Ryan Goodman and Andrew Weissmann/The Atlantic:
When the Media Bow to Trump
Two of the biggest news stories of recent weeks—Trump’s indictment and Fox News’s Dominion settlement—share a troubling fact pattern.
Two of the top news stories in recent weeks—the Manhattan district attorney’s criminal indictment in People of the State of New York v. Donald Trump and the three-quarter-billion-dollar settlement in Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News Network—may seem like independent affairs, but they are parts of one bigger story. That story is how former President Trump has been able to control what information is available to the public, as he has repeatedly done in an effort to aggrandize and cling to his own power. His willing helpers were media companies, but they were not acting as news organizations. The National Enquirer deliberately generated false information and hid true information from the public as part of a scheme to secure Trump’s grip on political power. Fox aired false claims and questioned true ones as it sought to placate Trump’s supporters. Together they have succeeded in polluting the marketplace of ideas in which democratic politics is supposed to thrive.
The Washington Post:
Top GOP lawyer decries ease of campus voting in private pitch to RNC
A presentation by Cleta Mitchell at a donor retreat urged tougher rules that could make it harder for college students to cast ballots
The presentation — which had more than 50 slides and was labeled “A Level Playing Field for 2024” — offered a window into a strategy that seems designed to reduce voter access and turnout among certain groups, including students and those who vote by mail, both of which tend to skew Democratic.
If you can’t win, cheat.
The New York Times:
DeSantis’s Electability Pitch Wobbles, Despite G.O.P. Losses Under Trump
The former president’s rivals are seeking to tap into Republican frustration with recent election disappointments to urge a new face for the party in 2024, but it is proving to be a tough sell.
But there are growing questions about Mr. DeSantis’s own ability to win over the independent and suburban voters who delivered the White House to President Biden, and whether the hard-line stances the governor has taken, including on abortion, will repel the very voters he promises to win back. His feuding with Disney — including an offhand remark this week suggesting he would put a state prison next to Disney World — has raised alarms, even among would-be allies.
For years, electability has been the fool’s gold of Republican politics.
Since the rise of the Tea Party more than a decade ago, Republican primary voters have consistently cast ballots with their hearts, sneering at so-called experts to select uncompromising hard-liners as nominees. Even as losses in winnable races have mounted, the mere perception of running as electable has repeatedly backfired, giving off for many Republicans the stench of the reviled establishment.
Joan Walsh/The Nation:
Ron DeSantis Might Have Already Blown His Shot at 2024
A top donor backs off over the governor’s six-week abortion law and book banning. A threat to build a state prison adjacent to Disney World seems unhinged. “Pudding fingers” is making a mess.
On Tuesday afternoon, as DeSantis prepped his DC confab, Trump added Representatives Brian Mast and John Rutherford as the sixth and seventh House GOP Florida men behind him. DeSantis grabbed one endorsement, Representative Laurel Lee, former Florida secretary of state and a longtime ally. “His leadership and his vision made Florida a shining beacon of freedom,” Lee said. Right now, she is the only member of the Florida delegation to back the Florida governor. Greg Steube complained to Politico that he’d never heard from DeSantis in the governor’s five years in office, not even when Steube was hospitalized early this year after a tree-trimming accident (Trump called immediately). To know him, I guess, is not to love him.
The New York Times with a searing (and possibly triggering) read:
They Saw the Horrific Aftermath of a Mass Shooting. Should We?
The crime-scene investigators are the ones who document, and remember, the unimaginable. This is what they saw at Sandy Hook.
I’m not going to excerpt it, though there is a gift link. I just want you to know it’s in The New York Times Magazine this weekend.
And for any and all of you who think it’s a good idea to post death scene pictures in hopes of capturing the horror of an event like this for persuasion purposes? Try and get through that article first.
James Poniewozik/The New York Times:
Everybody Knows What Fox News Is Now
Even without a trial, the Dominion suit made plain that the network’s main goal is the maintenance of a reality bubble.
But the quote that I’ll remember best — the one that summed up the relationship between Fox and its audience better than I ever have as a TV critic — came from Fox’s star host Tucker Carlson. Referring to the election conspiracy theories of the Trump adviser Sidney Powell, which he called “insane,” he added: “Our viewers are good people and they believe it.”
Say this for Carlson, he can pack a lot into a few words. There’s an implicit agreement here: Whether or not you, the viewer, are correct in the technical sense, you are right in the larger sense. You are the authentic voice of this country. So you deserve to feel right about your beliefs, about your enemies, about how you have been cheated. You deserve — through whatever combination of insinuation or hypotheticals or myths — to have the space to keep believing it, without us making that harder.
All this, trial or no trial, makes clear what Fox News really is. It’s a service provider. That service is the maintenance of a reality bubble and the deference to beliefs that Fox’s hosts helped shape.
The other side of the coin is that Dominion, which settled their libel suit for $787.5 million, is a also corporation. Corporations are not people, my friend. They are not activists, and their job is to make money, not stick it to Fox.
That’s our job.
Simon Rosenberg/”Hopium Chronicles” on Substack:
Forward or Backward? The Descent of the GOP Into A Reactionary Mess
My long form magazine essay on the GOP's worrisome embrace of a dangerous, reactionary politics - from 2012. In Spanish and English.
As there are many people here at Hopium new to my work and thinking, I will from time to time dust off some of the old but good stuff and toss it out there for review and discussion.
What follows is an English language version of an essay that originally appeared in September of 2012 in Letras Libres, the Mexico City-based, Spanish-language intellectual journal. The Spanish text was translated from an earlier version of this essay, so this English version should be seen as a version of the Spanish original, and not a direct translation. The Spanish version can be found here.
I was asked by Letras Libres to write about what I was seeing in the Republican Party in the weeks before the 2012 election. I closed the essay with the passage below, which warns that what I was seeing was the dangerous descent of the Republican Party into a far-right reactionary politics, with no one strong enough to stop it; and here we are, almost eleven years later, and the tragedy for the country is that there is still no Republican on the horizon strong enough to stop the GOP’s ongoing dangerous descent.
Oliver Willis/”Oliver Willis Explains” on Substack:
Conservatives, Not "The Left" Are Making Young Americans "Woke"
This Is The World They Built
While I’m not much of a believer in the idea that the young voters will save us — my own demographic, Gen X, is disturbingly favorable for MAGA candidates despite the fact we should know better — I don’t think it’s controversial to say that the Republican/conservative brand is toxic with the youth and even worse for those who haven’t hit voting age yet.
The right clearly believes this is the product of a massive brainwashing campaign. Recently failed Wisconsin governor and never-was presidential candidate Scott Walker, head of the right-wing Young America’s Foundation argued that “radical indoctrination” by the left created this GOP nightmare. This is not an outlier argument for the right. They truly believe that the left-wing views of younger Americans are a product of a dedicated leftist machine.
They think that the Borg-like Boogeyman creature they caricature as “the left” has burrowed its way into young minds, via high school and college teachers and professors who are purportedly preaching Karl Marx like biblical heretics, pop culture icons like Cardi B who are imparting life lessons about wet genitals, and TikTok videos that are supposedly making everyday teens decide to become transgender. As always, the Left of the right’s fevered nightmares are impressive and terrifying.
Of course, this is all nonsense.
What is really happening in America is that young Americans are lashing out at the nightmares built by years of conservative policy and rhetoric, because those toxic ideas are making their lives worse.