Opinion

If the 2020s are shaping up to be about any one thing, it's ultimately about how this was the decade in which millions of people decided no amount of evidence or rationality could ever pry them from their dumbest, most reactionary beliefs. We see this in the Big Lie, of course, but also in the ongoing pile-up of asinine right-wing myths and hoaxes currently taking hold like "critical race theory," accusations that Disney employees are "groomers," and claims that kids in schools are pooping in litterboxes. If there's an ethos of this era, it's that you can believe whatever idiotic thing you want, so long as it's "anti-woke." And, of course, any effort to dislodge you from your stupid idea with annoying facts is "cancel culture."

In recent weeks, the most virulent example of this hasn't come from likely culprits Donald Trump or Florida's Republican governor cursed with permanent constipation face, Ron DeSantis. No, it's the nauseating defamation trial that pits the bloated remains of what used to be a handsome and promising movie star against a long-suffering actress. In the real world, as many a journalist with a high tolerance for Twitter abuse has reminded us, Johnny Depp's defamation case against Amber Heard is not legitimate. Any jury that actually follows the evidence should throw the case out, as investigative journalist and podcaster Michael Hobbes recently explained on Twitter.

Donald Trump promoted a modern Civil War in America this week on his social media platform. Civil War?

Further confounding things, Republican candidates like Pennsylvania’s Kathy Barnette are openly running as ultra-MAGA candidates, having hijacked Trumpism without Trump himself. It’s causing the media and political elites to have a “Huh? What?” moment.

Former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has answered another question about her reading habits – strangely enough – in her latest political quest, the race to fill the Alaska’s vacant U.S. House seat.

Palin responded to a questionnaire posed by the Alaska News Source:

"Shocking." That's the word being bandied about in both news coverage and social media reactions to a nearly 300-page report released on Sunday that details both extensive sexual abuse within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) and a thorough effort to cover it up by the denomination's leadership. As Christianity Today bluntly noted, the convention had "a secret list of more than 700 abusive pastors," but "chose to protect the denomination from lawsuits" rather than the victims or potential future victims in the pews. Instead, protecting predators became the norm, and victims of abuse were frequently blamed. One victim, whose abuse started when she was 14, "was forced to apologize in front of the church," but forbidden to name the pastor who had forcibly impregnated her.

The situation is, indeed, horrific. It's a minor miracle that this report even happened. Activists have been clamoring for it, but have faced a massive institutional resistance from the leadership of America's largest single Protestant denomination. One cannot help but marvel at the nerve of some Southern Baptist leaders who engaged in the coverup. SBC general counsel Augie Boto, for instance, responded to victims and their allies by accusing them of being part of "a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism." Boto even appeared as a character witness for a Nashville gymnastics coach who was convicted on charges of molesting a 10-year-old girl.

Americans aren’t getting what a majority of us want, even when we show up in majority numbers to vote.

The problem is that we’ve trusted the rich to run things here in America for 42 years now since the Reagan Revolution, and it’s not working.

The whole country has its eyes on Georgia this week in anticipation of the big Republican primary showdown between Gov. Brian Kemp and former President Donald Trump. Trump isn't actually in the race, of course but he might as well be. He reportedly harangued former Sen. David Perdue to run in an effort to vanquish Trump's hated enemy Kemp, who refused to help the then-president overturn the 2020 election.

Likewise, Trump has energetically endorsed Rep. Jody Hice to replace Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who famously released the recording of a phone call from Trump in which he asked Raffensperger to "find" the necessary votes to hand him the state's electoral votes. The most recent polling has Raffensperger and Hice likely headed to a runoff — but Kemp is probably heading for a landslide victory. Trump's former vice president, Mike Pence, is scheduled to show up at a rally for Kemp on Monday, in one of the biggest signs of a permanent Trump-Pence split.

The Democrats are bad at messaging. That complaint is so common, I say no thanks whenever a contributor pitches me a story about it. (Well, most of the time.) Yes, the Democrats could do better, but honestly, I don’t see how much better – not without their own media.

Fact is, the complainers want the Democrats to be as loud as the Republicans. They want the Democrats to bend political reality in their direction the way the Republicans bend political reality in theirs.

A number of years ago, I sat on a long plane ride next to an orthodox Jewish man. We struck up a conversation and found out that we each had three children. I have three daughters, while he told me he had two daughters and a son. When I told him I was a law professor, he told me with delight that both of his sons had expressed some interest in going to law school. I asked him about his daughter and he said that she would, of course, be a wife and mother and take care of the home.

I expressed surprise at this (naive, I know) and asked him what his teen daughter thought about these differing expectations based on gender.

The Republican "Big Lie" about voter fraud takes root in the fact-free soil of opposite world, where the Oscars are held at Mar-a-Lago and honor Dinesh D'Souza's "documentaries."

Here in reality, D'Souza is a convicted felon, his films amount to a lucrative grift operation and should be filed under fantasy, and GOP claims of voter fraud actually seek to distract from their own extensive pattern of rule-rigging, lawlessness and brazen vote suppression. (As for D'Souza, he received a presidential pardon from Donald Trump.)

Like everyone else in the House Republican conference, New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik has done her share of inciting white political violence. While the House debated recently additional aid for Ukraine, the No. 3 Republican chose during her allotted time to rail against the president for “the invasion at the southern border.”

That “invasion” plays a small role in the larger story of “the great replacement” feared by right-wingers to such a degree that one of them, Payton Gendron, took matters into his own hands last week and shot to pieces 10 Black people at a supermarket on Buffalo’s eastside.

Deficit reduction sounds like one of those nonpartisan measures of governing competence. That’s why Joe Biden has been touting it.

In fact, it’s largely irrelevant to voters – for good reason.

Republicans believe that Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán has figured out the “secret sauce” to turn a republic into a hard-right oligarchy, and today they’re in Budapest drinking deep from his insights on the fine points of destroying democracy.

In two speeches this week, Orbán laid out his Hungarian version of the racist American “Great Replacement Theory,” trashed Jewish financier George Soros as a proxy for Jews around the world, reiterated the importance of having friendly rightwing billionaires seize control of a nation’s media, and attacked societies that allow gay marriage and tolerate trans people as engaging in “gender madness.”

On May 15, a young white man carrying a semi-automatic rifle opened fire outside a supermarket in a predominantly Black eastside neighborhood of Buffalo. The rifle barrel had the N-word written on it along with the number 14, a well-known white supremacist slogan.

Payton Gendron killed three outside the grocery store and wounded another. Then he went inside. When it was over, 10 people were dead, including a security guard with whom he had exchanged fire. Of the 13 people shot, 11 were Black. Gendron, clad in body armor, live-streamed the shooting on Twitch. (Twitch has since deleted the video).