Political Irony

Thing that I expect will happen:

• Evangelicals will claim that God killed Ruth Bader Ginsburg so that Republicans can appoint another arch conservative to the court.
• Mitch McConnell will ram someone through, despite the hypocrisy of sitting on Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland for most of a year. In fact, McConnell has already said he will do that.
• The GOP actions will enable the Democrats to pack the court, assuming that Democrats prevail in both the presidency and the Senate in this election. The only question is whether they will stop at 11 or go to 13.
• Partisanship will get even worse.

UPDATE: Good articles about Ruth Bader Ginsburg in Electoral-Vote and by Heather Cox Richardson.

“Biden leads Trump among women, people of color, and former members of the Trump administration.” @WindsorMann

“Trump campaign strategy now clear: he’s running against the election itself.” @sbg1

“Is it just me, or did Nixon do a hell of a lot less than Trump at this point?” @chipfranklin

I believe that social media has become the most powerful and potent purveyor of propaganda in existence.

A memo written by a now-former data scientist at Facebook is full of multiple concrete examples of the company being aware of it being used to spread propaganda, but doing nothing about it. In fact, Facebook and other social media build their algorithms to maximize sensational content (at the expense of truth) in order to attract eyeballs and make more money. They don’t really care about checking facts or shutting down bots that amplify misinformation. And they are only too happy to take money from foreign governments to influence our elections.

Note: I don’t normally post comics by Michael Ramirez because he mostly just repeats Republican talking points, but I couldn’t resist on this one. Here’s a comic by another artist for “balance”:

UPDATE: Article from the Washington Post headlined “Pro-Trump youth group enlists teens in secretive campaign likened to a ‘troll farm,’ prompting rebuke by Facebook and Twitter”. Here’s a quote:

The messages have been emanating in recent months from the accounts of young people in Arizona seemingly expressing their own views — standing up for President Trump in a battleground state and echoing talking points from his reelection campaign.

Far from representing a genuine social media groundswell, however, the posts are the product of a sprawling yet secretive campaign that experts say evades the guardrails put in place by social media companies to limit online disinformation of the sort used by Russia during the 2016 campaign.

Teenagers, some of them minors, are being paid to pump out the messages at the direction of Turning Point Action… The campaign draws on the spam-like behavior of bots and trolls, with the same or similar language posted repeatedly across social media. But it is carried out, at least in part, by humans paid to use their own accounts.

Heatwaves, out of control fires, strong hurricanes, shrinking ice sheets, sea level rise — these are all dangerous effects of global climate change. So how does the Trump administration respond? By appointing climate science denier David Legates to a top post at NOAA, which runs the National Weather Service.

The head of NOAA under Barack Obama says about Legates, “He’s not just in left field — he’s not even near the ballpark.” According to a prominent climate scientist:

At a time when those impacts are playing out before our very eyes in the form of unprecedented wildfires out West and super-storms back East, I cannot imagine a more misguided decision than to appoint someone like Legates to a position of leadership at an agency that is tasked with assessing the risks we face from extreme weather events.

I know this article is a week old, but there were just too many things going on that pushed this down in my stack. But you really should read this article in The Atlantic titled “Why Trump Supporters Can’t Admit Who He Really Is“.

When I’m talking to various liberal people, a common refrain is that we can’t figure out why Trump’s base continuously dismisses his terrible behavior and even believes his obvious lies and even rejoices in his venal corruption. Well, here’s your answer.

The bottom line is that they believe that “If Joseph R. Biden Jr. wins the presidency, America dies.” If you believe that Biden is an existential threat to you, your family, and your beliefs, then you will find a way to tolerate and even justify virtually anything Trump does to save you.

That is the message that is being delivered to them by the Republicans, by Fox News and other right-wing media, and even by their churches:

During last week’s Republican National Convention, speaker after speaker insisted that life under a Biden presidency would be dystopian. Charlie Kirk, the young Trump acolyte who opened the proceedings, declared, “I am here tonight to tell you—to warn you—that this election is a decision between preserving America as we know it and eliminating everything that we love.” President Trump, who closed the proceedings, said, “Your vote will decide whether we protect law-abiding Americans or whether we give free rein to violent anarchists and agitators and criminals who threaten our citizens. And this election will decide whether we will defend the American way of life or allow a radical movement to completely dismantle and destroy it.” And in between Americans were told that Democrats want to “disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home, and invite MS-13 to live next door” and that they “want to destroy this country and everything that we have fought for and hold dear.”

“They’re not satisfied with spreading the chaos and violence into our communities. They want to abolish the suburbs altogether,” a St. Louis couple who had brandished weapons against demonstrators outside their home, told viewers. “Make no mistake, no matter where you live, your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats’ America.”

This creates a strong tribal identity that people cling to:

When groups feel threatened they retreat into tribalism. They close ranks and become more insular, more defensive, more punitive, more us-versus-them.

As a result, they will justify almost anything. For example:

In just the past two weeks, the president has praised supporters of the right-wing conspiracy theory QAnon, which contends, as The Guardian recently summarized it, that “a cabal of Satan-worshipping Democrats, Hollywood celebrities and billionaires runs the world while engaging in pedophilia, human trafficking and the harvesting of a supposedly life-extending chemical from the blood of abused children.” Trump touted a conspiracy theory that the national death toll from COVID-19 is about 9,000, a fraction of the official figure of nearly 185,000; promoted a program on the One America News Network accusing demonstrators of secretly plotting Trump’s downfall; encouraged his own supporters to commit voter fraud; and claimed Biden is controlled by “people that are in the dark shadows” who are wearing “dark uniforms.”

Trump believes his own government is conspiring to delay a COVID-19 vaccine until after the election. He retweeted a message from the actor James Woods saying New York Governor Andrew Cuomo “should be in jail” and another from an account accusing the Portland, Oregon, mayor of “committing war crimes.” The president is “inciting violence,” in the words of Maryland’s Republican Governor, Larry Hogan. Trump defended 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, a supporter who is charged with first-degree homicide; and stated that if he loses the election in November it would be because it was “rigged.” At the same time, the second-ranking House Republican, among other of the president’s supporters, has shared several manipulated videos in an effort to damage Biden.

Telling these people that Donald Trump is a lying, corrupt con man won’t help. When people believe they are drowning, they will grasp at straws.

The article even points out that Democrats have done similar things in the past (albeit to a lesser degree). For example:

The degree to which Democrats, including feminists, overlooked or accepted Bill Clinton’s sexually predatory behavior—including his campaign’s effort to smear his accusers and its use of a private investigator to destroy Gennifer Flowers’s reputation “beyond all recognition”—is an illustration of this. So Flowers was branded a “bimbo” and a “pathological liar,” even though Clinton later, under oath, admitted to having an affair with her.

But as usual, Trump has taken this to an extreme:

But what’s different in this case is that Trump, because of the corruption that seems to pervade every area of his life and his damaged psychological and emotional state, has shown us just how much people will accept in their leaders as a result of “negative partisanship,” the force that binds parties together less in common purpose than in opposition to a shared opponent. As the conservative writer David French has put it, with Donald Trump and his supporters we are seeing “negative partisanship in its near-pure form, and it’s the best way to explain Trump’s current appeal to the Republican party.” His ideology is almost entirely beside the point, according to French: “His identity matters more, and his identity is clear—the Republican champion against the hated Democratic foe.”