Inverting power relationships -- casting the powerless as a looming threat and the powerful as beleaguered -- is a primal feature of reactionary thinking, the very seed that blossoms into fascism.
This week's featured post is "Republicans think they've found a way to pitch abortion bans".
The David Roberts quote above is in response to this social-media exchange:
Rod Dreher: Trump is rich, but he is totally not the ruling class. It's about culture.
Radley Balko: Trying to think of a definition of "ruling class" that includes Oberlin social justice activists, Black Lives Matter, and drag queens, but not the billionaire real estate mogul who was literally just president, appointed 1/3 of SCOTUS, and is even odds to be president again.
This week everybody was talking about Fulton County Inmate #P01135809
Trump surrendered to authorities in Fulton County Thursday evening. He was booked, photographed, and then released. He returned to Twitter (for the first time since his post-insurrection banning) with a post of his mugshot and the slogan "Never Surrender!" -- as if he hadn't just surrendered. That image and slogan is now available on a wide variety of Trump merchandise, in case you believe a self-described billionaire needs your money more than you do. (BTW, I thought "Never Surrender" was done better in Galaxy Quest.)
Did you wonder what was going on with Trump's expression in his mugshot? It turns out the look he gave has a name.
"The Kubrick Stare" is one of director Stanley Kubrick's most recognizable directorial techniques. A method of shot composition where a character stares at the camera with a forward tilt, to convey to the audience that they are at the peak of their derangement
The other amusing thing about the booking was his height-and-weight listing: 6'3", 215 pounds. That turns out to be a fairly typical set of measurements for NFL quarterbacks. To me, this just underlined something I've believed for several years: This guy can't tell the truth about anything. I mean, we've all probably shaved a few pounds off our weight at one time or another, but at some point you're just insulting people's intelligence.
Legally, of course, these indignities are meaningless. The other three jurisdictions where Trump was indicted didn't mugshot him or report his weight, and yet I'm sure police will easily recognize him if he goes on the lam.
Nonetheless, I suspect this ubiquitous mugshot will end up mattering politically. Until now, low information voters who favor Trump have been able to tell themselves that his legal troubles are all meaningless political shennanigans, kind of like the "scandals" on Fox News that rage for a weekend and then come to nothing. (Biden is banning gas stoves! ) They ignored his impeachment hearings (where his guilt was proved for anyone who bothered to watch) and the January 6 hearings (ditto), and felt justified in doing so, because ultimately there were no consequences.
But the mugshot sends a different message: This is really happening. It's different from the usual partisan mudslinging.
A new poll from Politico underlines this point: 61% of the country wants to see Trump's election-subversion trial happen before the 2024 election. 51% believe he's guilty, and only 26% believe he's innocent. 50% believe he should go to prison if convicted, while only 18% said he should go unpunished.
The upshot is that about a quarter of the country hasn't paid enough attention to have a definite opinion. That number is going to shrink as the trials take place. And since the evidence against him is compelling, a lot of those people are going to shift into the guilty/prison columns.
and Putin's revenge
Russian officials have now verified that Yevgeny Prigozhin's DNA is in the wreckage of the plane that crashed between Moscow and St. Petersburg Wednesday. The number of Putin opponents who have had fatal "accidents" is long and not worth reviewing.
I haven't yet seen any persuasive analysis of what Prigozhin's death means for Putin, for Russia, or for Ukraine. University of Colorado Professor Sarah Wilson Sokhey is tentative, but makes sense to me:
What the historical context best tells us in this case is that when you have a coup attempt, and when you have generals being demoted and you have a failing military campaign, there are a lot of cracks in the system. It's very difficult for people to predict how that power struggle will play out, but violently and chaotically is one way that has played out in the past. And that's something we should be concerned about.
and the Jacksonville race shooting
Saturday afternoon, a White gunman with swastikas on his AR-15 killed three Black people in a Dollar General store before killing himself. Reportedly, he had previously stalked the historically Black college Edward Waters University, and left behind a manifesto expressing his hatred of Black people.
[The shooter] legally purchased his guns despite having been involuntarily committed for a mental health examination in 2017, the Associated Press reported.
This shooting follows last summer's shooting in a Buffalo supermarket, where a White racist gunman targeted Black people, killing ten of them. In 2019, a White gunman targeted Hispanics at a WalMart in El Paso, killing 23. He also left a manifesto citing the Great Replacement theory that White people in America are at risk. I could go on.
If young Muslim men were entering places with a lot of Christians and shouting "Allah Akbar!" before opening fire, they would be portrayed in the media as Muslim terrorists, independent of their state of mind at the time. But due to White privilege, that's not how these shootings have been covered. Instead, each shooter is described as "mentally ill", rather than as a representative of a dangerous ideology.
In this instance, for example, Governor DeSantis acknowledged that the killings were racially motivated, but denounced the shooter mainly in individual terms as a "deranged scumbag" and "lunatic".
But these are not random lone-wolf attacks. It's time we start linking these killings together as a White supremacist terrorist movement, and addressing what the government and the public can do about this dangerous violence.
and the Republican debate
I covered the abortion part of the debate [transcript] in the featured post. But that was not the only important topic. By far the most significant moment of the debate was when the moderators posed this question from a young Republican:
Polls consistently show that young people’s number one issue is climate change. How will you as both President of the United States and leader of the Republican Party calm their fears that the Republican Party doesn’t care about climate change?
Moderator Martha Maccallum then asked for a show of hands: "Do you believe in human behavior is causing climate change?"
No hands were raised and the young man's question was never answered. Vivek Ramaswamy declared that "the climate change agenda is a hoax", and claimed that "more people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change."
No one contradicted him. Various candidates obliquely recognized the issue, but made excuses for doing nothing. Nikki Haley said:
We also need to take on the international world and say, okay, India and China, you’ve got to stop polluting. And that’s when we’ll start to deal with climate.
Tim Scott pointed his finger at the whole developing world:
America has cut our carbon footprint in half in the last 25 years. The places where they are continuing to increase Africa, 950 million people, India, over a billion, China over a billion. Why would we put ourselves at a disadvantage, devastating our own economy? Let’s bring our jobs home.
No one presented an idea that would have any effect on the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, other than to increase them.
To me, everything else about the debate was trivial. My takeaway from the debate is this: If you care at all about climate change, there is no Republican you can support.
That's why I agree with Beau of the Fifth Column: The winner of the debate was Joe Biden.
The climate change quote was far from the only outrageous thing Vivek Ramaswamy said during the debate, and over the weekend he was on virtually every talk show saying even more outrageous things.
There's something broken in our media, and it intersects badly with what's broken in the Republican Party. In our media, saying ridiculous things gets you more attention than saying wise or sensible things. And a sizable chunk of the Republican base yearns to break free from the constraints of Reality, so a potential leader shamelessly spouting nonsense -- heedless of the criticism of "elites" who are still attached to Reality -- appeals to them.
Ramaswamy has been taking full advantage of that sad configuration, and no doubt the next set of polls will show him moving up, at least as a second choice for Trump voters.
Consequently, I'm not going to repeat all the craziness he spouted on the talk shows. However, I did take a look at his biography, and I'm having a hard time figuring out why anyone thinks he should be president.
Ramaswamy, at 38, is an entrepreneur in the pharmaceutical industry, and he's made quite a bit of money in that role. But it's hard to tell whether his career has actually benefited anyone. His fundamental idea is to buy up patents for unproven drugs that the large companies are giving up on, then form small companies focused around getting those drugs through clinical trials and onto the market.
Does that strategy work? Hard to say, at this point. His main company, Roivant, got its first drug onto the market in 2022; it's a cream for treating plaque psoriasis. A dozen or so other drugs are in various phases of clinical trials and may or may not ever be approved for use. At the moment, the testing and development process is burning cash faster than the one marketable drug can earn it, so the company is losing money. A lot of start-ups do that, and some of them eventually turn into Facebook. But most don't.
So 10-20 years from now, Ramaswamy could be Elon Musk, or he could be (barely) remembered as a guy who sucked in a lot of investor cash and blew it.
Personally, I'd like to see more definite results from his first career before I consider him for a second career as a political leader.
and you also might be interested in ...
Today is a significant day in Trump's trials. Mark Meadows has a hearing before a federal judge in Georgia, trying to get his trial moved from Georgia state court to federal court. The issue is whether what Meadows did to further Trump's conspiracy was part of his job as White House chief of staff. If so, he's entitled to move the case to federal court.
Ordinarily that hearing would mostly have procedural significance, but both sides have upped the ante: Meadows is testifying in favor of his motion, and Fani Willis has called Brad Raffensperger. So this hearing is a preview of the overall case.
In a different courtroom, Judge Tanya Chutkan picked a trial date for the federal case against Trump for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election: March 4, a date much closer to Jack Smith's January 2 proposal than Trump's April, 2026 offer. If this date holds up, the trial will begin the day before the Super Tuesday primaries.
Sarah Palin is the latest Republican to suggest "civil war" as a proper response to the Trump indictments.
“Those who are conducting this travesty and creating this two-tier system of justice, I want to ask them what the heck, do you want us to be in civil war? Because that’s what’s going to happen,” Palin told Newsmax on Thursday night.
“We’re not going to keep putting up with this.”
It's important to recognize this talk for the admission of guilt it is. If Trump supporters really believed what they say -- that the charges are politically motivated nonsense -- they'd want a quick trial so that a jury could laugh the case out of court. The only way that "civil war" makes sense is if you believe that a jury of ordinary American citizens who sees the evidence against Trump will find him guilty, and so violence is the only way to keep him out of prison.
and let's close with something photogenic
Past Chronicles picks out a few dozen of the most creative ways people have incorporated statues and prominent architecture into their photos.
As several of the photos suggest, kids do this spontaneously.
Sometimes you can repurpose a statue completely: With the right staging, an applause can become a spanking.
And a baseball swing becomes an assault.
Apparently, the Leaning Tower of Pisa is a popular target for photographic abuse. Here, it tops an ice cream cone.
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