Republican Kelly Loeffler just got called out for yet another troubling conflict of interest
December 29, 2020
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Writing for the Orlando Sentinel on Thursday, columnist Scott Maxwell blasted the direction of Republican leadership in Florida.
"We make headlines for alligator attacks, radioactive sinkholes and bricks of cocaine that fall from the sky. Heck, if a guy’s strolling naked down the street in Key West, nobody calls the cops. They call it a parade," said Maxwell. But now, GOP leadership from Gov. Ron DeSantis on down are taking the Sunshine State "from quirky to full-on nuts."
Maxwell named a litany of stories humiliating the state, from a school principal in Tallahassee being forced to resign for showing students the "pornographic" Statue of David, to another school in St. Petersburg being forced to pull a civil rights documentary about Ruby Bridges, to GOP lawmakers threatening to pull all funding from St. Petersburg over contributions to an abortion-rights group.
Perhaps most absurd, argued Maxwell, is that DeSantis is now considering naming state Rep. Randy Fine the president of Florida Atlantic University — a man who, in Maxwell's words, is "absurdity incarnated."
READ MORE: 'They're ready for executions': Author sounds alarm after interviewing 'ordinary' conservatives
"The Brevard County Republican called a school board member he disliked a 'whore' and got into a spat with the Special Olympics after the nonprofit group didn’t invite him to a party at a local Chick-fil-A," wrote Maxwell. "He once threatened to show President Joe Biden 'why the Second Amendment was written' and boasted on Facebook that, if anyone asked him for his pronouns, he’d reply: 'You / Are / A / Fu&$ng / Moron/.' (Just the kind of scholarly debate tactics you’d crave from a university leader.) Fine once called for shutting down the state’s largest university, the University of Central Florida. And he accused local school employees of 'child abuse' — only to have cops determine Fine was wrong, that the photos he cited as evidence had been staged and that the stepfather who’d first reported the 'abuse' had lied to officers. (Fine never apologized. In fact, he doubled down.)"
All of this, Maxwell said, is making him reconsider his long-held position, as an independent voter, that extremism doesn't define the Republican Party.
"I still disagree with my far-left friends and readers who believe there are no sensible and decent conservatives out there. I know there are. Some are my friends," wrote Maxwell. "But unless more of them start speaking up and saying: 'I’m tired of my state looking like an absurdist, rights-trampling joke,' we’re going to keep seeing more of it. Absurdity will continue to be our new norm."
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As Donald Trump plunges headlong into his third bid for the presidency, he appears to be getting the cold shoulder from Fox News which could hinder his chances of re-election.
That is the opinion of New York Times media analyst Michael Grynbaum who noted that hosts on the conservative network are not only not reflexively leaping to the former president's defense, but are becoming increasingly critical of his actions and comments.
As he explains, any belief Trump may have that Fox News is a "safe space" where he can say what he wants is turning out to be a massive miscalculation.
In part, Trump's growing split with Fox began on election night in 2020 when the network's anchors reported that he had lost Arizona, which infuriated the Trump camp and led to a flurry of phone calls demanding a retraction despite the network's analysts being correct.
READ MORE: 'Crazy stuff': Morning Joe panelists burst out laughing at Trump's latest campaign riff
Since then it has been downhill and recent comments by prominent hosts have demonstrated that the split is widening.
As Grynbaum noted, normally reliable Trump supporter Jason Chaffetz -- a former GOP House member -- recently lashed out at the former president after his recent interview with Fox News personality Sean Hannity.
“I voted for Donald Trump twice, I have defended him countless times; I thought he was horrific,” Mr. Chaffetz said. “I think that was the worst interview I’ve seen the president do.”
Grybaum went on to report that Chaffetz went on to "criticize the former president for 'whining,' 'complaining' and playing 'the victim card.' Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade, two of the co-hosts of the morning show 'Fox & Friends,' also knocked Mr. Trump’s performance."
Worse still, he wrote, Fox viewers also appear to be tuning the former president out.
"Nielsen ratings — one of Mr. Trump’s preferred metrics — provided their own kind of tough review. In past years, a Trump interview almost always delivered Fox News’s biggest audience of the day. On Monday, Mr. Trump drew 3.04 million viewers, higher than the average episode of 'Hannity' but well below that day’s viewership for 'The Five' and 'Tucker Carlson Tonight,'" he added.
He then added, "With a defamation suit against Fox News filed by Dominion Voting Systems hurtling toward a trial, it was notable that Mr. Hannity’s interview with Mr. Trump was taped. Mr. Trump’s baseless claims about a 'rigged' 2020 election are central to the Dominion case; a live appearance by Mr. Trump in which he repeats those claims could be hazardous for the network. It could also put a Fox News anchor in the awkward position of having to contradict Mr. Trump on the air, the kind of exchange that could easily go viral and turn off some of the network’s viewers."
You can read more here.
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'They're ready for executions': Author sounds alarm after interviewing 'ordinary' conservatives
March 30, 2023
Author Jeff Sharlet has spent years interviewing conservatives and found many unassuming Americans are ready and eager for violence against their political enemies.
Sharlet's latest book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, is the result of more than a dozen years of reporting on the religious right, compiling numerous interviews conducted throughout the Midwest and Great Plains, and he's more worried than ever about the possibility of civil war, reported The Guardian.
"I’ve been writing about the right for a long time," he told the newspaper. "I’m always interested in the margins of things that tell us about what’s happening at the center. An undertow is a metaphor for that, for the force that’s been pulling us to this place for a long time. If you’d asked me 10 years ago if I ever thought another civil war would be possible in the United States, I would have said no. But to think so [now] is to not understand that the right in America is as dangerous as it is."
He cited a "nice-looking" family he met near Eau Claire, Wisconsin, who seemed like "ordinary" conservatives, as the newspaper described them, but harbored bloodthirsty fantasies rooted in extreme conservative politics.
READ MORE: Trump's new embrace of his 'bloody riot' is a 'huge mistake': conservative
"[The father said] he had a 'Let’s go Brandon' sticker because he didn’t want to swear around his son," Sharlet said. "They’re a middle-class dad and mom. They were always gun people, but not a lot of guns. Now they’re up to 36, now they are arming up. The father had always been anti-abortion. But now it was like a dream had moved into his and his wife’s mind. He described, in incredibly violent detail, the process of abortion. Then he described, in incredibly violent detail, the punishment he thought he and others were going to give to abortion doctors. They were ready for executions."
The current political moment was rooted in a decades-old struggle against fascism, and Sharlet said Donald Trump, intentionally or instinctively, used its "dream logic" to spellbind his followers, who fill in the unfinished thoughts in his pronouncements with their own beliefs -- and that creates the illusion that he's speaking their truth into existence.
"The free association that happens at Trump’s rallies, the ways people make connections that make no sense – it has dream logic," Sharlet said. "One minute, a scary man is crawling into the window to rape your wife, and then the next minute we’re laughing at windmills, and then the next minute we’re sad for the birds that were killed by windmills. And then, in the next minute, we’re yelling, 'Lock her up.'"
"This is dream logic, and there’s vanity in it, right?" Sharlet added. “'I will interpret what they’re saying and I will bend it.' It’s the vanity of the base, the vanity of the mob, the aggregate grotesque imagination of power. It becomes a spinning whirlpool that pulls more and more people in. These are people for whom reality is not enough."
The illusion that's created for Trump and his followers feels interactive and very real to them, Sharlet said, and that's where the twice-impeached former president gains his power.
"This is why the right feels they are more democratic than the left," he said. "The intellectual rightwingers are like, 'F*ck democracy, we don’t need it.' But the everyday people, they’re like, 'This is the most democratic I’ve ever felt. I am not only receiving – I receive, I interpret and then I transmit back.'"
Sharlet sees a similar dynamic at work within the anti-abortion movement, which the left sees as an effort to control women's bodies, but the right sees as a cause so righteous that violence is necessary.
"Yes, the project is misogynist to the core," he said. "But it is not experienced as such by many on the right. Once you make that move, that we’re talking about children, what kind of person are you if you don’t want to save that child?"
"It’s astonishing there hasn’t been more violence," Sharlet added. "I think we’ve had a shield from that violence for a long time and now that shield … I sound like Jerry Falwell saying the hand of God is being removed from America."
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