Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

You cannot shame the shameless.

… gradually, and then suddenly.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Let there be snark.

I’m just a talker, trying to find a channel!

“Let’s not pretend [Trump] wants to engage in high-minded discourse.”

We’ll be taking my thoughts and prayers to the ballot box.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

I’m more Christian than these people and I’m an atheist.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Donald Jessica Trump found guilty as fuck – May 30, 2024!

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

This blog will pay for itself.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

You are here: Home / Economics / Grifters Gonna Grift / Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: CPAC Did Nazi A Problem

Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: CPAC Did Nazi A Problem

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Fringe leftist media outlet NBC sent a ‘cub reporter’ to pass judgement at CPAC. Gotta watch out for those young, hungry dudes, Mr. Schlapp:

… Throughout the conference, racist extremists, some of whom had secured official CPAC badges, openly mingled with conference attendees and espoused antisemitic conspiracy theories.

The presence of these individuals has been a persistent issue at CPAC. In previous years, conference organizers have ejected well-known Nazis and white supremacists such as Nick Fuentes.

But this year, racist conspiracy theorists didn’t meet any perceptible resistance at the conference where Donald Trump has been the keynote speaker since 2017.

At the Young Republican mixer Friday evening, a group of Nazis who openly identified as national socialists mingled with mainstream conservative personalities, including some from Turning Point USA, and discussed “race science” and antisemitic conspiracy theories.

One member of the group, Greg Conte, who attended the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, said that his group showed up to talk to the media. He said that the group was prepared to be ejected if CPAC organizers were tipped off, but that never happened.

Another, Ryan Sanchez, who was previously part of the Nazi “Rise Above Movement,” took photos and videos of himself at the conference with an official badge and touted associations with Fuentes…

For several years, CPAC and its supporters have attempted to temper the most extreme fringes of the conservative movement, and have welcomed the continued debate between Trump and more moderate conservatives.

This year, however, some attendees and former attendees have expressed frustration with the conference’s stronger association with Trump and his wing of the party.

In one of the most viral moments from this year’s conference, conservative personality Jack Posobiec called for the end of democracy and a more explicitly Christian-focused government. While Posobiec later said his statements were partly satire, many CPAC attendees embraced his and others’ invocations of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection…


The FTFNYTimes, of course, treats it as a style issue:


(Gift link… but you can’t say you weren’t warned.)

… CPAC has long been as much a social event as an opportunity to set the tone and agenda of the conservative movement. But in recent years, as Donald J. Trump has remade the Republican Party, CPAC’s attendance and cultural capital has declined, a trend heightened by allegations of sexual assault made in a lawsuit against the organization’s president, Matt Schlapp. (Mr. Schlapp has denied the allegations.)

In the days leading up to the convention, one longtime conservative activist told The New York Times in a text message that he would rather poke out his own eyes than attend, arguing that the event had turned into a veritable Trump rally at which no other views were permitted.

Those who did show up were quick to note that the CPAC party scene was also on life support.

“It’s dead,” said Michael R. Bartels, 28, the advisory chairman of the New York Young Republican Club. Mr. Bartels said that the conference was caught between an older generation of conservatives in the mold of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and a younger, Trumpier wave…

At the atrium bar in the Gaylord Convention Center, where CPAC was being held, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida posed for pictures with grinning college students and grizzled consultants. Across the way, a small group of men in an assortment of antiquated formal wear — double-breasted coats, lederhosen, low-collared vests — sidled in from the hotel lobby. They stopped to chat with three CPAC attendees, one of whom NBC News identified as a minor internet personality affiliated with the white nationalist Nick Fuentes and his groyper movement.

“I’m a national socialist,” said Gregory Conte, 35, one of the men in formal wear. Mr. Conte, the former operations director for the National Policy Institute, the white nationalist think tank run by Richard Spencer, said he had come to CPAC for “people watching,” but wasn’t willing to pay for attendance…

The “War Room” party was billed as invite-only, but with Mr. Burra at the door, it seemed as if everyone was invited. The groyper contingent showed up alongside several of the costumed National Socialists. So did a contingent of Young Jewish Conservatives.

“It’s all about building coalitions,” said Ian Chase McMath, 31, a member of the New York Young Republican Club and a cameraman for Newsmax. “There could be a future president in this room.”


With any luck, this past week will eventually be diagnosed as what behaviorists call an ‘extinction burst‘. Ben Jacobs, for NYMag — “Calling Himself a ‘Political Dissident,’ Trump Pitched Regime Change at CPAC”:

If Trump rallies are for his fans, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is for his zealots. In his keynote address to the conference on Saturday, Donald Trump let his most devoted followers know that he was a “proud political dissident” on a mission to liberate the United States from Joe Biden…

The former president also spent much of the event indulging in the discursive rambling that marked much of his first presidential campaign. After all, he didn’t need to adhere too closely to the teleprompter for this audience. CPAC was once considered the premier right wing gathering in the U.S., where a variety of conservative leaders and activists could link up, share ideas, and try to push their agendas forward. Not anymore. Now, it’s a niche MAGA convention that only seems crowded when Trump himself appears and increasingly has the feel of a reunion — if not a commemoration — for those who wanted to overturn a presidential election on January 6, 2021…

Unlike an average Trump rally, attendees had to nominally pay to get into CPAC. And, unlike CPACs of the past, there was no other draw. Less than a dozen congressional Republicans attended an event that had once been a showcase for ambitious conservatives. Further, despite the fact that the National Governors Association was holding winter meetings only miles away in Washington D.C., the only sitting governor to attend was Kristi Noem, who is a contender in the Trump veepstakes, and used the event to tout her bona fides as a MAGA diehard compared to other vice presidential hopefuls who had been disloyal enough to even consider running for president against him.

There were no Trump skeptics. There was no corporate presence, unless you counted a business that sold silver infused toothbrushes or www.magahammocks.com. The professional political operatives who once treated the event as a virtual trade convention were nowhere to be found. The conference has become more international, but by featuring Trump’s fellow travelers from abroad. This year’s speaker list felt like a Steve Bannon dream team of figures from the foreign populist right, including Argentinian President Javier Milei, Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele and, for some reason, former British prime minister Liz Truss…

Reader Interactions

129Comments

  4. 4.

    piratedan

    Maybe next year at CPAC, we can have the FBI and the US Marshalls roll up on them like that scene from The Warriors when the cops bust the meeting in the park with all of the street gangs who are there wearing their colors.  I figure they could round up the Nazi’s, the III%ers, the Aryan Brotherhood, the Oath-Keepers and possibly a good number of the unaccounted for J6 coup members, either those that stormed the Capitol or paid for it to happen.

    With their constant militant rhetoric, I figure they’d all be good for a sedition charge or two.

  6. 6.

    Tehanu

    For people who worship winning, they sure do love them some losers — Nazis, Fascisti, Confederates…. It’s like Triumph of the Will remade with the Three Stooges, only not funny.

  7. 7.

    Citizen Alan

    All Republicans are Nazis now. It’s just a matter of how confident or stupid they are in trumpeting it. But I don’t think there’s a Republican of any national prominence under the age of 80 who doesn’t secretly wish that Hitler had won WW2, conquered America, and exterminated all the people that the Republicans hate today.

  9. 9.

    Odie Hugh Manatee

    Of course a Nazi can’t see a Nazi. Makes sense to them anyway. I look and all I see are Nazi and KKK in the Republican party.

  10. 10.

    JoyceH

    I remember in the immediate aftermath of J6, Stephen King (yes, the writer) suggested a simple moral compass check – “If you look around and the Nazis are with you, you’re on the wrong side.”

  11. 11.

    Chris T.

    Not that I would curse myself with their presence, but I would have a question for these guys:

    The Nazis … started talking about skull measurements and pushing the conspiracy theory that all races were being controlled [by] Jewish people.

    Q: If Group X can control all other people without the other people realizing it, doesn’t that make Group X superior to the other people, mentally?

  13. 13.

    Nukular Biskits

    The issue for me isn’t the malcontents, incels and sociopaths who attended CPAC (although they are a concern).

    The real issue for me is the Republicans who refuse to denounce the malcontents, incels and sociopaths who attended CPAC.

  25. 25.

    Matt McIrvin

    All these articles about how CPAC has become a fringe event, freaks like Posobiec drove them away and mainstream causes and corporations don’t want to be associated with it any more… yet everyone even an inch to the right of center is going to support these Nazis’ and white supremacists’ presidential candidate, and give him back the keys to the military and law enforcement, so what gives?

    The Chamber of Commerce types who just want lower taxes don’t like the smell of these people but they’ll let them do their dirty work.

  26. 26.

    Baud

    @Matt McIrvin:

    I hear you. OTOH, lefties and centrists in our coalition aren’t going to attend each other’s gatherings even though we need to be unified to defeat the fascists.

  27. 27.

    TBone

    @Gin & Tonic: You should patent that!  Speaking of vomit and patents, I once worked for a patent attorney on the top floor of a tall, center city building at 20th & Market.  Each morning when I got off the elevator, I’d get seasick from the building swaying in the wind. But I never get seasick on the actual sea!

  28. 28.

    Soprano2

    A few years ago the 1A show went to CPAC. To say the regular listeners were unhappy about it is an understatement. The show’s host at that time, Joshua Johnson, said there were lots of Republicans there so they went to hear their views. I suggested that to be fair they should also attend Netroots Nation, but of course they didn’t do that. They haven’t been back since. The show’s black female gay host is probably not open to attending an event with people who are openly Nazis.

  32. 32.

    TBone

    @Baud: I am on hubby’s laptop so no emojis today but HA!  In the before times, I’d eat at a free buffet, but we’ve got a norovirus problem AND high covid here so that’s a no go.  My salad bar days have long  been over.

  33. 33.

    Another Scott

    The good news is that people are voting with their dollars and not showing up there. Maybe next year instead of having it at National Harbor they will have it at a Harbor Freight in Pascagoula.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  36. 36.

    TBone

    I realize I am late to the party of laughter from the Wonkette link.  I plead real life getting in the way, I hate when that happens!  A day late and a dollar short is no way to go through life.

  39. 39.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @TBone: didn’t they go to Hungary last year?

    Congressional Republicans can go to bed Hungary until they stop holding up funding for the Ukraine effort.

  40. 40.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Nukular Biskits: The issue for me isn’t the malcontents, incels and sociopaths who attended CPAC (although they are a concern).

    The real issue for me is the Republicans who refuse to denounce the malcontents, incels and sociopaths who attended CPAC.

    But then, you repeat yourself.

  42. 42.

    Ken

    Not so much flirting with Nazism, as rutting in the street screaming obscenities and scaring the horses.

  46. 46.

    Kay

    nytimes
    2d
    President Biden is overwhelmingly likely to be the Democratic nominee. But if he unexpectedly ended his campaign, the next steps would depend on the timing of his departure. Here’s what to know.

    Like a parody of a newspaper. Every day is like this – 100% openly lobbying against Biden and for Trump.
    Apparently the ninnies at the NYTimes think the US President is like the Harvard President and if they mount a concerted campaign to get rid of him (and Kamala Harris) he’ll go.
    They aren’t going to be able to get rid of Joe Biden so easily, thank goodness.
    They should go back to the Ivy League President beat -it’s the only thing they really know.

  51. 51.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    Ugh. Ezra Klein started this latest round of Biden bashing. So disappointing. I liked his podcast – he actually lets his guests talk. But- he’s another self hating liberal who yearns to be accepted in conservative circles and thinks if he just shits on Democrats enough they’ll let him in the club.

    It’s a real problem on our side. “Our” pundits have contempt for Democrats, especially Democratic voters. To join the ridiculous, out of touch snobs at the NYTimes in bashing this came-from-the- middle class President is just pathetic.

  52. 52.

    Matt McIrvin

    @different-church-lady: The Nazis already are the cops, to a large degree. All fascist politicians have to do is give them free rein to do what they want to do. Especially since it’s so much easier to crack down on peaceful civilians who don’t look right than on dangerous criminals.

  54. 54.

    Kay

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Yup. Biden coverage the last two days – fantasy piece on how the owners of the NYTimes hope to remove Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and a piece on how no one in Michigan supports Joe Biden. It’s relentless. This is bigger than their (successful) campaign to remove the AA, female Harvard President! That only merited 7 reporters – this has ten.

    I guarantee whoever is “covering” the Biden campaign in 2024 – whichever gossip columnist they plucked from Politico – is already writing their book. They probably have a deal with a publisher – “How Trump, the Greatest Ever, Prevailed”. It’s a fucking racket.

  55. 55.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    Part of this is snobbery. Biden has a middle class CV. He didn’t go to the right schools. Back when Biden was VP Karl Rove used to opine knowingly that Biden was “dumb” in a way that let you know it was conventional wisdom among the fucking morons in punditry and political media. They think they are smarter than Biden is.

    Oh, well. He’s been underestimated his whole career and this decision political media made that Trump is the winner of the 2024 race will come back to bite them. Not that it matters – none of them ever get fired for garbage work. They get promoted.

  57. 57.

    Baud

    @Kay:

    They felt the same way about Bill Clinton, although he went to the right schools, because he was from Arkansas. Unfortunately for them, Joe isn’t having affairs, and the Hunter Biden business, which was always at zero,  is falling apart.

  58. 58.

    gene108

    @Kay:

    What incumbent President does this?

    I think their meetings must just be about how to prove they have no point of view they must report absurd things about President Biden, because Trump’s current candidacy so fucking bonkers it should not be.

  59. 59.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Kay: ​ On the other hand, it seems Joe enjoyed himself on Seth Meyers last night.

    “Can you confirm or deny that there is an active conspiracy between you and Miss Swift?” Meyers asked.

    “Where are you getting this information, it’s classified,” Biden replied, adding that Swift endorsed him for president in 2020. Meyers followed up to ask if she would endorse Biden again, prompting the president to laughingly add: “I told you it’s classified.”

  61. 61.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Baud: They give all D Presidential candidates this treatment be it Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Obama, HRC or Biden. Ds are ridiculed by the NYT and other prestige publications. because Dems give better representation to non-white folks. So prestige media is as racist as the MAGA hatted but they are more erudite

    Their racism is thinly veiled and the condescending variety rather than the foaming at the mouth kind but they both seem to want the same things. Some tokens to prove how egalitarian they are but they do not see non-white people as their equals

    My Sikh friend calls it, suit-boot ki racism (well dressed racism)

  63. 63.

    Soprano2

    @Kay: They are angry that they were deprived of their primary, because there’s supposed to be at least one every election but they didn’t get one this year. Instead of being mad at the Republican side that deprived them (because that’s the side that should be having an actual primary), for some reason they’re mad at Democrats.

    Later today I’ll post about an interview of students I heard on NPR this morning. Did you know Joe Biden has done nothing about student loan debt? Ggggrrrr…..

  64. 64.

    gene108

    @Kay:

    It’s a real problem on our side. “Our” pundits have contempt for Democrats, especially Democratic voters. To join the ridiculous, out of touch snobs at the NYTimes in bashing this came-from-the- middle class President is just pathetic.

    A lot of liberal talking heads are intellectual wankers.

    They’ll point out some detail that’s technically not correct to crap on what Democrats try to do, never mind the larger point, or come up with some novel theory why the current Democratic plan isn’t good enough.

    I’m not sure they even care about impressing conservatives. They want to show off how smart they are, and how they’ve arrived at their liberalism through intellectual rigor. They aren’t just blindly following what the Democratic establishment wants.

  67. 67.

    Chris Johnson

    @Matt McIrvin: Well, but… then why the fuck is the Fuhrer not doing better than 60% in some primaries against an immigrant woman?

    Careful. Look around and see who else among you is hawking doomerism as hard as they possibly can.

    It’s an ongoing psychological war among nationstates, as in Russia is literally doing this to us and known to be doing it, and they gain direct advantage any time you take total bullshit seriously, legitimize it, and popularize it in the discourse.

    Doomerist bullshit is NECESSARY to a coup orchestrated by Russia. It is absolutely necessary for them to widely disseminate the notion that America is sunk in civil war, totally torn between libs and the Trump wing, and that the Trump wing represents ALL Republicans full stop end of story.

    They lean authoritarian, sure, but not THIS much. Put it this way, if they were all as authoritarian as they’re painted, Trump would not be getting 60%ish in primaries of his own god-damned party.

    And huge, huge effort is being made to cover up that simple reality.

    They are so much worse off than they were in 2016. People weren’t prepared for all this in 2016. It’s nearly ten years later. We watched these people try to dismantle the USA under a potemkin president, and our system held up amazingly considering that fact.

    Our system has always had Republicans. This is different, and our system is in the process of choking on the foreign agents and spitting them out. That includes Republicans spitting them out and correctly seeing them as the traitors they are. We’ll go back to a system designed to function with permanent contradictions, built-in conflict. You know. Politics.

    This isn’t, and hasn’t been, politics. Don’t get it twisted. This has been WWIII even before it broke into active warfare in Ukraine. Next it’ll be Alaska.

    Don’t assume all Republicans are the way they’re being painted by a very busy, media-savvy, foreign power. Russia does not get to define Republicans for me, they only get to try. I don’t have to agree with what real Republicans want (and I don’t), but Trump isn’t it, Trump is outside take-over as an act by a foreign power.

  68. 68.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Soprano2: for some reason they’re mad at Democrats.

    Maybe they’re always mad at DEMs it’s just the reasons change as often as their socks?

  69. 69.

    Soprano2

    @Kay: It sounds like NPR found an “atypical” union couple to interview for today’s broadcast. Strange how they find these “atypical” union members who are willing to bash Democrats, I’m sure it’s just a huge coincidence.

  70. 70.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Soprano2: And at the same time, I hear the other side: people who are constantly incensed that Joe Biden HAS done something about student debt, and they want all those deadbeat kids to suffer.

  71. 71.

    Baud

    @Soprano2:

    Happens all the time with the media. A while back, the atypical person was someone who blamed Biden for Dobbs.

    The best you can hope for is that the person being interviewed is an actual dumbass rather than an undisclosed GOP operative.

  74. 74.

    Soprano2

    @Baud: Ugh, the interview was crazy-making. That comment particularly, I was wishing the interviewer would follow up with “Would it surprise you to know that the Biden administration has forgiven X hundreds of millions of dollars of student loan debt so far?” What people who say he has done nothing always mean is that he hasn’t forgiven their debt.

  76. 76.

    Baud

    @Soprano2:

    What people who say he has done nothing always mean is that he hasn’t forgiven their debt.

     
    Which is ironic, since they preach to people who have paid off their debt that they should support debt relief for others.

    Altruism for thee, not for me.

  77. 77.

    Soprano2

    @OzarkHillbilly: I just think that if there were a real primary race on the Republican side they wouldn’t be spending so much time bashing Biden. They feel deprived, but they’re taking it out on the wrong party because that’s their tendency.

  78. 78.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    The GoP is turning into a full blown 1920’s Call of Cthulhu LARP  between it’s recreation of the Red Year, Klan mainstreaming, Isolationism and Lizard Men from Space conspiracy theories.

    So Socialism is acceptable to the Hard Right, as long as it’s the racist kind.

  79. 79.

    Chris

    @Kay:

    @Baud:

    At the end of the day it’s not about where they went to school or what class they came from (though that certainly doesn’t help).  Anybody who’s a Democrat is on the bad list.  You could be a Yale law school grad, a straight white guy, a lifelong East Coaster, and a lifelong Washington insider who gives interviews to the press every week.  The fact that you’re a Democrat means you’re a class traitor, who’s still on the side of the wimminz and blacks and union workers.

  80. 80.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Soprano2: I know. ;-)

    eta: They need their horse race, otherwise what will they print? How trump and Biden differ on the issues? C’mon, that’s like work! They might have to do some research and such. Much easier to just read the polls and pontificate.

  81. 81.

    Kay

    @Soprano2:

    It is just amazing all these crack journalists can’t find a single Biden supporter to interview.

    What are the odds? It’s the herd-like behavior that pisses me off. These people are supposed to be professionals and part of that is using your own judgment . Why do we need a billion dollar for profit political media industry if they all write the same fucking story at the same time? They all follow the shitty NYTimes like lemmings. It’s a bore. We could all write the “atypical union member” story bashing Biden because we have read it so many times.

  82. 82.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Chris: ​
      For example, you just more or less described John Kerry. Not Yale law, but Yale undergrad and Skull and Bones.

  83. 83.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Baud: Kids are kids. They’ve got a lot on their minds. If you’re still struggling with a lot of debt you’re not going to care much that somebody else has gotten relief. I can understand that. Partly it’s the age-old, crabs-in-bucket story: it’s really easy to make people mad that somebody else got a break that they didn’t. But in this case, it sounds more like they never heard about it in the first place.

  84. 84.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Soprano2: ​
     

    I just think that if there were a real primary race on the Republican side they wouldn’t be spending so much time bashing Biden.

    When the presumptive nominee can’t break 60%, they could act like it was a race if they wanted to, and do all sorts of stories about what’s wrong with the Trump campaign, why can’t it do any better, and do lots of fluff stories about Haley as this bright new hope.

    They have chosen to not go that route, and to pretend that Trump’s 59.8% is a ‘landslide’ win. So I have to disagree with you on this point.

  85. 85.

    Kay

    I;ve been wearing scarves to work the past year or so in an effort to put forth the kind of “older lady dignity” vibe I am currently seeking, and yesterday I overheard one of the women who work upfront say to another “It’s a scarf day” when I walked in. Making fun of me!

    If I was Elon Musk I would have to fire them.

    I’m sticking with the scarves. They’re wrong – this is a good idea :)

  86. 86.

    Chris T.

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Maybe they’re always mad at DEMs it’s just the reasons change as often as their socks?

    No, it’s like the old adage that says “Men are afraid women will laugh at them; women are afraid men will kill them”, only less drastic. The news people are much more afraid of Rs than Ds.

  88. 88.

    Soprano2

    @Kay: It’s a repeat of 2016, when for some reason tens of millions of Hillary supporters were invisible to the Times and the WaPo. They can’t seem to see any voters who aren’t white conservatives.

  90. 90.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Kay: ​

    It’s the herd-like behavior that pisses me off. These people are supposed to be professionals and part of that is using your own judgment . Why do we need a billion dollar for profit political media industry if they all write the same fucking story at the same time? They all follow the shitty NYTimes like lemmings. It’s a bore. We could all write the “atypical union member” story bashing Biden because we have read it so many times.

    Forty years ago, my dad used to say that there was no point in reading certain columnists, you could read the header and write the rest of the column for them.

    Now it’s the whole fucking ‘news’ biz.​

    ETA: the scare quotes around ‘news.’

  91. 91.

    Soprano2

    @lowtechcyclist: This is true, I’m dreading the stories about the Michigan primary, because if uncommitted gets a significant number of votes the “Biden is doomed” stories will be unbearable.

  92. 92.

    Soprano2

    @Kay: Scarves are fashionable, I love them! Of course I did just turn 63. You do whatever makes you happy, who cares what they think?

  93. 93.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Baud: ​
     

    If they have the right to vote, they’re adults.

    Easy to say. But if you’re still sleeping in your parents’ house or in a college dorm, you’re not an adult; you probably haven’t really started on the process of becoming one. What makes you an adult is getting out on your own, finding a way to support yourself, making your own life choices that you’ll have to live with for better or worse.

    You’re unlikely to get past a black-and-white view of politics before you’ve started encountering the complexities of your own life.

    I could vote at 18; I wasn’t really an adult until maybe 27.

  94. 94.

    TBone

    @Kay: can you make jokes with them about scarves?  Like at lunch, say “That looks good, I’d like to scarf it down!”  Make ’em laugh is always my motto to deescalate tension.  Also too, fuck them!

  95. 95.

    different-church-lady

    @Soprano2: About 25 years ago operatives figured out NPR will just naively talk to anyone who comes up to them, and NPR still hasn’t caught on.

  96. 96.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Soprano2: ​

    This is true, I’m dreading the stories about the Michigan primary, because if uncommitted gets a significant number of votes the “Biden is doomed” stories will be unbearable.

    In Michigan, we’ve finally got a direct comparison between the two parties’ primaries: same state, same time. I’d bet a big chunk of money that Biden will get a higher % of Dem primary votes tonight than Trump gets of GOP primary votes.

    And if that happens, you’d think they would be unable to say both that Trump won in a landslide and Biden is doomed. But I’m betting they’ll find a way.

  97. 97.

    Melancholy Jaques

    @Kay:

    But- he’s another self hating liberal who yearns to be accepted in conservative circles and thinks if he just shits on Democrats enough they’ll let him in the club.

    If he does, they will.

  98. 98.

    RevRick

    @Chetan Murthy: It would be hilarious if it weren’t so ominous. As much as the GOP might want to disassociate itself from these fascists, CPAC is, in fact, the leading edge of their party.

  99. 99.

    H.E.Wolf

    @Kay: ​Part of this is snobbery. Biden has a middle class CV. He didn’t go to the right schools.

    @Baud: ​They felt the same way about Bill Clinton, although he went to the right schools, because he was from Arkansas.
     
    Same with Harry Truman. Such disdain for him! Missouri native; no college degree; no family money; liberal political views (anti-segregation in the 1930s fergawdssakes). Clearly a no-hoper.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Defeats_Truman

  100. 100.

    jonas

    @TBone:  I had no idea that attorney Clifford S. Robert tried to file a proposed counter-judgment 😆 with Judge Engoron.

    Yeah, even I (NAL) know that you can’t, um, initiate settlement negotiations in an appeal. That ship, as they say, sailed long ago. And the crazy thing is, these are Trump’s *good* lawyers, too.

  101. 101.

    jonas

    @schrodingers_cat:  Dems give better representation to non-white folks. So prestige media is as racist as the MAGA hatted but they are more erudite

    Yup. To wit, Kamala Harris has spent a lot of time cultivating the Dems’ base of Black women, but if you read the press about her, she “never gets out” and is a “do-nothing” VP. Only strolls through midwestern diners with white, male customers count as “outreach” to voters. If you visit a shelter in South Philly for domestic violence victims, the MSM could not care less.

  103. 103.

    Chris

    @H.E.Wolf:

    I remember reading McCullough’s biography of Truman, and I definitely got very heavy Bill Clinton vibes from the way national politics treated him.

  107. 107.

    Citizen Alan

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques:

    So Socialism is acceptable to the Hard Right, as long as it’s the racist kind.

    Well, yeah, of course! This country would have scandinavian-style hardcore socialism if only they could figure out a way to only give it to white people.

  108. 108.

    Chris

    @Citizen Alan:

    I mean, not actually, because fascism is never going to lead to that sort of social democracy.  If you could figure out a way to give it only to white people, it would take all of five minutes before they started looking around and searching for who the next category of people who weren’t really white was going to be, and how to deny it to them.

  111. 111.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Paul in KY: Obama got a fair bit of “making history/shiny object” fascination that conservatives see as soft media treatment. He also got whacked hard by them once the honeymoon period ran out.

  112. 112.

    Chris

    @Paul in KY:

    I’d have been curious to be a fly on the wall listening to the David Brooks and Tom Friedman equivalents in 1964.  I suspect you’d have had a lot of people grudgingly admitting that, yes, okay, LBJ the grimy Texan machine pol is probably better than Barry Goldwater the wide-eyed Arizona Bircher… but Nelson Rockefeller!  Why couldn’t we have had Nelson Rockefeller as a candidate!  The right breeding, the right education, the right… part of the country!  Oh, what could have been.

    JFK, yeah, got good coverage because he was shiny and new, but I kind of wonder how much would have lasted if he’d made it to 1964.

    Other than that, it’s pretty much Dem-bashing all the way down.  They hated FDR, they hated Truman, and oh boy I hate to think what they thought about Stevenson.

  113. 113.

    Chris

    @Matt McIrvin:

    And the honeymoon period ran out about ten minutes after he was inaugurated.

    There’s also the fact that the media was utterly convinced all through 2012 that Romney had it in the bag and Obama was a lame duck.  They didn’t gin up a Butter Emailz equivalent because they didn’t think they had to – his being black and a failed president (the former naturally implies the latter) was his Butter Emailz, and it was so obvious that it would have been gauche to belabor the point.

    And there’s also the fact that Obama in 2008, like Biden in 2020, ran at a time when Republicans had fucked up so badly that the media was temporarily shell-shocked into suspending their Butter Emailz nonsense.  Does anyone seriously believe that if Obama had run in 2000 or God forbid 2004, the media would’ve been anywhere near as hands-off as they were in 2008?

  114. 114.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Chris: If I recall correctly, JFK’s public approval rating started super high and was continuously declining from there, kind of like George W. Bush after 9/11 except it didn’t start with a 9/11. There was a blip up at the Cuban missile crisis.

    But the fringe right hated him with a murderous intensity. It’s interesting that the guy who shot him seems to have been sort of a left-wing crank instead of one of those, but it was in the air.

    I think he might well have become an unpopular President if he hadn’t been murdered and had somehow survived the serious health issues he was hiding. I don’t think he’d have gotten out of Vietnam; I think it would have been on him instead of LBJ. And, it sounds weird, but JFK might not have gotten the big civil rights laws or Great Society stuff passed without the political rocket fuel that LBJ got from JFK being killed.

  115. 115.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Chris: Since the end of the Reagan-Bush era, the role of Democrats has been to come in as Mr. Fixit after the Republicans fuck up dramatically. We have two years to make repairs. Things aren’t perfect. The shine wears off and we lose control of Congress. Things do get better, but the public gets bored and starts indulging their love of Republican cranks and grifters again, and the cycle continues.

    It seems like that hasn’t stopped. It is interesting that the Republican gains in 2022 were nothing like the usual first-midterm landslide.

  116. 116.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Matt McIrvin: Trump made a lot of people pay attention to politics for the first time. And not just the ones in his cult. A lot of normies started paying attention to the press’s shenanigans. Once you have seen the press bias you can’t unsee it.

  117. 117.

    Surly Duff

    I feel like the lede is being buried deep here, and it’s a doozy.

    The GOP nominee for president gave the keynote address at a Nazi convention.

    I don’t know if this has sunk in for people yet. That’s OK; better to let it sink it slowly over the next eight months.

  118. 118.

    Chris

    @Matt McIrvin:

    But the fringe right hated him with a murderous intensity. It’s interesting that the guy who shot him seems to have been sort of a left-wing crank instead of one of those, but it was in the air.

    JFK being a moderate liberal who had an unusual background and fairly conventional politics is basically in the perfect position to have pissed off people from every conceivable background without actually doing very much to earn any of it.  One of the reasons conspiracy theories around his death are so prolific and blame such a wide variety of people.

  119. 119.

    Chris

    @Matt McIrvin:

    It seems like that hasn’t stopped. It is interesting that the Republican gains in 2022 were nothing like the usual first-midterm landslide.

    Even 2010 was actually muted compared to what it could have been.  It’s hard to remember now because it was in fact an absolute disaster.  But Republicans in any rational world could have easily won both houses of Congress, and only failed because they insisted on running absolute lunatics like Mrs. “I Am Not A Witch” who had the proper far-right credentials but were wildly out of touch with their state’s electorate.  So instead they had to wait four more years to get the Senate.

  120. 120.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Chris: It’s also hindsight inflating the significance of things. The years after Kennedy’s murder were such a shitshow in so many ways that people who remember it seem to feel like something shook loose that was holding American society together (kind of like the more recent jokes about how David Bowie was some kind of linchpin of reality). I’ve seen boomers opine that America’s soul died with JFK.

    So of course people don’t want to believe that some rando shot him for no really significant reason. It’s got to be something huge, some conspiracy worthy of Vietnam and Watergate.

  121. 121.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Chris: The really tragic damage in 2010 happened at the state and local level. So many Republican supermajorities empowered to the point that they could game the rules and entrench themselves almost permanently. That didn’t happen in 2022.

  126. 126.

    brantl

    @Baud:

    The best you can hope for is that the person being interviewed is an actual dumbass rather than an undisclosed GOP operative.

    You’ve created a distinction without a difference.

  128. 128.

    Citizen Alan

    @Chris: Yes, well, I said “socialism” rather than “social democracy.” As in, “give lavish benefits to the Master Race, paid for by taxes paid by the Untermenschen.”

  129. 129.

    Citizen Alan

    @Chris:

    JFK, yeah, got good coverage because he was shiny and new, but I kind of wonder how much would have lasted if he’d made it to 1964.

    Probably off-topic, but one of favorite episodes of Red Dwarf was the one where the boys went time-travelling and accidentally averted the Kennedy assassination. It led to WW3 and the extermination of the human race within just a few years. The pivot point was that JFK lived and ran for reelection in 1964, only for his affair with Marilyn to be exposed at the right point in the election to throw it to Goldwater, who allowed Vietnam to escalate into a nuclear conflict. And since the cast members responsible couldn’t undo the changes themselves because of some time-travel rule, the only way to fix things was to kidnap JFK on the eve of the nuclear war, explain what had happened, give him a gun, and then drop him off at the grassy knoll to assassinate himself (and then cease to exist once his younger self died).

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