Three days after Trump tested positive for covid, Melania, Don Jr and others in his inner circle sat in the debate hall without masks, in direct violation of protocols. They rebuffed demands to mask up.
Here's a picture of the Trump family, all maskless, at the first debate.
Three days earlier Trump had tested positive for covid. And chief of staff Mark Meadows told Trump's whole inner circle to treat Trump as potentially contagious.
Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene aren't fringe. They're leading indicators of an increasingly violent, paranoid style of right wing politics. They claim to speak for the base. Given that GOP leaders won't censure them, are they wrong?
There's real overlap between the ravings of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Steve Bannon, and some of the stuff from the "intellectual" Claremont Institute.
The thread: A leftist enemy so fiendishly monolithic and totalitarian that anything goes in response:
Now that it looks like Trump might run in 2024, is the media prepared to cover a fundamentally anti-democracy candidate who employs rampant disinformation as a deliberate strategy? Some media insiders are sounding the alarm. I offered a few ideas here: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
My suggestions:
First, let's stop saying that Trump and/or his supporters" actually believe" the 2020 election was stolen.
This has the effect of whitewashing away the seriousness of the ongoing threat to democracy:
These are strange times for liberals. With BBB we're nearing the most transformative victory in decades. Yet the GOP is entrenching minority rule, political violence is rising, and authoritarianism is on the march.
We're in a really strange split screen moment for American liberals. On one side there's cause for celebration. On the other there's cause for deep despair:
I tried to go really big picture here, putting BBB in the context of the last 50 years of liberal advancement, retrenchment, and, now, equal parts optimism and despair:
The SALT provision is a serious issue, and not just substantively. It also points to a real coalitional problem Democrats face, with some House members coming from wealthy suburban districts:
Here's my proposal in the wokeness wars: Let's ground our response to the right in egalitarian liberalism. This provides a way to recapture the center, articulate a real vision of our own, and unmask the ugly truth about the right's real goals. My latest: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Chris Rufo tweeted that "it's time to clean house in America" and "lay siege to universities" and "overturn school boards."
This messianism about purging subversive cultural leftism creates an opening for liberals to occupy the center of this debate: