Just awful: Steve Bannon is now ripping into David Perdue, who is *Trump's* candidate for Georgia governor, as too much of a squish to wage the war on democracy Bannon wants. This shows that the right is headed toward full-blown insurgency. My new piece: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
I had a fascinating conversation with Nicole Hemmer, a historian of conservative media, about Bannon.
Bannon is similar to Oliver North. Both parlayed their willingness to operate outside the law into a media following built around explicit insurgency:
David Perdue supported the lawsuit seeking to invalidate millions of Biden votes. He called for the firing of the Sec of State who rebuffed Trump's pressure to steal the election.
Yet Bannon still sees him as a squish. Only full blown insurgency will do:
Also see this key related insight from @shikhadalmia:
The real reason to be worried about right wing media is that it's "determined to tear down the journalistic marketplace of ideas and replace it with a lapdog media that serves its interests."
How can Biden lead at the democracy summit without telling the truth about the authoritarian threat at home -- that it comes from the right and GOP? Will he really paper over his own party's utter failure to safeguard against that threat? My latest: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Biden advisers are struggling with how to address our own democracy problems at the summit. SecState Blinken says he will use it to rally our "better angels" at home.
But this casts the problem as a failure of persuasion, when it's a failure of inaction:
It's unthinkable that Ds would let the filibuster scuttle reforms to avert a future coup, when we *already saw* Trump attempt exactly this scheme, and antidemocratic currents in the GOP are getting worse:
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:
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.
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: