News and commentary for understanding and coping with the years ahead...
Turning universities into right-wing propaganda factories
The authoritarian parallels
A compendium of the best reporting and commentary surrounding the pivotal 2024 elections in the United States. You will rarely find horse race coverage here, or the standard "both sides" BS that passes so often for political journalism. What you will find are links, with brief commentary, to work that I believe advances the conversation we should be having about America's – and the world's – future. Remember: Everything is at stake this year. (Unfortunately, some of the work I point to is behind paywalls.)
Musk's malignant trolling
“PLEASE help stop this junk,” GOP North Carolina state Sen. Kevin Corbin implored his Facebook followers on Oct. 3, citing false stories such as Antarctic weather control, land grabs over lithium and FEMA stealing donations. A fellow lawmaker had received 15 calls in one day about untrue rumors, he added. “I’m growing a bit weary of intentional distractions,” Corbin said. The next day, Musk reposted some of those same falsehoods to his 200 million followers, with one word: “Wow.”
The most powerful and dangerous troll – excepting Trump – in American public life is Musk. This story in Politico is a detailed roundup of the misinformation – much of it amplified by Musk – that is plaguing Hurricane Helene recovery efforts and throwing vile, if absurd, conspiracy theories into the Hurricane Milton situation. We knew already that Trump has contempt for anyone's life but his own, and now we know that Musk shares that vile attitude. The mega-billionaire has wired himself into not just business power, but his companies' contracts with the government give him unparalleled influence over public policy. He is a menace, and eventually someone will have to act on that. Given all of this, why in the world are so many journalists continuing to actively support ExTwitter through their active participation there? They have reasons, but there is no excuse anymore for helping this guy. They need to relocate their conscience, the sooner the better.
I’m not suggesting that we all now need to scream the word fascism from the rooftops. I’m not suggesting that politicians fighting Trumpism use terms like fascism or neo-fascism or fascism-American-style. ... But there is also a case for some of us not directly involved in electoral politics to strive for intellectual clarity. There is a case for coming to grips with what has happened, and what is happening. There is a case for overcoming some of our inhibitions against being impolite, and for seeing things as they are and calling them what they are.
There is no question whatsoever about what Trump and his apparatchiks and oligarch financiers are doing. They are trying to create a dictatorship in which they control everything, and to get there they are working from the Fascism 101 playbook. I'm glad that Kristol, who's moved a long, long way from his big-business-friendly Republican roots, is confronting the question. If, as he writes, the general public would recoil from politicians' use of the word, he should have noted one of the key reasons: Big Journalism's longstanding timidity in telling Americans what's happening, along with their relentless normalization of extremism. Let's all stop being polite and start recognizing, out loud, that one of our two major political parties – backed by many of America's new oligarchs – are moving us toward a fascist state.
Divergent ideas and beliefs have always been with us, but divergent outcomes at the state level are new, and growing. One reason for this is that there are fewer institutional brakes on policy disagreements. In 1980, 26 states split control of the legislature and the governor’s office, and each branch checked the other. But today, only ten states have split control; a whopping 40 states have unitary Republican or Democratic governance. With state lawmakers often responsible for gerrymandering state Senate and House districts beyond recognition, they cement one party’s control well into the future by picking their own voters, even if their overall electorates are closely divided.
This article offers useful context for the political turmoil in which we are so fully embroiled. I'm not sure Dayen fully makes the case that state-level policy divergence is new in the modern era, but it is definitely growing as one party dominates in more and more states. (A key reason for this is that for decades, right-wing Republican activists cared a lot more about local and state legislative politics than Democrats did.) The broader context: Larger red states are working feverishly to turn regional right-wing "conservatism" into national autocracy. And as they wreck democracy on their own turf – via relentless voter suppression and stifling of protest – they also want to make that national policy. (This article introduces a special issue of the American Prospect, and I encourage you to read it all over the next several weeks.)
The MAGA-nauts are coming for your vote. The 2024 election is in danger: 40,000 self-proclaimed vigilante vote-fraud hunters have already challenged the rights of 852,381 voters of color. Investigative reporter Greg Palast hunts down the MAGA vote rustlers who blocked the vote of 4,000 Black soldiers. Palast teams up with one of those soldiers, MAJ Gamaliel Turner, to hunt down and confront the GOP chairman who blocked his ballot — a vigilante who even dresses up as Wild West vigilante Doc Holliday, including cowboy hat, boots and loaded 6-gun.
To get a visceral sense of the Republicans' voter-suppression machine, you should watch this film. It's centered on Georgia, where the current governor, Brian Kemp, has a long history of doing everything possible to keep likely Democrats – particularly people of color – from being able to vote. He and his party have used every trick in the book, and one of their most insidious tactics has been to make it easy for right-wing activists to launch bad-faith challenges to individual people's the right to vote with no real grounds for doing so – and do so on a mass scale. This sleaze is being copied in many other Republican-controlled states. Big Journalism has done such a terrible job of explaining the Republicans' nationwide voter suppression campaign, but this documentary brings home just one of the many facets of this effort. "Vigilantes Inc." is free to watch, but I urge you to make a donation to support this important investigative journalism.
Voting is just part of democracy, but it's the essential place to start. Make sure you're registered. Doublecheck in the fall, well before Election Day, because in some states Republican officials are removing people, mostly those who tend to vote for Democrats, from voting rolls.
Please send your suggestions
I spend a lot of time looking for essential coverage, and hope you'll help me by letting me know about the good stuff you find. Let me know.
Subscribe
Was this forwarded to you? If you would like to have your own free subscription, please click here.
William Kristol
David Dayen
Greg Palast
