The craziest, most aggressive people can push more reasonable people out of public discussions. That, in turn, makes the decision-making body crazier, which gives more people the impression that, if they're reasonable, fact-based, and don't like being harassed, it's not for them https://t.co/yRsyrMhzZH
— Nicholas Grossman (@NGrossman81) August 11, 2021
Motif for this whole week has been It’s so much easier to BREAK things than to BUILD things…
can’t emphasize enough how much it distorts public policy that only the craziest people show up for open meetings pic.twitter.com/bVcMipd7UT
— Christopher Hooks (@cd_hooks) August 11, 2021
a *seriously* under-discussed dynamic in how GOP electeds started enabling anything & everything the crazy people wanted to do: they are fairly sure the crazy people will murder them & their families if they push back https://t.co/4gKeZULUpb
— kilgore trout, terminal hiccups patient (@KT_So_It_Goes) August 11, 2021
rose weiss
Even in my tiny Oregon town, our Dem office has been vandalized many times in the last few years. The front windows have been shot out, rocks thrown through them, etc. Nothing has ever happened to the Repub office of course, because we’re civilized.
HumboldtBlue
We still have food.
Brachiator
These are the wealthiest people? So, I guess not a lot of “economic anxiety” motivating their actions.
They will also be the first to demand the best medical treatment should their kids get sick.
Monsters.
scav
Squeaky wheels get the grease. Freaky whines eat up air-time. Unhinged loons demand their boons. Creepy dicks get the clicks. etc.
But it’s getting really clear how ‘mercan crowds tended to treat lynchings as popular entertainment. Stood around slackjawed, getting their photos taken, congratulating themselves on their DIY virtue. I know that theoretically, it’s only half of this country that’s that’s of below average intelligence or kindness, but empirically it’s hard to believe it recently.
smike
@Brachiator:
Of course, because they are the bedrock… no wait, because they are paragons of… no, that’s not it, it’s because they fought for this… nope. Are these people exclusively white folk?
mrmoshpotato
@smike:
Not sure if they’re exclusively white, but they’re definitely all stupid, selfish dumbfucks who’re going to be responsible for the deaths of innocent kids.
lgerard
It seems the loudest, most threatening guy in that parking lot is not even a parent, just an anti mask malcontent.
The other guy, who is calling for calm, and then turns around and threatens the doctor also has an interesting backstory,having been fired onstage by Kelly Clarkson for being an asshole
http://tnholler.com/2021/08/wilco-man-who-threatened-doc-was-party-to-tn-stands-lawsuits/
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I was think about this concept this very week. Trump “brilliant” strategy to make up for the storage of angry white men was to bring the mental ill into the Republican party and now truly insane are the ones in control . It sure looks the Batshit Nuts base has lost interest in Trump and is now totally obsessed over masks and vaccines.
Jay
@Brachiator:
They can demand all they want. The ICU’s are full.
James E Powell
They are following the anti-ACA plan. Show up & shout. The local news will lead with it and will interview some shouters or their supporters. It creates the illusion that they are the majority.
The difference this time is that the consequences aren’t theoretical. People are getting sick, filling hospital beds, and dying
ETA – And on twitter, Hunter Biden is trending. These people are insane.
MikefromArlington
@James E Powell: <= What he said.
Wouldn’t surprise if it’s coordinated by local political organizations.
Great how the cops just let the threats and harassment continue.
Geminid
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: This process started in Virginia ten years ago. Republican leaders knew the party’s numbers were in relative decline, and they were glad to see an influx of “populist” tea party cranks. By 2014 these had knocked off Eric Cantor. Four years later his seat was won by a Democrat for the first time since the party realignment of the 1970s. In the meantime, two more Republican Congressmen retired relatively young, apparantly because they did not want to run a tea party gauntlet to be renominated. One of those seats also fell to a Democrat in 2018, and the other is on the edge.
Republicans have not won a Virginia statewide race since 2009. Polls show that as far as self identified ideology goes, Virginia is not especially liberal. But the radicals have repelled moderate Republicans and Independents. Now Virginia Republicans can’t win with the radicals, but they can’t win without them either. The more moderate leaders seem to be standing back from the train wreck. They hope to reclaim their party when the fever breaks, but it will be hollowed out by then.
A February Wason Center poll of registered Virginia voters showed Republican identification at 25%, down from 31% in November 2019. The next poll will be taken some months away from the insurrection, so Republicans could come back a point or two. But this won’t be a trend, but rather a “dead cat bounce.”
Shalimar
@Brachiator: There was no requirement that you have a child in the district to attend the school board meeting. My guess is most of the violent loons were outsiders. Not that there weren’t likely a few local rich assholes who also got extremely angry, but they make up the numbers by having every nut in the area converge on their meeting of choice.
Mary G
I put up a link to a thread in the last post about the right wingers trying to intimidate a local official by camping outside her house, and how her neighbors ran them off. The tweeter said the cops just stood on and looked, disappointed that there were not enough righties to hide amongst to beat up lefties and the affluent neighbors were taping everything.
Mary G
? ? ? Hope this is wrong; I’m too tired to fact check, but still scary:
Kristine
All this reminded me of Barney Frank’s response to an anti-ACA constituent: https://youtu.be/nYlZiWK2Iy8
Not sure if a politician who responded in that manner today would be taking their life in their hands or not.
sukabi
That Matt Walsh guy, he doesn’t have kids in the school…he (or his wife) homeschools their kids…
Geminid
@Shalimar: A new kind of “mayhem tourist.”
Martin
A million people in Japan told to evacuate over unprecedented rainfall.
Seems like 2021 is the year the inflection points really started to be reached.
Robert Sneddon
@Martin: Bad weather kills a number of people in Japan every year — in the autumn of 2011, six months after the great Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, about 90 people died in floods and landslides due to heavy rains following a typhoon. It’s like tornadoes in the mid-Western US, something people learn to live with.
Spanky
@Martin: Where do a million people evacuate to?
prostratedragon
@Spanky: During Katrina it was Baton Rouge, Houston, Atlanta, Memphis, … There were even a few Tulane students who got emergency admission for a semester at UMich. Might not have been quite a million, but that’s how it works.
rikyrah
@Mary G:
Then that means more than the immune compromised need a booster shot
Butter Emails
Jeffro
@Butter Emails:
Good point (esp #2)
Democratic politicians try to actually deliver for their constituents, by telling them the truth and attempting to make their lives better. GQP politicians lie to their constituents and answer only to big money donors, many of whom are crazed Randians bent on making no one’s life better but their own
raven
oops
Matt McIrvin
@Mary G: Papers coming out of Israel have consistently shown scary low vaccine effectiveness compared to numbers for the exact same vaccines over the exact same time periods out of every other country, and I am not sure why. It’s gotten to the point that I wait for outside corroboration on any scary report on breakthrough infections coming out of Israel.
It may just be that they have really mild thresholds in these studies for detecting “infection”, I’m not sure.
Skepticat
@Kristine:
I MISS BARNEY FRANK SO MUCH.
Chris
a *seriously* under-discussed dynamic in how GOP electeds started enabling anything & everything the crazy people wanted to do: they are fairly sure the crazy people will murder them & their families if they push back
I said exactly this ten years ago, when the Gabby Giffords shooting happened. One of the under-reported consequences was that a batch of moderate Republicans (don’t know if they actually were or not, but that’s what they were known as) resigned, citing the ever-mounting number of death threats they were getting from anonymous far righters. Things were already reaching the point of KKK level rule-through-terror back then, and needless to say it hasn’t gotten any better after four years of a President actively telling them to.
Chris
@Geminid:
The best hope for the GOP right now is something like the Democratic Party of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; it’s got a bunch of strongholds that are untouchable, but it’s so radioactive everywhere else that it basically can’t win national elections, so it spends a couple generations in the wilderness until it finally grows a wing rooted in the other parts of the country that can win national elections, but is so radically different that that’s not such a bad thing anymore.
Honus
@Geminid: We need to reconnect. Every time time i read your posts I totally agree with your analysis.
I’d say we could meet at Maupins store but they razed it last month.
Gvg
This is why I became anti gun. “Gun rights” are threats like lynching. Everyone who disagrees with the violent is constantly intimidated, not just politicians. I think this is the real reason police have gotten so out of control of civilians the last few decades. The violent crazies within the police departments intimidated any de escalation types into leaving. This type has also pushed good people out of all kinds of things like school boards or county commissioners. Naturally it impacts politics, but it was happening everywhere sooner. Like….the NRA takeover of the radicals about 50 years ago. They used to be about gun safety teaching and hunters.
Bill Arnold
@lgerard:
The people that find these assholes may not be loud, but they can be pretty effective.
That probably would have been the appropriate response – “Maybe, but WE will find you! And your backstories stories will be told.”
Bill Arnold
@Matt McIrvin:
Remember the mil fan chatter about how Hamas was attempting to overwhelm the Israeli Iron Dome through coordinated mass artillery missile attacks? (I don’t know if it was actualy true, but the speculations were pretty visible.)
Delta is arguably bit like that; low levels of antibodies in/under the nasal surfaces, that are enough to fight off original-SARS-CoV-2 exposure, but are (perhaps) overwhelmed by the high levels of inoculum in the plumes exhaled by Delta infecteds, particularly if the index patient is unmasked (and especially if both are unmasked). (Common among the Ultras.)
That, and Israel was early with the vaccinations, so if there is any fading effect it would hit them first.
I.e. the Israeli science and press are primed to be shrill on these matters, which is not a bad thing since Israel does a lot of good medical research.
Ella in New Mexico
Does anyone else notice that these “Spontaneous Concerned Citizen Protests” of school boards and county commissions and city councils are incredibly well organized and cohesive in not only their messages but in the behaviors of the attendants? Like, maybe they’ve done this before?
Why, it’s almost as if there might be a few folks there who don’t even really have a stake in the community, they just like to go from place to place rabble rousing. Yelling at people. Feeling powerful because now they have a purpose in life again.
Anti-mask/Anti-vaccine/ProQ protests are the new Trump Rallies.
VOR
@Ella in New Mexico: the Trump rallies had a core base who went to rally after rally, following Trump from state to state like Grateful Dead groupies.
Mart
‘The craziest, most aggressive people can push more reasonable people out of public discussions.” Principal asked my HS teaching daughter to come talk to the
craziesparents but declined after watching incidents like above. So she sent a letter which she thought would be confidential that was read to the assembled. Now she has vaccinated co-teachers pissed at her as they are vaccinated and don’t want to wear masks. I’ve worn N95 masks all day in factories for years and have yet to die on my own CO2. Must be one of the lucky ones.