Personal thoughts: Is it even possible to debate demagoguery?

Demagoguery (official definition): political activity or practices that seek support by appealing to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than by using rational argument

Demagoguery (Germaine definition): any political, religious, commercial or other activity or practices that seek support by playing on and/or appealing to the ignorance, desires and/or prejudices of people rather than by using rational argument; demagoguery usually relies significantly or mostly on lies, slanders, irrational emotional manipulation, flawed motivated reasoning, logic fallacies, etc.; relevant inconvenient facts, truths and sound reasoning are usually ignored, denied or distorted into an appearance of false insignificance or false irrelevance

Way back in 2014, when cowboys with six shooters were duking it out against cattle rustling T. rex lizards, Bill Nye the science guy publicly debated young Earth believer Tom Ham, a crackpot Christian nationalist. He is a demagogue by Germaine's definition. Ham, the founder and chief executive officer of Young Earth creationist ministry and Answers in Genesis, challenged Nye to debate the question "Is Creation A Viable Model of Origins?" The debate was held at Ham's "Creation Museum" in Petersburg, Kentucky.

Before the debate, Team R&R (reality and reason) urged Nye not to debate because there was nothing to debate. Many in the scientific community criticized Nye's decision to debate, arguing that it lent undue credibility to the creationist worldview. Ham argued crackpottery like cowboys duking it out with dinosaurs in the wild, wild West. Obviously, Team R&R had a point. But Nye debated anyway. As expected, things ended just as they started. Minds did not change. But, Ham did get some publicity for his "museum" and probably made some extra money.

Rock solid proof that cowboys and 

dinosaurs co-existed in the 1800s

Over the years, it slowly dawned that, like the Nye-Ham nonsense, debating demagoguery is pointless, but probably unavoidable in most situations. Such debates are arguably more harmful than beneficial as Team R&R argued. But, maybe not as harmful as not engaging with demagoguery at all. There is nothing to debate when demagogues deny or distort important facts, resort to flawed reasoning and so forth. But they are there, influencing public opinion, well funded, and not going away.

Much (most?) of the harm arises from false balancing (false equivalence, bothsidesism). By simply debating with a demagogue, the demagogue's false assertions (lies), flawed reasoning and whatnot are treated with seriousness and respect they do not deserve. In the hands of a skilled demagogue, false balancing can feel or seem like rational thinking, especially when it appeals to prejudices, comforting false beliefs and the like. 

We easily mistake psychological comfort for rationality, i.e., nonsense has to be rational because it feels so right. But when relevant facts and the reasoning applied to them heavily favor one side and heavily undermines the other, a basis for rationality just isn't there. But the basis for false belief is still there, i.e., people still want to feel good about themselves and their beliefs, even when there is no basis for it. That never goes away. That is the demagogue's target.

The problem is that by ignoring the demagogue and not trying to counter the lies and nonsense, Team R&R leaves the public opinion playing field uncontested for the demagogues to slime all over. Demagoguery is rampant in major issues including climate change, climate regulations, gun regulations, the scope and meaning of the Constitution, civil liberties, and abortion. 

Slimed by demagoguery &

the ground gets slippery

I suppose little or none of this is new to most folks here at Dissident Politics. It's all come up multiple times. Guess it doesn't hurt to repeat some things. 

Doxxing a fascist billionaire

A day or two ago our beer boofing, sexual predator Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh was disgruntled when protestors turned up outside the restaurant he was having dinner at. The protests disrupted dissert and Bretty-poo left the restaurant in a huff-snit. 

AOC was dismayed at the protests, musing that protesters should have at least let him eat cake.

Anyway, the restaurant in DC where this happened was a Morton's steak house. The restaurant issued a public statement saying that the beer boofer had a "right" to eat dinner without protestors disturbing his equanimity or the restaurant's feng-shui. Now the restaurant is being flooded with fake reservations and irate messages. Poor Morton's. Nah, not really. 

Morton's is one of those grossly overpriced cow and booze houses with dark stained wood paneling, low lights, thick carpets, comfy stuffed chairs and cute young waitresses. I know because over the years I've been to a Morton's for several business dinners. I didn't know who owned it or what he was.

One observer commented:

Morton's is a subsidiary of Landry's. It's owned by Tillman Fertitta, a billionaire who also owns the NBA Houston Rockets (and has close ties to the NFL Houston Texans [and Donald T****]).

These are related restaurants/hotels/etc. in his corporate org if you'd like to avoid giving them your money/business:

• Bubba Gump Shrimp Company

• Cadillac Bar

• Landry's, Inc.

• Landry's Seafood

• Rainforest Cafe

• The Golden Nugget Hotel and Casinos

• McCormick & Schmick's Seafood & Steaks

• Saltgrass Steak House

• Claim Jumper

• Houlihan's

• Joe's Crab Shack

• Del Frisco's

• Chart House

• The Oceanaire

• Mastro's Restaurants

• The Palm

• Grotto Restaurants

• The Boathouse Restaurants

• Vic & Anthony's Steakhouse

• Brenner's on the Bayou

• La Griglia

• Willie G's Seafood & Steaks

• EMM group (Catch Restaurants)

• B.R. Guest restaurant group (owns 15 large Manhattan places, including five Dos Caminos, two Strip House steak joints, Blue Water Grill and Ruby Foo’s)

• Restaurants Unlimited, Inc. (includes Skates on the Bay, Portland City Grill, Manzana Grill, Palisade, Cutters Crabhouse, Stanford's, Henry's Tavern, Kincaid's, Palomino Restaurant & Bar and Portland Seafood Company)

• Kemah Boardwalk

• Galveston Island Historic Pleasure Pier

• Houston, Denver and Nashville Downtown Aquariums

• Waitr (online delivery app)

• several hotels in the Houston, TX area

One source reports that Rocket guards James Harden and Russell Westbrook may want out of Houston is because they have a problem with Fertitta’s support of T****.

If you are a pro-democracy patriot and happen to have a choice, consider choosing to not patronize any of Fertitta's establishments. He supports T**** and by implication, fascism.

Q: Can a person support T**** and not be a fascist in some form to some non-trivial extent?

Billionaire T**** supporter Tilman Fertitta

Legal expert analysis: The fascist Republican Party legal movement

Our thesis may be simply stated: basic democratic theory requires that there be knowledge not only of who governs but of how policy decisions are made. .... We maintain that the secrecy which pervades Congress, the executive branch and courts is itself the enemy. .... For all we know, the justices engage in some sort of latter-day intellectual haruspication, followed by the assignment of someone to write an opinion to explain, justify or rationalize the decision so reached. .... That the opinion(s) cannot be fully persuasive, or at times even partially so, is a matter of common knowledge among those who make their living following Court proclamations. -- AS Miller and DS Sastry, Secrecy and the Supreme Court: On the Need for Piercing the Red Velour Curtain, 1973, In this paper, Miller and Sastry bitterly criticize the court’s practice of deciding a case first, then coming up with a legal rational to justify the result. That is the opposite of how the law is supposed to work. Cases are supposed to be decided based on how the facts of the case fit with legal principles and doctrines, not the opposite way around. The court vehemently claims it works as intended, but that is not true especially with the current, hyper-partisan, radical right Supreme Court. On this point, the court has been a big fat liar for decades. The court relied heavily on unwarranted and unjustified secrecy to hide its partisanship, sloppiness and laziness, and to deny inconvenient facts and truths as needed.

Q: How would that court decide cases?

A: The right way, or else

(No, this is not an allegation that the fascist  

Republicans on the Supreme Court are Nazis)

Since congress is likely to stay gridlocked for a long time, the Supreme Court is the key place in federal government where Republican Party fascism can exert power and rapidly advance its anti-democratic agenda. In an opinion piece, Adrian Vermeule, the Ralph S. Tyler Jr. professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, gives his analysis of the current conservative legal movement. 

The key point he argues is that there is no conservative legal movement other than outcomes of cases. The Republican fascists on the court just make rationales up to defend their decisions as “constitutional” for whatever reason(s) they can dream up. If Originalism fits, then that will be the basis of the court’s “rational.” If the court says it decides because there is an “extraordinary case” and the court had to apply a “different approach” than the ordinary legal principles, that is how cases will be decided. In other words, the Republican fascists know in advance exactly what outcomes they want from each case they pick up and decide it. Once they know what decision will be, the radicals then make up the reasoning to support it. 

Vermeule relies heavily the recent Supreme Court decision that guts the authority of the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide to exemplify the facts and his reasoning based thereon. This analysis is really interesting and important, so I include most of his essay here. Vermeule writes in the Washington Post:

There is no conservative legal movement

Originalism, textualism and judicial restraint all got short shrift in this term’s major environmental-regulations decision.

On the last day of the Supreme Court’s term, in a case called West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, the Court declared that the Clean Air Act does not clearly authorize the EPA to create a Clean Power Plan — in other words, to set standards for emissions from existing power plants with a view to encouraging “generation shifting” of electricity production toward sources that emit less carbon dioxide. If this does not sound like the stuff of great events, it was made so by the court’s approach to the case. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, announced expressly, for the first time, that the court would apply a “major questions doctrine.” According to the majority, the doctrine holds that in “extraordinary cases” the court will apply a “different approach” than the ordinary legal principles governing the interpretation of statutes. Instead, it will demand clear congressional authorization for agency action that is, in the judges’ view, “highly consequential,” posing questions of “economic and political significance.”

Commentators rushed to discuss the significance of West Virginia v. EPA for the conservative legal movement, to which they assumed the justices in the majority belong, perhaps because the court limited abortion rights and strengthened gun rights in the same term. But that framing rests on an error: In reality, as this case makes clear, there is no conservative legal movement, at least if legal conservatism is defined by jurisprudential methods rather than a collection of results. West Virginia v. EPA illustrates that every last methodological tenet professed by the movement will be downplayed, qualified or abandoned when the chance arises to limit the regulatory authority of the federal agencies, especially in environmental matters.

The conservative legal movement distinguishes itself from other approaches by declaring itself united not around “results-oriented jurisprudence” but rather around a set of supposedly neutral methods for interpreting legal texts. Conservative jurisprudence — again, as advertised — has four pillars: originalism, textualism, traditionalism and judicial restraint. Although different conservatives emphasize one or the other approach, all are staples of Federalist Society events and lauded in the opinions of conservative justices.

It is grimly hilarious, then, that the court’s opinion in West Virginia v. EPA follows none of these methods. It is not an “originalist” opinion. Originalism purports to ground the interpretation of legal texts in the original public meaning as understood by the founding generation, for constitutional provisions, or in the original public meaning of enacted statutes. As Justice Neil M. Gorsuch recently wrote in Bostock v. Clayton County, which recognized sexual orientation and gender identity as protected categories under federal civil rights law, “this Court normally interprets a statute in accord with the ordinary public meaning of its terms at the time of its enactment.” In West Virginia v. EPA, however, neither the majority nor Gorsuch’s concurrence shows any interest in the original context or public understanding of the Clean Air Act provisions enacted in 1970 — perhaps because, as the court put it soon afterward in 1976, those provisions were widely understood to create a “drastic remedy.” In West Virginia v. EPA, the original understanding of the relevant provisions is absent without leave.

The court briefly, and Gorsuch laboriously, tried to ground the major questions doctrine in the separation of powers and the “nondelegation doctrine,” a putative constitutional principle which holds that Congress may not grant rulemaking authority to the executive in excessively broad or discretionary terms. On this view, the major questions doctrine is used to construe statutes narrowly to avoid a potential question of constitutionally invalid delegation. Requiring clear congressional authorization for important agency action, the argument runs, represents an attempt to implement the separation of powers at the level of statutory interpretation rather than constitutional law.

The problem, from an originalist standpoint, is that there is no constitutional question to avoid; the originalist credentials of the nondelegation doctrine are shockingly thin. Careful scholarship has confirmed the thesis that the nondelegation doctrine was essentially nonexistent during the founding era, in which the first Congress made broad delegations to the executive in a variety of areas, including military service, territorial government and relations with Indian tribes.

The doctrine is basically a creation of the Supreme Court in the later 19th century, and even then it did not control the outcomes of cases; the court has only twice in its entire history applied the doctrine as a matter of constitutional law, invalidating the central components of the New Deal’s National Industrial Recovery Act in 1935 — some 150 years after the Constitution’s structural provisions were written. Although Gorsuch’s concurrence tries to blur the nondelegation doctrine’s desperate lack of originalist credentials with a long string of citations to academic works, those arguments mainly eschew historical particulars in favor of abstract constitutional theory, and in the end the facts of the founding era are what they are: In the vast landscape of contemporary documents, total mentions of anything like a nondelegation principle would take up less space than an op-ed. Nondelegation is an invented tradition.

The decision is also not textualist, as Justice Elena Kagan observed in a crushing dissent. Textualism says that the ordinary meaning of statutory text is the law, but the majority‘s statutory analysis is cursory, and that of Gorsuch basically nonexistent. The court briefly claims that the major questions doctrine captures the ordinary understanding of Congress in situations where agency action has “economic and political significance.” (What agency action doesn’t?) But the court itself also makes a point of saying that the doctrine counsels against “a reading of a statute that would, under more ‘ordinary’ circumstances, be upheld.” The only cases in which the doctrine possibly makes a difference arise when the courts believe that a “highly consequential” issue warrants an extraordinary override of ordinary statutory meaning.

Finally, West Virginia v. EPA is not “restrained” in any possible sense. At the level of procedure, the court decided a case in which, remarkably, no agency rule existed. The Clean Power Plan had been repealed by the Trump administration, and the Biden administration had asked the lower courts not to reinstate it. Nonetheless, the justices felt that there was a sufficient threat that EPA might try to create such a rule in the future. Any more such restraint, and the court will end up dispensing with actual cases and controversies altogether in favor of pronouncing on abstract hypotheticals.

On the merits, the court insists, again and again, that the doctrine applies when cases are “extraordinary.” But this is not only to admit, but indeed to proudly proclaim, that this is a doctrine ungoverned by ordinary legal principles. Some legal doctrines are unpredictable in application; here unpredictability is built into the essence of the doctrine itself. Who knows when the court, or for that matter any one of the nation’s 700 district judges, will deem a case “extraordinary” and shut down a national federal regulatory program? Moreover, despite insisting that major questions cases are extraordinary, the court inconsistently went on to describe them as arising “from all corners of the administrative state” — a clear signal that the court expects its anti-regulatory approach to be routinely invoked in the future. The extraordinary has become ordinary. The doctrine displays the same vagueness of standards that the court finds objectionable, under the nondelegation rubric, when authority is granted to agencies. What is constitutional overreach for unelected bureaucrats in the agencies is constitutional virtue for the unelected bureaucrats on the bench. Whatever this is, judicial restraint it is not.

So, there you have it legal analysis fans. The Republican Supreme Court just makes things up to get the decisions it wants. There is essentially no legal principle in it at all. It is almost completely outcome driven, not principles of law driven. 

The court decides the case and then dreams up a rational to support the decision. That is exactly what Miller and Sastry bitterly criticized in 1973. The difference between 1973 and 2022 is that the Republicans on the 2022 court are anti-democratic, fascist, radical Christian nationalist and radical laissez-faire capitalist. The judges back in 1973 weren't as hostile to democracy and principled rule of law as the six radical Republican extremists. 

Those six yahoos are fixin’ to fix this country as they see fit. Most of us are not going to like what we are going to get. But elite Republican Party politicians and supporters are going to love what is coming their way, namely even greater amounts of wealth and power than they possess now.

Analysis of what causes civil wars

Barbara Walter, UCSD, political science professor

Civil war expert at UCSD, Barbara Walter (political science professor) and colleagues have been using computers to analyze mountains of data related to 200 major armed conflicts that occurred since 1946. Their analysis points to two likely main causes of a country ready for civil war. 

One is the presence of a political state of affairs called anocracy. Anocracy is politics and government characterized by both democracy and autocracy (one-person dictatorship). Countries that are solidly democratic or solidly autocratic tend not to experience civil wars or major armed conflicts. The blended state of affairs is destabilizing and polarizing.

The second factor is whether a major political party bases its politics almost exclusively on ethnic, religious and/or racial identity identity politics. It is not a matter of being a communist, socialist, capitalist, fascist, liberal or conservative. What polarizes and destabilizes is political identity and the means to build it into a tribe or cult. 

For years, the US was solidly democratic. Then in recent times it became significantly anocratic. At the same time, the Republican Party intensified its reliance on identity politics. An interview with Walters the Washington Post published includes these comments:

The quintessential example of this is what happened in the former Yugoslavia.

My dad is from Germany. He was born in 1932 and lived through the war there, and he emigrated here in 1958. He had been a Republican his whole life, you know; we had the Reagan calendar in the kitchen every year.

And starting in early 2016, I would go home to visit, and my dad — he doesn’t agitate easily, but he was so agitated. All he wanted to do was talk about Trump and what he was seeing happening. He was really nervous. It was almost visceral — like, he was reliving the past. Every time I’d go home, he was just, like, “Please tell me Trump’s not going to win.” And I would tell him, “Dad, Trump is not going to win.” And he’s just, like, “I don’t believe you; I saw this once before. And I’m seeing it again, and the Republicans, they’re just falling in lockstep behind him.” He was so nervous.

I remember saying: “Dad, what’s really different about America today from Germany in the 1930s is that our democracy is really strong. Our institutions are strong. So, even if you had a Trump come into power, the institutions would hold strong.” Of course, then Trump won. We would have these conversations where my dad would draw all these parallels. The brownshirts and the attacks on the media and the attacks on education and on books. And he’s just, like, I’m seeing it. I’m seeing it all again here. And that’s really what shook me out of my complacency, that here was this man who is very well educated and astute, and he was shaking with fear. And I was like, Am I being naive to think that we’re different?

That’s when I started to follow the data. And then, watching what happened to the Republican Party really was the bigger surprise — that, wow, they’re doubling down on this almost white supremacist strategy. That’s a losing strategy in a democracy. So why would they do that? Okay, it’s worked for them since the ’60s and ’70s, but you can’t turn back demographics. And then I was like, Oh my gosh. The only way this is a winning strategy is if you begin to weaken the institutions; this is the pattern we see in other countries. And, as an American citizen I’m like, These two factors are emerging here, and people don’t know.

So I gave a talk at UCSD about this — and it was a complete bomb. Not only did it fall flat, but people were hostile. You know, How dare you say this? This is not going to happen. This is fearmongering. I remember leaving just really despondent, thinking: Wow, I was so naive to think that, if it’s true, and if it’s based on hard evidence, people will be receptive to it. You know, how do you get the message across if people don’t want to hear it? If they’re not ready for it.  

I didn’t do a great job framing it initially, that when people think about civil war, they think about the first civil war. And in their mind, that’s what a second one would look like. And, of course, that’s not the case at all. So part of it was just helping people conceptualize what a 21st-century civil war against a really powerful government might look like.

After January 6th of last year, people were asking me, “Aren’t you horrified?” “Isn’t this terrible?” “What do you think?” And, first of all, I wasn’t surprised, right? People who study this, we’ve been seeing these groups have been around now for over 10 years. They’ve been growing. I know that they’re training. They’ve been in the shadows, but we know about them. I wasn’t surprised.

The biggest emotion was just relief, actually. It was just, Oh my gosh, this is a gift. Because it’s bringing it out into the public eye in the most obvious way. And the result has to be that we can’t deny or ignore that we have a problem. Because it’s right there before us. And what has been surprising, actually, is how hard the Republican Party has worked to continue to deny it and to create this smokescreen — and in many respects, how effective that’s been, at least among their supporters. Wow: Even the most public act of insurrection, probably a treasonous act that 10, 20 years ago would have just cut to the heart of every American, there are still real attempts to deny it. But it was a gift because it brought this cancer that those of us who have been studying it, have been watching it growing, it brought it out into the open.  

I can’t say when it’s going to happen. I think it’s really important for people to understand that countries that have these two factors, who get put on this watch list, have a little bit less than a 4 percent annual risk of civil war. That seems really small, but it’s not. It means that, every year that those two factors continue, the risk increases.

Walter sees what me and many others saw on 1/6, (i) a coup attempt, and (ii) a Republican Party and republican president that openly supported it. The GOP and ex-president still openly support it. They demagogue their treason it by calling it "legitimate political discourse." 

To a large extent, I feel vindicated in my deep concerns for the poor state of American democracy, blatant disrespect for truth by the radical right, and weakening civil liberties and rule of law. 

Germaine takes a stab at estimating the costs of climate change

The cost of climate change is never mentioned by pro-pollution interests and ideologues. That is because they demagogue the issue instead of debating it. Like most other contested issues in politics, radical right conservatives and fascists no longer debate, assuming they ever did. Instead, they demagogue because they cannot win arguments on the merits. 

Over the last couple of months, various sources have been increasingly reporting on costs of climate change and environmental damage. Presumably, that increased focus on cost is due to the fact that the costs are starting to become very painful for increasing numbers of people. For example, the AP writes:

Every day billions of people depend on wild flora and fauna to obtain food, medicine and energy. But a new United Nations-backed report says that overexploitation, climate change, pollution and deforestation are pushing one million species towards extinction.

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services - or IPBES - report said Friday that unless humankind improves the sustainable use of nature, the Earth is on its way to losing 12% of its wild tree species, over a thousand wild mammal species and almost 450 species of sharks and rays, among other irreparable harm.

Humans use about 50,000 wild species routinely and 1 out of 5 people of the world’s 7.9 billion population depend on those species for food and income, the report said. 1 in 3 people rely on fuel wood for cooking, the number even higher in Africa.

For decades, pro-pollution interests including the Republican Party, Exxon-Mobile, Koch Industries Dow Chemical Company and other big pro-pollution corporations and interests have successfully blocked efforts to acknowledge climate change, and to deal with it. An important and effective part of their demagoguery is to ignore costs when possible, or downplay or deny them when they cannot weasel out of the question. Usually they weasel out, because (i) the mainstream media is lame at best and co-opted or complicit at worst, and/or (ii) the polluters and their defenders hide behind a massive shield of silence and opacity. That's just laissez-faire capitalism doing its thing as usual.

Big pile of waste plastic

The subjectivity of environmental and climate value or cost

Two other factors that favor the polluters are (1) perceptions of value and costs can be and have been demagogued and skewed to favor polluters, and (2) the fact that humans inherently value many things very differently. That is especially true when demagoguery has skewed perceptions of value and cost to favor the people and interests who benefit. 

We all remember how hard affected interests howled in outrage about the worthlessness of the spotted owl in the Northwest and the snail darter fish in central California. The species were condemned as worthless and costing waaay too much to save. Defenses of the species back then were pretty weak. These days, defenses of threatened species are weaker than they were then.

As a start to realign perceptions of value and costs, here is Germaine's list of costs for various environmental damages from carbon dioxide and other forms of pollution. These are top of head personal estimates. Exxon-Mobile and Koch Industries would no doubt howl in outrage, but they are mostly demagogic crooks and liars who profit from polluting our environment. They lie about it.

Death of a human, e.g., from excessive heat exposure: $15 million

Extinction of a valued plant or mammal species: $8-10 trillion 

Extinction of a less than valued plant or mammal species: $4-6 trillion  

Extinction of a valued insect species, e.g., bees: $4-6 trillion 

Extinction of a less than valued insect species: $2-3 trillion  

Loss of clear air, with frequent haze: $15 trillion

Dirty air and associated injury and human deaths: $20 trillion

Plastic in the environment: $30 trillion

Sea level rise: $15 trillion per inch

Drought in the American Southwest $6-8 trillion 

Availability of unregulated polluting energy and plastics: $100-200 trillion

Prevention of efforts to deal with climate change by pro-pollution interests: $100-200 trillion

Things like clear air might not come to mind as something of any value. But it has serious value to me. I remember the 1950s and 1960s when the air was usually clearer than today. I really miss days when the air is clear. I really, really like clear air.

The effectiveness of pro-pollution interests to keep on polluting is also a real cost. Obviously polluters would not see it that way, but again, they are crooks and liars. They advocate their interests based on demagoguery and lies. I advocate mine based on what I believe to be facts, reason and my own values, including concern for the public interest. 

Q: Is Germaine off his rocker by attaching high costs to various kinds of environmental damage, or is this at least a reasonable way to start to rethink environmental damage?

Golly, that is a big pile of waste plastic and 

most of it, ~91%, is headed for the landfill, the ocean, lakes, etc.

News from Redstatelandia: America's future unfolds today

Given where the US is headed, brief news updates from red states seem to be in order. These fiddly bits entertain us as fascism slowly creeps over the land and poisons everything it touches.

First off, is Arizona and its move toward a police state. This one starts slowly, but over time one can expect the law to harden into fascist police state brutality. Azcentral writes:

People will no longer be allowed to take close-range recordings of Arizona police under a new bill signed into law by Gov. Doug Ducey on Wednesday. House Bill 2319, sponsored by Rep. John Kavanagh, makes it illegal for anyone within 8 feet of law enforcement activity to record police. Violators could face a misdemeanor, but only after being verbally warned and continuing to record anyway.

The farther away people are kept, the less evidence of policy brutality their videos will contain. The original draft law had the limit at 15 feet, but it got changed to 8. It will take some years to harden this law based on to 1st Amendment concerns. The Supreme Court will need to nibble away at the 1st by creating exceptions for police activity.

We all knew this was coming. From South Carolina, a proud leader in fascism, we have more abortion restrictions on the horizon. From the NYT:

Nearly two weeks after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion established by Roe v. Wade, South Carolina lawmakers became the first to consider more restrictive legislation. The state had already decided to outlaw abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy. But on Thursday its legislature, now empowered to consider even greater restrictions, offered the first glimpse of a state taking early steps into a post-Roe America.

 

Not quite yet there feller, hold yer horses

Abortion is going to be murder

The red state stampede to be the most fascist about abortion is on. Big herds of red state legislators states are thundering ahead in a massive cloud of thick dust. The race is on to be the first and worst. It will be of some interest to those with inquiring minds to see the unintended consequences unfold, including lives destroyed.

From Wisconsin he have an update on fascist election subversion:

A divided Wisconsin Supreme Court barred the use of most ballot drop boxes on Friday and ruled voters could not give their completed absentee ballots to others to return on their behalf, a practice that some conservatives disparage as “ballot harvesting.” For years, ballot drop boxes were used without controversy across Wisconsin. Election clerks greatly expanded their use in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic as absentee voting hit unprecedented levels.

That speaks for itself. The question is how effective will it be at boosting Republican votes while suppressing Democratic votes? That is the intent.

Next is a fun snippet from federal Redstatelandia. This is about how the IRS will be turned into a tool to obliterate those darned anti-fascists, not to be confused with Antifa people. Well, maybe there will be some comingling. Whatever. The NYT writes about the IRS tax audit to two people that T**** hated and wanted to see dead, so they got the next best thing just short of outright murder 😊, an intense IRS tax audit 😵‍💫:

How Unlikely Is It That the Audits of Comey and McCabe Were a Coincidence? A Statistical Exploration. The chances are minuscule. But minuscule is not zero.

But gee whiz, it really was just a coincidence!

Honest!!

In the statistical analysis, there were other ways of calculating how likely it was that T**** had sicked the IRS on McCabe and Comey.[1] The odds of random chance at play were always so small that one can be about as certain as reasonably possible that the IRS intentionally targeted those two yahoos because T**** told it to do that. That's just how fascists do politics. Nixon tried to do the same fascist thing. But way back then, Republican politicians still had some respect for democracy, truth, the rule of law and the Constitution. Those days are gone and not coming back.

There's your exciting update from Redstatelandia. The folks there want to succeed from the Onion, er, Union. Maybe it's time to let 'em go? 

Footnote: 

1. It is hard to have sympathy for Comey. He was the Republican jackass that announced an FBI investigation of Hillary about a week before the 2016 election. IMO, that was a necessary factor in Clinton's loss to T**** (necessary but alone not sufficient). Naturally, Comey's devastating investigation fizzled into the nothingburger it always was. That left Clinton grievously wounded just days before the election. 

Some time after his fascist Republican investigation fiasco, Comey got pensive and philosophical and whatnot. His idiotic reaction to what he did was something stupid about like this:

Gee willikers, golly and shucks. I hope I didn't have any effect on the election. That would have been awful if it hurt Hillary. Gosh, dang and darn. That would have been not good. I'm all aflutter just thinking about it! Jeez. mumble . . . . mumble . . . . mumble

Lame Republican crap like that is enough to inspire one to buy an AR-15 (or two) and a few thousand rounds of ammo. For self-defense, of course. Peace out man! 

Peace out 2022

It's been real!