Pussyfootin' Around with Putin

 How to address the pending invasion of Ukraine?

The U.S. and NATO way: remove your citizens from Ukraine, wag your finger at Putin, and impose sanctions. I am sure Putin is running scared.

Snowflake's way: have the U.S. and NATO build up massive number of troops and heavy military hardware all along the Belarus border, and let Putin know if he invades Ukraine, the West will invade Belarus.

Send Ukraine massive deadly weapons. Arm them to the teeth. Make the cost of invasion too costly.

Impose those sanctions NOW, not after the fact. Offer to remove them if Putin withdraws all forces from the border to Ukraine, and leaves Crimea.

Cancel the pipeline NOW, offer to reinstate it only after Putin withdraws.

ALL OF NATO AND THE US immediately withdraw ALL of it's citizens from Russia and ban travel there. This aught to crush their tourism industry. 

BUT, my way might force Putin to react in anger, right? Wasn't that the same argument Europeans, the Brits, and Americans made prior to World War 2. Ask Hitler to play nice but don't ruffle his feathers? And how did THAT work out?

Thoughts?

A GOP alliance to oppose Trumpism

The New York Times reports on a GOP effort to keep Trumpism from fully consuming the party, making the ex-president a full-blown dictator in control. This effort has been going on quietly for months. This is surprising news to me. More surprising is the NYT’s disclosure that Mitch McConnell is leading the effort to stop Trumpism and he is aided by former president George Bush.

The circumstances here are bizarre. In public, McConnell has supported essentially all of what the ex-president wanted and did, including protecting him from impeachment on transparently crackpot hyper-partisan logic. 

What the hell is going on here? What effect, if any, will the reporting of this story have on internal GOP politics and the party's corrupt authoritarian, ideology? What about the critically important issues? Specifically, where do defense of or opposition to democracy, the rule of law, inconvenient facts, inconvenient truths, sound reasoning, secularism and civil liberties stand with each side in this quiet internal Republican war among GOP elites? 

It is the fight among the elites that count here. Rank and file Republicans are just as clueless as I, and probably most of the rest of the American public, were. In the end, rank and file Republicans and with the rest of us, will be lied to, spun, manipulated, distracted and deceived, no matter how this war plays out.

There are three basic ways to see this, roughly mostly good, mostly bad and mostly mixed-ambiguous.

The NYT writes:

As Mr. Trump works to retain his hold on the Republican Party, elevating a slate of friendly candidates in midterm elections, Mr. McConnell and his allies are quietly, desperately maneuvering to try to thwart him. The loose alliance, which was once thought of as the G.O.P. establishment, for months has been engaged in a high-stakes candidate recruitment campaign, full of phone calls, meetings, polling memos and promises of millions of dollars. It’s all aimed at recapturing the Senate majority, but the election also represents what could be Republicans’ last chance to reverse the spread of Trumpism before it fully consumes their party.

Mr. McConnell for years pushed Mr. Trump’s agenda and only rarely opposed him in public. But the message that he delivers privately now is unsparing, if debatable: Mr. Trump is losing political altitude and need not be feared in a primary, he has told Mr. Ducey in repeated phone calls, as the Senate leader’s lieutenants share polling data they argue proves it.

In conversations with senators and would-be senators, Mr. McConnell is blunt about the damage he believes Mr. Trump has done to the G.O.P., according to those who have spoken to him. Privately, he has declared he won’t let unelectable “goofballs” win Republican primaries.

History doesn’t bode well for such behind-the-scene efforts to challenge Mr. Trump, and Mr. McConnell’s hard sell is so far yielding mixed results. The former president has rallied behind fewer far-right candidates than initially feared by the party’s old guard. Yet a handful of formidable contenders have spurned Mr. McConnell’s entreaties, declining to subject themselves to Mr. Trump’s wrath all for the chance to head to a bitterly divided Washington.

Mr. Trump, however, has also had setbacks. He’s made a handful of endorsements in contentious races, but his choices have not cleared the Republican field, and one has dropped out. 

If Mr. Trump muscles his preferred candidates through primaries and the general election this year, it will leave little doubt of his control of the Republican Party, build momentum for another White House bid and entrench his brand of politics in another generation of Republican leaders.

If he loses in a series of races after an attempt to play kingmaker, however, it would deflate Mr. Trump’s standing, luring other ambitious Republicans into the White House contest and providing a path for the party to move on.

But while there is some evidence that Mr. Trump’s grip on Republican voters has eased, polls show the former president remains overwhelmingly popular in the party. Among politicians trying to win primaries, no other figure’s support is more ardently sought.

Mr. Trump is backing primary opponents to incumbent governors in Georgia and Idaho, encouraged an ally to take on the Alabama governor and helped drive Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts into retirement by supporting a rival. The Republican Governors Association, which Mr. Ducey leads, this week began pushing back, airing a television commercial defending the Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, against his opponent, former Senator David Perdue. It was the first time in the group’s history they’ve financed ads for an incumbent battling a primary.

Mr. McConnell has been loath to discuss his recruitment campaign and even less forthcoming about his rivalry with Mr. Trump. In an interview last week, he warded off questions about their conflict, avoiding mentioning Mr. Trump’s name even when it was obvious to whom he was referring.

The Senate Republican leader has been worried that Mr. Trump will tap candidates too weak to win in the general election, the sort of nominees who cost the party control of the Senate in 2010 and 2012.

“We changed the business model in 2014, and have not had one of these goofballs nominated since,” he told a group of donors on a private conference call last year, according to a recording obtained by The New York Times.

Analysis

On the one hand, McConnell dislikes goofballs and tries to get reasonable-sounding Republicans like Maryland governor Larry Hogan to run for office. On the other hand, nearly the entire GOP leadership went along with open attacks on or rejection of democracy, inconvenient truth, the rule of law, civil liberties, etc. Before T**** came on the scene, corrupt authoritarianism and incompetence was the direction the GOP had been moving toward for decades. T**** accelerated the moral rot in already anti-democratic, anti-truth, anti-civil liberties GOP. McConnell cannot undo anything he did, e.g., saving T**** from impeachment twice.  

Assume that McConnell succeeds in neutering T**** and the goofballs. So what? What will be left to run the party? When it comes to the important issues, how far apart is the T**** goofball wing of the GOP and the McConnell-Bush radical Christian right, laissez-faire capitalist wing? Christian nationalists and their grip on the party are not going to go away. Neither are laissez-faire capitalists with their hundreds of millions in cash needed to run party operations and campaigns. None of that will change. Both have shown their acceptance or tolerance of T**** and the goofballs. What about Kevin McCarthy? he is a hard core T**** supporter and likely to become House speaker in less than one year. He is not going to go away or change his mendacious authoritarian brand of politics.

Given the intense threat that democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties are under from hyper-toxic T**** wing of the Republican Party, it probably makes sense to hope that McConnell triumphs and what is left of the GOP can be more effectively opposed.

So, much as I dislike the self-serving, sleazy, corrupt McConnell (and his corrupt wife Elaine Chao), I hope he succeeds and democracy remains more or less intact.

The Democratic Party better wake up. There isn't much time left, assuming there is still enough left to effectively defend democracy.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to PD for pointing this NYT article out.

The party of shameless double standards and hypocrisy

Double standard vs hypocrisy: A double standard arises when two or more people, groups, organizations, circumstances, or events are treated differently even though they should be treated the same way. ... If correctly identified, a double standard is viewed negatively as it usually indicates the presence of hypocrisy, bias or unjust behaviors.

Can you guess which party that might be these days? These comments from a New York Times article summarize it nicely:

Donald J. Trump once thundered that the questions surrounding Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server were “bigger than Watergate.” On his 2016 presidential campaign, “where are her emails?” became a Republican rallying cry that was soon replaced with an even more threatening demand: “Lock her up.”

Now, it’s Mr. Trump who faces accusations of improperly taking government records to his private residence. But among Republicans, once so forceful about the issue of mishandling documents, there was little sign of outrage.

Several Republicans who once railed against Mrs. Clinton’s document retention practices did not respond Thursday to questions about Mr. Trump’s actions. Others who had been directly involved with investigating Mrs. Clinton declined to discuss the specifics except to suggest, without evidence, that the National Archives and Records Administration was treating Mr. Trump more harshly.

“Why is the Archives handling this differently?” Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa asked in a statement relayed through his spokeswoman.

Although the details differ, the broad strokes of the controversy over a former official’s handling of government documents were strikingly familiar, prompting a wave of Democratic anger — and some painful memories. The fact that Mrs. Clinton was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing only added to the sense of frustration among Democrats.

“There is just the hypocrisy and irony of it all,” said Karen Finney, a Democratic strategist and former Clinton aide, who added that she wasn’t particularly surprised by the new accusations against Mr. Trump. “This is who Donald Trump is. He frequently will attack people falsely for things he is actually doing.” 

The years long State Department probe of emails sent to Mrs. Clinton’s private computer server concluded with a whimper in 2019, when State Department investigators sent a report to Congress finding that “there was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.” (emphasis added 😘)

Republican double standard hypocrisy speaks for itself. Too bad that tens of millions of Americans who are trapped in authoritarian radical right echo chambers won't hear even a squeak about this, although some or most might hear some demagoguery and lies about it. Or they might not.

Christian nationalism: Origins, dogma, tactics and goals for all of us

“There are very good Christians who are compassionate and caring. And there are very bad Christians. You can say that about Islam, about Hinduism, about any faith. That is why I was saying that it was not the faith per se but the adherent. People will use their religion to justify virtually anything.” — Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Multiple online sources have written about the existence of Christian nationalism and its aggressive, toxic power. An article in The Nation (solid liberal bias, high fact accuracy), How Do We Confront White Christian Nationalism?, discusses various aspects of CN ideology and the CN political movement. The author, Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis writes:

Christian nationalism has influenced the course of American politics and policy since the founding of this country, while, in every era, moral movements have had to fight for the Bible and the terrain that goes with it. The January 6 assault on the Capitol, while only the latest expression of such old battlelines, demonstrated the threat of a modern form of Christian nationalism that has carefully built political power in government, the media, the academy, and the military over the past half-century. Today, the social forces committed to it are growing bolder and increasingly able to win mainstream support.

When I refer to “Christian nationalism,” I mean a social force that coalesces around a matrix of interlocking and interrelated values and beliefs. These include at least six key features, ....

• First, a highly exclusionary and regressive form of Christianity is the only true and valid religion.

• Second, white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity are “the natural order” of the world and must be upheld by public policy (even as Latino Protestants swell the ranks of American evangelicalism and women become important gate-keepers in communities gripped by Christian nationalism).

• Third, militarism and violence, rather than diplomacy and debate, are the correct ways for this country to exert power over other countries (as it is our God-given right to do).

• Fourth, scarcity is an economic reality of life and so we (Americans vs. the world, white people vs. people of color, natural-born citizens vs. immigrants) must compete fiercely and without pity for the greater portion of the resources available.

• Fifth, people already oppressed by systemic violence are actually to blame for the deep social and economic problems of the world—the poor for their poverty, LGBTQIA people for disease and social rupture, documented and undocumented immigrants for being “rapists and murderers” stealing “American” jobs, and so on.

• Sixth, the Bible is the source of moral authority on these (and other) social issues and should be used to justify an extremist agenda, no matter what may actually be contained in the Good Book. 

Such ideas, by the way, didn’t just spring up overnight. This false narrative has been playing a significant, if not dominant, role in our politics and economics for decades.

In the Poor People’s Campaign (which I cochair with Reverend William Barber II), we identify Christian nationalism as a key pillar of injustice in America that provides cover for a host of other ills, including systemic racism, poverty, climate change, and militarism. To combat it, we believe it’s necessary to build a multiracial moral movement that can speak directly to the needs and aspirations of poor and dispossessed Americans and fuse their many struggles into one.

A Feb. 2020 article in Washington Monthly (center-left bias, high fact accuracy), Christian Nationalists Found the Leader They’ve Been Looking For, writes: 

I had previously referred to the group [Christian nationalists] that has shown unwavering support for Trump as “white evangelicals.” But that is a bit of a misnomer, primarily because, as we saw with the article in Christianity Today calling for the president’s removal from office, there are pockets of white evangelicals who aren’t part of the movement. There are also members of other religious groups that espouse the same beliefs. For example, Catholic leaders like Attorney General William Barr and Federalist Society President Leonard Leo are major players in the Christian nationalist movement. 

Equally important for us to understand is that this movement isn’t simply about culture wars. [Quoting Katherine Stewart's 2020 book, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism]: 

It is not a social or cultural movement. It is a political movement, and its ultimate goal is power. It does not seek to add another voice to America’s pluralistic democracy but to replace our foundational democratic principles and institutions with a state grounded on a particular version of Christianity answering to what some adherents call a “biblical worldview” that also happens to serve the interests of its plutocratic funders and allied political leaders…This is not a “culture war.” It is a political war over the future of democracy. (emphasis added)

When it comes to that “biblical worldview,” we often hear about the fact that Christian nationalists oppose abortion and LGBT rights. But as Stewart explains, the movement is actually based on the idea that “the Bible is very clear about the right answers to the political issues American voters face in the twenty-first century.” For example, they also believe that the Bible:

• opposes public assistance to the poor as a matter of principle—unless the money passes through church coffers;

• opposes environmentalism and, as a matter of theology, denies the science that human contributions to greenhouse gases causes global warning;

• opposes gun regulation;

• supports strong national borders;

• favors the privatization of schools;

• favors a gender hierarchy in both the home and church, with women being submissive to men;

• favors the use of corporal punishment when discipling children;

• favors government deregulation of business and minimal workers rights; and

• favors capitalism and property rights.

For me personally, the major myth about Christian nationalists that Stewart busted was to provide some history of where this movement came from. In this case, I have to disagree with my colleague Martin Longman. Trump hasn’t corrupted his Christian supporters, he is the apex of decades of work that led up to his election. Here are just a few of the men who laid the groundwork for where we are today.

Robert Lewis Dabney

Dabney was a Presbyterian minister and theologian who was born in 1820. He was an anti-abolitionist, who argued that opposing slavery was “tantamount to rejecting Christianity.” After the Civil War, Dabney, who referred to democracy as “mobocracy,” took up the cause of his “oppressed white brethren of Virginia and neighboring states to the south.”

Their oppression consisted in, among other things, having to pay taxes to support a “pretended education to the brats of black paupers.” These unjustly persecuted white people, as Dabney saw it, were also forced to contend with “the atheistic and infidel theories of physical science.”

As Stewart notes, “Christian nationalism came of age in the American slave republic” due to the proslavery theology of men like Dabney, who fused religion with a racialized form of nationalism.

Rousas Rushdoony

The importance of Dabeny can be seen from the fact that Rushdoony, whose writings provided the core of today’s Christian nationalism, considered him a role model.

The views of the theologian who lies at the center of so much influence are not hard to state simply and clearly: Rushdoony advocated a return to “biblical” law in America. The Bible, says Rushdoony, commands Christians to exercise absolute dominion over the earth and all of its inhabitants. Women are destined by God to be subordinate to men; men are destined to be ruled by a spiritual aristocracy of right-thinking, orthodox Christian clerics; and the federal government is an agent of evil. Public education, in Rushdoony’s reading of the Bible, is a threat to civilization, for it “basically trains women to be men,” and represents “primitivism,” “chaos,” and “a vast integration into the void.”

Two of the themes that are critical for today’s Christian nationalists emerged from Dabney and Rushdoony: (1) the fight against government (ie, public) schools, and (2) the disdain for democracy in favor of a hierarchy of authoritarianism. As Stewart wrote: “the new generation of leaders promoted a theological vision that emphasized the divine origins of the existing order, which invariably involved domination and subordination.”

Paul Weyrich

Weyrich wasn’t a particularly religious man. Instead, he was a Goldwater Republican who was passionate about “anticommunism, economic libertarianism, and a distrust of the civil rights movement.” It was Weyrich’s genius to meld those commitments with Christian nationalists in order to form a new radical right.

Initially, Weyrich joined with leaders like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Bob Jones to rally around the cause of fighting against federal attempts to desegregate their schools. In that effort, we can see the groundwork that was laid by Dabney and Rushdoony.

But they had a problem. As Weyrich understood, building a new movement around the burning issue of defending the tax advantages of racist schools wasn’t going to be a viable strategy on the national stage. “Stop the tax on segregation” just wasn’t going to inspire the kind of broad-based conservative counterrevolution that Weyrich envisions. They needed an issue with a more acceptable appeal.

That is when, several years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v Wade was actually embraced by most conservative Christians, they decided to focus on the issue of abortion. The rest, as they say, is history.

One of the most important moments of the so-called “Reagan revolution” was the fact that he launched his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi with a dog-whistle shout-out to states rights. But equally important was the speech the not-so-religious presidential candidate gave at the Reunion Arena in Dallas, Texas to a crowd of 15,000 pastors and religious activists.

I know that you can’t endorse me,” he declared, but “I want you to know that I endorse you and what you are doing.” The pastors went wild. Reagan went on to air his personal doubts about the theory of evolution. Then he offered a homespun hypothetical: if he were to be trapped on an island with only one book, he said, he would take the Bible. “All of the complex questions facing us at home and abroad,” he said, “have their answer in that single book.”

With his speech in Mississippi, Reagan secured the support of southern white racists. But it was his speech in Dallas that married Christian nationalists to his candidacy and forged the bond with the Republican Party that lasts to this day. Weyrich’s vision came to fruition.

Those are some of the historical highlights that led Stewart to this conclusion.

America’s conservative movement, having morphed into a religious nationalist movement, is on a collision course with the American constitutional system. Though conservatives have long claimed to be the true champions of the Constitution — remember all that chatter during previous Republican administrations about “originalism” and “judicial restraint” — the movement that now controls the Republican Party is committed to a suite of ideas that are fundamentally incompatible with the Constitution and the Republic that the founders created under its auspices.

Mr. Trump’s presidency was not the cause of this anti-democratic movement in American politics. It was the consequence. He is the chosen instrument, not of God, but of today’s Christian nationalists, their political allies and funders, and the movement’s legal apparatus.

Paul Weyrich in a 1980 speech directly 

attacking free and fair elections

(0:41 video)

From what I can tell, most rank and file Christian nationalists do not understand that they are Christian nationalists. The CN movement is highly disciplined in the dark arts of deceit, lies, irrational emotional manipulation and hyper-partisan motivated reasoning. CN elites know that most Americans do not want to buy what they are selling. That is no different than government-hating laissez-faire capitalist elites. Most Americans are not radical Christian fundamentalists who want Old Testament Biblical law with, for example, (i) death by stoning of gay sex and adultery, and (ii) legalized overt discrimination against, and oppression of, people who God commands be discriminated against and oppressed.  

When one combines the radical CN movement with wealthy, ruthless, government-hating laissez-faire capitalist political donors, one gets the modern but deceitful, autocratic and poisonous Republican Party.

Rousas Rushdoony arguing that if humans make laws humans 

are God, but when God makes laws, God is God

(2:45 video)

Corruption in China

The New York Times writes on how China's government is doing with its anti-corruption campaign:

One by one, the officials spoke candidly on camera about how they abused their power and accumulated enormous wealth. They looked relaxed, confident and even happy as they described bribes, kickbacks and other perks of corruption.

Getting seafood boxes stuffed with $300,000. Owning a fancy house for nearly every season. Running red lights without getting tickets.

The documentary work, produced by the state, was meant to celebrate the success of the top Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s signature anti-corruption campaign. But the series seemed to prove the opposite: The party hasn’t figured out a way to stamp out corruption.

“Zero Tolerance” is the eighth in a series of shows about fighting corruption that the party has produced since 2014 — and the best journalistically and artistically.

But the show’s producers, the state broadcaster and the party’s anti-graft enforcer, seemed unaware or unconcerned that they were airing the dirtiest laundry of the Communist Party, which, as the ruling party of a one-party state, has no one to blame for the rampant corruption but itself.

At times the documentary felt like a political satire show that offered absurdly detailed yet credible insights into how the corrupted acts were conducted and what drives its senior officials. And, yes, the motivations were the usual ones: power, money and sex.

Sun Lijun, then a vice minister of public security, in 2020, 

described in the documentary how he would receive boxes of  

“seafood,” stuffed with $300,000 in cash

Here is what I learned from watching it:
1) It’s awesome to be a Chinese official: Officials can enjoy many perks, big and small; get all their whims pampered; and live a privileged lifestyle that even money can’t buy.

Wang Fuyu, formerly a deputy party secretary in Hainan Province and later in Guizhou Province, asked businesspeople to buy him houses in three cities for different seasons: winter on tropical Hainan Island, summer in the cool Guizhou Plateau, and spring and fall in the southern city of Shenzhen. An avid golfer, he had a mansion on a golf course and could start swinging as soon as he stepped out of his door.

2) It’s all in the family: The officials weren’t usually directly involved. A lot of times their wives, children and siblings acted on their behalf by taking the bribes or channeling them through shell companies.

Sons of two senior officials in Inner Mongolia set up a coal company that had no staff, capital or real business activities. Their only “work” was to sign contracts that let them buy coal at low prices and sell it at high ones.

3) Power is money: The Chinese government has a lot of say in the economy because it owns almost all the land, natural resources and banks. Officials, in turn, have enormous power to pick winners and losers at their whim, leaving a lot of room for corruption.

Some of the officials saw nothing wrong with the power-for-money arrangement.

“I always felt that they owed me,” Liu Guoqiang, former vice governor of northeastern Liaoning Province, said of the businesspeople who bribed him. “I helped them growing from small to big. They gave me money because they were genuinely grateful.” He accepted bribes worth $55 million. (Ahh, the awesome power of the human mind to rationalize anything inconvenient, including blatant corruption) (emphasis added)

Not surprisingly, some of the public isn't reacting the way the Chinese government expected. So, it has started censoring the documentary. One observant and understandably grumpy Chinese citizen, a little tater, commented: “I don’t understand why little potatoes like us should watch ‘Zero Tolerance.’ Is it to remind us how poor and pathetic our lives are?” 

Good question comrade tater tot! Hm, maybe this documentary ought to be censored. It's got some capitalist microaggressions in it!

Why mention Chinese government corruption 

when we are awash in it here?

Good question comrades! I mention Chinese government corruption because it is dead-on relevant to the US. The underlying drivers of corruption and its persistence, power, money and sex, are the same in the US government as they are in the Chinese government. Shocking as this revelation may be to many self-righteous ideologues, but few cynics, humans are human in both the US and China. That is especially true for men with raging libidos. 

Power + testosterone = bad combination.

Power + wealth + testosterone = worse combination.

The thought keeps coming back that men are often bad at leadership and women would probably do better on balance. That is because women might not think and act with their sex hormones and nasty bits nearly as much as inherently defective men and their nasty bits.

Power + estrogen ± wealth = unknown combination.

Also note the same mental trait of rationalizing and justifying the blatantly irrational and unjustifiable, e.g., “I always felt that they owed me.” That is a core human cognitive biology trait. It is rampant among ideologues and other people simply lusting after power and/or wealth. That is probably also true for most demagogues, autocrats, plutocrats, narcissists, religious zealots, crackpots, and the like (QAnon, the GOP, the ex-president, Mitch McConnell, Young Earthers, Flat Earthers, Cube-shape Earthers, etc.).

The take home lesson here: With few exceptions, humans are going to be human, especially powerful and/or wealthy humans, no matter how often or self-righteously they deny it. Or as federal court judge Richard Posner once astutely quipped: I do not myself believe that many people do things because they think they are the right thing to do . . . . I do not think that knowledge of what is morally right is motivational in any serious sense for anyone except a handful of saints.

Jeez, not even all the saints can break away from what they are by their evolutionary heritage and biology.

Campaign season heats up and probably lots of folks are going to be uncomfortable

The scrappy challenger: Gary Chambers Jr.

The unbeatable incumbent: Senator John Kennedy

In a cannon blast at the status quo, Louisiana resident Gary Chambers Jr. has started his campaign for US Senate, in the feeble hope of unseating the unseatable Republican Sen. John Kennedy. At least the campaign will be interesting. This 1 minute video gives the flavor that Chambers brings to the race.

A Rolling Stone article discusses the Chambers campaign:

Gary Chambers Jr.’s first campaign ad was short and simple: The Louisiana Senate Candidate alone, in a park in New Orleans, sitting in a leather armchair, smoking a massive blunt. The ad landed him a wave of press, all of which, he told Rolling Stone, were part of an attempt to prove that the race to unseat incumbent Republican Sen. John Kennedy was “winnable.”

Now, Chambers is back with more fuel for the viral-marketing fire. In a new ad titled “Scars and Bars,” a first look at which was provided exclusively to Rolling Stone, he douses a Confederate battle flag in gasoline before lighting it on fire. The gesture makes for a striking image on its own, but like the first ad’s stark shots of Chambers smoking in New Orleans City Park, it’s accompanied by a voiceover monologue that pulls no punches.

“Here in Louisiana and all over the South, Jim Crow never really left,” Chambers says, before rattling off statistics about the inequities Black Americans face in his state and across the country. “Our system isn’t broken — it’s designed to do what it’s doing: produce measurable inequity.”

Chambers is no stranger to pushing back against the legacy of the Confederacy. One of his first brushes with public activism — and viral fame — came in 2020 when he delivered a fiery speech at a Baton Rouge school board meeting, castigating public officials who resisted changing the name of the former Robert E. Lee High School.

“I’m from North Baton Rouge, born and raised. It’s the majority Black side of town. I grew up middle class Black, and as I got older I started watching my community be divested in,” Chambers told Rolling Stone last month, describing his turn to social activism and politics.

One can see where a lot of psychological discomfort and fear will be coming from in this campaign.