Ron Brownstein/Atlantic:
What Will Happen in Georgia?
More after the break...
For those who say yeah, but kids don’t vote (from the above Atlantic article):
Compared with older generations, Millennials and members of Generation Z are more racially diverse, more likely to hold postsecondary degrees, and less likely to identify with any religious tradition. Both cohorts have leaned sharply Democratic since the first Millennials entered the electorate in large numbers in the 2004 election; the party has routinely carried about three-fifths of young adults in recent presidential contests. In 2018, Democrats hit a peak of support among young voters, winning two-thirds of those younger than 30 and three-fifths of those ages 30 to 44, according to estimates by Catalist, a Democratic targeting firm…
Compared with 2014, youth turnout increased in every state in 2018, more than doubling across the country overall, Circle, a think tank at Tufts University that studies young voters, has calculated. Some of the biggest increases occurred in Sun Belt states where the youth population is the most racially diverse, including Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada.
The turnout surge continued into 2020, when exactly half of adults younger than 30 showed up to vote, a big increase from the 39 percent in 2016, Circle concluded. Georgia again ranked among the states with the biggest youth-turnout increase compared with 2016—a key factor in the Democrats’ razor-thin victories there in the presidential race and the two Senate runoffs.
Michael A Cohen/MSNBC:
Herschel Walker was caught in another lie — why the GOP reaction this time is eyeopening
Conservative Christians refuse to reckon with the fact that their preferred senator from Georgia is, by their own logic, now an accused murderer.
The muted response from some of the country’s most virulent critics of abortion is an instructive reminder that for many conservatives — particular conservative politicians — opposition to abortion has little to do with morality, and everything to do with politics.
Indeed, conservative commentator Dana Loesch summed up best the rank hypocrisy of the anti-abortion movement. Calling Walker’s former girlfriend a “skank” she said, "I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the Senate.”
Republicans, who regularly moralize about the evils of abortion, are more than happy to look the other way on Walker’s transgressions because his success is in their political best interest. So what if Walker is, by his and their logic, now accused of murder? He’ll vote to make abortion illegal, Republicans say, and that’s enough — just as it was enough to look the other way on Trump’s outrageous behavior because he had stocked the federal judiciary with conservative judges.
As Josh Marshall notes, this story from last night is in some ways the worst for Walker of the (now) daily pieces.
WaPo:
Putin confronted by insider over Ukraine war, U.S. intelligence finds
The disagreement by a member of Putin’s inner circle was deemed significant enough that it was included in President Biden’s daily intelligence briefing
The information was deemed significant enough that it was included in President Biden’s daily intelligence briefing and shared with other U.S. officials, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence.
The discontent that the member of Putin’s inner circle expressed related to what the insider considered mismanagement of the war effort and mistakes being made by those executing the military campaign, according to one of the people.
The insider’s identity could not be confirmed, although the name has been included in U.S. intelligence reporting.
Thomas Lecaque/Editorial Board:
Stop laughing at Michael Flynn
The former Trump advisor is spearheading a project to build a violent, ultra-nationalist, ultra-Christian right to take control of America.
Others can analyze the I AM movement and its issues, but the use of militant religious language and the comparison to an aggressively apocalyptic, anti-Communist doomsday cult is bad enough.
Then in early November, Flynn and Wood had a series of exchanges — people have focused on the audio recording of Flynn calling QAnon a CIA disinfo operation — but more worrying was the fact that he told Wood, on November 3, to read an article proving QAnon is a fraud.
Why more worrying? Because it was written by Hal Turner, a neo-Nazi radio host who’s promoted various QAnon conspiracies and served time for threatening elected officials — he advocated murder repeatedly. The article is incredibly scary. It included this passage:
The Trump Anon believers want SOMEBODY ELSE to do it for them. Well, I’ve said this before and I will say it again now: Nobody is coming to save them/us. Nobody is coming to save the country. If you want something done, you gotta do it yourself. And until someone (but not me) decides that it is finally time to throw away all the comforts of this life, and brutally slaughter the people who are doing all these things, (and by “slaughter” I mean exactly that) then all these things will continue, unabated, to the destruction of our country and our oh-so-comfy lives.
David French/The Dispatch:
Lifting Up the Rock on the Gutter Right
Lie after lie after lie.
I want to write about cruelty and slander and how those dark sins are wielded as weapons of political and cultural warfare in the worst corners of the online right. While politics has never been a gentle pursuit, the advent of Trumpism and the Trumpist ethos has spawned a host of popular voices who embrace lies as a tactic and character assassination as an objective.
Consider my last few days as a case study. It all started, as so many of these online mobbings do, with a lie. A person who works for The Blaze and who trolls me constantly accused me of calling management to complain about his tweets. I did no such thing. The claim is completely false, and I told him so. And that, I thought, was that.
But no. His completely false claim was picked up by a gutter website called “Twitchy.” Twitchy’s business model is to package right-wing Twitter attacks into news stories, slap inflammatory headlines on them, and gleefully claim that this or that person has been shamed, destroyed, humiliated—often by a set of random Twitter trolls.
Ty Rushing/Iowa Starting Line:
How The Right’s Hatred Of Electric Vehicles Is Growing In Iowa
Over the last few months, the Starting Line team has noticed an interesting trend in Iowa social media: Stories about electric vehicles drive huge engagement and draw intense debate among supporters and detractors, mostly on Facebook.
And while wild comment threads on Facebook stories is nothing new, the sheer ferocity on EV-related stories, even if it’s a routine, bland article, has become noteworthy.
JJ McCullough/WaPo:
Canada’s main covid legacy? Right-wing populism.
For at least half a decade now, it’s been fashionable to speculate why Canada has supposedly been “immune” to the sort of right-wing populist politics gaining traction elsewhere. I personally think the most convincing explanations are structural, but in retrospect it now appears a lack of a single, clear rallying issue for Canada’s populists was just as significant. Here, progressive pundits can claim at least a half-victory: they seem to have been broadly correct in assuming that anti-immigration rhetoric would never fully mobilize voters in comfortably multicultural Canada. On the other hand, many of these same voices misjudged the number of Canadians ferociously loyal to individual liberties, an equally fierce reserve of ideological energy that was unleashed upon the imposition of burdensome covid safety restrictions.