I’m blaming the holidays for how little advance preparation I got done on this week’s Sift. So everything will probably run a little late today.
Everyone’s fretting about the polls showing Trump slightly ahead of Biden, but to me the important information from those polls is where Democrats are losing messaging battles they ought to win: in particular on the economy. That’s the subject of this week’s featured post, “The Remarkable Biden Economy”, which should be out around 10 EST or so.
The weekly summary will link to articles about the Israel/Hamas prisoner exchange and the possibilities for a longer ceasefire, which seem to change hourly. Also, a right-wing party had a surprising victory in Holland, sparking discussion about the momentum of right-wing politics in Europe. I’ll discuss a few other things, like the mainstream media’s failure to cover Trump accurately, the origin of the wall between church and state, and a few other things, before closing with some music to play if the onslaught of Christmas songs starts getting to you. I’ll try to get that out before one.
The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is here. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon.
This week’s featured post is “Revisiting the fascism question“. I didn’t notice this cartoon until after that article posted.
If you wondered what I was doing with my week off last week, I was in a church speculating about death.
This week everybody was talking about Gaza
A frequently rumored deal where Hamas would release some number of hostages in exchange for a ceasefire of a certain number of days keeps not quite happening.
The war news this week centered on the Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza, which Israel has claimed sits over a Hamas command-and-control center. Meanwhile, though, it was a hospital, and conditions there became horrific while Israel searched it for Hamas fighters and their hostages. Saturday, a deal was reached to evacuate the patients that could be moved and leave the hospital with a skeleton crew to take care of the rest.
Israel turned up a collection of weapons from the hospital and a shaft that presumably goes down into deeper tunnels. But so far this evidence has fallen short of a command-and-control center, so not everyone was impressed.
It’s hard to feel good about any news coming out of Gaza. My interpretation of the October 7 attacks is that Hamas designed them to offend Israel as deeply as possible, giving Israelis the maximum motivation to come to Gaza and root them out. Simultaneously, Hamas had embedded itself in Gaza so tightly that Israel would have to do ugly, horrible things to succeed in rooting them out. For its part, Israel is now doing those ugly, horrible things, and Palestinian civilians are dying in large numbers.
Watching from the outside, I have a hard time coming up with some alternative path Israel ought to be taking, and yet I also have a hard time rooting for them to succeed in their current path. I find myself agreeing with this Nicholas Kristof column, especially this line:
Unless you believe in human rights for Jews and for Palestinians, you don’t actually believe in human rights.
There’s been a lot written — maybe appropriately so — about antisemitism on college campuses, and from the left in general. But this week we got a reminder that antisemitism on the right is far more pervasive and virulent.
Matt Yglesias wrote a fairly long column about left and right antisemitism, which I’ll oversimplify down to this: Leftists sympathize with Palestinians, and sometimes end up overshooting into hating Jews. Rightists hate Jews, and so invent conspiracy theories to justify that hatred. Neither position is good, but they’re not exactly mirror images of each other.
Cases in point are these statements by Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk, which blame Jews for financing “white genocide” and “anti-white causes”. Elon Musk responded to a tweet expressing a similar view with “You have said the actual truth.”
The borders of the homeland of the Jews are the Euphrates in the east and the Nile in the southwest.
That’s the land promised to Abraham’s descendants in Genesis 15. It includes big chunks of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq.
If someone decides to invent a new religion today, who will decide the rules? The first nation that got the word from God, the promise from God—the first nation is the one who has the right to it. The others that follow—Christianity and Islam, with their demands, with their perceptions—they’re imitating what existed already. So, why in Israel? They could be anywhere in the world. They came after us, in the double sense of the world.
She’s fine with non-Jews continuing to live in these lands, as long as they accept that
We the Jews are the sovereigns in the state of Israel and in the Land of Israel.
That means accepting that “they are not going to have the right to vote for the Knesset. No, no, no.”
and averting a government shutdown
I give Speaker Johnson credit for not waiting until the absolute last minute to recognize reality: Any plan to keep the government funded has to rely on Democratic votes, so loading a continuing resolution up with right-wing culture-war riders can’t work. The House got a relatively clean CR done Tuesday (supported by 209 Democrats and only 127 Republicans), the Senate passed it Wednesday, and President Biden signed it Thursday, with a day to spare. The ordinary business of government shouldn’t be dramatic. Things that need to get done should get done without watching some clock tick down to zero.
Johnson accomplished this by pulling the same trick Kevin McCarthy did just before the House sacked him: He avoided putting the bill through the Rules Committee (where all bills usually go, so that rules can be established for amendments, debate limits, etc., and which McCarthy had stacked with “Freedom” Caucus members as part of the deal that made him speaker). That meant it needed a 2/3rds supermajority to pass, which it only got via overwhelming Democratic support.
Predictably, passing a realistic CR with mostly Democratic votes angered the “Freedom” Caucus, which has no interest in the kind of compromise democracy always entails. So far no one is proposing another vacate-the-chair resolution. But it’s hard to see how Johnson gets past the next set of funding deadlines without a revolt.
About those deadlines: The one weird thing about the Johnson-designed CR is that it has two. The bill would extend funding until January 19 for military construction, veterans’ affairs, transportation, housing and the Energy Department. The rest of the government – anything not covered by the first step – would be funded until February 2.
It’s not clear what kind of game Johnson has in mind. Maybe he wants to get full-year appropriation bills approved for the January 19 departments approved first, then have a showdown over big cuts to the February 2 departments. Or maybe he wants to be able to have a shutdown over the January 19 departments while the others are still funded. We’ll see how Democrats maneuver in response.
In general, it’s hard to disagree with one part of Johnson’s rhetoric: Congress ought to debate individual programs on their merits, rather than vote the whole government up or down. However, such a plan requires repeated compromises with Democrats, and recognizing that the small and fractious Republican House majority can’t get its way on everything. As long as the House loads every bill with things Democrats will never support, nothing will pass and we’ll keep coming down to deadlines with the government unfunded.
The CR does not include additional aid for Israel or Ukraine. Meanwhile, Johnson’s previous bill that coupled aid to Israel with a deficit-increasing IRS cut is dead in the Senate. If Israel (not to mention Ukraine) is going to get more aid, the House is going to have to try again.
The fact that the IRS cut increases the deficit (by making it easier for rich taxpayers to cheat; I’ve heard the cut described as “defund the tax police”) is routinely left out of conservative-media articles. Conservative media frames the situation as Democrats wanting to protect IRS bureaucrats, not Democrats wanting rich people to pay the taxes they legally owe.
Basically, there are two kinds of legislators. When something needs to get done, one kind thinks “What am I willing to give up to make this happen?” and the other thinks “What can I get people to give me to stop blocking this?”
and the China summit
President Biden met President Xi on Wednesday, and accomplished a small number of important but not flashy things: They restored communications between Chinese and American military leaders, which is how minor incidents are settled without escalating into war. And China agreed to reduce precursor chemicals for making fentanyl, which is a key point in the China-to-Mexico-to-America drug trade. The two leaders disagreed about a number of other issues, like Taiwan.
Back in 2018, John Oliver publicized the banned-in-China anti-Xi memes styling him as Winnie the Pooh, and now I can’t see him without noting the resemblance.
and the Tuberville drama
Senator Tuberville’s blockade on military promotions continued this week, and we found out that he has at least one ally: Mike Lee of Utah.
Several Republicans have publicly expressed frustration with Tuberville on the floor of the Senate, to no avail. Democrats are going to propose a temporary rule change to circumvent the blockade, but it needs 60 votes to pass. If all 51 Democrats show up to support the change, nine Republicans will be needed. No one knows whether the anti-Tuberville faction has that many Republicans.
and Trump’s “insurrection”
A Colorado judge weighed in Friday on whether the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause makes Donald Trump ineligible to be president again. The ruling is a mixed bag: She finds that Trump did engage in insurrection, in the sense intended by the Amendment, but denies that the phrase “officer of the United States” was intended to include presidents. As a result, Trump’s name should appear on Colorado primary ballots.
That sounds like a victory for Trump, but Harry Litman isn’t so sure. The engaged-in-insurrection part is a finding of fact (based on extensive examination of evidence) which the appellate courts would be inclined to defer to, while the not-an-officer part is a matter of law that the higher courts will want to decide for themselves. So this Trump “victory” may set up a less victorious outcome on appeal.
The judge’s opinion is a good summary of what happened on January 6. A key point is that Trump’s words can’t be taken at face value because
Trump developed and employed a coded language based in doublespeak that was understood between himself and far-right extremists, while maintaining a claim to ambiguity among a wider audience.
When Republicans and a few Democrats voted against a resolution to expel George Santos from the House of Representatives a few weeks ago, they claimed it was because he had not yet gotten the due process that an Ethics Committee investigation would provide.
The most glaring defect of the new code is its complete lack of any enforcement power. Its 15 pages are littered with weak verbs like “should,” “should not” and “endeavor to,” which, as any college student on a pre-exam bender will tell you, is a reliable way to sound serious without actually doing the work. … Whatever the justices do, they must know there will be no professional repercussions. Appointed for life and removable only by impeachment, they are effectively untouchable.
Baseball’s A’s will move from Oakland to Las Vegas by 2028, leaving Oakland without any sports franchises. The A’s are baseball’s most traveled franchise, beginning as the Philadelphia Athletics, then moving to Kansas City, Oakland, and now Las Vegas.
My annual exercise in humility — reading various publications’ best-books-of-the-year lists and admitting how few of them I’ve even noticed — begins with the Washington Post. And Vox reviews the 25 nominees for a National Book Award.
and let’s close with an interesting question
WaPo columnist Michael Dirda raises the idea of books you come back to again and again, and refines it a little: Books you may have read only once, but you want to come back to. What’s interesting in his column isn’t his list of 22 books, but the question itself.
I’ll offer All the King’s Men as a novel I re-read every five years or so, and Gravity’s Rainbow as one I don’t re-read cover to cover, but keep coming back to for specific scenes and descriptions. (If you write, you need to keep exposing yourself to authors whose grasp of language is deeper than your own.) As for a set of books I want to come back to someday: Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle and Nick Harkaway’s Gnommon, which I almost understood the second time through.
People who used to deny that Trump is a fascist have been changing their minds.
From the beginning of his first presidential campaign, it was clear Donald Trump was not like other candidates. The difference was not in political philosophy, because he barely seemed to have one. On any given day, he might be for or against a national healthcare program. He might want to raise or cut taxes on the rich. If “conservative” had been defined by Ronald Reagan and carried into the present by Republicans like Paul Ryan, then Trump was not a conservative.
Meanwhile, he celebrated his supporters’ violent tendencies, called Mexican immigrants rapists, and promised to ban Muslims from entering the country. Maybe we needed a different word for this. Maybe the word was fascist.
For years, the word fascist had mainly just served as an insult in American politics. Yes, there were people on the right-wing fringe who waved swastikas and celebrated Hitler’s birthday, but they had no power and nobody took them seriously. If you heard some congressman or cabinet secretary described as a fascist, it was hyperbole. No significant player in American government was literally a fascist. [1]
But maybe it was time to dust that word off as a serious descriptor. If you were going to do that in a responsible way, though, you had to be clear about what you were using the word to mean. It couldn’t just be “somebody more conservative than me” or “somebody I don’t like”. It needed a real definition that could be applied objectively.
And that was actually kind of tricky, because historical fascism has not displayed a defining set of policy positions, like communism’s public ownership of the means of production. Once in power, fascists become chameleons, championing whatever ideas their leaders find useful. Fascism often resembles a charismatic religion more than a political philosophy; the important thing is the spirit, not adherence to some 10-point plan.
But by November of 2015, I was ready to start using the word again, so I wrote “The Political F-Word” to say what I would mean by it. I said fascism was more about social psychology than politics, and described it as:
“a dysfunctional attempt of people who feel humiliated and powerless to restore their pride by:
styling themselves as the only true and faithful heirs of their nation’s glorious (and possibly mythical) past, [2]
identifying with a charismatic leader whose success will become their success,
helping that leader achieve power by whatever means necessary, including violence,
under his leadership, purifying the nation by restoring its traditional and characteristic virtues (again, through violence if necessary),
reawakening and reclaiming the nation’s past glory (by war, if necessary),
all of which leads to the main point: humiliating the internal and external enemies they blame for their own humiliation.”
I could easily see Hitler’s and Mussolini’s fascism in that description, and believed that it fit Trumpism as well, with its vague allusions to making America great “again” (without specifying when exactly that greatness was present or how it was lost), its persistent claims of persecution and victimhood, its emphasis on “owning the libs”, its hatred of immigrants, the violence of its rhetoric (which is frequently echoed in the manifestos of mass murderers), its focus on “real Americans”, and (most of all) the cult of personality around Donald Trump himself. [3]
The subsequent eight years, I believe, have borne out what I saw in 2015. The January 6 insurrection, for example, was a direct manifestation of “helping that leader achieve power by whatever means necessary, including violence”, and so are the current threats of violence against the prosecutors and judges who attempt to make Trump submit to the rule of law.
Still, not everyone agreed, and calling Trump a fascist was controversial. To many, fascist meant Hitler, and (whatever you might think of him) Trump was not Hitler. This week, Tom Nichols summarized his thinking like this: He was against using fascist through the 2016 campaign because
Trump, as a person and as a public figure, is just so obviously ridiculous; fascists, by contrast, are dangerously serious people, and in many circumstances, their leaders have been unnervingly tough and courageous. Trump—whiny, childish, unmanly—hardly fits that bill.
At the time, I thought this view was unhistorical, because Hitler also had seemed ridiculous to many Germans, even after he had become chancellor. But Nichols continued:
After Trump was elected, I still warned against the indiscriminate use of fascism, because I suspected that the day might come when it would be an accurate term to describe him, and I wanted to preserve its power to shock and to alarm us. I acknowledged in August 2022 that Trump’s cult “stinks of fascism,” but I counseled “against rushing toward the F-word: Things are poised to get worse, and we need to know what to watch for.”
Well, Nichols is now shocked and alarmed. What changed his mind? The same things that have swayed a lot of pundits lately: the escalating rhetoric that now routinely dehumanizes his opponents as “vermin” and immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country“, coupled with a series of ominous proposals for his second administration:
Add the language in these speeches to all of the programmatic changes Trump and his allies have threatened to enact once he’s back in office—establishing massive detention camps for undocumented people, using the Justice Department against anyone who dares to run against him, purging government institutions, singling out Christianity as the state’s preferred religion, and many other actions—and it’s hard to describe it all as generic “authoritarianism.” Trump no longer aims to be some garden-variety supremo; he is now promising to be a threat to every American he identifies as an enemy—and that’s a lot of Americans.
Nichols is not alone. [4] Though The Economist does not use the F-word, it says that Trump “poses the biggest danger to the world in 2024”. WaPo’s Dan Balz also avoids fascist, but says his rhetoric is “associated with authoritarian leaders of the past”, whoever they might be. His colleague Aaron Blake puts recent Trump quotes side-by-side with Hitler’s use of the same language. The New Yorker’s John Cassidy warns that the 2024 election is
a struggle to prevent the election of a President whose embrace of fascistic imagery and authoritarian governance goes well beyond what comes out of his mouth.
In short, it’s not just the crazy things Trump says or how he says them. It’s what he’s done and plans to do.
The 2020 election plot. It’s important to realize that we’ve gone well beyond the point of Trump-says-a-lot-of-crazy-things. Openly fascist ideas and proposals are percolating in TrumpWorld right now, and are still not being taken seriously by many American voters. But before we go into those, we need to lay out what Trump has already done: launched a plot to stay in power after losing the 2020 election.
People who think we can put January 6 behind us tell the story like this: After it became clear that Trump had lost the 2020 election, he latched on to every rumor of fraud because he didn’t want to admit defeat. His stolen-election rhetoric resonated with his most radical supporters, and the result was a January 6 rally that got out of hand. Eventually, though, Trump told the rioters to go home and left office peacefully. He still may be claiming he won in 2020, but so what?
Both the evidence gathered by the House January 6 Committee [5] and the Georgia and D.C. indictments against Trump, though, tell a different story:
As soon as it became clear that Trump was likely to lose the 2020 election, he began preparing to claim fraud and stay in office.
Within a few days of the November 3 election, his campaign officials and other top advisors told him that he had lost.
Within a few weeks, all his administration’s top investigators — Bill Barr in Justice, Chris Krebs at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and others — told him that his claims of election fraud had no basis in fact. No one in a position to know supported those claims.
Republican officials in key states — Georgia, Michigan, Arizona — told him that the votes had been counted accurately. Again, no one in a position to know said otherwise.
In order to find support for the view that he had won the election, Trump had to turn to amateur conspiracy theorists like Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell.
Barr’s successors at Justice refused to send state legislators a letter falsely claiming that evidence of significant election fraud had been found and recommending that they reconsider their states’ electoral votes.
Republican-controlled state legislatures all refused Trump’s urging to ignore the election results and appoint Trump electors instead of Biden electors.
Officials close to Trump coordinated attempts in multiple states for Trump supporters to falsely claim to be electors, and to fraudulently cast Electoral College votes for Trump.
His own vice president, Mike Pence, resisted his urging to count the votes of the fake electors, or to refuse to count electoral votes from states Biden had won.
The January 6 assault on the Capitol was planned in advance by groups like the Proud Boys, and their leaders have been convicted of seditious conspiracy. A direct connection from the White House to the Proud Boys has not been nailed down in evidence publicly available, but may have gone through Roger Stone.
The more details come out, the clearer it becomes that this plot could have worked if only Trump had more yes-men in key positions. If the Justice Department had backed rumors of election fraud, Republican legislatures would have had cover to submit alternate slates of electors, and Mike Pence might have been convinced to count those votes, creating a constitutional crisis that the Supreme Court (with three Trump appointees) might have been unwilling to resolve in Biden’s favor. A military leader unlike Mark Milley might have provided troops to put down any subsequent disorder, and Trump would be President for Life. [6]
From the preparations for his second administration, we can conclude that Trump has learned a lesson from his first failed attempt to overthrow the constitutional order, and will not make the same mistakes again. He’ll appoint a compliant attorney general, a compliant vice president, and military leaders willing to do what they’re told. Former Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly put it like this:
The lesson the former president learned from his first term is don’t put guys like me … in those jobs. The lesson he learned was to find sycophants.
Plans for Trump’s second term. According to many reports, Trump did not expect to win in 2016, so he paid little attention to the transition plan drafted by Chris Christie. Top jobs were filled in a haphazard way, often with conservatives who had little previous connection to Trump, like General John Kelly, or with people like Senator Jeff Sessions, who backed Trump but retained independent views of how government was supposed to function. The Trump legislative agenda was largely left to Speaker Paul Ryan, who engineered a Reagan-style tax cut for corporations and the rich, but failed to “repeal and replace” ObamaCare.
As a result, Trump was frequently told that he couldn’t do what he wanted to do; it was illegal or unethical or against the norms of the federal government. By the end of his term, he had gotten rid of most of those people, but there were still enough establishment conservatives around to thwart his attempt to steal a second term.
Weaponize the Justice Department against his enemies. Trump claims that the indictments against him are purely political. [7] But rather than promise to restore the Justice Department to its proper function, Trump promises to do to his enemies what he (falsely) claims has been done to him. In an interview with Univision, he said:
What they’ve done is they’ve released the genie out of the box. … They’ve done indictments in order to win an election. They call it weaponization, and the people aren’t going to stand for it. But yeah, they have done something that allows the next party. I mean, if somebody if I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say go down and indict them. Mostly what that would be, you know, they would be out of business. They’d be out they’d be out of the election.
This is third-world-country stuff, “arrest your opponent”. And that means I can do that, too.
In general, I’m trying to source Trump’s second-term plans to his own words and quotes from allied organizations and named advisors, rather than anonymous sources (though the Mueller Report often attached names and testimony under oath to anonymously-sourced reports Trump had labeled “fake news” at the time). But I’ll make an exception for this quote from the WaPo:
In private, Trump has told advisers and friends in recent months that he wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley, according to people who have talked to him, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Trump has also talked of prosecuting officials at the FBI and Justice Department, a person familiar with the matter said.
One person who believes this account is John Kelly:
There is no question in my mind he is going to go after people that have turned on him.
Use the military against Americans. During his administration, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows deploying the active-duty military to enforce law and order within the United States itself. (During riots and natural disasters, governors may call out their state’s chapter of the National Guard, which consists of ordinary citizens and is the successor to the “militia” mentioned in the Constitution.) According to the NYT, he was talked out of doing so by Attorney General Bill Barr, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, and Joint Chiefs Chair Mark Milley — exactly the kind of appointees he will avoid in a second administration.
Instead, Trump reportedly plans to invoke the Insurrection Act on Day One of a second term. This would put the military on call to respond wherever he found it necessary.
Turn the federal government into a patronage machine. In the early days of the United States, the government worked according to the “spoils system”, in which federal jobs were plums a new president could award to his political allies. This led to a lot of corruption and inefficiency, so a series of reforms were passed that made most federal jobs nonpartisan civil service jobs.
Trump began trying to undo the civil service in his first term. A month before the 2020 election, he ordered the creation of “Schedule F” jobs — tens of thousands of positions formerly protected by civil service rules that would become fireable by the president.
Rather than take advantage of this power grab, President Biden reversed Trump’s executive order. But Trump has pledged to restore it if he regains office. Presidents already need to make about 4000 appointments when they take office, but Trump’s plan could cover ten times as many jobs. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is assembling a database of Trump loyalists who could fill those jobs. According to Axios:
intense attention will be given to the social-media histories of anyone being considered for top jobs. Those queasy about testing the limits of Trump’s power will get flagged and rejected.
Create massive detention camps for immigrants and the homeless. Trump has pledged to conduct “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history”, a statement fleshed out by Trump advisor and speech-writer Stephen Miller, who told the NYT:
Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown. The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.
Miller is talking about rounding up not just “illegal” immigrants, deporting “millions per year”, but also revoking the legal status of many others: foreign students who participate in demonstrations Trump disagrees with, immigrants granted temporary protected status because they escaped from countries the US deems unsafe, Afghans evacuated after the Taliban takeover, and others.
To help speed mass deportations, Mr. Trump is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings. To help Immigration and Customs Enforcement carry out sweeping raids, he plans to reassign other federal agents and deputize local police officers and National Guard soldiers voluntarily contributed by Republican-run states.
To ease the strain on ICE detention facilities, Mr. Trump wants to build huge camps to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights. And to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Mr. Trump would redirect money in the military budget, as he did in his first term to spend more on a border wall than Congress had authorized.
The threat of non-action. In addition to the things Trump is planning to do in a second administration, we have to consider the things he might choose not to do: enforce the law against groups who do violence against his opponents. From the beginning, Trump has defended his supporters when they get violent, from describing two Trumpists who beat a homeless man in 2015 as “passionate” to saying “We love you. You’re very special.” to the January 6 rioters, whom he says he will pardon.
In the early Hitler years, the more serious threat was not that the official Gestapo would whisk you away to a concentration camp, but that the unofficial Brownshirts would beat or murder you with no interference from the police. Kristallnact was not police enforcing draconian laws, but hooligans running free. If you think the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers wouldn’t like to play a similar role today, you haven’t been paying attention.
[1] On the Right, the word communist is still used this way, as when Trump promised to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country”. I doubt he could define communist, Marxist, or fascist. The words are simply barbs that he throws at people.
[2] Four years after my F-word post, Trump made this point clearly in his January 6 speech:
Just remember this: You’re stronger, you’re smarter, you’ve got more going than anybody. And they try and demean everybody having to do with us. And you’re the real people, you’re the people that built this nation. You’re not the people that tore down our nation.
[3] The 2020 Republican Convention, for example, refused to write a platform that would endorse any specific policies, but declared instead that it “enthusiastically supports President Trump” and would “enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda” — whatever turns that might take.
any motion to amend the 2016 Platform or to adopt a new platform, including any motion to suspend the procedures that will allow doing so, will be ruled out of order
Going forward, the Republican Party would be Donald Trump, and its policies would be whatever Trump said they were.
[4] You might think Nichols’ article would have an apologetic tone, something like: “You guys were right, he is a fascist.” But no. Those of us who saw further ahead than Nichols are to blame for “the overuse of fascist” that “wore out the part of the public’s eardrums that could process such words”.
I see it the other way: Maybe if people like Nichols had taken Trump’s fascism more seriously in 2015, more of the public could have processed the threat then, and we could have avoided this whole mess.
What this point ignores is that nearly all the testimony heard by the committee came from Trump appointees, Republicans at the state level who supported Trump’s 2020 campaign, and even members of the Trump family. There would have been more even testimony from Trump supporters if so many (including Trump himself) had not refused to testify. Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, and Peter Navarro went so far as to defy subpoenas.
I can’t help believing that if any of those people could have testified to Trump’s innocence without committing perjury, they would have.
The possible bias of the Committee’s report was an issue in the recent hearing in a Colorado court about whether Trump is disqualified from being on the ballot in 2024 by the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause. The judge’s ruling noted:
while Trump spent much time contesting potential biases of the Committee members and their staff, he spent almost no time attacking the credibility of the Committee’s findings themselves. The Hearing [in Colorado] provided Trump with an opportunity to subject these findings to the adversarial process, and he chose not to do so, despite frequent complaints that the Committee investigation was not subject to such a process. Because Trump was unable to provide the Court with any credible evidence which would discredit the factual findings of the January 6th Report, the Court has difficulty understanding the argument that it should not consider its findings
We are going to win four more years. And then after that, we’ll go for another four years because they spied on my campaign. We should get a redo of four years.
Doubting his intent would be repeating another mistake Germans made with Hitler: believing that he didn’t really mean what he said. Hitler’s 1925 book Mein Kampf laid out much of what he wanted to do and later did, but many Germans refused to take his writings seriously.
[7] That position is hard to square with the evidence those indictments lay out. Trump has been indicted because he committed crimes.
In practice, Trump simply does not address the evidence against him. See the quote from the judge’s ruling in note [5].
[8] In this context, it’s worth pointing out that the Nazi death camps did not start out as death camps, and did not specifically target Jews. In the beginning, the camps housed “undesirables” like Communists. Over time, the definition of “undesirable” expanded, and the limits of what could be done to them loosened.
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.
No Sift next week. The next new articles will post on November 20.
One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.I do not think this is necessary.
This week everybody was avoiding talking about the war in Gaza
That reluctance is the subject of the featured post.
This week Israeli troops moved into Gaza in force, and have encircled Gaza City, cutting the region in two. The Gaza health ministry now reports over 10,000 Palestinian deaths, though this number can’t be independently verified.
Here are a couple of links that didn’t make it into the featured post: Ta-Nahisi Coates goes to the West Bank and interprets what he sees through the lens of Jim Crow: Some people can vote and others can’t. Some people can go wherever they want and others can’t. The history of how things got to be this way may be complicated, Coates says, but the morality of it is simple.
And Nicholas Kristof visits two Palestinian men he met 41 years ago on a bus.
I pushed back and noted how brutal the Hamas terrorism had been and how many Israeli civilians had been killed or kidnapped. Saleh and Mahmoud said that they mourned the Israeli deaths, but wondered why the world wasn’t equally outraged that Palestinians have been killed in cumulatively greater numbers. They were disappointed by my focus on the Hamas barbarism, and I was disappointed by their reluctance to unequivocally condemn those attacks.
… We parted, all of us less spry than we had been the first time. They were fairly ordinary Palestinian men who had mostly kept their heads down; they had avoided politics and had not lost family members to the conflict. But they had lost freedom and dignity. There are untold numbers just like them who never make the headlines but are stewing inside.
I remembered two young men full of promise and warmth, animated by hope and inhabiting a world in which Israelis and Palestinians interacted regularly and didn’t much fear each other. It is wrenching to see such change. As Saleh and Mahmoud became dads and grandfathers, they were shorn of a future, of vitality, of hope.
And that, I think, is the core of the Palestinian problem.
and talking about the new Speaker’s first bill
OK, the House has a speaker again so it’s open for business and ready to govern. Sort of.
The first order of business is a $105 billion emergency spending bill Biden proposed that included money for Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan, and the southern border. It seems likely to pass the Senate with a substantial bipartisan majority.
But “No, no, no,” the House Republican majority says. “That’s not how we want to do business any more. We’ll unbundle the pieces and look at them separately, then combine them with cuts so that spending doesn’t increase.”
But there’s a snag in the House’s logic: The IRS funding was supposed to crack down on rich tax cheats, and is expected to raise more revenue than it costs. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that cutting $14.3 billion out of the IRS budget will decrease revenue by $26.8 billion over ten years, for a net deficit increase of $12.5 billion. (The Fox News story on the bill leaves this detail out.)
So in order to “balance” deficit-increasing aid for Israel, the House adds a deficit-increasing cut to the IRS.
A few things we can conclude from this:
House Republicans aren’t serious about the deficit. If they were, they’d pair the $14 billion of Israel aid with $14 billion of deficit reduction, not an additional deficit increase.
They aren’t serious about helping Israel. Otherwise they wouldn’t try to score political points that will slow down coming to an agreement with the Senate.
Getting aid to Ukraine is going to be difficult. (That should make Putin happy.)
Helping rich people cheat on their taxes is a high priority for them.
If this is how Speaker Johnson approaches legislation, avoiding a government shutdown is going to be difficult. New funding has to pass both houses of Congress by a week from Friday.
Cutting spending: Great idea! Here’s a Labor Party video from Britain a few years ago that explains how austerity (doesn’t) work.
and prejudice rising in America
There were always a number of things wrong with the “melting pot” imagery America once used to describe itself. (Chiefly: the assumption that you had to give up your prior ethnic identity to become truly American, and the fact that we never allowed Black people to fully melt in.) But there’s one thing it got right: Whatever ethnic squabbles you had in the old country should be left in the old country. Germany/France, Greece/Turkey, Serb/Croat — whatever it was, we didn’t want it here. Of course we developed our own ethnic rivalries, but at least they were based on things that happened in America, not feuds brought across the ocean. Mr. Dubois and Mr. Schwartz could be good neighbors here, whatever the Der Kaiser and la République were bickering about.
We seem to have lost that. One of the many depressing aspects of the current conflict in Israel and Gaza is antisemitic and Islamophobic violence in the United States. This much should be obvious: Your Palestinian-American neighbor is not a Hamas terrorist and your Jewish-American neighbor is not trying to steal anybody’s ancestral land. I understand that Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East face difficult issues that I don’t know how to resolve. But the echoing violence here in America is something we can and should just stop. There’s no reason for it.
and the Trump trials
Donald Trump is testifying today in the New York civil fraud trial against the Trump Organization. Last week, Trump sons Don Jr. and Eric testified, and Ivanka is due up on Wednesday.
Last Friday on MSNBC’s “Deadline White House”, former DoJ official Andrew Weissman outlined the standard Trump family strategy on testifying. (Sorry I can’t find video on this or quote him exactly.)
The first ploy, Weissman said, is to claim to be the smartest person in the room. You see this, for example, in things Trump has said about valuing Mar-a-Lago: He knows what it is worth, and nobody else’s opinion matters. Appraisers don’t know, assessors don’t know, accountants don’t know — but he knows. When that fails, the back-up ploy is to claim to be the dumbest person in the room: It’s not my job to know these things; I have people for that. I just do what the accountants and lawyers tell me.
It will be interesting to see which way Trump himself goes today.
Don Jr. and Eric were using the second ploy in their testimony. Junior’s Wharton MBA, he testified, doesn’t mean that he knows anything about accounting. (I have it on good authority that other Wharton MBAs were mortified by this.) The accountants, the Trump sons both claimed, did the financial statements and they just signed off on them.
If you’ve ever had somebody else do your taxes, you should understand that accountants don’t work the way the Trumps claimed. Accountants are not auditors; they apply laws and rules to the numbers you give them. If you lie to your accountant about, say, what you spent to keep your home business operating or how much you paid for the house you just sold, it’s not up to the accountant to do an independent investigation and correct you.
Same thing here: When Trump claimed his Trump Tower apartment was three times its actual size, it wasn’t the accountants’ responsibility to get out a tape measure and check.
Prior to FTX’s collapse, Bankman-Fried was ranked the 41st richest American in the Forbes 400, and the 60th richest person in world by The World’s Billionaires. His net worth peaked at $26 billion. By November 11, 2022, amid the bankruptcy of FTX, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index considered his net worth to have been reduced to zero.
If the federal prosecutors can put Sam Bankman-Fried in jail for stealing billions of dollars, imagine what they can do to you.
but hardly anybody has been talking about the World Series
If you’re younger than, say, 50, you probably have no notion of what the World Series meant when I was growing up in the 1960s. For a little over a week, the world all but stopped. If somebody was playing football on Saturday or Sunday, nobody noticed.
And it wasn’t just the sports world that ground to a halt: The games were all played in the daytime until 1971, and radio broadcasts echoed through factories and other workplaces. Young fans like me applied considerable ingenuity to sneaking radios into our classrooms. (If you could stuff one of the cheap new transistor radios into a shirt pocket and cover the bulge with a sweater, you could thread the earphone cord under a sleeve as far as your left wrist — or right wrist if you were left-handed. Then you could prop your head up palm-to-ear while pretending to do schoolwork with your dominant hand.)
There were no “playoffs” until 1969, and no “wild card” teams until 1995. The regular-season champion of the National and American Leagues played each other, and since there was no interleague play during the season (until 1997), the two leagues were impossible to compare. So the Series held a considerable mystique: These match-ups — Mickey Mantle facing Sandy Koufax or Bob Gibson — could only happen in an All-Star game or a World Series. No one knew what to expect.
That mystique cloaked a difficult truth about baseball: Unlike football or basketball, baseball is so inherently random and streaky that you can’t tell how good a team is by watching it for only a week or two. (For example, countless no-name pitchers have thrown no-hitters during their one magical day in the sun, only to immediately fade back into obscurity.) So while it was undoubtedly true that occasionally the lesser team won the World Series (like the Pirates beating the Yankees in 1960 despite being outscored 55-27 over the course of seven games), it was easy to suspend disbelief and convince yourself that the winner was indeed the best team.
That’s much harder to do now. Twelve teams — nearly half of the 30-team league — get into the playoffs, so one or two of them are bound to get hot and play way over their heads for a few weeks. Whichever two teams are most favored by luck and circumstance will meet in the World Series, and one of them will win. Is that “champion” the best team in baseball? Don’t be silly.
Under the pre-1969 system, this year’s World Series would have featured the Orioles (101-61 in the regular season) against the Braves (104-58), instead of the Rangers (90-72) against the Diamondbacks (84-78). An Orioles/Braves series would have been the culmination of the drama fans had been watching all summer. (Within the National League, the Braves/Dodgers pennant race would have been epic.) Instead, those of us living outside of Texas and Arizona were scratching our heads saying, “Wait. Who are these guys again?”
Or we just ignored it. Because “World Series winner” — the Rangers this year, in case you hadn’t heard — has just become a line in a record book. It doesn’t actually mean anything any more.
and you also might be interested in …
The latest set of polls from NYT/Siena aren’t good, and aren’t good in mysterious ways: Trump has a surprising amount of support among young voters and voters of color.
I finally broke down and subscribed the The Status Kuo blog by Jay Kuo. His latest post is “One Year Out from Election 2024“, and it roughly parallels the argument I made in “About the Polls” in September. He is concerned about the polls, but still thinks Biden is in a far better position than the polls make it appear.
Every single Dem presidential candidate of my lifetime, the tag-team of RW media & shitty MSM has honed in on some (often silly) weakness & beaten it to death. Gore is insincere; Kerry’s a flip-flopper; Clinton had her emails; Biden’s age. Only Obama has escaped this. …
Any realistic alternative to Biden would also be tagged with some flaw, some Thing, some narrative that the media beat to death until the public started repeating it back to them. It’s structural, just how the game works.
And then we’d get calls to shove that person aside in favor of some other even-more-unicorn unicorn that would not be subject to the same shit. There is no unicorn. Solve the structural information problem or things keep getting worse.
It reminds me of a refrain I’ve heard so often in climate/energy over the years: “they’ve polarized X, let’s talk about Y instead.” Dudes. They can polarize anything! They’ve spent decades building a giant polarization machine! There is no non-polarizeable term/tech/policy!
The vote to expel George Santos from Congress failed. But the interesting voice here is Jeff Jackson, a Democrat who voted not to expel him. Jackson points out that an Ethics Committee report on Santos is due in two weeks. The Ethics Committee process that gives investigated members certain rights, and expelling Santos without the report would set a bad precedent. Jackson fully expects to vote to expel Santos after the report comes out, but not until then.
“But Jeff, the other side doesn’t care about precedent or due process!” Perhaps, but I do. And I think we all should. So that’s the standard I’ll defend.
The bigger threat, as I see it, is not that members are kicked out too easily for partisan reasons. It’s that members who are clearly unfit to serve are permitted to remain because of the letters next to their names.
The endless spiral of tragedy seems too depressing to contemplate. But beyond the repetitive segments of the 24-hour news cycle, a few articles are worth paying attention to.
Nobody I know, including me, wants to talk about the war in Gaza and Israel. Sometimes we feel compelled to: It is the news, after all. It is consequential, and informed citizens in the world’s most powerful democracy should form opinions about it.
And yet …
I’ve been witnessing, experiencing, and occasionally complaining about this phenomenon for nearly a month now (since the October 7 Hamas attacks on southern Israel). But it really came home to me Friday evening. I was at a church potluck dinner. My church is full of opinionated people, many of whom have a fairly high assessment of their grasp of world affairs. Then someone brought up the war, and there was an awkward silence. Eventually we segued onto some other topic.
I did not break the silence, because anything it occurred to me to say sounded either pompous or stupid. I have no simple paradigm that lays everything out clearly, and no five-point plan for peace. The people who can fit everything into a simple frame — whether that frame is the Global Zionist Conspiracy or God’s promise to Abraham’s descendants in Genesis 15 — are more likely to be part of the problem than part of the solution. The situation seems to illustrate a famous Bertrand Russell quote:
One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.
And yet, a simple Google search for a source shows that this quote is out of context: Russell’s next line was “I do not believe this is necessary”, and from there he laid out a hopeful message of how he believed human happiness might be achieved.
I have no comparable vision. But if I have no grand explanation to present, Russell at least inspires me to start collecting articles and ideas that seem useful if we want to think seriously about the situation.
Colonialism plays a role, but maybe not the one you think. In the critique of Israel that is popular in some left-wing circles, Zionism is just one more example of White colonists stealing land from indigenous peoples. Previous examples include the United States, where Native Americans were steadily pushed onto smaller and smaller reservations, and the apartheid regime of 20th-century South Africa. In this narrative, the foundation of Israel is an unjust act of Jewish aggression from the beginning, and all the subsequent unhappiness — from the Nakba of 1948 to last month’s Hamas attacks and the Israeli reprisals — can be laid at the door of the early Zionists and their contemporary successors.
Simon Sebag Montefiore does a good debunking of this view in “The Decolonization Narrative Is Dangerous and False” in The Atlantic: Most of the Jews who moved to Israel in the last century or two were not “settlers” so much as refugees — from Czarist pogroms, Nazi death camps, Soviet oppression, Ethiopia, or long-vanished Jewish quarters of Muslim cities like Baghdad. Many of these refugees (especially the Ethiopians) do not fit any reasonable definition of White. Josh Marshall echoes this point:
You cannot look at the range of inhabitants of Israel and all the Palestinian territories together and think the conflict is fundamentally or consistently about skin color. Many Ashkenazi Jews [i.e. from European backgrounds], in American terms, look white. But more than half of Israel’s Jewish population is descended from Jews from the Arab and Islamic worlds. There are many Palestinians and Israeli Jews who could not be readily identified as one or the other by physical appearance or skin color alone.
There is a role for colonialism in this narrative, but it is more subtle. (I’m leaving Montefiore’s article at this point and going off on my own interpretation of history.) In the aftermath of the Holocaust (and the Western world’s relative indifference to it as it was happening), the Zionist vision of a sanctuary for Jews — a place that would always accept them and never throw them out — became compelling for many non-Jews. Once, Western liberals might have imagined that civilization and education would eventually overcome the ancient prejudices, but what society had been more civilized or better educated than Germany? And among those ancient prejudices, antisemitism seemed virtually unique. Jews, of course, are not the only group that has ever been persecuted, and the Holocaust was not history’s only genocide. But antisemitism’s ability to subside for decades and then spring up with renewed virulence made virtually any nation’s guarantees suspect.
In addition to that theoretical justification, there was a practical problem that needed a solution: Postwar Europe was full of displaced persons, including many survivors of the death camps. They couldn’t be sent back to their families, who were either dead or similarly displaced. Often their entire villages no longer existed, or were now occupied by the people who had collaborated with the Nazis to send them away. But they had to go somewhere.
Palestine was of course where the Zionists envisioned their homeland, but the great powers were not bound by their preferences. (Michael Chabon’s novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union takes place in an alternate history where part of Alaska became a sanctuary for Jews fleeing the Holocaust.) There was even a certain logic to making the nations that caused the problem pay the price: What if, say, Bavaria, where Hitler’s movement got its start, had been set aside as a Jewish homeland?
But even suggesting such a thing sounds laughable, because Bavaria already had citizens (some of whom share my last name, though I’ve never met them) and cities like Munich. But so did everyplace else, including Palestine. The world had no desirable empty spaces. The challenge was to find a place whose current inhabitants volunteered, or could be induced to cooperate.
Or whose desires could be ignored.
What separated Palestine from everyplace else wasn’t just the Zionist vision, it was that the Arab world had no power. World War I had brought down the Ottoman Empire, and the subsequent treaty of 1922 divided the region into a British mandate and a French mandate. These colonial powers then drew the outlines of the subsequent states: Syria and Lebanon by the French, and Iraq, Jordan, and the Hejaz (a forerunner of Saudi Arabia) by the British. The strife-torn histories of several of these states comes in part from their unnatural founding. (As we saw during the Iraq War, there is little reason for Iraqi Kurdistan — largely the Ottoman province of Mosul — to belong to the same country as the former Ottoman provinces of Baghdad and Basra.)
When Britain and the United Nations (with American support) split the Palestine mandate into a Jewish state and an Arab state, the great powers were doing what great powers often do: paying their moral debts with someone else’s assets.
Today, Americans often shake our heads at the two sides: Why can’t they get along? We are dismayed when every dispute seems to have no beginning: The Israelis have no choice but to do Z, because the Palestinians did Y. And the Palestinians had no choice but to do Y, because the Israelis had already done X … back and back and back to A and beyond. “Why not leave them to fight it out?” we sometimes think, because it has nothing to do with us.
But it has everything to do with us. We played a large role in the great-power coalition that redrew the world after World War II. That arrangement set the Israeli Jews and the Palestinians up to fight with each other. What has happened since was not fate; both sides have made mistakes and have blown opportunities to seek peace. But it’s not all their fault either.
Jews deserve a state. The Western powers should not have made Palestine provide one. That is history now and there’s no undoing it. Generations have been born and died in Israel; moving either the Israelis or the Palestinians somewhere else would be no more just than moving you or me from our homes. But we also can’t wash our hands of the current situation. If there is some way to resolve it that demands sacrifice, the US, Britain, the EU, and perhaps other countries should be ready to make some of those sacrifices.
The situations in Gaza and the West Bank may be linked, but we can’t lose sight of the differences. Here I would point you to Matt Yglesias’ “Israel’s Two Wars“. He believes that Israel has little choice but to root Hamas out of Gaza (with all the costs that entails), but opposes what has been happening slowly for decades on the West Bank.
while Israel is waging a just war in Gaza, they are in parallel waging an unjust war in the West Bank. This second war is much less spectacular, much more of a slow burn, and at the moment, is causing much less death and destruction to innocent civilians. That these two wars — one just but spectacularly deadly, one unjust but lower-key — are playing out in tandem is contributing to a confused and polarized debate over a set of issues that were already quite fraught.
Yglesias believes that the closest the two sides came to peace was at the 2008 summit in Annapolis. The framework of that near-agreement was that Israel got to keep its most populous West Bank settlements, in exchange for giving the new Palestinian state land elsewhere. Obviously that compromise gets harder for Palestinians to accept the more settlements there are. Yglesias believes that sabotaging such a two-state solution has been a deliberate Netanyahu policy.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s return to power in 2009 was based on a very different premise [than an Annapolis-style agreement]: that the Palestinian issue could be managed indefinitely rather than resolved and with no major repercussions. …
For those of us who never believed this could be true, it did slowly become a matter of reason over experience. That couldn’t go on forever. And yet, year after year somehow it did. Israel’s economy grew stronger. It normalized relations with more Arab countries. It even managed a de facto normalization and something close to a de facto, though sub rosa, alliance with Saudi Arabia. It couldn’t work and yet it kept working. Until it didn’t.
What exploded Netanyahu’s legitimacy and reputation on October 7th wasn’t just an abject national security failure. It exploded the whole idea that the occupation could be effectively managed and that Benjamin Netanyahu could manage it.
He sees a return to the Netanyahu status quo as a failure of imagination: a simultaneous inability to imagine peace and an inability to imagine the nightmares that will continue to happen until both sides are willing to take risks for peace.
What might happen in Gaza. One of the most dismal aspects of thinking about this war is that all roads seem to lead nowhere. Simply punishing Hamas, but leaving it in control of Gaza, just starts the clock ticking down to the next attack. But occupying Gaza would be an endless quagmire.
In Iraq, the US demonstrated the limits of military power: A superior military can go wherever it wants and destroy whatever it chooses. Any goal that can be achieved by going places and destroying things can be achieved by military might alone. However, neither winning over a population that hates you nor establishing a government they will cooperate with fits that description.
Israel wants to wind up living next to a Gaza that is stable rather than a launching pad for future attacks like the ones we just saw. But what kind of government could achieve such a goal?
Thus far, the Israelis have answered the question only in the negative. Although some of the ultranationalists in the Netanyahu government openly fantasize about reoccupying Gaza, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has said that his government won’t pursue that path, which would come at a financial, military, and moral cost that Israel apparently doesn’t want to bear. But the alternative to a postwar occupation of some sort is lawlessness, which would permit Hamas’s return, thus undermining the very purpose of the war.
Foer asked “a former prime minister, a former national security adviser, and a former head of Mossad, as well as longtime diplomats and analysts in Washington” to imagine “a plausible endgame for Gaza”.
What I found was both a surprising degree of consensus on a plan for life after Hamas, and a lack of faith in the current Israeli government’s ability to execute it.
That plan has a number of moving parts, and requires a number of countries, including the Gazans themselves, to make sensible decisions. The basic steps are
Israel goes into Gaza and destroys Hamas as a viable government. But it does not stay as an occupying power.
During a transition period that is framed from the beginning as temporary, a collection of Arab countries not aligned with Iran — the article suggests Egypt, Jordan, the Emirates, and Morocco — manage a reconstruction. Presumably, this reconstruction is funded by some combination of the oil-rich Arab states, the US, and the EU.
What makes the transition temporary is turning Gaza over to the Palestinian Authority that currently oversees the West Bank.
Each participant buy-in might be difficult to achieve, but Foer tries to answer those objections: Egypt will want its companies to get reconstruction contracts. The PA will want to “substantially [bolster] its position in the West Bank.”
It would almost certainly demand stringent constraints on settlement expansion and promises of greater autonomy, measures that Netanhyahu and coalition partners abhor.
Now we’re back to the “sacrifices for peace” from the last section. So why would the Israeli government (whatever it looks like when the war ends) make such concessions?
In the midst of such gloom, I also thought I detected muffled hints of hope. Israelis almost universally invoked the unexpected aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the other cataclysmic lapse in the history of the nation’s defense, so searing that it scrambled the politics of both Israel and its neighbors. Some of the Jewish state’s old enemies finally accepted its existence. Fervent hawks in Israel became ambitious peacemakers. No Israeli was willing to stake their reputation on the rise of a new alignment, but they all wanted to believe in its imminence, beyond the carnage.
A million things can go wrong with the plan Foer describes, and with the resolution of Gaza as a stepping stone to a broader peace. Certainly, plans that seemed more promising have failed in the past. Peace is definitely a long shot. But we have to hope that at some point all involved will realize that there is no alternative. At that point, an admonition of the original Zionist, Theodore Herzl, can be repurposed: “If you will it, it is no dream.“
For about a month I’ve been watching a tendency both in myself and in just about everyone I know: We’d rather not think about the war in Gaza. Yes, it’s news. Yes, we see ourselves as citizens of a democracy who have a duty to stay well informed. But this is just too depressing. Maybe there’s something amusing we can stream on Netflix.
The 24-hour news cycle doesn’t help. Every time I look at CNN, it seems like they’re interviewing either a relative of a Hamas hostage, someone who managed to hide or run from the October 7 attack, or a Gaza nurse who has no supplies — as if the tenth such interview will communicate something the first nine failed to capture.
In some sense, though, this kind of situation is the Weekly Sift’s whole purpose: Beyond the endless repetition, somebody out there must be saying things we need to think about. I’ve tried to pick a few out in this week’s featured post, “Can we talk about Israel and Palestine?” That should be out around 9 or so EST.
The weekly summary will cover the new Speaker’s attempt to play politics with Israel/Palestine aid, the ongoing Trump trials, the polls a year out from the election, the actual elections happening tomorrow, and an old man’s rant about the World Series, before doing something I try to never do: repeat a closing. I used this 2Cellos video as a closing nine years ago, but it’s still great. That should appear before noon.
Someone asked me today in the media, “People are curious, what does Mike Johnson think about any issue?” I said, “Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.“
This week everybody was talking about the new speaker
Wednesday, the House ended three weeks of chaos by electing Mike Johnson (R-LA) Speaker of the House on a party line vote. The featured post outlines why Johnson scares me more than some random right-wing extremist with similar views on most issues: Mike Johnson is a Christian Nationalist. So he feels perfectly justified in ignoring the will of the electorate and imposing his moral vision on us.
But there’s more to think about here than just Johnson. Last week I may have raised your hope that non-MAGA Republicans had found their backbones. I apologize. After watching the MAGA wing torpedo Tom Emmer’s candidacy for speaker, his supporters gave in and voted unanimously for Mike Johnson, whose ideology differs from Jim Jordan’s only by being more theocratic.
Ken Buck of Colorado is a prime example. Two weeks ago, in an interview with MSNBC’s Katy Tur, Buck seemed to be taking a principled pro-democracy stand:
I asked [Steve Scalise] last night: “Will you unequivocally and publicly state that the election, the 2020 presidential election, was not stolen?” He didn’t answer that question very clearly and Jim Jordan didn’t answer that question very clearly.
But then he backed down and voted for Johnson, who led 100 Republican members of Congress in supporting an unsuccessful lawsuit by the Texas attorney general that would have invalidated the electoral votes of Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Without those states, Joe Biden would not have had 270 electoral votes and the outcome of the election would have been thrown into dispute. (The Supreme Court refused to consider the case on the grounds that Texas had no standing.)
After casting his vote in support of Johnson on Wednesday, Buck told CNN that he had not heard Johnson acknowledge that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election, as he had previously demanded of Jordan and Scalise.
“I have not gotten that promise from Mike,” Buck said. “I hope he comes around to that point.”
Here’s how much respect Johnson has for Buck’s question: When Johnson faced the press for the first time as speaker, ABC’s Rachel Scott tried to ask something similar. She was shouted down by the Republican congresspeople surrounding Johnson, highlighted by North Carolina’s Virginia Foxx yelling, “Shut up! Shut up!” The Hill describes the Speaker’s response:
Johnson smiled, shook his head and said “next question.”
That seems to be Speaker Johnson in a nutshell: He dresses more neatly than Jim Jordan, keeps his cool, and is not as uncouth as Virginia Foxx. But he’s on the same page, and will unapologetically take advantage of their rudeness.
In the same Katy Tur interview, Rep. Buck mentioned that he wanted assurances from the speaker candidates that they would bring Ukraine funding up for a vote. It looks like he didn’t get that from Johnson either. Thursday, Speaker Johnson announced that he intended to separate Ukraine and Israel funding bills. The implication of that is that each bill would be subject to the Hastert Rule, which does not allow votes on bills that don’t have majority support inside the Republican caucus. Ukraine aid is a close question within the caucus, so it may not come up for a vote in the full House, where it would surely pass.
and the Israel/Gaza war
Unless you implicitly trust one side or the other, it’s hard to get any clear idea of what’s going on in Gaza. Bombs are falling, and whatever anyone intends, they fall (like the rain) on the just and the unjust alike. A ground invasion has started, but doesn’t seem yet to be an all-out assault. Such an assault may still be coming, but it might not.
This is America, so you don’t have time to process one shooting before the next one happens. Saturday night, shots were fired in Tampa’s Ybor City neighborhood.
A shooting erupted in the middle of Ybor City after a Saturday night full of Halloween celebrations, leaving two dead and at least 18 people injured, Tampa police said.
But you may not be ready to think about that yet, because the rampage in Lewiston, Maine Wednesday evening is still so fresh. A shooter attacked random people in a bar and in a bowling alley, killing 18 and wounding 13. (Early reports that 50-60 people had been injured were wrong.) The shooter has been identified as Robert Card, and his body was found Friday; apparently he killed himself.
If you wanted to make the point that American gun laws are insane, you could hardly have designed an event more perfectly. In July, Card bought a Ruger SFAR high-powered rifle and a Beretta semi-automatic pistol. Ten days later, while serving as an Army reservist at a camp in New York,
the army gave Card a “Command Referral” to seek treatment after he told army personnel at Camp Smith Card had been “hearing voices” and had thoughts about “hurting other soldiers.” A National Guard spokesperson confirmed to CNN Card was transported to the nearby Keller Army Community Hospital at the United States Military Academy for “medical evaluation,” after Army Reserve officials reported Card for “behaving erratically.”
Card’s family told NBC News on Thursday that he had been hearing voices for months. “His mind was twisting them around,” said Katie Card, the suspect’s sister-in-law.
She said the family reached out to police and Card’s Army Reserve base as they “got increasingly concerned.”
Unfortunately, Maine only has a “yellow-flag law”, a watered-down version of the red-flag laws 21 other states have.
Even though Card underwent psychiatric treatment, [Nick] Suplina [senior vice president for law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety] said he believes that would not have immediately set Maine’s yellow flag law into motion because that process involved a law enforcement agency in a different state. [New York]
The family would have likely had to contact police in Maine, starting a new process, Suplina said.
So in the United States, or at least in Maine, you can be crazy, people can know you’re crazy, there can be a recent record of you buying a gun suitable for mass killing, and nobody can do anything about it.
I’ve heard several local people explain that implementing a more effective red-flag law hadn’t seemed all that urgent, because Maine (and particularly a small town like Lewiston), just didn’t seem like the kind of place where these things happen. But the inadequacy of that kind of thinking has been exposed over and over again: Parkland, Florida wasn’t the kind of place where these things happen. Neither was Uvalde, Texas or Newtown, Connecticut. After last year’s Fourth of July shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, I tried to explain what that meant:
I don’t think I’ve ever been to Highland Park, and you probably haven’t either. But you’ve seen it.The movies use Chicago’s North Shore suburbs to symbolize affluent communities so sheltered from the scary aspects of modern life that teens have to seek out adventure for themselves. Ferris Bueller lived in Highland Park; so did Joel Goodsen from Risky Business. That idyllic family life The Good Wife had before her crooked-politician husband went to jail and everything fell apart? It was in Highland Park. The town sits between Lake Forest, where 1980 Best Picture Ordinary People was set, and Winnetka, site of the Home Alone house. (But parts of that movie were shot in Highland Park too.)
During their glory days with the Bulls, basketball legends Michael Jordan and Scotty Pippen had Highland Park mansions. Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick was born there. About 30K people live there now, and the 2010 census says the median household income is over $100K.
Here’s what I’m trying to get across: If a mass shooting can happen in Highland Park, it can happen anywhere. It can happen in your town too.
So me say it again: As long as we have these crazy gun laws, we’re all vulnerable.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is hearing a case that could invalidate another kind of red-flag law: one that takes guns away from domestic abusers. Such laws are excellent from two points of view:
They undoubtedly save the lives of spouses, children, and other close associates of violent individuals.
And they probably prevent mass shootings, because mass shooters often start on a smaller scale, with violence against the people closest to them.
But maybe a law disarming domestic abusers is one of those nice things we just can’t have in the United States, at least not under this Supreme Court.
According to Vox’ Ian Millhiser, Zackey Rahimi is “an individual that no sensible society would allow to have a gun”. Allegedly, in addition to assaulting his girl friend in a parking lot, Rahimi fired a gun at a bystander who witnessed the incident. He was involved in five other shooting incidents in a little over a year.
And yet, an appeals court recently found that Rahimi has a constitutional right to own a gun. In fact, any law that tries to take his guns away is unconstitutional on its face.
That means that, if the Fifth Circuit’s decision is upheld by the Supreme Court, this federal ban on firearm possession by domestic abusers may never be applied to any individual, no matter how violent that individual may be and no matter how careful the court that issued a restraining order against such an individual was in ensuring that they received due process.
But we haven’t gotten to the craziest part yet: That result is a correct application of the doctrine Clarence Thomas laid out in the 2022 Bruen decision.
Bruen held that, in order to justify nearly any law regulating firearms, “the government must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” This means that lawyers defending even the most widely accepted gun laws, such as the federal ban on gun possession by domestic abusers, must show that “analogous regulations” also existed and were accepted when the Constitution was framed — particularly if the law addresses “a general societal problem that has persisted since the 18th century.” If they cannot, the challenged gun law must be struck down.
And that’s where we’re out of luck. Domestic abuse certainly existed in the Founding Era, but it wasn’t considered a crime. And there’s no contemporary record of any law taking flintlock pistols away from wife beaters. So unless the Court wants to backtrack on a fairly recent decision, Rahimi (and even worse people) will get to keep his guns.
and the Trump trials
Another of Trump’s co-defendants in the Georgia RICO case pleaded guilty Tuesday: Jenna Ellis.
Ellis, who once described herself as part of an “elite strike force team” of attorneys pursuing unfounded claims of election fraud, pleaded guilty to one count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings.
“If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-election challenges,” a tearful Ellis told the judge.
What damage Ellis’ testimony might do to Trump — or to co-defendant Rudy Giuliani, who Ellis worked with closely — is still speculative. In the NYT, Norman Eisen and Amy Lee Copeland cast her as a star witness, but it’s hard to say at this point.
Rudy Giuliani, flanked by cooperating witnesses Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis.
Two different Trump gag orders were in the news. In the civil fraud trial against the Trump Organization in New York, Judge Arthur Engoron called Trump to the stand, found his testimony not credible, and fined him $10,000. Engoron had earlier issued a gag order on Trump preventing him from attacking officers of the court when Trump had baselessly posted on Truth Social that Engoron’s law clerk was Chuck Schumer’s girlfriend. He had fined Trump $5K when the post persisted on Trump’s campaign website, which his lawyers said was “inadvertent”.
This fine came after Trump told reporters outside the courtroom on Wednesday that “This judge is a very partisan judge with a person who is very partisan sitting alongside him — perhaps even much more partisan than he is.” Judge Engoron took that as yet another reference to his clerk, which Trump denied on the stand. (He claimed he was talking about Michael Cohen, who had appeared that day as a witness. Attacking witnesses is also typically frowned upon.) This was the claim Engoron said he didn’t believe.
Meanwhile, Judge Tanya Chutkan (presiding in the federal election interference case against Trump) issued a gag order banning him from attacking prosecutors and witnesses in that trial. She stayed the order temporarily while waiting for an appellate court to rule, but then reinstated it when Trump used the temporary break in the order to go after potential witness Mark Meadows.
Trump is claiming that his status as a former president and current presidential candidate gives him rights no other criminal defendant would have. I doubt the appeals court will agree with him.
Ultimately, Trump will have to be found in contempt of court because he is in fact contemptuous of the proceedings against him. Clearly, $10K fines are not going to restrain him. Eventually, we’ll have to see if jail time works.
This should be an exciting week in the New York fraud trial: Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka are expected to testify.
you also might be interested in …
The Commerce Department reported that the US economy grew at a 4.9% annual pace in the third quarter. (And yes, that number does account for inflation.) The previous week, a report from the Federal Reserve said that both mean and median household wealth is up. In other words, American households are generally richer than they were before the pandemic.
One of the continuing mysteries of American politics is that President Biden consistently polls badly on economic issues, while the country’s economic statistics have been quite good.
Weird weather continues to result from climate change: Hurricane Otis made landfall near Acapulco as a Category 5 storm Wednesday. It is the only Cat 5 storm to hit the Pacific coast, and intensified from a mere tropical storm in less than 24 hours.
Virginia holds its elections in odd years, making the state a possible bellwether of national trends. Two years ago, Glenn Youngkin’s upset victory in the governor’s race drew attention to critical race theory and other right-wing education tropes.
A week from tomorrow, the governorship is not on the ballot, but control of the legislature is. Democrats currently hold a small majority in the Senate and Republicans in the House.
Here are a few things Trump said in Sioux City, Iowa yesterday. He bragged about being willing to ignore our NATO obligations.
I remember, the head of a country stood up and said, “Does that mean that if Russia attacks my country, you will not be there?” And I said, “That’s right. That’s what it means. I will not protect you.”
The NYT collects some of Trump’s other recent blunders: He warned that the US is on the verge of World War II. He bragged about being ahead of Barack Obama in the polls, and claimed that he beat Obama in 2016. He referred to Hungarian President Viktor Orban as the president of Turkey. He pronounced Hamas as if it were hummus.
But Biden is the one who’s out of it because he’s too old.
Mike Pence suspended his presidential campaign. From the beginning, his campaign has felt like one of those moments in football when a quarterback cocks his arm and I think, “Where is he throwing that?” And sure enough, the pass goes right to a defender and gets intercepted.
Same thing here. I never understood what voters Pence was targeting. MAGA voters resent Pence for not cooperating in Trump’s coup. Non-MAGA voters resent Pence for staying loyal to Trump right up to moment of the coup. Maybe he thought that he could reclaim the Evangelical voters he led to Trump in 2016, but they’re long gone. In the GOP, the good-Christian-family-man boat sailed a long time ago.
He should have thrown the ball out of bounds and punted.
You may not know about Conservapedia, the conservative alternative to the “liberal” (i.e., reality based) Wikipedia. But Kat Abu pays attention to these things, while managing to keep her sense of humor.
and let’s close with something massive
There’s something really primal about singing along with large numbers of people. Also, large groups often sound surprisingly decent. (The notes sung tend to average out on the right ones.) Astrid Jorgensen of Australia started the Pub Choir project to create singing-together projects on an epic scale.
At Pub Choir events, Jorgensen teaches a well-known song in 3-part harmony to non-trained singers. The performance is filmed and posted on the net.
In this video, Pub Choirs in cities across Australia unite to sing Toto’s “Africa”. The result is strangely compelling, whether you like the song or not.
Most Americans don’t know much about Christian Nationalism. They’re about to find out.
If you hadn’t heard of Mike Johnson until this week, don’t be embarrassed. Neither had I and neither had anybody but his Louisiana constituents and the most obsessive observers of politics. And so since Wednesday, when the House Republican caucus suddenly pulled unity out of a hat and elected Johnson speaker on a party-line vote, we’ve seen a lot of scrambling to characterize him.
Matt Gaetz, who had started this three-week circus by introducing a motion to get rid of Kevin McCarthy, declared victory by christening Johnson as “MAGA Mike”. Critics pointed to his role in Trump’s election denial: He organized the 100+ House Republicans who signed an amicus brief in the Texas lawsuit challenging the electoral votes of Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and offered legal cover to the 147 Republicans who voted not to certify Joe Biden’s victory.
On the eve of the Jan. 6 votes, Mr. Johnson had honed his arguments undermining the election to be more palatable. He presented colleagues with arguments they could use to oppose the will of the voters without embracing conspiracy theories and the lies of widespread fraud pushed by Mr. Trump. Mr. Johnson instead faulted the way some states had changed voting procedures during the pandemic, saying it was unconstitutional. [1]
Other people noted his extreme views on social issues: Johnson has sponsored a six-week abortion ban. As a lawyer for Americans Defending Freedom, he defended laws criminalizing gay sex (which doesn’t sound very freedom-loving to me). He sponsored a federal version of Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law. He’s a climate-change denier who fights all efforts to discourage fossil fuel use. His discussion of the border dog-whistles the racist Great Replacement Theory. All of which caused the NYT’s Jamelle Bouie to characterize him as “an election-denying extremist who believes that his allies have the right to nullify election results so that they can impose their vision of government and society on an unwilling public”.
And that analysis is true as far as it goes, but it misses the underlying theme that justifies these views and portends worse ones we haven’t heard yet: Mike Johnson is a Christian Nationalist.
Christian Nationalism. In a nutshell, Christian Nationalism is the belief that the United States was founded not as a secular republic, but as a specifically Christian nation. In an interview with Politico, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a historian who specializes in evangelical Christianity and politics, elaborates:
Christian nationalism essentially posits the idea that America is founded on God’s laws, and that the Constitution is a reflection of God’s laws. Therefore, any interpretation of the Constitution must align with Christian nationalists’ understanding of God’s laws. Freedom for them means freedom to obey God’s law, not freedom to do what you want.
On most contentious issues, this puts Christian Nationalists on the same side as ordinary conservatives, and makes it easy to confuse one with the other. But there’s a difference: Ordinary conservatives at least give lip service to the idea of fairness, while Christian Nationalists don’t. Their side represents God’s Truth, so of course they should win. The appropriate standards are God’s standards, so it would be ridiculous to apply abstract rules equally to both sides.
For example, one point I often make in my articles on the Supreme Court’s “religious freedom” cases is that they aren’t about freedom at all; they’re about giving special rights to Christians. (The “praying football coach” won his case because he’s Christian. No Muslim or other non-Christian coach should imagine that the Court will defend his right to lead players in prayer on the 50-yard line.) But I make that point expecting the other side to deny it. If I could argue with Sam Alito or Amy Coney Barrett, I would expect them to spin their position in a way that makes it sound scrupulously principled and fair.
Similarly, when I accuse MAGA Republicans of being against democracy, I expect them to dodge, not to confront the point. Somehow, they’ll paint gerrymandering, voter suppression, the Electoral College, and the filibuster as pro-democracy, not anti-democracy.
But in either case, a true Christian Nationalist might accept my characterization and openly defend it: Of course Christians should get special rights, because the United States is a Christian nation. And ultimate sovereignty belongs to God, not to the People. If democracy leads to the People voting down God’s laws, then democracy has to go. [2]
For example, in this broadcast radio host Brian Fischer of the American Family Association claimed that the First Amendment’s “free exercise” clause only applies to Christians.
But the point is, by “religion” the Founders were thinking of Christianity. So the purpose was to protect the free exercise of the Christian faith. It wasn’t about protecting anything else. They weren’t providing any cover or shelter for the free exercise of Islam or even Judaism or even atheism. They weren’t saying you can’t do it, I want to be clear on that. They weren’t prohibiting that. They were just saying “That’s not what we’re talking about here.” …
If we don’t understand the word “religion” to mean “Christianity” as the Founders intended it, then we have no way to stop Islam. We have no way to stop Satanism. We have no way to stop any other sort of sinister religious practice that might creep onto these fruited plains.
Mike Johnson. While Du Mez admitted she had never heard Johnson characterize himself as a Christian Nationalist, she believes the shoe fits.
I feel comfortable applying that [label]; it’s not in a pejorative way. It’s simply descriptive. As he understands it, this country was founded as a Christian nation. …
But he goes much deeper than that, and really roots that in what he would call a biblical worldview: The core principles of our nation reflect these biblical truths and biblical principles. He has gone on record saying things like, for him, this biblical worldview means that all authority comes from God and that there are distinct realms of God-ordained authority, and that is the family, the church and the government.
Now, all this authority, of course, is under this broader understanding of God-given authority. So it’s not the right of any parents to decide what’s best for their kids; it’s the right of parents to decide what’s best for their kids in alignment with his understanding of biblical law. Same thing with the church’s role: It is to spread Christianity but also to care for the poor. That’s not the government’s job.
And then the government’s job is to support this understanding of authority and to align the country with God’s laws.
I want to tell all my colleagues here what I told the Republicans in that room last night. I don’t believe there are any coincidences in a manner like this. I believe that scripture, the Bible is very clear that God is the one that raises up those in authority. He raised up each of you, all of us, and I believe that God has ordained and allowed each one of us to be brought here for this specific moment in this time. [3]
We don’t live in a democracy, because a democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what’s for dinner. … The Founders set [our system] up because they followed the Biblical admonition on what a civil society is supposed to look like.
And:
The Founders believed that we’re endowed by our Creator with these rights, and that we owe our allegiance ultimately to our Creator, because He’s going to be the judge of all of us. One day, every knee is going to bow before the Lord.
God ordained civil government with certain authority. But He gave it limited authority. … The overarching problem we have right now is that the government has gone beyond the scope of the authority that was ordained by God. … And when the government grows and it expands its scope of authority, it usurps it from somewhere else. It takes the power and authority that God had ordained for the Church and the Family.
The Christian-establishing Constitution is what Christian Nationalists have in mind when they talk about defending or restoring “the Constitution” — not the document that you or I might read, the one that never once mentions God, and whose meanings and intentions Americans have been arguing about since the Founding, but that document overlaid with a very specific set of interpretations rooted in an Evangelical Christian moral vision.
In this way, they are treating the Constitution much the way they treat the Bible itself — as if their own very elaborate interpretations were sitting right there in the text. As Speaker Johnson told Sean Hannity:
I am a Bible-believing Christian – someone asked me today… people are curious, “What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the Sun?” I said, “Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it, that’s my worldview – that’s what I believe.”
But if you ever do what Johnson suggests — pick up a Bible and try to read it de novo, as if no one had ever told you what it is supposed to mean — you almost certainly will fail to find anything resembling a “worldview”, and certainly not a view that transparently applies to the 21st-century world. [4]
Instead, you’ll find a number of evocative stories open to a wide range of interpretations. To take an extreme example from the very beginning: In the Garden of Eden story, it’s not entirely clear that the serpent is the villain. What the serpent tells Eve turns out to be true, and God’s threat that she will die if she eats the forbidden fruit only becomes true because God makes it true: He banishes her and Adam from the Garden specifically so that they won’t eat from the Tree of Life. So which of the two supernatural antagonists has Eve’s best interests at heart?
In short, the people who want to bring America “back to the Bible”, or to “restore the Constitution”, aren’t talking about the actual Bible or the actual Constitution. They are talking about these revered documents with their particular sect’s interpretations pasted on top of them.
And now one of them is running the House of Representatives.
[1] Note what is not being claimed here: that Biden’s voters weren’t real or weren’t entitled to vote. Instead, the claim is that these legitimate voters cast their votes in ways that shouldn’t have counted — like by mail in districts that in previous elections had different rules about voting by mail.
Even if this claim had some legal legitimacy, which I doubt, trying to fix it two months after the election violated the way we have always done things here in America: We argue about the election rules before the election. We don’t wait to see who wins, and then, if we lose, try to invalidate the votes of fellow citizens who voted in good faith under the rules their local officials had laid out for them.
[2] Arguing with a Christian Nationalist can be jarring for precisely this reason: They happily take the position you had hoped to trap them in. It’s as if a child accused their parents of liking another child better, and the parents replied, “Of course we like Jenny better. Now shut up and clean your room.”
[3] Someone needs to ask Johnson whether God has raised up Joe Biden to his current place of authority. I can’t guess what his answer would be.
[4] Try this experiment: Find some article (like this one) listing all the Bible verses that supposedly condemn abortion. Now go to each one and read the whole chapter the verse comes from. You will discover that, in context, these verses have nothing to do with abortion.
Anti-abortion views, like many other conservative Christian views, do not come from the Bible. They come from somewhere else — largely whatever the Christian community wants to believe — and are imposed on the Bible through interpretation.
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.
The Weekly Sift 