Oh Freedom Over Me

 

In the email from rightwing poll aggregator Real Clear Politics:

Sweet Christ, Carl, you're still fretting about how four and a half years ago Twitter followed FBI advice that the New York Post's Hunter laptop story might be infected by Russian disinformation and blocked links to the Post for [checks notes] nearly three whole days, leaving users to the humiliation of having to find it on Facebook instead? 

(If it had been four days, Trump totally would have won the election? Uh, maybe a comforting thought for Trump but I really don't think so.)

Meanwhile, the Republican White House is openly blackmailing the country's public school system, public and private universities, medical research institutions and hospitals, museums, national parks, armed services, federal and state judges and prosecutors, numerous prestigious law firms, and the privately owned press and public broadcast media to adopt its ideological positions on everything from history to biology and energy production, for which Twitter now, acquired by a multibillionaire who appears to have become literally the president's single-dad housemate, what a setup for Aaron Sorkin's new series "The East Wing", serves as a propagandist. 

Maybe you'd like to say that there's no constitutional prohibition against the Executive making laws abridging the freedom of the press so there's nothing we can do about it? It's not over till it's over! Don't surrender in advance!

And the FBI was right, too, BTW; the laptop (which wasn't in fact the laptop, which seems to have been squirreled away in impenetrable FBI secrecy for years, but Rudolph Giuliani's alleged copy of its hard drive), was certainly infected by Russian disinformation from the Russia agents he worked with, Pavel Fuks, Andrij Telizhenko, Andrij Derkach, and so on, though it never made it into a criminal case against Hunter Biden anyway, largely because as evidence it was total garbage with which special prosecutor Durham could never think of anything to do. And it was never a First Amendment case even under one of the weird interpretations that are going around (social media companies were always able to, and frequently did, ignore the FBI's advice).

But whoever has ever been living in terror that a bunch of college students might "cancel" them or even be publicly rude to them really needs to wake up to the evidence of what real deprivation of freedom of speech is like, where the president's impression of wrongthink is getting people fired from their jobs in really large numbers, prevented from doing peer-approved research, prevented from curating peer-approved museum exhibitions and staging peer-approved plays and dance events and the like, fired from research jobs and medical jobs and teaching jobs or if they're students thrown out of school, or if they're foreigners thrown out and transported by midnight plane without communicating with their families or lawyers to the 21st-century equivalent of Devil's Island. Something like the McCarthy era (under the guidance of Roy Cohn's old pupils Stone, Manafort, and Trump) is really back.

I mean, the Reagan administration and the Bush II administration had the cynicism and clownishness and the violent foreign policy from South and Central America to West Africa and the Middle East and the furious push to increase economic inequality through the tax system, a democratic society really shouldn't have tolerated any of it. I'n not fighting it because I'm such a good person, I'd fighting it because they're after me. I'm not even saying it's worse now, I'm saying it's personal. 

If I should have fought it harder in the past, now I have no choice. They're really after me and my friends and family. If I should have felt the attack on everybody, now I feel it on us. If I've made fun of the cult of the Founders and their commitment to FREEDOM, because of the way they willingly denied freedom to enslaved people and women and workers and foreigners and "deviants" of one kind and another from the beginning, it's my freedom now: I've always been able to complain about the abuse I saw around me, and do a little something for others, giving a few dollars to ACLU and a candidate here and there, grousing about the reactionary views of some of my kids' teachers, writing a blog. I'm not sure even these little things can last. All freedom is threatened now, except for the freedom you can buy with huge amounts of money, like Justin Sun openly—openly!—escaping fraud charges with $400 million in bribes, or that other asshole with the fake e-vehicle, Trevor Milton. That kind of freedom works better than ever.

They want us in jail. They want suicides. And they give zero fucks about "free speech" because, you know why? Because they've got expensive speech, all you could ever desire, from the philosophical Charles Koch to the drugged-up Elon Musk. You know what I'm saying? Your freedom is absolutely in jeopardy.

For the Record: Putin Is Not a Leftist, part 5,412

"During Fascism, photography, in synergy with the communications industry ante-literam, was an essential part of the construction of the cult of the leader that transformed the figure of Mussolini into an icon... The Duce, in anticipation of our celebrities today, did not hesitate to undress and display his torso in what Valerie Sperling calls ‘iconic public-relations stunts’ that were both exhibitionistic and voyeuristic." He even favored the baseball cap! From Alessandra Antola Swan, "The iconic body: Mussolini unclothed", Modern Italy 21/4 2016.

In his evident desire to restore the Russian empire in his own name, rather than some descendant of Rurik, Putin really resembles Mussolini, who was thinking of the same kind of thing for Rome, much more than Hitler. Moscow is, of course, theologically, the "Third Rome" of Orthodoxy, after Rome proper and Constantinople, and Putin's emergence as a kind of physical hero from nowhere, like the milkman in a porn film, is a kind of iconic thing too, with the same kind of precedent. Not sure that's been discussed before. 

I seriously can't tolerate any more treatment of Putin as some kind of "leftist", meanwhile, sorry, but it really upsets me, at least in part because of the way it keeps offering Republicans an excuse for not attacking fascism, because, as keeps turning up, fascism doesn't really bother them, as when they failed to respond one way or the other to Putin's campaign to "de-Nazify" Ukraine.

This is cool (from Ben Collins/NBC): In the runup to the war, Russian propaganda was centered on the "Ukraine is Nazi" theme, but it wasn't going anywhere with the international or American right--that's when Russians came up with the "bioweapons" canard.https://t.co/K8e8B7Ueo1

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) March 20, 2022

They only reacted to the threats of evil liberal government, in the form of Dr. Fauci and the Communist Party of China. The anti-government threat of Nazism doesn't bother them at all, and they're not interested in examining their views on whether somebody is fascist or not. But meanwhile, when I found this extraordinary thread on the current situation inside Russia (I'm not reproducing it, but check it out!), tweeps found occasion to associate Putin with communism again:

Really hghlights the devastating criminality of the communist era, throwing away millions of lives so casually. Putin could have arrested this demographic crime but instead but guns and got rich. He finished the communist work at mutilating the country.

— TralfamadoreStan (@zoffany90) March 21, 2022

I'm like no, that's not the point:

I grant that, except to say his is more a criminal despotism - KGB criminal. My point was more that these very characteristics that you have cited made him the worst possible style of leadership to resuscitate Russia from the demographic body blows of the 20th Century.

— TralfamadoreStan (@zoffany90) March 22, 2022

Not that I'm clear what a "demographic body blow" is

Yah, but the Okrhana was not really used in the Putinist fashion to gut the oligarchs & bend them to his will. Grandees in the Tsarist system were by real power centres of their own, not puppets by any measure. If anything was more a scourge of the intelligentsia, Old Believers..

— TralfamadoreStan (@zoffany90) March 22, 2022

He allows them freedom of speech because he doesn't fear them. He fears journalists and opposition politicians and street demonstrators. Just like the tsars. Even a radical like Tolstoy was allowed to do whatever he wanted on his estate, because he didn't matter.

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) March 22, 2022

And now, interestingly, he seems to fear the FSB https://t.co/w1za0KNHBF

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) March 22, 2022

Fuq the Blues, They Don't Vote For Us

Illumination ca, 1413-15 by the Boucicault Master, Paris, depicting the Roman emperor Galerius "on his deathbed, suffering from a horrendous malady that reportedly caused his entrails to decay inside his body and worms to come out of his mouth, ears, and nose... as two servants cover their mouths from the stench of his rotting flesh." J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

In March 1992, Ed Koch, the former New York City mayor, wrote that Baker had dismissed concern about Jewish anger [over G.H.W. Bush administration demands that Israel join Madrid peace process], saying “F*** the Jews, they don’t vote for us.” Baker adamantly denied it.

Fred Zeidman, a Houston-area businessman and Republican fundraiser who is friendly with the Bush family and with Baker, said the remark has long been misunderstood. Baker was aiming his ire at another Cabinet member, Zeidman said, and intended it as a joke. (JTA, December 2018)

Meaning, of course, Baker really did say it, and providing evidence that calling your racism a "joke" is an old Republican habit, but let that pass. Nowadays Republican politicians demand lockstep fealty to the Israeli government, but most American Jews don't agree, and so they still don't vote for them. So it goes.

Meanwhile, the latest outrage is the revelation, in a terrific piece by Katherine Eban for Vanity Fair ("How Jared Kushner's Secret Testing Plan 'Went Poof Into Thin Air'"), that the coronavirus response team of business bros convened at the White House by Jared Kushner had managed by early April to put together a plausible proposal for a national Covid testing plan to coordinate distribution of test kits and contact tracing, beef up antibody testing, and report all test data directly to a national repository as well as state and local authorities, but ditched it under the impression that only Democrats were really suffering from the disease so it wasn't worth the trouble, because it really looked like a lot of work, and besides the virus might just disappear (according to models pushed by Dr. Birx), and

Horse race stuff

Hi Cowpokes from Mike's Roundup, thanks Monsieur Bouffant!

Via All Hat No Cattle.

Jordan writes in comments:

Yas, what do you think of Steve's new post about how the likelihood that testing won't get straightened out by November won't affect Trump's reëlection chances?

Not to impugn Steve, obviously (and we all know he's been on that side of every "Trump support will not flag" argument), but I wonder whether this is a "hot hand fallacy" (to the extent that I understand the idea: I admit I got it from The Big Short) -- whether this is finally Trump's Waterloo or whether that's as false as it's been every previous time.

As usual, I think Steve is right-but: he's always right when he says Trump support won't flag, that's not a "hot hands" fallacy but a consistent reality of the last four years and he's been on it from the start.

But they're still a minority and always will be. He's now back to a more normal 8.6 points underwater in the 538 average. Which doesn't in itself stop him from winning (on election day 2016 he was down 13 points in the Gallup poll!), but it takes more cooperation from Fate and from the Democrats than he's likely to get a second time. Saying there's any likelihood he'd be able to steal it through the Electoral College the way he did last time would be in the hot-hands universe, I think, because it took such a lot of factors to line up, and most of them won't be available to him this year. Not Wisconsin and Michigan.

Cheap shot: Dr. Ben

Takes a tough man to make a tender superPAC. But you can keep fucking that chicken, Dr. Ben, as long as you don't marry it. Image via 365 Bars.

The Times seems to be interested in taking Dr. Ben Carson seriously as a presidential candidate:

One of the clearest indicators of his intention to run is that he has met recently with communications experts to tone down his remarks. In an interview, he blamed “the P.C. police” for frequently twisting his meaning. “When I mention bestiality or pedophilia in the same sentence with homosexuality, people say ‘Carson says they’re the same.’ Of course they’re not the same,” he said. “That point was if you change the definition of marriage for one group, you’ll have to change it for the next group and the next group.”