Future Timeline

(National Review) TWO days ago, the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman reported that Donald Trump “has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August.” In response, many figures on the right inserted their fingers into their ears and started screaming about fake news.

Instead, they should have listened — because Haberman’s reporting was correct. I can attest, from speaking to an array of different sources, that Donald Trump does indeed believe quite genuinely that he — along with former senators David Perdue and Martha McSally — will be “reinstated” to office this summer after “audits” of the 2020 elections in Arizona, Georgia, and a handful of other states have been completed. I can attest, too, that Trump is trying hard to recruit journalists, politicians, and other influential figures to promulgate this belief — not as a fundraising tool or an infantile bit of trolling or a trial balloon, but as a fact.
…
The scale of Trump’s delusion is quite startling. This is not merely an eccentric interpretation of the facts or an interesting foible, nor is it an irrelevant example of anguished post-presidency chatter. It is a rejection of reality, a rejection of law, and, ultimately, a rejection of the entire system of American government. There is no Reinstatement Clause within the United States Constitution. Hell, there is nothing even approximating a Reinstatement Clause within the United States Constitution. The election has been certified, Joe Biden is the president, and, until 2024, that is all there is to it. It does not matter what one’s view of Trump is. It does not matter whether one voted for or against Trump. It does not matter whether one views Trump’s role within the Republican Party favorably or unfavorably. We are talking here about cold, hard, neutral facts that obtain irrespective of one’s preferences; it is not too much to ask that the former head of the executive branch should understand them.
…
That is not how America works, how America has ever worked, or how America can ever work. American politicians do not lose their reelection races only to be reinstalled later on, as might the second-place horse in a race whose winner was disqualified. The idea is otherworldly and obscene.

(Alternet) I'll never understand why anyone listens to Donald Trump on any subject. He wanted to nuke hurricanes. He wanted to put alligator-filled moats along the southern border. He thinks windmills cause cancer, asbestos is swell, and exercise is bad for you. He seriously suggested pumping our bodies full of UV light and disinfectant. He thinks we have planes that are literally invisible, for God's sake!

Nevertheless, millions of Trump fans have bent their brains into pretzels trying to make his doofus proclamations sound presidential—or even marginally nonsimian (see also: hydroxychloroquine).

We've pretty well established that Trump's brain is, at best, masticated circus peanut and, at worst, Lucifer's molten boom-booms, and yet when he dry-heaves utter batshit nonsense, plenty of his fans seem all too ready to lick it up like feral purse poodles.

Case in point: Fully 29% of Republicans think Donald Trump is returning before the year is out—possibly riding in on a cloud or a flaming chariot or (more likely) a golf cart with a cupholder and custom-installed deep fryer.

A new Politico/Morning Consult poll asked survey respondents this straightforward question: "How likely do you think it is that former President Donald Trump will be reinstated as U.S. President this year, if at all?" The question was no doubt included in the poll because Trump himself has been telling insiders that he thinks he'll be back in office by August. (Narrator: He won't.)

(Alternet) After the New York Times' Maggie Haberman reported, on June 1, that former President Donald Trump believes he will be "reinstated" as president by August, many Trump critics — from liberals and progressives to Never Trump conservatives — warned that his delusions could inspire more attacks like the January 6 insurrection as well as an increase in threats against officials. The death threats, harassment and intimidation that election workers have been receiving from Trump supporters is the focus of in-depth article published by Reuters this week, and reporter Linda So shows that the abuse continues months after Trump's departure from the White House.

In her report, (Linda) So emphasizes that the election workers who have suffered ongoing abuse range from high-level officials such as Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (a conservative Republican) to low-level and mid-level election workers. Raffensperger, following the 2020 presidential election, infuriated Trump and his allies — including former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and far-right attorneys Sidney Powell and Lin Wood — by maintaining that now-President Joe Biden won Georgia fairly and that there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the state as Trump claimed. And Raffensperger, along with his wife Tricia Raffensperger, have been inundated with death threats ever since.

…Georgia's secretary of state is hardly the only major election official who has been receiving death threats from Trump supporters. Others have ranged from Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, who is part of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's administration, to Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs.
…
(Linda) So explains, "Trump's relentless false claims that the vote was 'rigged' against him sparked a campaign to terrorize election officials nationwide, from senior officials such as Raffensperger to the lowest-level local election workers.

(The Guardian via MSN) Marjorie Taylor Greene, the extremist Republican congresswoman, has apologized for her comments comparing the required wearing of safety masks in the US House to the horrors of the Holocaust.

“I’m truly sorry for offending people with remarks about the Holocaust,” Taylor Greene told reporters outside the Capitol on Monday, saying she had visited Washington’s US Holocaust Memorial Museum earlier in the day. “There’s no comparison and there never ever will be.“

Related: Fury as Marjorie Taylor Greene likens Covid rules to Nazi treatment of Jews

Greene’s comments were a rare expression of regret by the conservative, who has a record of racist and Islamophobic remarks, as well support for QAnon and other antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Her apology came more than three weeks after appearing on a conservative podcast and comparing Covid-19 safety requirements adopted by Democrats controlling the House to “a time and history where people were told to wear a gold star”. She said they were “put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany. This is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about”.

Her comments sparked widespread outrage across the political spectrum, and were condemned by Republican leaders, including the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, who called the comparison “appalling”.

(Vox) The Southern Baptist Convention, an umbrella group for conservative evangelical churches across the country, is the largest Protestant denomination in the country. But for the past few years, it has been rocked by a series of internal controversies — most notably, fights over the cover-up of sexual abuse in SBC churches and in the organization’s approach to racism and critical race theory.

These tensions culminated in a dramatic fight over the SBC’s presidential election, held on Tuesday during the organization’s annual meeting in Nashville, Tennessee. In the election, two prominent far-right candidates lost to a more mainstream conservative named Ed Litton, blunting the momentum of a Tea Party-style group aiming to lurch the SBC in an even more right-wing direction.

What do these events say about the future of the SBC, one of the Republican Party’s most important civil society allies? And what have been the reverberations in broader American politics and culture?

To answer these questions, I reached out to Greg Thornbury, a prominent scholar of evangelical Christian philosophy and theology. While not an SBC member himself, Thornbury trained at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and taught at Union University, a Baptist school in Tennessee, and is personally familiar with leading figures in the SBC.

According to Thornbury, seeing Litton’s victory as a sign of a “moderate” ascendance in the SBC is a mistake. The organization is thoroughly conservative, politically and theologically, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

(Alternet) On Tuesday, June 15, some supporters of former President Donald Trump were bitterly disappointed when the Southern Baptist Convention chose the Rev. Ed Litton, an Alabama pastor, as its president and rejected some of the more extreme Trumpians who were competing for the position — including the Rev. Mike Stone, who was supported by the far-right Conservative Baptist Network. Journalist Molly Olmstead analyzes this development in an article published by Slate on June 17. As Olmstead sees it, Litton's narrow victory shows a move away from Trumpism among Baptists.

"The SBC has been going through something like an identity crisis this year," Olmsted explains. "Southern Baptists, like most White evangelicals, voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, but in the run-up to the 2020 election, critics began to chafe at the frequently conspiracy theory-laden partisan politics within their churches. After last summer's racial unrest, many of the denomination's Black pastors — actively courted by a Convention uncomfortably aware of its overwhelming whiteness and deeply racist history — began to protest the SBC's unwillingness to recognize the extent of modern-day racism. At the same time, an organized group of Southern Baptists has pushed for a second conservative resurgence to correct what it sees as a loosening of the core Southern Baptist identity."

Baptists who believe that the Southern Baptist Convention should be MAGA through and through favored Stone, a Georgia-based pastor. But 52% of the vote went to Litton, who is White and politically conservative but believes that Baptists should have at least have a conversation about race.

(Counterpunch) Republicans are looking to bolster their electoral prospects by declaring war on “woke” teachers. President Trump warns against “indoctrinating America’s schoolchildren” with “toxic and anti-American theories,” and demands legislative and administrative changes designed to give children a “patriotic, pro-American education.”

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican presidential hopeful, says teachers are “not trying to educate; they’re trying to indoctrinate,” and pledges “We’re not going to let that come to Florida.”

But Trump, DeSantis, and their supporters can rest easy. While public school textbooks and curriculum do throw some sops to us leftist teacher-indoctrinators, they’re filled with all that’s necessary to perpetuate the status quo. These materials don’t lie, exactly, but they distort and omit. The problem often is not what they tell students, but what they don’t tell them.

If a fact undermines or threatens the case for America’s big business-dominated political and economic system, our materials will distort, minimize, or omit it. If a fact does not threaten the raison d’être of the system or is so commonly known that it cannot be credibly omitted, it will be included, sometimes in a sanitized form.

The most egregious and telling distortion in our textbooks is the diminution of the Labor Movement.

(USA Today) Ed Henry, who was fired last July by Fox News Channel over a sexual misconduct allegation, sued the network Wednesday and its CEO, Suzanne Scott, for defamation.

Filed in U.S. District Court in Newark, New Jersey, Henry's lawsuit seeks punitive damages and states the network's CEO "sandbagged" him with a July 1, 2020, statement saying a former employee had accused Henry of sexual misconduct a week earlier and he was being fired after the findings of an external investigation.

Henry, who co-anchored "America's Newsroom" at the time of his dismissal, says the misconduct allegations are false.

The lawsuit by Henry says Scott's statement lent "credence to the false allegations because she was trying to save her own career and burnish her image as a tough, no nonsense female executive who cleaned up Fox News.. In reality, however, Ms. Scott had long been an instrument to cover up the existence of sexual misconduct at Fox News," adding she "has repeatedly covered up sexual misconduct by senior Fox News management."

More: Fox News fined $1 million in New York City settlement of sexual harassment allegations

wjfox wrote: ↑Thu Jul 08, 2021 5:45 pm You know, maybe it'll be a good thing if these complete morons just die off.

America's collective IQ should go up a notch or two.

(Bulwark) Given his utter ignorance about the U.S. Constitution, it remains shocking that Donald Trump was—as recently as half a year ago!—charged with preserving, protecting, and defending it. The latest evidence of his appalling constitutional ignorance comes in the form of a series of frivolous lawsuits that reveal an embarrassingly distorted understanding of our national charter. At least this legal mess has one silver lining: It’s an opportunity for another mini-lesson in basic civics.

Last week, Trump filed class-action complaints in a Florida federal court against YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and their respective CEOs, claiming that the private companies’ decisions to suspend his social media accounts in the wake of the January 6 insurrection violate, among other things, the First Amendment. In a press conference, Trump called his lawsuits “a very important and beautiful development for our freedom of speech.” If these companies can do this to a president, Trump added, “they can do it to anyone.”

Here’s the glaringly obvious problem: With rare exceptions, the First Amendment doesn’t bind private companies. It applies to the state. As with most of the rest of the Bill of Rights, and indeed much of the Constitution in general, the point is to limit the massive power of the government. The Framers (understood broadly to include the authors of the Bill of Rights) understood exquisitely that people with the power of government tend to abuse it and so power must be limited and checked and balanced.

Thus, when Trump was president, his actions were bound by the First Amendment because he had at his fingertips the massive power of the federal government: its criminal justice, military, and regulatory apparatuses. Companies like Google (YouTube’s parent), Twitter, and Facebook are not restrained by the First Amendment; to the contrary, they can sue executive branch officials to validate their own First Amendment rights.

(Alternet)Although conservative journalist David Frum has been a blistering critic of Donald Trump, he has been reluctant to use the word "fascist" to describe the former president. The words "fascist" and 'fascism," Frum has stressed in the past, should never be used casually simply to attack policies one does not like. But in an article published by The Atlantic on July 13, the Never Trump conservative lays out some disturbing reasons why Trumpism does, in fact, fit the definition of fascism.

(Atlantic) “I became worse.” That’s how double impeachment changed him, Donald Trump told a conservative audience in Dallas last weekend, without a trace of a smile. This was not Trump the insult comic talking. This was the deepest Trump self. And this one time, he told the truth.

Something has changed for Trump and his movement since January 2021. You can measure the difference by looking back at the deadly events in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. Trump made three statements about those events over four days. He was visibly reluctant to speak negatively of the far-right groups. He praised “fine people on both sides” and spread the blame for “this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.”

I do not consider myself guilty. I admit all the factual aspects of the charge. But I cannot plead that I am guilty of high treason; for there can be no high treason against that treason committed in 1918.

Maybe you recognize those words. They come from Adolf Hitler’s plea of self-defense at his trial for his 1923 Munich putsch. He argued: You are not entitled to the power you hold, so I committed no crime when I tried to grab it back. You blame me for what I did; I blame you for who you are.

Trump’s no Hitler, obviously. But they share some ways of thinking. The past never repeats itself. But it offers warnings. It’s time to start using the F-word again, not to defame—but to diagnose.