Kirk Swearingen, Salon

In his new 12-part podcast series, "Blue Dots in a Red Sea (How to Win When You're Blue in a Red State)," which he began on Christmas Day as a set of citizen goals for the New Year, he provides advice and encouragement to those of us who live in Republican-controlled states. In each brief episode, he exhorts us to get active in our continuing defense of democracy and offers his own hard-won suggestions on how to succeed.

Moore was nearly spot-on in his prediction about the 2022 midterm elections (countering nearly every poll, he also predicted Donald Trump's victory in 2016). Leading up to Election Day, he embarked on an ambitious series of posts on his Substack site, citing 44 "truths" to refute the mainstream media narrative of a "red wave." Republicans and the media were focused on pundits and polls saying that history, inflation, gas prices and Biden's approval rating would sink the Democrats.

But Moore persisted (even after a bout of COVID) in countering those arguments, providing many cogent reasons for Democrats and progressives to not despair. He said if they got to work, there would be no red wave — and that there could instead be a blue tsunami.

As things turned out, the Democrats did very well, historically speaking, for a party that holds the White House. They picked up a seat in the Senate and held all but one of their own governorships while flipping three (there are now 24 Democratic governors). While 121 of the 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election of Joe Biden were sent back to Congress (I wish I could say inexplicably), not a single election-denier running candidate for a position in charge of state elections actually won. Voters in all five states where an abortion-rights measure was on the ballot upheld a woman's right to choose. Alaska voters chose a Democrat over Sarah Palin for an open House seat. (In fact, they did so twice, first in a special election.) In key races across the country, Trump-endorsed candidates suffered loss after loss.

It was not a blue tsunami, but Moore was grateful for the blue wall that held back any semblance of a red wave. It's worth remembering that in November 2021, then-Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy predicted that Republicans would pick up more than 60 seats in the midterms. In the event, they gained just 10, and required 15 ballots over four days to elect McCarthy as speaker of the House, with the narrowest possible majority.

Who even came close to calling this outcome? The staff at FiveThirtyEight? Real Clear Politics? Other pollsters? No. Michael Moore. Moore notes that only a few outlets reported on his efforts at the time: Salon did, along with Joy Reid and Alex Witt at MSNBC. (I also published an article on Medium.)

Perhaps my favorite of Moore's comments came in an episode of his "Rumble With Michael Moore" podcast after the midterms when he noted that the media notion that Joe Biden's popularity would be a key factor was dead wrong. He observed that in today's highly partisan environment, a president's approval rating has become a long-outmoded measure. "You might as well say, 'Vaudeville! I love going to vaudeville!' You know, that ended. Things end. Approval ratings — they're irrelevant and often wrong."

The New York Times finally caught up with the impact of "GOP-inflected" polling pushed by right-wing media — which drove so much of its own coverage. Moore had already covered that (in "Truth #36").

The New York Times recently published a report about how and why pollsters and analysts again dropped the ball, mostly because of an increase of "GOP-inflected" polling amplified by aggregation and pushed by conservative media. Moore had already covered that (in "Truth #36"), posting a note from a polling insider about the many problems of poll aggregation, especially when it relies on overtly partisan polls. If economics is "the dismal science," should we start calling polling "the abysmal science"?

Moore's Substack series was an effort bolster the spirits of all those who felt downcast by the hyper-partisan GOP and the historic expectations for midterm elections. As he wrote, "pundits and the political hacks want you to believe the Democrats are going to lose. They want you demoralized, depressed, and fearful of The Return of Trump."

Unfortunately, it's not likely that most pundits aligned with corporate media will learn any lessons from being so wrong, or will change their behavior. They'll continue to focus on horse-race coverage rather than on candidates' policy proposals (or on whether they're telling the public the truth about any aspect of who they are).

Perhaps all citizens who love their country and the Constitution and who oppose treason will take a little time to hear to his suggestions about how to get a leg up on the sowers of chaos who cannot govern and don't even want to. As Moore points out, when it comes to people who don't live up to their oath of office, the pro-democracy tent is big:

All continued coup attempts will be met by the vast majority of this country — Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Greens, Libertarians, nonvoters, anarchists, meat eaters, vegans, idiots, brainiacs, Presbyterians, pipefitters, rappers, nurses, numbskulls, preachers, periodontists and everyone else — we will ALL stop you, peacefully but forcefully.

In each of the brief podcasts in "Blue Dots in a Red Sea," Moore asks us to carry on this work, providing examples of how to get involved, from creating your own group of interested citizens to attending and reporting on school board meetings to creating your own version of an online newspaper. He bases his suggestions on lessons learned when he ran for office as a young man and when, a couple of decades later, he found himself living in a Michigan county dominated by Republicans.

Because people took action to communicate and organize, Democrats don't feel as lonely in that county today. It can be done, and more quickly than you'd imagine. That's Michael Moore's message to all of us who feel trapped and frustrated in red states, cities, towns and counties.

The words of 2022 were "goblin mode," in the United Kingdom, and "gaslight," in the United States.

In these times of the right's determined distribution of disinformation, conspiracy theories and lazy thinking, those choices make perfect sense.

We are all now more than familiar with gaslighting, which dates back to the original 1940 film "Gaslight," (remade by MGM in 1944, starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman), in which a deceitful husband repeatedly lies to his wife about many things, including the gas lamps dimming in the lower part of the house as he secretly lights lamps in the attic, in an effort to shake her sanity.

A real-life example of gaslighting, the word of 2022 selected by the folks at the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, would be, for instance, Donald Trump insisting that he is a good businessman or that the 2020 election was stolen. When any of the scores of open traitors in Congress, like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Josh Hawley, refer to themselves as patriots, that would also be gaslighting. The claim in no way fits the reality, and it refutes what anyone of good faith can plainly see, that these people violated their oaths of office and should not be allowed to serve again at any level.

Nazi propagandists knew all about gaslighting, about how if you repeat an untruth over and over again, a surprisingly large percentage of people come to believe it, even in the face of contrary evidence. In recent years there's been no end to the GOP's efforts to gaslight the public, from Trump's ceaseless lies about voter fraud to his claim that all presidents walk away with classified documents to his habit of referring to himself as one of the greatest presidents of all time ("Better than Lincoln, better than Washington").

Earlier this year, I wrote about how Republicans have tried to gaslight us on their "originalist" view of the Constitution, on liberals as sexual deviants, on liberals as an oppressive "elite," on mass shootings in America being "unthinkable" and on how somebody or other (it's never clear who) is coming for you and all your stuff.

"Goblin mode" was new to me. As the Oxford English Dictionary has it, the 2022 winner describes behavior that is "unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations."

For some, the term can describe positive behavior, describing people who reject unnecessary societal norms, which many have done in the face of the pandemic. One could also say that many Republican leaders have been in goblin mode since their frat-boy days, or at least since the Age of Rush and Newt, when they were trained to despise members the opposing party and do absolutely everything to prevent government from functioning normally.

Let's try it in a sentence:

As president, Trump was in goblin mode from the first day he took office, when he watched television all morning in what he called "executive time" [spot the gaslighting?], to his determined effort to attack his own government and destroy all norms, all the way to his lazy, unconcerned response to the Department of Justice's attempts to retrieve stolen classified documents.

The disgraced, twice-impeached, document-stealing, insurrection-fomenting, perpetually lying former president has been in goblin mode since childhood, allegedly cheating to get into college; cheating on his wives, apparently even when they were expecting; harassing, groping and sexually assaulting women ("I don't even wait…"); and cheating competitors (not to mention taxpayers) while playing golf, a game based on personal honor.

But in our era of trolls (meaning those unhappy fellows who find deep satisfaction in annoying others, for example as the proprietor of Twitter), these words bubbling to the top make perfect sense. Because what the far right desires most is never again to have to present policy options — all that hard work of thinking things through and making compromises! — and just somehow "MAGA" a version of America that never existed or even a feudal state of play, where women and other serfs and peasants know their place and only the truly deserving people (who largely happen to be rich white Christian men) have a say in running a government devoted to keeping the masses down.

Think "Game of Thrones," with the dragons replaced by white nationalist cretins who now apparently are game to attack their own country's critical infrastructure and scientific advances like the COVID vaccines that are still saving lives.

Speaking of cretins, Elon Musk has repeatedly huffed and puffed and blown his ram's horn, inviting all exiled trolls back to Twitter so they can taunt and gaslight the public to their heart's content, while he himself, in hyper-goblin mode, repeatedly threatens the ever-shrinking staff of his own company.

Our twice-impeached, document-stealing, insurrection-fomenting former president is a master gaslighter, and has been in goblin mode since childhood.

Five conservative Catholics dominate the Supreme Court, a few of whom appear to definitely hold medieval views on personal freedom and "religious liberty." They gaslight the public by claiming not to be partisan hacks while being wined and dined by conservative groups. Both Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas are perpetually and gleefully in goblin mode, the former overturning Roe while quoting 17th-century English jurist Matthew Hale, who was happy to excuse marital rape and to put women to death for witchcraft, and the latter refusing to recuse himself from cases pertaining to Trump's attempted coup, which Thomas' wife worked diligently to foment.

Filmmaker, activist and all-around mensch Michael Moore may dress like he's in goblin mode, but is decidedly not. He correctly predicted there would be no red wave in the 2022 midterms and worked hard to convince the rest of us not to give up hope. He describes those five justices as "priests" in their robes handing down theocratic decisions. As Moore has put it, though the corporate media did its utmost to downplay this, one of the top reasons Republicans did not do nearly as well in the midterms as they hoped was pretty simple: "The right-wing Supreme Court issued a religious edict on June 24 reminding women they are second-class citizens."

In addition, Florida senator and infamous Medicare fraudster Rick Scott annoyed Mitch McConnell and others in the GOP by not gaslighting the public about Republican intentions. He did us all a favor by publishing his infamous 11-point plan to remake our democracy into a theocracy headed by religious zealots, one free of those endless "entitlements" of Medicare, food stamps and Social Security.

As it turned out, most Americans prefer living in a democratic republic that offers at least some semblance of a social safety net.

Armed with these two highly useful and relevant terms, "gaslighting" and "goblin mode," we can hope a majority of Americans will continue to see the endless nonsense coming from the right — especially from its abusive cult leader — in a way many on the right no longer can. As the people who run these high-profile dictionaries know, words matter.

In the annals of unheeded warnings about appeasing bullies, there's British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who literally cut a deal with Adolf Hitler and promised "peace in our time." Then we have toddler-man Donald Trump, with his endless hissy-fits about not being treated fairly and mob-speak threats about what a shame it would be if our nice democracy was to — well, was to run into a narcissistic, psychopathic compulsive liar. Somebody like him.

This article first appeared in Salon.

Trump was also impeached twice, let us note — and got off the hook both times.

With the recent revelation that Trump acolyte Roger Stone, a Republican dirty trickster clear back to the days of Richard Nixon — told his cronies, "Fuck the voting, let's get right to the violence," before the 2020 election had even happened — let alone any bullshit claims that it was stolen — we have yet another example of what happens when you give in to a bully. What happens? We've heard it a thousand times and more during the Trump era, so let's all say it together: He becomes emboldened.

Stone has long claimed credit for the faux-grassroots uprising against the hand recount of votes in Florida after the 2000 election, dubbed the Brooks Brothers riot because it was carried out by a bunch of frat-boy insurgent Republicans in polo shirts, who tried to intimidate election officials while chanting "Shut it down!" In memory of Hitler's 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, an attempted coup against the government of the Weimar Republic, we might well call that Miami event the Kegger Putsch.

As Chris Lehmann wrote recently in The Nation, the Kegger Putsch vividly refutes any claim that the Jan. 6 insurrection was some sort of unthinkable anomaly:

The precedent set by the post-election uprising in Miami-Dade County gives the lie to the common depiction of the failed Trumpian coup as an isolated and outlying event in the annals of right-wing protest. In reality, the "Brooks Brothers riot," staged amid the surreal, fiercely contested battle over the Florida vote, laid out the blueprint. Then, as in 2020, key legal and political strategists on the right sought to disrupt a clear procedural mandate to preserve the integrity of a vote count. The symbolic staging of the right-wing uprising conveyed the clear message that the votes of a white, upscale electorate were innately more American, legitimate, and potent than the more numerous non-white coalition that broke for the Democratic presidential ticket.

There's a salient difference between 1923 and 2000, not to mention 2021: Hitler was arrested a couple of days after the Beer Hall Putch and charged with treason. He even did time in prison (although that didn't stop him from rising to power nine years later). Roger Stone and his Izod-clad minions simply walked away from their shenanigans in Florida, which successfully altered the course of history — aided, as Lehmann notes, by three members of the Bush legal team at the time who now sit on the Supreme Court — and put George W. Bush in the White House.

Thus emboldened, Stone went from "Shut it down" to "Stop the steal" — a slogan he first tried out years before 2020 — and got away with it again. When you keep getting away with things, over and over again, you naturally get impatient with all the fussy preliminaries, like the actual voting. And it's human nature, in a perverse sort of way, to see just how far you can take things. "Fuck the voting. Let's get right to the violence." We must assume the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack has been listening.

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The director of "A Storm Foretold," the Danish documentary that clip comes from, was interviewed recently on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" and said Stone's remark was made in frustration, knowing that Trump was likely to lose the election. Stone has claimed that he was only joking, but his remarks about challenging all election results make it clear enough that he was serious about winning the election by any means necessary — starting with bluster, threat and well-placed judges.

What other bad actors have we issued a free pass, to the detriment of society or the world at large? Richard Nixon (whose face is tattooed on Roger Stone's back) got his pardon. Rush Limbaugh and Rupert Murdoch brought a level of propaganda and hate speech to America so shameless it might have made Joseph Goebbels blush. Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan have made enormous personal fortunes miseducating a generation of young male Americans about how to be a good citizen and a good man.

How about the 147 Republican members of Congress who voted against certifying the electoral votes of a free and fair election? Have literally any of them paid a price?

While one cannot count this, legally or perhaps morally, as "getting away with something," it's worth noting that Donald Trump himself reportedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination nearly 450 times in the New York civil case about his business practice of overstating (to lenders) or understating (to tax authorities) the value of his properties. Again, he took the Fifth over and over, during testimony in a civil case, where neither he nor anyone else was at risk of going to jail.

Justice seemed to catch up with Roger Stone in February 2020, when he was convicted of obstruction, witness-tampering and lying to Congress in its Russia probe and sentenced to three years in federal prison. Predictably, that justice was short-lived as Trump commuted his sentence that July and then, in December, granted him a full pardon, along with a number of other felons, including former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and Charles Kushner, father of Jared. Stone reportedly sought a pardon for his actions around the insurrection on Jan. 5 and 6, 2021, while he was delivering end-of-the-world speeches to the Trump faithful and hanging around the Willard hotel with members of the Oath Keepers as "bodyguards." All six Oath Keepers seen with Stone on those two days reportedly later took part in the Capitol insurrection.

How much more abuse from this bully do we have to take, before we're finally done appeasing him?

Why do people who attack the gender identities and romantic and sexual affiliations of others often seem so twisted up? I suppose history tells us that it pretty much goes without saying. But we need to speak plainly about it because we are all now hyper-aware of the serious damage that damaged people can do to others — and to society.

This article first appeared in Salon.

The Republican Party long ago slipped under the sheets with the religious right to become bedfellows in the culture wars, encouraging bigots, misogynists and Christian zealots to insist that others live by their morals (or lack thereof).

This bizarre-tent party of religious grifters, pussy grabbers, gun polishers, closeted men, angry incels, alleged rapists and take-girls-across-the-state-line Lotharios is evangelically intolerant of the personal business of others and determined to dictate whom you can love or marry, how you should come to terms with your gender identity and how much of your reproductive future you should control. These people believe they have the right to demand that you go through your entire pregnancy even if you have been raped or are the victim of incest, and they're not particularly concerned if you die fulfilling their will.

In a country with a maternal mortality rate that ranks last among all industrialized nations, these religious and political grifters have created anti-abortion statutes that make health care professionals hesitate to address dire childbirth situations and even delay urgent treatment because they need to consult with lawyers.

This hyper-focus on anything and everything sexual extends to the right's self-proclaimed tough guys, the seeming adults who so much enjoy playing dress-up. When five members of the Proud Boys were indicted on charges of seditious conspiracy for their role in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol, we were reminded in various news stories that members of their "fraternity" are told to masturbate no more than once "in a calendar month." (Is that part of the bylaws? Is there an actual calendar with titillating monthly photos of white guys carrying tiki torches, or manly images of Confederate heroes?)

Of that rule limiting self-pleasuring, Stephen Colbert quipped: "That's going to make those 20 years in prison seem pretty long. But I do understand why they are so angry." He went on to ponder, "I don't get once a month. I get none. That makes sense. But once a month?"

Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina claimed he was invited to orgies by other members of the House Republican caucus. And those claims, unlike all the false and outrageous things a certain Republican former president has said, were enough to get Cawthorn literally canceled and expelled from the GOP.

Look, if longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone — who, as we know, was present at the Willard hotel on Jan. 5, 2021, proudly being "protected" by those white-supremacist boys — considers himself a "trysexual" (because he says he's willing to try everything) or Cawthorn enjoys a bit of frat-boy-style cross-dressing while drinking with his bros, that's none of my business.

Which is exactly the point.

For all Tucker Carlson's bluster about masculinity (including his risible special "The End of Men" whose promo included a fair amount of plausibly-homoerotic imagery), a more accurate tagline for his Fox News show program might be a variation on Teddy Roosevelt's famous saying: Speak hysterically — and fret about carrying a tiny stick.

Among those most vocal about the supposed crisis of masculinity, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley's much-publicized scamper away from his own insurrectionist supporters inside the Capitol building on Jan. 6 wasn't much of a revelation, though it was objectively hilarious.

It bears repeating that creating fear about the "state of manhood" is a key move in the authoritarian playbook (and abstention from masturbation was, by the way, a Nazi rule.) As historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat noted in an essay last November for the Atlantic:

Illiberal political solutions tend to take hold when increased gender equity and emancipation spark anxieties about male authority and status. A conquest-without-consequences masculinity, posing as a "return to traditional values," tracks with authoritarianism's rise and parallels the discarding of the rule of law and accountability in politics.

These days, boys will adamantly be boys, and this means they don't expect to be held accountable. For anything. The more loutish among them long for the days when they could easily slide from responsibility for their actions. That's why many Republicans, including a distressingly large number of obedient Republican women, are willing to support men who face multiple allegations of sexual abuse, or who have been accused with domestic violence.

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Insecure young men are not being taught how to be better persons in their relationships with young women; they are being taught to hate by misogynistic grifters.

On the Trumpian right, flip a coin — heads is racism; tails is misogyny and homophobia. Heads they win, tails you lose.

Meanwhile, as Republicans rant about fantasy pedophiles and LGBTQ "groomers" and call others (and often each other) "cucks," school children and ordinary citizens are being cut down by young men with legally purchased assault-style weapons. Survivors get "thoughts and prayers"; families are left to figure out how to carry on after the lights of their lives have forever been extinguished.

Gun fetishes, closeted sexuality, talk of "pussy" and rape, sadistic name-calling and general hate-mongering, worship of power and that telling focus on "manliness" — anyone else feel like we're back in a really bad high school locker room? That stink isn't coming from healthy athletics.

I agree that there is a masculinity crisis in this country, but it is most obviously found among the cohort of Republican politicians and their supporters who have prostrated themselves before Donald Trump. I would add fathers who refuse to teach their sons about sexuality and healthy, nurturing relationships but are all too eager to teach them that their guns and their jobs should define who they are as men.

Boys and girls both desperately need our help. They need to feel safe at home and at school. They need to grow up in a reasonably clean environment. They need to learn from their parents and teachers to treat one another respectfully. They need to build a strong sense of community, and to know they can get an affordable education (and/or job training) and find a decent job at a living wage, with benefits. They should be able to find a comfortable and affordable place to live, and be able to start a family of their own, if such is their choice. They should be able to find affordable health care throughout their working lives and into retirement. All of that, in fact, should be considered the bare minimum, the starting point.

Furthermore, children and young adults need to be educated broadly, so they can find something more in life than a cycle of consumption, acquisition and constant work-related striving. They should feel psychologically safe to love who they choose to love. (Our younger daughter just introduced me to the sad phrase "compulsory heterosexuality," which I'd somehow missed but which makes sense in this patriarchal, still-puritanical country.)

But as the younger people in our society wait for adults to do positive things that may help them move forward in life, they are, by force, living in a country with more guns than people.

Does anyone genuinely believe that Republicans in Congress or the mean-spirited, small-minded Trumpians who have taken over so many state legislatures are even the slightest bit interested in elevating the lives of young people? Even so-called moderate Republicans don't care a whit about, say, the concept of a living wage.

So-called conservatives dehumanize liberals with horrifying and hateful epithets, calling them "cucks," cannibals, "groomers" and pedophiles — again, tellingly sexual insults — while leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the country, have a massive, far-reaching sex scandal to face up to.

In his seminal 1964 essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics — which famously begins, "American politics has often been an arena for angry minds" — Richard Hofstadter noted that sexual obsessions are frequently projected on one's political opponents, to build a case that they are inhuman or unacceptable:

[T]he sexual freedom often attributed to the enemy, his lack of moral inhibition, his possession of especially effective techniques for fulfilling his desires, give exponents of the paranoid style an opportunity to project and express unacknowledged aspects of their own psychological concerns.

We all knew mistreated or abused boys in school who felt they had to play "yes men" to the local bully, no matter how badly he treated them — or, more likely, because of how badly he treated them. I can easily imagine the young Lindsey Graham or Sean Hannity or Marco Rubio or Tucker Carlson or Kevin McCarthy — really, any of the spineless, fawning, unprincipled Republicans who failed to stand up to Trump at any point during his rise or reign, playing that part in their youth.

In the face of all the grim, twisted, hateful and self-hating moralism from the right, liberals and progressives must reclaim their mojo as celebrants of the beauty and joy of life, as Salon's Amanda Marcotte argued a few months ago. Masculinity and femininity need not be prisons or traps or destinies. Those supposed poles, and all points in between, are available to all of us as we go through life figuring out who we are. Isn't that wonderful?

Testimony before the House Jan. 6 committee has often been cringeworthy, primarily because what Donald Trump was actively trying to do — his steadfast intent, in the face of all evidence and most of the advice from the approximately sane people around him — is abundantly clear to anyone who has an open mind.

But it gets especially excruciating when we have to hear accounts of Trump getting all hissy and hurt, his tantrums turning to vindictiveness, like an immature, petulant high school student. (Most likely a ninth-grader with emotional problems.)

None of that behavior is surprising, because Donald John Trump has always shown everyone around him — and indeed everyone, period — precisely who he is, a shameless man-boy who lies and cheats to get ahead and takes pleasure in bullying others, all the while bleating about how others treat him unfairly because they accurately point out that he's a liar, cheat and bully.

He's a human Möbius strip of misdirection, misinformation and misappropriation of funds from his supporters.

We've always known that Trump was happy to encourage violence among his followers, so while it was shocking to hear about him reportedly throwing White House lunches and dinners against the wall or onto the floor, or about his henchmen's alleged efforts to influence witnesses, mob-style, it wasn't exactly surprising.

Everybody's talking about Cassidy Hutchinson's bombshell testimony — but let's go back to the Jan. 5 session when Trump tried to browbeat Mike Pence.

While everyone and their uncle is talking about former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson's bombshell testimony during the surprise hearing on June 28, let's not forget the session that focused on Trump's relationship with his fanboy vice president, whom we now know Trump was willing to see hanged in front of the Capitol by the armed mob he had summoned to Washington and whipped into a fury.

In meeting with Mike Pence and John Eastman — the attorney full of imaginative schemes who later on just wondered about that pardon — on Jan. 5, 2021, the eve of You Know What, Trump reportedly pressed the veep to do his bidding in his usual mature manner: "You can either go down in history as a patriot, or you can go down in history as a pussy." (We don't know whether any of the White House china wound up on the floor during this encounter.)

When Pence correctly responded that he had no constitutional authority to stop or reject the certification of the electoral votes, according to the account in "Peril," by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, Trump tried to appeal to some untapped adolescent side within the pious Hoosier, asking him: "But wouldn't it almost be cool to have that power?"

While it's a bit of a stretch to call Mike Pence a hero, his backbone had apparently been stiffened by conversations with former Vice President Dan Quayle and retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig (man of exceedingly slow answers), and he continued to resist. That was when Trump pulled out his big guns, threatening Pence with the horror of taking away his friendship:

When Pence did not budge, Trump turned on him.
"No, no, no! Trump shouted, according to the authors. "You don't understand, Mike. You can do this. I don't want to be your friend anymore if you don't do this."

One is reminded of the queen bee character played by Rachel McAdams in Tina Fey's spot-on 2004 film "Mean Girls." She wouldn't have been so pathetically direct about it, but manipulating others by leveraging her "friendship" was certainly how she rolled.

But that wasn't the final card pulled by Mean Girl Trump in the climactic Pence meeting. When the vice president refused to play along with Trump's plot to subvert the Constitution and undo the outcome of a legitimate election, Trump called on his public, via social media and speeches and anything else he could think of, to "tell on" Pence and ramp up the pressure for him to "do the right thing." What's more, he kept that up well after he had to know that Pence was in real physical danger at the Capitol.

People inside the White House, including the former president's daughter Ivanka, have testified that Trump phoned Pence on the morning of the insurrection and during a final heated conversation called him a "wimp" and a "pussy."

Trump's deepest fear, through all this, was that he might wind up being thought of as a loser. As reported by the New York Times, the day before Trump and his many co-conspirators — in the West Wing, in the "war room" at the Willard hotel and in the Capitol itself — kicked off the insurrection for real, he admitted as much to people around him:

The president has told several people privately that he would rather lose with people thinking it was stolen from him than that he simply lost, according to people familiar with his remarks.

That is so, so high school. And there it is again, the knowledge that what he was doing was based on a lie (in case "Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen" wasn't enough for you). Trump always planned to say the 2020 election was stolen if he didn't win. He started undermining the process in the eyes of his supporters back in the 2016 primaries and then when he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million.

As we have learned from the committee hearings, Trump also understood that his Big Lie about election fraud presented him another opportunity for grift. He reportedly brought in some $250 million from his supporters for a nonexistent election defense fund (which was supposed to investigate nonexistent election fraud), emailing his small-dollar donors dozens of times a day.

People of my generation are always hoping that members of the younger generation will step up and save us from ourselves. Cassidy Hutchinson, a well-spoken 25-year-old, did just that. It was remarkably brave of her to do the right thing, to tell the truth about what she saw and heard in the mob social club of the Trump White House. (It's also reasonable to ask what she thought she was doing there in the first place.)

The ultimate lesson of these hearings so far is clear: The former president of the United States still thinks it might be "cool" to destroy democracy, and if you don't want to go along with that he definitely won't be your friend anymore — and might just encourage his followers to string you up.

As Salon columnist and longtime White House correspondent Brian Karem noted recently, if our democracy is to survive, this dangerous mean girl must finally face the consequences of his actions. Seeing Trump and his enablers prosecuted would only be a first step toward our national recovery, but a vitally important one. It might make sure that future presidents don't emulate his example — and remind them that "being our friend" isn't actually part of the job.

When I moved to New York City in 1981, I first stayed at the YMCA, and every day I encountered street hustlers on 34^th Street, taking people's money with the shell game. You know how it goes: A pea or a little ball is placed under one of three cups and moved around rapidly; you are enticed to bet on where it ends up. (And after the first "lucky" guess, you are invariably wrong.)

I've been thinking about those shell games because of the endless, reverent talk of "textualism" and "originalism" by conservative, Federalist Society–approved justices on the Supreme Court.

It was Justice Antonin Scalia who first articulated a handy way to expand "gun rights" beyond any reasonable limits, and to render our Constitution as dead as any of the innumerable victims of American gun violence — in the process, going against the explicit wishes of some of the most prominent members of the founding generation, founders, including Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. In the 2008 Heller decision, which somehow blithely dispensed with the whole "well regulated Militia" thing, and in various of his writings, Scalia outlined the right-wing constitutional interpretation now known as "textualism" or "originalism."

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"Strict construction "— meaning an absolutely literal reading of the Constitution or of a statute — was supported by conservatives until it received too much criticism. That clenched-sphincter dodge was then replaced by "textualism" and later "originalism," both of which, more or less, allow a judge just a bit more interpretive leeway. Then there are the different kinds of originalism — one that seeks to divine the writer's original intent, and another that looks at original meaning, as supposedly understood by reasonable people at the time of the writing. Failing that, originalists, including Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who formerly clerked for Scalia, will detour into a "common-law Constitution" (or "living Constitution") and wander through English common law, historical documents and even favored philosophers until they find what they're looking for.

I don my tricorn hat and declare this "poppycock."

Historian Heather Cox Richardson has detailed, referring specifically to Barrett, how conservative justices have used this interpretive technique to limit the powers of the federal government and reverse the gains made since World War II in regulating business activities or and in expanding civil and women's rights:

The originalism of scholars like Barrett is an answer to the judges who, in the years after World War Two, interpreted the law to make American democracy live up to its principles, making all Americans equal before the law. With the New Deal in the 1930s, the Democrats under Franklin Delano Roosevelt had set out to level the economic playing field between the wealthy and ordinary Americans. They regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and promoted infrastructure.

And what about all of our nation's current problems, ones the founders could not possibly have anticipated? The simple algorithm for textualists and originalists appears to be: 1) If the founders didn't write explicitly about it, then we don't need to know about it, because the Founders were godlike and are still totally pertinent; 2) If the founders did write about it but were vague in their expression, we'll consult English common law or our fave-rave philosophers (e.g., Plato, Edmund Burke) for answers, because, well, everyone knows the founders were in a big hurry and often imbibed too much cider.

In other words, it's a rigged game in which you cherry-pick whatever quotes seem to support the decisions you are determined to make anyway. We all try to fight confirmation bias when we go searching for evidence in other people's writings. Even a journalist writing an opinion piece with a solid point of view needs, at least, to appear reasonable to the other side, to state facts clearly, to link to reputable sources and to outline or otherwise anticipate the likely objections.

So with that in mind: The argument made by conservatives for textualism and originalism is that they comply with the separation of powers: Only the legislative branch makes the law, and the judicial branch interprets it. Which would all be elegant and true in a fully functioning republic.

But Republicans have declared war, at least since the era of Ronald Reagan, on government itself, so making laws to address public needs has become anathema to those who want only to "starve the beast" or, in Grover Norquist's troubling and violent metaphor, "drown it in the bathtub" and thereby send power back to individual states. So here we are, with only one functioning political party, while the other is enthralled with nonexistent voter fraud and other wacko conspiracy theories, harboring a growing devotion to authoritarian leaders, and doing anything possible — including flouting public health rules — to "own the libs." And now that unreasonable minority has supermajority control of the highest court in the land.

Republicans steadfastly refuse to make laws that address issues of grave public concern — such as regulating gun ownership, for example — because they are deeply invested in proving that our form of government cannot or does not work. That perverse effort has been in play for so long now that Republicans reflexively try to cast themselves as the victims and make tragedies like mass shootings further alienate Americans from one another, insisting that nothing can be done because sowing that sense of helplessness and isolation far and wide yields short-term political benefits for them.

Remember the Obama signs that said "HOPE," which Republicans countered with "NOPE"? They meant it. They told us then that they were the party that stood for hopelessness.

As least as they're utilized now by emboldened right-wing judges, both textualism and originalism are merely august-sounding forms of judicial obstructionism or revanchism.

Despite the Heller ruling, any good-faith textualist reading of the Second Amendment would instantly reveal that the so-called right to bear arms depends on the continuing need for a well-regulated militia, an observation made by previous Supreme Court justices and other legal minds much more qualified than I am. But even a dope like me can read the plain meaning of the text: The second part of that 27-word statement is dependent on the first part. It's a conditional clause. If the first part is not true or no longer valid, the rest does not stand.

But, again, the so-called originalists will, from time to time, allow themselves to delve deeper and find their justifications wherever they can, in order to get that pea under the shell where they knew it would wind up from the beginning.

Even if you steadfastly don't want to believe that, then ask the question so many people have asked about the Buffalo shooter, the Uvalde shooter, the Tulsa shooter and the dozens or scores of others: Which well-regulated militia were they members of?

Scalia often wrote about the need for a "reasonable" interpretation of the Constitution, and that is exactly what has been abandoned, especially in his own on-the-fly remix of the Second Amendment.

The entire world sees it as it is, absurd and monstrous. If the United States is going to act as the "muscle" around the globe, we seriously need to get over our fake tough-guy fetish and our "exceptionalism" and learn from what works in other developed or even developing countries, where these kinds of mass shootings simply do not happen. The U.K. managed to quell gun violence after suffering tragedies, and now has a very low rate of homicide (0.04 per 100,000 people) relative to the U.S. (nearly 4 per 100,000). Australia and Ireland have done the same. Canada stands poised to ban assault-style weapons and limit ownership of handguns. Speaking of Heller and the "right" to own a handgun in the home, more than half the gun deaths in the U.S. result from suicide, because having a gun in the house makes suicide attempts far more likely to be lethal.

In this particular shell game, Americans lose more than pocket money — they lose many hard-won rights, environmental regulation and consumer protection, almost any action on the existential threat of climate change and their freedom to feel safe, for themselves and their loved ones, in public places.

In a 2018 New York Times op-ed, former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens urged post-Parkland protesters to do more than fight for gun regulation. He wrote that they should "seek more effective and more lasting reform" and work for a repeal of the Second Amendment. In his view, the amendment was originally intended only as a stopgap measure:

Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of that amendment, which provides that "a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Today that concern is a relic of the 18th century.

My wife and I got to see our daughters finish elementary school and move on to middle school. My wife worked at their elementary school, and made lovely videos to commemorate those graduations to the next level. It breaks our hearts that the parents of all the children slain in the name of preposterous policies allowing for easy access to guns and assault weapons — or, for that matter, the parents who have lost a child to suicide made more efficient by a gun in the house — will never experience the joys and pains of seeing their kids grow up and become amazing adult versions of the beautiful children they once were.

But there are more guns to sell, more "patriotic" lobbyists trying to make a buck, more "pro-life" politicians to bribe, and a population that needs to be constantly reminded that government cannot work. (Especially when the Biden administration, in numerous ways, is proving that it can. Even Fox News admits to some positives.)

At the moment, the Supreme Court looks primed to strike down an eminently reasonable, century-old law in New York that regulates who can carry a handgun in public. So much for all the talk about being reasonable and including notions of fairness and good policy in decisions. Or even precedent — a once-cherished concept, now tossed to the wind.

They want you to listen up when you are told that, after the prayers, we will move on from this tragedy.

As gun fanatics continue to make increasingly absurd and often revealing arguments about who or what is to blame for the endless slaughter of their fellow Americans, of even schoolchildren, people of good faith in this country need to do everything we can to quell the gun violence. Public health campaigns are important, as are "red-flag" laws and regulations of semiautomatic weapons. But ultimately, Justice Stevens' solution will probably be necessary: The Second Amendment has to go.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a member of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, recently tweeted: "We now have evidence to support the story of the worst presidential political offense against the Union in American history."

OK, good. Bring it. Please.

In terms of holding onto power, this may still be a country for old men, but it should be no country for insurrectionists. The committee plans to present its case to the American people at last, with at least eight public hearings, starting on June 9.

More than 800 citizens (many also full-time denizens of the Confederacy and QAnon) have been arrested for their actions that day at the Capitol, and about 250 have pleaded guilty so far. The FBI has video and photos of other suspects, many of which are so clear one wonders how it can be that they have not yet been identified. But there are other suspects — far more culpable for what occurred that day — and we can see them walking in and out of Congress every day.

The highly placed "public servants" who instigated the insurrection — the Insurrection Elite, as it were — have been allowed to slide so far, and keep on defending the deadly attack or obfuscating what happened. Republican leaders first claimed that it might be a "false flag" operation, in which members of some imaginary anti-fascist group dressed down as Trump supporters; then a GOP congressman from Georgia suggested that the attack wasn't really so bad, but more like "a normal tourist visit." After that, some gleefully claimed that the whole thing was Nancy Pelosi's or President Biden's fault.

Those who actually instigated the insurrection have been allowed to slide so far, and keep on defending the attack or lying about it.

The most popular guy on Fox News has quipped that the day when the president of the United States and members of his cult nearly succeeded in a violent subversion of the peaceful transition of power "barely rates as a footnote" in history.

Was someone talking about the "elite" and their privilege? Here, their confidence about getting away with anything and everything is so great that they blithely change the narrative of things we all saw with our own eyes.

Nearly a year and a half after 140 Capitol and Metropolitan police were injured, some grievously, by the stun guns, chemical sprays, clubs, batons, poles, sharpened shafts and other makeshift weaponry brought by Trump followers — who engaged in a kind of hand-to-hand combat likened by police to "a medieval battle" — the public is learning how planned out the day really was, and how duplicitous and shameless the Republican leadership is.

The Jan. 6 committee has done an exhaustive study of the events of the day and the planning that led up to it. In a lengthy, rambling speech to his crowd of supporters on the Ellipse that day, Trump insisted they must "stop the steal," claimed he had won by a landslide, said that many Republicans were weak, and told the crowd they should march to the Capitol and "fight like hell" or else they would not have a country anymore. Of course he skipped the march himself and repaired to the White House to gleefully watch on television as they rampaged at the Capitol. During the siege, Republican members of Congress, including Kevin McCarthy, along with Fox News personalities and his own family members were calling and texting Trump, begging him to call things off. (We don't know who Trump spoke with for most of that day because there is a gap of more than seven hours in the official White House phone logs.)

Beyond that clear example of hiding or destroying evidence, indulge me in a list of the things that most stand out:

• Trump had been setting up his Big Lie for months before the election, saying at rallies that if he lost it could only be because of voter fraud. He did the same thing before the election in 2016, and even when he squeaked out an Electoral College victory then (losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million), he complained, with no evidence, about "voter fraud."
• After the 2020 election, Trump told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" him 11,780 votes, and then started suggesting various things he had heard "that may or may not be true" about ballots being destroyed in various ways. (It's worth listening to that again, if only to be reminded how pathetic it was and how much pressure he put on Raffensperger.)
• Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani repeatedly cut a ludicrous figure — even without that press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia — as he endlessly claimed he had evidence of voter fraud but declined to offer any of it in court, where there happen to be rules against making things up.
• Nothing came of any of the recounts in any of the disputed states — including the "audit" performed by the so-called Cyber Ninjas, hired by the Republican-led state Senate in Arizona to audit the votes in Maricopa County. That audit actually found more votes for Biden but kept the Republican base roiled up about voter fraud for months on end, which was the entire point. Then the company went belly-up rather than turn over their records to officials.
• The only instances of voter fraud uncovered in the past year or so were by Republicans, including Trump's former chief of staff Mark Meadows, who lives and votes in Virginia but also registered to vote in North Carolina, at a remote rural trailer he has probably never visited.
• Speaking of Meadows, the 2,319 text messages he turned over to the Jan. 6 committee were so revealing, historian Heather Cox Richardson wondered what could possibly be in the 1,000-some other messages he has fought to withhold.
• Former national security adviser Michael Flynn, lawyer John Eastman, Giuliani, and many others were concocting a strategy to keep Trump in office and working the phones in their "war room" on Jan. 5 at the Willard Hotel. Longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone was also there, "protected" by a group of Oath Keepers.
• Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, raised money for, and attended, the "Stop the Steal" rally. She also sent numerous emails to Meadows begging him to do whatever was necessary to keep Trump in office. (Here's a quick and illuminating history by Greg Olear of that Washington power couple.)
• MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, an endless font of conspiracy theory, was allowed access to the Trump White House. In a mildly sensible age, that fact alone would be damning enough to keep Trump from holding any position of responsibility in the future.
• As we now know, both Mitch McConnell, at the time Senate majority leader, and Kevin McCarthy, House minority leader, recognized what Trump had done and said so in the moment. To his credit, McConnell did so in public (later, characteristically, retreating into serving himself and his party), while McCarthy privately said he would tell Trump to resign — and then did not. And then lied about it.
• Marjorie Taylor Greene can't remember a gosh-darned thing. If the republic survives, perhaps that will be a sing-song phrase that school children will learn. In any case, someone with that level of memory loss would appear unfit for public office.

Why are Josh Hawley, Marjorie Taylor Greene and their fellow conspirators still allowed anywhere near the Capitol? It boggles the mind.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., that anti-elitist champion of the common man (and graduate of Stanford and Yale Law School) not only betrayed his country but betrayed the high emotions of his fellow conspirators on Jan. 6, when he couldn't help himself from raising his fist in solidarity with the roiling mob. That he and multiple GOP members of Congress who appear to have engaged in planning to stop the certification of electoral votes are still allowed anywhere near the Capitol boggles the mind.

Near the end of Joel and Ethan Coen's 2007 Academy Award­–winning film "No Country for Old Men," adapted from the novel by Cormac McCarthy, two older lawmen are ruminating about how the culture — and criminals — have changed. Speaking of the relentless killer-for-hire Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), El Paso sheriff Roscoe Giddens (Rodger Boyce), shakes his head and says to Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones): "Strolls right back into a crime scene. Who would do such a thing? How do you defend against it?"

It appears to many of us that quite a few insurrectionists walked right back into the scene of the crime, the U.S Capitol, or "the People's House," as they like to call it — as if they had some special claim on it and could do whatever they like with it — and have been lying and stonewalling about their roles ever since. One hundred and forty-seven Republicans voted against certifying the electoral votes, even after the riot by Trump's supporters, after chaos had come to the Capitol and people had died. Why persist at that point? Well, because some of them were in on the plan and still thought it might succeed. Some were apparently asking for presidential pardons in real time.

The People's House is not theirs to destroy. And the people who live in my house want any traitor to this country out of office and banned from even running for dogcatcher. The third section of the 14th Amendment may have been written with members of the Confederacy in mind, to disqualify them from holding office, but who doesn't see that we have a new Confederacy standing tall and defiant in front of us? It wasn't for nothing that the rest of us had to suffer seeing the Confederate flag carried into the Capitol.

Thinking of another scene from the film, it could be that I'm just an old man who doesn't know what's coming. But I think I see it clearly — and the mainstream press is finally seeing it, too. And it won't be the United States of America anymore — my country, and presumably yours — if the small but relentless gang of white nationalists and religious right zealots that Trumpism let loose prevails in the end.

Why do I consider Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, the wealthiest person in the U.S. Senate, so thoroughly dreadful? Is it his background in defrauding the American taxpayer? His penchant for spreading disinformation? His smarmy habit of getting all Jesus-y, even in the face of a public health crisis?

It was indeed very Christian of Scott to release his new plan to "save" America — but I don't mean that as praise. At least he's honest: The gentleman from the Sunshine State openly advocates for dismantling the federal government, undoing all federal laws and regulations and effectively transforming our democracy into a white male Christian theocracy.

OK, not in so many words, but that's the idea. For some reason Scott dispensed with a hyphen in the title of his "11 Point Plan to Rescue America" — is punctuation "woke" now? It's so hard to keep up — which might better be described as a Christian-right reboot of the Ten Commandments (plus one).

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Before we discuss Scott's plan to save the country, it's worth mentioning that as founder of Columbia Healthcare and then CEO of the merged hospital corporations Columbia/HCA, Scott was in charge in 1997 when the company was fined $1.7 billion for overbilling and defrauding Medicare and Medicaid, at the time the largest health care fraud in U.S. history. He was forced to resign and said he took "responsibility" for the fraud, said responsibility apparently requiring him to invoke the Fifth Amendment some 75 times while under oath.

Scott kept his chin up, however, and walked away with a huge financial package, including some $300 million in stock. An earlier excursion in business at Solantic, a Florida chain of walk-in urgent care clinics, resulted in several lawsuits around discriminatory hiring practices. Randy Schultz, in an opinion piece for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, wrote that Scott "built his political career with a fortune based on fraud.

Florida voters, in their wisdom, elected this guy twice as governor and then sent him to the Senate in 2018. Lately he's been given to calling Democrats "the enemy within," and now he wants to tell us how the country can be "saved."

Salon's Heather Digby Parton thinks that Democrats should shine as much light as possible on Scott's plan, since it is "batshit lunacy" yet has been embraced by many Republicans. As she recently put it:

Much of it is the usual right-wing cant about work and family and law and order. But there is some stuff in this thing that will make for some beautiful ads if the Democrats can find it in themselves to get off the defensive and tell the American people about it.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was apparently horrified that Scott's plan was published (remember, the Republican Party refused to have platform for the 2020 presidential campaign), but Scott himself fearlessly and correctly observes that "Americans deserve to know what we will do when given the chance to govern."

One might note here that Republicans always have a chance to govern — every single day — by choosing to work with members of the other party to find suitable compromises, rather than by employing scorched-earth tactics against their "enemies"— but, you know, whatever The oddly cherubic yet spiteful Newt Gingrich — who long ago took Rush Limbaugh's admonition to treat the opposition as your enemy and ran with it — is smiling somewhere in the opulence that negative life work too often brings. He very much likes the plan.

I'm tempted to winnow these down to a few highlights, the way comedian George Carlin famously did with the Ten Commandments, which he got down to just two (along with a third he added himself).

On Scott's Point 1, "Education": I have no problem with the Pledge of Allegiance in schools, even if it's a bit odd, given their insurrectionist bent and love for foreign despots, for Trumpists to demand that children prove their loyalty to the country. Let's compromise: We'll leave in the mention of God, which was added to the pledge in 1954 in an attempt to thwart "godless communism," and then we outlaw the use of the U.S. flag as an advertising vehicle, flying enormously over used-car lots and the like. To avoid making the flag meaningless (if not noxious) with overuse, let's fly it only over public buildings, like the public schools you are trying to destroy with your "classical" charter schools, and, as desired, on private residences.

Scott's Point 7, "Fair Fraud-Free Elections," is just out-and-out projection. With these guys, every accusation is an admission (which is deeply troubling when it comes to their recent focus on pedophilia). In this Toddler Nation of ours, even senators — men and women who are said to cool the passions of House members — are given to the schoolyard taunt: "No, you!" One thinks of candidate Trump's "No puppet, no puppet! You're the puppet!" when Hillary Clinton said that if he were elected, he'd be cavorting at the end of Vladimir Putin's strings. We know how that worked out.

Scott's Point 10, "Religious Liberty and Big Tech," clearly has a special resonance for the evangelical component of his audience. "Americans will be free to welcome God into all aspects of our lives" is in boldface type, and OK, that appears reasonable enough. As always, the devil is in the detail. Scott goes on to reveal that what he means by "all aspects" is that the personal religious beliefs of people like him should be pushed into public policies that affect all of us, which is a form of government known as theocracy. What he means, but does not quite say, is that certain Americans will be free to welcome their idea of God into all aspects of other Americans' lives.

Last, but perhaps not best, comes Point 11, "America First," where Scott informs us, "We are Americans, not globalists." Yeah, OK — but so what? Who says that being American and having a global consciousness are incompatible? Most of us can walk and chew gum at the same time, and the world is proving to be a surprisingly small place.

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Enough with my sniping. (Scott cleverly anticipates how his plan will be mocked by "the wokes.") If you read it for yourself, be sure to delve into the details. No matter what Mitch McConnell says, this appears to be an accurate reflection of what the GOP wants to do if or when they take full control in Washington again: Dismantle the federal government and its "deep state" of experts; have a do-over on all federal laws and regulations (someone seems to be still smarting from that federal charge of fraud); force all Americans to pay taxes, even the poor (so they have "skin in the game"); end all public discussion of race and gender; and force schoolchildren to pledge their allegiance to a nation whose history has been whitewashed and sanitized by right-wing Christians.

In an opinion piece in the Orlando Weekly, Jeffrey C. Billman notes that the plan is "Scott's attempt to marry the anti-tax, pro-austerity wing [of the GOP] with Trump's populist, authoritarian wing." Billman writes that the plan is largely a familiar litany of grievances from white male conservatives who are worried about losing their leg-up in society:

From start to finish, this is an authoritarian document dressed up in the language of freedom. Like all variants of right-wing populism, it focuses the grievances of its target demo (a loss of cultural primacy) at scapegoats (the wokes).

I will mention again that Scott, supposedly a devout Christian, has taken to calling his political opponents the enemy, which, it hardly needs to be pointed out, is a precursor to violence and even genocide. When it comes to a holy war against the secular, socialistic, "woke" enemies of America, I guess all bets are off. It's disturbingly similar to the language of Putin and his official mouthpieces in describing Ukrainians and Russian dissenters as "scum" and "traitors," likening them to gnats that must be spat out of one's mouth.

In Carlin's famous Ten Commandments routine, he holds off a while from commenting on the Fifth Commandment. Those who call themselves religious, he observes, have never had that much of a problem with murder: "More people have been killed in the name of God than for any other reason….The more devout they are, the more they see murder as being negotiable."

Scott's Point 10, which attempts to pit religious liberty against the "wokeness" of big tech, ends with an implicit threat of violence: "Remember – the Second Amendment was established in order to protect the freedoms guaranteed in the First Amendment."

That's like killing two birds with one stone tablet: Scott is willing to encourage violence against his political opponents while simultaneously grossly misrepresenting the meaning of the first two amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

Honestly, we owe Scott a debt of thanks for setting this out in plain type. Let me try to repay that with my own 11-point plan to save America, in a spirit of give-and-take and constructive debate, which is sometimes necessary even with one's "enemies":

1. In a democracy, you should not lie or spread misinformation — or trust anyone who does. Democracy depends on reality-based information and the best reporting of what is known right now. Let's make it illegal for any corporate entity to willfully disseminate false information.
2. You should not treat people who are different from you — in race, color, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation or anything else — as second-class citizens. America's not-so-secret strength has always been in its diversity.
3. Your religious freedom is not a license to harass others with your personal beliefs. Your faith is no doubt a strength for you; hold it close and know that many of us envy the solace you derive from it. But keep your faith out of our bodies, our relationships, our libraries and our critical scientific research. As historian Garry Wills put it, the separation of church and state is the one unique, genius thing in our Constitution.
4. You likely have your hands full with your own love life. Don't pass judgment on the consenting activities of other adults. Get your business out of everyone else's business (see #3). In a world reeling with hate, why would anyone attack love?
5. You should not ban books (unless you want to see them on the bestseller list). You say you believe in the free market and in free speech. Stop being outrageous flaming hypocrites on this stuff.
6. You should be careful in picking your populist pals. The "elite" are not always who you think they are. Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton all went to Ivy League schools, no matter what dialect they affect when they sidle up to you to talk self-serving nonsense.
7. Your culture wars are an attempt to divide and distract Americans. They are pushed down your throats by unscrupulous politicians and true enemies of America, like Vladimir Putin and his lapdog Donald Trump. They should be ignored.
8. Your freedom of speech is not under attack. You can say pretty much anything you want, at home as well as in the public square. But other people have every right to respond, and even to challenge what you say. Threatening the lives of election administrators, public health officials or school board members, however, is a crime, and goes way beyond what you call "cancel culture." Banning novels and the teaching of real history makes it seem like you are canceling culture for real.
9. You should not elect obvious grifters to public office. America does best when it is not led by sociopaths and criminals.
10. You should bear in mind that we need each other. When Americans come together in mutual effort — supporting each other after natural disasters, or coming to the aid of Ukraine — it's a beautiful, powerful thing. We have far more in common than we are led to believe.
11. We all need to get out more often — to walk in nature, see a play, hear some music and, most of all, stop thinking about our political disagreements. We could all stand to gain some perspective on the world and each other. What Abraham Lincoln said at Gettysburg about the "unfinished work" of American democracy will always be true. To continue that work, we could use a break. People of good faith are not relentless, but we need to show endurance against the unceasing attack on democracy.

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White House reporters laugh at Peter Doocy after Jen Psaki reminds him he's not a doctorwww.youtube.com

With Donald Trump's Big Lie about the 2020 election, his followers' insurrection at the Capitol and the ongoing attacks on voting rights in GOP-controlled states across the country, most people should now recognize that our democracy is in real peril. The undoing of the U.S. democracy is being carried out slowly, in stages, to wear down opponents and normalize what would otherwise be outrageous.

According to the detailed reporting of the late Village Voice journalist Wayne Barrett, this has been the modus operandi of Donald Trump from the beginning of his public career, after he was born on third base and then began whining that the public was not applauding his mighty triple — to obfuscate, obstruct, lie, manipulate, cajole, gaslight, demand loyalty, sue and repeat, ad nauseam, to wear down those trying to expose his misdeeds. He learned most of his underhanded tricks from his father, Fred, and his mentor, the lovely Roy Cohn.

We find ourselves living in a country where the traditions of political discourse were systematically destroyed, over a number of decades, by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, who taught Republicans to always be aggressively aggrieved and to treat political opponents as enemies; where the norms of presidential behavior were turned on their head during Trump's years in the White House; where Republicans in Congress now compete with each other to see who can reach the next new low; and where a far-right media empire profits most when it spews out disinformation and trades in conspiracy theories.

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And all this despicable behavior — from demonizing political opponents to praising white supremacists to passing laws that hinder voting rights and even harm public health — is being done in the name of making America "great again."

In such a hostile environment, how can a democracy best defend itself? Benjamin Franklin famously remarked, when questioned by Elizabeth Willing Powel of Philadelphia about the form of government that had been devised, that we had "a republic, if you can keep it." (We can speculate as to whether Powel, a well-connected and politically astute upper-class woman, wondered at that remark, given that she didn't have the right to vote.)

Matters are, of course, more complicated now. We live in an extremely large republic with a diverse population, and our government has long faced serious issues with representation. Because every state, despite its population, gets two senators, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming (with a collective total population of about 2 million) have triple the clout of New York (20 million) or California (39 million). The 50 Democratic senators now represent 41.5 million more people than the 50 Republican senators. If population trends continue, by 2040 it is estimated that 70% of Americans will be represented by only 30 senators, while the other 30% will be represented by 70 senators.

Even in the House of Representatives, where population is supposed to count for fair representation, congressional districts are heavily gerrymandered to ensure one party has more representatives in the House and at the state level than they otherwise would. In the past couple of decades, the Electoral College has allowed Republicans to win the White House twice (Gore v. Bush in 2000 and Clinton v. Trump in 2016) when they've lost the popular vote.

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Still, a broken democracy might be fixed. A slide into theocracy or autocracy would mark the end of the American experiment of freedom of speech — especially press freedom — separation of church and state and the rule of law. Grifters and oligarchs would have free play.

RELATED: Can American democracy escape the doom loop? So far, the signs are not promising

We should all sound warnings about it, but this creates an apparent dilemma: Does it help that more people are speaking about it, or does having this issue in the news so often simply normalize the idea, giving sustenance to those who plan to subvert it? The warnings have been crystal clear:

• Many warned about Trump's thuggish, autocratic tendencies from the beginning of his run for the Republican nomination in 2015, after he kicked off his campaign by saying of Mexican immigrants "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."
• Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was concerned enough by anti-democratic movements she saw around the world, and growing signs of it at home, to publish "Fascism: A Warning" in 2018 and to speak both knowledgeably and passionately about it in interviews.
• All 10 living former defense secretaries warned in an op-ed in January 2021 about the possibility of Trump using the military to overturn the fairly decided election. We have lately learned that military leaders' concerns about Trump's plans for the National Guard, which he allegedly wanted to use to protect Trump supporters from imaginary counter-protesters, may have caused them to be deployed so late on Jan. 6.
• Retired generals have recently warned of the possibility of a civil war in 2024, with the military splitting along ideological lines.
• Prominent political scientists and journalists have warned about the characteristics of autocratic and fascist movements (e.g., make your political opponents the enemy, denigrate the free press) for years now.
• Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist and the former president's niece, wrote a book about his malignant narcissism and continues to warn the country about what he is capable of and what he represents.
• I don't know what's happening in your town, but our favorite local radio guy here in St. Louis is counting down on his podcast the number of days remaining for democracy in America "as we have known it."

And of course everyone in the country saw with their own eyes the "Stop the Steal" protest that was followed by the brutal, deadly, feces-smeared assault on the Capitol. Those people had just heard their president exhort them for more than an hour with clear directives: "We want to go back, and we want to get this right, because we're going to have somebody in there that should not be in there and our country will be destroyed, and we're not going to stand for that."

Trump told them to go to the Capitol to "fight like hell, and if you don't fight like hell you won't have a country anymore." We all knew he was unwilling to call the attack off, and now the House committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 wants records of his calls to allies at the so-called war room at the Willard Hotel the day before.

RELATED: Jan. 6 committee to investigate Trump's calls to allies at Willard Hotel before Capitol riot

The rest of us had already heard Trump pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" him the 11,780 votes he needed to prevail in that state.

Citizens of good faith naturally wonder: How much does it take to get charged with tampering with an election? Are certain crimes no longer crimes if you are white and wealthy, and you commit them brazenly?

Sometimes it seems like the kid's game of Chutes and Ladders: People who stormed the Capitol are prosecuted, pulling us closer to a seeming level of justice and a discouragement of continued acts of insurrection, but then Kyle Rittenhouse gets a standing ovation at a right-wing conference, and we find ourselves sliding down again, back to where we began. In the meantime, the true instigators — those who planned and funded and exhorted the insurrection — slip off the hook, time and again, pointing a toddler's finger back at those who charge them with anti-democratic actions, stamping their feet and saying, "No, you are the insurrectionists."

In this the bully-is-really-the-one-getting-bullied world (which apparently now has a name), the coup took place on election day and the tyrant is Joe Biden. Oh, and Democrats are pedophiles who hate their country and are trying to destroy it, and they must be stopped—which is not only psychological projection, as we are all tired of pointing out, but also quite politically useful in creating the sub-human enemy one needs to justify the use of violence.

Thanks again, Rush. Thanks, Newt.

RELATED: The conservative urge to be a victim: Why right-wing victimhood is spreading so fast

So, what can one do with this? How does one warn people about the distinct possibility of the United States becoming a Putin-like dictatorship when Trump's fans seemingly adore Putin (remember "I'd rather be a Russian than a Democrat" T-shirts during the Obama years?), talk up autocrats like Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán and are themselves normalizing the idea of a violent insurrection on Trump's behalf?

As Salon columnist Amanda Marcotte noted in a recent piece about how Fox News hosts follow the Trumpian method of coupling shamelessness and belligerence to spew out disinformation, it is all about flooding the information zone, wearing opponents down, and further indoctrinating their cult-like following:

In a sense, it's not even really lying. Lying is an attempt to deceive. Gaslighting, however, does not try to convince anyone of anything, except their own powerlessness. Trump's incessant insistence that the election was "stolen" convinces no one. But, by grinding at it day and night, Trump has indoctrinated his followers into parroting the lie, not because they believe it, but as a means to demonstrate loyalty.

Trump's fans are now so tribal, and so deeply steeped in his demagoguery about Democrats and "elites" and experts in general being the enemy, that they even boo him if he strays from the message — in admitting that he got the vaccine and then the booster — in a belated attempt to promote public health or, more likely, try to seize personal glory from the vaccines.

With despotic leaders working together despite competing ideologies, as Anne Applebaum wrote recently in the Atlantic, and the far right apparently now collaborating to create a global think tank to push its oligarchic or autocratic ideology in Steve Bannon style, how should democracies respond?

In the first Summit for Democracy, held in early December 2021, President Biden laid out three key areas for action: strengthening democracy and defending against authoritarianism, fighting corruption and promoting respect for human rights. Fighting corruption must of course begin at home, not only by stopping the money-laundering operations of oligarchs but by getting money out of our own politics.

To get back to my original question: Are our constant warnings about the rise of autocracy and fascism only serving to normalize it, in effect to talk it into being? I think the question hardly matters. More than 70% of Republicans already believe that democracy in this country is facing a "major threat" — not because of the Big Lie about the election and the insurrection, but because they've swallowed Trump's lies about the election. Only 35% of Democrats, on the other hand, feel democracy is facing such a threat. A Harvard poll of voters aged 18 to 29 shows that a majority (52%) feel our democracy is in trouble or failing.

You're not crying wolf if the wolves are all around you — and even roaming the floor of Congress.

Will our democracy become a pretend one, backsliding into "competitive authoritarianism"? As Christopher Sabatini and Ryan C. Berg wrote in Foreign Policy last February, the autocrats have a playbook; those who want to keep their democracies — as imperfect as they may currently be — need a playbook too. We need to learn from other countries where democracy has been challenged, and we need to let the wannabe dictators know that we see their slow-motion coup game and are ready to fight it — by exposing it to the light of day, by strengthening the rule of law and by insisting on the right to vote and then exercising it.

Are we talking about this too much? No; that's not possible.

From the left, we often hear that we really don't have a true democracy. That is undoubtedly true: It is a republic, and one that is dangerously unfair in terms of representation, for reasons noted above. How can the rights of citizens be protected by a Congress that continues to operate through bribery? Still, the underlying message of such analyses may be that such a "democracy" is not worth saving. Such arguments end up being uncomfortably akin to the "whataboutisms" perfected by dictators like Putin.

RELATED: Democracy vs. fascism: What do those words mean — and do they describe this moment?

As much as we may critique the democratic system in the United States for not living up to its name, or the Democratic Party for not getting enough done, what we now face is dire. Trump himself may not precisely fit the "classic" definition of a fascist leader — we can quibble about that around the edges — but he's close enough for many experts. More to the point, he is a nonstop liar, a conman and a sociopath. He doesn't care about his own followers, only about himself. No such person should be in a leadership position at any level.

Democrats are at least trying to save our democracy by proving it can works for the average person. Trumpists? To paraphrase the presidential candidate who went on to become the first twice-impeached president, in one White House term: They're bringing ultra-nationalism, they're bringing white supremacy, they're spreading COVID, but we assume some of them are good people. Those "good people," if they still exist, need to step back from the brink and help us save our democracy.

Everyone has a pet theory or two about what has gone wrong in America. And by America I of course mean the United States of, discounting the other 34 countries of the Americas — which speaks to our exceptional self-centeredness, which might in fact be seen as one of the overarching reasons why the country has gone to pot. Not only do we harbor a fervent belief that we have nothing to learn from others, we barely comprehend that they exist.

With the Republican Party's platform morphing from obstruction to fascism (e.g., CPAC is planning a spring fling in authoritarian Hungary), citizens losing their minds over wearing masks and talking up anything but a safe and free vaccine in a deadly pandemic that has taken more American lives than were lost in our Civil War (in an era before doctors could do much more than use a saw), and school board members facing violent threats for supporting basic inclusion and diversity efforts in public schools — for many, the concept of American exceptionalism has been turned on its head.

One could easily contend, as was argued back in the day, that the country "went south" (literally) when it was first truly established because too much had to be given to the South to get the Constitution ratified. We are still suffering from those compromises, and still making them, to this day. America's hidden wound, as writer Wendell Berry termed it, our collective unwillingness to fully acknowledge our history of slavery, is now producing the bad-faith arguments about critical race theory being taught in public schools and the banning of books that address the history of slavery in this country. This wound may prove mortal.

In what I wish were a side note, I will mention the insightful — and unfortunately highly pertinent to our era — article entitled "Who Goes Nazi?" by Dorothy Thompson, published Harper's Magazine in 1941. If you've not read it, read it now, as if we were up against it. Because we are.

My few pet theories cannot compete with the increasingly bizarre QAnon-ish fantasies on the right, of which the less said the better. (I won't bother to link to anything. Anyway, as we know all too well now: Do your own research!)

While there is still time, while we enjoy what could be the final days of this little experiment in semi-representational democracy, let me put a few lesser theories forward, just for the record. Lesser theories, one might say, from my admittedly lesser mind.

Was it the frat boys?

The serious lack of seriousness and misogyny inculcated by life in a typical fraternity during a young man's college career has bled into most of our institutions, including Congress. The problem with many former frat boys is that they are never really former frat boys. Then, they were young and strong and could chug a beer without so much as a thought. Not thinking about things was a badge of honor. They look back on those years as defining and suffer at least a certain level of arrested development. In their underdeveloped minds, they are still gleefully cheating on exams, bragging about their sexual prowess, regularly using words like "pussy" and making the pledges' lives a living terror. If you want to comprehend how dangerous they can be if they stumble into public service roles later in life, in the previous sentence just swap out pledges and swap in citizens. You're done, pledge. Fetch me a beer.

I'm rather unhappily compelled to note that the current Congress has many members, both Democrat and Republican, a number of whom I admire, who went Greek in their college days. All I can say is that when I was pledge-class president in a fraternity, trying to get a group of a dozen pledges through a mind-bendingly idiotic and semi-dangerous Hell Week (only one guy had to be taken to the hospital), I determined that I would not be returning the next year and quietly let that be known to the active members. The upperclassmen brought down four or five of the more sober, sensible members to try to talk me out of it. So I'm assuming there are some sensible members who have not engaged in "the stupidification of the Right" as even Bret Stephens, a conservative voice at the New York Times, calls it. But for the most part, I think the frat-boy theory must stand, much as the endless influx of so-called Oxbridge graduates apparently leads to group dope-think within the Westminster Parliament. So, yes, go on and get me that beer. Speaking of which …

Perhaps it was light beer

I contend that the remarkable success of light beer around the era of Ronald Reagan has led to further gaslighting, a continual drift away from reality and an unremarked-upon underlying roiling dissatisfaction among U.S. males. They've been hammered their entire lives by the message that these weak froths "taste great and are less filling," which is utter nonsense. Being of a certain age, these men first felt bamboozled and then likely hoodwinked, but they kept buying the stuff because, you know, sports.

Maybe there was another message being conveyed: We don't need any darker brews around here, no swarthy beers, my fellow good European-descended sirs! Light is right! Someone on the right must have figured out that if you could get men to believe that these watery brews were beer, you could get them to believe anything. Even younger men began falling for the light beer marketing onslaught (see above: Frat Boy Theory). Again, the lack of flavor created an unrecognized deep, underlying dissatisfaction with life's prospects, like that "incel" thing, but with beer. Light beer is to beer what viewing porn is to having sex — you're definitely going to end up feeling disappointed. The advent of an unending panoply of delicious (and, yes, sexy) craft beers, enjoyed by younger Americans (the 18-40 demographic accounts now for 31% of voters), sometimes brought away from "microbreweries" in "growlers," no doubt overwhelms and enrages the ever-aging cohort of light-beer quaffers, whose lives were stolen from them, so they irrationally demand, you know, MAGA. Don't forget where Hitler and his swell pals worked up their grievances into an incoherent conspiracy theory–fueled rationale for ruthlessly murdering, plundering and conquering the world — in beer halls. Beer matters.

The athlete-pay breakthrough theory

When St. Louis Cardinals centerfielder Curt Flood sued Major League Baseball, in 1970, for his independence from the reserve clause, which left all decision-making about his career to team ownership, he never personally enjoyed the fruits of his labor. But other players did, kicking off the free agent era and elevating salaries for professional athletes. Interestingly, in that same era corporate heads looked around and muttered to themselves they should be paid more, and we saw the relative pay of CEOs and other corporate executives grow exponentially, leaving their workers far behind.

When Flood was pleading his case for freedom as an independent contractor, a top executive's salary was roughly 30 times the pay of their lowest-paid worker; now it is nearly 400 times higher. Corporate America's most devoted lackeys in Congress would later come to call these men "job creators," as if they were demigods. (I didn't mention that many of these liberated athletes were people of color because, you know, that might sound like some CRT tangent and be upsetting for some folks. I just want a little credit for not bringing it up. Now, get me one of those craft beers, will you? If it's going to cost $10 for a beer at the ballgame, it might as well taste like something.)

Service with a smile

The culture and traditions of the American workplace have always been linked with the slave economy, and our expectations as consumers of endless "service with a smile" fit right in with that owner's mentality. Think of Brad in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," berated by a smirking customer who demands his money back, and not being backed up at all by his manager. Or think of me, as a young man working in a New York City restaurant and taking over for a female colleague who was in tears after being harassed by a four-top of coked-up Wall Street characters. One of them thought it would be fun to grab me by the shirt and pull me down close to his face to express his unhappiness that I was not the waitress he wanted to continue to harass. Now think of store clerks and line cooks and flight attendants and nurses getting screamed at by endless streams of toddlers posing as adults. This is the attitude — on steroids, if not cocaine — that essential workers around the country have faced during the pandemic. As journalist and author Sarah Jaffe notes in an excellent interview with Ezra Klein, during the COVID crisis many workers learned that their bosses literally didn't care if they died.

The "Prosperity Gospel"

The Republican Party managed to make people think they cared about religion, grabbing their votes while they transformed God into a CEO who's suitably impressed by your numbers and Jesus into a caddie waiting to serve your needs at the country club. (Much as I loved playing golf, what are country clubs but a somewhat more presentable version of the Old South plantation?)

Talk radio

You hear them whenever you drive across the country, especially outside metropolitan areas: Endless tirades from religious and political lunatics, for hours and hours. Just try to find an NPR station out there. It's unbelievable.

The "Freebird" theory

Gosh, I really don't mean to keep talking about the South. I loved that double lead guitar sound — I mean, back when I was a frat boy). But, really, it's hard not to put at least some of the blame on Lynyrd Skynyrd, isn't it? I know that statement will likely send some of their fans into a blind. So, listen, just give me three steps, mister.

IN OTHER NEWS: 'Flat-out wrong' Lauren Boebert doesn't understand the meaning of Christianity

'Flat-out wrong' Lauren Boebert doesn't understand the meaning of Christianitywww.youtube.com

Lately I've been reading about space and time and quarks and protons and neutrons — all things I never learned about in physics, because I never took that course in high school or college. I was a biology major for a couple of years, vaguely pre-med, until I saw physics and organic chemistry looming ahead and changed my major to journalism. While studying the hard sciences, I had also fallen hard for theater, so the shift away from the study of science was partly due to the time-suck of memorizing lines and rehearsals. The gravitational pull exerted by one excellent lecture course on Shakespeare and some superb theater professors set me on a new course.

I never lost interest in the things I walked away from then. I have numerous science books around the house that I thumb through and still hope to read. On my desk right now are two stacks of books which contain (along with novels and poetry and a book about running) "The Mathematics Devotional" and "30-Second Biology." For some years I had a cool retro "Calculus for the Practical Man" that I kept thinking I might be able to comprehend.

Reading about how black holes form, I can't stop thinking about the implosion of the Republican Party. The metaphor is perfect, even when extended.

Astrophysicists tell us a black hole is created when a star of a certain size begins to cool and thus loses the heat that keeps the force of gravity at bay. In his "A Brief History of Time," Stephen Hawking compares the steady state of a star with a balloon, the air inside (representing the star's heat caused by nuclear fusion) pushing against the skin, which pushes back (the star's internal gravity). Once the heat dissipates, the star begins to collapse inward until it becomes so dense that light can no longer escape the gravitational pull. The boundary where light reaches, but can go no further, is called the event horizon.

Sound familiar? Swap in "truth" for "light" (light being a standard metaphor for truth) and you have the current condition of the former Grand Old Party.

Nothing can go faster than the speed of light, but in human terms we know that falsehoods travel much faster than the truth. One thinks of the quip, often attributed to Mark Twain, which runs something like, A lie travels halfway around the world before the truth can get its shoes on. (Apparently, the concept goes back to Jonathan Swift, who wrote in 1710: "Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.") So lies have a higher velocity than the truth — especially in the age of social media — and continue to be emitted daily from the Republican black hole.

You cannot see a black hole, but it still exerts a gravitational pull on nearby objects. Astronomers can see this by watching other stars orbit around seemingly nothing. (Speaking of "seemingly nothing," a comparison is inescapable, which would be pretty funny if it weren't so scary.)

One wonders whether Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Mitt Romney and others who are now trying to distance themselves from the black hole centered on Mar-a-Lago can garner enough velocity to pull away from the singular density of all the lies, mendacity, grifting, gaslighting, bad-faith dealing, authoritarian praising, anti-democratic espousing, white supremacist messaging and conspiracy-theory reeling.

As Hawking writes: "Stars in the galaxy that come too near this black hole will be torn apart by the differences in the gravitational forces on their near and far sides."

Cheney and Romney are certainly feeling those effects.

Only stars beyond a certain size can become a stellar black hole, something Indian-American astrophysicist and mathematician Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who spent his career at the University of Chicago, noted in a series of papers in the 1930s. He received the Nobel Prize (with British physicist Ralph Fowler) for his work in 1983 — about the time Donald Trump opened his namesake tower on Fifth Avenue.

Although I'm referencing stellar black holes here, it should be noted that Donald Trump was never truly a star. From the first moments he came into public view, he ceaselessly tried to create a name for himself, even stooping to pretend to be a press agent for himself (remember how "John Barron" and "John Miller" sounded exactly like Donald?).

Trump was eventually puffed up into a reality-show star by decades of falsehoods about his prowess as a businessman and one biographer, Tony Schwartz, the true author of "The Art of the Deal," who very much regrets the work he did. Trump was a phony president for the same reasons he was a phony businessman: He couldn't be bothered by work and details; he just bullied and pushed and threatened to get his way. The late Wayne Barrett, the longtime Village Voice reporter who had Trump's number from the beginning, put it best, while introducing his two-part series of articles on Trump published in January 1979:

Each history — the Brooklyn empire, the Manhattan purchases, and the government contracts — is a tale of overreaching and abuse of power. Like his father, Donald Trump has pushed each deal to the limit, taking from it whatever he can get, turning political connections into private profits at public expense.

At best, then, in this extended metaphor he was an odd star, a white dwarf or a neutron. But then his size was bloated immensely by the false premises of "The Apprentice" and his notoriety then began to reach — let's say, for the purposes of the metaphor — the "Chandrasekhar limit," the point at which a cold star can no longer support itself. What took him over the top was the endless coverage he was gifted by cable news during the 2016 campaign. (I nearly wrote "inexplicably gifted" but of course it's all too easy to understand. Even real news programs are corporate owned and profit-minded, and on the air far too long every day. They have to fill that time with something, and showman Trump knew very well how to take advantage of the hungry maw of 24/7 news coverage.)

Some 70 percent of Republicans still believe in Trump's falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen. If you don't fight against the lies, as Liz Cheney — who knows a thing or two herself about offering up the Big Lie — recently noted, you only make them stronger: "Remaining silent and ignoring the lie emboldens the liar." It's like a law of physics.

Speaking of lies, the longer version of Jonathan Swift's concept is illuminating, in this context:

Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ'd only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv'd, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect …

No astrophysicist has seen a black hole form, but we have. As with the celestial phenomenon, it has taken a long time; the Republican Party has been gaining unhealthy mass (e.g., Newt Gingrich) at least since the days of Ronald Reagan and his Big Lies about welfare queens and trickle-down economics and small government. Think back, if you can stomach it, to the months leading up to the 2016 election, when all the major media outlets, including CNN and MSNBC, breathlessly ticked down the time to every single Trump campaign lie-fest, where they also rocked out to music that made no sense at all ("Funeral for a Friend," "YMCA"?) that the artists asked them not to use.

Do you remember? As my friend Joel is wont to say, "Sure you do." The GOP black hole was forming right there on television; like a pack of amateur astronomers, we could all observe it happening — Trump's bullied opponents capitulating, journalists and their corporate leaders allowing themselves to be pushed around, party members refusing to comment about the endless stream of disinformation — with the naked eye, in broad daylight.