Frontpage Commentary - 6 articles

In our hazy collective memory about Franklin Roosevelt, the Great Depression and the march toward World War II in the 1930s, we sometimes assume the people of the United States were absorbing the printed and broadcasted words of an objective and fair news media.

Nothing could be farther from the truth, as University of California, Davis history professor Kathryn S. Olmsted ably proves in her deeply researched book The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler. Not only were some of the foremost newspaper publishers of the day needling FDR with stilettos on their editorial pages, but they also even imposed their views on their reporters. “Fake news” was as evident in those days as it is today.

The most consequential night of the 2022 primary season looms Tuesday, highlighted by races that should provide the clearest reading to date of former president Donald Trump’s grip on the Republican Party.

The August 2 lineup features primary contests in five states, representing the largest number of nationally watched battles on any single day of the 2022 primary calendar. Among the key tests will be the fate of three Republican House members who voted to impeach Trump in 2021 – all of whom face primary challenges as a result.

Since the beginning of his campaign, Blake Masters, the conservative venture capitalist turned U.S. Senate hopeful from Arizona, has been drawn to the kind of rhetorical extremism that now animates the Republican Party, bandying insults and talking points of the kind that require no specialized knowledge or experience but nevertheless leave an indelible impression on Republican voters. As far back as 2015, Masters told The Washington Post, he'd been entranced by the rhetoric of Donald Trump, a loud misogynist, who during one of his presidential debates proudly embraced accusations of sexism rather than deny them.

"You've called women you don't like fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals," then-Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly said to Trump during a 2016 GOP debate. "Your Twitter account ––"

President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election were brazenly antidemocratic. Yet Trump and his supporters nonetheless justified their actions under the dubious pretense of preserving American democracy – as a matter of getting the vote right, of reversing voter fraud.

There’s a good reason they took this approach. Authoritarianism has long been rejected across the political spectrum. Democrats and Republicans routinely lob insults like “dictator” or “fascist” to describe politicians of the other party who are in power.

Stephen K. Bannon’s conviction today by a federal jury for contempt of Congress carries a higher-than-usual prospect for prison time thanks to his arrogant conduct outside the courtroom, a top law professor told Raw Story today.

Bannon was found guilty of two misdemeanor counts by a federal jury in U.S. District Court in Washington D.C. Each count carries a minimum of 30 days and a maximum of one year in jail, as well as a fine of $100 to $100,000.

In the days since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which had established the constitutional right to an abortion, some Christians have cited the Bible to argue why this decision should either be celebrated or lamented. But here’s the problem: This 2,000-year-old text says nothing about abortion.

As a university professor of biblical studies, I am familiar with faith-based arguments Christians use to back up views of abortion, whether for or against. Many people seem to assume the Bible discusses the topic head-on, which is not the case.

Former senior adviser to Ted Cruz, Amanda Carpenter, wrote for the Bulwark that she's not quite clear on who the U.S. Secret Service is protecting given what has been uncovered about their behavior on Jan. 6.

Among the things that have been uncovered, it turns out the Secret service informed the president about weapons that participants at the Ellipse rally had on Jan. 6. They didn't arrest anyone, despite it being illegal to have firearms on federal property like the Washington Monument. In fact, the Secret Service didn't report the weapons they discovered from rally attendees to the DC Metro Police or the Capitol Police as those rally goers began marching in that direction.

Today's Republican Party is in revolutionary mode. They are escalating their more than 50 years-long campaign to take away the human and civil rights of women, non-whites, the LGBTQ community, the disabled, the poor and others deemed to be the enemy in their "real America."

As the country becomes more racially diverse, younger, forward thinking and pluralistic, the American right wing is attempting to force the country back to the 19th century and the Gilded Age. Such moves are generally unpopular with the American people en masse. The Republican Party and the larger right wing movement dismiss such protests because they reject the basic principle of a true "We the People" democracy and are earnestly working to create a herrenvolk, apartheid, plutocratic, Christian fascist new America that will be ruled by a small number of white men and their allies.

This week the nation bore witness to an especially shameful episode for Republicans, even by the right's rock-bottom standards. Right-wing media came together to respond to the story of a 10-year-old rape victim by denying her existence and calling those who provided medical care liars. What was surprising about the whole thing was not that conservative media was reckless, hateful, and mendacious. That's a permanent state of play for Republican propagandists. No, it was that the face of these attacks on a child rape victim and her doctor was not the usual doe-eyed Bible-huggers pretending they want to force fourth graders to give birth for Jesus and "the babies." It was the noxious frat daddy Jesse Watters, the former Bill O'Reilly underling who is now forever vying for Tucker Carlson's throne as the Fox News host most like a rich boy villain in an 80s movie.

Sadly, there was a choir of jackasses making false, unevidenced accusations against the doctor who terminated the child's pregnancy, but it was Watters and his smirking visage that was really the star of this clown show.

Political observers on Friday were alarmed by a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling restricting the use of drop boxes for absentee election ballots—not just because the decision will make it harder for many residents to vote, but also because the high court's right-wing majority openly embraced in its ruling former President Donald Trump's lies about the 2020 election.

In the 4-3 decision, the court's conservative justices argued that the use of ballot drop boxes is unlawful because the boxes are not explicitly mentioned in the state's laws, which allow for absentee ballots to be returned to a municipal clerk.

In late June, a conservative education coalition called the Civics Alliance released a new set of social studies standards for K-12 schools, with the intention of promoting it as a model for states nationwide. These standards, entitled "American Birthright," are framed as yet another corrective to supposedly "woke" public schools, where, according to Republicans, theoretical frameworks like critical race theory are only one part of a larger attack on the foundations of American democracy.

"Too many Americans have emerged from our schools ignorant of America's history, indifferent to liberty, filled with animus against their ancestors and their fellow Americans, and estranged from their country," reads the introduction to "American Birthright." (The "birthright" here refers to "freedom.") And the fields of history and civics, it suggests, exemplify the worst of that trend. "The warping of American social studies instruction has created a corps of activists dedicated to the overthrow of America and its freedoms, larger numbers of Americans indifferent to the steady whittling away of American liberty, and many more who are so ignorant of the past they cannot use our heritage of freedom to judge contemporary debates."

Trump embraced that argument, called the independent state legislature (ISL) theory as a way to overturn his defeat in key states. It had been gathering dust in right-wing think tanks and academia, where it was championed under the banner of so-called constitutional originalism, whose adherents want the government to mimic what the founders established in the 18th century.

Trump, as the January 6 hearings have shown, saw the assertion of legislative authority as one way to seize a second term. Republican-majority legislatures, led by his loyalists, theoretically could bypass their state’s popular vote and appoint pro-Trump Electoral College members. Even though courts rejected Trump’s suits, and no legislature followed that script, 84 GOP activists and officials in seven swing states forged documents giving Trump their Electoral College votes.