discuss how the House GOP “moderates”, who seemed to have found their backbones when Jim Jordan was running for speaker, crumbled completely in the Johnson vote. I don’t have a lot to say about the Israel/Gaza War, but I’ll link to people who do. There’s Trump trial news every week: more people flipped on him, two different judges are trying to figure out how to discipline his outbursts (which would send any other defendant to jail for contempt), and his children are going to have to testify this week in the Trump Organization fraud trial. And he gets more befuddled on the campaign trail, where he projects his own mental decline onto President Biden.

You may not have noticed Mike Pence was running for president, but he has dropped out. A Cat 5 hurricane hit Acapulco without drawing much media attention. Virginia is about to have an important election. And I’ll close with 18,000 people singing a Toto song. I’ll try to get that out by noon or so.

It’s been more than a week since the Hamas attack on Israel, and it still dominates every news program. Air attacks on Gaza have been going on for some while, and Israeli troops are massing for what could be a re-occupation. If there is anything else going on in the world, it’s having a hard time getting anyone’s attention.

From the news networks’ treatment of the topic, I gather their ratings must be up. But not because of people like me. I find I’m having a hard time watching. I tune into my usual programs, check that no surprising new development has transpired, and then go stream a drama or watch a sports event.

This isn’t normal for me. Ordinarily, I have a very thick skin for the news, even news that includes a lot of human suffering. So I’ve had to introspect about what’s going on with my emotions: Why is this so hard to watch? That’s the topic of this week’s featured post. For those of you who are also avoiding the news these days, I’ll summarize: This war has been flashing me back to 9-11; not so much the events of that day as the way it felt afterwards — that heady sense of my country being the avatar of Good in its eternal battle with Evil.

America got carried away with that mythic identification, and as a result we did horrible things. We’re still paying for those mistakes. So hearing echoes of those emotions now is terrifying; it makes me feel as if I’m about to do something I’ll regret for a long time.

That post, “My 9-11 Flashbacks”, should be out soon.

The weekly summary includes some less self-centered accounts of the war. It also discusses the continuing dysfunction of the House of Representatives. Everything else has gotten snowed under this week, so it will be covered by short notes. A scheduling conflict doesn’t give me as much time this morning, so the summary will have to post by around 11.

In a week full of big news events, probably the biggest is the one that didn’t happen: The government didn’t shut down yesterday, and will stay open for at least another six weeks. There’s a lot to say about how that transpired and what comes next, as the MAGA wing of the House Republican caucus comes after Kevin McCarthy’s speakership.

But the government-that-didn’t-shut-down had a lot of competition for our attention: A New York judge issued summary judgment on one part of the state attorney general’s civil suit against Trump. He ruled that Trump committed fraud by inflating the value of his properties to get bank loans, and he cancelled the Trump Organization’s licenses to do business. Also, one of Trump’s co-defendants in the Georgia RICO trial pleaded guilty, New York flooded after massive rains, Joe Biden walked a picket line, and House Republicans opened their impeachment investigation against Biden.

So of course I’m going to write about Taylor Swift. This week I couldn’t help being amused by right-wingers’ ridiculous attempts to go after her online: She’s dumb, her music sucks, she’s homely, and so on. Other people know far more about Swift, her fans, and her music than I do, but this story is a hook for making a point that’s been on my mind for a while: Conservative rhetoric lauds Horatio Alger types, whom the capitalist system allows to rise to the top through talent and hard work. But in practice, right-wingers actually hate those people. How dare they have opinions of their own, or remember where they came from?

I’ll put more detail into that point in “MAGA and the Swifties”, which should by out around 9 EDT.

I’ll also contrast Democrats asking for Bob Menendez to resign from the Senate with Republicans who stay loyal to their own corrupt leaders like Donald Trump and Clarence Thomas. That piece, “When should public officials resign?” should be out a little after 10. And I’m shooting to get the weekly summary out by 11 this week.

It’s hard to know where to start. House Republicans are moving towards impeaching President Biden for something-or-other, but they don’t seem to be moving towards funding the government, which looks increasingly likely to shut down in two weeks. The Justice Department indicted Hunter Biden, but apparently that just proves that it’s not independent, because Republicans hold that it’s not indicting Hunter for the right things — the things that implicate his father, and which they have no evidence to support.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is back in office, having escaped his impeachment trial without being removed. NBC gave Trump a major platform to spew his lies, and demonstrated the complete helplessness of Cronkite-era interviewing tactics when confronting a subject who can’t be shamed.

Mitt Romney is retiring, and getting in a bunch of parting shots at his party before he goes. He’s being lauded for his courage, but I can’t help thinking that a truly courageous man wouldn’t wait until he had nothing to lose before telling the truth. And while we’re talking about character, there’s Lauren Boebert and Kristi Noem. But other than just salacious gossip, those would be stories about hypocrisy, which no one is ashamed of any more.

And then there are natural disasters: a hurricane affecting New England, an earthquake in Libya. The auto workers are striking.

You know: Just another week.

In the featured post, I take a step back from the Biden impeachment effort and look at a thought pattern we’ll undoubtedly see a lot of if it proceeds: connecting the dots. Connecting the dots is about telling a story that weaves together a collection of plot points your audience already believes or wants to believe. A true investigation would begin by drilling down on the dots themselves, to see if they’re real. Only after the dots are solidly established would the investigator begin turning them into a story.

But connecting the dots flips things around. The overall appeal of the story — the “stolen election”, the QAnon “storm”, the “Biden crime family”, the worldwide plot to unleash Covid on us and then trick us into taking vaccines that do something nefarious to our bodies or souls — is what establishes that the dots must be true.

So the featured post “Don’t just connect the dots” should post around 10 EDT. The weekly summary will be out somewhere around noon.