Biden drops out of the race; Now what?

Joe drops out of the race and endorses Kamala. Things just keep getting weirder. 

1. This is mostly bad for DJT, mostly good for democracy

2. This is mostly good for DJT, mostly bad for democracy

3. I don't know what this is 

4. Other

Book comments: Autocracy Inc.

One thing that seemed to be real and serious was a personal perception that the world’s authoritarians are banding together to mount a global war against democracy, the rule of law, civil liberties and transparency in government. Apparently, at least a few others see basically the same thing. 

The Hill published commentary on a new book by historian Anne Applebaum (staff writer at The Atlantic), Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want To Run The World: 

Last month, North Korea and Russia signed a pact covering trade, investment and cultural ties, and pledging aid if either nation faces “aggression.” In exchange for economic assistance and technology transfers that bolster its nuclear weapons program, North Korea is continuing to provide Russia with ammunition for its war against Ukraine. President Vladimir Putin praised Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un for supporting “the fight against the imperialistic policies of the United States and its allies.”

This month, soon after he assumed the rotating presidency of the European Union, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — a self-proclaimed champion of “illiberal democracy” who has cracked down on freedom of the press and an independent judiciary — left EU leaders fuming by urging President Volodymyr Zelensky to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, and then lavishing praise on Putin and Xi Jinping in Moscow and Beijing. A few days later, Orbán met with Donald Trump, whose reelection he has endorsed. “We discussed ways to make peace,” Orbán said. “The good news of the day: he’s going to solve it.”

These incidents indicate that aspiring autocrats and dictators share the same goals: enrich themselves, remain in power, deprive their own citizens of influence, discredit and destroy democracy and create a new world order. And that they are collaborating to achieve these goals.

Shared grievances and anti-democratic goals motivate autocrats to help one another. Iran traded food and gasoline for Venezuelan gold and sent equipment and personnel to repair oil refineries. In 2016, Xi Jinping endorsed Iran’s role in helping Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, who authorized chemical weapons attacks on his own people, retain power. Iran increased China’s access to its oil, infrastructure, telecommunications and banking markets.

Enemies of democracy have vastly improved their capacity to censor online content. China outlaws posts that “endanger national security, subvert the government, or undermine national unification.” Afraid of losing business in the world’s second most populous nation, American tech companies altered software to protect the “Great Firewall’s protocols.” Pakistan, Brazil, Mexico, Serbia, South Africa, Turkey, Singapore and Zimbabwe have acquired China’s “safe city technology.”

Autocrats have also ramped up the internal and external dissemination of fake news about democracies.

Along with increasing military and financial assistance to Ukraine, Applebaum believes that to regain the initiative a multinational movement must make money laundering and real estate transactions transparent; require internet posts to be more evidence-based and less anonymous, while holding social media companies more accountable for content; and reduce democratic countries’ reliance on minerals, semiconductors and energy supplies sold by Russia, China and other autocracies.

These reforms won’t occur, Applebaum emphasizes, until citizens of democracies “think of themselves as linked to one another and to the people who share their values inside autocracies, too. They need one another, now more than ever, because their democracies are not safe. Nobody’s democracy is safe.”

At a time of increasing isolationist and nationalist sentiments in Western democracies, implementing this agenda won’t be easy.

The NYT comments on Applebaum’s book (not paywalled):

Something new is happening in the world of oppression. Or so says the historian Anne Applebaum.

Whereas the twilight struggle of the 20th century was waged between formal “blocs” of ideologically aligned allies, today’s autocrats are more diverse — a mix of self-described Marxists, illiberal demagogues, kleptocratic mafiosi, old-school tyrants and new-school theocrats.

Of course, they do share ideas if not ideologies, among them that liberal internationalism is an alibi for imperialism, the means by which Washington and Brussels impose their interests and decadent cultural mores (especially L.G.B.T.Q. tolerance) on the rest of the world. But today’s autocrats principally cement their bonds, Applebaum argues, “not through ideals but through deals.” Thanks in large part to the opacity of global finance, they enjoy a vibrant trade in surveillance technologies, weapons and precious minerals, laundering one another’s dirty money and colluding to evade American sanctions. This venal compact of convenience she calls “Autocracy, Inc.” 

To her credit, Applebaum’s new book risks a more sophisticated, and less flattering, answer: Globalization did work, only not how she and her friends assumed it would. Autocracies became more integrated with one another, while American and European trade dependence on the autocratic world — on Chinese manufacturing and Russian oil, for instance — became a weapon to be used against the West. “Everyone assumed that in a more open, interconnected world, democracy and liberal ideas would spread to the autocratic states,” Applebaum writes. Nobody imagined that autocratic and illiberal ideas “would spread to the democratic world instead.”

And not only ideas. Before and after the fall of the Soviet Union, cash robbed from the coffers of the Communist East flowed into bank accounts in London and the Caribbean. More recently, shell companies in Delaware have purchased apartments in New York on behalf of oligarchs in Russia and China, while European and American accountants, real estate agents and lawyers have enjoyed hefty fees for secreting the ill-gotten wealth of the world’s kleptocrats. In short, the world system accommodated the needs of autocracy; the autocrats were not required to change. 

Applebaum is cleareyed about the difficulties of rectifying this situation: “Powerful people benefit from the existing system, want to keep it in place and have deep connections across the political spectrum.” She’s no anticapitalist, but her recommendations for reforms to the financial system — requiring companies to be registered in the name of their actual owners, for example — are concrete and admirable. (emphasis added)

The NYT article goes on to criticize some of Applebaum’s reasoning and conclusions, but I found her reasoning more persuasive and evidence-based than the NYT critic’s subjective evaluations. In essence, she sees even more than what I could see. 

Remembering the radical right authoritarian elite Bill Buckley

In 2008, FAIR published a remembrance about the politics of the influential radical Bill Buckley (1925-2008), a mainstream media creature who held the mainstream media in open contempt:

William F. Buckley, Rest in Praise

Glowing obits obscure an ugly record

Over the course of his career, William F. Buckley routinely reproached the “liberal media” from his perch high atop it. By his death on February 27, he’d published dozens of books, written decades of syndicated columns that appeared in hundreds of newspapers, and made thousands of television and radio appearances, among them some 1,500 on his own PBS show, Firing Line, the longest-running public affairs show in public television history.

Unsurprisingly, that same “liberal” media treated Buckley’s passing as the loss of a great intellectual and upstanding human being, with admiring obituaries that largely ignored a massive body of unfavorable material.

Buckley’s career began in 1951 with the publication of God and Man at Yale, an attack on his alma mater that urged the firing of professors whom he felt were insufficiently hostile to socialism and atheism. Despite this early assault on academic freedom, Buckley in later years routinely took offense at what he saw as liberal “political correctness” (e.g., National Review, 10/24/05; Post and Courier, 2/18/99).

During the Civil Rights Era, Buckley made a name for himself as a promoter of white supremacy. National Review, which he founded in 1955, championed violent racist regimes in the American South and South Africa.

A 1957 editorial written by Buckley, “Why the South Must Prevail” (National Review, 8/24/57), cited the “cultural superiority of white over Negro” in explaining why whites were “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where [they do] not predominate numerically.” Appearing on NPR’s Fresh Air in 1989 (rebroadcast 2/28/08), he stood by the passage. “Well, I think that’s absolutely correct,” Buckley told host Terry Gross when she read it back to him.

A 1960 National Review editorial supported South Africa’s white minority rule (4/23/60): “The whites are entitled, we believe, to preeminence in South Africa.” In a 1961 National Review column about colonialism—which the magazine once called “that brilliantly conceived structure” (William F. Buckley, John Judis)–Buckley explained that “black Africans” left alone “tend to revert to savagery.” The same year, in a speech to the group Young Americans for Freedom, Buckley called citizens of the Congo “semi-savages” (National Review, 9/9/61).

National Review editors condemned the 1963 bombing of a black Birmingham Church that killed four children, but because it “set back the cause of the white people there so dramatically,” the editors wondered “whether in fact the explosion was the act of a provocateur—of a Communist, or of a crazed Negro” (Chicago Reader, 8/26/05).

Just months before the 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed, Buckley warned in his syndicated column (2/18/65) that “chaos” and “mobocratic rule” might follow if “the entire Negro population in the South were suddenly given the vote.” In his 1969 column “On Negro Inferiority” (4/8/69), Buckley heralded as “massive” and “apparently authoritative” academic racist Arthur Jensen’s findings that blacks are less intelligent than whites and Asians.

The ugliness of Buckley’s public advocacy was not restricted to race. McCarthy and His Enemies, published in 1954 and coauthored by Buckley with Brent Bozell Sr., called Sen. Joseph McCarthy “a prophet,” and described McCarthyism as “a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks.”

Buckley’s disdain for what he called “liberals’ fetishistic commitment to democracy” (William F. Buckley, John Judis) was evident in his admiration for dictators, including Spain’s Francisco Franco and Chile’s Augusto Pinochet. “General Franco is an authentic national hero,” wrote Buckley (National Review, 10/ 26/57), lauding the fascist for wresting Spain from its democracy and “the visionaries, ideologues, Marxists and nihilists” in charge. Pinochet was defended (National Review, 11/23/98) for deposing the democratically elected Salvador Allende, “a president who was defiling the Chilean constitution and waving proudly the banner of his friend and idol, Fidel Castro.”

The remembrance continues at length in that vein, but concludes with this blast at the mainstream media:

With such a wealth of unbecoming material—long-term support for racism, fascism, militarism and harshly intrusive policies into the private lives of individuals—one might have expected obituaries to present at least a mixed portrait of Buckley’s influential life. Considering the generosity Buckley received from a media he disdained, one shudders to think about the orgy of praise his death would have occasioned in a media more to his liking.  

Is it just me, or do the more radical pillars of what used to be called conservatism, now MAGA or radical right authoritarianism, look amazingly alike? Their distorted visions of reality, biases and their thinking all seem quite alike. They are all openly hostile to democracy and civil liberties. They all seem to apply about the same reasoning that leads to about the same beliefs and policy preferences. 

To me, Buckley spewing his bigoted authoritarian brand of politics in the 1950s and 1960s sounds very much like DJT and the Republican Party sounds in 2024. With more nuanced language about racism as a possible exception, the attitudes of Buckley are basically the same as the attitudes of MAGA. This is a reminder. The roots of MAGA go back a long ways in time. How far back? Arguably at least back to the 1800s, if not a century or two earlier than that.

This article raised the question: Was “true” conservatism always more like what Buckley and now MAGA espouse than what the now extinct moderates and liberals in the pre-MAGA Republican Party briefly represented? I wonder.

About JD Vance, an intelligent, complex, flawed person

LGBQT Nation writes about JD Vance:

J.D. Vance’s former trans friend speaks out 

about how he turned hateful

He delivered baked goods to his trans friend after their gender-affirming surgery. Now he's calling LGBTQ+ people "groomers"

“It hurt my feelings when he started saying hateful things about trans people,” said Sofia Nelson, a former classmate of Vance at Yale Law School.

They were reportedly close friends, with their friendship continuing after Vance graduated in 2013, but this ended when Vance supported an Arkansas bill that restricted transgender care for minors in 2021.

He had another classmate at Yale who has since cut ties with him – Josh McLaurin, a Democratic state senator from Georgia. The two stayed in touch up until when Trump first ran for president. Vance reportedly told McLaurin on Facebook, “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”

“He realized that the only way that he could realize and give effect to his own anger in politics was to identify with the MAGA movement,” McLaurin said to the Times.

The cynicism of MAGA elites cannot be easily overstated. These people are driven by wealth and power lust, rage, hate, bigotry and moral cynicism to the point of nihilism. But try to square my allegation of cynicism with these parts of a fascinating much longer essay that Vance wrote for The Lamp, a Catholic blog in 2020:

HOW I JOINED THE RESISTANCE

As I advanced through our educational hierarchy—moving on from Ohio State to Yale Law School—I began to worry that my assimilation into elite culture came at a high cost. My sister once told me that the song that made her think of me was “Simple Man” by Lynyrd Skynyrd. Though I had fallen in love, I found that the emotional demons of my childhood made it hard to be the type of partner I’d always wanted to be. My Randian arrogance about my own ability melted away when confronted with the realization that an obsession with achievement would fail to produce the achievement that mattered most to me for so much of my life: a happy, thriving family.

I had immersed myself in the logic of the meritocracy and found it deeply unsatisfying. And I began to wonder: were all these worldly markers of success actually making me a better person? I had traded virtue for achievement and found the latter wanting. But the woman I wanted to marry cared little whether I obtained a Supreme Court clerkship. She just wanted me to be a good person.

Around the same time, I attended a talk at our law school with Peter Thiel. This was 2011, and Thiel was a well-known venture capitalist but hardly a household name. He would later blurb my book and become a good friend, but I had no idea what to expect at the time. He spoke first in personal terms: arguing that we were increasingly tracked into cutthroat professional competitions. We would compete for appellate clerkships, and then Supreme Court clerkships. We would compete for jobs at elite law firms, and then for partnerships at those same places. At each juncture, he said, our jobs would offer longer work hours, social alienation from our peers, and work whose prestige would fail to make up for its meaninglessness. He also argued that his own world of Silicon Valley spent too little time on the technological breakthroughs that made life better—those in biology, energy, and transportation—and too much on things like software and mobile phones. Everyone could now tweet at each other, or post photos on Facebook, but it took longer to travel to Europe, we had no cure for cognitive decline and dementia, and our energy use increasingly dirtied the planet. He saw these two trends—elite professionals trapped in hyper-competitive jobs, and the technological stagnation of society—as connected. If technological innovation were actually driving real prosperity, our elites wouldn’t feel increasingly competitive with one another over a dwindling number of prestigious outcomes.

Peter’s talk remains the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School. He articulated a feeling that had until then remained unformed: that I was obsessed with achievement in se—not as an end to something meaningful, but to win a social competition. My worry that I had prioritized striving over character took on a heightened significance: striving for what? I didn’t even know why I cared about the things I cared about. I fancied myself educated, enlightened, and especially wise about the ways of the world—at least compared with most of the people from my hometown. Yet I was obsessed with obtaining professional credentials—a clerkship with a federal judge and then an associate position at a prestigious firm—that I didn’t understand. I hated my limited exposure to legal practice. I looked to the future, and realized that I’d been running a desperate race where the first prize was a job I hated.

I began immediately planning for a career outside the law, which is why I spent less than two years after graduation as a practicing attorney. But Peter left me with one more thing: he was possibly the smartest person I’d ever met, but he was also a Christian. He defied the social template I had constructed—that dumb people were Christians and smart ones atheists. I began to wonder where his religious belief came from, which led me to René Girard, the French philosopher whom he apparently studied under at Stanford.

One of Girard’s central insights is that human civilizations are often, perhaps even always, founded on a “scapegoat myth”—an act of violence committed against someone who has wronged the broader community, retold as a sort of origin story for the community.

Girard points out that Romulus and Remus are, like Christ, divine children, and, like Moses, placed in a river basket to save them from a jealous king. There was a time when I bristled at such comparisons, worried than any seeming lack of originality on the part of Scripture meant that it couldn’t be true. This is a common rhetorical device of the New Atheists: point to some creation story—like the flood narrative in the Epic of Gilgamesh—as evidence that the sacred authors have plagiarized their story from some earlier civilization. It reasonably follows that if the biblical story is lifted from somewhere else, the version in the Bible may not be the Word of God after all.

The victim of the madness of crowds is, as Christ was, infinitely powerful—able to prevent his own murder—and perfectly innocent—undeserving of the rage and violence of the crowd. In Christ, we see our efforts to shift blame and our own inadequacies onto a victim for what they are: a moral failing, projected violently upon someone else. Christ is the scapegoat who reveals our imperfections, and forces us to look at our own flaws rather than blame our society’s chosen victims.

These very personal reflections on faith, conformity, and virtue coincided with a writing project that would eventually become a very public success: Hillbilly Elegy, the hybrid book of memoir and social commentary I published in 2016. I look back on earlier drafts of the book, and realize just how much I changed from 2013 to 2015: I started the book angry, resentful of my mother, especially, and confident in my own abilities. I finished it a little humbled, and very unsure about what to do to “solve” so many of our social problems. And the answer I landed on, as unsatisfactory then as it is now, is that you can’t actually “solve” our social problems. The best you can hope for is to reduce them or to blunt their effects.

I noticed during my research that many of those social problems came from behavior for which social scientists and policy experts had a different vocabulary. On the right, the conversation often turned to “culture” and “personal responsibility”—the ways in which individuals or communities held back their own progress. And though it seemed obvious to me that there was something dysfunctional about some of the places in which I’d grown up, the discourse on the right seemed a little heartless. It failed to account for the fact that destructive behaviors were almost always tragedies with terrible consequences. It is one thing to wag your finger at another person for failing to act a certain way, but it is something else to feel the weight of the misery that comes from those actions.

The left’s intellectuals focused much more on the structural and external problems facing families like mine—the difficulty in finding jobs and the lack of funding for certain types of resources. And while I agreed that more resources were often necessary, there seemed to me a sense in which our most destructive behaviors persisted—even flourished—in times of material comfort. The economic left was often more compassionate, but theirs was a kind of compassion—devoid of any expectation—that reeked of giving up. A compassion that assumes a person is disadvantaged to the point of hopelessness is like sympathy for a zoo animal, and I had no use for it.

And as I reflected on these competing views of the world, and the wisdom and shortcomings of each, I felt desperate for a worldview that understood our bad behavior as simultaneously social and individual, structural and moral; that recognized that we are products of our environment; that we have a responsibility to change that environment, but that we are still moral beings with individual duties; one that could speak against rising rates of divorce and addiction, not as sanitized conclusions about their negative social externalities, but with moral outrage. And I realized, eventually, that I had already been exposed to that worldview: it was my Mamaw’s Christianity. And the name it gave for the behaviors I had seen destroy lives and communities was “sin.”

A decade ago, I took this as evidence of a vengeful, irrational God. Yet who could look at the statistics on what our early twenty-first century culture and politics had wrought—the misery, the rising suicide rates, the “deaths of despair” in the richest country on earth, and doubt that the sins of parents had any effect on their children? 

This is a passage from City of God, where St. Augustine summarizes the debauchery of Rome’s ruling class:

This is our concern, that every man be able to increase his wealth so as to supply his daily prodigalities, and so that the powerful may subject the weak for their own purposes. Let the poor court the rich for a living, and that under their protection they may enjoy a sluggish tranquility; and let the rich abuse the poor as their dependents, to minister to their pride. Let the people applaud not those who protect their interests, but those who provide them with pleasure. Let no severe duty be commanded, no impurity forbidden. Let kings estimate their prosperity, not by the righteousness, but by the servility of their subjects. Let the provinces stand loyal to the kings, not as moral guides, but as lords of their possessions and purveyors of their pleasures; not with a hearty reverence, but a crooked and servile fear. .... If such happiness is distasteful to any, let him be branded as a public enemy; and if any attempt to modify or put an end to it let him be silenced, banished, put an end to.

It was the best criticism of our modern age I’d ever read. A society oriented entirely towards consumption and pleasure, spurning duty and virtue. Not long after I first read these words, my friend Oren Cass published a book arguing that American policy makers have focused far too much on promoting consumption as opposed to productivity, or some other measure of wellbeing. The reaction—criticizing Oren for daring to push policies that might lower consumption—almost proved the argument. “Yes,” I found myself saying, “Oren’s preferred policies might reduce per-capita consumption. But that’s precisely the point: our society is more than the sum of its economic statistics. If people die sooner in the midst of historic levels of consumption, then perhaps our focus on consumption is misguided.”

And indeed it was this insight, more than any other, that ultimately led not just to Christianity, but to Catholicism. Despite my Mamaw’s unfamiliarity with the liturgy, the Roman and Italian cultural influences, and the foreign pope, I slowly began to see Catholicism as the closest expression of her kind of Christianity: obsessed with virtue, but cognizant of the fact that virtue is formed in the context of a broader community; sympathetic with the meek and poor of the world without treating them primarily as victims; protective of children and families and with the things necessary to ensure they thrive. And above all: a faith centered around a Christ who demands perfection of us even as He loves unconditionally and forgives easily. (emphases added)

Three thoughts

1. Try squaring Vance’s 2020 essay with the Vance the 2024 LGBQT article talks about. On the one hand Vance (i) points to the “scapegoat myth” that Girard articulated as a fundamental insight, (ii) says God loves unconditionally and forgives easily, (iii) openly admits his own failings, but then he (iv) publicly attacks, insults and slanders the LGBQT community as evil “groomers.” What is going on in that man’s mind? Is he a cynical Christian nationalist scapegoating LGBQT people in an insane drive for wealth and power, an imperative he criticizes? Or, is he an old-fashioned Christian like his Mamaw? Or, is he just very confused? 

2. I am struck by how similar my thinking about some of these things has been to the journey that Vance took. I never had the complication of any urge toward any form of religion. My mental path was different that way, but pretty similar otherwise. Vance says he was desperate for a worldview that understood our bad behavior as simultaneously social and individual and structural and moral. I do wish that Vance had somehow become aware of pragmatic rationalism. It is a worldview that understands that human bad behavior is both simultaneously social and individual, and moral (maybe also structural depending on what he means by structural).

3. Not all religious people are stupid. Some are brilliant, probably most are average. I have argued that many times here. This essay make that clear. No one can accuse Vance of being stupid or carelessly self-deluded. He knows exactly what he is doing and why. That is how I see the elites behind the MAGA movement. I see them as cynical aggressively opportunistic people with an intense lust for wealth and power and fundamentally different from most (~95% ?) of the rank and file MAGA. So, is Vance a cynic and/or something else?

A retraction of yesterday's poll post; The wheels are falling off the rule of law cart

I retract the poll data I posted yesterday from 538. That data gave Biden a 53% chance of winning. Nate Silver, formerly at 538, explains the problem with the model that 538 is using:

When the Silver Bulletin presidential forecast launched last month, I said I wasn’t interested in prosecuting the “model wars”, meaning having big public debates about forecasting methodology. One reason is that I find these arguments tiresome: I first published an election model in 2008, and it’s been the same debates pretty much ever since. But there’s also a more pragmatic consideration. If I think a model is unsound, I worry about elevating it by giving it even more attention. Because I do believe in probabilities, after all. Joe Biden’s chance of winning another term is hard to forecast because (1) he might still drop out and (2) he’s probably not capable of running the sort of normal campaign the model implicitly assumes he can. Biden’s chances are probably lower than the current 28 percent in the Silver Bulletin forecast, in other words. But they’re certainly not zero. I worry about a news cycle on Nov. 6 when an unsound model is validated because it “won” the model wars based on a sample size of one election.

What also makes this awkward is that the model I’m going to criticize comes from the site I used to work for, 538. I’m sure newsletter readers will know this, but what was formerly the FiveThirtyEight model1 from 2008-2022 is now the Silver Bulletin model — I retained the IP when I left Disney. But, I’m not sure the rest of the world knows that. (I still sometimes run into people who think FiveThirtyEight is affiliated with the New York Times, which it hasn’t been since 2013.) I worry a little bit about a Naomi Klein / Naomi Wolf situation in which criticism of the 538 model rebounds back on me.

Let’s also state the other and more obvious conflicts here: I publish a competing product. And I’m not a fan of the guy 538 hired to develop its new model, G. Elliott Morris.

However, various high-profile reporters have contacted me for comment. And I think I have a professional obligation to speak up. Not all that many people have explored the inner workings of models like these. Moreover, we’re in an unusual circumstance where the models themselves have become part of the debate about what Biden should do. For instance, the 538 model — which showed Biden with a 53 percent chance of winning as of Thursday afternoon — has been cited by Biden defenders like Ron Klain, the former White House Chief of Staff, as a reason that Biden should stay in the race: ....

I’m not sure that Klain or anyone else should get their hopes up from the 538 model, however. At best, all it’s really saying is that Biden will probably win because he’s an incumbent: the polls have very little influence on the 538 forecast at this point. And at worst, it might be buggy. It’s not easy to understand what it’s doing or why it’s doing it.

I thought the 538 model seemed basically reasonable when it was first published in June, showing the race as a toss-up. But its behavior since the debate — Biden has actually gained ground in their forecast over the past few weeks even though their polling average has moved toward Trump by 2 points! — raises a lot of questions. This may be by design — Morris seems to believe it’s too early to really look at the polls at all. But If my model was behaving like this, I’d be concerned.

Moreover, some of the internal workings of the model are strange, or at least appear that way based on the information Morris has made publicly available.

I retract this 

The prediction model is possibly flawed

The rest of Nate’s long post is fascinating about weighing poll data vs two fundamentals (incumbency and the economy), but not necessary to explain my retraction.

This prediction model kerfuffle raises a question. Based on my limited knowledge about the science of prediction probably being a ridiculously dangerous thing, is predicting a presidential election outcome fundamentally different than predicting other events? This prediction model flaw issue makes no sense to me unless presidential elections are fundamentally different than other kinds of events. 

We all recall my wonderful blog post blithering about the predictive power of a moderately sophisticated algorithm called autoregressive distributed lag. Don’t recall it? Well, it’s here if you’re interested. It did really well at predicting future events compared to both human experts and confident blowhards who make their living telling the public false predictions about basically everything. We live in strange times.

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From the What Fresh Hell is This Now? Files: The AP reports the most amazing, mind-blowing thing about Hunter Biden one could ever imagine -- Aileen Cannon has bailed him out of his federal legal troubles 😮:

Hunter Biden seeks dismissal of tax, gun cases, 

citing decision to toss Trump’s classified docs case

President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, asked federal judges on Thursday to dismiss tax and gun cases against him, citing a ruling in Florida this week that threw out a separate prosecution of former President Donald Trump.

The requests in federal court in Delaware and California underscore the potential ramifications of U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s dismissal Monday of the classified documents case against Trump and the possibility that it could unsettle the legal landscape surrounding Justice Department special counsels.

Both Hunter Biden and Trump were prosecuted by special counsels appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland. In dismissing the Trump case, Cannon ruled that the appointment of the special counsel who prosecuted Trump, Jack Smith, violated the Constitution because he was appointed directly to the position by Garland instead of being nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.  

In a pair of filings Thursday, lawyers for Hunter Biden said the same logic should apply in his cases and should result in the dismissal of a pending tax prosecution in Los Angeles — currently set for trial in September — and a separate firearm case in Delaware, in which Hunter Biden was convicted in June of three felony charges.

Presumably, the judge on Hunter’s federal lawsuit is a normal, actual judge, not a loose Republican Party cannon like Aileen. In that case, the judge would reject Hunter’s plea and his prosecution would probably carry on. His attorneys will probably appeal to the local federal appeals court and they might apply for a stay of prosecution until the legal question is ultimately resolved by the US supreme court in a year or two (or maybe three). Hunter, like DJT will probably die of old age before the courts figure out what the hell is going on with the rule of law.

Our legal system has degenerated into a stupid fustercluck. What a mess.

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The New Republic reports that Republican racists are raising a ruckus -- Rut Roh!:

MAGA Enters Racist Meltdown Mode 

Over J.D. Vance’s Wife

The past week has seen an outpouring of hate from the far right over the wife of Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance. The unremarkable fact that Vance is married to Usha Vance, a woman of Indian heritage, has become a fixation for white nationalists online.

Following Monday’s announcement of Vance as Trump’s running mate, white nationalist “groyper” Nick Fuentes seemed to enter a meltdown on his broadcast, saying, “What kind of man marries somebody that isn’t a Christian? What kind of man marries somebody named Usha? Clearly, he doesn’t value his racial identity, his heritage. Clearly, he doesn’t value his religion. He doesn’t marry a woman that professes Jesus Christ? What does that say about him?”

Jaden McNeil, another white nationalist activist, posted a picture of Vance, his wife, and their newborn with the caption, “I’m sure this guy is going to be great on immigration.” Other prominent far-right accounts have similarly bemoaned Vance’s multiracial family, with replies awash in bigotry. “There is an obvious Indian coup taking place in the US right before our eyes,” whined far-right conspiracy theorist Stew Peters.

Considering the flagrant racism of the far right, this reaction may not shock, but it certainly appalls. [Well said, if I do say so myself!] It’s a reminder that there are factions of Trump’s base that view diversity in their party, and the country, with horror. (Recall Ann Coulter telling Vivek Ramaswamy that she would not vote for him because he is Indian.)

It’s good to know that most of America’s bigots, racists, misogynists, pedophiles, perverts, crackpots, creeps, cranks and Christian theocrats are now comfortably ensconced in the radical authoritarian, morally rotted Republican Party. Wheee!! What great fun. 

Q: What the hell is a groyper? 

Lest we forget, or never knew, here are some patriotic Trump supporters:

A short history of Christianity in America & Christian nationalism

Until recent years, Christianity never bothered me much. It was always there but it mostly existed in peace and cooperation with things other than religious worship and practices. Despite the decline in Christian practice in the US in recent decades, the rise of radicalized authoritarian Christian nationalism has made me uneasy ever since I came to learn of its existence and power in American politics. In the last couple of years, my unease has turned into increasingly intense fear.

Christian nationalism is a political wealth and power movement, not a Christian religious movement. Nonetheless, the elites who control the movement use strict Christian fundamentalist dogmas to shield the wealth and power agenda from the rank and file. Poll data indicates that most rank and file Christian nationalism supporters do not know what Christian nationalism is or that its agenda is anti-democratic authoritarian wealth and power for the elites, not Christian religion for the benefit of all.

This 21 minute video outlines the origins and practices of Christianity in the US since the time of the colonies. In the past, educational content like this would not have fazed me. Now all of it scares me. I look differently at history that was never troubling until now. 

Faithful America, a Christian group that opposes Christian nationalism writes about the authoritarian threat.

What is Christian nationalism, and why is it a threat?

As defined by multiple sociologists and academic researchers, Christian nationalism is a political ideology and cultural framework that claims America was founded to be a "Christian nation" where Christians should receive special legal treatment not available to non-Christians. This merges the previously separate Christian and American identities, proclaiming that the only true Americans are the country's Christians (and a specific subset of conservative Christians, at that). This means that Christian nationalism is antisemitic and Islamophobic, and poses a threat to the religious freedom of America's Jews, Muslims, Indigenous peoples, mainline Protestant Christians, and more.

As the "Christians Against Christian Nationalism" coalition notes, "It often overlaps with and provides cover for white supremacy and racial subjugation," which is why you will also often hear the related and important term "white Christian nationalism." Christian nationalism also falsely teaches that there is no separation of church and state -- and that conservative Christians should seize complete power by any means necessary.

Driven by that lust for power, Christian nationalism is the ideology that inspired and guided the deadly January 6 insurrection; organizes countless attacks on the equal rights and religious freedom of non-Christians, immigrants, women, the LGBTQ community, people of color, and other Americans; and now threatens to incite a new wave of political violence with never-ending rhetoric about "holy war," the "armor of God," and "the angel of death" coming for the movement's political opponents. 

Is Christian nationalism Christian?

No, Christian nationalism is a political ideology and a form of nationalism, not a religion or a form of Christianity. It directly contradicts the Gospel in multiple ways, and is therefore considered by many Christian leaders to be a heresy. While Jesus taught love, peace, and truth, Christian nationalism leads to hatred, political violence, and QAnon misinformation. While Jesus resisted the devil's temptations of authority in the wilderness, Christian nationalism seeks to seize power for its followers at all costs. And while Christianity is a 2,000-year-old global tradition that transcends all borders, Christian nationalism seeks to merge faith with a single, 247-year-old, pluralistic nation.

If Christian nationalism is a political ideology, not a religion, why call it "Christian?"

We still say "Christian nationalism" because, just as white nationalism seeks to define national citizenship by a particular race, Christian nationalism seeks to define national citizenship by a particular religion. We need to note which faith is being hijacked -- our faith -- in order to highlight the danger to the church as well as to explain why we are the ones speaking out.

Equally importantly, while the ideology of Christian nationalism isn't Christian, individual Christian nationalists are. We should not question anyone else's stated faith or relationship with God the way that some of our own critics have questioned us. Instead, it is precisely because we are their fellow Christians that we can say to the pastors and politicians who abuse their power, "This is not what our shared faith is supposed to look like. This hunger for power and this mistreatment of others is not the love that Jesus wants from us." 

Why should Christians oppose Christian nationalism?

Pro-democracy, pro-love Christians must speak out together to show the country that Christian nationalism does not represent Jesus or our faith. When we do this, we prove that the biggest critics of the Christian-nationalist ideology are in fact Christians, and thus disprove the source of its biggest power: the false perception that the religious-right speaks for all American Christians.

Scared of losing this power, Christian-nationalist leaders like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Michael Flynn, and Tony Perkins have worked very hard to convince their followers of the lie that all critics of Christian nationalist are "atheistic globalists" from "the godless left" who want to "marginalize" Christians. Others, like Franklin Graham, warn that "progressive Christianity will lead you to hell." They are desperate to sideline or silence our voices, but their backlash simply shows that speaking out for the Gospel's message of love works.

In reality, it is Christian nationalism that marginalizes the Black Church tradition, mainline Protestants, Roman Catholics, progressive evangelicals, and millions of other members of the Body of Christ by trying to erase our faith and our relationship to the public square. To assist such Christians and churches in recognizing and responding to Christian nationalism when we see it, Faithful America has compiled the following list of helpful resources.

Some Christian nationalist rhetoric and thinking:

“Mercy is more than undeserved kindness. It is either a full pardon from a crime you are guilty of committing or it is a stay of execution.” ― Lance Wallnau (a major Christian nationalist advocate), God’s Chaos Code: The Shocking Blueprint that Reveals 5 Keys to the Destiny of Nations

“The fact that companies are as influential as nations should reshape how we see corporations. Nations now compete with corporations for influence and political power.” ― Lance Wallnau, God’s Chaos Code: The Shocking Blueprint that Reveals 5 Keys to the Destiny of Nations (Here is where a fight between the autocrats and the plutocrats against the theocrats could come from - how the three power sources will reconcile their endless lust for wealth and power is not at all clear to me)

Christian Ethics,Volume 33, page 26,

Number 1,   Aggregate Issue 127, Winter 2023