#it was a spectacle and a farce. like presidential elections always are

[britneyshakespeare]

this is my honest exhausted political hot take on the biden resignation situation. i don't fuckin care that we didn't get a dem primary

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

supreme dysfunction

A lot of the politics around the Supreme Court has a kind of soft-focus, sepia-toned Before Times deceptiveness about it. The obfuscation is as thick and persistent as it is because the situation is extremely simple. Several decades ago, Republicans realized they could not win fair and square, so they put a lot of institutional focus and an obscene amount of money into rigging the courts. Cheating is the secret sauce. I realize that’s not a satisfying explanation for years of political dysfunction, but it is what it is.

And yet here we are, six weeks from Election Day, facing the prospect of a Trump-brand replacement for the irreplaceable Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

What you need to do is keep your head for the next few weeks. If that means putting this out of your mind as soon as possible, fine. All you need to know is that anyone this criminal would nominate to the court will be a disaster and anyone who would accept a nomination under these circumstances is wildly unfit to judge a dog and pony show. Republicans really did tell loud and insulting lies all throughout 2016 about why they wouldn’t confirm the replacement for a Supreme Court justice who passed away nearly a year before an election, and they really are out here now mocking the idea that anyone might have had to pretend to believe them then. They will probably succeed in pushing through a sentient garbage fire before the election, but we have to try to make it hurt. All you need to do is call your senators and tell them to honor Justice Ginsburg’s wish by refusing to confirm anyone Trump nominates. Either you’ll hear that they’re trying to do the right thing, which might make you feel better, or you’ll get an opportunity to call a Republican a fascist pig, which always makes me feel better.

If you are going to be following this farce, out of interest or because you can’t block it out, let me help you prepare for some of the bullshit that’s coming at you.

One of the foundational assumptions commentators make is that Democrats don’t “care” about the courts in the way Republicans do. Whenever you hit that assumption, think of this article:

Hillary Clinton Just Delivered the Strongest Speech of Her Campaign—and the Media Barely Noticed

Madison, Wisconsin—Hillary Clinton delivered the strongest speech of her 2016 campaign in Wisconsin this week, and the media barely noticed.

At the time (March 31, 2016) this article was just one of the many passive-aggressive subtweets from responsible commentators that their colleagues were ignoring policy for spectacle. After 2016, when Clinton’s supposed failure to go to Wisconsin has been waved like a talisman against any retrospective concern about whether the presidential election was even free (questionable) and fair (definitely not), it’s the fact that the press ignored a campaign event in Wisconsin which gives it that twist of dramatic irony. But it is also relevant because Clinton’s speech was about why anyone who truly cares about a progressive agenda must prioritize the federal courts as an issue. Since then, the press – who were called out AT THE TIME for ignoring substance generally and this speech specifically – have settled on “Republicans have seized the federal courts because Democrats don’t talk about the courts” as their new just-so rationalization for Moscow Mitch’s latest crime against democracy.

It’s bad enough that influential commentators ignore the substance of Democratic campaigns in favor of airing Trump’s empty podium and then use their own failures as an excuse to lie about whether or not Democratic politicians talk about the courts or any other issue. But the reality is even worse: in 2016 the Democratic candidate gave a brutally prescient speech about the courts, and our blue-check betters collectively decided to lie about WHETHER SHE WAS EVEN PRESENT AT HER OWN SPEECH. Then they used that lie to derail any chance of accountability for the MULTIPLE CRIMINAL CONSPIRACIES her opponent’s campaign committed, or even the slightest hint that they probably shouldn’t have allowed an autocratic regime that regularly murders actual journalists to be their assignment editor at the most important moment of their careers. “I wouldn’t have spent four months helping Russian intelligence dox Clinton campaign employees if only they’d gone to Wisconsin!” is a thing you can say without losing an ounce of standing in the pundit-industrial complex; of course lying about Democratic campaign messaging on the justice system carries even less of a penalty.

I’m ranting a little because RBG deserved to live three hundred years and these gaslighting bootlickers deserved to be flayed alive, boiled in oil, and fed to rabid vampire squirrels. But I also think people should absorb my point about just how rotten the information environment is. There is every political incentive for Democrats not to bother talking about they courts. They do it anyway because they know it’s important.

That terrible information environment has the predictable consequence of misinforming people. Even if you are trying to encourage people to act on this issue because you sincerely care about it, you end up saying ridiculous things sometimes.

Senate Democrats could have stopped Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation by sacrificing a virgin basilisk under a harvest moon to summon the wrath of the Old Ones, but they didn’t even try!

This is, to put it kindly, rewriting history. Senate Democrats made a herculean effort against Kavanaugh. Even before Christine Blasey Ford’s and Deborah Ramirez’s stories came out, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee made the best case possible for the Senate to reject his confirmation.* After Dr. Ford was outed against her wishes, Democrats used every tool they had to force as much of an investigation as they could get, which drew maximum blood from Republicans, who were always going to do the wrong thing no matter what. Because Democrats did the work, voters got the point in the 2018 midterms. The Kavanaugh spectacle kept Republicans from gaining too much ground in the Senate in a year they should have cleaned up, and it radicalized the educated suburban voters who gave Democrats an unprecedented victory in the House.

None of this worked because Senate Democrats are in the minority, but they did try everything they could possibly have done. It’s true that they did not invent time travel and go back to re-run the 2014 midterms or rewrite the laws of mathematics to make 48 more than 52, because those things are impossible.

When people do the thing you supposedly want them to do, and you respond by stubbornly insisting they never did it, you’re not motivating them to do a better job. You’re telling them they should ignore you because you don’t actually care what they do.

I’m using this tweet as an example of a problem I see a lot, but my point isn’t to dunk too hard on this rando. We’re all a little emotional right now and who amongst us has never responded to stress by being Wrong Online; more importantly, it’s not entirely this person’s fault that they’re misinformed. You’re not supposed to have to be a huge nerd that actually watches Senate committee hearings! You’re supposed to be able to rely on the news to give you a reliable idea of what’s happening!! That’s literally their job!!!

AAAArgh. Okay. I’m back.

So. Okay. There are pervasive failings in news coverage of the politics around the federal courts, which leads to a lot of silly misunderstandings in the public more generally. Even if you work your way through all that nonsense and get to a reasonable understanding, you will find a fairly persistent asymmetry. The Republican establishment really does put a wildly disproportionate amount of effort into building conservative movement infrastructure for right wing lawyers and judges, and until recently, Republican voters really were much more likely than Democratic voters to tell pollsters that they were highly motivated by judicial nominations. Taking these things on face value and saying “oh, well, Republicans care more about the courts” obscures some really important, though disturbing, underlying dynamics.

The professional and intellectual ecosystem behind the conservative legal establishment is one of those situations where you really have to apply the Trunchbull principle. There really are millions and millions of dollars pumped into think tanks which invent bizarre excuses for radical right-wing subversion of the public interest by judicial fiat, extravagant “retreats” where sitting judges are alternatively pampered and bombarded with the resulting propaganda, and clubs which indoctrinate young conservative law students and vet them for career advancement based on their fealty to right-wing dogma. Describing what the Republican establishment is doing sounds fevered, conspiratorial hyperbole. I wish it were! If you don’t want to take my word for it – and I really wouldn’t blame you – you can get a lot of gory details from Vox.com’s courts and justice editor Ian Millhiser and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI).

Senator Whitehouse’s main thesis is that these radical right-wing interests understand that a hostile takeover of the federal judiciary is in their financial interests, and that’s definitely sufficient to explain it. My personal sense is that there’s a second, even more unsettling, dimension to this. Article III of the Constitution deliberately insulates the federal judiciary from political pressure as much as possible. Another way of saying that, of course, is that the federal judiciary is removed from democratic accountability. I don’t think it’s just that the economic policies they want are unpopular. I think the investment in this judicial takeover project is motivated in part by the American right wing’s dark authoritarian streak. They value the judiciary because it’s the most leverage they can get against the electorate. “Judges!” is anti-democratic and that’s why they like it. It’s not just that they want things the voters don’t want so they have to get creative; it’s that they resent the voters for even having the ability to get in their way.

It’s not just the dedication to getting judges they agree with on the courts. It’s also the degree to which they expect those judges to humiliate themselves. They’ve had ten years and roughly the GDP of a small country at their disposal to come up with a challenge to the Affordable Care Act which did not sound like unhinged gibberish. Instead, they came up with the legal equivalent of a drunk guy trying to write a sonnet in Dothraki with a yellow crayon. (Actually that might be an improvement, so NOBODY TELL THEM ABOUT DRUNK DOTHRAKI CRAYON SONNET GUY.) It’s such a stinker that you hav to wonder if it isn’t the same phenomenon as what drives Trump and other autocrats to tell such blatant and ridiculous lies: it’s a power trip that shows off how they don’t even have to care about what “is true” or “makes sense,” because fuck you, that’s why. So what if an overwhelming majority of the American people have successfully convinced their elected representatives that health care costs were too much of a driver of economic inequality and limits on that are a good thing? We can still wreck it, because [*long fart noise*].

And if you listen to what Republicans say about the Supreme Court with that in mind, it starts to make a lot more sense. Under cover of mainstream apathy or even approval, the court gives conservatives unearned victory after unearned victory. If you’re a conservative, you’ll want to avoid killing that golden goose by making the court’s bias toward you completely undeniable. But if you’re a fascist, your priority is getting the court to commit. Any concession to truth or democracy, even if it’s just lip service, seems like a crack in the wall that your enemies can exploit, because it is.** As funny as it is to watch their little Pravda knockoff cry about John Roberts, Leftist Judas, this is what they mean: sometimes he tries to preserve the fiction that he hasn’t turned the Supreme Court into an arm of the radical right, which means they don’t win 100% of what they want immediately. Even Neil Gorsuch – hack, sadist, full-time Mayor Wilkins impersonator – can actually be cajoled into doing the right thing occasionally by lawyers who can craft an argument that fits into his crimped, cherry-picked definition of logic.

Like I said. Dark. I don’t want to overwhelm and discourage you. I think their absolutism and desperation is because even they know the victories they’ve won can slip away fast. But deluding ourselves hasn’t been constructive.

For their part, rank-and-file Republicans say they care about the courts. Fine. Republicans say a lot of things. They don’t think saying true things is important; if they did, they wouldn’t be Trump voters. Years before Trump, Republican voters learned how to give reporters and pollsters certain buzzwords to make their worst views sound more palatable. People are starting to grasp this with the “pro-life” white evangelicals who say they care about abortion on religious grounds. They support Trump as strongly as ever, despite the babies in cages, forced hysterectomies, and hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 deaths proving that neither he nor his party are in any way “pro-life.” It’s because “abortion” is the way they can get away with saying they support white patriarchy. Trump isn’t their guy despite his sleaziness, it’s because “grab ‘em by the pussy” has always been their actual preferred policy. “Law and order” is their dogwhistle for anti-Black racism. “Immigration” is the world they use when they mean they want more racism generally; pre-Obama, the preferred code phrase was “national security” but we’ve all seen how much of a shit they give about that.

As code words go, “judges” is less direct. Some commentators who try to parse it say it’s really about Roe v. Wade, but as we just went over, they don’t actually give a shit about that either. For some of them, “judges” is a sufficiently abstract rationalization for supporting Republicans when they know it is morally indefensible. This was probably a more pronounced issue than usual in 2016, both because it was so much harder to defend a vote for Trump and because of his inconvenient habit of giving the game away on the usual shibboleths. For others, “judges” represents the same thing it does for Republican elites.

I don’t know how conscious any of this is. I’m sure plenty of them have convinced themselves of whatever rationalization they give. Because we’re pretty good at fooling ourselves, what people say in opinion polls doesn’t necessarily tell us more than what they do when they’re not being prompted by pollsters. When Justice Scalia died four years ago, you didn’t thousands of people coming out to grieve for days on end. Little kids don’t dress up on Halloween as Chief Justice Roberts. RBG didn’t inspire that devotion by being a warm and gracious soul, although by all accounts she was. Liberals and progressives developed our sincere admiration of her because of her work on the bench. That is to say, Democratic voters care a great deal about the court. We just have to get our act together and do something about it.

The bad news is that winning in November is going to be the easy part. The good news is, we are getting organized behind some reforms that have been needed for many years. It’s not just Extremely Online progressives who are pushing for this. Even cool-headed institutionalist Democrats are openly advocating radical action. Democratic leadership are unlikely to get too specific right now – and they probably shouldn’t – but if voters do our job in November, some big and important changes are on the table.

*Footnoted because it isn’t really relevant, but Senate Democrats flawlessly executed a precise and coordinated strategy against Kavanaugh. The first few members to question Kavanaugh each focused on a specific issue tailor-made to give one or two of their Republican colleagues a reason to do the right thing. Then, boom, sucker-punch, Cory Booker started releasing the embarrassing emails Republicans were abusing committee rules to hide. Then, bam, left hook, Kamala Harris tripped him up by making him try to deny having been asked for assurances on the Mueller investigation. They did a great job, which everyone forgot about when someone threw Dr. Ford to the wolves.

**This is also a big part of why conservatives feel so instinctively victimized by the existence of a “liberal media” no matter how hard the political press bends over backwards to pound both thumbs on the scale for them. A free press actually is necessary for the functioning of the whole post-Enlightenment idea that people should have some say in how they are governed. If you’re an authoritarian who genuinely does feel that might makes right, then a somewhat functioning news media does at least pose a hypothetical threat to your power and even your worldview.

[soggymilkchronicles]

Lockdown protests are shameless astroturfing, and the establishment makes #FloridaMorons of us all

           Stuck at home with your HBO account and food delivery apps? Looking for something to be pissed off about? Wonderful! The mainstream media would like to direct your attention to a coordinated string of right-wing protests for an end to the lockdown, and away from— well, whatever it is the people who cut their checks are up to. Conservatives in power, like Betsy Devos, whose family funded the protest against Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s Stay at Home order, and Trump, who’s brazenly encouraged the demonstrations, are attempting to shift our baleful gaze to local government, the Democrats, and the Chinese. Authoritarians, they cry! Communists! Elitists! The Democratic elite, through the megaphone of mainstream media outlets they keep in their pocket, would like to convince you it’s the Conservatives’ fault. Racists! Philistines! “Why is it the right-wingers always seem to need their screws tightened?” one man wrote in a tweet about the Michigan protests. And so it goes. As long as you remain in the stands, watching the Reds and Blues bat blame back and forth like a tired tennis ball and cheering for your favorite team, you’re right where they want you. 

          Both parties would like you to believe they’re ardent champions of the working man, their efforts hampered only by the self-serving interference of the opposite side— and, crucially, the ordinary people who elected them. Who they really want us to blame is ourselves. Didn’t vote Clinton in 2016? Might wanna wash the blood off your hands. Not social distancing? Don’t have a mask? This is your fault, and you must be punished (for the safety of the American people, of course). In Philadelphia, a man was physically pulled off a bus by several police officers for not wearing a mask. A New York woman was arrested for not social distancing and thrown in a cell with two dozen others for 36 hours. These are far from isolated incidents. The government primes us to accept them by painting our fellow working people (and the migrants, the Chinese, the Russians, et al., depending on your political leanings) as the enemy they’re protecting us from. If we stay divided, frightened, and vengeful, we remain prey to the real enemy— our American aristocracy. Distracting us with political white noise ensures that the current system won’t be held responsible for the violence it caused. 

         The re-opening protests being pushed in our face are a perfect example of this. The protests are a sloppy spectacle of astroturfing— the practice of concealing the sponsors of a movement so it appears to have grassroots origin and mass support. In other words, something that seems like a spontaneous expression of the zeitgeist but is actually a few rich pricks using their immense wealth to change our perception of the political landscape. Americans on both sides of the party line are falling for it. 

          If it seems like this movement popped up overnight, it’s because it did: tech-savvy Redditor sleuths discovered that the protest websites (reopen[state abbreviation].com, although in some cases this re-directs to a page on a different website, like minnesotagunrights.org, the domain always registered to the same LLC) can be traced to at least two professional astroturfing firms (or, as they call themselves, “digital advocacy solutions”). The sites for PA, MN, IA, VA, WI, and OH— all presidential election swing states— were made by OneClickPolitics, and the sites for MD, MJ, and NJ were made by UJoin. Strategies like this can be incredibly impactful; digital astroturfing was employed by AggregateIQ/Cambridge Analytica in the Brexit campaign, for instance. If you’re confused about what exactly these companies do, that makes two of us— but you can get an idea from OCP’s website: 

“Are you launching a new coalition or association and need more members now? Want 10,000 signatures for your petition from residents of a certain state? Are you battling a legislative issue in a location where you don't have enough advocates, who are constituents of the legislators you are attempting to influence? Or would you like to impress your boss by reporting a 15% growth in membership in less than 90 days? If your answer is yes, keep reading!

OneClick Acquisition is your solution for generating immediate legislative actions from new supporters within mere days. We deliver “on demand, organic supporters” through our proprietary digital ad placement technology.”

          It’s unknown who’s paying for these campaigns, but I could hazard some guesses. After all, Republican puppetmasters are making less effort to hide than ever before— FreedomWorks, the thinktank behind the Tea Party movement, is “holding weekly virtual town halls with members of Congress, igniting an activist base of thousands of supporters across the nation to back up the effort,” according to an Associated Press article titled “Powerful GOP allies propel Trump effort to reopen economy”: history repeating itself as farce. Besides DeVos, these “powerful allies” include The Heritage Foundation and Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity. 

          Americans have become so reverent of wealth and power, so blind to class distinctions, that they see billionaire chessmasters as their “allies” protecting their inalienable “right to work”: the right to sacrifice themselves at the altar of capital so their families get some Eucharistic breadcrumbs. It’s incredible that elites funding supposedly populist political maneuvers can be construed as a good thing— a philanthropic thing, even. In case it isn’t obvious, not only is the ruling class not acting in our best interest, or trying to keep us healthy, or preserve our freedom, they are acting in their best interest, which is to limit our freedom and maximize our productivity as much as possible. And before you go and tweet about those MAGA hat-clad #FloridaMorons, you should consider the elites you’re prepared to trust— like, I don’t know, richest man in the world Bill Gates, or certified worst person in the world Nancy Pelosi and the “experts” bearing her seal of approval. 

         Whether you’re out protesting in your truck with an American flag or at home with your gourmet ice cream tweeting angrily about it, the establishment is laughing all the way to the bank (they just auctioned your liberty and privacy off to the highest bidder!). Wake up, sheeple. It’s 2020. The two party system is a joke. It doesn’t really matter who’s behind the astroturfing, because the only lines that matter right now are class lines: it’s not Enlightened Democrats vs. The Trumpian Troglodytes, it’s Normal People vs. the rapidly dystopic Big-Data-Big-Pharma-Privatized-Government Orwellian Technocracy of the new world order. Uniting under our shared interests is our only hope. Well, that and Bill Gates, of course.