Thursday, August 17, 2023

News bits: Radical right violence watch; A flawed GOP analysis?

The NYT reports about a threat of violence related to we all know who and what:
A Texas woman has been charged with threatening to kill Tanya S. Chutkan, the federal judge in Washington who is overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s prosecution on charges of seeking to overturn the 2020 election.

The woman, Abigail Jo Shry, of Alvin, Texas, called Judge Chutkan’s chambers on Aug. 5, two days after Mr. Trump was arraigned on the election interference charges, and left a voice mail message attacking the judge, who is Black, with a racial slur, according to a criminal complaint unsealed on Friday.

In the message, Ms. Shry told Judge Chutkan, “If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you, so tread lightly, bitch,” according to the complaint. She added, “You will be targeted personally, publicly, your family, all of it.”
The purported names and addresses of members of the grand jury that indicted Donald Trump and 18 of his co-defendants on state racketeering charges this week have been posted on a fringe website that often features violent rhetoric, NBC News has learned.

NBC News is choosing not to name the website featuring the addresses to avoid further spreading the information.

The grand jurors' purported addresses were spotted by Advance Democracy, a nonpartisan research group founded by Daniel J. Jones, a former FBI investigator and staffer for the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee.

“It’s becoming all too commonplace to see everyday citizens performing necessary functions for our democracy being targeted with violent threats by Trump-supporting extremists," Jones said. "The lack of political leadership on the right to denounce these threats — which serve to inspire real-world political violence — is shameful.” [IMFO, Jones frames this wrong -- lack of radical right political leadership in defense of democracy is intentional; GOP elites support violence by silent complicity or otherwise, but they do not condemn it] 
Tuesday — after Trump posted on his social media website that authorities were going "after those that fought to find the RIGGERS!" — Advance Democracy said Trump supporters were "using the term ‘rigger’ in lieu of a racial slur" in posts.
Notice the overt racism the poisoned ones are expressing? 

Qs: A peanut gallery denizen asks: How the fuck does this racist dude still have bail? He's openly encouraging supporters to threaten and attack witnesses, jurors and judges. What the actual fuck? 

Darn good questions. Our two-tiered system of justice, one for elites, the other for the rest of us, keeps the violent dictator beast out on bail. 
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An NYT article used recent poll data to analyze the groups that make up the authoritarian radical right Republican Party (ARRRP). Much of the analysis makes little sense to me in terns of the big picture, i.e., actual voting behavior. The NYT writes:
The last New York Times/Siena College poll found that only 37 percent of Republicans count as part of Mr. Trump’s loyal base.

The Moderate Establishment (14%). Highly educated, affluent, socially moderate or even liberal and often outright Never Trump.

The Traditional Conservatives (26%). Old-fashioned economic and social conservatives who oppose abortion and prefer corporate tax cuts to new tariffs. They don’t love Mr. Trump, but they do support him.

The Right Wing (26%). They watch Fox News and Newsmax. They’re “very conservative.” They’re disproportionately evangelical. They believe America is on the brink of catastrophe. And they love Mr. Trump more than any other group.

The Blue Collar Populists (12%). They’re mostly Northern, socially moderate, economic populists who hold deeply conservative views on race and immigration. Not only do they back Mr. Trump, but he himself probably counted as one a decade ago.

The Libertarian Conservatives (14%). These disproportionately Western and Midwestern conservatives value freedom and small government. They’re relatively socially moderate and isolationist. Other than the establishment, it’s Mr. Trump’s worst group.

The Newcomers (8%). They don’t look like Republicans. They’re young, diverse and moderate. But these disaffected voters like Democrats and the “woke” left even less.

Mr. Trump’s dominance of the Republican Party is founded on an alliance between the Right Wing and Blue Collar Populists, two groups that combine to represent nearly 40 percent of Republicans — and about two-thirds of Mr. Trump’s MAGA base of seemingly unshakable support.  
The Blue Collar Populists and the Right Wing don’t always agree. In particular, they split on the issues of the religious right, like same-sex marriage and abortion. But these two groups are big Trump supporters. They mostly agree with him on his defining issues and they share his deeply pessimistic, even cataclysmic view of the direction of the country, including fear of the declining white share of the population.
Susan Collins is an establishment moderate?
Really!!??

Rick Perry is a traditional conservative?
Really!!??

What makes little sense is that despite various group differences, ARRRP voters vote for ARRRP candidates, not Democrats. Decades of divisive, mendacious, slandering ARRRP dark free speech has poisoned the minds of the party's voters. So despite their alleged dislike of DJT, they nonetheless vote for him. Also missing, is the usual MSM failure to understand how radicalized the entire GOP has become. Susan Collins is no moderate. She voted to confirm all three of DJT's radical right Christian nationalist, brass knuckles capitalist, pro-dictatorship USSC nominees. That is not moderate. That is radical right, even if she did vote to impeach DJT in his 2nd impeachment trial (she voted to acquit him in the 1st trial, which is radical right extremism). 

Take Rick Perry allegedly being a traditional conservative. That is nonsense. Traditional conservatives are pro-democracy and pro-civil liberties. Perry does not stand against the pro-tyranny, anti-civil liberties GOP. He is a GOP elite and the GOP stands for corruption and tyranny. As usual, the MSM either fails to understand what it is dealing with mostly because it is incompetent, or it has been subverted and corrupted by corporate ownership, or more likely some combination of both. The 4th estate continues to fail the American people.

Most, maybe ~85%, of the so-called moderate establishment and the allegedly traditional conservatives probably didn't vote for Biden or voted for DJT. If it were otherwise, the 2016 and 2020 elections probably could not have been as close as they were. Something about the NYT analysis feels seriously wrong. I think the main problems are that the NYT misunderstands voting behavior and indefensible definitions of groups. 

Q: What counts more in a democracy, party loyalty and actual voting behavior, or complaints about the party candidates by a group within the party?

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