"Broke into the Speaker's house and all I got was excommunication from the people I was trying to impress" It's not easy being Depape

 The first story I read about the home invasion and attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, was from NPR via Twitter. The details in story were still a little shaky but the outline was pretty clear, a disturbed white man broke into the Pelosi house and demanded to see the carbon unit designated Nancy for the purposes of tying her up and interrogating her. When the police arrived the home invader struck the 82 year old man in the head with a hammer. Thankfully Paul Pelosi was taken to the hospital immediately and looks to be making a good recovery. But this should not have been necessary in the first place. I put on my HazMat suit (they are expensive in sea monster size) and opened the replies. Yup, Twitter is still awful. But it was the direction that the vitriol went that caught my attention.

Since Brother Charlie Pierce shared the criminal complaint against the suspected attacker, David Depape, to try and get a look into his mind via the dry, legalistic "cop speak" as he put it, I should contrast the observations with what I saw in those comments on Twitter. "It is as good a look as we may get into the pure MAGA mind."

It’s all there. A mind, made soft by hours of conservative media saturation, weirdly dehumanizing the speaker of the House into an ideological doppelgänger named “Nancy,” spoken of with a false familiarity bred by his inability to see her as anything beyond a target for invective and, it turns out, even worse.

The complaint itself is only 8 pages long, I'm not sure why I didn't find it as interesting at Charles P. Pierce but I don't spend much time reading court documents. His take on this idea of the caricature or doppelgänger of Nancy Pelosi brought to mind V'ger from the first Star Trek movie. How little propaganda did it take to dehumanize the person into a monster in Depape's soft mind? Two hours of fox news? Two days? A side of Michael Savage spitting venom into his microphone? There are many books to be written on the self-brainwashing of lone wolves at the hands of stochastic terrorists.

I didn't think it was even in doubt that Depape was an extremist right-winger but the Tweets were just adamant about how he was actually a nudist gay prostitute who lived in a house with BLM signs and rainbow flags so he was totally a lefty. And an illegal immigrant (that code word is enough right? Doesn't matter one wit that he was a white guy from Canada). I had never before seen the authoritarian mob on Twitter work so feverishly to distract with false information, or try so hard to disown a guy who actually went out and did what they all want to do. It was almost like some tinge of conscience was prickling. But where did the uniformity of talking points come from? Was it just monkey see monkey do? Did someone feed a 'botnet the talking points and they went forth to search and destroy? And was it really just to "own the libs"? The truth came out almost immediately and as you can see from the court filing there was nothing about it being a lover's spat, drug deal gone wrong, underwear, or any of the crazy things getting flung against the wall.

So, the republican noise machine radicalized some random guy in San Francisco to attack Nancy Pelosi's house, broke in and assaulted her husband. At once threatening and intimidating anyone daring to oppose the fascist takeover. And now it's practically crickets, a thirty second update on nightly news. A probable assassination attempt on one of the most prominent Democrats in the country, right before the midterms and nothing is going to come of it. Another example that basically sailed through the mainstream media is how fascists in MTG's district drove her opponent out of the race with intimidation and death threats. Despite her being such a disgrace and being such an onmipresent reminder of the danger this fact is barely ever mentioned. I wish her opponent this time good luck and pray for his safety. But the only way to stop this is to trounce all republicans in the elections tomorrow.

Bad Faith Polling and Inflation

 As clogged with lies and misinformation as the interwebs are these days, it still only takes a few intrepid reporters or representatives to get the truth out. Every morning I try to turn on the news, usually on ABC, while making lunches and helping get the clan out the door and on with their days to get a bit of what's going on. And for days it was nothing but "polls are tightening," "GOP surges," and the omnipresent bugbear of 2022 "inflation skyrocketing." 

First, I hate that mainstream media now uses GOP adjectives to poison discourse the way Newt Gingrich taught republican candidates in the '90s. Second, that the mainstream media repeats the same poisonous GOP talking points without context. Third, that any real counterpoint to the BS is shut out. In this case, Rep. Katie Porter gave a master class on inflation and corporate greed that maybe got five seconds of play on the networks. ABC uses terms like skyrocketing, massive, unprecedented, and horrific to categorize inflation but never do they actually define what inflation is. No context as in how inflation is present around the world and actually lower in the US than many other countries. The simple answer to what inflation is is rising prices, businesses raise prices in hopes of inflating their profits. Yes, it really is that simple, nothing about wages and nothing about the cost of labor or any other explanation that then rationalizes crushing workers to squeeze out inflation. Once upon a time there was competition between businesses that could restrain them from raising prices with reckless abandon but there are very few checks on that greed today. 

I have more to say about inflation but I'm trying to be brief.

What I really wanted to nail is the panic about polls. It is in media's interest to have a tight horserace on elections because they can then ignore actual problems and solutions. For instance, what is the GOP plan to fight inflation? Climate change? Healthcare? Sure, we know all about critical race theory now and how republicans all vow to ban it from elementary school (even though it doesn't exist there and is just thinly coded racism). But how would having republicans control Congress hold down inflation? Anyone? No? But hey, Hershel Walker has paid for many abortions of his own children, how can republicans still be supporting him? Look at how close the polls are! We need a 20 minute, carefully controlled panel discussion on why Senator Warnock is failing to pull ahead!

So you have contextless polling data driving discussion and speculation about why Democrats are failing to contest the conventional wisdom that of course republicans are going to sweep the midterms. Because the out of power party always gains. What if, those polls are being manipulated?

Tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors posted a clip on Crooks and Liars of Joy Reid hosting New Democratic Network's Simon Rosenberg. An expert who knows how to read polls and give context to a host who is willing to listen? Banish the thought. Imagine if real discussion and debate were a value that network and cable news shows universally shared instead of the occasional nuggets that feel almost seditious compared with regular broadcasting. Rosenberg reported that poll aggregators like Real Clear Politics and 538.com are inundated with partisan republican polls, which then skew the numbers of polling firms who really are trying to reach people and report accurately. Getting a really representative sample of voters is really difficult, I know I don't answer the phone for unknown numbers. So good faith polling is facing real challenges and losing credibility for the same reason as every other problem and challenge America faces: Republicans.

This is the same thing they do with any liberal book, TV show, film. Flood the review sections with trolling, bad faith, negative reviews to bring down the average of good faith reviewers. Amazon tries to combat this with the "confirmed purchase" icon and other sites try to combat the deluge in other ways. But as I recently read in a book about changing police culture, leaders can make as many rules as they want but if the prevailing culture does not accept them then it will not change. We don't get in-depth coverage of republican training camps and online courses teaching fascists how to most effectively troll and destroy the status quo. And this flood of fake and bad faith polling results from partisan start ups is the latest gambit by fascists to wreck the institutions of democracy. James Burnham wrote about bad faith extremists wrecking democracy all the way back in 1964, it is sad that this sabotage is now the primary platform of his party.

But once you understand that polling is now misinformation because of republican sabotage, you can be less worried about it. The main goal of this particular bout of ratfckery might be to contest the Democratic victories next week and fuel further brownshirt republican violence about rigged elections. There won't be a grain of truth to it.

So, most of the inflation is caused by corporate greed, no one on the networks or cable will ever ask the obvious question: what is the republican plan to fight inflation? Or better yet, why do voters believe republicans have any interest in fighting inflation? Instead they will continue flogging bad polling data all the way to election day. You, dear reader, do not have to sit back and let this continue. Share the links in this post, tweet about it, talk to neighbors. Find credible sources of your own. 

A Spark of Life from the Depths

 So... uh... what's new?

I apologize for my long absence. There is no excuse I suppose but it just seemed like the narrative was outrunning my ability to keep up. If anything, democracy and what we like to believe America actually represents is slipping away faster and faster. I realized that not only was I not able to stem the tide in even the tiniest way I thought I was before but that I don't really have anything novel or useful to add. In short, I am out of practice for any kind of meaningful writing. It is so easy to slip into despair at the powerlessness of individuals to make any impact on political discourse. Or at least what was once known as the "liberal blogosphere" that I tried to be part of. What place can a guy writing under a pseudonym about history's effects on the present have in 2022? I'm not a Youtuber, a Tiktoker, or even particularly good at Twitter or any platform people are using and actually paying attention to. It seemed like spending time with my family or my hobbies was a more productive use of the limited time we have on Earth. My "output" such as it was, dwindled even on Facebook where it was comparatively easy to post a news story with a reaction. What difference did it make?

Then, my father died suddenly in early 2021 and I just completely gave up. He left almost nothing behind of his experiences, ideas, or opinions. Nothing in writing anyway. Over seven decades on Earth and in a moment, all of those things disappeared. I really took that hard. What is the point? Why bother? We're all worm food in the end anyway and very few of us humans will leave any kind of lasting mark. My goal, once upon a time, was to make a difference in even just one person's thinking on what this great experiment in self-government means in the long story of human history. But what difference could it make if I gave even dozens of people tools to fight against this horrible self-delusion of millions on a collision course with fascism? A few more people aware of the crushing wave of organized money and manipulation of masses of stupid people? In times of great evil, maybe ignorance is better. Better not to be aware of how bad it is, how a minority of cruel, self-serving scum will rule over the majority that couldn't fight back and never had a chance.

Reinhold Niebuhr used to say that nothing is inevitable, that wars can be stopped. Tyrants can be prevented from taking over. One of his books was called Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic where he dealt with the disillusionment of whole-heartedly supporting the US war effort in WW1 only to feel betrayed by the cynical exploitation and oppression used to suppress dissent. The fight against evil was not only "over there" but it had to be taken up in domestic politics as well. What was the point of defending democracy with anti-democratic methods? So while the rest of the country partied to jazz and bootleg liquor while cruising in their Model T's, Niebuhr was trying to make peace with the imperfect ways men must use to combat evil on Earth. I don't know where I lie on the spectrum of cynicism, perhaps I am just too weak and cowardly to confront the trolls and too tired to motivate the apathetic. But, in the same way Niebuhr came to realize that despite all the apathy and cynicism, war is not inevitable. The midterms are not a foregone conclusion and there is still a chance to save democracy.

At least, when I go, my children will know where there old man stood. That's enough reason to get back up and try.