Powerful politicians subverting the rule of law and democracy

Yesterday's Rachael Maddow news show highlighted a serious weakness in the American system of justice. That weakness is the possibility of powerful politicians attacking and subverting the federal Department of Justice when it investigates serious crimes against those politicians. In the process of subverting the rule of law, criminal politicians attack and utterly destroy the careers and reputations of the investigators who try to defend the rule of law by prosecuting the powerful criminals.

In the past powerful politicians in the federal government have successfully blocked investigation and prosecution of crimes by powerful politicians who have committed serious crimes. The example Maddow explained at the beginning of the 34 minute video below described powerful Nazi collaborators in the American congress who successfully blocked prosecution of their treason and other treason and crimes. As part of their self-defense, those traitors viciously destroyed the careers and reputations of DoJ prosecutors who investigated the treason and moved to indict the guilty politicians. The traitors were never prosecuted.

The same is happening today. The Republican Party in congress and the state of Georgia are doing their very best to slander, neuter and destroy the prosecution of Trump for election interference by Fulton County District Attorney Fanni Willis. What the modern Republican traitors, e.g., Jim Jordan, are doing is no different from what the Nazi traitors in congress got away with in the 1940s.

At ~21:20 of the video, Maddow interviews Willis and gets her take of what radical authoritarian Republicans in congress and the Georgia state legislature are doing to block her prosecution of Trump for criminal interference with the 2020 election. She refers to the Jim Jordan as a clown. Jordan is no clown. He is a dangerous traitor and a vicious, lying authoritarian thug. He is trying to do to Willis what treasonous Nazi collaborators in congress successfully did to DoJ prosecutors in the 1940s. He wants to protect Trump from prosecution for his crimes by destroying and blocking Willis’ lawsuit, and her career and reputation. Jordan is, more or less, a modern day Nazi collaborator right out of the 1940s.

Maddow points out that few people have stood in defense of what Willis is doing. Willis is remarkably unfazed by all the threats, or which there are plenty, attacks on her reputation and constant harassment by radical Republican politicians and rank and file Trump supporters. She says nothing is going to stop her from prosecuting crimes that evidence shows have been committed.

I post this as an urgent warning about the shocking ill-will and vicious intent that the poisoned, radicalized authoritarian Republican Party stands for. The GOP does not care about democracy, public opinion or the rule of law if it is works against themselves or their supporters. They care only about unfettered access to more wealth and power. GOP elites and rank and file (whether they know it or believe it or not), are pro-dictatorship and pro-kleptocracy.

American democracy, rule of law and civil liberties are all under a ferocious attack by well-organized, well-funded and deeply corrupt, morally rotted authoritarian forces that are concentrated mostly (~80% ?) in the Republican Party and its supporters, e.g., corrupt Christian nationalist theocrats, and corrupt plutocrats, with the rest residing mostly with elements within the Democratic Party. 

___________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________

For the wonks - Perplexity gets perplexed

A search of Perplexity (an artificial intelligence search engine) for information about the Nazi collaborators came up with an answer that there were no Nazi collaborators in congress in the 1940s. When I asked a follow-up question about why Perplexity was unaware of Rachael Maddow's book Prequel which focused on Nazi collaborators in congress in the 1930s, it responded:

Based on the excerpts and summaries provided from Rachel Maddow's book "Prequel", it is now clear that there were indeed members of Congress in the 1930s and 1940s who collaborated with and took money from Nazi agents like George Sylvester Viereck, spreading Nazi propaganda and potentially obstructing investigations into their activities.

The chain of my questions and Perplexity’s answers is at this link. It took me a while to ask the right question. If you ask artificial intelligence the wrong question, you will get a wrong answer. And sometimes, if you ask artificial intelligence the right question, you can get a wrong answer. For example this chain of Qs & As. One needs to be very careful with artificial intelligence.

Politics lite: Some cartoons

An interesting Q&A about race & racism

Could this be true?

This is sort of interesting, and embarrassing because I was unaware of it:

Q: Does modern science no longer recognize different human races as biologically meaningful?

A: Modern science does not recognize different human races as biologically meaningful categories. The genetic evidence shows that there is no clear biological basis for dividing humans into distinct races.

Human genetic variation is real and widespread, but it is clinal, meaning it varies gradually across geographic regions rather than falling into distinct clusters or races. The vast majority of human genetic diversity exists among individuals within populations, not between different "racial" groups. Genetic studies have consistently shown that humans cannot be divided into biologically distinct subcategories or races. 

While there are some modest genetic differences between human populations adapted to different environments, these differences do not represent deep evolutionary divergence or separate genetic lineages that could define biological races. Traits like skin color are adaptations to specific environmental factors like UV radiation, not indicators of overall genetic differentiation into races. 

The concept of race is a social and cultural construct, not a biological one grounded in genetics. Racial categories are inconsistently defined across societies and do not correspond to objective biological distinctions. As the scientific consensus statement states, "There is no biological basis for 'races.'"

Considered a social construct without inherent physical or biological meaning, which is foundational to the concept of racism.

Wait, what? There is no biological basis for race? But, but, how can there be racism and White Supremacy? There can be bigotry against the ethnicity or culture an alleged race comes from, but not racism. Racism has gone extinct! Science killed it.

Q: 

1. Wadda think about the non-existence of racism as a real, specific thing in people's minds but not in actual reality?

2. Why was I unaware of this? 

Germaine didn't know!?

References:

1. Much of the recent scientific literature on human evolution portrays human populations as separate branches on an evolutionary tree. A tree-like structure among humans has been falsified whenever tested, so this practice is scientifically indefensible. It is also socially irresponsible as these pictorial representations of human evolution have more impact on the general public than nuanced phrases in the text of a scientific paper. Humans have much genetic diversity, but the vast majority of this diversity reflects individual uniqueness and not race. 2013

2. We argue that human races, in the biological sense of local populations adapted to particular environments, do in fact exist; such races are best understood through the common ecological concept of ecotypes. However, human ecotypic races do not in general correspond with ‘folk’ racial categories, largely because many similar ecotypes have multiple independent origins. Consequently, while human natural races exist, they have little or nothing in common with ‘folk’ races. 2022

3. Race Is Real, But It’s Not Genetic -- For over 300 years, socially defined notions of “race” have shaped human lives around the globe—but the category has no biological foundation. Human variation does not stand still. “Race groups” are impossible to define in any stable or universal way. It cannot be done based on biology—not by skin color, bone measurements, or genetics. It cannot be done culturally: Race groupings have changed over time and place throughout history. Science 101: If you cannot define groups consistently, then you cannot make scientific generalizations about them.

A few pundits such as Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute [home of Project 2025 😏] and science writers such as Nicholas Wade, formerly of The New York Times, still argue that even though humans don’t come in fixed, color-coded races, dividing us into races still does a decent job of describing human genetic variation. Their position is shockingly wrong. We’ve known for almost 50 years that race does not describe human genetic variation. 2020

Social institution degeneration: Normalization of American political violence

A NYT article (not paywalled) discusses threats to politicians and officials arising from political extremism, crackpot conspiracy theories and false beliefs:

One Friday last month, Jamie Raskin, a Democratic congressman from Maryland, spent a chunk of his day in court securing a protective order.

It was not his first. Mr. Raskin, who played a leading role in Donald J. Trump’s second impeachment hearing, said he received about 50 menacing calls, emails and letters every month that are turned over to the Capitol Police.

His latest court visit was prompted by a man who showed up at his house and screamed in his face about the Covid-19 vaccine, Mr. Trump’s impeachment and gender-related surgeries. Nearly two years earlier, the same man, with his 3-year-old son in his arms, had yelled profanities at Mr. Raskin at a July 4 parade, according to a police report.

“I told the judge I don’t care about him getting jail time. He just needs some parenting lessons,” Mr. Raskin said.

Mr. Raskin was far from the only government official staring down the uglier side of public service in America in recent weeks. Since late March, bomb threats closed libraries in Durham, N.C.; Reading, Mass.; and Lancaster, Pa., and suspended operations at a courthouse in Franklin County, Pa. In Bakersfield, Calif., an activist protesting the war in Gaza was arrested after telling City Council members: “We’ll see you at your house. We’ll murder you.”

A Florida man was sentenced to 14 months in prison for leaving a voice mail message promising to “come kill” Chief Justice John Roberts.

And Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, refused to rule out violence if he were to lose in November. “It always depends on the fairness of the election,” he said in an interview late last month.

This was just a typical month in American public life, where a steady undercurrent of violence and physical risk has become a new normal. From City Hall to Congress, public officials increasingly describe threats and harassment as a routine part of their jobs. Often masked by online anonymity and propelled by extreme political views, the barrage of menace has changed how public officials do their work, terrified their families and driven some from public life altogether.

By almost all measures, the evidence of the trend is striking. Last year, more than 450 federal judges were targeted with threats, a roughly 150 percent increase from 2019, according to the United States Marshals Service. The U.S. Capitol Police investigated more than 8,000 threats to members of Congress last year, up more than 50 percent from 2018. The agency recently added three full-time prosecutors to handle the volume.

More than 80 percent of local officials said they had been threatened or harassed, according to a survey conducted in 2021 by the National League of Cities.

“People are threatening not just the prosecutor, the special counsel, the judge but also family members,” said Ronald L. Davis, director of the U.S. Marshals Service. Lisa Monaco, the deputy attorney general, said she saw “an environment where disagreement is increasingly tipping over” into “violent threats.”

The mass shootings at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 and the Tops Friendly supermarket in Buffalo in 2022 were both carried out by perpetrators who expressed extreme right-wing views. Trump supporters’ riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was one of the largest acts of political violence in modern American history.

Others — including an Ohio man’s shootout with state troopers after the F.B.I. searched Mr. Trump’s home and shootings at the homes of Democratic officials in New Mexico — fall out of the headlines quickly.

Surveys have found increasing public support for politicized violence among both Republicans and Democrats in recent years. A study released last fall by the University of California, Davis, found that nearly one in three respondents considered violence justified to advance some political objectives, including “to stop an election from being stolen.”

“Although actual acts of political violence in America are still quite low compared to some other countries, we’re now in a position where there has been enough violence that the threats are credible,” said Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who studies political violence.

Violence — and the threat of it — has been a part of American politics since the nation’s founding. But experts describe this moment as particularly volatile, thanks in great part to social media platforms that can amplify anonymous outrage, spread misinformation and conspiracy theories and turn a little-known public employee into a target.

No politician has harnessed the ferocious power of those platforms like Mr. Trump. The former president has long used personal attacks as a strategy to intimidate his adversaries. As he campaigns to return to the White House, he has turned that tactic on the judges and prosecutors involved in his various legal cases, all of whom have subsequently been threatened.

Democrats by and large have been the loudest voices in trying to quell political violence, although many on the right have accused them of insufficiently condemning unruly left-wing protesters on college campuses and at the homes of Supreme Court justices.

There is little research on the political views of those behind the onslaught of abuse. Some surveys show that Republican officeholders are more likely to report being targeted, often from members of their own party. Research does show, however, that recent acts of political violence are more likely to be carried out by perpetrators aligned with right-wing causes and beliefs.

Senator Mitt Romney, a Republican from Utah who is retiring at the end of this year, told a biographer that some G.O.P. lawmakers voted not to impeach and convict Mr. Trump after the Jan. 6 attack because they were afraid for their safety if they crossed his supporters. Mr. Romney did not identify the legislators by name and declined an interview for this article.

Andrew Hitt, the former head of the Republican Party in Wisconsin, agreed to go along with the Trump campaign’s failed scheme to overturn the 2020 election because he was “scared to death,” he told “60 Minutes.”

“It was not a safe time,” he said. 

Local libraries have also become targets amid a heated campaign to ban books and cancel events aimed at members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community. Bomb threats were reported by 32 of the American Library Association’s member institutions last year, compared with two the year before and none in 2021. 

Carolyn Foote, a retired librarian in Austin, Texas, who co-founded a group that supports librarians, said her members had become used to being called “pedophile, groomer, pornographer.”

Proving that ugly and hostile language has crossed the line from First Amendment-protected speech to credible threat can be difficult. Experts say prosecutions became even harder last year after the Supreme Court raised the bar for what qualifies as a credible threat, ruling that the person making the threat has to “have some subjective understanding of the threatening nature of his statements.”

In Bakersfield, Calif., a lawyer for Riddhi Patel, the activist who spoke of murdering City Council members after urging them to take up a Gaza cease-fire resolution, said her statement was not a crime. She has pleaded not guilty to 21 felony charges.

“It’s clear that this was not a true criminal threat, which under California law must be, among other things, credible, specific, immediate and unconditional,” said Peter Kang, the public defender of Kern County, which includes Bakersfield. “Instead, what we hear are Ms. Patel’s strong, passionate expressions, which fall within the bounds of constitutionally protected speech.”

It is fair and rational to consider people who issue threats to be violent extremists. Some are leftists and most are rightists. It is also fair and rational to consider Trump and authoritarian radical right propaganda media like Faux News to be major influencers in normalizing violent extremism. For example, both Trump and Faux have publicly defended and justified the violence of the traitors engaging in the 1/6 coup attempt. Faux publicly downplayed the violence and defended them. Trump says he will pardon all of them as patriots if he is re-elected. 

In terms of blame, this estimate seems reasonable and rational:

America’s radical right authoritarianism and its supporters: ~90% at fault (~85-95%)

Everything and everyone else: ~10% at fault

Qs: Is that estimate of blame reasonable and rational? Regarding normalization of violent extremism, the US Supreme Court more helpful than harmful?