Opinion

Several weeks ago, I warned that the Republicans will impeach Joe Biden after they likely regain control of the House of Representatives next year. This is an obvious conclusion based on what leading Republicans, Donald Trump himself and the right-wing propaganda machine have been saying in public since Biden's election last year.

Impeaching Biden is one tactical or strategic element in a larger plan to delegitimize any election that Republican do not win. The ultimate goal is to replace America's nascent multiracial democracy with an unofficial apartheid system under which nonwhite people and other targeted groups are effectively second-class citizens. The Democratic Party would be rendered practically irrelevant, and the country would be a type of fake democracy ruled under a system of "competitive authoritarianism."

Alison from Los Angeles is one of many women who called my SiriusXM program after the 2016 election to express the turmoil they'd experienced because the men in their lives were committed Trumpists.

They were among many others callers who relayed tense conflicts — some of which boiled over into angry confrontations — with parents, children, siblings, friends and co-workers who were deep in the Trump cult. Many of these people cut off communication with the Trump loyalists in their lives, unable to have any kind of interaction that wasn't explosive, mostly because the Trumpers can't be reasoned with, become enraged and promote propaganda. Others found ways to cope, imperfect as they were.

Facebook's former employee Frances Haugen, in an interview on "60 Minutes," explained to host Scott Pelley that the social media giant has conducted internal experiments that demonstrate just how quickly and efficiently its users are driven down rabbit holes of white supremacist beliefs.

The 37-year-old data scientist who resigned from Facebook earlier this year and became a whistleblower explained how the company knows its algorithms lead users down extremist paths. Facebook, according to Haugen, created new test accounts that followed former President Donald Trump, his wife Melania Trump, Fox News and a local news outlet. After simply clicking on the first suggested links that Facebook's algorithm offered up, those accounts were then automatically shown white supremacist content. "Within a week you see QAnon; in two weeks you see things about 'white genocide,'" said Haugen.

For those convinced of the depravity of large corporations and the super-wealthy, recent days have provided an abundance of vindication. Thanks to the whistleblower at Facebook and an anonymous leaker of a vast collection of confidential financial documents dubbed the Pandora Papers, we have amazing new evidence of corruption and anti-social behavior.

Frances Haugen's release of internal research paints a picture of Facebook as prioritizing profits ahead of taking steps to address evidence that its algorithms promote social animosity and that its products such as Instagram exacerbate mental health problems among teenage users.

There was little surprise in the disclosures this week of a Senate Judiciary Committee majority staff report detailing what amounts to a plot led by Donald Trump to overthrow last November's election.

It was neither surprising that Trump would break federal law and ethical standards to stay in office nor that his own Justice Department office would threaten to resign en masse if Trump named Jeffrey Clark, a Big Lie loyalist, as attorney general to stop the Electoral College results from being confirmed by Congress.

When it comes to dealing with egregious corporate polluters, we tend to think first about what Environment and Justice officials are doing to address the problem. Yet there is another way in which environmental miscreants can be called to account: private litigation.

For the past half-century, a series of major lawsuits have served as the means by which large corporations have been compelled to change many of their worst environmental practices and compensate victims of those abuses.

Move over Tiger King. There's a new reality show in town that's even more outrageous than an exotic cat owner's murder-for-hire scheme.

I call this “show" the Real Politicians of Arizona because, just like the “Housewives" series, there's plenty of back-biting, sensationalized drama and questionable fashion choices.

Time to dial it up to 11, as Nigel Tufnel would say.

If my fellow Louisvillian Dr. Hunter S. Thompson were still among us, this is when he'd drop multiple hits of acid, snort up enough marching powder to keep his shirts stiff for several months, drink copious amounts of Wild Turkey sufficient to numb or knock out the average human being — and then show up at a White House briefing in shorts, drenched and babbling like a ferret on Benzedrine.

Fox News Channel has offered us oh so many ways to mark its 25th anniversary. How could we possibly count them? Creating a chronological list of its Achievements in Outrage would be a massive undertaking; someone else is welcome to it.

Retracing its history back to the start, when the late Roger Ailes launched the network with an array of opinion-based programming packaged to resemble news and calling it "fair and balanced," has been done. Citing poll data and statistics proving the extent to which the network's dedicated viewership is more misinformed than other news' outlets consumers would be similarly redundant.

The first bit of news today is that the United States Chamber of Commerce has been sitting in on strategy calls by the GOP leadership of the United States House of Representatives. That's news, because the chamber speaks for every major corporation you can think of. It claims to be nonpartisan and strictly business-focused. That was a lie.

The second bit of news is the decision by the chamber to flip-flop on its support of a Democratic plan for nation-building at home. After months of lobbying for a bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, at a cost of millions, it decided this morning to oppose it. That's news, because its decision was announced after reporters revealed the House GOP leadership was kicking the chamber off its strategy calls.

The Cyber Ninjas' sham review of Maricopa County's presidential election has drawn to a close. The self-styled investigators found no evidence of fraud and their hand recount was within spitting distance of the official result. Still, the grift rolls on: Arizona Republicans announced a busy schedule of hearings and investigations to rehash the report's non-findings. Unchastened by utter failure, Republicans are keen to replicate the Arizona debacle in other states, and similar efforts are already underway in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Texas.

"This is a situation of states' rights," said Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers as she unveiled a manifesto signed by dozens of Republican state legislators calling for audits in all 50 states. "No matter what the left says, we will keep this in the narrative."

I continue to think regime change is a useful way of understanding politics. That's the idea that American political history turns in cycles. For 40 or 50 years, one party and its ideas prevail over the other with a majority of voters. From the 1930s to the 1970s, it was the Democrats. From the 1980s to the 2010s, it was the Republicans. Each period is punctuated by crisis — world wars, economic shocks or, in our case, the covid pandemic.

Regime change is useful because it helps put the chaos of lived experience into a coherent historical context. But that's not all. Once you're aware of the cycles of political history, you realize very little is set in stone. The political assumptions of the past may or may not be relevant to the new political assumptions of the present. Plus, the political assumptions of the present are not really new. Even as one set of assumptions dominates an era, another set is always already in some stage of development. It just needs an opportunity to emerge.