Opinion

Over a year ago, and in violation of my own good advice, I got caught up in a Facebook argument with a Republican relative about Donald Trump. I don't remember what the topic was, and it hardly matters now, since the past four years was just a constant churn of Trump doing terrible stuff and his defensive voters constantly grasping for dumb excuses for why the terrible stuff wasn't actually all that terrible. What I do remember, however, is that, at one point, I linked the Washington Post's daily counter of Trump false statements — he was up to over a dozen a day by then — and demanded an explanation of why she would support such a liar. (I am not proud of myself, as noted.) She retorted with something along the lines of, "Oh, like Elizabeth Warren has never told a lie!"

This article originally appeared at Salon.

I think normal people possess an instinct the Washington press corps does not, which is this: some things are debatable while others are not. Specifically, very few things are debatable at all. More specifically, very few are worth debating. Who's got the time when there are jobs to do, kids to raise, classes to attend, elders to care for and so forth? Most people most of the time have other things to do than sit around debating minutia. Most people seek out, and accept, what's reasonable—and move on.

What's reasonable is getting vaccinated in the time of the covid, a disease that has killed, as of this writing, more than 589,000 Americans. It will probably kill a million before it's over. Getting vaccinated in the time of the covid is as reasonable as washing your hands after using the bathroom; as wiping your feet before entering the house; as brushing your teeth before going to bed. The likelihood of death or serious harm from failing to wash your hands, wipe your feet and brush your teeth is too ridiculous to bother mentioning. But that doesn't make doing those things any less reasonable.

Rudy Giuliani and his lawyers are suggesting that the reason a search warrant was issued for his premises and computers is "Trump Derangement Syndrome."

Yeah.

America's collective memory hole is becoming a bottomless abyss.

On Jan. 6, Donald Trump's followers launched an attack on the U.S. Capitol as part of a larger effort to nullify the results of the 2020 presidential election — and, in effect, overthrow American democracy.

United States Rep. Glenn Grothman was kind enough to send his thoughts on DC statehood in an e-newsletter last weekend, as he does for his constituents. If you haven't had the fortune to know the congressman from Wisconsin's Sixth, well, bless you. I first encountered him at a pancake breakfast, where he was picking fights with constituents. He has a long history of making ill-informed, inflammatory statements as a state senator and now as a member of the United States Congress.

Recently, Grothman found himself embroiled in controversy when he accused Black Lives Matter of disliking "the old-fashioned family." He defended that statement on-camera while wearing a jaunty hat he'd worn in a local St. Patrick's Day parade.

While the federal raid on Rudy Giuliani's home has attracted the national media's attention, there's a thread in the story leading up to the issuance of the search warrant that may be underplayed.

The New York Times story that initially reported the news on Tuesday noted that the investigation into Giuliani has been ongoing for years, growing out of his conduct implicated in the first impeachment of former President Donald Trump. He was instrumental and deeply involved in Trump's 2019 effort to induce Ukraine to announce an investigation into Joe Biden, who they perceived as the president's likely 2020 rival. As part of the effort, Giuliani sought to disparage the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, and eventually, Trump had her removed from office.

Republican-controlled state legislatures have introduced over 361 voter suppression bills in 47 states, and some states, like Georgia, have already enacted them into law.

There's only one way to stop this assault on our democracy. It's called the FOR THE PEOPLE ACT, and the window for Congress to pass it is closing.

Over the weekend, two sensational fake stories — a Fox Business Network segment about President Joe Biden's supposed plans to impose strict beef rations on Americans and a New York Post news article claiming Vice President Kamala Harris's book was being distributed to migrant children in shelters — spread rapidly through right wing social media after being injected into the bloodstream by outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch and his family. Both stories were eventually corrected — Fox on air, and the Post in two separate, corrected articles — after being debunked by fact-checkers.

This article originally appeared at Salon.

The state of Georgia has drawn the most national attention as the hub of the Republican strategy to suppress the votes of people of color in particular, and Democratic constituencies in general.

But the trophies for hypocrisy and chutzpah go to Florida.

I have thought for a long time that it wasn't at all improbable that the first woman president would end up being a Republican. I know that seems absurd considering the right's patriarchal ideology and their strong reliance on ultra-conservative, white evangelical voters. But it isn't. After all, some of the most successful anti-feminist activists, such as Phyllis Schlafly, were women with important public careers, even when that was extremely unusual in American society. As we now know, Republican adherence to the tenets of "traditional family values" is much more malleable than anyone suspected. After all, GOP "base" voters remain big fans of the dishonest, profane, crude, thrice-married ex-president to this day.

I wrote about this for Salon a couple of years ago, suggesting that while former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley looked perfect on paper — an experienced Southern politician, a person of color, the child of immigrants, even a respected member of the Trump administration — she was not likely to be that first Republican woman nominated for president. I'm afraid that person-of-color, child-of-immigrants thing is a serious liability for a white nationalist party.

In the real world, there are real problems that serious people are worried about: global pandemic, climate change, economic inequality, systematic racism, mass shootings, and gendered violence, just to name a few. The problem for Republicans, of course, is that they are, quite literally, on the wrong side of pretty much each of those issues, and spend their time either actively making problems worse or getting in the way of people who want to fix things. Outside of sociopaths, Fox News hosts, and people with "Pepe" memes in their Twitter profiles, however, few people want to look in the mirror and see a villain gazing back at them. So right-wing media, which has always been addicted to selling its audiences on imaginary threats and preposterous fairy tales of conservative victimhood, has only been escalating such nonsense in recent months as the Republican policy agenda has been increasingly exposed to be nonexistent.

If your "team" is on the side of the Capitol insurrectionists and Derek Chauvin, it's hard to suppress the haunting fear that you're the baddies. So Fox News is on hand to spoon out alluring fantasies that recast liberals as the bad guys and conservatives as the long-suffering heroes. Tucker Carlson — a Fox News host who clearly relishes being a cartoon villain (think: "Dan White Society") — coughed up an almost too-perfect sample of the form Monday night, when he encouraged his audience of millions to harass ordinary people minding their own business under the guise of "helping."

By this point, almost everyone has heard of QAnon, the conspiracy spawned by an anonymous online poster of enigmatic prophecies. Starting with an initial promise in 2017 that Hillary Rodham Clinton would be imminently arrested, a broad group of interpreters divined a conspiracy that saw President Donald Trump's Democratic opponents as a global cabal of Satanic pedophiles.

Perhaps the greatest success of the conspiracy is its ability to create a shared alternate reality, a reality that can dismiss everything from a decisive election to a deadly pandemic. The QAnon universe lives on – now largely through involvement in local, not national, Republican politics.

Americans thought January 6 was the peak of the effort to end democracy in America and replace it with strongman authoritarian rule. But January 6 was merely the tip of the iceberg.

This article was originally published at The Hartmann Report