super duper lols: Even Donald Trump Doesn’t Know What He Created in the MAGA Swamps of Michiganhttps://t.co/d45NwJPLfI
— Michigan GOP Watch (@MiMagaWatch) May 6, 2024
Thank you, WaterGirl, for tipping me to I owe one of you a hat tip this great article with a dumb headline. From Ben Mathis-Lilley, at Slate — “Even Donald Trump Doesn’t Know What He Created in the MAGA Swamps of Michigan”:
At 2 p.m. in the basement of the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel, the mood was distrustful, the air was humid with human moistness, and the disagreements over minor procedural issues simply would not end.
The people assembled in this particular conference room were delegates from Michigan’s 9th Congressional District. They were among those who had come to Grand Rapids this past March for a statewide meeting to help nominate a Republican presidential candidate. And despite all of them believing that the nominee in question should be “Donald J. Trump”—as they insisted on saying his name, for some reason—they had already been there for four hours.
One of the major points of contention was which of these delegates would get to attend the Republican National Convention later this year in Milwaukee to take on the largely symbolic act of officially certifying Trump’s victory in the primary. And things took a particularly sour turn when the meeting chair, Deb Ross, said that a delegate named Billy Putman, who was seeking to represent the district, may have submitted paperwork identifying himself as “uncommitted”—rather than as a supporter of Trump’s.
Putman is a bearded man whose suit jacket and evident enjoyment of public speaking marked him as the room’s most likely aspirant to higher office. (He lives with his parents, his siblings, and their families in a single home, an arrangement which was featured in a 2017 TLC reality series called Meet the Putmans.) He and others considered the allegation that he might not be a Trump supporter to be slanderous. In turn, he accused Ross of being “bogus,” and “disenfranchising everyone in this room.”…
This scene was a small expression of the absurd dysfunction that has characterized the operations of the Michigan GOP for nearly a year. It is also a window into the problems of the current Republican Party writ large—one of many intraparty conflicts at the state and local level that are exploding across the country.
The problem, in short, is that the MAGA activists in charge are eating each other alive. States in which old-guard “establishment” Republicans were run off—seemingly paving the way for unified efforts on behalf of Trump—are instead beset by resignations, lawsuits, and financial crises. Conflicts are ongoing in Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, and Georgia as well as Michigan, and are tearing apart smaller chapters at even more local levels…
*****
In 2020, Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump here by a 150,000-vote margin. Trump’s supporters said the victory had been achieved via fraud centered in the largely Black city of Detroit. Subsequent lawsuits, hearings, and investigations failed to substantiate any allegations of election theft, but the chaos did end up elevating the loudest, most excitable voices to the top of the state’s Republican Party. When their leadership turned out to be unusually dysfunctional and bankruptcy-adjacent even by Trump-era standards, the state organization splintered into two rival factions.
One faction was run by Kristina Karamo, who, before the fall of 2020, had been a community-college professor and single mom who occasionally volunteered for local Republican causes and hosted a small-time, conspiracy-minded Christian podcast. On election night, she joined a number of other Trump supporters to observe vote-counting at an events complex in Detroit. Karamo filed an “incident report” alleging that she’d seen malfeasance there, including the suspicious delivery of ballots between 3 and 3:30 a.m. After it became clear that Biden was going to be declared the winner, her report was cited in lawsuits seeking to have the results thrown out…
In April 2022, Karamo won a nominating-convention vote to become the party’s candidate for secretary of state—the role that, in Michigan, actually administers elections. Angela Hall, an Upper Peninsula county chair and Karamo supporter, remembers being impressed by her presence. “She gave a speech that was just unbelievable. She’s a very powerful orator. And I said, ‘Well, she’s got something here,’ ” Hall told me.
Karamo lost that race by 13 points, but it didn’t slow her political momentum. Naturally, she didn’t concede defeat; in 2023, she told the news site MLive that the election system is not trustworthy enough for her to be able to say with confidence whether she won or lost. In February 2023, she was elected state party chair—replacing Ron Weiser, a real estate millionaire and University of Michigan trustee. (Talk about establishment!)
Karamo’s critics say she immediately went about putting the state GOP on a “path to bankruptcy.” She failed to raise money and spent what money there was on things like having Passion of the Christ and Sound of Freedom star Jim Caviezel give a keynote address at the party’s annual conference in Mackinac Island. (It cost $110,000.) She got into a legal dispute with Comerica Bank over a defaulted $500,000 line of credit; the bank said in legal filings that trying to understand the party’s position on the matter was “like trying to nail Jell-O to a tree.” Hall argued Karamo never got a fair shake: “As soon as she was elected, people were trying to get her out of her seat.” (Slate’s attempts to reach Karamo for comment were unsuccessful.)…
Then this year, on Jan. 6—yes, Jan. 6—Karamo’s critics on the state committee held a meeting just outside of Detroit. Karamo’s supporters boycotted, which allowed the anti-Karamo faction to establish a quorum and vote her out. A few weeks later, with Trump’s approval, they voted to replace her with Peter Hoekstra, a bald Dutch American who has the glowing, confident face and well-fitting clothes of someone who is often on TV. (A failed candidate for governor and the Senate, he served as Trump’s ambassador to the Netherlands.)
Karamo responded by denying the “allegations” that she had been removed and saying the “rogue faction” that had replaced her would be “dealt with swiftly.” She refused to give Hoekstra control of the state party’s bank accounts, such as they were, or its communications logins and website, MIGop.org. So Hoekstra and his supporters set up a rival site, MI-Gop.org, booked the Grand Plaza in Grand Rapids for the March 2 convention, and filed a lawsuit seeking to compel Karamo to yield control of the party…
******
The day’s meeting, under the auspices of the new Hoekstra team, was a chance for those who’d felt railroaded—like Billy Putman—to air their grievances. The Hoekstra regime had made a calculated decision to support the seating of the renegade counties’ delegations in a gesture of magnanimity, but that didn’t preclude arguing about how to do so properly and whose fault it was that it hadn’t been done already. Within six minutes—you can see it on McMahan’s video here—someone wielding a large binder stood to tell Ross that she wasn’t correctly following the bylaws governing the conduct of the meeting…Elsewhere in the hotel, “presidential preference” votes and the selection of delegates to the national convention from other districts were duly taking place, also with an undercurrent of paranoia. In one room, a delegate who was voting “present” on every subject told me that he was making a statement about the convention’s illegitimacy. Rob Steele, who was running for reelection to the Republican National Committee and was nominally the most establishment figure present, gave a stump speech in which he touted the support he had helped provide to MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, a prolific loser of election-related lawsuits, “in his election integrity work.” A life-size standup poster advertised a long-shot Senate candidate named Sandy Pensler, whose campaign slogan was “Let’s take our country back from the morons.”…
Back in the 9th District, once Ross stepped aside and let her critics take the microphone to make the case for deposing her, they lost steam. The man in the turquoise shirt accused her of “disrespecting the rule of law” and running the room like “a fricking dictatorship,” but others came forward and said replacing her would be too drastic. A woman wearing a shirt that said “CHEMTRAILS ARE KILLING US” drew applause for saying, sensibly, that selecting a new chair would be a waste of time. Even Putman rose to support the effort to keep things civil a short time later, although he was met with widespread groaning when he transitioned into what sounded like a campaign speech about securing the border and cutting off funding to Ukraine.
It still took some time afterward to finish all the day’s votes. There was a long debate over whether a potential delegate who didn’t think Donald Trump was necessarily conservative enough should be removed from eligibility, or whether it was OK for her to simply go unelected. There was also a break for a fundraising pitch by a speaker who mentioned during her talk that she was, “unfortunately,” a (fake) Trump elector who was facing “quite a few criminal charges.” After six-plus hours of deliberation, the district wrapped things up around 4 p.m….
Michelle Smith, another old-guard Michigan GOP veteran, has a simple theory about what’s going on: Trump’s sudden rise and surprising 2016 victory attracted a new cohort of activists who had not previously been politically engaged and did not, on some level, understand that it is possible to lose an election. “I’ve suffered losses before,” Smith told me on the morning of the convention. “A loss is a loss. But they say, ‘I got off my couch—why didn’t we win?’ ”…
I asked [Angela] Hall if she didn’t think there was something a little counterproductive or unusual about putting so much energy, in a presidential election year, into a conflict with a state leader that the presidential nominee helped put in place. She reminded me that she got involved in politics because of election integrity, mask mandates, and the loss of medical freedom, not because of Trump. He’s often described as the leader of a cult of personality. But for some modern Republicans, he appears to be more like a symbol of tribal affinity—a symbol of a deeper allegiance to conspiratorial beliefs, or to beliefs about having been treated unfairly by the rest of society. (The number of new Michigan Republicans who have criminal convictions or fraud accusations in their pasts—for the record, Angela Hall does not have any!—is striking.) “I’m very wary of putting my hope and trust in one person,” McMahan told me. “But I also see that he’s the only candidate that we have right now that could become president. I don’t like that there’s only one person, though—I would love it if we had some backup.”…
A few weeks later, Angela Hall forwarded me a flyer for a rally to be held outside the former party headquarters in Lansing. It called on the people of Michigan to “Stand in Solidarity” with the 24 counties that had been “disenfranchised” by the “hoax” state convention Skibo and I had attended.
Skibo was listed as a featured speaker. “The Grassroots,” the flyer said, “will be heard.”
Yes, I have a deep affection for my former state of residence (I posted about some of the Karamo / Hoeskstra conflict back in February; also, see Hoekstroika in the lexicon). But this is a fun (for us Democrats) read, and embodies a larger point: In order to hang on to control over the short term, the GOP has embraced genuinely self-destructive forces. Not just TFG, but a network of conspiracy theorists, scammers, would-be petty autocrats, and off-kilter ‘original thinkers’ who have the same approach to actual governance as a medieval baron building a chapel to house the fragment of the True Cross he just bought from a traveling merchant. Some of them actually believe, some of them don’t care as long as it lets them hang on to their fiefdoms, some of them just crave attention. If we weren’t trapped in this commonwealth with them, it’d be even funnier.
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Baud
Sadly, not just self-destructive.
Rusty
With an election of two president’s both running for second term, there aren’t a while lot of undecided voters. Winning will more than ever come down to turning out your base voters and those sometime party voters. Having chaos at the Republican party level in swing states, and Trump burning money on lawyers instead of building organizations in those states can only help. We can only hope for more GOP disfunction!
The Pale Scot
Maybe it’s because I’ve been up all night, but I think this tune from one of PZ Myer’s students about allergies and immune systems is dope.
“I just want to live with my favorite fuzzy creatures”
Don’t we all?
smith
As funny as this is, there’s a discouraging downside to the saga of newly-minted MAGA activists. I think it’s been generally assumed on the progressive side that expanding the franchise and making the population of voters larger and more diverse is good for democracy. Now that this particular segment of the country has become politically activated, it’s clear that a shocking number of our fellow citizens are neither cognitively nor morally prepared to participate in a democracy. In fact, bringing them into political life has the potential to destroy democracy itself.
Baud
@smith:
These people were never voter suppressed.
smith
@Baud: No, but they weren’t participants either. In theory, anyway, you’d want as high a level of participation as possible in a representative democracy.
Baud
@smith:
Sure, but we have our own slackers too.
I think it’s an interesting question how Americans would vote if we have mandatory universal voting like they have in Australia. Maybe the assumption that we are the majority isn’t accurate, or less accurate than we’d like.
Jeffro
But…but my guy is magic! An invincible conqueror! And he TOLD me that unless he wins, it was ‘rigged’!
Leader signaling is a powerful, powerful thing. See also: wearing masks, getting vaccinated, buying an EV, etc etc etc.
Baud
@Jeffro:
Interesting perspective on the damage done by people who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for that woman.
OzarkHillbilly
They are all certifiably crazy. Absolutely looney tunes. The GOP is an insane asylum and the inmates are in charge.
Anne Laurie
Well, tragically for all of us, mostly they’re not certifiably crazy. Most of them, mostly, can hold down a day job, or run a household, or at least stay off the streets and out of jail.
As someone with a family history of mental illness — sometimes certified! — I can attest that there’s infinite harm done by people who are doing their best. I can’t, rationally, blame them for not always succeeding.
Now, the predators & parasites who take advantage of their victims’ illnesses for their own malign ends (looking at you, Republicans) — those guys, I blame.
Baud
@Anne Laurie:
As the founder and president of the Baud Commission on Mental Accreditation, I hereby certify these people as cray cray.
Parfigliano
Dumbfucks gonna dumbfuck.
Rusty
@smith: This reminded me of the story of the grandmother that got herself elected to the local school board and then proceeded to review all the books in the school libraries for any hint of sex. She completely gummed up board meetings with right wing issues. Previously such people would have nun. Now they have been fired up by extreme right wing media and targeted by billionaire funded right wing groups. Our local community page is now filled with older people that don’t have kids in school, but are now convinced that the schools are teaching filth and pandering to LGBTQ+ students. Where in the past they would have been excited when the school basketball team made it to the state semi-finals, they now religiously vote against the budget and for candidates that want to destroy public schools with vouchers.
Baud
@Rusty:
Despite the Internet, information still flows slowly. There’s always this long time gap between when bad faith actors reach a critical mass to do bad things and when ordinary folks stand up to them. In that interim, a lot of damage is done.
It kind of works the other way too. Our side feels like we have a critical mass to make substantial, revolutionary progress, but we’re actually in the interim period before the other side regroups. And then we get depressed that things have stalled.
NotMax
(emphasis added)
’nuff said.
“Main conference room? Keep going down this hall and turn right at the My Pillow Lounge. You can’t miss it.”
Chet Murthy
I’ve mentioned this This American Life piece before: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/820/believe-in-me
It’s …. in a way absolutely hilarious. Just an amazing portrait of the infighting and crazies in the MI G(r)OP. I think it’s really worth a read, and as a teaser, I’ll just describe one little tidbit (there are so many other delicious stories in there).
The interviewers talk with a couple of cousins, vice-chairs of the MI G(r)OP, who happen to be (drum roll) young Arab-Americans from Dearborn (IIRC). They’re good little Republicans and all, and so when they go to their state convention-or-something-like-that, they’re shocked, shocked, *shocked* lemmetellya, at the racism they receive. And it is HILARIOUS! I mean, these are guys who wanna oppress the downtrodden, oppress the women, just like any other good G(r)OPer, but hey, the club they wanna join doesn’t want ’em, b/c they’re, y’know, Moooselimb. Imagine that!
That’s one story. There are so many other stories, so much craziness in the MI G(r)OP.
Great article. Great article.
Kay
This was absolutely great:
At one point Stefanick accused him of lying – she picked the wrong person to bully – he all but shouted “you check the record!” and she was, of course, wrong.
He defended his schools. Universities could learn from him.
They all did great. The superintendent of Montgomery County wasn’t taking any shit from these clowns either.
Kay
Public school superintendents have been just embattled the last 4 years, between covid and then anti vaxxers and then the ridiculous anti woke ninnies attacking their schools and removing books – they walked in there ready to fight back. I think Republicans were stunned. They expected subservience.
NotMax
@Baud
“A cuckoo in every pot and a straitjacket in every closet.”
Baud
@Kay:
That article seems like it has a very pro-Republican framing.
Ken
Captures the motivation and fervor of the believers, but I have to think the medieval baron would be more competent, or at least hire competent workmen.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
@NotMax: I grew up in Grand Rapids and am old enough to remember when the Devos family took the grand old (but abandoned) Pantlin Hotel and renovated it into the Amway Grand Plaza. This was in the early 1980s if I recall correctly.
When it opened it seemed soooo fancy. Since then they haven’t given anything a facelift as far as I can tell. It’s well maintained but a sort of time capsule of Titanic era luxury filtered through 1980s interior decor trends.
I loathe the Devos family’s politics but when it comes to Grand Rapids they have helped seed a lot of major upgrades and improvements. It’s really hard to square their local civic mindedness with their politics. Granted some of what they do, like the new convention center right next to the Amway Grand, has some element of self serving but the city does benefit. Not that that makes me a fan.
Chet Murthy
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?: Perhaps the Devoses have learned the time-honored maxim: “You don’t shit where you eat”.
Anne Laurie
@NotMax: The deVos family made its ‘legitimate’ fortune in that part of Michigan, home to devout White Christians of every flavor from center-right to extremely-batsh*t-far, far-right.
Like that other famous criminal Willy Sutton, the GOP goes to Grand Rapids because ‘that’s where the money is.’
OzarkHillbilly
Police shoot and kill Black US airman in Florida home
Senior Airman Roger Fortson, 23, was at home in apartment when officers burst into wrong unit and shot him dead, family says
Soprano2
@Chet Murthy: That was a great episode, well worth the time.
Soprano2
@Kay: I bet they were all minorities. I heard that exchange with Stefanik, she beclowned herself.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
I feel bad when I find a typo in something I wrote.
Kay
@Baud:
Oh, the contempt for public schools is widely shared across elite media – none of them attended one.
They should show the Banks testimony to every college administrator in the country. THAT’S a confident, competent person who loves his job and does not suffer fools. He defended the whole idea of education. It’s like he knows he has to start at the beginning with them – remedial – what IS education, really?
NotMax
@Anne Laurie
I suppose Ponzi Plaza is too on the nose.
//
Baud
@Kay:
Public school administrators aren’t in the business of begging rich people for donations. That helps.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: I brag about my typos.
Kay
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?:
When my youngest was little we would take him to Lake Michigan frequently and Grand Rapids is the half way point, so we would usually stop and give him a break. He would say “when I grow up I’m going to live here” – like Grand Rapids is just the most desirable place you could imagine. A boy can dream, right?
NotMax
@OzarkHillbilly
“Some of my best fiends are typos.”
;)
Ramalama
@Chet Murthy: It’s been a while since I’ve listened to This American Life. They’re high quality stories with interesting themes. I had them on my ipod connected to my car radio when I commuted weekly between Boston and Montreal with rideshare peeps. Sometimes the stories from TAL gave a flavor of America that some of the foreigners I drove had never heard of. I guess I stopped listening in earnest when I stopped working in ‘Merica and became legal to live in Canada.
tl;dr thanks for the reminder
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
Duck you.
Ramalama
Also, the Slate story has so many moving parts it feels like someone’s going to option it for a movie.
Also this:
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Muck you right back.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Kay: My parents and sister still live there, and while dreaming of living in Grand Rapids is…not something you hear, it’s actually a very fine place to live and I fantasize about moving back. I live in Jamie Raskin’s district in the DC suburbs.
The museums are better here, but other than that I’d take GR in a heartbeat. It’s got plenty of all the other amenities DC has, but the hassles of big city living (my God the traffic) are pared way down. We may retire there or in that general area of Michigan. Maybe closer to Lake Michigan although that’s an easy day trip from GR.
catclub
I am pretty sure he would want the bestest chapel evar for his fragment, but would complain about the cost of high quality construction, and ask if they could skip the expensive buttresses.
Kay
@Soprano2:
Yup. They picked three urban districts, but none in Texas or Florida.
It’s like how media and Republicans focus exclusively on crime in blue states and never mention the high crime rates in red states. Some of the most dangerous places in this country are in red states. No one knows it.
Ramalama
@OzarkHillbilly: Like Michael Cohen did to the Stormy NDA, attaching a $1 Million fine if she violated it, why not hit people with guns who kill the wrong person esp po-lice in the pocketbook. Because they never go to jail. $1 Million for killing the wrong person, not dischargeable in bankruptcy (like student loans). Let them have that hanging over their heads like a mortgage from Hell.
Princess
You deny the validity of one election; pretty soon you’re denying the validity of all of them.
Kay
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?:
Well, he ended up in Lansing so not far off. He could get to Grand Rapids yet!
Agree on all points. I’m in the midst of slowly relocating to Lake Michigan, near Manistee. We’ve been vacationing there for 30 years. I just love it. I think it’s among the prettiest places in the country. I’m officially tired of living two places, though. I can’t wait to wrap it up in Ohio. I have to drag my husband away from his law practice -he’s stalling. Supposedly he’ll be ready in 16 months.
Geminid
@Ramalama: One question I have is: what will these MAGA fanatics will do once their guy loses again. Some will drift away from politics, I think. As a friend pointed out, most were not very civic-minded to begin with.
OzarkHillbilly
@Ramalama: If we start holding cops accountable for their mistakes, pretty soon there won’t be any cops. Where will we be then? Gay sex in the streets???
narya
THAT is the ballgame. They are–if they’re competent–trying to run the damn schools, which means dealing with just about every group of people other than donors, whereas, as best I can tell, the main job of a college/university president is raising money. I’m not disparaging that job, either, mind you, but it is a different beast than running a sprawling urban school district.
Ramalama
@OzarkHillbilly: Accountability is a GATEWAY. People marrying their llamas. Children eating chocolate cake for dinner. Adults putting climbing walls in their living rooms.
Kay
@narya:
Too, I think public school leaders know Republicans hate public schools and are literally trying to eradicate them because they have been attacking and undermining public schools for 150 years, and university leaders do not (yet) know that. They will, though.
OzarkHillbilly
@Ramalama: The horror. The horror….
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
From the sheets to the streets!
Eyeroller
@narya: Having watched this phenomenon going on for a long time, it’s not clear to me that chasing big donations actually helps universities overall, at least at state-affiliated institutions. It’s claimed it’s to make up for loss of state funding (which is genuinely a huge problem), but nearly all major donations are encumbered, i.e. the donor requires that they be used for a specific purpose. And that purpose may not be in line with the university’s strategic goals. So the goals are distorted to fit the donors’ “vision”.
But I suppose sometimes they get buildings out of it when they otherwise would have difficulty raising the money.
WaterGirl
Funny. I linked to that article in my post yesterday afternoon.
Jeffro
155% this. No one seems to want to put the majority of – much less the entirety of – their donation towards an endowment that simply covers rising tuition costs. But a building with their name on it? (which the university will then have to maintain?) SURE!
comrade scotts agenda of rage
The problem, in short, is that the MAGA activists aren’t eating each other alive fast enough.
Geminid
Grand Rapids has been represented in Congress by a Republican almost continuously since the Civil War. That streak ended in 2022, when incumbent Peter Meijer* lost his primary and Democrat Hilary Scholten won in November.
The Southetn poliical realignment saw a large swath of the country go from Democratic control to Republican in the 1970s and 80s. There has been a slower counter-realignment going on in the rest of the country that has accelerated this century. It started in New England. Now its more widespread, especially in subirban districts nationwide including the South, and it is crippling the Republican party.
* Meijer was one of ten Hose Republicans who voted to impeach Trump. Four retired and four lost their primaries. Only Dan Newhouse (WA) and David Valadeo (CA) survived, likely because they’re in jungle primary states.
Baud
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
To be fair, I bet they taste awful.
Ken
@Baud: That’s what ketchup is for.
narya
@Kay: They want schools to prepare children to be docile workers. The old (i.e., a century ago) minutes of the National Education Association have so many sessions led by people like reps from the National Association of Manufacturers. They don’t want to teach children to think (and don’t think most are actually capable of it). It’s grimly fascinating to watch them (these days) try to control what books/reading materials are available, since they’ve been unsuccessful in controlling who gets to learn to read.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Needs more ketchup.
@Ken: Dammit Ken… This is what I get for not reading all the comments before adding my own pithy observations.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Ain’t enough ketchup made to cover up that taste.
lowtechcyclist
@Kay:
I bet not! The person running the Montgomery County schools has to routinely deal with challenges and criticisms from parents who are actually smart. Compared to them, going up against the GOPers in the House must’ve seemed like getting to swing against pitching out of Class A ball.
Soprano2
@Kay: They do talk about the high crime rate in “Democrat-run St. Louis” as if it’s not part of Missouri. LOL One of the people running for governor here on the Republican side is campaigning on “fighting illegal immigration”, “removing liberal prosecutors”, and “charging fentanyl dealers with MURDER”. None of these things are functions of the office of governor! I knew them removing Kim Gardner like that was a bad idea, because now they’re running on the idea that if there’s a prosecutor in a city that you don’t like, you can just remove them even if they were elected by the people in that city. It’s not a great thing.
JML
@Jeffro: It’s more complicated than this, though. Most schools are smart enough now to turn down a donation that has too many strings attached to it or isn’t in alignment with what they want to do. While maintaining the cost of a new building is a real issue, most universities were planning for the new building and the donation takes some or all of the university’s cost off the books, which allows them to reallocate funds towards other things (like keeping tuition down). And it’s not unusual for someone to get their name on a building or something else that’s already in place when the actual donation does things like create an endowment for one of the colleges or schools within the university to pay for operational costs. It’s great when a donor endows a chair within a department, because now that’s a faculty position that’s paid for with outside funds rather than university ones.
The restrictions don’t always work well and can be problematic down the road, but universities are a lot more careful about this than they used to be, and most of them make sure not accept gifts for programs they can’t or don’t want to handle.
Matt McIrvin
@Geminid:
Except that I’m not convinced it’s actually causing them to lose elections.
Long-term, I think it’s liberalism that’s in trouble. The Republicans are getting more insane-fascist and everyone under 40 on the left is so fed up at the damage done to them by the unrestrained greed of capitalists that they’re basically Communists, not liberals. They want capitalism completely destroyed. They have no memory of the Cold War to taint that feeling. They sure don’t like us. Both sides think Democrats are a bunch of wimps and sellouts to the other side.
I don’t see an easy nonviolent resolution to this, frankly. It’s a lot like the situation in the 1930s, and then we had FDR to square the circle and give the mainstream left the shot of socialism it needed. But is there anyone like that waiting in the wings?
(The *difference* from the 1930s is that the US was actually a way more violent society in general then. These days we seem to have a lot of people who are sort of itching for violence without necessarily doing it or having any experience of it. It’s a weird sort of powderkeg.)
Ocotillo
@Rusty: Some good news from San Antonio. I personally live in Republicandia, a very red part of SA.
Last week we had a school board election and 5 of the trustee seats were on the ballot, two more (conservative) trustees were not up for re-election. A trustee had passed away so the 7 seat board was down to 6 and was a 3 to 3 deadlock and thus election would break the tie.
Outside money flowed into the district and the MAGAs only needed to win two of the five races to gain control of the board. I was pessimistic due to the amount of money being used by the MAGAs/Moms for Liberty candidates.
Lo and behold, the normies swept all of the races and now will have a 5 to 2 majority of the board.
Valued commenter Kay has often posted about suburban folks not wanting these lunatics to come in and actually screw up their schools with the anti-woke bs and vouchers and it certainly turned out to be the case here.
This makes me think here in Texas it might be possible to eat away at the margins of these gerrymandered districts with reproductive healthcare and education as the focus. A tough fight with the rural areas being so dominate in state politics.
OzarkHillbilly
@Soprano2: I called our wonderful current Gov yesterday to give him shit about going to the clown show on the border today instead of actually doing something for Miserians. (I managed to avoid talking too much like a union carpenter) (I think)
The polite young lady on the other end sounded rather surprised.
Kay
@narya:
Oh, God so true. I was on a school council for years and this is a manufacturing area. We had a German-owned industrial fastener company coming in for years and pushing the kids to all enter trades or engineering. I would sit with the director of the high school band and we would plug away, raising our hands and insisting the kids also needed music and novels and things. Trades are great, engineering is great, but this is a general studies public high school in a county where only 25% of people go past a high school degree. If they don’t get exposure to music or art or reading fiction in K-12 they won’t ever get any of it. The same with field trips. They will go to the art museum 70 miles away in 7th grade and never go again. It’s 50% low income. No one outside of the public school system is taking these kids to a museum. Ever.
RevRick
@Baud: Sadly, our belief that we’re the majority is far from accurate. And a big reason for that is how ill-informed a huge swath of the population is. They consume no news whatsoever and their opinions on a whole range of issues are about as useful as used toilet paper.
Trump brought those folks into the electorate, because he stroked their feelings of fear, resentment and the desire to dominate. And, like it or not, that’s what motivates more people than we’d like to admit.
Soprano2
@JML: This reminds me that I talked to our local state university a year ago about endowing a scholarship in my sister’s name. I need to dig out that e-mail and just do it! So many things I need to do, but I want to get that done. My mom and I tried to do it when she was alive, but we couldn’t agree on what to do so we didn’t do anything. Now I can do what I want and what I think my sister would approve of.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
Could you guys cut out the wise quacks? ;-)
twbrandt
As a life-long resident of Michigan, the MiGOP clown show delights and amuses me no end. Love to see it.
Soprano2
@OzarkHillbilly: It’s such a clown show, we’re wasting millions of taxpayer dollars to send the National Guard to Texas for posturing and political points. I thought he was signing the bill to keep Planned Parenthood from getting Medicaid funds today. Oh, and they don’t have a budget yet and if they don’t get one by tomorrow they’ll have to have a special session, but he’s got time to posture by the border….and he’s not even running for re-election!
OzarkHillbilly
@lowtechcyclist: Oh hell no. The both of us are absolutely totally and completely quackers
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Nah, we’ll crush them all.
Eyeroller
@JML:No university president will turn down even a $M donation, much less a $100M donation. I’ve only seen a dean (not even a president) turn down a donation once, when the donor’s ask was extremely offensive to the faculty.
Base salaries of endowed chairs are usually not paid by the endowment. They pay a supplement and provide a slush fund for research. Most of the time, a current faculty member gets the new chair. They are especially useful for retention of “star” faculty.
Most major donors are bidnessmen and they donate for things in which bidnessmen are interested. They are rarely interested in undergraduate education or libraries. They aren’t usually interested in pure sciences or any type of humanities or social science (except economics). Business schools get lavish donations, including for buildings (but not usually for maintaining the building) while science faculty fight practically to the death over lab space. Tech attracts big donations. I no longer have free access to the Chronicle of Higher Education, so it may have already started, but I’m anticipating a huge flow into CS departments for AI.
Sometimes the donor wants to create a whole school that is tiny and not self-sustaining. I’ve also seen an unneeded building constructed because some rich guy’s trophy wife had a particular obsession and thought students should have a place to learn about it. Meanwhile lab scientists continue to fight to the death over space.
My experience is at a state-affiliated R1 so YMMV.
Michael Bersin
Not just republicans, though they have a distinctly paranoid style and take it to a much higher level.
Your $27.00 won’t get you into heaven anymore (June 19, 2016)
lowtechcyclist
@Ramalama:
Works for me.
Something that might actually have a chance in a Dem Congress: you kill the wrong person (standard of ‘wrong’: preponderance of the evidence), you lose your right to possess or handle firearms for the rest of your life. Minimum of a year in prison for your first violation, five years for subsequent.
And let SCOTUS strike that down on 2A grounds.
Another Scott
@Eyeroller: Thanks for your perspective.
Heh.
A little bird told me about a place that has plenty of lab space, but renovation costs too much of the wrong kind of money, or building codes have changed too much meaning new labs are too small for the equipment, or overhead square footage costs are too high, or … :-/
Infrastructure is spendy. Very spendy. And one has to think carefully about how it’s paid for (do people who telework pay for the building and office and lab overhead?). But it’s one of the many costs of building the future.
Cheers,
Scott.
narya
@Eyeroller: @Soprano2: My fantasy is to leave all/most of what I have to establish a scholarship or chair in the African Studies Dept named after my sister (who died in Africa) and a joint one for politics & philosophy named after my anarchist grandfather. I don’t know if my estate would be big enough for very much, though.
Starfish
@Kay: You know what’s in blue states? Jobs. And they give them to women also!
Starfish
@narya: I think everyone in education politics thinks the other side wants to brain wash the children and make them docile.
Apparently, no one has actually worked with children to know that they have minds of their own, and their favorite activity oscillates between what makes the olds proud and what annoys them.
Eyeroller
@narya:Cost depends on the college or university. Their development office would be very happy to tell you how much and would probably even provide boilerplate text for your will. For a “supplement” type of scholarship, say enough to buy textbooks and pay some fees and the like, it’s often about $100,000. A full ride may cost a lot more than that, but again will depend heavily on the institution.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: The trend I spoke of cost Republicans 40 seats in 2018, and they’ve won less than 10 of those back in the two cycles since then. They will likely lose more of these suburban seats this November.
Starfish
@JML: Keeping tuition down. Lol.
There are numerous schools approaching $90,000 a year now.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Kay: I just rented a house in Manistee on VRBO for a week in August! I haven’t been to that area in decades. The only camp I ever went to is near there – on Portage Lake – it’s an Evangelical Covenant church camp. Onekama is the town across the lake from it.
And my family used to make regular camping trips to the Manistee State Forest campground in Nordhaus Dunes when we were kids… camping for a week along Lake Michigan somewhere was what we did for a summer vacation through most of the 1970s (that and visiting relatives in Cleveland and Jamestown NY). We started out just going Hoffmaster or Ludington State Parks but eventually they got impossible to get in at. So one time when we struck out at Ludington we found that State Forest campground and it became our go-to because we could always get a campsite. I remember my dad reading Robinson Crusoe to us in the evenings one summer as we sat in the dunes staring out at the sun setting over Lake Michigan.
Haven’t been back to that particular area since the mid 1980s. Been lots of places north and south of there but it’ll be fun to see it again. I never really made it into Manistee proper all that often back then so it’ll basically be new to me.
narya
@Eyeroller: Thank you! I’m gonna reach out . . . it would be fun.
Ramalama
@Eyeroller: My uncle pooled some money together to create a partial scholarship fund for Boston College students interested in working public service jobs after graduating. The money isn’t enough to cover tuition but it’s a nice chunk like a summer job. He named it after his mentor there. I think any money available for students is a great thing.
CliosFanBoy
It’d be a lot more fun to watch if there wasn’t a decent chance these people will be in power. These are the American version of the Red Army’s Political Officers. Grifters, True Believers, Kooks, and walking examples of Dunning-Krueger.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=381Di8Cw0-I
Luther Siler
Jesus Christ, “the air was humid with human moistness” is the worst single phrase I have ever seen.
Eyeroller
@narya: You can bequeath/donate any amount, but they usually have minimums for named endowments so be sure to specify that’s what you hope to do.
Soprano2
@Geminid: I’m hopeful that we can add to the number of Democrats in the state legislature in MO this year. The goal is to get rid of the Republican supermajority. We might add a 4th Democrat from my area. Eight years ago there was one, now there are three, all women. One of them, Crystal Quade, is term limited and is running for governor.
Anne Laurie
@WaterGirl: Thank you — corrected my post above!
Ray Ingles
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?:
We camp at Ludington every year, but I have to get sites six months in advance, and we stay Sunday through Wednesday because those days are less desirable. Otherwise, yeah, it’s impossible.
Citizen Alan
@smith: Participatory democracy presupposes that all the voters are able and willing to become informed about the candidates and their positions and then to vote for the one who best represents the voter’s own positions. It was always a source of incredible frustration to me that in Mississippi I was given a long list of down ticket offices to vote for with absolutelino way to research the people runnand determine who I should vote for. I mean, shit, how am I supposed to know who is the best choice for chancery clerk? Let alone county coroner (which is an elected position in mississippi for some incomprehensible reason)? So you can imagine my joy and delight when the state of California sent me a big thick voter information package that listed every candidate for every office on the ballot and their positions on various issues.
Citizen Alan
@Ramalama: You would have to get around the qualified immunity issue to go after the cops for that. As long as the cop is acting under color of authority, The taxpayers will be on hawk for any damages rather than him.
Attempted Chemistry
I used to think the lunacy was going to hit Michigan lightly, and Chamber of Commerce sorts would continue to rule the MIGOP. But all is fealty to Trump, so the mask is pretty well off. Whitmer, Nessel, and Benson will make it hard for the GOP to cheat, and the GOP personalities will make it hard to win Michigan honestly. I’m hopeful (though still twitchy from 2016).
Barry
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?: “Haven’t been back to that particular area since the mid 1980s. Been lots of places north and south of there but it’ll be fun to see it again. I never really made it into Manistee proper all that often back then so it’ll basically be new to me.”
I go up to Ludington regularly.
It has boomed. You will be amazed at how much new stuff there is.
Geminid
@Attempted Chemistry: I think there can be a tipping point with state Republican parties, where enough moderate voters leave and the Chamber of Commerce-types can no longer withstand the Tea Party cranks. Virginia seemed to hit that point 10 years ago, when Dave Brat beat Eric Cantor in the 7th CD primary. Two other Republican Reps retired the next cycle, Robert Hurt (VA05) and Scott Rigel (VA02).
Rigell was a wealthy Tidewater auto dealer and Hurt was from a wealthy land developer family, both Chamber of Commerce Republicans in the literal sense. Hurt was in his 40s and Rigel was in his 50s, and they each flipped seats in the 2010 Republican wave. They decided that kowtowing to the radicals wasnt worth it and quit.
I think the takeover might have come earlier to this state because of the large number of politicized evangelicals. Once they aligned with the tea party cranks the Chamber of Commerce/Country Club Republicans could no longer call the shots like they had ever since the 1970s.