Opinion

The former leader of the Oath Keepers militia and his four associates went on trial for seditious conspiracy this week. The defendants are accused of conspiring to prevent the transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden, a plan which included, but was not limited to, the siege of the US Capitol on January 6.

Stewart Rhodes and his minions are the first J6 defendants to be tried under this rarely-used Civil War-era statute. The government’s track record of convicting far-right defendants of seditious conspiracy is weak, but the facts of the Oath Keeper affair make for an unusually strong case.

Donald Trump aspires to be a warlord. He publicly admires despots, tyrants and other authoritarian leaders who kill their enemies and take away the rights of anyone who oppose them. Mental health professionals have repeatedly warned that Donald Trump is likely a sociopath with an erotic attraction to violence and mayhem.

He has repeatedly shown that he has no regard for the rule of law, democracy, human rights or other restrictions on his behavior. He encourages his followers and allies to engage in acts of terrorism and other violence on his behalf. The most notable example came, of course, on Jan. 6, 2021. To this point, Trump has been limited by his cowardice. He prefers to have others engage in violence on his behalf instead of directly ordering such acts or participating in them himself.

Time for a few words on Herschel Walker, the once-great football player now turned Republican Senate candidate. He’s running to unseat US Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t know much about politics. He doesn’t seem to care. He appears willing to do what he’s told, including opposing abortion.

Turns out, old Herschel’s been sticking his pigskin in the mash potatoes since his glory days as a University of Georgia running back. Evidently, he’s fathered more than few children by more than few women without having much participated in their rearing. According to big scoops by The Daily Beast, Dear Deadbeat Dad paid for an abortion by one woman who’d later give birth to another child.

Instead, it’s all about white power and wealth, in a context that once ruled the southern states. This campaign anecdote pretty much explains it all:

Back in 2020 when the economy was sinking like a stone the Senate voted 96-0 to send a $1,200 check to every adult American with a social security number. It was explicitly for every American, including people then held in prisons: everybody in, nobody out.

Last spring, as the right began using the word "grooming" as a slur against LGBTQ people and their allies, journalist Melissa Gira Grant noted at the New Republic that the word provided a way to "say both the quiet and the loud part." Contorting a term long used to describe real instances of child sex abuse into a weapon to be deployed against LGBTQ people and commonplace policies — for example, that their existence can and should be acknowledged in schools — was the "loud" part. It was a shocking but pithy means of demonization; as Gira Grant wrote, the "right is using the reality of child abuse to raise unfounded fears and panic about criminal and predatory behavior hiding in plain sight." The quiet part was the secondary implication: If one's "enemies" really are "an ill-defined yet pervasive threat to children, what wouldn't be justified in stopping them?"

This week, that quiet part got noticeably louder, as right-wing activists escalated the already-dangerous rhetoric of "grooming" — language that multiple social media platforms have banned from use as an insult related to LGBTQ issues — and graduated into claims that LGBTQ people and liberals are literally kidnapping and trafficking children.

More crime is caused by rich people than poor people in America. It’s not that rich people are committing the crimes, although they often do, but that inequality destroys social trust. If we want to reduce crime, we have to start taxing billionaires.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis says he’s going to cut taxes for Floridians. The Florida legislature isn’t meeting again until March of next year, which is when governors typically roll out new proposals, but, hey, he’s heading into a make-it-or-break-it election against former Florida Governor Charlie Crist in six weeks.

In 33 days, voters will decide which party controls the Congress. As the time ticks down, I’m not the only one who’s noticed that the Republicans, for all their Sturm und Drang, don’t appear to be running on anything. What will they do with control of the House? It’s hard to say. Whatever the Democrats do, do the opposite?

Again, I’m not the only one to notice a conspicuous absence of a positive policy program. So has Kevin McCarthy. That’s why the House minority leader staged a big reveal of the Republicans’ new agenda, “Commitment to America,” in Pittsburgh last month.

After a damning article claiming he paid for one of his girlfriend’s abortions, Republican U.S. Senate nominee for Georgia, Herschel Walker, is out with a new ad that claims he has “overcome” his mental illness thanks to God, while he attacks his incumbent opponent, Democratic U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock, who he baselessly says “doesn’t even believe in redemption.”

Walker’s own campaign compared the Daily Beast’s report – that says Walker even signed a card mentioning the abortion he reportedly paid for – to Donald Trump’s 2016 “Access Hollywood” video, which almost cost him the election.

Former Trump 2016 campaign manager and Senior Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway has remade herself multiple times. A pollster who once had as a client Todd Akin – the GOP lawmaker who made the phrase, "if it's a legitimate rape" infamous – Conway also did polling for Donald Trump when he was considering a run for New York governor.

Once inside the White House Conway was one of the newsiest officials, often appearing before the Fox News cameras almost daily.

I'm so old I can remember a time before critical race theory, Mr. Potato Head and library books about gay teenagers were the greatest threats to America. I know it's hard to believe that anything could ever be more dangerous to all we hold dear, but once upon a time millions of people were convinced that affordable health care spelled the end of the republic as we know it. They took to the streets, mobbed town hall meetings and screamed bloody murder when the government proposed a law that would ban insurance companies from refusing to cover sick people and offered government help to people who could not afford the sky-high premiums those companies charged.

It seems like ancient history now but just a few years ago the hottest, most contentious issue in America was the passage of the Affordable Care Act (also known, for better or worse, as Obamacare). The Republican Party organized itself for almost a decade solely around a promise to repeal it. In fact, they actually voted to do so 67 times over the course of seven years. As president at the time, Barack Obama would have vetoed any repeal, of course, but the act of voting against it was enough to keep the base in line, outraged and on the march from one election to the next.

When Gov. Gretchen Whitmer gave her keynote address at the Mackinac Policy Conference in May, it suddenly became clear how many pundits had misjudged this particular political moment.

You would have expected the Democrat to earn some polite applause at the traditionally stuffy confab dominated by CEOs, lobbyists and legislators, one where her predecessor, Republican Gov. Rick Snyder, always seemed most at home.

Whoopi Goldberg is glad that her former co-host, Meghan McCain, is no longer on "The View."

In a Saturday interview with Page Six, Goldberg opened up about the new — and enjoyable — sense of peace on the show's set following McCain's departure, saying, "It's calmer because nobody wants to be that tired every day."

The Economist posted a list this month entitled "What to read to understand Donald Trump," a list of five "handy books" from the overflowing library of volumes about the man who, as the editors put it, "remains at the center of American politics." These include the first major book about the Trump White House, Michael Wolff's 2018 "Fire and Fury," and several other classics of this mini-genre: "Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America" by John Sides, Michel Tesler and Lynn Vavreck; John Bolton's White House memoir, "The Room Where It Happened" and two accounts of the end of Trump's presidency, "Frankly, We Did Win This Election," by Michael C. Bender, and most recently "Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission" by Mark Leibovich.

This article first appeared on Salon.