One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World
This week's featured post is "The Mar-a-Lago Documents Indictment".
This week everybody was talking about the Trump indictment
That's the subject of the featured post.
Jeff Sharlet takes a deep dive into the fascist codewords in Trump's first post-federal-indictment speech. Among other things, Sharlet has the only coherent interpretation I've heard of "Jack Smith. Does anyone know what his name used to be?" Sharlet reads this as an implication that Smith is Jewish, and hence part of the conspiracy of "globalists" and "Marxists", which are also fascist codewords for Jews.
Jack Smith, claims Trump, "caused" the IRS to "go after evangelicals, Christians, great Americans of faith." Get the antisemitism? Jack Smith, who must have changed his name must be a Jewish enemy of Christianity.
Sharlet also has a principle I will have to keep in mind: You can't fact-check a myth, but you can interpret it.
What he seems to mean by that is that it does no good to point out that what Trump (or some other fascist) says is untrue. His followers probably already know that it's untrue, or they don't care. The point of saying such things is to communicate something. Decoding the communication is more important than challenging the fact.
I believe he referenced the following Sartre quote somewhere, but I can't find the link:
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
and wildfire smoke
We usually associate wildfires with the West, and mostly with sparsely populated areas. But this week smoke from wildfires in Canada blanketed the densely populated Northeast, including New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.
Most of the time, climate change seems abstract, but scenes like the one below bring it home.
and the other Republicans running for president
There's a type of self-fulfilling prophesy that always drives me nuts: Because everyone believes "You can't do X", nobody even tries to do X. And then the fact that X doesn't happen is taken as evidence for "You can't do X."
One case in point is the belief among Republicans that "You can't stand up to Trump." So again and again we've seen some senator like Jeff Flake or Bob Corker or Ben Sasse criticize Trump in some fairly mild way, and then not seek reelection. At each impeachment trial, Mitch McConnell had it in his power to remove Trump from office and make him ineligible to run again, but he backed down both times. Trump was almost untouchable for a few weeks after January 6, but then Kevin McCarthy made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to kiss his ring.
For six years now, Republicans who are secretly anti-Trump have been hoping that someone else -- the Democrats, the courts, more courageous Republicans -- would take Trump out, absorb the anger of his cult, and leave them to pick up the pieces. But it hasn't happened.
Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney are the most visible Trump critics who did not voluntarily walk into the sunset. Cheney was expelled from the party, but Romney still seems to be doing fine. For the most part, though, the Republican Party has surrendered without putting up a fight. It's hard to blame Republican voters for believing there's no case against Trump, when none of their elected leaders are willing to make that case.
The first few candidates to challenge Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination continued the pattern. Listening to Nikki Haley or Tim Scott raises an obvious question: "Why are you running?" If the front-runner in the race was such a great president and you have no signature issue you would handle differently, why go to all the bother?
Mike Pence's timid criticisms inspired this parody from Josh Marshall:
Pence: I should have been hanged. Trump couldn’t get it done. I will.
For a long time Ron DeSantis seemed to think he could handle Trump without confronting him, but that resulted in a collapse of the strong position he held in the polls after the midterm elections, where DeSantis did well and Trump-endorsed candidates did badly. But key Republican constituencies -- White working-class men, Evangelical Christians -- are looking for a fighter who will stand up to the cultural forces working against them. Every time DeSantis takes a punch from Trump without punching back, he convinces more voters that he's not that guy.
Well finally somebody has entered the race to go after Trump: Chris Christie, who has a CNN town hall tonight.
The grift from this family is breathtaking. It’s breathtaking. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Kushner walk out of the White House, and months later get $2 billion from the Saudis. You think it’s because he’s some kind of investing genius? Or do you think it’s because he was sitting next to the president of the United States for four years doing favors for the Saudis? That’s your money. That’s your money he stole and gave it to his family. You know what that makes us? A banana republic.
He has almost no chance to be the nominee himself, but maybe he can wound Trump badly enough to give someone else a shot at the nomination.
and the voting-rights decision
Chief Justice Roberts has been chipping away at the Voting Right Act for years, so it was a surprise Thursday when Roberts wrote a majority opinion preserving what is left of the VRA. Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh joined the court's three liberals (Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson) in a 5-4 decision rejecting Alabama's congressional map, which is drawn so that only one of the seven districts has a non-white majority.
Decades of precedent have interpreted the VRA as requiring the creation of majority-minority districts when a state's voters are racially polarized, the current map results in a congressional delegation where minorities are under-represented, and the districts can be drawn without violating other principles of sound redistricting, like forming compact and contiguous districts that don't split cities and counties unnecessarily. This has become known as the Gingles test, after the 1986 case where it was spelled out.
Alabama could easily have created a second majority-minority district, bringing its congressional delegation closer to racial parity. But it chose not to, inviting the Court to replace Gingles with a less rigorous test. Justices Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, and Coney Barrett agreed with Alabama.
So the current decision preserves the status quo. It doesn't represent an advance in minority voting rights.
This decision concerns an injunction, not a final resolution of the case. But the injunction is based in part on the Court's assessment that Alabama is likely to lose on the merits.
Personally, I remain skeptical of Roberts' intentions. Like Ed Pilkington in The Guardian, I think Roberts plays a long game. Whenever he is about to push hard in one direction, he first makes a head fake in the opposite direction to give himself cover.
Any day now, I expect the Court to strike down affirmative action in college admissions. When that happens, the media will reference this voting-rights decision to frame Roberts as a "moderate". Taken as a whole, though, the two decisions will represent a continued whittling down of minority rights, and Roberts can continue destroying the VRA in some later decision.
and the Right shutting down the House
The resolution of the debt-ceiling crisis showed that the far-right House "Freedom" Caucus has less power than they like to think. Naturally, they have to do something to strike back.
Originally, everyone expected they would exercise the concession they got when Kevin McCarthy needed their votes to become speaker: Any single member can introduce a resolution the "vacate the chair" and reopen the speaker election.
Apparently that didn't suit their purposes, though, so they have struck back at the House as a whole rather than just McCarthy. They have been withholding their support on the procedural motions that bills need to progress towards passage, so the House is essentially shut down.
So far, this is just affecting Republican priorities, like a bill to stop the completely imaginary threat that Biden might ban gas stoves. But the federal fiscal year ends on September 30, so if new appropriation bills aren't passed by then, the government will have to shut down.
and golf
Corporate PR efforts have expanded our language in so many ways. Many of the new terms spin off of whitewashing, a metaphor for putting a deceptively bright sheen on something rotten. For example, the NRDC has defined greenwashing like this:
Greenwashing is the act of making false or misleading statements about the environmental benefits of a product or practice. It can be a way for companies to continue or expand their polluting as well as related harmful behaviors, all while gaming the system or profiting off well-intentioned, sustainably minded consumers.
This year, Saudi Arabia's sponsorship of a new golf league, LIV, popularized a new -washing term: sportswashing, which Greenpeace defines:
Sportswashing is the act of sponsoring a sports team or event in order to distract from bad practices elsewhere. This tactic is often used by companies and governments with poor environmental or human rights records, exploiting people's love of sport to 'wash' their image clean.
Saudi Arabia's image desperately needs washing. They're a repressive feudal monarchy with a wasteful and corrupt royal family. They export a dangerous strain of Islam. 15 of the 19 9-11 hijackers were Saudi, as was Osama bin Laden. They sponsor war crimes in Yemen. Their crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, ordered the killing and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was residing in Virginia and working for The Washington Post at the time of his death. Currently, they are working with Russia to keep oil prices high, which helps Putin finance his war in Ukraine.
But on the plus side, they have oil and a huge amount of money: Their sovereign wealth fund is sitting on more than $600 billion. So the fund created the LIV golf tour and started writing nine-figure checks to secure the participation of big-name golfers.
This presented a moral challenge to golfers, and the words "blood money" came up fairly often. The previously dominant PGA tour capitalized on that. PGA Commissioner Jay Monahan challenged golfers by invoking the families of 9-11 victims:
I would ask any player who has left or any player who would consider leaving: "Have you ever had to apologize for being a member of the PGA Tour?"
Well, this week Monahan announced a merger with LIV. Let the apologies begin.
and you also might be interested in ...
Anti-abortion Republicans have been pushing 12-week bans as a "compromise", citing similar bans in Europe. The Atlantic's Julie Suk comments: Not only do Republicans offer far fewer and stricter exceptions than European countries do, but
Republicans are interested in only one part of the European approach to protecting life—the abortion restrictions. They seem to forget that every European country that protects unborn life by restricting abortion after the first trimester protects born life too, through prenatal health care, paid maternity leave, and a public infrastructure for child care and preschool. If Republicans are sincere in invoking Europe as a model, Democrats and other proponents of abortion access should seize this chance to find common ground on policies that would substantially improve the lives of mothers and children in this country.
After months of speculation, the Ukrainian counter-offensive has started. Ukraine reports some advances, but so far it's hard to tell from the outside whether the offensive is going well or not.
Meanwhile, Russian rebels based in Ukraine have raided and shelled a sliver of Russia.
Pat Robertson died at the age of 93. I mark his passing by remembering two moments in his career:
Robertson called feminism a “socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians”. ... [O]n his TV show The 700 Club, he agreed emphatically with his fellow evangelist Jerry Falwell’s theory that the 9/11 attacks were caused by “pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians, the American Civil Liberties Union, and [the progressive advocacy group] People for the American Way”.
I am a Universalist, so I don't believe in a vengeful God. If there is an afterlife, I picture it as a place of mercy and compassion rather than retribution.
Sometimes that belief is unsatisfying.
A novel lawsuit is going to trial today: 16 young residents of Montana are invoking a clause in the Montana constitution committing the state to "maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations". The suit claims that the state's energy policy, which encourages fossil-fuel production, is unconstitutional.
I'll be shocked if any Montana laws are thrown out, but the suit will raise local awareness of climate change and frame it in generational terms. Similar cases are pending in Hawaii, Florida, Utah, and Virginia.
I can't think of an easy way to check this claim, which is almost too good to check anyway: The LA Times article about newsroom layoffs at the LA Times is illustrated with a photo taken by one of the photographers they laid off.
DeSantis pledges to change the name of Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg, because deciding not to honor the slavery-defending generals of the Confederacy is "political correctness run amok".
Mike Pence also promises to restore the name of Fort Bragg. What's up with that? Is the idea that the US Army should honor people who take up arms against the United States in defense of White supremacy?
and let's close with a public service
As the summer vacation season kicks off, countless articles will tell you where you should go and where to stop along the way. But Explored Planet tells you something just as important: where not to go. What famous places are either over-priced, over-crowded, full of chain franchises you could find at home, or not worth the effort it takes to get there?
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