More Saturday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

Youngkin Scrambles as Schools Reject His Anti-Trans and Anti-LGBT Policies

With the entire Virginia General Assembly up for election this November and in light of his presidential ambitions, Glenn Youngkin is continuing the charade that he is a "moderate" and is pushing his deceptive "parent's rights" agenda.  The only parental rights that Youngkin truly cares about are those of Christofascists who follow the dictates of The Family Foundation, Virginia's leading anti-LGBT hate group whose roots trace back to the "Massive Resistance" movement that opposed desegregation. Hence Youngkin's first executive order barring "divisive topics"  - namely an accurate portrayal of Virginia's true history and acknowledgement that LGBT individuals exist - which has been followed by the Youngkin/The Family Foundation policies on LGBT and transgender students that (i) treat children as the chattel property of their parents and (ii) ignore the fact that the biggest danger to many LGBT students are their "Christian" extremist parents.  With the November elections heating up, Youngkin is faced with a revolt by a number of Virginia's largest school divisions (e.g., Fairfax County, Virginia Beach) which are either refusing to adopt the anti-LGBT policies or insisting on modifications to ensure LGBT students are protected.  A piece in The Advocate looks at Youngin's effort to appease his masters at The Family Foundation in the face of the rejection of his bigoted and dangerous policies.  Here are excerpts:

As the school year begins anew in Virginia, many districts around the state are rejecting Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s new school policies that advocates say discriminate against transgender students. His administration is scrambling to find ways to compel school districts to adopt these controversial new policies.

During a Fox News interview on Monday, Youngkin criticized schools that aren’t adopting his administration’s controversial “Model Policies on Ensuring Privacy, Dignity, and Respect for All Students and Parents in Virginia’s Public Schools” for transgender students, stating that “it is the law and they don’t have a choice.”

Appearing on “The Story with Martha MacCallum,” Youngkin griped how many districts around the commonwealth are considering or have chosen to forego implementing the 2023 policies that have been in the works since last September and were finalized in July.

The policies require students to use bathrooms and locker rooms according to their assigned sex at birth. They also require that all parents provide written permission to the school if a student wishes to use a name or pronoun that differs from their official records. Furthermore, schools must disclose to parents if students share information regarding their sexual orientation or gender identity with school staff.

The Advocate spoke with Niko, a transgender teen who goes to school in Arlington.

Niko made headlines for calling out Gov. Youngkin on his transgender model policies for trans students at a CNN town hall event in March. Youngkin appeared stumped when Niko asked which bathroom Youngkin thought the teen should use.

“I think it shows that he’s grasping at straws,” Niko said. “Youngkin doesn’t have a lot to stand on right now. I think that this is a topic that is firing people up right now, and so it’s something that he’s able to rely on.”

The district where Niko goes to school has rejected Younkin’s new policies.

Superintendent of Arlington Public Schools, Francisco Durán, toldThe Advocate recently that he believes that his district’s current policies align with Virginia law and that he would not implement the governor’s discriminatory new guidelines.

“It’s very important for me to make the statement because when the model policies came out, many of our families, our staff, and our students were very concerned with what they meant for them,” he said. “As the superintendent of all students, regardless of their background, it’s my responsibility to ensure we provide a welcoming, safe environment for them.”

On Thursday, Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares gave his opinion regarding new guidelines the Virginia Department of Education set forth regarding transgender and nonbinary students.

As part of a release issued by the attorney general’s office on Thursday, Miyares said the new guidance “complies with federal and state nondiscrimination laws,” adding that “the model policies comply with the Equal Protection Clause, Title IX, and the Virginia Human Rights Act,” noting “local school boards are required to adopt policies that are consistent with them.”

An opinion on the guidelines was released “at the request of Governor Glenn Youngkin,” who expressed support for the guidelines, saying that children should “trust your parents,” Miyares said.

The opinion stated that under the First and Fourteenth Amendments, parents have “a fundamental right to direct the upbringing and education of their children.”

Virginia voters need to vote against Republican candidates and realize that if the GOP gains control of the General Assembly, Virginia will quickly become a carbon copy of DeSantis' Florida with abortion banned, black history erased, and LGBT individuals subject to a Christofascist jihad. .  Virginians deserve better than that.

More Saturday Male Beauty

 

Palin’s Civil War Threat Underscores MAGA World's Insanity

Since she burst on the scene when John McCain tapper her as his vice presidential running mate - and likely sealed his election loss - Sarah Palin has embodied the insanity and embrace of constant lies and ignorance that now define much of the Republican Party base. Ignorance is celebrated and the truth and objective reality simply do not matter.  Michelle Bachmann's - another utterly insane and unhinged individual (who is now appropriately encamped at the late Pat Robertson's Regent University) - short-lived rise to prominence continued the race to the bottom intellectually and morally within the GOP and set the stage for Donald Trump, a shameless pathological liar who could not even admit his own obesity when booked in Atlanta this week.  With Trump headed to likely convictions on numerous felony counts both at the federal level and in Georgia, his acolytes and those like Palin who are struggling to regain some small part of the media limelight are pushing increasingly dangerous language that seems intended to set the stage for violence no matter how guilty Trump may be.  Meanwhile, morally bankrupt evangelicals and those living in the bubble of Fox News and its imitators continue to worship Trump, a man who embodies everything moral and decent people should reject.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the MAGA world insanity and race towards violence.  Here are highlights:

As a phenomenon in itself, Sarah Palin’s pithy comments about Donald Trump’s arrest in Atlanta this week were neither surprising nor terribly significant. Her rant and rave, as the Daily Beast reported, were characteristically over the top:

Sarah Palin responded to Donald Trump’s arrest in Georgia on Thursday night by talking up the possibility of civil war. Speaking to Eric Bolling as the former president was booked at the Fulton County Jail on election interference charges, Palin slammed “those who are conducting this travesty and creating this two-tier system of justice.” “I want to ask them: What the heck?” the former Alaska governor said. “Do you want us to be in civil war? Because that’s what’s going to happen. . . . .

It’s unlikely that the perpetually overrated pol last seen losing two congressional races in Alaska to a Democrat last year is going to lead the kind of violent insurrection she is not-so-subtly threatening. But it’s a sign that the many, many, many attention-starved MAGA straphangers in or at the periphery of national politics are going to have a new mantra going forward. Having burned through more conventional measures to “take our country back” via normal electoral or legislative activity, Trump’s surrogates are embracing their leader’s increasingly incendiary talk about past, present, and future setbacks that must be avenged or prevented by any means necessary.

Jack Smith’s federal indictment of Trump sparked a lot of fiery rhetoric, as Insider reported in June:

Right-wing Trump supporters are indignant and using “violent rhetoric” online after a federal grand jury brought criminal charges against former President Donald Trump. “We have now reached a war phase,” Republican congressman Andy Biggs menacingly tweeted on Friday. “Eye for an eye,” said the Arizona Rep.

More recently, the threats have been more specifically aimed at the alleged persecutors, notes Time:

Trump has repeatedly been warned by federal officials to refrain from rhetoric that could “incite violence or civil unrest.” Yet as he faces a fourth criminal indictment within a matter of months, he is only stepping up his attacks on prosecutors and judges. And within minutes of his attacks, his acolytes respond.

Here’s the scary thing that ensures this rhetoric will only escalate: By labeling his multiple indictments “election interference” (the very crime of which he is charged by both federal and state prosecutors), Trump has now made his “rigged election” claim for 2024 well over a year in advance.

In the view from the MAGA fever swamps, it’s now impossible for Trump to have a fair shot at regaining the presidency. If he wins despite the massive “election interference” he faces, he is fully justified in unleashing the vengeance that is so prominent a part of his 2024 message. If he seems to lose … it’s clearly grounds for whatever extra-constitutional redress he and his supporters choose.

But with this terrible miscarriage of justice underway before our eyes each day in Washington and Manhattan and Florida and Georgia, why wait for the preemptive theft of the presidency to be consummated? Why not demand it stop right now on pain of nation-rending violence (or as some hard-core conservatives like to put it, a “Second Amendment Solution”)?

Trump’s 2024 campaign is already infused with the smell of gunpowder and the clamor of insurrection. More conventional thinkers may believe his endless misconduct and his ever-more-relentless extremism will convince Republican primary voters to dump him in favor of some safer substitute who doesn’t terrify half the electorate. But the MAGA take on the nomination contest is that doing anything other than sending Trump back out into battle represents complicity in a “rigged election” that happened in 2020 and that is already fully underway for 2024. That makes the rhetoric of civil war, and at some point a significant risk of something worse than rhetoric, not only inevitable, but certain to get worse and worse as the various legal proceedings against Trump run their course.

Be very afraid of what these insane people are capable of doing.  January 6, 2021, may prove to be a mere dress rehearsal.

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

 

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Yevgeny Prigozhin May Yet Have the Last Laugh

A piece in The Atlantic by Anne Applebaum looks at the long list of murders and assassinations that has marked Vladimir Putin's dictatorship in Russia.  The lesson to be drawn is oppose Putin, then one needs to plan to die or at best be imprisoned.  This lesson appears to been lost on Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner Group leader who staged an abortive coup of sorts back in June, who by all appearances was assassinated in a spectacular downing of his private jet which was either hit by a missile or had a bomb placed on board.  While Putin may have rid himself of a would be challenger and embarrassment in the short term, Prigozhin's very public murder may over time help set in motion forces that will usher in the end of his regime (some messages from the Wagner Group have included threats of retribution for Prigozhin's murder).  Another column in The Atlantic looks at Putin's apparent thinking and the forces he may unwittingly have set in motion, hopefully to his extreme detriment.  In the interim, Russia continues its run of brutal dictators who have ruled since the October Revolution in 1917 and put personal power over the interests of the nation and the Russian people.  Here are highlights:

Initial reports suggest that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the ruthless mercenary leader of the Wagner Group, has been killed. Although confirmed details are scant, his private plane has allegedly crashed or been shot down, an event that many have interpreted as an assassination. Prigozhin probably knew to stay away from windows in high buildings, so it seems plausible that Vladimir Putin took him out at 28,000 feet instead.

Coup plotters rarely die of old age. Prigozhin sealed his fate in June when he launched a failed mutiny against Putin, which fizzled hours after it began. No dictator can afford to tolerate that kind of disloyalty: Every moment that Prigozhin lived made Putin look weaker, a dictator seemingly forced to accommodate a man who had directly challenged him, simply because Russia needed the Wagner Group for its disastrous war of attrition in Ukraine.

Putin likely knew that letting Prigozhin live risked emboldening enemies within to mount additional threats. In an interview earlier this year, Putin said that leaders must be able to forgive, but that not everything can be forgiven. When the interviewer asked him “What can’t be forgiven?,” Putin’s answer was immediate: “Betrayal.”

And so Prigozhin has apparently gone down in his private plane. The Kremlin could easily have staged a less conspicuous death that would be more likely to dupe outsiders into wondering whether Prigozhin had died of natural causes. But dictators don’t usually want plausible deniability. When they use deadly force against their enemies, they want everyone to know—a shot across the bow to other would-be plotters—which is why Russia’s enemies abroad have been killed with highly controlled radioactive substances that point directly to the Kremlin. If you’re going to send a message, make sure everyone knows who sent it.

Prigozhin’s death, if confirmed, is very likely Putin’s calculated method of trying to reassert his strength. But if so, Putin has made the classic error that all dictators make: wrongly conflating ruthless violence with strength. True strength—and lasting power—comes from regimes that are resilient. The apparent death of Yevgeny Prighozin instead reveals a brittle dictatorship with cracks and divisions that will continue to grow over time.

Today’s events are almost certain to have unintended consequences, as Putin falls further into what I call “the dictator trap”: In authoritarian regimes, every act comes with a trade-off, and those intended to shore up power nearly always wind up undermining it. Short-term displays of brutal strength ensure long-term weakness. In the immediate future, loyalists will fear Putin more—and they will understand that betraying him comes with the ultimate price tag. But in the medium to long term, two fresh threats will likely emerge.

First, senior loyalists in Russia’s regime will now rightly wonder whether they could be next. When dictators start to kill top-level insiders—even those who have challenged the dictator’s authority directly—an intensified paranoia sets in. And who could blame those in Putin’s inner circle for worrying after all of the “mysterious” deaths over the past two decades of Putin’s reign of terror? Some might contemplate whether they’d be better off living in a Russia without Putin, so long as they could define its terms. If insiders fear for their own safety, a palace coup becomes more likely. In that way, getting rid of Prigozhin just shifts and delays the threat. Eventually, every dictator meets his end.

Second, the quality of Putin’s information pipeline is about to get considerably worse, which could lead him to make avoidable errors, because he’s not being told hard truths. That pipeline was likely already compromised after two decades of brutal rule, in which Putin—like all dictators—purged honest advisers who upset him and promoted fawning lackeys who told him what he wanted to hear. Many advisers learn that the best survival strategy when working for a ruthless autocrat is to be a bobblehead. Putin, in one of the biggest blunders in modern history, listened to the bobbleheads who told him he’d capture Kyiv in a few days. That venture has blown up in his face.

But when a dictator assassinates a senior official and not just journalists, opposition candidates, and dissidents, well, then the fear impulse goes into overdrive. Trusted advisers who used to speak honestly but cautiously soon start to bite their tongue or provide overly optimistic assessments, which creates a vicious cycle of bad information and bad decisions. Over time, catastrophic miscalculations become more likely—and, eventually, one of them triggers the end of the regime.

None of this is to say that Putin’s murderous regime is now in its death throes. But once the long-term costs of today’s apparent assassination have been accounted for, the late Yevgeny Prigozhin may yet have the last laugh from beyond the grave.

Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Thursday Male Beauty

 

America Is Losing Religious Faith

Growing up my entire family was Roman Catholic and we went to Sunday mass every week, observed Church holy days, and participated in Lenten services.  Fast forward three or four decades and none of my family attends church regularly and none of us consider ourselves Catholic.  As numerous polls and surveys reveal, my family is not atypical.  Across America there has been an exodus from religion and by the mid-2030's those Americans considering themselves as "Christians" may be in the minority.  What happened?  It's not that our collective morality and that of other former churchgoers has changed. Instead, as a piece in the New York Times argues, the hypocrisy and immorality of church leaders and evangelicals in particular has demonstrated that too often religion in America is a negative influence, a source of division and a principal purveyor of hatred.  In addition, the sex abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church and denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention has underscored the utter moral bankruptcy of church leaders who put money, control over others and image over protecting the innocent.  Looking back, this immorality was always there behind a veneer of respectability and the myth that religion was a positive force in society.  Now that rank and file Americans have recognized the cruelty and hypocrisy that defines much of institutional religion, it is unlikely that the exodus from religion will end.  The irony is that those who most want to impose their beliefs on others are the principal drivers of religion's demise. Here are column excerpts:

While much of the rest of the industrialized world has become more secular over the last half-century, the United States has appeared to be an exception.

Politicians still end their speeches with “God bless America.” At least until recently, more Americans believed in the virgin birth of Jesus (66 percent) than in evolution (54 percent).

Yet evidence is growing that Americans are becoming significantly less religious. They are drifting away from churches, they are praying less and they are less likely to say religion is very important in their lives. For the first time in Gallup polling, only a minority of adults in the United States belong to a church, synagogue or mosque. (Most of the research is on Christians because they account for roughly 90 percent of believers in the United States.)

“We are currently experiencing the largest and fastest religious shift in the history of our country,” Jim Davis and Michael Graham write in a book published this week, “The Great Dechurching.”

The big religious shifts of the past were the periodic “Great Awakenings” that beginning in the mid-1700s led to surges in religious attendance. This is the opposite: Some 40 million American adults once went to church but have stopped going, mostly in the last quarter-century.

“More people have left the church in the last 25 years than all the new people who became Christians from the First Great Awakening, Second Great Awakening and Billy Graham crusades combined,” Davis and Graham write.

This “dechurching,” as they call it, is apparent in most denominations, reducing the numbers of Presbyterians and Episcopalians and also of evangelicals like Southern Baptists. White and Black congregants have left churches in similar percentages, but Hispanic religious attendance has dipped less.

Pew reports that 63 percent of American adults identify as Christian — but that’s down from 78 percent in 2007. And in that same period the percentage of adults who say they have no religion has risen to 29 percent from 16 percent.

If this trend continues at the same pace, by the mid-2030s fewer than half of Americans may identify as Christian.

There are various theories for what is behind the struggles of Christianity, and multiple factors are probably at work. One noted by Davis and Graham is that to many people the church hasn’t seemed very Christian.

When the Rev. Jerry Falwell dismissed AIDS as God’s lethal judgment on promiscuity, he conveyed a sanctimoniousness that in the 1980s and 1990s allowed much of the religious right to turn a cold shoulder to the suffering of people with the virus.

Jesse Helms, a leader of the religious right in the Senate, even suggested in 1995 that funds for fighting AIDS should be reduced because gay men contract the virus through “deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct.” In retrospect, the most immoral conduct in America in the late 20th century was not taking place in gay bathhouses but in conservative churches where blowhards preached homophobia, embraced bigots like Helms and resisted efforts to counter AIDS — allowing millions of people, gay and straight alike, to die around the world. That is not morally inspiring.

Then in 2001, Falwell and the Rev. Pat Robertson suggested that the Sept. 11 terror attacks were God’s punishment for the behavior of feminists, gay people and secularists.

The embrace of Donald Trump by many Christian leaders, even as he boasted about assaulting women, separated children from parents at the border and backed an insurrection, was for some a final indication of moral decay.

The loss of religious community has far-reaching implications. Congregations are a crucial part of America’s social capital, providing companionship, food pantries and a pillar of community life. There’s also some evidence that religious faith is associated with increased happiness and better physical and mental health.

One of the most thoughtful contemporary religious commentators, Russell Moore, an evangelical who is now editor of Christianity Today, bluntly acknowledges the challenges ahead.

“American Christianity is in crisis,” Moore writes in his new book, “Losing Our Religion.” “The church is a scandal in all the worst ways.”

Moore is deeply critical of the way many evangelical leaders embraced Trump, and he is pained by church sex abuse scandals. In his own ministry, Moore said that he increasingly has heard from committed young Christians who are upset that their parents have been politically radicalized: “I was less likely to hear about wayward children going out into ‘the real world’ and losing their faith as I was to hear about wayward parents retreating into an imaginary world and losing their minds.”

Moore cites data suggesting that the reason people leave churches is not that they lose their belief in God so much as that they lose confidence in religious leaders and in the church’s moral leadership. He thinks faith can still recover; I’m not so sure.

Religious charlatans like Falwell may have meant to usher in a new Great Awakening, but in fact they taught millions of Americans to be wary of preening ventriloquists who claim to speak for God. 

The last paragraph sums up the force behind the phenomenon well. 

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

 

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DeSantis Continues to Be His Own Worse Enemy

Anyone watching Ron DeSantis' floundering campaign - save Virginia's Glenn Youngkin who continues to try to be DeSantis' mini-me on the culture wars - can quickly come to the conclusion that DeSantis is his own worse enemy.  Besides be unlikeable, DeSantis is continuing his culture war agenda that thrills some of the MAGA base, yet repels moderates and independents he would need to win a general election.  As a long column in the New York Times lays out, DeSantis comes across as stiff and his positions are calculated and give little appearance that DeSantis truly believes what he says.  He can try to hold himself out as a man of the people but his Ivy League credentials only serve to show the act as a sham.  With the upcoming Republican Party debate - which Trump is boycotting rather than have to engage in any sort of debate or answer questions about his multiple indictments - DeSantis' only chance would seem to somehow recast himself.  Based on his conduct to date, that act may be beyond DeSantis' skill set and would require a transformation of his prickly personality.  Personally, I hope DeSantis continues to implode even as Trump's criminal charges and the apparent flipping of some of his co-defendants may begin to set the stage or Republican voters to wake up to Trump's foulness.  Here are column highlights:

Earlier this year, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, appeared to be a formidable challenger to Donald Trump — on paper at least.  He didn’t back down from fights with the left; he started them. “I will be able to destroy leftism in this country, and leave woke ideology on the dustbin of history,” DeSantis said.

He has thumbed his nose at blue state governors, shipping them planeloads of immigrants. He has removed locally elected Democratic prosecutors. Whenever he sees what he believes to be an excess on the left, he stamps it out — from drag shows to critical race theory.

He is not just a supporter of the hard right agenda; he has personally weaponized it. Unlike traditional conservatives, wary of the abuse of state power, DeSantis relishes using his authority to enforce his version of what is moral and what is not.

Since declaring his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, however, DeSantis has lost traction: support for DeSantis has fallen from 31.3 percent on Jan. 20 to 20.7 percent on May 15, the day DeSantis announced, all the way down to 14.9 percent on Aug. 21, according to RealClearPolitics.

As DeSantis prepares for the first Republican presidential debate Wednesday night, the central question he faces is why his support collapsed and whether he can get his campaign back on track.

There are a lot of answers to the first question, most of them with a grain or more of truth. DeSantis has turned out to be a stiff on the stump, a man without affect. He speaks in alphabet talk: CRT, DEI, ESG. His attempts to outflank Trump from the right . . . seem to be more politically calculated than based on conviction. In terms of executive competence, attention to detail and commitment to an agenda, DeSantis stands head and shoulders above Trump, but he has so far been unable to capitalize on these strengths.

That much is understood, but is DeSantis burdened by a larger liability? I posed the following question to a cross section of political operatives and political scientists:

Ron DeSantis has been noticeably unsuccessful in his challenge to Trump. Why? Is it because DeSantis does not or cannot demonstrate the visceral animosity that Trump exudes?

The net result is that his supporters get to realize Trump is willing to refer to “shithole countries” in Africa and Latin America, to say about immigrants that “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists” or to describe Latino gang members: “These aren’t people, these are animals, and we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before.”

“Trump’s speech style,” Joan C. Williams, a professor at the University of California Law School-San Francisco, wrote by email, “adeptly channels the talk traditions of blue-collar men who pride themselves on not having to suck up and self-edit to get ahead, which is the way they see professionals’ traditions of decorum.”

Not only that, Williams continued, “Trump is way ahead of DeSantis in his perceived ability to get things done as a strong leader — that’s Trump cashing in on his enactment of blue-collar traditions of tough, straight-talking manliness. Also Trump is fun while DeSantis is a drip.”

Williams argued, “DeSantis holds the delusion that politics is chiefly about policy differences” when in practice it is more often “about identity and self-affirmation. Trump understands instinctively that non-college Americans feel distinctly dissed: non-college grads are 73 percentage points lower than grads to believe they’re treated with dignity.

Williams described DeSantis’s approach to campaigning as “a clumsy color-by-numbers culture-wars formula” accompanied by a speaking style “more Harvard than hard hat, as when he talked about ‘biomedical security restrictions’ in his speech to the Republican Party convention in North Carolina (whatever those are??).”

Williams cited a paper, published earlier this year, “Measuring the Contribution of Voting Blocs to Election Outcomes” by Justin Grimmer, William Marble and Cole Tanigawa-Lau, that “showed that, while racial resentment strongly predicts Trump voting, that’s not why he won: He won because he also attracted a much larger group of voters with only moderate levels of racial resentment.”

DeSantis, in contrast, is very specific and consistent about policy, and he is too extreme for many on the right. To ice the cake, he appears to be really bad at retail politics — he just isn’t likable, and certainly isn’t charismatic. Together, I don’t think DeSantis can compete to overcome these obstacles, even if he were to start using Trump-like rhetoric.

In a particularly devastating comparison of DeSantis to Trump, David Bateman, a political scientist at Cornell, wrote: “Trump is able to speak the language of hate and resentment in a way that everyone believes is real, and not just a calculated act.”

Everything about DeSantis, by contrast, seems calculated. He’s the Yale and Harvard guy now complaining about intellectuals and elites. He’s talking about wokism and critical race theory, when no one knows what those are (even Trump noted no one can define woke, though he yells against it himself). When he tries to be as visceral as Trump, he just comes off as weird. DeSantis saying he’s going to start “slitting throats” reminded me of Romney’s “severely conservative.” While DeSantis’s is a dangerous escalation of violent imagery, they both sound bizarre and unnatural.

[I]nsofar as DeSantis is seen as “an establishment Trump, who I expect most voters will see as fully aligned with G.O.P. orthodoxy but even more focused on the priorities of racial and social conservatives (taking over universities, banning books, or attacking transpersons), he starts to look more like a general election loser.”

Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, argued in an email that DeSantis has adopted an approach to the nomination fight that was bound to fail:

DeSantis’s strategy, and that of any candidate not named Trump, should be to consolidate the Maybe Trump voters. But DeSantis has seemed like he was going after the Always Trump voters with his aggressive language (“slitting throats”), his comment that Ukraine was just a “territorial dispute,” his suggestion that vaccine conspiracy theorist RFK Jr. would be a good candidate to head the Centers for Disease Control, and his doubling down on whether slavery might have been beneficial to some enslaved people.

The problem with this approach, Ayres continued, is that “the Always Trump voters are ‘Always Trump’ for a reason — they are not going to settle for the second-best Trump if they can get the real thing.”

Robert Y. Shapiro, a political scientist at Columbia, elaborated on the difficulties facing DeSantis’s bid to position himself to the right of Trump. “The DeSantis strategy is weak in that there are not enough Republican voters to be gained to the right of Trump,” Shapiro wrote in an email. ” In addition, Shapiro contended, “Trump’s style and language are more authentic and natural.” Trump’s “Queens street-rhetoric style may help, but the point is that Trump sounds real and not staged for political purposes, in contrast to DeSantis’s endless use of ‘woke’ which is very vague and has had more meaning in liberal-left and educated elite circles and does not have the clear meaning that Trump’s position taking has. DeSantis sounds staged and forced in discussing this.”

“DeSantis’s main problem,” Carnoy wrote by email, is that he is not Trump and Trump is still around largely filling the space that Trump himself has defined and continues to define. This is the ‘victim’ space, where the ‘victims’ are the ‘forgotten core Americans,’ besieged by liberals who want to help everyone but them — migrants, blacks, LGBTQIA, homeless, foreign countries in fights for democracy.

“Trump figured out in 2015 that he could continue to help the rich (including himself) economically through traditional tax reduction policies — stoking inequality — and simultaneously enthuse the forgotten by throwing rich red ‘victim identity’ meat to this bloc of white (and Hispanic) working class voters.”

It will be very difficult to persuade Republican primary voters to abandon Trump, Hopkins wrote, citing “a nationwide survey I conducted earlier this summer. I found that on key issues from immigration to health care and climate changes, the differences between all Republicans, Trump supporters, and DeSantis supporters were typically fairly minimal. On issues alone, it’s hard to envision DeSantis convincing G.O.P. voters to abandon Trump.”

Not everybody thinks Trump has charisma, wit and humor, but many of his supporters remain captivated. They want the show to go on.

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

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Store Owner Murdered by Christian Extremist for Flying Rainbow Flag

Republican politicians and Republican controlled state legislatures continue to whip up anti-LGBT hatred in order to pander to the ever more hideous Christofascist and white supremacist dominated party base and to further their own self-interests.  Sadly, hate speech and the normalization of hate have real world consequences, not, of course, that these Republicans could care a whit about the harm they do.  Friday this fanning of hatred towards LGBT Americans and citizens had deadly consequences in California where a shop owner was murdered by a Christian extremist who took issue with her flying a rainbow flag outside her business. As The Independent reports, after making derogatory remarks about the flag this religious extremist shot and killed the shop owner.  Ultimately, the shooter was killed by police, but the frightening reality is that there are likely others who will heed the Republican message of hate and do harm to LGBT individuals and/or their allies.  The Christofascists and their Republican allies continue to transform Christianity into a religion defined by hatred and bigotry even as they whine and bemoan the fact that the younger generations are leaving religion in droves because it has come to signify something ugly.   Here are highlights from The Independent:

Police have named a man who shot dead a 66-year-old California store owner following an argument over a Pride flag.

Travis Ikeguchi, 27, killed Laura Ann Carleton outside of her Mag.Pi clothing store in Cedar Glen after making “several disparaging remarks about a rainbow flag that stood outside the store,” the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Office said.

Deputies responded to the incident around 5pm on Friday following reports of shots being fired. The mother of nine children was pronounced dead at the scene, the sheriff’s office said in a statement. Ikeguchi was later shot dead during a confrontation with police.

Hollywood director Paul Feig, whose works include Bridesmaids and The Heat, posted a tribute saying that Carleton, who he called his “wonderful friend,” had been killed by a young man.

Ari and Kelsey Carleton, two of the shop owner’s nine children, wrote on Instagram that their “beautiful mommy” had been taken in a “senseless act of violence”.

“She was murdered over a pride flag that she proudly hung on her storefront. Make no mistake, this was a hate crime,” the daughters wrote. “Our family is broken. We have a long road ahead of us as we navigate this new reality without our loving matriarch.”

Ari and Kelsey Carleton said that in the two years since her mother opened her second Cedar Glen, vandals had on several occasions ripped down Pride flags hanging outside. Each time, her mother would replace them with bigger ones, they said.

Before fatally shooting Carleton, the suspect tore down the LGBTQ+ Pride flag that was hanging in front of the store and “yelled homophobic slurs” toward the woman. Ikeguchi reportedly lived in Cedar Glen and frequently posted hate-filled content on social media, sheriff’s officials said.

A report has found more than 350 anti-LGBTQ incidents in 46 states and the District of Columbia – as more anti-LGBTQ legislation is voted through across the country.

In reaction to the hate inspired murder, the Los Angeles Times has run and editorial encouraging people to fight the message of hate and violence and to fly rainbow flags in honor of Carleton and true American values.  Here are excerpts:

This would be a good time to fly your multicolored Pride flag. If you don’t have one, this might be a good time to get one.

Laura Ann Carleton flew the flag in front of her store in Cedar Glen, near Lake Arrowhead. San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department officials said a man shot Carleton to death on Friday after making disparaging comments about the flag. He fled, and was killed in a later confrontation with deputies.

Those like Carleton who fly the rainbow flag make a statement in support of solidarity, inclusiveness, welcome, dignity and equality. Those who violently attack the flag fliers make a statement of their own — a particularly un-American statement: No, not all people are created equal and not all people are entitled to life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness.

So fly the flag that Carleton flew, in her memory and honor, and in support for the right to express oneself and be oneself. Fly it in defiance of killers and terrorists who undermine personal freedom and expression. Fly it in support of our unalienable rights. Fly it in support of the LGBTQ+ community and its righteous defense against bigotry. Fly it for pride.

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State and Local Government's Aren't Ready for Climate Change

As President Biden heads to Maui to view the wildfire devastation  that all but obliterated the small city of Lahaina, the Sunday quarterbacking is in high gear and like so many other areas that have suffered the catastrophic results of climate change some things are becoming clear:  there was too little emergency planning, communication systems were too vulnerable, power companies ignored known dangers, inadequate escape routes, and a lack of funding for emergency management and firefighting cost scores of lives.  This is not to beat up on Hawaii or Maui in particular.  The same problems exist across the nation - Hurricane Hilary will likely lay bare deficiencies in California - including my home area of Southeast Virginia which always faces the threat of hurricanes which is being made worse by rising sea levels and warming ocean temperature.  When the next significant hurricane hits Hampton Roads - and there will be one, the only question of when it will occur - the same kind of after the fact analysis will doubtlessly reveal major short comings.  Sadly, state legislatures are more willing to give tax breaks and incentives to businesses than they are in funding emergency programs to protect the lives of their citizens.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the disaster in Maui.  Here are excerpts:

It was the firestorm that wildfire experts and residents on Maui had warned about for years — a blaze fueled by hurricane winds roaring through untamed grasses and into a 13,000-person coastal town with few ways in or out. Local officials had released plan after plan acknowledging that wildfire was all but certain.

But when the nightmare fire erupted across Lahaina on Aug. 8, killing at least 114 people and possibly scores more, systems that had been put in place to sound the alarm and bring people to safety collapsed, residents and experts said.

Cellphone sites were burned and lost power, leaving people unable to communicate or receive emergency alerts. Two main roads providing escape routes out of town were closed because of flames and downed power lines, funneling evacuees into an inferno of gridlock along a coastal road where many burned inside their cars. Powerful emergency sirens never made a sound. Fire hoses almost ran dry.

And while fire departments and wildfire-preparedness groups have long urged people in fire-prone areas like West Maui to be ready and leave early, other advice from the authorities was far less concrete. The state of Hawaii’s own guide for how people should respond to hurricanes, tsunamis and other disasters does not include any direction on what to do in a wildfire.

[T]he initial shock and grief are giving way to anger and questions about the government’s planning and response, most significantly why communications around Lahaina failed so badly, and whether earlier, more aggressive evacuation measures could have prevented some of the deaths.

Half of all addresses in the contiguous United States face some wildfire risk, meaning that tens of millions of lives may be vulnerable to some of the same failures that engulfed Lahaina: A lack of early evacuations and unpracticed escape plans. Communications networks crippled by flames, power outages and fire-spewing winds. Limited evacuation routes that clog with people fleeing when it is already too late.

Hawaii’s attorney general has ordered an outside investigation into the response by county and state officials; Maui County’s mayor, Richard T. Bissen Jr., has faced persistent questions from residents and the news media about the county’s response . . . .

Elizabeth Pickett, co-executive director of the nonprofit Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization, cautioned against blaming the devastation in Lahaina solely on emergency-management decisions in the middle of a firestorm.

“I hear, ‘Emergency management bungled the response, alarms should have gone off,’” she said. “All these things — they’re pieces. But it’s not telling the whole story of how it got so bad.”

She said Hawaii’s wildfire risk has been growing after years of underinvestment in fire departments and fire prevention. She said that there were not enough access roads for firefighters or evacuation routes in subdivisions, and that landowners were not forced to manage the invasive grasses that become tinder for fires.  . . . . “There’s barely enough resources at the Fire Department to do code enforcement,” Ms. Pickett said. “No one with power has heard us.”

Inside the disaster zone that is central Lahaina lies what some call the grim result of failing to address wildfire danger: a panorama of destruction beginning at the hillsides and cutting through neighborhoods and business districts right up to the ocean and beyond. Floating in the harbor are burned boats bobbing in the sea. Rebuilding is expected to cost more than $5 billion.

The fire caused a “catastrophic communications failure” as it burned through neighborhoods and downtown later that afternoon, State Senator Angus McKelvey said.

Fiber optic cables melted in the intense heat, he said, leaving people unable to let others know about the fire, call for help or receive emergency alerts from the county.

“Nobody could communicate with anybody on any level,” Mr. McKelvey, a Democrat, said.

Before he stepped down as director of Maui’s emergency management agency, Herman Andaya defended his decision not to sound the sirens, saying at a news conference that people might have thought that there was a tsunami and run inland into the fires.

Before the inferno consumed Lahaina, the deadliest wildfire in America in more than a century was the Camp fire, which devastated the Northern California town of Paradise. Five years later, Paradise is installing a siren system, at the urging of residents.

In California, regulators now require wireless carriers to have backup power sources for their cell towers in areas at high risk for wildfires, a measure imposed after residents did not receive emergency alerts during several devastating fires in recent years, including the Camp fire.

In fire-prone Australia, after the Black Saturday bush fires of 2009 that killed 173 people and incinerated entire towns, the government expanded its warning system and aimed to move faster in telling people to evacuate.

But many fire officials in Australia warn that the scale and intensity of today’s biggest fires require new expectations.

“People have this idea that someone will protect me,” said Greg Mullins, who spent 50 years in fire management in Australia, “but we know with climate change, on the worst days, no force on Earth can beat Mother Nature.”

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Donald Trump's Mental Health Crisis is America's Problem

With the news waves inundated with coverage of Donald Trump's multiple indictments, debate avoidance stunts and general demagoguery and attacks on prosecutors, grand jurors, the FBI, - the list goes on and on - one topic not adequately discussed is Trump's severe mental illness in the eyes of numerous mental health experts and the threat he poses to American society and democracy.   Sadly, far too many Republicans continue to recognize Trump as the malignancy that he is and, instead, eat up the hatred and cruelty that he projects on his political and law enforcement foes to distract from his own moral and mental health failings. Throughout history similar figures have used Trump's tactics to gain and/or retain power often at great cost to the societies in which they lived. A long piece at Salon looks at Trump's mental illness issues and the continuing threat he poses, especially as his legal situation deteriorates.  His main goal is to distract his cultist followers and accuse others of that which he is guilty of himself.  The man is a true menace and America will be in danger as long as he continues to draw breath.  Here are article excerpts:

To properly respond to Donald Trump and the level of extreme danger he represents — especially as he faces multiple criminal prosecutions — requires understanding some specific aspects of Trump's behavior and motivations.

Trump has shown a wide range of pathological behavior over the past seven years or so. He has an unhealthy fascination with violence. He lacks impulse control and empathy. He revels in cruelty. He compulsively lies and exhibits traits of malignant narcissism. He is a confirmed sexual predator and misogynist. He has a tenuous relationship to reality, and increasingly retreats into victimology and a persecution complex. He believes himself to be almost literally superhuman and often behaves like a cult leader. 

In my many conversations with mental health experts during the Age of Trump, one of their consistent themes has been the suggestion that if the ex-president was not a rich white man he would likely have been arrested or otherwise removed from normal society decades ago.

Trump's pathological behavior is in no way separate from his role as leader of the neofascist MAGA movement and larger white right. One repeated error made by the mainstream media and the larger political class is to divide Trump's obvious mental health issues from his political behavior and the ascendancy of his movement.

Fascism and other forms of illiberal politics are not "merely" political problems. In reality, such things are a societal force and imaginary that both harness and generate collective mass sociopathy and other forms of physical, emotional, psychological, intellectual and spiritual pathology. Sick societies produce sick leaders; sick leaders have sick followers; in combination, those forces produce sick political movements. Collectively, these are manifestations of a condition of malignant normality that can all too easily end in societal destruction.

After four indictments on a wide variety of charges for which he potentially faces imprisonment, Donald Trump has reacted in entirely predictable fashion, lashing out at many of his perceived enemies, including President Biden,  Attorney General Merrick Garland, special counsel Jack Smith, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, the Democratic Party, the FBI and others he views as part of a "deep state" plot against him and his MAGA movement.

[Trump’s theme]: Biden and the Democrats and their voters are existential enemies of the nation, and the twice-impeached, four-times-indicted ex-president is the only person who can defeat them.

Rather than mocking or deriding these rants, it is better to understand them as problematic and dangerous. This is classic projection: Trump is projecting his inner views and pathological sense of self-identity outward onto others.

Trump's projections and his evidently unstable behavior may provide insight and map onto what he and his followers will do next — up to and including potential acts of political violence — in response to his impending criminal trials amid the 2024 presidential campaign. I asked Dr. Marc Goulston, a prominent psychiatrist, former FBI hostage-negotiation trainer and author of the bestsellers "Just Listen" and "Talking to 'Crazy'," for his insights into Trump's inflammatory rhetoric and what it reveals about the ex-president's state of mind. He responded by email:

If we took out the words "Joe" or "Biden"  from his rants and asked non-dictator world leaders to choose whom they seemed to describe more accurately, Biden or Trump, I'm guessing most would say it's a better description of Trump and what he is or would do to America.

I also asked Dr. Lance Dodes, a retired assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a training and supervising analyst emeritus at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, for his assessment of Trump's behavior and language. He also responded by email:

Donald Trump has always relied on primitive psychological defenses, including denial of reality, as in his long history of inventing "alternative facts" and fake news. Another of his primitive mechanisms is projection and its more severe form, "projective identification." In the latter case, he reverses identities to claim that those opposed to him have exactly the amoral traits that define himself, for example, calling President Biden "Crooked Joe." This dangerous capacity to project his identity onto another person, in order to shift responsibility and anger away from himself, is common in tyrants and would-be tyrants.

In a recent interview with Salon, Dr. Marcel Danesi, author of the new book "Politics, Lies and Conspiracy Theories: A Cognitive Linguistic Perspective," explained how fascists, authoritarians and demagogues use emotions and rhetoric in sophisticated ways to control their followers. I asked Danesi for his analysis of how Trump's attacks on Biden fit into that model:

This strategy is right from the Machiavellian playbook. In "The Prince," Machiavelli warned that any admission of wrongdoing is the death knell of the prince's rule and loosens his mind control over people. ... Trump's current attacks on the judiciary are a calculating, Machiavellian strategy of deflection by projection — blaming others for employing his own tactics. Interestingly, in an article Orwell wrote in 1940, he pinpoints the core of this strategy, writing that the manipulator portrays himself as a martyr, a victim, the "self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds." The intent is to portray himself as fighting against an invisible enemy — the same enemy that Trump's followers are purported to be fighting.

Trump's strategy is not new. It has always existed. In ancient Greece, the aristocrat Cleon was elected in 424 B.C., using oratory that resonated with people ... instilling a mistrust of intellectuals and even aristocrats opportunistically, despite the fact that he was an aristocrat himself. He called them liars, responsible for all the ills that were endemic to society.

Trump's attempt to cling on to power and avoid accountability is actually a simple one that has worked from time immemorial — blame the deep state (whatever that may be) as the enemy engaged in a takeover of the "real America." As Machiavelli wrote in various works, never admit any wrongdoing, accuse others of the wrongdoing, and do it over and over, and the prince will enhance his chances to keep people in a mind fog. 

Donald Trump's mental health and diseased mind are not likely to improve, given the pressures he now faces. And as goes Trump, so goes the Republican Party, the MAGA cult and the larger white right.

In total, Donald Trump's poor mental health and aberrant behavior amount to a political, social and legal crisis for America and the world. He must be defeated at the polls and prosecuted in the courts, but even that will not be enough.

To paraphrase historian Timothy Snyder, the Trump era is America's "collective malady." It will take years of collective hard work, grit and determination to get better. 

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