He's been indicted again, good and hard this time

The NYT reports about the latest indictment against DJT and 18 other miscreants:

Former President Donald J. Trump and 18 others have been indicted by an Atlanta grand jury in a sweeping racketeering case, accusing Mr. Trump and some of his former top aides of orchestrating a “criminal enterprise” to reverse the results of the 2020 election in Georgia.

The 41-count indictment, an unprecedented challenge of presidential misconduct by a local prosecutor, brings charges against some of Mr. Trump’s most prominent advisers, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, his former personal lawyer, and Mark Meadows, who served as White House chief of staff at the time of the election.

Donald J. Trump’s legal team includes a former prosecutor with experience in white collar cases and a career defense lawyer who started as a public defender and is best known for defending hip-hop artists.

The defense lawyer, Drew Findling, is known in rap circles in Atlanta as a “magician” because of his effective defense of clients like Cardi B, Migos and Gucci Mane.

It is very good to see Meadows, a rabid, morally rotted Christian nationalist, finally nailed for his role in the coup attempt. Where the hell is the US DoJ?

The WaPo reports that DJT faces 13 counts if illegal acts, presumably felonies. All the defendants have been indicted for racketeering, which carries a mandatory minimum jail sentence for a conviction. The perjury count contradicts DJT's defense in the federal lawsuit. Another WaPo article reports: 

A core Trump defense in the federal Jan. 6 case is the idea that he was merely exercising free speech.

But that defense won’t work as easily in Georgia, which has a broad prohibition against making “a false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation … in any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of state government.”  

That law figures heavily in the indictment, with the phrase “false statement” appearing more than 100 times, including as individual counts and as part of the alleged racketeering. (The indictment lists 161 overt acts as part of the latter.) Defendants like Trump and Giuliani are accused of making false statements about voter fraud publicly, in legal filings, in hearings in Georgia and elsewhere.  

One of the more striking details comes in the 38th and 39th counts — the last charges against Trump — which date to Sept. 17, 2021, nearly eight months after Trump left office.

The charge has to do with a letter Trump sent to Raffensperger in which he enclosed a report alleging that 43,000 ballots in Atlanta-based DeKalb County were not properly handled using chain-of-custody rules. Trump suggested that Raffensperger “start the process of decertifying the election, or whatever the correct legal remedy is, and announce the true winner.”

The indictment accuses Trump and others of having “corruptly solicited Georgia officials, including the Secretary of State and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, to violate their oaths to the Georgia Constitution and to the United States Constitution by unlawfully changing the outcome of the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Georgia in favor of Donald Trump.”

One can only hope that the coup attempting dictator wannabe lying liars face non-trivial consequences for their filthy lying lies, and their power-lust driven coup attempt.

Part of the 1st page

of the indictment

Page 3

State Dept. Investigator Alleges that US Gov't is Hiding Critical Info about Wuhan Lab Leak

What follows is an article by David Zweig (investigative reporter Atlantic, New York Mag,NY Times, Wired et al.) based on interviews with a bioweapons and East Asia specialist who led the US State Department's Covid-19 origins investigation . Note, this potentially explosive article was not,  of course,  published in the Atlantic, New York Magazine, Wired or the NYT, but on his Substack page where most of the high level leaks and big scoops on this topic have surfaced through various journalists -- some well known, others relatively obscure. If the allegations are true,  it supports the view I've long taken that the claim "we will never know the origins of Sars-CoV-2 because China won't give us the info" is not necessarily the case. As I noted in previous posts on this subject, the experiments in China were collaborative, and the idea that the NIH and EcoHealth Alliance (who wrote the proposals for the GoF research carried out in Wuhan) would not keep very good records of the results never seemed credible to me. According to the official who led the State Dept's investigation earlier this year, the government is deliberately hiding damning evidence of a research-related lab leak. Here is Zweig's August, 14 article from his Substack, Silent Lunch..

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“It’s a massive coverup spanning from China to DC.” This stunning claim, made in reference to our government’s wishy washy official stance on the origin of Covid-19, is not from a cable TV pundit or an internet rando. It is by David Asher, a bioweapons and East Asia specialist who led the US State Department’s Covid-19 origins investigation. 

According to Asher, the notion that after three-and-a-half years there still is not a clear assessment of how the pandemic began, “is the biggest intelligence failure in American history.” Asher has plenty of points of comparison. A veteran investigator, he held senior roles in the US Government’s campaigns to disrupt North Korea’s WMD program, and counterterrorism efforts related to Iran and the Islamic State. 

Through a series of interviews conducted over several weeks, Asher, who is now a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, a think tank, shared a torrent of knowledge and views—about his experience infiltrating international terror networks, the inner workings of various intelligence agencies, and, most pressingly, his exasperation at the investigations into the origin of SARS-CoV-2. 

***

THE DNI REPORT

“A large amount of information, classified, unclassified, and pertinent to the origin of Covid-19, remains inside in the United States government, undisseminated and unanalyzed,” Asher said in frustration. He was referring to the shortcomings of what was supposed to be an all-encompassing report on the pandemic’s origin, released in June, by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The DNI is the head of all United States intelligence operations, and the report was derived from assessments by at least nine of the agencies that the DNI oversees. Mandated by a law issued from Congress and signed by President Biden in March, the much-anticipated report was seen as a chance to bring some clarity to the lab leak debate—one of the most divisive issues of the pandemic.

Yet perhaps nothing exemplifies the problem that Asher speaks of more than the DNI report.

Given the arcane science and extensive resources devoted to myriad investigations, many people had expected a comprehensive analysis. Instead, the DNI report was a dud. Clocking in at a shockingly meager 10 pages, five of which were taken up by a glossary and introductory pages, the document brought little new information. Citizens and politicians alike who had been following the origins debate closely were left angered and wondering whether, surely, there is more the intelligence community must know. 

According to Asher, these people are right to be suspicious. His charge about Covid origins information remaining inside the government is an explosive allegation, given that the law required the DNI to “declassify any and all information relating to potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origin of COVID-19.” 

More striking, still, of the limited information that was included in the DNI report, Asher said, some of it was “deliberately distorted or downplayed in a manner that reeks of coverup.” 

“WE MAY NEVER KNOW”

In Asher’s view, there are a few main issues with the “we may never know” official line about the pandemic’s origin—a sort of bureaucratic shrug—that many intelligence agencies and the executive branch seem to have settled on. 

First, an insufficient effort has been made to find out what still is unknown. 

“We broke into North Korea,” Asher said. “We penetrated an underground facility. Do you know how difficult that is? It’s crazy.” Asher said the Wuhan Institute as an investigative target is “a cake walk” compared to North Korean and Iranian WMD programs. “If someone gave a small team of us access to $50 million to pay sources and encourage defections and to run operations against the Chinese we could penetrate any lab in China,” he said. “I have done so much harder things than this.” Asher said we could have solved this mystery, but “those in charge obviously don’t want to know.”

Second, there has been a purposeful burying of much of what is already known, and a refusal for those at the top to connect the dots between this copious evidence.

For example, some politicians share Asher’s view about the DNI report, among them Indiana Senator, Republican Mike Braun, who released a critical statement on June 26 that said, in part, “the COVID-19 Origin Act calls for a full declassification, not CliffsNotes.” And when I asked Asher directly about the report, he was very clear. “The DNI is deliberately noncompliant with the law,” he said. Yet most of the government has been mute on this point. And to make matters worse, similarly, much of the legacy media in its coverage of the DNI report did not question why it was so flagrantly deficient, and how its paucity of information was at odds with the law. 

More broadly, earlier this week I published an exposé in The Free Press on Anthony Fauci’s obfuscations and evasions regarding the funding of dangerous virology research, and its connection to a potential lab leak in Wuhan and the triggering of the pandemic. As I reported, Fauci’s actions have not been unique. His former boss, Francis Collins, then head of the National Institutes of Health, along with a Fauci deputy named David Morens, among others, have partaken in an extensive campaign to confuse and conceal the NIH’s funding of gain-of-function research of concern on coronaviruses, including said research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Third, the differing intelligence reports that have been made public about potential links between the WIV and the origin of the pandemic have been framed in a manner of false equivalency. 

The coverage of the DNI report in much of the media has been that its findings are inconclusive, and that the intelligence community was divided, with only two agencies—the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Energy—determining that a lab leak was the most likely cause of the pandemic. Yet what the media has failed to elucidate, said Justin Kinney, a quantitative biologist at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and a critic of gain-of-function research of concern, is that the FBI and DOE are the two agencies most equipped to make a determination. 

In fact, the DNI report itself notes that the differing views of the agencies that were part of the DNI report largely stem from the differences in how they conduct their investigations. The CIA, for instance, likely prioritizes human intelligence gained from foreign assets. The Department of Treasury’s core competency obviously is related to financial matters, not the intricacies of virology. The DOE, by contrast, Kinney said, has a deep scientific expertise, and the FBI, of course, has an investigation focus, which is very different from simply intelligence gathering. David Asher agreed with Kinney’s observations. 

***

Despite the lack of effort into a more effective investigation, Asher emphasized that much is already known. But a purposeful effort has been made to pretend that some form of perfect evidence, which will never exist, is necessary to draw as close to a firm conclusion as one reasonably can at this time. “With these types of investigations,” he said, “you often don’t find a smoking gun. But when the room is on fire—as it is now—there is smoke everywhere.”

The reason we don’t have a clearer answer on the pandemic’s origin—beyond the fact that there is much evidence already gathered that is not being analyzed or made public—Asher said, is because those in power want it that way. There are too many officials in too many government agencies who would be implicated in a lab leak, not to mention how it would complicate our relationship with China. “Our own state department told us ‘don’t get near this thing, it’ll blow up in your face,’” he told me. 

“We may never know” is a policy preference of many people, Asher said. “It protects everyone. It’s a convenient obscurity.”

China’s internal coverup of COVID’s emergence—whether is was from a lab or nature—and the country’s unwillingness to share an early warning is beyond reproach, Asher said. Assuming the virus leaked out of a lab, there are massive geopolitical and global health implications. If we simply let this go, he said, Beijing can get away with millions dead, sending much of the world economy into a tailspin, and costing us trillions to recover. Asher warned about the repercussions of our inaction. “What message does that send President Xi?”

News bits: A stupid DJT court filing; GOP endorses civil war; Environmental NIMBYism

The Independent reports about a court filing that DJT's lawyers filed. It complained that Jack Smith’s prosecution team “has been investigating this matter for three and a half years, while the defense is starting with a blank slate.” Smith's team responded “Not only is this claim impossible, as January 6, 2021, was two and a half years ago, but it is disingenuous” 

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Newsweek reports that radial right Matt Gaetz is arguing that only through "force" can change be made in "corrupt" Washington. Gaetz commented: "We are having a great time at the [Iowa state] fair. We love standing with you. But we know that only through force do we make any change in a corrupt town like Washington, D.C." At present, it probably would take force to get the corrupt GOP out of power in congress. But since the 2024 elections are not that far off, waiting and voting seems like a better plan. One can reasonably take his comment as advocating civil war and preparing the radical right base for that if DJT loses the election. 

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The NYT reports on clean energy NIMBYism among environmentalists. They want clean energy, but just not in their back yard. The problem is overpopulation in America and almost everywhere else on Earth that is reasonably inhabitable. Everywhere is someone's back yard, whether they believe in and/or are worried about global warming or not. The NYT writes about ostensibly pro-environment NIMBYs in Maine:  

If there is anywhere in the country primed to welcome the clean energy transition, it is Penobscot Bay in Maine. Electricity prices there are high and volatile. The ocean waters are warming fast, threatening the lobster fishery. Miles offshore, winds blow strong enough to heat every home and power every car in the state.

One key to harnessing that wind lies at the end of a causeway jutting into the bay, on a mostly undeveloped island where eagles fish offshore and people walk in the quiet shade. Many officials see this spot, known as Sears Island, as the ideal site to build and launch a flotilla of turbines** that could significantly lessen Maine’s reliance on fossil fuels. 

** The blades on the turbines are planned to be about 300 feet long, i.e., they are huge.

Standing in their way are environmental groups and local residents, all of whom are committed to a clean energy future and worried about the rapid warming of the earth. Still, they want the state to pick a different site for its so-called wind port, citing the tranquility of Sears Island and its popularity and accessibility as a recreation destination.  

no hurdle to a clean energy transition at the speed and scale scientists say is needed to avert catastrophic warming is easier to see than the growing local backlash to large-scale wind and solar projects, like the one roiling Sears Island.

The problem boils down to this: If lawmakers want to ramp up renewables as fast and cheaply as possible, they’ll need to bulldoze or build over some places that people treasure.  

From the desert suburbs outside Los Angeles to the rolling hills along the Ohio River to the Jersey Shore, residents are crying out against solar farms, wind turbines and new power lines. They are suing, passing laws and taking other steps to stop or slow projects, some of which would power the nation’s largest towns and cities with renewables.

Conservationist NIMBYs plan to sue to block the wind farm development. One activist engaged in motivated reasoning to reason that lawsuits are unfortunate because that wastes time that the state could be looking for some other place to put the turbines. Of course, the state is already aware of other sites and other places are someone else's back yard. Presumably, Maine chose Sears Island as the best site because it is the best site, but because it wanted to piss off environmentalists. So, off to court we go, pissing aways valuable years in pissing matches court. That is wasted time we probably no longer have the luxury of pissing away, but we're gonna do it anyway.  

And, there are serious problems in addition to NIMBY's endless lawsuits and constant radical right Republican Party fighting against doing anything meaningful about global warming, which cynical lying radical right elites still call a hoax.

When it comes to global warming, America is constipated to say the least, almost completely broken or moving in the opposite direction to say the worst. 

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America's moral rot and a sad note about Afghanistan: A WaPo opinion by Annie Yu Kleiman laments the tens of thousands of allies the US left behind. Their fates are currently in the hands of the vicious, murdering Dark Ages Islamic Taliban: 

Annie Yu Kleiman is a senior technical analyst at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation and an 18-year Air Force reservist. She serves on the board of directors for No One Left Behind, an organization working to help evacuate, resettle and advocate for Afghan Special Immigrant Visa recipients.

As of April 2023, about 152,000 Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) applicants remain trapped in Afghanistan. These people, who served side-by-side with U.S. forces during the long war, face years of danger, severe economic hardship and increasingly onerous restrictions — particularly on women and girls — while applying for their SIVs through a complicated, Kafkaesque process.  

The dangerously slow SIV process has become practically a death sentence. No One Left Behind has documented hundreds of SIV applicants who were murdered while waiting for their visas; details will be released in a forthcoming report.

To create a snapshot of the absurd gantlet our former friends and allies have to run, I gathered quotations from text messages and emails that they sent to my organization, No One Left Behind, seeking help.

“I have all the recommendation letters from the teams [I worked for], but I cannot get the human resources [showing proof of employment with the US government] letter because the company does not answer our emails.”

“If the Taliban finds me, they will not ask me how many days I worked for the U.S. Army. If the Taliban finds me, they will kill me.”

“The Taliban has killed my brother ... and my wife. They also shot my younger brother in the left leg. The Taliban told us that we are spies for the Americans, and that one by one they will kill all my family members.”

“I am living like a prisoner. After the fall of the regime, my husband and I lost our jobs. Please help me if you know any way to evacuate me. I don’t have enough money to transfer my case to a third country.”

“I was in a car accident and my leg is broken. If I don’t get evacuated, I’m sure they will kill me. I no longer have a job. I can’t afford my family’s food or medicine for my three girls. Also my Pakistan visa was rejected.”  

“The passport department [in Afghanistan] is either overcrowded or closed most of the time. It takes months to get an appointment, and it is risky because our biometrics are there.” 

“My wife is pregnant with twins. The passport department is closed. It’s impossible. I am just confused about what to do.” 

“Please help save me and my children. We are not safe and keep changing our locations.” 

“My innocent baby boy was killed by the Taliban. Now it is my turn to be killed.”

Why anyone would ever trust the morally rotted US again is a very good question. We betray our local allies and leave them to die in misery and fear in local hellscapes. We even betray ourselves. The two political parties in power betray us. Racist, radical right Christianity is betraying us. So is big capitalism. Moral rot and corruption in America are rampant and deepening.

I presume that the US process to get allies out is still being sabotaged by a racist radical right deep state presence that the cruel, virulent racists DJT and the Steven Miller installed and then left behind after Jan. 20, 2021.

Two linked chunks: Christian nationalism; Pseudoscience and racist radical right billionaires

America is changing in fundamental ways. Christina nationalism is making inroads into government and the law. That is a cherished goal of what used to be extremist crackpots, but it's now mainstream among the far right elites who control the authoritarian radical right Republican Party. Slate writes about a current example of authoritarian Christian nationalist extremism:

Texas Republicans Cite Noah’s Ark in Lawsuit Over 

State’s Right to Wage War With Mexico

Texas Republicans have no good argument to justify the state’s construction of buoys separated by circular saw blades in the Rio Grande. This dangerous stunt is a clear violation of federal law, which grants the federal government—not Texas—control over the river. So GOP lawmakers and lawyers have fallen back on a series of claims that run from disturbing to comical. They say the Rio Grande, which law enforcement navigates every day, is not “navigable.” They assert that Texas is under “invasion” by “thousands of aliens” that warrants the use of force to repel migrants, and potentially merits the invasion of Mexico by state law enforcement. And they fall back on the story of Noah’s Ark to bolster their defense. Yes, the tale of the divine deluge has been invoked in support of a death trap meant to turn back migrants fleeing violence and poverty. Just as the Bible intended.

The Department of Justice promptly sued, citing the Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Act of 1899, which prohibits “the building” of any “structure” or “obstruction” in a “navigable river” without permission from the federal government.

Abbott’s lawyers, aided by a group of mostly Texan GOP congressmen, filed their response on Wednesday, and it is, to put it mildly, not the work of serious people. .... the law prohibits all unapproved “structures” in the Rio Grande, regardless of whether they interfere with navigation.

The DOJ’s “theory” that a river is still “navigable” even when some parts become unnavigable, they declare, “would lead to absurd” outcomes because “most of Texas was once covered by seas.” But don’t just trust the geological record; also consider “the Book of Genesis,” which, taken “literally,” says “the entire world was once navigable by boats large enough to carry significant amounts of livestock.” For support, the brief cites Genesis 7:17–20, which tells the story of Noah’s Ark. Checkmate, libs.

Unauthorized border crossings, the state’s lawyers write, is tantamount to an “invasion,” and Texas “has the constitutional power to repel that invasion” to “protect the health, safety, morals, and general welfare of its citizens.” They cite a provision of the U.S. Constitution that bars states from “engag[ing] in war” without congressional approval “unless actually invaded.”

Until DJT came on the scene and accelerated and normalized the ongoing radicalization of the anti-democracy, anti-inconvenient truth GOP, radical crackpots citing Genesis in a lawsuit would not have happened. Radical Christian nationalist moral and intellectual rot is slowly but persistently eating away at democracy, the rule of law, civil liberties and secular society, at least among many of those on the political right.  

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Pseudoscience, racism, vicious propaganda -- the radical's plan for the rise of tyranny

The NIH describes the concept of eugenics and scientific racism like this: 

A NYT opinion by Jamelle Bouie, Why an Unremarkable Racist Enjoyed the Backing of Billionaires, . Bouie writes: 

.... “John D. Rockefeller Jr., the world’s wealthiest man, funded scientific research into how what he called the ‘defective human’ could be bred out of the population.” Or that, as Edwin Black explains in “War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race,” eugenicists drew from “almost unlimited corporate philanthropy to establish the biological rationales for persecution” of the so-called unfit.

I mention all of this as context for Richard Hanania, a rising star among conservative writers and intellectuals. For years before appearing in the pages of newspapers and publications like this one, Hanania wrote articles for white supremacist publications under a pseudonym. According to a recent investigation by Christopher Mathias of The Huffington Post:

[Hanania] expressed support for eugenics and the forced sterilization of “low IQ” people, who he argued were most often Black. He opposed “miscegenation” and “race-mixing.” And once, while arguing that Black people cannot govern themselves, he cited the neo-Nazi author of “The Turner Diaries,” the infamous novel that celebrates a future race war.

Hanania no longer writes for those publications. And though he may claim otherwise, it doesn’t appear that his views have changed much. He still makes explicitly racist statements and arguments, now under his own name. “I don’t have much hope that we’ll solve crime in any meaningful way,” he wrote on the platform formerly known as Twitter earlier this year. “It would require a revolution in our culture or form of government. We need more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people. Blacks won’t appreciate it, whites don’t have the stomach for it.” Responding to the killing of a homeless Black man on the New York City subway, Hanania wrote, “These people are animals, whether they’re harassing people in subways or walking around in suits.” 

But more interesting than either Hanania — whose recent notoriety has not lifted him too far from his previous obscurity — or his rancid views are his backers. According to Jonathan Katz, a freelance journalist, Hanania’s organization, the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, has received at least $700,000 in support through anonymous donations. He is also a visiting scholar at the Salem Center at the University of Texas at Austin — funded by Harlan Crow. 

A whole coterie of Silicon Valley billionaires and millionaires have lent their time and attention to Hanania, as well as elevated his work. Marc Andreessen, a powerful venture capitalist, appeared on his podcast. David Sacks, a close associate of Elon Musk, wrote a glowing endorsement of Hanania’s forthcoming book. So did Peter Thiel, the billionaire supporter of right-wing causes and organizations. “D.E.I. will never d-i-e from words alone,” wrote Thiel. “Hanania shows we need the sticks and stones of government violence to exorcise the diversity demon.” Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican presidential candidate, also praised the book as a “devastating kill shot to the intellectual foundations of identity politics in America.” 

The question to ask here — the question that matters — is why an otherwise obscure racist has the ear and support of some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley? What purpose, to a billionaire venture capitalist, do Hanania’s ideas serve? 

Look back to our history and the answer is straightforward. Just as in the 1920s (and before), the idea of race hierarchy works to naturalize the broad spectrum of inequalities, and capitalist inequality in particular. 

If some groups are simply meant to be at the bottom, then there are no questions to ask about their deprivation, isolation and poverty. There are no questions to ask about the society which produces that deprivation, isolation and poverty. And there is nothing to be done, because nothing can be done: Those people are just the way they are.  

This, in fact, has been the traditional role of supremacist ideologies in the United States — to occlude class relations and convert anxiety over survival into the jealous protection of status. The purveyors of supremacist ideologies have worked in concrete ways to bound the two things, survival and status, together; to create the illusion that the security, even prosperity, of one group rests on the exclusion of another. 

Why are billionaires backing an unremarkable racist as he tries to find a place in polite society? Because his interest in a hierarchical society built on racism serves their interest in a hierarchical society built on class — and ruled by capital.

It’s the same, then, as it ever was.

What the modern radical right Republican Party 

has done and wants to ultimately do

Points I want support by citing both chunks together in this post are:

1. Modern brass knuckles capitalism has a deep inherent streak of authoritarianism in it, just like old-fashioned laissez-faire capitalism of the late 1800s with its vicious robber baron plutocrats like Rockefeller (a capitalist Taliban, if you will); 

2. Radical American Christian nationalist elites have a deep, inherent streak of authoritarianism in them, just like radical Islamic Taliban elites have in Afghanistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia and radical Jewish Taliban elites have in Israel -- God's law is above man's law and God is cruel, bigoted and unforgiving;

3. Both the radical capitalists and the radical Christians in America rely heavily on (i) scapegoating target groups (usually prominently including, liberals and liberalism, racial minorities and the LGBQT community and "woke" policies), and (ii) dark free speech to distract, deceive, divide and foment distrust among the public; those targets and states of mind are enormously helpful to American authoritarians in making their run at far more power and wealth than they already control;  

4. Elites running the the modern Republican Party and their wealthy and/or powerful elite capitalist and Christian nationalist supporters have not just formed an intimate marriage to gain more power and wealth, the GOP has radicalized and embraced far right authoritarianism -- the party is now engaged in a vast, well-funded, coordinated propaganda and corruption effort to replace (1) meaningful democracy with deeply corrupt theocratic-plutocratic-autocratic authoritarianism, (2) principled, constitutional rule of law with rule of a corrupt Christian Taliban and corrupt plutocratic Taliban backed by a corrupt tyrant, (3) civil liberties with power flowing from the people to elites and special interests, and (4) a principled constitutional rule of law with an unprincipled rule of God, plutocrats and/or the tyrant; and

5. The radical right authoritarian plan for America is well underway and may already at a point where it is unstoppable, although a couple of powerful forces are beginning to mobilize in possibly meaningful opposition, e.g., American population demographics and attendant voting behavior seems to favor defense of democracy and popular civil liberties over radical right tyranny, oppression and corruption.

Q: Is that analysis wrong, flawed, hyperbolic and/or crackpot? 

Bits: The gun version of fentanyl; Theocracy rising in Israel; Global warming is a hoax?

Gun switches convert semi-automatic pistols to fully automatic machine guns.  

If a gun safety law that bans switches come into effect, it is reasonable to think that gun nuts would haul it into federal court court and eventually the radical right Republican US Supreme Court would find the ban to be an unconstitutional burden to bear arms. The new test is whether the weapon at issue was regulated according to the traditions and history of the US. By that easily cherry-pickable test, essentially all modern gun safety laws are unconstitutional burdens on citizen's right to bear arms. A NYT article comments:

The growing use of switches, which are also known as auto sears, is evident in real-time audio tracking of gunshots around the country, data shows. Audio sensors monitored by a public safety technology company, Sound Thinking, recorded 75,544 rounds of suspected automatic gunfire in 2022 in portions of 127 cities covered by its microphones, according to data compiled at the request of The New York Times. That was a 49 percent increase from the year before.

Switches come in various forms, but most are small Lego-like plastic blocks, about an inch square, that can be easily manufactured on a 3-D printer and sell for around $200.

“The gang wars and street fighting that used to be with knives, and then pistols, is now to a great extent being waged with automatic weapons,” said Andrew M. Luger, the U.S. attorney for Minnesota.

Oh great, killing technology advances. Some humans sure do know how to kill humans and enjoy it. It's probably been that way since a few centuries after the rise of modern humans, maybe sooner. Here's a fun 29 second video:

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A Taliban consisting of rabid Jewish extremist theocrats is forcing its way toward control of Israeli society. That movement looks a lot like its Christian counterpart in the US, Christian nationalism. As usual, deranged male ideologues dominate a push to move a modern society back to the Dark Ages. The NYT writes:

An ultra-Orthodox Jew walking past a sign in Bnei Brak, Israel, 

urging men to not look at women in the street

(I don't want to look at that anywhere)

The trains from Tel Aviv were packed one evening last month when Inbal Boxerman, a 40-year-old mother of two, was blocked by a wall of men as she tried to board. One of them told her that women were not allowed on — the car was for men only.

Ms. Boxerman was stunned. It was a public train operated by Israel Railways, and segregated seating is illegal in the country. The men stopping her appeared to be protesters going home from a rally supporting the governing coalition, which includes extremist religious and far-right parties pushing for more sex segregation and a return to more traditional gender roles.

“I said, ‘For real?’” said Ms. Boxerman, who works in marketing. “And my friend came up and she also said, ‘Are you for real?’ But they just laughed and said, ‘Wait for the next train — you can sit in the way back.’ And then the doors slammed shut.”

Public transportation is the latest front of a culture war in Israel over the status of women in a society that is sharply divided between a secular majority and politically powerful minority of ultra-Orthodox Jews, who frown on the mixing of women and men in public.  

Supporters of expanding the rabbinical courts’ jurisdiction — such as Matan Kahana, a former religious affairs minister who remains in Parliament but is not in the governing coalition — argue that as a pluralistic society, Israel should tolerate sex segregation in some arenas to accommodate the ultra-Orthodox, for whom it is a way of life.  

“I’m all for the rabbinical courts — they are a symbol of Israeli sovereignty in our own land and our eternal connection to Hebrew law,” he said on Twitter earlier this year.  

One of the first bills put forth by the coalition’s ultra-Orthodox Shas party proposed jailing women for six months if they visited the holy site of the Western Wall in Jerusalem in “inappropriate” or immodest clothing. Although the bill drew so much outrage that it was dropped, the coalition has taken other steps that worry women.

Q: What is the difference between what the Israeli Jewish Taliban and the American Christian Taliban are trying to do?

A: Religion and not much else. 

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Notice: Republican candidates running for president

The Hill reports:

GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy railed against climate-conscious business policy at an Iowa State Fair appearance Saturday.

In an fireside chat with Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, Ramaswamy said that environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) business policies are among the “grave threats to liberty,” and said “the climate change agenda” is a “hoax.”

“They’re using our money… to implement social and environmental agendas through the backdoor. Through corporate America,” Ramaswamy said. “Using your retirement funds and your investment accounts to vote for racial equity audits or Scope 3 emissions caps that you didn’t know they were using your money to do, and that Congress would have never passed through the front door.”

That's just a quick reminder that for the most part, the radical right Republican Party is pro-pollution, pro-climate change, pro-species extinction, corrupt, morally rotted, authoritarian, anti-climate science and some other bad stuff. At this point in view of all available evidence, one can argue that those are assertions of fact, not opinion.

Qs: Are those assertions fact or are they still in the realm of contested opinion? What additional evidence would be needed to move one, some or all of them from opinion to fact?  

Why some people are willing to believe conspiracy theories

 WASHINGTON — People can be prone to believe in conspiracy theories due to a combination of personality traits and motivations, including relying strongly on their intuition, feeling a sense of antagonism and superiority toward others, and perceiving threats in their environment, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

The results of the study paint a nuanced picture of what drives conspiracy theorists, according to lead author Shauna Bowes, a doctoral student in clinical psychology at Emory University.

“Conspiracy theorists are not all likely to be simple-minded, mentally unwell folks—a portrait which is routinely painted in popular culture,” said Bowes. “Instead, many turn to conspiracy theories to fulfill deprived motivational needs and make sense of distress and impairment.”

The research was published online in the journal Psychological Bulletin.

Previous research on what drives conspiracy theorists had mostly looked separately at personality and motivation, according to Bowes. The current study aimed to examine these factors together to arrive at a more unified account of why people believe in conspiracy theories.

To do so, the researchers analyzed data from 170 studies involving over 158,000 participants, mainly from the United States, the United Kingdom and Poland. They focused on studies that measured participants’ motivations or personality traits associated with conspiratorial thinking.

The researchers found that overall, people were motivated to believe in conspiracy theories by a need to understand and feel safe in their environment and a need to feel like the community they identify with is superior to others.

Even though many conspiracy theories seem to provide clarity or a supposed secret truth about confusing events, a need for closure or a sense of control were not the strongest motivators to endorse conspiracy theories. Instead, the researchers found some evidence that people were more likely to believe specific conspiracy theories when they were motivated by social relationships. For instance, participants who perceived social threats were more likely to believe in events-based conspiracy theories, such as the theory that the U.S. government planned the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, rather than an abstract theory that, in general, governments plan to harm their citizens to retain power.

“These results largely map onto a recent theoretical framework advancing that social identity motives may give rise to being drawn to the content of a conspiracy theory, whereas people who are motivated by a desire to feel unique are more likely to believe in general conspiracy theories about how the world works,” according to Bowes.

The researchers also found that people with certain personality traits, such as a sense of antagonism toward others and high levels of paranoia, were more prone to believe conspiracy theories. Those who strongly believed in conspiracy theories were also more likely to be insecure, paranoid, emotionally volatile, impulsive, suspicious, withdrawn, manipulative, egocentric and eccentric.

The Big Five personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness and neuroticism) had a much weaker relationship with conspiratorial thinking, though the researchers said that does not mean that general personality traits are irrelevant to a tendency to believe in conspiracy theories.

Bowes said that future research should be conducted with an awareness that conspiratorial thinking is complicated, and that there are important and diverse variables that should be explored in the relations among conspiratorial thinking, motivation and personality to understand the overall psychology behind conspiratorial ideas.

https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2023/06/why-people-believe-conspiracy-theories