Views From the Moderate Democrat About 2024

 Back in 2016, many on the left were looking for an alternative to Hillary Clinton based on her long time in the Beltway, her perceived self-dealing, and an air she exuded that she deserved the title of the presidency, as opposed to someone with the character to be worthy of that title.

When Donald Trump came on the scene, he was something different and gave many Americans the chance to try something outside the box. After four years, however, it became apparent to the left that whatever character flaws Clinton had were minor in comparison to the complete lack of morality of Trump as leader of the United States.

For the left in 2020, it was "anyone but Trump," and the turnout in that election from the left put on full display the danger that was perceived in a second Donald Trump term.

As we approach 2024, many on the left are starting to make it known by commenting on articles pertaining to the upcoming election how they plan to cast their vote. Both parties should take note of the leanings of the moderate voters.

In a recent call to donors, Florida governor Ron DeSantis made the comment that there are three viable options for 2024, but only two are electable—himself and Joe Biden. Based on that story, many moderates from the left had some things to say in response to his belief:

I'm going to do the Republicans voters a big favor. Speaking as a person that voted for Joe Biden last election. I'm really not thrilled with voting the same way, but if all the right has to offer is Trump and DeSantis, I'm voting Joe Biden. The Republicans have to get a candidate that speaks to more of the voting public than these two extremists you have now. As a Democrat, I'm not against voting for Republican, but there is no way I'm going to vote for Trump or DeSantis or someone like Ted Cruz , Pence or Nikki—it has to be someone with some common sense that's running on a policy to help Americans not divide America. I want to hear conversation about the border, about inflation, about what we're going to do about gas prices and less conversation about transgenders and gay people and drag queens which can come after an individual is voted in the office. But running on these policies means nothing to me or my bank account and I'm going to vote for the person that personally makes my life better.

 In response to this thought, a few others chimed in:

That makes no sense. The kind of Republican you're speaking of has no shot in today's Republican primary. Thirty years of Fox News and conservative media has filled them with hate/anger and radicalized them to varying degrees. If you speak of Democrats as fellow Americans that need to be challenged but worked with, they think you're a RINO and drum you out of the party. They only want someone extreme who thinks of Democrats as an enemy to be destroyed. Give it up, that Republican party is dead and never coming back. The remaining common sense Republicans who want to work together just haven't been drummed out yet, but they will.

 Another moderate Democrat sees things in a similar manner:

I'm along the same thinking. I would have crossed over for Kasich in 2016, but any Republican that stands up to Trump's base gets forced out of the party or has zero chance to secure the nomination. The kind of Republican that has the backbone to stand up for what is right instead of pandering to the far-right is just very rare in today's GOP. Until the scourge of Trumpism is gone, it's all blue, all day.

 

The Path to the Nomination

The problem that DeSantis faces is that in order to win the nomination from the GOP, he believes he has to pander to Trump's base and "out-Trump" Trump himself. This is looking like a major miscalculation—the reason people liked DeSantis in the first place was that he appeared more normal than Trump.

Instead, what he has done is show people that he is cut from the same mold as Trump and would be an eerily similar version of what people voted out of office in 2020. His campaign slogan might as well be "Trumpism that is popular in Florida."

His extreme positions as governor on education, the LGBQT+ community, and abortion have alienated many moderates and independents already, as seen in this comment:

DeSantis shouldn't count himself. He has burnt himself with many moderate Republicans, Independents, Black people, LGBT people and the teachers in K-12 and colleges/universities as well as the businesspeople. His name already is tarred.

Others are beginning to come up with monikers for how they see Ron DeSantis and not many are flattering.

Neither Deranged Donald nor the Florida Fuehrer will be allowed anywhere near our White House.

Ron DeExtremist is doing a great job alienating potential voters and making even more political adversaries.

DeFascist has a snowballs chance just like Trump.

DeSantis' Leadership Style

After a term in office, the DeSantis leadership style might be popular with Floridians, but others are not as enamored by him:

DeSantis is running on a more extreme platform than Trump. He just behaves less loudly, less flamboyantly and watches his speech more carefully. Pretty much the same as Trump at the core but probably more authoritarian as he seems obsessed with one subject—while Florida has multiple issues to focus on—and wants to want to run Florida as his own "personal kingdom." Being less raucous doesn't make a politician less tyrannical.

The fact that Disney is eating his lunch in the political arena, and the fact that he can't handle the reality and keeps trying more petty retaliation, is turning off many voters. His misstep in talking about Ukraine was also noted by voters, including those from his own party that are clearly on the side of democracy as it pertains to foreign nations, as stated in this comment:

DeSantis can't even handle a certain district in his state, yet alone the entire nation and our foreign allies.

Further setting back DeSantis is the view that he's anti-open market by not only Democrats, but also many Republicans.

Yeah, because I want a president that saves our economy by … driving away business that is too woke? Didn’t realize only evangelicals had green money. Guess those woke bucks don’t count.

And one user wrote his own manifesto to describe the DeSantis leadership style and how many Americans view him:

DeSantis seems to have a much higher opinion of himself than the vast majority Americans. DeSantis is an extreme-right fascist/white Christian nationalist candidate trying to woo the MAGA crowd but the MAGA extremists are split with many remaining loyal to Trump (like MTG, Lindsey Graham and JD Vance). And if the GOP doesn't back Trump, he'll probably run as a 3rd party candidate to make matters even worse for DeSantis. DeSantis' ratings have done nothing but go down, he's already past his prime and his recent more extreme actions have not made him into someone that can win a general election. Like all wannabe dictators, DeSantis lives in a bubble, doesn't listen, just pontificates and thinks bullying minorities and business with a white Christian nationalists ideology of hate, fear-mongering and division is somehow a winning strategy.

 

Beyond the Person: GOP Party Issue

Many users have gone beyond the individual candidates to note what the current form of the GOP stands for and that it's a major turnoff. The Republican party panders so far right in attacking vulnerable Americans—like the transgender community—that they are seen as extreme:

Biden will beat Trump or DeSantis by 10-12 Million Votes. Most independents are done with the MAGA extremism. Not to mention their extreme assault on Women’s Healthcare.

The further the party goes to enact abortion restrictions, including Florida's six-week abortion ban, the more they alienate half of the voting population in the country. The recent election in Wisconsin for the State Supreme Court highlighted how the issue has motivated younger voters that don't want their rights taken away, giving the Democratic candidate a whopping 10-point victory margin.

And the House of Representatives is doing the party no favors by putting some very extreme politicians into a very public spotlight. At this point, many Americans think that Marjorie Taylor Greene is the typical Republican because of how much airtime she and her extremist positions get on television. People recognize her as fully committed to Trumpism.

An Election Over Before It's Even Begun

The Republican party is using the same attacks against Biden and Harris we saw in 2020—Biden's age and Harris' capability as successor should that age become a factor. Biden's age is more of a concern, but when the left looks across the aisle and sees the 78-year-old option, one with very clear mental deficiencies, it's not really a defining issue. That is the one thing DeSantis will have an advantage on if he should garner the nomination.

However, that one advantage will not be enough to overlook the baggage of being linked to the MAGA following that has turned off the vast majority of the Democratic party and around two-thirds of Independents.

DeSantis could slide into the nomination should Trump develop health issues or end up in jail from one of his numerous upcoming convictions. But the path DeSantis is going down is the same one we saw in 2022 where GOP candidates pandered to the extreme Trump base to get the nomination and then tried to unsuccessfully tack back to the middle in the general election.

The Trumpist label doomed all of those candidates, yet DeSantis has decided that that's his best strategy for 2024.

Based on what happened in 2020 and in 2022, this election could very well be over before it even begins—much of the electorate has seen enough of the candidates to know exactly who they don't want in the Oval Office.

BY

 JOC

Would you vote for DeSantis over Biden?

•  Yes
•  No
•  I'd vote third party

https://soapboxie.com/us-politics/views-from-the-moderate-democrat-about

When you get “prayed for”…

Hmm.  What does it mean when someone prays for you, and you don’t feel you are in need of any prayers?  How would you take it?  Case in point:

• A gesture of good will in their eyes? (Definitely)
• A request to their God (and that they want/need to inform me about) that He will help me/force me to see the(ir) light (see religion their way)? (Definitely)
• An (overt) hint-hint wink-wink that I’m “messed up?” (Definitely)
• A disrespect/diminishing of who I am, and have come to be, religiously/spiritually? (Definitely, but they don’t see it)

Seriously, I do not need prayers.  I already have a wonderful life and nothing is missing in it.  To pray for more something, anything, isn’t that kinda, well, selfish?

Q: So, what do you think about those who pray for you?  Do you ever get prayed for?  Do you pray for others?  Explain to me this prayer phenomenon, including the psychology of praying.

*Note- For the record, I just answered, “Thanks for thinking of me,” and let it go.  I don’t want to rock their boat.  But they just don’t see how such a statement can be rather insulting. 🤷‍♀️

(by Primal “a Pantheist*” Soup)

____________________________________

*pantheism

noun

pan·​the·​ism ˈpan(t)-thē-ˌi-zəm 

My definition:

: a doctrine that equates the “notion of God” with the processes, fundamental forces and Laws of Physics within our universe.  Existence itself is representative of the “God Notion/Process.”

Plausibility in science and the reality of psi phenomena

CONTEXT

There are good reasons to consider the plausibility of data when it is asserted to mean something extraordinary. An example:

Someone with a dent in their car’s fender has a bit of blood and some brown fur in the dent. The car's owner claims they hit a deer the night before. Is that evidence plausible enough to believe that the claim is probably true? Probably for most people. But what if they said they hit a Bigfoot or a furry alien? Now is the evidence enough to be plausible? Would you ask for more evidence before believing the Bigfoot or alien claim is likely true?

The same thing applies to assertions of data from paranormal or psi research. Believers in explanations for supernatural, paranormal and psi phenomena argue that existing data proves that something is there, supernatural or not. 

Psi phenomena are the aggregate of alleged parapsychological functions of the mind including extrasensory perception (ESP), precognition, and psychokinesis. Parapsychology is the study of mental phenomena which are inexplicable by orthodox scientific psychology and other knowledge. Such phenomena include telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis. Psychokinesis is the supposed ability of some people to move physical objects by mental effort alone.

ABOUT PLAUSIBILITY

Steven Novella at the Neurologica blog writes:

I get e-mails, and my recent article on ESP research attracted a number of angry individuals who wanted to excoriate my closed minded “scientism”. I think people care so much about ESP and other psi and paranormal phenomena because it gets at the heart of their beliefs about reality – do we live in a purely naturalistic and mechanistic world, or do we live in a world where the supernatural exists? Further, in my experience while many people are happy to praise the virtue of faith (believing without knowing) in reality they desperately want there to be objective evidence for their beliefs. Meanwhile, I think it’s fair to say that a dedicated naturalist would find it disturbing if there really were convincing evidence that contradicts naturalism. 

Both sides have an out, as it were. Believers in a supernatural universe can always say that the supernatural by definition is not provable by science. One can only have faith. This is a rationalization that has the virtue of being true, if properly formulated and utilized. Naturalists can also say that if you have actual scientific evidence of an alleged paranormal phenomenon, then by definition it’s not paranormal. It just reflects a deeper reality and points in the direction of new science. Yeah!

Regardless of what you believe deep down about the ultimate nature of reality (and honestly, I couldn’t care less, as long as you don’t think you have the right to impose that view on others), the science is the science. Science follows methodological naturalism, and is agnostic toward the supernatural question. .... So you can have your faith, just don’t mess with science.

ESP and psi believers become apoplectic when you mention scientific plausibility. In my experience, they have to misunderstand what it is and how it is used, no matter how many times or how many ways I explain it to them, in order to maintain their position. For example, I recently had an exchange where the e-mailer responded:

Dr. Novella, your argumentation here is more reasonable, even if it still displays scientism. I’ll point to your statement, “This is especially true since they are proposing phenomena which are not consistent with the known laws of physics.” Here you’re making the known laws a determining factor for rejecting the prospect of the phenomena. The very point of the investigations is to see if something exists beyond the known laws. Again, the evidence is the authority. The known laws don’t disallow what isn’t known. You seem to think you’re making a very sound argument, all the while exhibiting pure scientism.

Of course, I said nothing of the kind, and no matter how many times I corrected this fallacy, he returned to it. The idea is that since science is trying to discover new things, that already established findings or laws don’t matter and can be comfortably ignored. “The evidence is the authority” – just like with alternative medicine. He pairs this with the straw man that plausibility is “a determining factor”.

Here is how science actually works. First of all, science builds upon itself. We have to take into consideration prior knowledge, because that affects how we interpret new information. If, to give an extreme example to illustrate the point, I make an observation that seems to contradict 1000 prior observations, do we chuck out the prior observations? What is the probability that the 1 observation is wrong vs the 1000 observations?

[There are some] people who claim that they have evidence for information going from the future to the past, or for information being transmitted from one brain to another without any detectable signal, and any known mechanism. The fact that these observations appear to contradict the known laws of physics is not “determinative”. But it is also not just a prior bias. It affects how rock solid [plausible] the evidence has to be before we conclude we have a genuine anomaly [inexplicable data or phenomenon] on our hands. In my opinion, this evidence (for ESP) is orders of magnitude too weak to conclude we have a genuine anomaly. The effect sizes are small, the researchers don’t have a great history for rigor, and the protocols cannot be reliably replicated. So we have relatively weak evidence being put up against rock solid laws of physics. It is not “scientism” to say that the evidence is not sufficient. And it is not scientific or logical to dismiss this dramatic lack of plausibility.

This exemplifies the ongoing disagreement between people who believe ESP and psi phenomena are real and mainstream science consensus that denies that ESP and psi are real. One of the believers, is researcher Daryl Bem. In 2011, Bem published an analysis of data from nine separate ESP experiments that showed that precognition is real. Precognition is knowing that an even will happen before it happens. 

In 2015, Bem and others published a paper that analyzed 90 experiments from 33 laboratories and found that precognition is a real phenomenon. The statistical significance from the 90 experiment analysis was vey high, even higher than the significance that physicists demanded for belief in the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. For context, the FDA requires statistical significance of there being a 5% (1 chance in 20) or less chance of the data for a new drug being a statistical fluke. That is usually expressed as p ≤ 0.05 (p means probability of a fluke). The lower the p number, the smaller chance there is of data being a fluke or an anomaly. 

The significance of Bem's 90 experiment analysis was p = 1.2 × 10^-10 or p = 0.00000000012. In other words, the chance of the data being a fluke is extremely low, 1.2 in 10 billion. Despite that, mainstream science still rejects psi phenomena as real, citing the implausibility of precognition in view of the laws of the universe. Mainstream science looks for explanations that do not violate the any law of the universe. Here, the violation is knowledge of a future event flowing backward in time and being accurately sensed by the human brain-mind before the event occurs. 

An expert rejects psi phenomena

One expert on Bem's work expresses a major concern about the entire scientific enterprise in view of Bem's analysis. E.J. Wagenmakers writes:

James Randi, magician and scientific skeptic, has compared those who believe in the paranormal to “unsinkable rubber ducks”: after a particular claim has been thoroughly debunked, the ducks submerge, only to resurface again a little later to put forward similar claims. 

Several of my colleagues have browsed Bem's meta-analysis and have asked for my opinion. Surely, they say, the statistical evidence is overwhelming, regardless of whether you compute a p-value or a Bayes factor. Have you not changed your opinion? This is a legitimate question, one which I will try and answer below by showing you my review of an earlier version of the Bem et al. manuscript.

I agree with the proponents of precognition on one crucial point: their work is important and should not be ignored. In my opinion, the work on precognition shows in dramatic fashion that our current methods for quantifying empirical knowledge are insufficiently strict. If Bem and colleagues can use a meta-analysis to demonstrate the presence of precognition, what should we conclude from a meta-analysis on other, more plausible phenomena?

Disclaimer: the authors [Bem et al] have revised their manuscript since I reviewed it, and they are likely to revise their manuscript again in the future. However, my main worries call into question the validity of the enterprise as a whole.

I urge the authors to convince themselves of the absence of psi and try and replicate one of Bem's experiment in a purely confirmatory setting, with a preregistered analysis protocol. When they monitor the Bayes factor they will, as N grows large, obtain massive evidence in favor of the truth. One good, preregistered experiment is worth a thousand experiments where the results are based on cherry-picking. To indicate that cherry-picking is a problem, I have never seen a preregistered experiment that monitored the Bayes factor and ended up supporting psi. Never.

In another publication Wagenmakers writes:

Research on extra-sensory perception or psi is contentious and highly polarized. On the one hand, its proponents believe that evidence for psi is overwhelming, and they support their case with a seemingly impressive series of experiments and meta-analyses. On the other hand, psi skeptics believe that the phenomenon does not exist, and the claimed statistical support is entirely spurious. We are firmly in the camp of the skeptics. However, the main goal of this chapter is not to single out and critique individual experiments on psi. Instead, we wish to highlight the many positive consequences that psi research has had on more traditional empirical research, an influence that we hope and expect will continue in the future. 

It is evident that even the smallest psi effects are worth millions if applied in games of chance. An online betting facility that requires the gambler to predict, say, whether a picture will appear at the left or on right of the screen should go bankrupt as soon as extraverted females [??] are allowed to predict the location of erotic pictures (we are happily prepared to invest in such a casino). If psi is demonstrably effective in generating cash, it would quickly be accepted in the pantheon of scientifically credible phenomena.

 

An economic argument 

against psi

A problem is that some people are making

money from homeopathy and tarot card readings

The rise of the Republican Supreme Court's anti-democratic, opaque shadow docket

In recent years, the radical right Republican Supreme Court has been increasingly relying on the shadow docket to advance the Republican's authoritarian anti-democracy, anti-transparency agenda. The shadow docket is a way for the court to decide issues while hiding both (i) the legal analysis behind the decision, and (ii) the judge's vote count. The shadow docket is an effective mechanism to keep the public from knowing what the court is actually doing and why.

NPR focused on a recent book, The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court uses stealth rulings to amass power and undermine the republic, by legal scholar University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck. NPR writes: 

Justice Samuel Alito hates the term shadow docket, and gave an hour-long speech in 2021 at Notre Dame, suggesting that journalists and politicians have seized on it to wrongly portray the court as "sneaky," "sinister," and "dangerous."

Nonetheless the term has stuck.

Professor Vladeck argues that the court has only itself to blame.

"What impelled me to write the book is that over the last six years, we've seen the shadow docket become a lot less boring because the Supreme Court, and especially the conservative majority, has been using unsigned and unexplained orders to a degree and in ways which really have no precedent in the court's history," he said in an interview with NPR.

These cases are brought to the court by a state, or a company, or a person who has lost in the lower courts, often at an early stage, and that loser is now asking the Supreme Court to block the lower court order while the case proceeds through the lower court appeals process, which typically takes many months.

Up until relatively recently, these shadow docket actions were quite rare. The statistics tell the story, statistics compiled by Vladeck. During the 16 years of the Bush and Obama administrations, the federal government, the most frequent litigant in the Supreme Court, only asked the justices for emergency relief eight times--or on average once every two years. The two administrations together got what they wanted in only four of the eight cases, and in all but one of them the court spoke with one voice, and no dissent.

But in the Trump administration, and with a newly energized conservative majority on the court, the picture changed dramatically. In just four years, the Trump Justice Department asked the court for emergency relief an astounding 41 times, and the court actually granted all or part of those requests in 28 of the cases.  

'The dirty secret'

[The court says it will fully and transparently consider a shadow docket case later when it comes before them, but that is a dirty secret lie.]

But "the dirty secret is that later never comes," he says. "By the time the border wall case," or "all kinds of other challenges to Trump policies make their way back to the Supreme Court, at the far end of the normal litigation process, President Biden is in office and those policies have been discontinued, and the cases are thrown out."

That pattern, he says, was repeated over and over again, thus allowing Trump "to carry out policies that lower courts had held to be unlawful because the Supreme Court, through unsigned and unexplained orders" said, in effect, 'Go ahead President Trump, we'll deal with this later.'"

Vladeck's point is not that the Supreme Court was necessarily wrong, but that its unexplained shadow docket rulings today are both "inscrutable, and inconsistent." The patterns that emerge, he maintains, put the court in an "exceptionally unflattering light."

"The more you look at the body of work, the more it looks like the best explanation for when the court is intervening and when it's not, is partisan politics and not neutral substantive legal principles," he contends. 

No opinions to analyze

Vladeck points to a speech Justice Amy Coney Barrett gave in 2021, in which she assured the audience that the current court "is not composed of partisan hacks" and urged people to "read the opinions." But as Vladeck observes, "What's remarkable about the shadow docket is that so often the court is handing down rulings with massive impacts in which there's no opinion to read."

The collapse of democracy in Turkey

An editorial in the WaPo by Fareed Zakaria lays out what is by now a familiar story about how modern tyrants kill both democracy and inconvenient facts and truths:

Turkey points to a global trend: Free and unfair elections

Many of us had high hopes for Turkey’s recent general election, believing that a flat-out victory for the opposition could mark a break with the worldwide trend toward illiberal democracy. But perhaps we were all misguided, seduced by the lure of free elections and trusting ultimately in the will of the people. In fact, what happened in Turkey this past weekend highlights the latest and most disturbing trend in the rise of illiberal democracy.

While incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan did not win outright reelection, the results were sort of a victory for him all the same. He did better than polls predicted and came out well ahead of his main opponent, leaving him highly likely to win a runoff scheduled for May 28. This is stunning, given that Turkey is a country in economic catastrophe, with sky-high inflation. The vote also took place just months after an earthquake, in which the government performed miserably.

Consider, though, the backdrop to these elections. Erdogan was up against Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the opposition candidate, a colorless bureaucrat without much charisma or eloquence. But the opposition had little alternative. The president had already eliminated from the field perhaps his most powerful potential rival, Ekrem Imamoglu, a charismatic politician from the same party as Kilicdaroglu, who was on a winning streak. In 2019, Imamoglu handily won the election for Istanbul mayor, a pivotal position that was Erdogan’s own path to power.

But on the flimsiest grounds, Erdogan’s party claimed fraud, and the electoral council ordered a fresh round of voting. Imamoglu won the second election by a larger margin. So Imamoglu was then charged with insulting public officials over the incident and was tried by a judiciary which has been widely described as packed with ruling party loyalists. Sure enough, last December, a court barred Imamoglu from politics and sentenced him to prison for almost three years. The decision is under appeal. In the meantime, though, Imamoglu has been prevented from running for the presidency.

Turkey’s political playing field is massively tilted in favor of Erdogan. The state lavishes funds on his supporters, and the country’s media is slavishly pro-government. Most of Turkey’s major media properties have been bought by business executives who are supporters of Erdogan. (The largest business group that maintained its distance from the president found itself mysteriously facing massive charges of tax fraud and ultimately sold its media holdings to a more compliant owner.)

State television, the country’s main source of broadcast news, relentlessly extols the virtues of Erdogan and his party and trumpets the achievements of the government. In April, state TV spent 32 hours on coverage of Erdogan versus 32 minutes for his opponent. Of all democracies, Turkey imprisons the most journalists. The Turkish government initiated more than 30,000 cases for the offense of “insulting the president” — in just one year (2020).

Erdogan’s government has systematically taken over ostensibly independent institutions, including courts and the body that controls elections. (If the May 28 runoff election turns out to be close and the opposition candidate comes out ahead, you can be sure that Erdogan will appeal — and that the election authorities will rule for him, just as they did in the case of the Istanbul mayoral vote.) Nongovernmental organizations face severe government investigation and scrutiny, limiting their ability to operate. The government has passed laws giving it tight control over social media and, over the election weekend, asked Twitter to block the accounts of about a dozen opposition figures. After February’s earthquake, when the government confronted intense criticism on social media for its mishandling of the disaster, it simply blocked Twitter for a while.

This is the next innovation in illiberal democracy. Elected presidents and prime ministers use their majorities to pass laws that give them sustained structural advantages over their opponents. They use government funds to shower their supporters with benefits. They file tax and regulatory cases against independent media groups, investigate journalists and NGOs, and reshape independent agencies and courts into compliant arms of the ruling party. They then hold “free” elections.

Erdogan’s tactics will seem depressingly familiar to citizens in many democracies around the world. Look at India, once home to fiercely independent media. Today, it has fallen to No. 161 in a world press freedom index issued by Reporters Without Borders. Look at Hungary, where the government and pro-government businesses control almost all the country’s media, and the body overseeing the judiciary effectively became an arm of the ruling party, drawing the ire of the European Union. (The office’s first head was a godparent to Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s oldest child.) Look at Mexico, where the president has tried to gut that country’s proudly independent election authority.

When elections are held in these circumstances, and international observers duly note that the ballots were properly cast and counted and then certify such elections to be genuinely competition, they are doing the world a disservice. We need a new vocabulary to describe this phenomenon. Are such elections free? Technically, yes — but they are also profoundly unfair.

Q: Is a rigged election actually free when people cannot vote for legitimate candidates they want to vote for? Is it better to call rigged elections a sham or fake election or a non-election than calling it free but unfair, or does it not matter much what the mainstream media calls rigged elections? 

Following the money that is killing democracy and civil liberties

The New Republic writes:

A few months before the midterms, with pollsters spewing red wave predictions and post-Roe conservatives planning to force raped children to give birth, a bit of political news added to progressives’ gloom. A Chicago billionaire had gifted anti-abortion Supreme Court fixer Leonard Leo the largest known tranche of dark money in U.S. history: $1.6 billion. The sum is staggering; it will finance at least a generation of extreme right-wing political proselytizing. And almost no one—except for the conservative cabal that bagged the whale—had heard of him.

Leonard Leo

The gift from nonagenarian electronics magnate Barre Seid (pronounced Barry Side) is effective altruism in reverse: a fire hose of cash aimed at destroying American liberal culture through lawsuits and support for politicians challenging gay rights, unions, environmental protection, voting rights, and public education. The money will last a good long while. Philanthropic recipients usually follow a 5 percent rule: They try not to spend more than 5 percent of the endowment per year. Seid’s pile is so large that it could return an average $136 million a year, or north of $230 million on a good year, to influence U.S. law and policy. Without ever having to touch the nut. For a sense of how enormous that is, consider this. The Heritage Foundation and its affiliates spent about $86 million in 2021. Heritage is a huge, and hugely influential, conservative think tank. Leo could create two Heritage Foundations and one more sizable organization on the side—all, again, without having to dip into the principal at all.

Barre Seid

Leo, a New Jersey Roman Catholic and grandson of an Italian immigrant who worked for Brooks Brothers, hobnobs around the upper echelons of American power .... Leo is a proud “Knight of the Sovereign Order of Malta,” and his long career has been motivated by fanatical opposition to women’s rights to reproductive choice. Since Seid handed the money over in 2021, part of the pile has been funneled into black boxes like Donors Trust, a mega-donor money-washing machine. Having succeeded at subjecting American women to forced pregnancy, Leo, 57, is directing the money toward other goals: stopping “woke” culture, ending federal regulations on climate change, and limiting voting rights. Ultimately, Seid’s money will be used to shore up society’s winners—the American oligarchy, inherited trusts, CEOs, self-made billionaires, corporations—against the demands of the weak. It will be used to make the United States a tougher and, for many, a nastier country, where big money always wins, under the eye of Rambo Jesus.

All that from a man nobody knows.

Mr. 999

Steven Baer is, like Leonard Leo, a career anti-choice fanatic, but with a political style from the Roger Stone School of Ratfuckery. The Illinois fringe conservative built himself a minor national reputation by shaming enemies like Donald Trump and Kevin McCarthy with salacious dirt. Even the conservative National Review finds Baer hard to stomach, calling him “the world’s most successful email harasser.”

Baer had his fetal rights epiphany as a student at Brown in the early 1980s, when he “saw photographs of piles of corpses at Auschwitz juxtaposed to photographs of piles of dead babies,” he told me, suggesting that legal abortion was equivalent to the Holocaust and abortion clinics the feminist version of Hitler’s gas chambers. He then spent much of his career raising hell and money from a wacky corner of fringe right-wing politics. 

What $1.6 Billion Means

Seid’s bequest is believed to be the largest dark money donation in U.S. history. Charitable nonprofits are required to disclose their major donors, but the IRS class of political recipients defined as “social welfare” groups like Leo’s Marble trust are not. “Seid’s donation seems to be one of the largest, if not the largest, single political donation ever given,” said Kathleen Enright, president of the Council on Foundations, a nonprofit association of philanthropic entities. “But to be clear, this is not a charitable contribution by any means. It is a political contribution made to support a political agenda.”

How it works is: If Warren Buffett sets up a charitable foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization under IRS rules, it must spend transparently. Political action committees engaging in candidate support also must disclose donors. But when a billionaire throws a fortune at a “social welfare,” 501(c)(4) status organization, the IRS doesn’t require donor disclosure. Beyond Leo and his coterie, nobody knows how the money is being spent, or whether Seid put any restrictions on it. If Leo’s past is precedent, the money will support cherished right-wing goals: expanded gun rights, further erasure of the wall between church and state, rollbacks of civil rights on various fronts, and federal and state judges who will rule favorably on those issues.

The NR article continues at length about the fanaticism and wealth that is a major source of wealth and power for the radical right Republican Party and American style fascism. What we are witnessing is an extremely well-funded, opaque, slow coup against democracy, civil liberties and inconvenient facts, truths and sound reasoning. 

If the American people could understand** what is going on here, most of them would oppose it. But this fascist effort to kill American democracy operates in as much secrecy as possible, which is a lot of secrecy. It also operates behind a powerful shield of dark free speech that effectively distracts, confuses and divides the American people. Public opposition to this evil political monster is splintered and diffused into weakness.

** By now, most rank and file people who still support radical right Republicans and Libertarians are, for the most part, psychologically and/or socially incapable of understanding what is going on. Facing the reality of what they actually support and empower with their votes is simply too painful to accept. The American fascist forces depend on two things. The first is the well-funded fascist elites like Barre Seid and Leonard Leo. The second is the deceived and betrayed rank and file voters who mostly unknowingly support and empower the elites and their American fascist agenda.