Saturday, August 19, 2023
What Trump’s Debate Stunt Says to GOP Voters
It’s hard to think of a more childishly on-brand stunt than Donald Trump’s effort to sabotage the first Republican debate of the 2024 presidential race.
The MAGA king refusing to put on his big-boy pants and share the stage with his opponents is one thing. But counterprogramming some sad sideshow to siphon attention away from the first major candidate forum of the cycle — and with Tucker Carlson, no less? That’s a whole different level of petulant and needy, and it speaks to his staggering disregard for voters and their right to accurately assess the field. The electorate, especially Trump-skeptical Republicans, should demand better.
I get why Mr. Trump isn’t eager to climb into this sandbox. Debating is hard, and he is out of practice. He participated in only two debates during the 2020 cycle, the first of which was the stuff of campaign legend — but in a bad way. (Proud boys, stand back and stand by!) At some point during Wednesday’s two-hour event he would need to talk about something other than his grievances. He hates doing that, and has always been kind of lousy at it. Much of the primary field he is now facing is younger, sharper, hungrier and actually cares about policy and governance. And while few people have Mr. Trump’s razzle-dazzle, at least a couple of his opponents have solid media chops.
Mr. Trump may well be correct to assume he has more to lose than gain from these matchups. But it bears remembering that debates aren’t supposed to be primarily for the benefit of the candidates strutting and fretting upon the stage. They are meant to provide voters with a meaty opportunity to judge their options side-by-side, to listen to them field tough questions, to compare their policies and priorities and visions of leadership. The point is to help the electorate make an informed choice.
This is the case for every presidential hopeful. It is all the truer for Mr. Trump, who is dominating the Republican herd. Sure, he’s done the job before. But his performance was … well, unsettling enough that he lost re-election — and then handled the loss rather poorly. Some Republican voters, especially all those suburban women he needs to win back, might care to hear why he thinks they should give him another chance, especially now that he is up to his comb-over in legal trouble. His high-handed decision to skip this debate risks underscoring to these voters how unserious he is about winning their support and expanding his base even a whit, versus staying comfortably focused on his MAGA fans.
Mr. Trump’s participation would reveal much about the other candidates as well. How would the field handle it when he started spewing his conspiracy nonsense? Who would call him out? (If these debate strategy memos are any indication, not Pudding Fingers DeSantis.) Would anyone be able to wrest the spotlight from him?
Even with Mr. Trump missing, there will be much awkward talk of him. (Or so Fox News’s debate moderators promise.) You would think that, if he were in fighting form, he would want to be on hand to keep the pretenders to his throne in line — or, more precisely, to humiliate his critics face-to-face. I mean, lobbing fat jokes at Chris Christie from afar can provide Mr. Trump only so much satisfaction, particularly since Mr. Christie has been calling him a liar, a coward, and a con artist of late.
Instead, the former president is taking the cheap and entitled way out, fulfilling at least one of Mr. Christie’s critiques. After weeks of being tiresomely coy about his debate-night plans, he has decided to sit down with the disgraced pundit Tucker Carlson, The Times reported on Friday. The man is notoriously fickle, so who knows when — or even if — this will actually happen. Let’s hope it doesn’t. I’m sorry, but we already watched Mr. Carlson give Mr. Trump a thorough bootlicking back in April, not long before Fox News gave Mr. Carlson the boot, in fact, and it was sad.
The Republican debaters, meanwhile, will be left to struggle with the thorny challenge of how to prevent Mr. Trump from hijacking the event in absentia. His antidemocratic inclinations and parade of indictments will have to be addressed. But then everyone really should move on to other issues, leaving the attention-thirsty former president in the shadows. If a Trumpless debate winds up being all about Mr. Trump anyway, he is the winner.
This election cycle is still young, and there will be other debates. The next one, in fact, was announced just last week. (Mark your calendars for Sept. 27!) Republican voters who are feeling even slightly ambivalent about a Trump nomination/coronation should make clear that they expect him to start showing up — and soon, before the field has been whittled way down.
Sure, the MAGA faithful don’t care about such niceties as accountability. But they do not constitute the majority of the Republican Party. The non-MAGA masses can take this primary in another direction if they choose. Many of those voters have reservations about Mr. Trump’s fitness for office — or at least about his electability. (The guy has been responsible for an awful lot of losing since 2016.) They deserve to take his measure directly against the field’s alternatives. And they are in a position to punish him if he cannot be bothered to even try.
Thursday, August 17, 2023
Wednesday, August 16, 2023
Ron DeSantis' Shriveling Campaign
Go to YouTube, and you can still find the Ron DeSantis who got Republican donors and media so excited, just a year ago. A source familiar with the campaign described clips of DeSantis, usually at press conferences he gave as governor of Florida, that went viral in Republican circles. . . . The questions were often about DeSantis’s COVID policies, and also sometimes about his aggressive stances against the teaching of race and gender topics in public schools or his perplexing war on Disney. In response, DeSantis generally took an impatient tone—the press, he seemed to suggest, was once again wasting everyone’s time.
It wasn’t surprising that this kind of figure would appeal most keenly to conservative élites: his gubernatorial campaign last year, effectively a COVID victory lap, drew an astonishing two hundred million dollars in contributions from donors, and, in a four-month period just after the 2020 election, Fox News producers asked DeSantis to appear on the network more than a hundred and ten times. By the end of 2022, after DeSantis romped to reëlection in a midterm cycle in which Republicans underperformed and some of Trump’s preferred candidates flamed out, it seemed to G.O.P. pollsters that the DeSantis phenomenon was no longer just top-down.
Since the 2020 election, Sarah Longwell, a Republican pollster closely affiliated with the Never Trump movement, has been conducting frequent focus groups with Republicans who voted twice for Trump. This past winter, Longwell told me, “We started having to screen groups for Trump favorability to find people who even wanted Trump to run again. I can’t tell you how dominant DeSantis was in that moment, and how clear people were that it was time to move on.” Former Trump voters, Longwell said, “were very DeSantis curious. They just thought Trump had too much baggage.
One theory circulating among politicos right now is that DeSantis simply waited too long to enter the race. . . . But, whatever the reasons for the delay, it was also the case that DeSantis and his advisers had not solved a fundamental problem for the campaign: how to run against Trump. Within two months of DeSantis’s announcement, his campaign laid off a third of its staff; last week, he fired his campaign manager. In a recent Times/Siena poll, he trailed Trump 54–17 among national Republican primary voters.
At the outset of his campaign, DeSantis had a strong base of support among more moderate, college-educated voters. But this base alone is not big enough to win the Republican primaries. “Early on in the race, DeSantis was gonna have to make a decision,” a leading G.O.P. consultant working with a rival candidate told me. One path, he said, would have been to run as a moderate, pull all the anti-Trump people into his camp, and then go to work on the conservatives by arguing that he was younger than Trump, more competent at governing, and likelier to win. The other path was to try to run from the right, even if that cost him the support of his natural base, on the theory that it would be impossible to beat Trump without denting his conservative support and that eventually the moderates would come home because, as the consultant put it, “Where the fuck else are they gonna go?”
In truth, a conservative run was a more natural fit for DeSantis. As DeSantis built his national brand, he had leaned heavily into a hard form of culture war: attacking Disney and pushing laws that curtailed the teaching of gender- and race-related topics. It would have been tricky for even the most adept politician to pivot from this to a moderate pitch of good governance and policy. The DeSantis campaign also seemed to lack Trump’s appeal to what the source familiar with the campaign called the “deep base instincts” of the Republican Party. Perhaps to compensate for this and to channel the right-wing id, the campaign associated itself with some envelope-pushing young activists and journalists. This backfired.
But, from the start of this year, DeSantis has struggled to identify issues that might appeal to very conservative voters. In February, DeSantis criticized the U.S.’s support of the Ukraine war, but he was forced to reverse his position after some prominent donors threw a fit. In April, as much of the political world was coming to terms with Democrats’ electoral advantage after the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, DeSantis signed a bill outlawing abortion after six weeks.
For several years now, it’s been common to hear Republican consultants and pollsters say that Trump dominates among the Party’s conservative base because he is seen as a “fighter.” More than anyone else in the G.O.P. primary, DeSantis has a reputation for political aggression and a track record of conservative efficacy, but that doesn’t seem to have helped him. Perhaps this characterization of Trump is misleading. Is he really a fighter? He is a yeller, certainly, an expresser, a maker of big threats. He also wanders away from the fights he has started.
On August 4th, a verdict of a sort was delivered on DeSantis’s effort to pry the conservative base from Trump. The hotel magnate Robert Bigelow, the largest individual donor to the DeSantis super PAC, Never Back Down, to which he’d given twenty million dollars, told Reuters that he would not give any more money to the campaign unless it adopts a more moderate approach, saying that DeSantis “does need to shift to get moderates.” When I spoke with Sarah Longwell a few days later, she told me that, in her last two focus groups of two-time Trump voters, not a single participant had said that they wanted DeSantis to win the nomination . . .
The qualities that recommended DeSantis six months ago are intact; Trump is in a strong poll position but a perilous legal one. When I followed DeSantis on the Iowa trail last week, at least, the challenge seemed to be the fundamental political matter of what, exactly, he was trying to say. . . . He did not mention his conflict with Disney; the riff on “parental rights in education” was reserved for his wife, who took the mike after him. Was he abandoning the culture-war hard line? It was difficult to tell. I had the impression that he was hedging.
If the DeSantis campaign is changing, it isn’t yet obvious how. The source familiar with the campaign told me, “If you’re seeking to understand why this entire operation has been such a disaster, the problem has more to do with the fact that there isn’t any unifying theory of the case and certainly no unifying, coherent message—it’s a schizophrenic campaign with a schizophrenic message.” DeSantis, the source went on, had put himself in the impossible position of trying to be “more moderate than Trump and more conservative than him simultaneously.”
In recent weeks, the campaign had taken note of an anti-Trump message that seemed likely to have some traction with Republican voters: a sixty-second spot, “John,” cut by a PAC. In it, a middle-aged man, seated on the steps of a suburban home and speaking calmly to the camera, says that he loves Donald Trump and saw him as a “breath of fresh air,” but that this got him disinvited from his sister’s for Thanksgiving. “The drama . . . he’s got so many distractions, the constant fighting, there’s something every day,” John says. “And I’m not sure he can focus on moving the country forward.” The country is heading in the wrong direction, he adds, “and we definitely need somebody that can freakin’ win. I think you probably lose that bet if you voted for Trump.”
But if this was the sort of message that DeSantis’s supporters hoped might dent Trump’s standing, there was an obvious problem: it did not so much as mention DeSantis. The first debate is on August 23rd, and the best message that the DeSantis campaign has found is not about the Florida governor himself.
Republicans Defend Trump at Their Own Risk
Republican leaders rushed to defend Donald Trump after a Georgia grand jury levied charges against the former president for his scheme to interfere in the state’s 2020 presidential election. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy described the indictment as a “desperate sham.” Rep. Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, said it was a “WITCH HUNT” and that Trump “did nothing wrong.”
That reaction is unsurprising, but it’s troubling nonetheless. Yes, the legal theories deployed against Trump might be questionable. And yes, there is no doubt that Trump’s prosecution is politically motivated. (That is, unfortunately, a fact of life.) But Republicans minimize Trump’s awful scheme to overturn his defeat at their own risk.
The indictment lists in excruciating detail how Trump and his band worked to undermine the election. The effort was at times shambolic and comical (remember what looked like hair dye dripping down Rudy Giuliani’s face at a news conference?), but nevertheless, it was a serious plot to ensure Trump stayed in the Oval Office against the voters’ will.
Trump’s defenders contend the Georgia indictment is an attempt to criminalize the former president’s political speech. . . . But this ignores the sheer audacity of Trump’s acts and willful ignorance of the facts. Gore had reason to believe that an honest recounting of the votes might award him Florida’s electoral votes. And Clinton did not spend months manufacturing phony controversies in multiple states to provide then-Vice President Joe Biden a pretext to reject electoral votes on the House floor. Trump did, even though he had no rational reason to think he was the fair winner of the election.
Trump flagrantly disregarded the truth from the moment the polls closed. He said, for example, that Milwaukee’s release of its absentee ballots on the morning after Election Day was proof those votes were fraudulent. But, as it was widely reported at the time, those votes would be released in the early hours because Wisconsin law did not allow election officials to begin processing mail ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day. Facts simply didn’t matter to Trump and his squad.
[T]he prosecution should spend considerable time at trial documenting the rampant disregard for the facts that Trump and his co-conspirators consistently displayed. This wasn’t a case of hardball politics as usual; it was an unusual case of a desperate man pulling every lever of power he could to stay in office despite the facts and the law. Even if doing so does not result in conviction, it would do a service for the public.
The Senate’s Watergate hearings helped sway public opinion against President Richard M. Nixon because they patiently and prudently unraveled his defenses. . . . That could happen again during Trump’s trial. Many Republican voters who back Trump believe his false claims of election fraud, but no one with the resources that Trump’s prosecutors have has ever attempted to systematically undermine those claims.
Prosecutors have a chance to correct that. If they do, do not be surprised if Trump’s GOP backing erodes as his own supporters realize he played them for chumps.
This is why the rush to defend Trump rests on such shaky ground. Ultimately, Republicans who do so are implicitly condoning his heinous behavior. That could prove to be politically unwise.
People will forgive partisan witch hunts if the facts prove the defendant is, in fact, a witch. Republicans should thus think twice before they risk drowning in Trump’s cauldron of deceit.
Tuesday, August 15, 2023
Trump's Lawyer Co-conspirators: A Stain on the Legal Profession
The second federal indictment [and now Georgia indictment] of Donald Trump describes conduct that posed a profound threat to our constitutional democracy — conduct that deserves serious punishment if proven. But the former president did not act alone. At least five and perhaps all six of the individuals who are alleged to have conspired with Mr. Trump to strip millions of Americans of their right to have their votes counted had a special duty to protect our constitutional system. They were lawyers.
The former senior Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark and the former law school dean John Eastman, who seem plainly to be two of the unnamed co-conspirators, are hardly representative of the million-plus practicing lawyers in the United States. Thousands of lawyers, most of them career civil servants, served honorably in Mr. Trump’s administration.
A few, such as the senior Justice Department attorneys Jeffrey Rosen, Richard Donoghue and Steven Engle, risked their jobs to prevent Mr. Trump from enacting some of his darkest election subversion schemes. And lawyers appointed by Mr. Trump to the federal bench were likewise among the dozens of judges who rejected his meritless lawsuits challenging the election in the courts. These lawyers served as powerful checks against Mr. Trump’s authoritarian ambitions.
But at the same time, the key role lawyers played in buttressing the former president’s plans speaks to a troubling crisis in the legal profession. The lawyers he conspired with — whose alleged conduct breached a host of rules of professional ethics, in addition to provisions of criminal law — did not emerge from whole cloth. They are the product of a profession that has changed over the past 40 years, in ways that tend to reduce the supply of Rosen-type lawyers in public roles, and increase the supply of Clarks. And unless we make changes in the structure of public lawyering and the professional path lawyers take to get there, we will not only lose one of our most effective checks against authoritarian power, we could accelerate its consolidation.
Scandals among presidential lawyers are, of course, hardly new. By the end of the Watergate revelations, no fewer than 29 lawyers — including two of President Richard Nixon’s handpicked attorneys general — faced sanctions for failing to check presidential misconduct, and lying to facilitate its commission. Both government and professional associations responded by adopting a revolutionary set of reforms, aimed at reinforcing the rule of law as a guardrail of constitutional democracy. The American Bar Association revised its influential model rules of professional ethics to make clear that lawyers who work for any organization, including the government, have a duty to report any unlawful acts of federal officials they encounter in the course of their work.
Congress, too, considered proposals to radically reform government lawyering — from requiring the attorney general to belong to a different political party than the president, to making him or her fully independent of the executive branch (and free from the president’s supervision or interference). To stave off these more dramatic measures, President Gerald Ford’s attorney general ordered the creation of a new Office of Professional Responsibility, charged with reviewing allegations that any department employee was violating legal or ethical rules — an office that exists to this day.
The parallels in lawyerly misconduct between Watergate and today are evident: Mr. Eastman is facing “moral turpitude” charges in California, Rudy Giuliani faces disbarment in Washington, D.C., and they’re far from the only ones. Dozens of other lawyers who represented Mr. Trump in election litigation now face misconduct allegations in state disciplinary proceedings nationwide.
But the prospects for systemic reform seem far less promising than they did half a century ago. Today, the formally nonpartisan A.B.A., which 40 years ago claimed the membership of about half of American lawyers, now represents roughly a fifth of them, its influence supplanted in key respects by more partisan alliances, the conservative Federalist Society most influential among them.
The effect of this partisan shift has not been limited to the courts. From law school to law practice to government service, elite lawyers can today move through their careers along effectively parallel professional paths. Most major private law firms with Supreme Court practices today consistently show an evident preference for hiring former clerks from judicial chambers on the firm’s preferred side of the political spectrum.
Conservatives in recent decades have worked to expand the role of partisan lawyering further still, even attempting to give hiring preference to conservative lawyers in career government service positions, jobs that post-Watergate civil service laws aimed to insulate from exactly such partisan pressures. Such moves send a clear signal to young lawyers: ideological loyalty is a credential, not a disqualification.
In the meantime, the Office of Professional Responsibility conducts far fewer ethics investigations than it did even as recently as the 1990s; these days, its active caseload is almost nonexistent. . . . thanks to the modern system of professional rewards, breaking ethical rules in the interest of securing partisan advantage has even won some lawyers nominations to the federal bench.
In this environment, it is not hard to see why government lawyers like Mr. Clark and even nongovernment lawyers like Mr. Eastman might have come to believe that their best path to career success was to elevate partisan loyalty over professional ethics. And it is not hard to see why these incentives may prove devastating for constitutional democracy.
The Trump case shows lawyers not only failing to make sure their government clients operate within the bounds of our democratic system, but stretching to help those clients craft ways to subvert it. The risk to the rule of law is equally apparent.
Changing the increasingly polarized nature of the legal profession is a more complex enterprise — one centrally bound up in how we learn, teach, reward and punish what lawyers do. It is a long-term project. With little time to lose.
Trump Indicted on 13 Counts in Georgia
“Defendant Donald John Trump lost the United States presidential election held on November 3, 2020. One of the states he lost was Georgia. Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump. That conspiracy contained common plan and purpose to commit two or more acts of racketeering activity in Fulton County, Georgia, elsewhere in the State of Georgia, and in other states,” . . .
Trump is not the only party indicted. The others include Mark Meadows, former chief if staff, a group of Trump's ghoulish lawyers, and some Georgia Republican officials. How the indictments and ultimate trial will play out will only be shown with the passage of time, yet sane, sentient and moral people already know that Trump and his conspirators are guilty as hell. Trump has until August 25th to turn himself in and one can only hope the judge on the case makes it clear to Trump that if he keeps up the lies and attacks on witnesses and jurors he will be put behind bars. Here is more from the Post piece:
Who: The co-conspirators include, Trump confidant Rudy Giuliani, Trump legal adviser John Eastman, former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, Trump lawyers Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell, and Georgia officials Shawn Still and David Shafer.
Why racketeering: The RICO charges “allows a lot of different things to be pulled together into a single very serious criminal charge,” Clark Cunningham, a law professor at Georgia State University, told our colleague Amber Phillips.
Willis, who is known to say, “I don’t like a bully,” said in an interview with The Post last year that she likes the anti-racketeering law because “it allows you to tell jurors the full story.”
When: In a brief news conference after the indictment was unsealed, Willis said she wants the trial to start in the next six months. The Iowa caucuses are five months from today.
Trump faces court dates from January to May 2024 in his other three indictments.
The (predictable) reaction:
- Trump’s team in a lengthy news release immediately attacked Willis, her family, and alleged a “suspiciously long” investigation “timed to interfere with the 2024 presidential election.”
- House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.)
tweeted: “A radical DA in Georgia is following Biden’s lead by
attacking President Trump and using it to fundraise her political career.
Americans see through this desperate sham.”
Republican presidential candidate Asa Hutchinson, one of the few willing to criticize Trump, said that he believes more than ever that Trump’s actions “disqualifies him from ever serving as president again.”
Monday, August 14, 2023
Sunday, August 13, 2023
The Dangerous Lost Boys of the American Right
Since the ascendance of Donald Trump, with depressing regularity, right-wing men have been outed for using the most vile rhetoric. In private chats and sometimes in full view of the public on social media, they’ll engage in blatantly racist, sexist and homophobic speech, flirt with fascist imagery and then often disavow their words and actions the instant they’re caught.
The examples are legion, and they’re not coming from fringe outlets on the American right. For example, last month, the Ron DeSantis campaign parted ways with a young speechwriter named Nate Hochman who reportedly inserted a Nazi sonnenrad symbol into a pro-DeSantis video online. Hochman was previously under fire for telling Nick Fuentes, a notorious white supremacist . . . Hochman responded, “I said some really stupid things, which I don’t actually believe, that signaled agreement with Fuentes, even though I couldn’t disagree more with his vision of the world.” Roughly a year after that incident, according to Axios, he created the sonnenrad video.
Was Hochman fringe? Hardly. Before he joined the DeSantis campaign, he worked as a staff writer at National Review and interned at The Dispatch, where I worked as a senior editor before joining The New York Times. He even once wrote for The Times.
Hochman is not alone. In June the right-wing publication Breitbart published group chats and private messages from Pedro Gonzalez, a popular online influencer and DeSantis supporter, which included comments like “Whites are the only hope nonwhites have of living civilized lives” and “The only tactical consideration of Jews is screening them for movements,” along with a host of other comments not suitable for a family publication.
This month HuffPost reported that Richard Hanania, an influential anti-woke writer, published a series of pseudonymous posts at racist publications in the late 2000s and early 2010s. . . . . close observers of his contemporary work were hardly surprised by the revelations. Just this past May, for example, he posted in a thread on crime that America needs “more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of Black people.”
The September issue of The Atlantic contains Graeme Wood’s fascinating and disturbing profile of a man named Costin Alamariu, better known online as Bronze Age Pervert, who has a cult following among the young right. Alamariu argues, writes Wood, “that the natural and desirable condition of life is the domination of the weak and ugly by the strong and noble. He considers American cities a ‘wasteland’ run by Jews and Black people . . .
Terrible stuff. And even more terrible is the realization that I could fill this entire column with other examples of right-wing bigotry, from Christian nationalists, a former Trump speechwriter, a former Daily Caller editor and one of Tucker Carlson’s former top writers. And this is hardly a complete list. The problem is so widespread . . .
What is going on? Why are parts of the right — especially the young right — so infested with outright racists and bigots?
Some readers might respond to my question with a question: Why am I surprised? The right has always been infested with racists and bigots, you might argue. Yet while I freely acknowledge that there was more racism on the right than I was willing or able to see before the rise of Trump, there has been a distinct change in young right-wing culture. It is dramatically different from what it was when I was in college, in law school and starting my legal career.
As I survey the right — especially the young, so-called new right — I see a movement in the grip of some rather simple but powerful cultural forces. Hatred, combined with masculine insecurity and cowardice, is herding young right-wing men into outright bigotry and prejudice. Contrary to their self-conception, they’re not strong or tough or courageous.
A tiny fringe adopts this mind-set as a conscious ethos, but for a much larger group, it is simply their cultural reality. In their minds, the left is so evil — and represents such an existential threat — that any accommodation of it (or any criticism of the right) undermines the forces of light in their great battle against the forces of darkness. Attack the left in the most searing terms, and you’ll enjoy the thunderous applause of your peers. Criticize the new right, and you can experience a vicious backlash. The result is a relentless pull to the extremes.
As they see it, classical liberal politics, which preserve free speech and robust debate as a priority, emboldened and empowered the left. Compromise, in their view, ran only one way, and conservatism conserved nothing. The left, in their mind, is winning the culture war in a rout.
And here’s where masculine insecurity enters the equation. To the new right, their opposition to the left is so obviously correct that only moral cowardice or financial opportunism (“grifting”) can explain any compromise. To fight on the right — mainly by trolling on social media or embracing authoritarianism as the based alternative to weak-kneed classical liberalism — is seen as strong, courageous and cool.
But what happens if you disagree? What happens if you ask: Wait, are we going too far? Well, then, you’re weak and small. . . . . Worse still, even when one initially embraces bigotry “only” as a form of social transgression, marinating in that environment soon turns trolling into conviction. . . . So in the name of strength, these young men capitulate until their minds and hearts are warped beyond recognition.
In the meantime, these angry online sheep can still bite. They’re using their platforms to whip countless Americans into their own frenzy of fear. We should expect more bigotry and more revelations. Dark words spoken in secret will spill out into the public square. The lost boys of the American right corrupt our culture. Full of fury against their opponents and afraid of running afoul of their “friends,” they poison our politics and damage their own souls.
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