Trial update; What voters want; Marketing and anti-abortion tactics update

The NYT published a long interview between NYT columnist David French and two experts, Rebecca Roiphe, a former assistant district attorney in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, and Ken White, a former federal prosecutor. Two points about the interview are of interest.  

1. The experts shed light on whether some of the Stormy Daniels testimony that was improperly allowed to get to the jury would be sufficient grounds to overturn a conviction of DJT. One expert said that the error would probably not be sufficient to cause a mistrial and the other did not respond. I assumed that the error would be a good basis to get a mistrial. My assumption was wrong.  

2. Both experts think the prosecution is doing a pretty good job and their assessment of the trial so far regarding one or more felony convictions is positive. They believe the jury will understand the nature of the case because the evidence has been laid out for the jury in a clear way. 

The relevant parts of the interview:

French: Is the judge’s decision to deny the motion for mistrial a reversible error?

Roiphe: I don’t think this will cause a huge legal problem for the prosecution on appeal. Defense lawyers call for mistrials all the time, and judges have a great deal of latitude in dealing with moments like these when testimony slips out that should not have.

French: Let’s end with some lightning round questions. First, since the trial has started, in your view has the chance of conviction gone up or down?

Roiphe: Up.

White: Up significantly.

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A NYT opinion by David Brooks makes an interesting point about poll data suggesting a reason for why DJT is leading Biden in key contested states: 

What do American voters want? The latest New York Times/Siena polls of swing states offer some confusing evidence on this point. Some of the polling results suggest that Americans are in a revolutionary frame of mind: If you ask whether the political and economic system needs major changes, 69 percent say it either needs major changes or should be entirely torn down.

On the other hand, when the pollsters gave voters a choice between a candidate who would bring the country back to normal and one who would bring major changes, 51 percent said they would prefer the back-to-normal candidate and only 40 percent would prefer the major-changes candidate.

So which is it?

Well, different voters want different things. But if I had to write a single sentence that reconciled these diverse findings, it would be this: The people who run America’s systems have led the country seriously astray; we need a president who will shake things up and return the country back to normal.

When they hear “systems,” I assume voters are thinking of the network of institutions run by America’s elite — corporations, governing agencies, higher education, the news media and so on. If voters believe one thing about Donald Trump it’s that he’s against these systems and these systems are against him.

Voters clearly see President Biden implicated in these systems. The heart of Biden’s problem heaves into view when you ask people which candidate will bring about change. Seventy percent of voters believe that Trump would bring about major changes or tear down the system entirely if elected. Yet 71 percent of voters believe that little or nothing would change if Biden is re-elected.

In other words, the evidence suggests that the swing voter wants reactionary change, not revolutionary change. The mood suggested by the evidence is angry nostalgia. That would be my explanation for why Trump is so convincingly ahead in most of the swing states.

That is plausibly part of the reason for support among some voters who might not otherwise vote for DJT. Biden does seem to be both unable and unwilling to change the status quo. DJT will shake things up, but in a very bad way.

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Radical antiabortion influencers are flooding social media with blatant lies about the alleged horrors of using birth control pills: 

US wellness influencers are increasingly targeting birth control pills, pushing their followers to abandon the contraceptives with false claims about infertility and low libido that researchers say leave them vulnerable to unintended pregnancies.

That includes Taylor Gossett, a TikTok influencer with nearly 200,000 followers who explicitly called the medication "toxic" alongside offers to join her "master class" in "natural" birth control.  

Podcaster Sahara Rose called birth control the "divorce pill" in a video viewed more than 550,000 times, claiming it impacts who "you're attracted to" and leads users to choose the wrong mate.

"This spike in contraception misinformation [lies actually] correlates with the restriction of abortion access in a number of states," misinformation researcher Jenna Sherman told AFP, adding that many of the online falsehoods stemmed from "anti-abortion actors."

Lying has truly been normalized in America. It is not confined to just politics. Grifters and radical activists are out there lying for money, fame and influence in the basically unregulated world of advertising and political dark free speech. The bad consequences of lies and grifting is not an obvious concern for morally rotted liars.

About the great replacement theory

An issue that is at or near the top of concerns among voters on the political right (I call the mainstream right the authoritarian radical right) is immigration. An important factor in raising fear and anger about uncontrolled immigration is a bit of powerful, polarizing propaganda called the Great Replacement Theory (GRT). Since this idea has powerful appeal to millions of voters, it makes sense to discuss it. The fear and anger this issue foments could be a necessary factor that gets DJT re-elected in 2024.   

Wikipedia describes the GRT like this:

The Great Replacement (French: Grand Remplacement), also known as replacement theory or great replacement theory, is a white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory espoused by French author Renaud Camus. The original theory states that, with the complicity or cooperation of "replacist" elites, the ethnic French and white European populations at large are being demographically and culturally replaced by non-white peoples—especially from Muslim-majority countries—through mass migration, demographic growth and a drop in the birth rate of white Europeans. Since then, similar claims have been advanced in other national contexts, notably in the United States. Mainstream scholars have dismissed these claims of a conspiracy of "replacist" elites as rooted in a misunderstanding of demographic statistics and premised upon an unscientific, racist worldview. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, the Great Replacement "has been widely ridiculed for its blatant absurdity."

An article the WaPo published in May of 2022 (not paywalled) discusses the GRT and some of the violence it has inspired in recent times:

The man authorities say opened fire in a Buffalo grocery store Saturday, killing 10, appears to have left behind a white supremacist document centered on the idea of a plot to replace the White population with immigrants.

This far-right conspiracy theory, known as the “great replacement theory,” has inspired a lot of recent violence, including the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand, where the shooter warned of “White genocide.” He later pleaded guilty to 51 murders, 40 attempted murders and engaging in a terrorist act.

Some of the torch-bearing “Unite the Right” demonstrators, including Ku Klux Klan members and neo-Nazis, who terrorized Charlottesville in 2017 were also motivated by the theory, which warns that an increase in the non-White population fueled by immigration will destroy White and Western civilization.

But while the great replacement theory has inspired horrific violence in the past five years, it’s a lot older than that. More than 70 years ago, a U.S. senator published a book warning of the same destruction of White civilization.

Theodore G. Bilbo, a Democrat, had twice been governor of Mississippi before he served in the U.S. Senate from 1935 to 1947, when “the growing intolerance among many whites toward public racism and anti-Semitism” led to his fall, according to an account in the Journal of Mississippi History.

An equal-opportunity racist, he addressed some of his letters with slurs against Italians and Jews, depending on the recipient. But the bulk of his loathing and fear was reserved for Black Americans, as spelled out in his 1947 book “Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization.”

A showboater and self-promoter, he began the book with this modest preface: “For nine years I have read, studied and analyzed practically all the records and everything written throughout the entire world on the subject of race relations, covering a period of close on to thirty thousand years.” ( Note: Bilbo was a liar -- the earliest known writing is from southern Mesopotamia ~3400 BC, not ~28,000 BC)

Bilbo saw an existential threat in the growing ranks of American-born descendants of enslaved Africans. His solution? Ship them back.

“The great civilizations of the ages have been produce[d] by the Caucasian race,” he wrote. When Black people moved in, he wrote, mighty societies such as ancient Egypt were destroyed and mongrel races were created. “The mongrel not only lacks the ability to create a civilization, but he cannot maintain a culture that he finds around him,” he wrote.

“A White America or a mongrel America — you must take your choice!”

The GRT is playing a role in the current elections. As usual for America's authoritarian radical right, authoritarian propaganda is mostly fact-free lies and slanders: 

U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake claimed without evidence Sunday that Democrats are allowing undocumented immigrants to flood across the border as part of a nationwide plot to pad voter rolls while registering that group for Medicare and Medicaid benefits.

The Republican front-runner echoed the "great replacement theory" favored by white nationalists as she mixed accusations of election fraud with welfare fraud to a credulous Maria Bartiromo on her “Sunday Morning Futures” show on Fox News.

Lake has repeatedly employed these themes, in part to explain her 2022 gubernatorial loss. Lake is currently running for the U.S. Senate seat held by U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz.

The authoritarian radical right Faux News has been a 

major proponent of GRT lies and slanders for years

Part of the loyal Faux News audience 

Some recent research on belief in the GRT suggests that emotions, especially feelings of insecurity and fear, correlate with belief in the GRT. By contrast, reasoned thinking correlates with disbelief in the GRT threat: 

According to the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, mass immigration to Europe and the U.S. is part of a secret plot to replace White and Christian population with non-White and Muslim immigrants. With the aim of exploring psychological factors that play a role in believing in the “great replacement” theory, the present research focused on individual differences in reflective thinking. Using data from a cross-sectional study (N = 906), we found that cognitive reflection [roughly, reasoned thinking] was negatively associated with belief in the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, even when political ideology and sociodemographic characteristics were controlled in the analysis. The findings highlight the key role of reflective thinking in countering conspiracy theories.  

Conspiracy theories can be toxic to democratic political discourse. By insinuating that societal groups or global elites have hidden agendas, they delegitimize certain opinions and political preferences, which harms constructive debates and can facilitate radicalization and evoke acts of political violence, including terrorism (Davey & Ebner, 2019; Marcks & Pawelz, 2022; Obaidi et al., 2022; Rottweiler & Gill, 2022). A globally relevant topic of political discourse where conspiracy beliefs can be particularly harmful is immigration. 

The GRT is a propaganda tactic frequently used by radical right authoritarians in Europe:

The idea that ethnically homogeneous populations in European nations are being demographically ‘replaced’ by people of non-European origin has been propagated by far-right actors for some time (Bjørgo and Ravndal, 2019). However, the idea of a ‘replacement’, orchestrated by liberal and/or left-wing elites, is also being propagated from the top, most notably by (illiberal) leaders such as prime minister Viktor Orban of Hungary and former prime minister Róbert Fico of Slovakia (Plenta, 2020).

The GRT and the insecurity and fear it generates is likely to be one of the top two or three authoritarian radical right propaganda issues that will motivate people to vote for DJT in 2024. 

That is the case because the Republican Party in congress recently killed a border immigration control bill that congressional Republicans themselves wrote. Once DJT realized that proposed legislation would help calm the emotions that border chaos and the GRT could foment (and the credit Biden would get for fixing the border), he ordered his party to block its passage into law. Being morally rotted and authoritarian, the GOP obeyed and killed their own proposed immigration law for purely partisan politics.

Before Faux fired Tucker, he was

a major proponent of GRT lies and slanders

How West Virginia’s first transgender elected official is influencing local politics

 

WHEELING, W.Va. (AP) — When Rosemary Ketchum gets introduced as the first openly transgender person to win elective office in West Virginia, there's often a shocked look that comes across people's faces.

(HOW did she pull it off?)

To her, it doesn't feel like magic. But in some ways, she can understand their surprise. Out of the handful of transgender officials in the U.S., only a few were elected in similarly rural, GOP-controlled states.

Ketchum answers matter-of-factly when people ask her how she got elected as an openly transgender candidate: she put her name on the ballot, knocked on doors, made phone calls to ask residents what they care about, and then trusted them to make a decision.

(Wow, what a novel approach)

“I didn’t pre-ordain or assume what they would think of me — I gave them the opportunity to think for themselves,” she said. “I didn’t walk up to a door, and say like, ‘Oh, this person has a Trump sign, they’re going to hate me.’”

Ketchum said when she’s canvassing, people aren’t talking about what bathrooms they think transgender people should be able to use, or whether kids should be reading books with LGBTQ+ characters in school. People often want to talk about repaving their road or worries about how many young people are leaving the state — one of only two states where the population declined in the 2020 census.

“That gives me more respect, frankly, for my neighbors,” Ketchum said. GOP lawmakers’ focus on books bans and bathroom access may attract attention statewide and nationally, but “it doesn’t work at a local level -- it doesn’t register,” she said.

(Is that true or just a quaint saying?)

She said many people have developed an apathy or distrust of government. But she doesn't engage with cynicism. Instead, she gives constituents her personal phone number and holds regular office hours at a local market where anyone can come by to speak with her.

More on her story:

https://www.courthousenews.com/how-west-virginias-first-transgender-elected-official-is-influencing-local-politics/

BUT this won't work on the national level. So I've heard. You can NOT appeal to those on the Right on the national level. 

So, let's hang this out there:

Could the methods Rosemary Ketchum is using to win local elections in a red district be used effectively on a national level? 

Russian social engineering; Netanyahu defends Gaza war

Since late in 2017, it seemed that global authoritarianism has sharpened its focus on attacking democracies everywhere. The most potent authoritarian forces come from within the border of democracies. In the US it is DJT and his Republican Party. The WaPo published an article about Putin mobilizing his entire society into an aggressive military force built to attack democracies everywhere by any means possible. In essence, what Putin is doing now looks a lot to me like what Hitler did with German society to prepare for war. The WaPo writes (not paywalled):

Under Putin, a militarized new Russia rises to challenge U.S. and the West

 

As Vladimir Putin persists in his bloody campaign to conquer Ukraine, the Russian leader is directing an equally momentous transformation at home — re-engineering his country into a regressive, militarized society that views the West as its mortal enemy.

Putin’s inauguration on Tuesday for a fifth term will not only mark his 25-year-long grip on power but also showcase Russia’s shift into what pro-Kremlin commentators call a “revolutionary power,” set on upending the global order, making its own rules, and demanding that totalitarian autocracy be respected as a legitimate alternative to democracy in a world redivided by big powers into spheres of influence.

“Russians live in a wholly new reality,” Dmitri Trenin, a pro-Kremlin analyst, wrote in reply to questions about an essay in which he argued that Russia’s anti-Western shift was “more radical and far-reaching” than anything anticipated when Putin invaded Ukraine but also “a relatively minor element of the wider transformation which is going on in Russia’s economy, polity, society, culture, values, and spiritual and intellectual life.”

In “Russia, Remastered,” The Washington Post documents the historic scale of the changes Putin is carrying out and has accelerated with breathtaking speed during two years of brutal war even as tens of thousands of Russians have fled abroad. It is a crusade that gives Putin common cause with China’s Xi Jinping as well as some supporters of former president Donald Trump. And it raises the prospect of an enduring civilizational conflict to subvert Western democracy and — Putin has warned — even threatens a new world war.

The WaPo article cites some of the efforts Putin is employing to re-engineer Russian society. For example, he is building an ultraconservative, puritanical society indoctrinated against liberal freedoms. That movement is very hostile to gay and transgender people. Putin is also reshaping all levels of education to indoctrinate hyper-patriotism among the young. Textbooks have been rewritten to reflect Putin's propaganda and re-written history. The state now requires compulsory military lessons to be taught by soldiers called “Basics of Security and Protection of the Motherland.” That education includes training with handling Kalashnikov assault rifles, grenades and drones. 

In addition to those efforts, Putin (i) is poisoning cultural life using blacklists of liberal or antiwar performers, directors, writers and artists, and (ii) abolishing women’s reproductive rights and access to abortions. Putin's anti-abortion demands are backed by constant propaganda about the need of young women to give birth often. Feminist activists and liberal female journalists are being arrested and charged with terrorism, extremism, discrediting the military and other offenses. Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center commented on Putin's preparation for war, “they need cannon fodder for the future.”

Q: Is it just me, e.g., self-delusion, or does the morally rotted, dictator DJT and his morally rotted, authoritarian Repub Party look a way too much like the morally rotted, murdering dictator-thug Putin and his murdering dictator enabling thugs and military? 

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At about 1:52 of this 3 minute video (produced by the Times of India) Netanyahu, defends his and Israeli government treatment of Palestinians in Gaza. In essence he refers to the holocaust of the 1940s and a current existential threat to Israel's existence. He says he will defeat Israel's “genocidal enemy” with or without foreign aid from any country and in the face of international criticism of how Israel conducts the war.

It is interesting that Netanyahu points to past history and the holocaust as part of the justification for what is happening in Gaza. One can wonder if Palestinian civilians point to history since ~1947 as justification for resisting Israel, but not justification for the Oct. 7 attacks, murders and kidnapping by Hamas. No one cannot justify the Hamas killings and kidnappings of Oct. 7. 

But does the horrible wrong by Hamas justify the horrible wrong Israel is committing in Gaza? Do two horrible wrongs make a right?

Opinions will differ.