We’re now in the land where a guy who has a racist name for his hunting camp can propose the overthrow of the government in a text to the White House Chief of Staff. But if that’s not a sign of the current state of “characterless opportunism”, then perhaps the weaponizing of SCOTUs by the GOP might prove how cultural and intellectual chaos has come to define America.
“Aggressive Strategy” has gone amok, because it’s the Professional-Managerial Class’s fault somehow, and it’s more likely bipartisan. After all, it was too easy to misattribute the text from Rick Perry to Mark Meadows as having a different author, since he couldn’t have sent such a stupid message, because Deep State. Or Deep in the Heart of something, something.
What kind of entrepreneurial, libertarian thinking could come up with a bounty program to prosecute abortion, that needs to be mocked by using a similar program to prosecute assault weapon ownership.
Washington (CNN)
Members of the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol believe that former Texas Governor and Trump Energy Secretary Rick Perry was the author of a text message sent to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows the day after the 2020 election pushing an "AGRESSIVE (sic) STRATEGY" for three state legislatures to ignore the will of their voters and deliver their states' electors to Donald Trump, three sources familiar with the House Committee investigation tell CNN.
A spokesman for Perry told CNN that the former Energy Secretary denies being the author of the text. Multiple people who know Rick Perry confirmed to CNN that the phone number the committee has associated with that text message is Perry's number.
The cell phone number the text was sent from, obtained from a source knowledgeable about the investigation, appears in databases as being registered to a James Richard Perry of Texas, the former governor's full name.
The number is also associated in a second database as registered to a Department of Energy email address associated with Perry when he was secretary. When told of these facts, the spokesman had no explanation.
The House Select Committee declined to comment on the author of the text.
Because “kill them all and let SCOTUS sort it out” is a Rick Perry kind of strategy. Oops. Like the Texas abortion bounties. OK Boomers.
Now it’s the Supreme Court itself that has been weaponized.
With the accuracy of a drone strike, the three justices appointed by President Donald Trump and strong-armed through to confirmation by Senator Mitch McConnell, then the majority leader, are doing exactly what they were sent to the court to do.
The resulting path of destruction of settled precedent and long-established norms is breathtaking. Despite the increasingly plaintive reminders by Chief Justice John Roberts that, as he wrote in dissent in the Texas abortion case last week, “it is the role of the Supreme Court in our constitutional system that is at stake,” the new majority has refused to defend the supremacy of federal law in the face of open defiance by Texas. The court’s acquiescence has left that state’s abortion clinics all but shuttered for months, with pregnant women fleeing to seek care in numbers that are destabilizing the abortion infrastructure in states hundreds of miles from the Texas border.
The imminent evisceration of the constitutional right to abortion, clearly apparent from the Dec. 1 argument in the Mississippi abortion case, is only the beginning. The argument last month in a case from New York on how strictly a state can regulate the carrying of concealed weapons strongly suggested that the court will expand the boundaries of the Second Amendment well beyond the 2008 Heller decision, which found a right to keep a handgun at home for self-defense and was itself a transformation of the long- established understanding that the amendment protected a collective right rather than an individual one.
Last week’s argument in a religion case from Maine indicated that a decades-old understanding about the extent to which religious schools can lay claim to taxpayer support is similarly about to be shattered.
Further, the justices will soon decide whether to add affirmative action to the smoldering culture war that is the current Supreme Court term. The fact that the high-profile case against Harvard’s admission policies went down to defeat in two lower federal courts, and that it even lacks an actual plaintiff who can claim to have been injured by Harvard, is not likely to deter a bloc that finally — following the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy and the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — has the votes to put an end to race consciousness in university admissions.
www.nytimes.com/...
Cultural Marxism is a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory which claims Western Marxism as the basis of continuing academic and intellectual efforts to subvert Western culture. The theory claims that an elite of Marxist theorists and Frankfurt School intellectuals are subverting Western society with a culture war that undermines the Christian values of traditionalist conservatism
According to philosopher Slavoj Žižek, the term Cultural Marxism "plays the same structural role as that of the 'Jewish plot' in anti-Semitism: it projects (or rather, transposes) the immanent antagonism of our socio-economic life onto an external cause: what the conservative alt-right deplores as the ethical disintegration of our lives (feminism, attacks on patriarchy, political correctness, etc.) must have an external cause—because it cannot, for them, emerge out of the antagonisms and tensions of our own societies."[14]
Academic Joan Braune explains that Cultural Marxism in the sense referred to by the conspiracy theorists never existed, and does not correspond to any historical school of thought. She also states that Frankfurt School scholars are referred to as "Critical Theorists", not "Cultural Marxists", and points out that, contrary to the claims of the conspiracy theory, postmodernism tends to be wary of or even hostile towards Marxism, including towards the grand narratives typically supported by Critical Theory.[7]
en.wikipedia.org/...
Catherine Liu, in Virtue Hoarders (2021), characterized the PMC as white-collar left liberals afflicted with a superiority complex in relation to ordinary members of the working class.[7][8][9] Hans Magnus Enzensberger had also observed the "characterless opportunism" of its members,[10] in reference to its constant shifting of allegiances, not only between the leisured and working classes but also among themselves.[10]
en.wikipedia.org/...–managerial_class
Biden seems to have been mugged by reality. Unlike his predecessors of whatever persuasion, this president has taken office at a moment when a democratic future in the United States—and in some important allied countries—can no longer be taken for granted. No task seems more urgent than the protection of democracy at home and abroad. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told me last month, “In every conversation I’ve heard him have with a foreign leader, the centerpiece of the conversation has been that he sees the fundamental struggle of our time as the face-off between autocracy and democracy. And that’s its fundamental for the U.S. to lead the effort towards democratic resilience and reinvigoration around the world.”
[...]
The European officials I spoke to sympathized with Biden’s plight, but had been deeply spooked by the January 6 riot. Several mentioned Robert Kagan’s Washington Post essay suggesting that by 2024, America might well experience “incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves.”
Administration officials are hardly blithe in the face of this reality, but they do their best to come up with second-best justifications. Blinken put the case this way: “The fact that we acknowledge our own challenges and don’t run away from them or hide them gives us real credibility. That in and of itself can be a source of strength and progress.” Humility in the powerful is certainly more appealing than bluster, but the most salient fact of the moment is the collapse of democratic norms that got Trump elected, and might get him re-elected.
There is yet a deeper point here. In what way will, say, agreements on new rules to safeguard against the spread of disinformation, important though they are, rally faith in democratic safeguards in the United States or persuade Republicans that it’s not worth gaining power at the price of American democracy? At bottom, democratic erosion in the United States, as in India or Poland or the Philippines, has less to do with external threats that can be blunted by joint action than with an internal loss of faith that can only be addressed domestically. Administration officials talk of the summit as a place to exchange “best practices”; yet democratic erosion is not a technocratic problem. For all their shortcomings, global summits on migration or climate may offer more hope for change than a global summit for democracy.
www.politico.com/...