News bits: New global warming propaganda tactic; Irreparably broken GOP;

Media Matters reports about new propaganda tactics to reach young people online that oil companies are employing. Oil sector propaganda promotes acceptance of more carbon dioxide emissions and more global warming:

As young voters increasingly support phasing out fossil fuels, oil giant Shell is aiming to reach this demographic — not by cutting its oil and gas development, but via video game marketing. The company is working with Fortnite creators and sponsoring popular gamers to promote its premium gas on the streaming platform Twitch, as well as on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

The campaign comes as trade industry groups and energy companies have sought to use influencer marketing to humanize their products even though the impacts of these products are driving climate change, jeopardizing the future of its target audience. In a 2021 survey of young people between 16-25 years old from 10 countries, 75% said the future is frightening because of climate change.

Meanwhile, the company announced in June that it is planning to expand its natural gas business. According to Bloomberg, its business plan “puts oil and gas front and center while giving low-carbon efforts a smaller supporting role,” despite the International Energy Agency’s recent warning that, “no new long-lead-time upstream oil and gas projects are needed” for a global pathway to net zero emissions by 2050.  

The campaign, dubbed “Shell Ultimate Road Trips,” encourages Fortnite players to use a new map made by six different Fortnite creators who were “invited” by Shell to participate in the project. To promote the map, Shell sponsored popular gamers to test it out. The campaign is meant to promote the company’s “new and improved” premium gasoline. In the game, players first fill up at a Shell gas station and are encouraged to take screenshots of the game and post them on social media using the hashtag #Shellroadtrips. The campaign also includes sweepstakes to win Shell e-gift cards or a “dream road trip.” 

In part, the Ultimate Road Trips campaign reflects Shell’s continued efforts over the last few years to reach a younger audience using TikTok and Instagram.

An August DeSmog investigation described a Shell-sponsored video from one popular feel-good account as “part of a concerted push from oil and gas supermajors to improve their image among younger generations. Edelman, one of Shell’s principal PR agencies, said in relation to a 2017 campaign that the oil and gas giant set the task of ‘giving millennials a reason to connect emotionally with Shell’s commitment to a sustainable future.’” According to Twitch, in 2022, 70% of its users were between the ages of 18-34.

Un-freaking believable. Shell’s commitment to a sustainable future?? Shell is committed to profit, not a sustainable future.

The ruthlessness, gall and shameless lies and deceit of polluters is jaw dropping. Not only are we in an all-out war against democracy and civil liberties, we are also fighting to protect the environment against sophisticated mind manipulation campaigns by wealthy, powerful corporations. 

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An opinion piece in The Messenger argues that the GOP is too broken to be fixed:

The Republican Party Cannot Be Fixed

There still are main-line Republicans who hope that if Trump loses the election next year, the de-Trumpification of the party can begin. Sorry, that train has left the station.

Trump's tenacles are deep into the GOP at the congressional level and in states around the country. Remarkably, Trumpism is more embedded than Reaganism ever was; in many GOP circles, the Bush presidencies should be expunged.

Not only is Trump dominating party polls, but the Republicans overwhelmingly believe his lie** that the 2020 election was fraudulently stolen from him; a significant portion of Republicans say the January 6 violent mob attack on the U.S. Capitol was primarily a peaceful protest, that any trouble was instigated by left-wingers. Both ideas are demonstrably false — but within the GOP, facts and truth no longer matter. 

** CNN Poll: Percentage of Republicans who think Biden’s 2020 win was illegitimate ticks back up near 70% (August 2023 poll data)

This has antecedents: The slashing incivility of Newt Gingrich in the 1990s; in the decade before that, the intraparty struggle between the vision of Jack Kemp — inclusive, entrepreneurial, optimistic — versus that of Jesse Helms — dark, reactionary, racist.

President Reagan straddled those two elements, but was more Kemp. Trump is Helms-plus.

The Trump camp dismisses such critics within their Party as “RINOs” — Republican in name only.

It’s a term they’d certainly apply to Stu Spencer, who says: “This isn't my Party anymore.” Spencer was the political genius behind Ronald Reagan's initial election as governor of California in 1966, and he played a critical role in Reagan’s 1980 election as president.

Stu Spencer a RINO? Really?

That’s how badly the Republican Party has been broken.

Maybe the GOP isn't broken, but just different. At one time the Democratic Party was the home of racists. Now it's the GOP. Things change.

Qs: Is this an indication of how badly the Republican Party has been broken, or an indication of how radicalized and changed it has become? In other words, does the GOP now mostly reflect traditionalists or Trump cultists?

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Fun billionaire facts and logic flaws from Bored Panda. Our team here at Bored Panda has traveled all across Reddit to bring you some of the most mind-boggling facts about billionaires and the wealth gap:

Put blame where it belongs

8 vs 4,000,000,000

It's too complicated!

But think about all the people working for those insurance companies become instantly whose jobs would obsolete! 

Oh wait, nobody did that when they invented self checkout so screw it.

Didn't the person that published that 

stuff get car bombed?

Actuality vs common belief vs common desire

About the war in Israel: Honorable war vs dishonorable war

Everyone has a different story about how we got to to this bloody mess. By the way, after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 by a radical Zionist monster, I strongly believed that a bloody day of final reckoning was coming sooner or later. Well, now it's apparently here. This time will probably finish the Palestinians for good, but there are probably going to be a hell of a lot of corpses and horrors along the way.

My vision of the history

My version of the history of this ongoing story of misery and death is pretty simple. Yes, almost all of this will be bitterly rejected by most Jews as a pack of lies and slanders. 

Major event 1: In 1947-1948, a gigantic population change occurred in the Jewish & non-Jewish population of Israel/Palestine. It was a whopper. 

According to Zionist mythology, hundreds of thousands of non-Jews apparently all decided accept buyouts from local Jews to permanently get the hell out of what the United Nations would turn into Israel in May of 1948. My understanding of actual history indicates that most of the non-Jews (Palestinians) who left were forced out, not voluntarily buggering out. 

That point of history, like every other point of the miserable, bloody Israel history, is bitterly contested between the two sides. The Israel-Palestine situation from that time and continuing today looks to be to be almost identical to the bitter differences in reality and belief in modern American politics. One example is what has happened to the Jewish-non-Jewish population from 1995 to 2023, Jewish presence is declining. 

That demographic shift scares the hell out of radical Jewish theocrats who are now fighting in Israel to install radical, aggressive fundamentalist Jewish Sharia law under a radical fundamentalist Jewish Taliban. Does that sound familiar? It should. (hint: Christian nationalism in modern America is fighting for aggressive Christian Sharia law administered by an intolerant, self-righteous, wealthy, White, heterosexual male Christian Taliban)

Major event 2 (still ongoing in 2023): Between 1948 and 1995, there were periods of peace talks, Palestinian terrorist attacks and atrocities. At the same time there was an always increasing occupation of land that Palestinians lived on. Palestinians kept get pushed back over and over and over. The peace talks were going nowhere because neither Israel nor the usually corrupt, incompetent and arrogant Palestinian leadership really wanted peace on terms that were possible at various times. The US sponsored peace talks but they always got derailed by one damn stupid thing or another, usually something bloody. During this time, and continuing today, Israel was slowly annexing Palestine into Israel, despite constant United Nations condemnation of each new illegal territory occupation. An Israeli newspaper commented in 2023:

The United Nations General Assembly passed more resolutions critical of Israel than against all other nations combined in 2022, contributing to what observers call an ongoing lopsided focus on the Jewish state at the world body.

Since 2015, the General Assembly has adopted 140 resolutions criticizing Israel, mainly over its treatment of the Palestinians, its relationships with neighboring countries and other alleged wrongdoings. Over the same period, it has passed 68 resolutions against all other countries, UN Watch said.

That article points out that various dictator-controlled nations the UN has condemned for human rights and other violations have ignored similar UN resolutions, e.g., Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela, Qatar, China, etc. Apparently, human dictators don't care about treating people like garbage when they can get away with it.

The US at the ineffective United Nations, 2018

Major event 3: The 1995 assassination of Rabin is the event that struck me as the end of any possibility of a peaceful two-state resolution of the stupid, bloody conflict. That's major event 3. After Rabin died, it was clear that Israeli society would back away from peace, prodded by incessant dark free speech to scare, divide and conquer Israeli society and turn society against the Palestinians and a Palestine. Does that sound familiar? It should. (hint: decades of authoritarian radical right dark free speech in America has turned a significant portion of society against democracy, civil liberties that God hates (including voting rights), the rule of law and the legitimacy of political opposition) 

The expected result of major event 3 is probably going to turn out to be the war the Palestinians launched against Israel in the past few days. What other options are there? Peace talks since the murder of Rabin were mostly a farce with no chance of a settlement. Since the non-Jews were forced out of Israel in 1947-1948, the Palestinians have constantly seen their land stolen and their freedoms strictly curtailed. They have nothing left to live for. No country on Earth wants the Palestinians, so they are left to their fate at the hands of cruel, racist, radical Zionist theocrat thugs. 

Honorable vs dishonorable war

So, is the current bloody war that Hamas launched against Israel and its non-combatant citizens dishonorable? After all, they attacked and brutalized innocent Israeli citizens. Or, since there is (i) no reasonable hope of any reasonable negotiated settlement, and (ii) a very high likelihood that the misery and hopelessness of Palestinian people will continue for at least decades, if not a century or two. A couple of examples of the hopeless rage that Palestinians feel helps to exemplify this asymmetric in some context:

A rock against a tank

Rock throwing

More rock throwing

Yes I know, murders and horrors have been committed by the Palestinians against non-combatant Israelis. Does that make one last ditch effort, driven by rage and hopelessness, dishonorable? The Palestinians are probably going to be slaughtered by the thousands in this war unless something miraculous intervenes. The US military has already committed to defending Israel. Maybe US troops will wind up obliterating some Palestinians.

An example of non-shooting war morphing into a shooting war

Despite outbreaks of shootings, I consider what is happening in American politics to still be predominantly a non-shooting war. But it is a real war. It is democracy and civil liberties vs dictatorship and oppression (i.e., power and wealth concentrated with the elites). 

How can that be a war without many shots being fired? Simple, take control of the levers of power and slowly chip away at democracy and civil liberties. So far, the American authoritarian radial right has taken a big chunk out of abortion rights (God hates abortion), voting rights (dictators and plutocrats hate voting), and anti-corruption laws (kleptocrats love corruption). If this erosion continues, there will be very little or no plausible peaceful political means to stop the rise of tyranny, oppression and bigoted cruelty in America. The American experiment will have failed and ended in corrupt, bigoted-racist tyranny.

If some Americans, seeing the hopelessness of their plight as authoritarianism, kleptocracy and hopeless oppression slowly engulfs them, rise up and start a shooting war and killing non-combatants, would that be dishonorable terrorism, honorable patriotism in defense of democracy and liberty, or something else?

News bits: About wealth inequality; Trump legal sleaze; Amazon’s AIexa spreads disinformation

An interview with an expert discusses wealth inequality, criticizing libertarianism for having a negative impact on economic analyses and average people generally: 

Angus Deaton on inequality: 

‘The war on poverty has become a war on the poor’

The Nobel prize winner and author of new book Economics in America argues economists must get back to serving society

The Scottish-born winner of the 2015 Nobel prize for economics struggled at first to understand why there was so little interest in a subject most European economists regarded as a central concern of post-war policies to reduce poverty and build more equitable societies.

But, as Deaton describes in his unsparing new book, Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality, he soon realized he had run headlong into the libertarian monetarists of the Chicago School of Economics, and they were driving US policy.

“There is this very strong libertarian belief that inequality is not a proper area of study for economists,” Deaton said. “Even if you were to worry about inequality, it would be best if you just kept quiet and lived with it.”

Deaton persevered, building a reputation as a contrarian for scrutinising the prevailing orthodoxy that an unfettered free market would deliver greater economic equality and individual liberty, and that government intervention and regulation would undermine both.

The result, said Deaton, is a predatory brand of capitalism in the US that enriches corporations and the wealthy at the expense of working people, deepens inequality of wealth and opportunity, and – although many Americans will deny it – is fuelling the rise of a class system. As he picks the system apart, Deaton zeros in on the evident absurdities of claims about the purity of the market.

“If you need an ambulance, you are not in the best position to find the best service or to bargain over prices; instead, you are helpless and the perfect victim for a predator,” he writes.

The results are clear. Real wages have stagnated since 1980 while productivity has more than doubled and the rich cream off the profits. The top 10% of US families now own 76% of wealth. The bottom 50% own just 1%.

The time has come, Deaton argues, for economists to get back to serving society.

“The discipline has become unmoored from its proper basis, which is the study of human welfare,” he writes.  

Deaton ticks off the list of Nobel prizes for economics won by the Chicago school’s highly regarded minds, including Milton Friedman and George Stigler. He does not doubt what he calls their intellectual contributions.

“Yet it is hard to imagine a body of work more antithetical to worrying about inequality,” he writes.

“A friend of mine, a conservative economist and deeply religious man, is fond of saying that ‘fair’ is a four-letter word that should be expunged from economics.”    

Deaton describes his own hopes as an immigrant 40 years ago as tempered by the corruption of the American economy and its politics to an extent that threaten democracy. But he is not without hope.

Deaton also sees change because of immigrants like him. He points to the Turkish-born American, Daron Acemoglu, as an economist whose thinking is changing the discipline.

“Seventy per cent of economics PhDs in the US are non-American. I compare it to the Jews who came to America between the wars who completely changed physics. Economics is being completely changed by this influx. I’m not the only immigrant who comes in to America and finds it a strange place,” he said.

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Slate writes:

The Most “Heads I Win, Tails You Lose” Trump Argument Ever

Trump’s attorneys argue that the Constitution itself gives him immunity because it specifies that impeachment may be followed by a criminal indictment. Trump’s attorneys reason, therefore, that an acquitted president, such as Trump, can no longer face indictment. See for yourself:

Presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts is also rooted in the text of the Constitution. The Impeachment Clauses provide that the President may be charged by indictment only in cases where the President has been impeached and convicted by trial in the Senate. Here, President Trump was acquitted by the Senate for the same course of conduct.

The Impeachment Clause of Article I provides that “Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office … but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.” … Because the Constitution specifies that only “the Party convicted” by trial in the Senate may be “liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment,” … it presupposes that a President who is not convicted may not be subject to criminal prosecution.

What is much more galling, though, than this logical error is that during the impeachment trial over the events of Jan. 6, Trump’s lawyers argued the exact opposite in order to win acquittal. Specifically, Trump attorney David Schoen said during that impeachment trial that the Senate could not convict Trump because, since he was no longer president, the only appropriate venue for accountability was the criminal justice system. Schoen went so far as to explicitly cite the very same section of the Constitution to say the exact opposite thing now being argued in court. Here’s what Schoen argued (emphasis mine):

[The impeachment managers] contend, citing various law professors, that ‘‘[any official] who betrayed the public trust and was impeached could avoid accountability simply by resigning one minute before the Senate’s final conviction vote.’’

This argument is a complete canard. The Constitution expressly provides in article I, section 3, clause 7 that a convicted party, following impeachment, ‘‘shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment, and punishment according to law’’ [after removal]. Clearly, a former civil officer who is not impeached is subject to the same. 

Now Trump’s attorneys, having successfully argued that he couldn’t be convicted during his impeachment because the criminal courts were the only appropriate venue, are arguing that he can’t be held accountable in criminal court because he wasn’t convicted during his impeachment. 

There is, it’s worth noting, a legal principle called estoppel, which prevents someone from claiming in court something contrary to a case that they made to win a previous argument in court. Judge Tanya Chutkan should consider deploying it.

Why Trump's lawyers are not heavily sanctioned and Trump jailed for contempt of court is beyond me. Trump's new arguments are estopped because his earlier argument directly contradicted this argument. 

Our rule of law is rigged to favor rich and powerful elites. That is why I doubt that Trump will ever be held accountable for his crimes. So far the only liability he has faces is in civil lawsuits, not criminal ones. Paying a fine is nothing to a criminal sociopathic narcissist like DJT.

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The WaPo reports about Amazon’s naughty AI-powered Alexa:

Asked about fraud in the race — in which President Biden defeated former president Donald Trump with 306 electoral college votes — the popular voice assistant said it was “stolen by a massive amount of election fraud,” citing Rumble, a video streaming service favored by conservatives.

The 2020 races were “notorious for many incidents of irregularities and indications pointing to electoral fraud taking place in major metro centers,” according to Alexa, referencing Substack, a subscription newsletter service.

Alexa disseminates misinformation about the race, even as parent company Amazon promotes the tool as a reliable election news source to more than 70 million estimated users.

Amazon declined to explain why its voice assistant draws 2020 election answers from unvetted sources. “These responses were errors that were delivered a small number of times, and quickly fixed when brought to our attention,” Amazon spokeswoman Lauren Raemhild said in a statement.

The radical Right: Libertarianism and why Republican elites embrace cruelty

A long opinion piece by Thom Hartmann, Libertarianism and why Republicans embrace cruelty, published by Raw Story describes a very interesting argument about the origin of the now fully radicalized, cruel libertarian anti-government dogma. Why the radical right rank and file support their own demise is not discussed. Hartmann writes: 

Last night was the Republican debate, where we heard lots of predictable rants about crushing the “welfare state” and restoring “freedom” and “self-reliance.”

So, once again, why are Republicans so cruel and why do they seem so fond of libertarianism? .... Why does Donald Trump target people for assassination by his followers? Why does Ron DeSantis revel in keeping tens of thousands of low-income Florida children from getting Medicaid?

Yesterday, I laid out the terrible impact Libertarian policies, which have infected the GOP for five decades, have had on the United States. But where did the whole idea of libertarianism come from, and who started the Libertarian Party?

How is it that Republicans so often embrace casual cruelty like tearing mothers from their children or throwing pregnant women in poverty off public assistance? Why have 12 GOP-controlled states refused to this day to expand Medicaid for their 30 million minimum-wage working people when the federal government covers 90 percent of the cost? Why are Republicans so committed to destroying Medicare and Social Security?

Why are Democratic members of Congress having to armor their own homes, having received over 9000 death threats so far this year, virtually all of them from domestic terrorists who Republicans refuse to repudiate? The FBI still is looking for a Matt Gaetz supporter who threatened to murder Gaetz’s Democratic opponent: why are these people attracted to the GOP?

It turns out this is not just politics; the roots of this brutal movement in today’s GOP run from a 1927 child murderer, through a greedy real-estate lobbying group, to Ronald Reagan putting both of their philosophies into actual practice and bringing morbidly rich rightwing billionaires into the GOP fold.

As a result, Republican policies over the past 42 years not only gutted America’s middle class and transferred $50 trillion from working people to the top 1 percent, but also led straight to the Trump presidency and the attack on the Capitol on January 6th that he led.

The Libertarians

Back in the 1940s, a real estate lobbying group came up with the idea of creating a new political party to justify deregulating the real estate and finance industries so they could make more money.

This new “Libertarian Party” would give an ideological and political cover to their goal of becoming government-free, and they developed an elaborate pretense of governing philosophy around it.

Their principal argument was that if everybody acted separately and independently, in all cases with maximum selfishness, such behavior would actually benefit society. There would be no government needed beyond an army and a police force, and a court system to defend the rights of property owners. It was a bizarre twisting of Adam Smith’s reference to the “invisible hand” that regulated trade among nations.

In 1980, billionaire David Koch ran for vice president on the newly formed Libertarian Party ticket.

His platform included calls to privatize the Post Office, end all public schools, give Medicare and Medicaid to big insurance companies, end all taxation of the morbidly rich, terminate food and housing support and all other forms of “welfare,” deregulate all corporate oversight while shutting down the EPA and FDA, and selling off much of the federal government’s land and other assets to billionaires and big corporations.

Reagan, who won that 1980 election, embraced this view in his inaugural address, saying, “[G]overnment is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” He then doubled down on the idea by beginning the systematic process of gutting and crippling governmental institutions that historically had supported working people and the middle class.

The child-killer who inspired a movement

Reagan wasn’t just echoing the Libertarian vision; he was also endorsing Ayn Rand’s “objectivist” view of the world, which traces its roots to a murderous psychopath in 1927.

Back in 2015, Donald Trump told USA Today’s Kirsten Powers that his favorite book was Ayn Rand’s raped-girl-decides-she-likes-it novel, “The Fountainhead.”

“It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions,” he told Powers. “That book relates to … everything.”

Ayn Rand’s novels have informed libertarian Republicans like former Speaker of the House of Representatives and current Fox News board member Paul Ryan, who required interns to read her books when they joined his staff.

Paul Ryan and Ayn Rand

(photoshopped)

Powers added, “He [Trump],” told her that he “identified with Howard Roark, the protagonist who designs skyscrapers and rages against the establishment.”

Rand’s hero Roark, in fact, “raged” so much in her novel that he blew up a public housing project with dynamite.

Rand, in her Journals, explained where she got her inspiration for Howard Roark and the leading male characters in so many of her other novels. She writes that the theme of The Fountainhead, for example, is:

“One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one’s way to get the best for oneself.”

On Trump’s hero Howard Roark, she wrote that he:

“…has learned long ago, with his first consciousness, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world. He knows what he wants and what he thinks. He needs no other reasons, standards or considerations. His complete selfishness is as natural to him as breathing.”

It turns out that Roark and many of her other characters were based on a real person. The man who so inspired Ayn Rand’s fictional heroes was named William Edward Hickman, and he lived in Los Angeles during the Roaring Twenties.

Ten days before Christmas in 1927, Hickman, a teenager with slicked dark hair and tiny, muted eyes, drove up to Mount Vernon Junior High School in Los Angeles and kidnapped Marion Parker — the daughter of a wealthy banker in town.

Hickman held the girl ransom, demanding $1,500 from her father — back then about a year’s salary. Supremely confident that he would elude capture, Hickman signed his name on the ransom notes, “The Fox.”

After two days, Marion’s father agreed to hand over the ransom in exchange for the safety of his daughter. What Perry Parker didn’t know is that Hickman never intended to live up to his end of the bargain.

The Pittsburgh Press detailed what Hickman, in his own words, did next.

“It was while I was fixing the blindfold that the urge to murder came upon me,” he said. “I just couldn’t help myself. I got a towel and stepped up behind Marion. Then, before she could move, I put it around her neck and twisted it tightly.”

Hickman didn’t hold back on any of these details: he was proud of his cold-bloodedness.

“I held on and she made no outcry except to gurgle. I held on for about two minutes, I guess, and then I let go. When I cut loose the fastenings, she fell to the floor. I knew she was dead.”

But Hickman wasn’t finished:

“After she was dead I carried her body into the bathroom and undressed her, all but the underwear, and cut a hole in her throat with a pocket knife to let the blood out.”

Hickman then dismembered the child piece-by-piece, putting her limbs in a cabinet in his apartment, and then wrapped up the carved-up torso, powdered the lifeless face of Marion Parker, set what was left of her stump torso with the head sitting atop it in the passenger seat of his car, and drove to meet her father to collect the ransom money.

He even sewed open her eyelids to make it look like she was alive.

On the way, Hickman dumped body parts out of his car window, before rendezvousing with Marion Parker’s father.

Armed with a shotgun so her father wouldn’t come close enough to Hickman’s car to see that Marion was dead, Hickman collected his $1,500, then kicked open the door and tossed the rest of Marion Parker onto the road. As he sped off, her father fell to his knees, screaming.

Days later, the police caught up with a defiant and unrepentant Hickman in Oregon. His lawyers pleaded insanity, but the jury gave him the gallows.

To nearly everyone, Hickman was a monster. The year of the murder, the Los Angeles Times called it “the most horrible crime of the 1920s.” Hickman was America’s most despicable villain at the time.

Ayn Rand falls in love with a “superman”

But to Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, a 21-year-old Russian political science student who’d arrived in America just two years earlier, Hickman was a hero.

Alissa was a squat five-foot-two with a flapper hairdo and wide, sunken dark eyes that gave her a haunting stare. Etched into those brooding eyes was burned the memory of a childhood backlit by the Russian Revolution.

She had just departed Leninist Russia where, almost a decade earlier, there was a harsh backlash against the Russian property owners by the Bolsheviks. Alissa’s own family was targeted, and at the age of 12 she watched as Bolshevik soldiers burst into her father’s pharmacy, looted the store, and plastered on her Dad’s doors the red emblem of the state, indicating that his private business now belonged to “the people.”

That incident left such a deep and burning wound in young Alissa’s mind that she went to college to study political science and vowed one day she’d become a famous writer to warn the world of the dangers of Bolshevism.

Starting afresh in Hollywood, she anglicized her name to Ayn Rand, and moved from prop-girl to screenwriter/novelist, basing the heroes of several of her stories on a man she was reading about in the newspapers at the time. A man she wrote effusively about in her diaries. A man she hero-worshipped.

William Edward Hickman was the most notorious man in American in 1928, having achieved the level of national fame that she craved.

Young Ayn Rand saw in Hickman the “ideal man” she based The Fountainhead on, and used to ground her philosophy and her life’s work. His greatest quality, she believed, was his unfeeling, pitiless selfishness.

Hickman’s words were carefully recounted by Rand in her Journals. His statement that, “I am like the state: what is good for me is right,” resonated deeply with her. It was the perfect articulation of her belief that if people pursued their own interests above all else — even above friends, family, or nation — the result would be utopian.

She wrote in her diary that those words of Hickman’s were, “the best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I ever heard.”

Hickman — the monster who boasted about how he had hacked up a 12-year-old girl — had Rand’s ear, as well as her heart. She saw a strongman archetype in him, the way that people wearing red MAGA hats see a strongman savior in Donald Trump.

As Hickman’s murder trial unfolded, Rand grew increasingly enraged at how the “mediocre” American masses had rushed to condemn her Superman.

“The first thing that impresses me about the case,” Rand wrote in reference to the Hickman trial in early notes for a book she was working on titled The Little Street, “is the ferocious rage of the whole society against one man.”

Astounded that Americans didn’t recognize the heroism Hickman showed when he proudly rose above simply conforming to society’s rules, Rand wrote:

“It is not the crime alone that has raised the fury of public hatred. It is the case of a daring challenge to society. … It is the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, with a consciousness all his own.”

Rand explained that when the masses are confronted with such a bold actor, they neither understood nor empathized with him.

Thus, “a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy [was] turned [by the media] into a purposeless monster.”

Libertarianism and Ayn Rand set the stage for Trumpism

Only billionaires should rule the world, Trump has suggested.

And he tried to put it into place, installing a billionaire advocate of destroying public schools in charge of public schools, a coal lobbyist representing billionaires in charge of the EPA, an billionaire-funded oil lobbyist in charge of our public lands, and a billionaire described by Forbes as a “grifter” in charge of the Commerce Department.

Trump’s chief of staff said that putting children in cages and billionaire-owned privatized concentration camps (where seven died) would actually be a public good.

As Ayn Rand might say, “Don’t just ignore the rules; destroy them.”

Welfare and other social safety net programs were, as Rand saw it, “the glorification of mediocrity” in society. Providing a social safety net for the poor, disabled, or unemployed, she believed, were part of a way of thinking that promoted, “satisfaction instead of joy, contentment instead of happiness… a glow-worm instead of a fire.”

Sociopaths of the world, unite!

Rand, like Trump, lived a largely joyless life. She mercilessly manipulated people, particularly her husband and Alan Greenspan (who brought a dollar-sign-shaped floral arrangement to her funeral), and, like Trump, surrounded herself with cult-like followers who were only on the inside so long as they gave her total, unhesitating loyalty.

Like Trump, McConnell, McCarthy and their billionaire backers, Rand believed that a government working to help out working-class “looters,” instead of solely looking out for rich capitalist “producers,” was throwing its “best people” under the bus.

In Rand’s universe, the producers had no obligations to the looters. Providing welfare or sacrificing one nickel of your own money to help a “looter” on welfare, unemployment, or Social Security — particularly if it was “taken at the barrel of a gun” (taxes) — was morally reprehensible.

Like Trump saying, “My whole life I’ve been greedy,” for Rand looking out for numero uno was the singular name of the game — selfishness was next to godliness.

Later in Rand’s life, in 1959, as she gained more notoriety for the moral philosophy of selfishness that she named “Objectivism” and that is today at the core of libertarianism and the GOP, she sat down for an interview with CBS reporter Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes.

Suggesting that selfishness undermines most truly American values, Wallace bluntly challenged Rand.

“You are out to destroy almost every edifice in the contemporary American way of life,” Wallace said to Rand. “Our Judeo-Christian religion, our modified government-regulated capitalism, our rule by the majority will… you scorn churches, and the concept of God… are these accurate criticisms?”

As Wallace was reciting the public criticisms of Rand, the CBS television cameras zoomed in closely on her face, as her eyes darted back and forth between the ground and Wallace’s fingers. But the question, with its implied condemnation, didn’t faze her at all. Rand said with confidence in a matter-of-fact tone, “Yes.”

“We’re taught to feel concern for our fellow man,” Wallace challenged, “to feel responsible for his welfare, to feel that we are, as religious people might put it, children under God and responsible one for the other — now why do you rebel?”

“That is what in fact makes man a sacrificial animal,” Rand answered. She added, “[Man’s] highest moral purpose is the achievement of his own happiness.”

Rand’s philosophy, though popular in high school and on college campuses, never did — in her lifetime — achieve the sort of mass appeal she had hoped. But today Ayn Rand’s philosophy is a central tenet of the Republican Party and grounds the moral code proudly cited and followed by high-profile billionaires and three former presidents of the United States.

 

“Colorful person” - Ayn Rand 1959 interview

16:30 Wallace: Do you predict dictatorship and economic disaster?

17:05 Rand: Yes, that is the way the country is going

Ironically, when she was finally beginning to be taken seriously, Ayn Rand became ill with lung cancer and went on Social Security and Medicare to make it through her last days. She died a “looter” in 1982, unaware that her promotion of William Edward Hickman’s sociopathic worldview would one day validate an entire political party’s embrace of a similarly sociopathic president.

A return to sanity

Today, 42 years of Ayn Rand’s ideas being put into practice by libertarian Republicans from Reagan to Bush to Trump have gutted the middle class, made a handful of oligarchs wealthier than any king or pharaoh in the history of the world, and brought a whole new generation of criminals, hustlers and grifters into the GOP.

Three men in America today own more wealth than the entire bottom 50 percent of the country, a level of inequality never before seen in the modern developed world.

When America was still coasting on FDR’s success in rebuilding our government and institutions, nobody took very seriously Rand’s or Koch’s misguided idealist efforts to tear it all down.

Now that Libertarians and objectivists in the GOP have had 42 years to make their project work, we’re hitting peak libertarianism and it’s tearing our country apart, pitting Americans against each other, and literally killing people every day.

If America is to survive as a functioning democratic republic, we must repudiate the “greed is good” ideology of Ayn Rand and libertarianism, get billionaires and their money out of politics, and rebuild our civic institutions.

That starts with waking Americans up to the incredible damage that 40 years of Rand’s writings and libertarian “Reagan Republicans” have done to this country.

That's a sobering version of history. No doubt radical right libertarians and Republicans will vehemently deny most of all of what is asserted, probably including most of the fact-checkable facts. Probably the easiest dismissal of this will be that this is from Thom Hartmann, a known liar who cannot be believed. For the record, Hartmann is not a liar. He is solidly liberal, but doesn't have the malice in him for large scale lying.

It is interesting that the Libertarian Party was started in the 1940s by real estate developers to avoid taxes and regulations and in 2016 the tax- and government-hating real estate grifter Trump was elected to power. What was the rank and file thinking? Probably mostly the thoughts that propaganda- and lies-fueled authoritarian radical right elites wanted them to think, e.g., they are horribly wronged and attacked innocent victims, they are patriots defending democracy and truth, government is all bad all the time, Democrats are communist tyrants and pedophiles, Trump is on your side, etc.

Hartmann is arguably right to say that radical right Republican policy kills people, at least more than Democratic policy. Some social science research supports that assertion.

Qs: Does Hartmann's version of history feel reasonably accurate? How about that Hickman guy, monster or hero? Is it just me, or do cruel radical right elites seem to be either (i) mostly infantile in their political reasoning and grasp of reality, or (ii) mostly cynical, grifters and malicious (evil) liars?

News bits: Science-based spirituality; Gerrymandering's unintended consequences

An interesting research paper, Spirituality of Science: Implications for Meaning, Well-Being, and Learning, indicates an aspect of spirituality that isn't discussed much:

Awe-inspiring science can have a positive effect on mental wellbeing

Research led by psychologists at the University of Warwick has revealed a profound connection between the spirituality of science and positive wellbeing, much like the benefits traditionally associated with religion.

The research explored how people use science as a source of spirituality and its connection with their sense of wellbeing.

Dr Jesse Preston, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick and lead author of the study said: “Spirituality is most often associated with religion, but science can be a powerful source of awe and wonder for many. It can provide a meaningful source of understanding oneself and the universe, and it can foster a sense of connection to others and our place in the world.”

Science parallels positive wellbeing observed in religious people

In three studies, Dr. Preston and her research team surveyed 1197 people (602 men, 589 women, and 6 others) on their attitudes towards religious beliefs, spirituality and their interest and belief in science.

The first study established the concept of “Spirituality of Science”, and asked people about feelings of transcendence, connection and meaning when engaging with science. Participants’ responses were compared with other attitudes towards science, including an interest in science and belief in science, feelings of awe, meaning in their lives and religious beliefs.

Spirituality of Science was related to belief in science, but unlike other attitudes including interest in science and belief in science, Spirituality of Science was also associated with feelings of awe and general spirituality. This showed that scientific sources of spirituality may be psychologically similar to religious spirituality.

In a 2014 book, Waking Up: A guide to Spirituality Without Religion, Sam Harris described spirituality and religion like this:

Twenty percent of Americans describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” Although the claim seems to annoy believers and atheists equally, separating spirituality from religion is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It is to assert two important truths simultaneously: Our world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit. 

I should address the animosity that many readers feel toward the term spiritual. Whenever I use the word, as in referring to meditation as a “spiritual practice,” I hear from fellow skeptics and atheists who think that I have committed a grievous error. The word spirit comes from the Latin spiritus, which is a translation of the Greek pneuma, meaning “breath.” Around the thirteenth century, the term became entangled with beliefs about immaterial souls, supernatural beings, ghosts, and so forth. It ac quired other meanings as well: We speak of the spirit of a thing as its most essential principle or of certain volatile substances and liquors as spirits. Nevertheless, many nonbelievers now consider all things “spiritual” to be contaminated by medieval superstition. 

I do not share their semantic concerns.

Maybe a person's interest and happiness with secular things like science and nature just reflects a form of spirituality other than a formal or informal religion. Guess in retrospect, all of that is obvious. The research paper is here.

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A WaPo article writes about backfired gerrymandering:

Illinois Democrats drew new maps 

They pushed the GOP to the right

The state’s congressional redistricting illustrates how gerrymandering hollows out the political center and strengthens the fringe, experts say

On a warm Friday night in the St. Mary’s Catholic Church parking lot, sweating men sipping cold beers dipped fish fillets into bubbling deep fryers as children played on the bouncy castle.

This down-home fish fry used to be a regular stop for U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis, a moderate Republican who grew up in this former coal town in Central Illinois. But that was before new district lines drawn in 2021 pushed him into far more conservative terrain — and into competition with a fellow GOP incumbent.

To keep his job in Congress, Davis had to square off with Rep. Mary E. Miller, a member of the right-wing Freedom Caucus who closely aligned herself with former president Donald Trump. In the primary campaign, she assailed Davis for his willingness to compromise with Democrats and to acknowledge Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.

Miller, the hard-liner, won the 2022 race. Davis, the consensus-seeker, was out.

The bitter Republican feuding was not merely a symptom of the broader civil war in the national party. Rather, it was prompted by the actions of Illinois Democrats, who used their supermajority in the legislature to redraw district lines in a way that would strengthen their already titanium-solid lock on power.

The strategy worked, adding one Democratic seat to the Illinois delegation and trimming two Republican ones as GOP voters were packed into a smaller number of districts. 

The new map also accomplished what experts say gerrymandering does with ruthless efficiency, regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans are responsible: hollowing out the moderate political center and driving both parties further toward the ideological fringes. 

“Gerrymandering undermines a key element of democracy, which is competition,” said Harvard University government professor Steven Levitsky.  

Politicians representing more-evenly split districts fear general election competition and therefore tend to govern more moderately, Levitsky said. But those in lopsided districts worry more about primary challenges and become responsive to the extremes in their party.  

“What’s really new about our politics today is that the radical fringe on the right, who are pretty authoritarian and pretty nativist, are now exercising outsize power,” Levitsky said.

13 states get an F

For years, gerrymandering to increase competition is something that seemed highly desirable to me. Then a few years ago, the radical right gerrymandered their way into power and that led to reconsidering that pro-competition belief for voting. Should Democrats fight for less partisan voting districts to avoid losing democracy to corrupt authoritarianism? Fight fire with fire? 

In view of this, more competition in voting seems better than less. A report broadcast on NPR yesterday indicated that Republicans in Matt Gaetz' gerrymandered Florida voting district were very happy to, as they see it, see Gaetz stand up to congress for them. One has to ask, stand up for exactly what? But that doesn't matter. It reflects the fact that no matter what Gaetz says or does, he will be re-elected to the House for as long as he wants. No Democratic Party candidate has a chance of winning the Gaetz Voting District.   

Now my mind has flipped. I'm back to opposing partisan gerrymandering (to offset Republican gerrymandering) and supporting pro-competition gerrymandering, or at least significantly less partisan gerrymandering.

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A WaPo article logic checks an FBI targets Trump supporters story that Newsweek published recently. Newsweek failed basic logic. Recently, Newsweek has been increasingly publishing pro-authoritarian radical right content. The WaPo writes:

It is not surprising that the assertion outlined in Newsweek’s headline — “Donald Trump Followers Targeted by FBI as 2024 Election Nears” — has been embraced as revelatory by Trump’s base.

That’s despite the lack of evidence within the article itself for this explosive claim.

That’s the fundamental problem with the report, written by [Newsweek reporter] William Arkin: That case is not made. Arkin presents some numbers and quotes, but none add up to “FBI singling out Trump supporters,” as the headline implies. Instead, it describes a new threat category created by federal law enforcement that includes people inspired to violent action by Trump — but also violent actors inspired by other ideologies and candidates. That may be a shift in the FBI’s approach, as Arkin argues, but it isn’t one aimed at broadly targeting Trump supporters.

Here’s the heart of Arkin’s argument, describing the extension of the group seen as “anti-government or anti-authority violent extremists” (AGAAVE):

“[T]he FBI went further in October 2022 when it created a new subcategory—'AGAAVE-Other’ — of those who were a threat but do not fit into its anarchist, militia or Sovereign Citizen groups. Introduced without any announcement, and reported here for the first time, the new classification is officially defined as 'domestic violent extremists who cite anti-government or anti-authority motivations for violence or criminal activity not otherwise defined, such as individuals motivated by a desire to commit violence against those with a real or perceived association with a specific political party or faction of a specific political party.’”

“Though Trump and MAGA are never mentioned in the official description of AGAAVE-Other, government insiders acknowledge that it applies to political violence ascribed to the former president’s supporters.”

That last paragraph is crucial. Notice that the insiders don’t claim it only applies to Trump supporters or even only to political violence from Trump supporters. This is a Logic 101 test question: Just because everything in Set A belongs to Set B does not mean that Set B only includes things from Set A. The word “felony” applies to bank robbery, but that doesn’t mean that “felony” only describes bank robberies.

So here, the facts are correct, but the logic is garbage. Did Newsweek make this obvious mistake because it is quietly pro-authoritarian radical right? It is hard to see this being a good faith mistake, but easy to see it being authoritarian radical right propaganda.

An essay: Radical right scholarship openly favors American dictatorship

An essay the Philadelphia Inquirer published yesterday focuses an interesting aspect of radical right authoritarianism:

America needs to talk about the right’s ‘Red Caesar’ plan for U.S. dictatorship

“Thought leaders” of the far right talk openly about a 2025 dictatorship -- People need to be alarmed 

To a small but influential gaggle of so-called “thought leaders” on the edge of the stage — the pseudo-intellectuals of right-wing think tanks, and chaos-agent-in-chief Steve Bannon — the growing rot infecting another key U.S. institution is just more evidence for their stunning argument now flying at warp speed, yet under the radar of a clueless mainstream media.

The D.C. dysfunction is more proof, they would argue, that the nation needs a “Red Caesar” who will cut through the what they call constitutional gridlock and impose order.

If you’re not one of those dudes who thinks about Ancient Rome every day, let me translate. The alleged brain trust of an increasingly fascist MAGA movement wants an American dictatorship that would “suspend” democracy in January 2025 — just 15 months from now.

"The idea that the US might be redeemed by a Caesar – an authoritarian, rightwing leader – was first broached explicitly by Michael Anton, a Claremont senior fellow and Trump presidential adviser." https://t.co/8Mzpyjx3af— Teddy Wilson 🏴‍☠️ (@reportbywilson) October 4, 2023

The guru of this push for a president seizing dictatorial powers to overthrow what far-right activists see as a “deep state” of liberals — corrupting institutions ranging from government agencies to the media to large corporations and the Pentagon — is a professor of politics at Michigan’s ultraconservative Hillsdale College, Kevin Slack. (Yes, the same Hillsdale that GOP-led school boards, including Pennridge in Philadelphia’s northern exurbs, are hiring to whitewash their curriculums.)

In War on the American Republic: How Liberalism Became Despotism, in which he rails against the “cosmopolitan class” of unelected elites he claims is running America, Slack writes that the “New Right now often discusses a Red Caesar, by which it means a leader whose post-Constitutional rule will restore the strength of his people.” In a recent Guardian article, writer Jason Wilson — who deserves enormous credit for tying together these threads — finds anti-democracy arguments like Slack’s are gaining traction in the small but influential world of far-right think tanks like Hillsdale and the Claremont Institute. That’s been tracked here in Philadelphia by another writer, the centrist liberal Damon Linker at UPenn, who sees a dangerous conspiracy theory taking root not just with obscure professors but with the iconoclastic billionaires who back the right.

“Intellectuals play a certain kind of role, especially on the right, in legitimating actions of elites in the party and [the] movement,” Linker told me in a recent interview, adding: “They’re giving people permission to do terrible things,” labeling shameful measures as “acts of virtue.”  

The chaos at the bottom of the political food chain is coming from the same instincts tearing apart the top of the government: A desire to blow it all up.

When these raw instincts are translated by the extreme right’s “intellectuals” into an explicit plea for a dictatorship, you can see that America is poised to cross the Rubicon — a metaphor rooted in the river in northern Italy that Julius Caesar had to cross with his army in 49 B.C. in order to drive out Rome’s democratically elected government and seize power.  

And yet the elites that far-right extremists claim are “all powerful” seem incapable of grasping these very real threats to constitutional government or a free press. That’s particularly true of the mainstream media and its pacesetters like the New York Times or the Washington Post, which seem determine to “both sides” the descent into dictatorship — with headlines that blame dysfunction on Capitol Hill on “Congress” instead of Republicans, or that place the 80-year-old President Joe Biden’s verbal or actual stumbles on a level pitch with rising GOP fascism.  

It’s all the more remarkable since we all know who the actual “Red Caesar” is — even if he is, technically, orange. Donald Trump, the 45th president who seems to have already locked down the Republican nomination to become the 47th, has been accused of running a rambling, ideas-free campaign — except that’s not true.

As the Los Angeles Times recently noted, Trump has been pretty specific in recent speeches and interviews about the actions he would take if he takes the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2025 — such as naming a special prosecutor to go after his political enemies, blowing up civil service protections to fill the government with his acolytes, deploying the military in a massive deportation campaign, and sending troops to “control crime” in Democratic-led cities. If Julius Caesar were still here, he’d surely be giving a Trump 47 presidency a Roman salute.  

In thinking about a “Red Caesar,” it’s helpful to remember what the actual Caesar said right before crossing the Rubicon: Alea iacta est, meaning, “The die is cast.” But in the United States in 2023, the die is not cast, not yet. The majority of Americans do not want to live under a dictatorship, and we have the power to stop this. But America is never going to prevent the “Red Caesar” unless we start talking about it, loudly and right away.

That is spot on.

Recent polling indicates that defense of democracy or opposition to authoritarianism is not a major concern for most Americans. The economy and national security are bigger concerns. Gallup reported: 

• Fifty-three percent of Americans believe the Republican Party will do a better job of keeping the country prosperous over the next few years, whereas 39% choose the Democratic Party.

• A slightly larger majority, 57%, have greater faith in the Republican Party to protect the country from international terrorism and military threats, while 35% favor the Democrats.

Q: Are Americans as a whole sufficiently alarmed about the threat radical right to democracy?