Opinion

In 2017, when Johnny Depp jokingly asked his British audience at that year's Glastonbury Festival, "When was the last time an actor assassinated a president?" then-Fox News host and eternal Donald Trump water bearer Eric Bolling lost his mind.

"Depp, you damn fool. You think you can say these things without repercussions?" he boomed in the monologue for his show "Fox News Specialists" which, if you blinked, you probably missed.

Less than 24 hours after agreeing to purchase Twitter, Tesla CEO Elon Musk may have already broken the deal which allowed him to perform a hostile takeover of the social media company. Although one of the terms is that he may only tweet about the acquisition "so long as such tweets do not disparage the Company or any of its Representatives," he posted two tweets on Tuesday which parroted right-wing talking points that attacked specific employees.

Normally there would not be many individuals applauding a wealthy CEO who purchased a company and then immediately attacked vulnerable employees, almost certainly knowing that doing so would instigate mass harassment against said employees (which is exactly what happened). In normal contexts, such a person would be classified as nothing more than a bully. Then again, when you are a billionaire with a cult of personality, there will always be people who applaud your actions.

In a world where so much news is just plain depressing, it's an unexpected delight to watch the Republican establishment pull out their bag of dirty tricks and rat-f**k one of their own. And boy, it couldn't be happening to a nicer guy: Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, part of the freshman class of Republicans who work more as full-time trolls than traditional lawmakers. Man, Republicans really hate this guy.

In just the past week, the efforts to destroy Cawthorn have included GOP-funded attack ads against him, a push to have his alleged financial crimes exposed, and, what's most fun of all, an "oppo dump" of embarrassing photographs. First, Politico published photos of Cawthorn at a party, drinking and wearing lingerie.

Guy Reschenthaler’s face looked beat up. I almost felt sorry for him. The Pennsylvania congressman was forced to explain Thursday what he and his conference were doing in the House after Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin, in short order, tore three of them down.

By the time Raskin was finished with Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, the carnage was so bad Reschenthaler demanded that Raskin’s word “be taken down.” That’s a House rule disciplining members who use “inappropriate words in debate.”

If the New York Times' "1619 Project" and Donald Trump's 1776 Commission mark two defining moments in American history, as well as opposite sides of an ideological chasm, a new book by sociologists Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry identifies a third defining moment. It's not a new proposed founding, but rather an "inflection point," the moment when the nation's history could have gone in another direction.

In "The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy," Gorski and Perry argue that in the years around 1690 — when Puritan colonists began envisioning their battles against Native Americans as an apocalyptic holy war to secure a new Promised Land, when Southern Christians began to formulate a theological justification for chattel slavery — a new national mythology was born. That mythology is the "deep story" of white Christian nationalism: the notion that America was founded as a Christian nation, blessed by God and imbued with divine purpose, but also under continual threat from un-American and ungodly forces, often in the form of immigrants or racial minorities.

Who are the elite of America? If you watch Fox, or spend time in rightwing media bubbles, you’ll probably think of celebrities, musicians, actors and athletes – all those fashionable bicoastal entertainers who look down on hard-working middle class Americans.

A recent ProPublica report based on IRS tax files from 2013 to 2018 shows this vision of America’s upper-crust is thoroughly misleading.

Americans of all political persuasions were somewhere between horrified and mystified yesterday when Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul argued that the US shouldn’t help Ukraine gain NATO membership because, as Putin said when he started the war, Ukraine was “part of the Soviet Union.”

Seriously — check it out:

Some say the Republican Party has gone nuts. In reality, they’ve simply reached the endpoint toward which they’ve been moving for 62 years: fascism.

Republican politicians since Barry Goldwater’s 1960 campaign have trash-talked “big government” in the United States. Like Reagan’s assertions that cutting taxes on rich people would “trickle down” benefits to poor people, or his claim that destroying labor unions would increase take-home pay for working people, this one’s just another lie.

“In time, he talked about the play more expansively. It’s not just about fascism, but also about moments when people are swayed by mobthink into doing and believing absurd things, and how the person tethered to reality feels crazy. They’re basically being gaslit by the world.”

Thank God the covid is spreading more slowly. At least for now. On February 1, daily deaths soared to more than 3,500, according to the Times. As of this writing, those are down to 305. Very welcome news.

Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has declared war on Disney, while his colleague in Texas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott, is on a jihad against the parents of trans children.

This is how fascism progresses through its later stages toward tyranny.

There was much that was compelling about Monday's CNN dump of another couple thousand coup-related Mark Meadows texts into the public domain. We learned Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., can't spell and that former Secretary of Energy Rick Perry apparently signs his text messages with his name and phone number. But while the linguistic faux pas of people conspiring to overthrow democracy are entertaining, I must confess that what I found most riveting and illuminating was the way the texts pulled back the curtain on how Republicans generate their lies.

Meadows' texts offer a glimpse into the apparently routine Republican brainstorming sessions about which false narratives they knowingly plan to inject into the conspiracy theory dissemination machine anchored by Fox News and social media. We see this in the flurry of texts that were spread around on January 6, 2021, when Donald Trump's co-conspirators began to realize that the violence of the insurrection was hurting their efforts at justifying the coup. Trump aide Jason Miller texted Trump's social media manager and Meadows his ideas for "tweets from POTUS." They included a conspiracy theory blaming the violence on "ANTIFA or other crazed leftists" and falsely accusing the media of "trying to blame peaceful and innocent MAGA supporters for violent actions." As the CNN reporters wrote, "Trump's allies in Congress appeared to get the message." In real-time, you can see them workshopping the details of this conspiracy theory, inventing details like how "Antifa dressed in red Trump shirts."

I've lost count of how many books have been published at this point about Donald Trump's final days, but I'm glad that the staggered release of them has helped to keep the event fresh in people's minds as each one offers up something that we didn't know before. With the January 6th Committee selectively leaking information and the prospect of public hearings at some point in the near future, it's still possible that the whole thing won't be completely swept under the rug before the election in the fall.

A few days ago, Politico's Kyle Cheney posted a useful overview of just some of what we have learned so far. We know that Trump went to great lengths in the days and weeks after the election to bully, coerce, strong arm and intimidate local and state officials in all the battleground states to illegally overturn the election results. He pushed the Department of Justice to declare the election results were tainted and only moved on when it became clear that they would all resign in protest if he installed a willing toady who would carry it out. And his legal team of fringe weirdos led by Rudy Giuliani descended upon courthouses in the targeted states with wild accusations of voter fraud that were all denied, many of them by judges Trump himself appointed.

After President John F. Kennedy appointed his brother as Attorney General, Republicans freaked out and passed an anti-nepotism law against presidents hiring family members.

When Donald Trump put Jared Kushner into the White House (even after he failed a security clearance), his Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel ruled, essentially, that Trump could ignore the law.