News bits: MAGA fascists in Arizona, etc.

MAGA fascists in Arizona: Adrian Fontes was elected to be the next Secretary of State for Arizona. He defeated a Trump-chosen election denier and enthusiastic 1/6 coup attempt participant, Mark Finchem. Fontes commented in a news article: 

“We won by about 120,000 votes – we put it away handily.” But the result is not grounds for complacency, Fontes believes. From his perspective, given the scale of the danger posed by Finchem and his ilk, the outcome should have been much clearer. “Our victory was more narrow than we would have liked. We should have won by 20 points, and sent a much stronger message. Nobody should sleep easy on the Maga fascist threat that still exists.”

“I use the words ‘Maga fascists’ because it’s the truth,” he said. “These people are not Grand Old Party Republicans; they are Maga fascists. There is no reason for me to call them by anything other than what they are. If they feel a little sensitive about that, then maybe they ought to reconsider their position vis-a-vis American democracy and stop acting like fascists.”  

“We had folks with long rifles and camouflage gear ‘guarding’ our ballot drop boxes,” Fontes said. “That was asinine. Those folks should be prosecuted as the domestic terrorists that they are.”

I agree with Fontes. They are fascists, MAGA!! or not.

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Racism in the GOP: The New Abnormal column at the Daily Beast discusses how some historians are aggressively attacking the lies the Republican Party has relied heavily on to create myths that many or most of rank and file Republicans believe are truths.

Republicans co-opting Martin Luther King Jr.’s quotes while pushing policy and supporting legislation directly in opposition to the Civil Rights leader’s wishes is just one example of the party attempting to rewrite history.

In fact, there are so many examples of revisionist history happening these days, particularly among conservatives, that historian and University of Princeton professor Kevin M. Kruse felt the need to publish a book alongside fellow historians, and join this episode of The New Abnormal politics podcast, to set the record straight. 

He talks about his book Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past, which is a compilation of historian-written chapters that crush those myths, and shares proof that contrary to Republicans’ denials, the party actively engages in “Southern Strategy,” which is, as New Abnormal co-host Andy Levy explains, the “idea that as the Democratic Party moved away from being the party of slavery and segregation, the GOP sort of consciously moved to fill that void and to become the champion of white Southerners.”

From speaking in coded racial language to antagonizing white voters through fear and taking starkly pro-police stances, they’re absolutely following the knowingly racist playbook of conservatives past, says Kruse.

“This is not some wishful thinking theory that we’ve imposed in the past. The people we’re talking about in documents at the time, in interviews at the time, in books, talk about this,” says Kruse. “[Richard] Nixon talks about this in his memoirs. Harry Dent, his adviser, talks about it in his memoirs. Lee Atwater gives an interview where he talks about the old coded racism of the Nixon-era Southern Strategy. This has long been conventional wisdom. Heads of the Republican National Committee apologized for this. The thought that suddenly people are saying, ‘Oh, this never happened. This is all a myth,’ was just kind of insane and frustrating.”

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Musk is killing people: Researchers report that COVID misinformation is surging once again now that Musk has dropped restrictions on lies and conspiracy theories. The NYT comments:

“It’s easy to forget that health misinformation, including about Covid, can still contribute to people not getting vaccinated or creating stigmas,” said Megan Marrelli, the editorial director of Meedan, a nonprofit focused on digital literacy and information access. “We know for a fact that health misinformation contributes to the spread of real-world disease.”

Twitter is of particular concern for researchers. The company recently gutted the teams responsible for keeping dangerous or inaccurate material in check on the platform, stopped enforcing its Covid misinformation policy and began basing some content moderation decisions on public polls posted by its new owner and chief executive, the billionaire Elon Musk.

From Nov. 1 to Dec. 5, Australian researchers collected more than half a million conspiratorial and misleading English-language tweets about Covid, using terms such as “deep state,” “hoax” and “bioweapon.” The tweets drew more than 1.6 million likes and 580,000 retweets.

Whether he likes it or not, Musk’s policies at his expensive Twitter toy is leading to people’s deaths and illness. He is a killer, plain and simple. So are the people who post lies and crackpottery that cause people to wind up ill or dead. One could say ‘shame on you’, but that would be pointless. People like Musk and Twitter cranks and crackpots have no shame. Heck, some (most?) of them probably actually enjoy seeing their ‘free speech’ poison injure and kill people.

That raises a question. How many ice-cold psychopath killers like these are there in America? According to the psychologists, about 1.2% of U.S. adult men and 0.3% to 0.7% of U.S. adult women are considered to have clinically significant levels of psychopathic traits. So, if we round it off to about 1%, that means there are up to about 3.3 million of these potential killers, mostly men, wandering maliciously among us. That raises a question. Are some men genetically defective or are the bad ones just mean and evil?

😵‍💫