Media Laziness – The Wrongologist

Democratic Party Messaging

The Daily Escape:

Pikes Peak, Colorado Springs, CO – December 2024 photo by Monica Breckenridge.

The Democrats are meeting this week to decide on who will lead them into the 2026 midterms and the 2028 general election. Wrongo thinks it’s time for a revolution.

The key question is how do Democrats go back to winning presidential elections? And it may not be the way you think. From Jon V. Last:

“Since Trump’s emergence in 2016 the opposition has responded by acting as if it were still 2015. The Biden administration pursued a vigorous, bipartisan agenda filled with popular legislation designed to promote economic growth across the board. Biden spent money on infrastructure and manufacturing—much of it in red states and rural areas where Democrats had little support.

The Biden administration’s theory was that by governing from the center and focusing on employment and economic growth, Democrats could retain the support of the majority….”

But that theory didn’t work, and Trump won, running on zero ideas about growth, prosperity, or progress. His campaign was posited on the infliction of pain to outsiders. Trump didn’t promise to improve the lives of his voters. He promised to punish the people his voters wanted to hurt. That was the entirety of his electoral proposition, and none of it was subtext. Instead it was bold-face, ALL CAPS text.

Last says it worked because America has changed and the majority of voters are no longer motivated by wanting progress for themselves. Instead they’re motivated primarily by anger that out-groups—the people they do not like—might be succeeding or getting benefits they’re not getting.

If this is true, and at least some evidence suggests it is, how do Democrats persuade voters not to be quite so angry and to vote for them? From Brian Beutler: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“…winning the next election will require Democrats to persuade some as-yet unpersuaded voters that they’re worth voting for. Whatever policies Democrats think are popular, whatever affects they associate with normalness and affability, if they can’t do the delicate work of changing a mind, they can’t get anywhere.”

“Democrats are about to have as little power as they’ve had at any time in the past two decades for a simple reason: Most Americans weren’t convinced that they’d be better off under Democratic rule. That’s it. And there’s no shortcut back to power that avoids the difficult task of convincing people to change their minds.”

More: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“The Democrats need more and better communicators, and, crucially, it needs the people who don’t understand their potential to influence conventional wisdom and public opinion to get with the times. Most persuasion doesn’t happen person to person, it is mediated. When it does happen person to person, it is most often between people who already know each other, and usually one of those people is regurgitating ideas they picked up….And the ripest targets are no longer classic swing voters who are happy to talk politics with strangers….”

Couple all of this with the problem of where people get their news, and you have Dems digging out of a ditch partially of their own making. What Democrats are missing more than anything is creative thinking about how to reach people who will never answer a telephone call from a number they don’t recognize, never answer the door for a canvasser, and never form lasting political beliefs by watching or reading professional newscasts (because they rarely, if ever do).

This time around, Democrats either need their leaders to adapt, or else they need new leaders.

Jon Last thinks what will win votes in this environment is a lefty demagogue akin to what Bernie Sanders has been selling for years with his “millionaires and billionaires” rants. Sanders’s pitches resonated with younger voters. He got quite a lot of traction in 2016, but Democratic Party primary voters were not ready for him.

Who should the Dems support to lead them into the next round of elections? It should be a group of people in the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s. And thank God there is at least some movement among “younger” Democrats on the Hill to challenge the party’s gerontocracy.

Billy Ray is a screenwriter. His Captain Phillips screenplay earned him an Oscar nomination. He thinks the Democrats’ storytelling ought to start with:

“Whoever is going to be our next presidential candidate needs to look to the American people and say, ‘You matter. Not me, not Trump. You matter. You matter to your family, you matter to your community, you matter to your country,’” he adds. “‘You matter to our collective future, and you matter to me. And what I’m going to do for the next four years is just work for working families. I’m going to do the things that made the Democratic Party your party for so long.’”

Working families. Who among the Democrats out there can build on and carry this message home?

Evolve or Die, Dems.

Hunter’s Pardon

The Daily Escape:

Eastham, MA mirror image, October 2024 photo by Bo Ericsson

Why are the media and the GOP so shocked and appalled at Hunter Biden’s pardon? It’s been called “the most consequential since Nixon”. Hunter was set to be sentenced and (probably) jailed this week. The seriousness of his likely sentence was disproportionately severe, largely because he was Joe Biden’s son.

Hunter lied on a form about being on drugs and he paid his taxes late. He entered into a plea deal in which he would admit guilt and get probation, a fair sentence. But the judge and the prosecution blew it up in court. He could have faced years in jail for crimes that someone not named Biden and who hadn’t also committed more serious crimes, would have ever been prosecuted.

On June 6, President Biden announced he would not pardon Hunter or commute any sentence he might receive for his gun-related conviction.

The President’s announcement in June was disappointing. While it was clear that felonies had been committed, the prosecution of Biden seemed motivated by something other than the pursuit of justice. And Hunter Biden was a recovering addict. His crimes, by his own admission, were the byproduct of his drug and alcohol abuse.

Biden has now pardoned Hunter and that was the right thing to do, because they brought the charges against Hunter to break Biden. As Biden said in the pardon statement:

“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong. There has been an effort to break Hunter – who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”

The media and the GOP have reacted strongly.

On the one hand, people are concerned about a president issuing an unprecedented pardon for his child. But against the orgy of Trump pardons of family, friends, and advisers, Biden’s pardon of his son on minor charges pursued for political purposes seems like small potatoes to Wrongo. Biden’s reasons for pardoning his son are understandable. But Biden’s decision could be a precedent for future pardons—by presidents with flimsy or corrupt reasons for pardoning family members.

On the other hand, people have expressed the belief the Joe Biden did the right thing. Wrongo comes down closer to that side of that equation. The pardon process is supposed to be used to do justice. And this is justice. Hunter Biden would likely not have been charged on the facts if he was anyone else.

Biden exercised the pardon power; he hasn’t tried to pardon himself. He issued a pardon he was entitled to give. But it is a departure since he’s been so careful to avoid even the appearance of impropriety and said he would not pardon his son, to reverse course. That is reason to pause and reflect on this pardon.

Bill Clinton pardoned his brother, Roger, after he completed a sentence for trafficking cocaine.

Will pardoning Hunter “embolden” Trump to break more norms? No, he will break them anyway. Trump didn’t need any excuse to pardon his henchmen. He’s already pardoned Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone and Jared Kushner’s father whom he just named to be the Ambassador to France! He’s pardoned Dinesh D’Souza and Joe Arpaio! A list of friends, allies and family.

It’s nonsense to think that pardoning Hunter changes anything when it comes to Trump.

Until the media uses the same yardstick to measure the actions by Biden against the actions by Trump, Wrongo is cheering for Joe. Trump’s actions are treated as somehow acceptable while incumbent GOP-ers clutch their pearls, or taking umbrage, at Biden. Democrats are being held to a totally different standard. It’s journalistic hypocrisy at its finest. And it does not serve democracy or America.

This ISN’T a two wrongs make a right situation. That Hunter Biden is not an admirable person in general has exactly nothing to do with any of this.

Let’s compare and contrast:

Hunter Biden was prosecuted mostly because his father is POTUS, and for actions that nobody else is ever been criminally prosecuted for. His plea bargain was rejected only because his father is POTUS. That is the very definition of political persecution.
OTOH, Trump was charged with extremely serious crimes: theft of secret documents and a failed coup d’etat are the most serious crimes anybody can commit against the body politic. And he is the only person to have been so charged, because no one else has ever committed such crimes.
Charging him wasn’t political persecution, despite Trump’s moaning that it was. While the Republicans spent the last six years trying to make Hunter a political albatross for Biden.

While Trump “whataboutism” is an exhausting game, the hypocrisy of the Republicans and the double standard of the media is galling. Those who supported Trump’s pardons of his political cronies for crimes that involved his own campaign, should have no critique of Biden’s pardon.

The Dems have to stop being the pearl clutching Party. Most voters do not care about Hunter Biden. We should remain on the high moral ground, and firmly assert and argue that the Biden pardon of his son was the moral thing to do despite the hand wringing from the press and others.

The Times That Try Men’s Souls

The Daily Escape:

“THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” – From The Crisis by Thomas Payne.

Everyone knows the bolded part of the comment above, but the rest is where we have to get to with 18± days left until Election Day. The pollster’s narrative is that the race has shifted and Trump has gotten stronger over the last few weeks. That Harris is lagging, not surging. At least some of that is caused by Republican Pollsters. Simon Rosenberg wrote: (emphasis and brackets by Wrongo)

“The red wavers [pollsters] stepped up their activity this past week, releasing at least 20 polls across the battlegrounds. It’s a sign that they are worried about the public polling in both the Presidential and the Senate, and have dramatically escalated their efforts to push the polling averages to the right and make the election look redder than it is.”

But this all has Democrats in disarray, thinking some or all of the following:

The polls are right and we’re doomed.
The polls are wrong. Some of them are skewed by these “Red Wave” polls.
Early voter data show that Harris is in good shape.
Harris going on Fox is a sign of strength or maybe weakness.

There’s a nub of truth in each of these. But on the whole, it’s whistling past the graveyard. The cake is pretty much baked. What we need in last18± days before Election Day: Vote. Donate. Pick a local candidate and support them with your money and time.

Let’s go from the macro in politics to the micro. The Intercept reported on a December 2022 drug bust in that bastion of democracy, Jackson, MS:

“It was a tip that brought a drug sniffing dog to the main post office in downtown Jackson, Mississippi. An employee there had reported seeing someone in the lobby putting pills into hot pink envelopes:

“…a police officer from the small city of Richland, just south of Jackson, walked into a back room at the post office where one of the envelopes had been set aside. Steed, a K-9 handler, arrived with Rip, his narcotics sniffer dog. Rip got to the pink envelope, sat down. According to records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, Steed said this meant the dog had smelled narcotics….This…was no ordinary drug bust. As it turned out, there were pills inside the package, but they were not the kind that Rip or other police K-9s are trained to detect. The envelope contained five pills labeled “AntiPreg Kit…their medical purpose is to induce abortion. Dwayne Martin, at the time the head of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service in Jackson, told me this was exactly what the initial tipster had suspected.”

It turns out that they were acting under a USPS procedure called mail cover: a little-known Postal Service method for collecting data about people suspected of committing crimes. From the WaPo:

“The US Postal Service has shared information from thousands of Americans’ letters and packages with law enforcement every year for the past decade, conveying the names, addresses and other details from the outside of boxes and envelopes without requiring a court order.”

More: (brackets by Wrongo)

“…postal inspectors, federal agencies, and state and local police forces made an average of about 6,700 requests [of the USPS] a year, and that inspectors additionally recorded data from about another 35,000 pieces of mail a year, on average.

Using an enormous database of images of the outside of envelopes and packages, postal inspectors can digitally compare names, addresses, and other information on one item to others. And the findings can be freely shared with almost any law enforcement agency that requests them.

This is bad enough: Imagine what could happen to abortion-pills-by-mail and the people who use them if Trump is elected? Since the accounts of the regional USPS head and The Intercept’s FOIA documents show a piecemeal crackdown is already underway during a Democratic administration?

Regardless of whomever is in power, the incident in Jackson provides a potential window into the future — one in which freelancing local Postal Service employees and officials call on the local cops who share their ideology to halt women from accessing reproductive care and potentially charge and arrest those providing or using abortion medication.

In the meantime, thanks to a Jackson-based postal worker, Rip the dog, and a federal agency that says it has no desire to police abortion, nearly 100 pregnant women did not receive little pink packages containing the medicine they requested.

Finally, Harris vs. Fox: She sat for the most confrontational interview of her campaign as she answered — and parried — questions from Fox News’ Bret Baier. The idea was to unmoor any loosely-affiliated Republican voters and show them she isn’t as scary as Trump and Fox News have portrayed her.

Baier thought he was prepared with enough “gotcha” questions. He showed a clip from a Fox town hall that conveniently edited out the section showing him saying “the enemy within”. But it was Harris who pounced:

“Bret, I’m sorry and with all due respect, that clip was not what he has been saying about ‘the enemy within’ that he has repeated when he is speaking about the American people. That’s not what you just showed…”

Baier insisted the clip was Trump’s response to a question about those statements, and Harris countered:

“You didn’t show that, and here’s the bottom line: He has repeated it many times, and you and I both know that. And you and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people.”

Baier absolutely knows that. Trump used the phrase on Maria Bartiromo’s Sunday morning program and at his rally in Aurora, CO., on Friday. Baier discussed and tried to sane-wash Trump’s usage of the phrase on his Oct. 15 show.

Go grab a napkin, Bret. You got served.

The Crypto Bro Vote

The Daily Escape:

When Trump pivoted to being pro-crypto, everyone thought it was just another scam to make a few extra shekels in advance of election. From The Atlantic:

“…more than 1 million people tuned in for the launch of World Liberty Financial, a new crypto project promoted by Trump and his family. The former president has been posting about it on social media for several weeks.”

“Trump wasn’t always this pro-crypto. He once referred to bitcoin as a scam….This summer, he appeared at a bitcoin conference and declared that the United States ‘will be the crypto capital of the planet’”

But his embrace may be more calculated than that. You shouldn’t be surprised to learn that crypto companies are bankrolling Republican campaigns this election. The New Yorker has a detailed story about how Silicon Valley’s crypto boys went all in on Sen. Adam Schiff in part by crushing Rep. Katie Porter’s attempt to become the Democratic nominee for the California Senate race:

“…Katie Porter was…futzing around on her computer when she learned that she was the target of a vast techno-political conspiracy….Now she was in a highly competitive race to replace the California senator Dianne Feinstein, who had died a few months earlier. The primary was in three weeks.

A text from a campaign staffer popped up on Porter’s screen. The staffer had just learned that a group named Fairshake was buying airtime in order to mount a last-minute blitz to oppose her candidacy. Indeed, the group was planning to spend roughly ten million dollars.”

“Porter…had raised thirty million dollars to bankroll her entire campaign, and that had taken years. The idea that some unknown group would swoop in and spend a fortune attacking her…seemed ludicrous: “I was, like, ‘What the heck is Fairshake?’ ”

Fairshake is a super PAC funded primarily by three tech firms involved in the cryptocurrency industry. The pro-crypto PAC has raised more than $200 million for 2024’s election cycles, per OpenSecrets, with tens of millions of dollars flooding in from crypto giants Coinbase and Ripple, as well as the Menlo Park CA venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Fairshake’s thinking was: If Porter lost and other politicians saw how much money the industry had available to spend on elections, they’d be more likely to become pro-crypto. The stakes, for the big donors, are existential — regulatory acceptance would boost the value of their companies’ assets and the use of their services.

The PAC dumped about $10 million into the race, a third of the $30 million Porter had for her campaign. She hadn’t ever heard of the group, but its attack ads called her “a fake,” a “liar” and a “bully.” Fairshake selected Porter from a list of high-profile options, hoping to make an example. She lost and will be out of Congress when it convenes in January.

An unnamed political operative told the New Yorker:

“Porter was a perfect choice because she let crypto declare, ‘If you are even slightly critical of us, we won’t just kill you…we’ll end your career.’ From a political perspective, it was a masterpiece.”

Fairshake’s scare campaign appears to have worked. The House of Representatives passed a pro-crypto bill, with bipartisan support, in May. Candidates with Fairshake’s support won their primaries in 85% of the cases.

This has made its way into the presidential campaign: Trump backs crypto and Harris has signaled her support for it as well.

Trump may be on to something, since this could be a bigger factor in the election than we realize. The New Yorker quotes Coinbase as saying that fifty-two million Americans own cryptocurrencies. Those polls indicated that 60% of crypto owners were millennials or Gen Z-ers, and 41% were people of color, key demographics for each Party.

Coinbase also launched an advocacy organization, Stand with Crypto, which is advertised to Coinbase’s millions of US customers every time they log in, and which urges cryptocurrency owners to contact their lawmakers.

Sherrod Brown (D-OH) is running for reelection, where Fairshake has directed forty million dollars to ads in support of his opponent.

In total, Fairshake and affiliated PACs have already spent more than a hundred million dollars on political races in 2024, including $43 million on Senate races in Ohio and West Virginia, and $7 million on four congressional races in North Carolina, Colorado, Alaska, and Iowa.

The big question is whether the bro vote is overhyped? Will these crypto bros turn out to vote?

Trump’s best chance at success in November requires minimizing his losses among women and suburbanites while building a coalition that includes a historic number of male and working-class voters in his corner. As a result, we’re seeing both campaigns and their allies attempt to reach men in unprecedented and unconventional ways online. (A reminder: Young men historically vote at lower rates than young women.)

For Trump, it seems this targeted outreach to the tech bros segment of the electorate is essential. If he can’t win record numbers of men, it’s unlikely he can win the White House.

For the Harris campaign, the male-focused outreach efforts are happening in addition to major campaigns and organizing programs designed to reach more dependable parts of their coalition who turn out more dependably.

In a way, this is proof that American governance and legislation have become so perverted by money that it is nearly impossible for people other than billionaires to further their agendas. It’s particularly dangerous given that the US economy has bestowed lavish riches on a tiny group of disaffected, unaccountable technologists.

Today’s startup founders and venture capitalists are, like the nouveaux riches of previous eras, using their wealth for selfish aims. In doing so, they have revealed themselves to be as ruthless as the robber barons and industrial tyrants of a century ago—not coincidentally, the last time that income inequality was as extreme as it is today.

Harris Needs To Speak To Gen Z’s Reality

The Daily Escape:

Before tackling the major subject for today, Wrongo wants to briefly cover something you probably missed. There was an abortion ruling in Georgia that overturned the state’s anti-abortion law. The judge plowed new ground with his reasoning: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“While the State’s interest in protecting ‘unborn’ life is compelling, until that life can be sustained by the State — and not solely by the woman compelled by the Act to do the State’s work — the balance of rights favors the woman….Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property the disposition of which is decided by majority vote. Forcing a woman to carry an unwanted, not-yet-viable fetus to term violates her constitutional rights to liberty and privacy, even taking into consideration whatever bundle of rights the not-yet-viable fetus may have….It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could — or should — force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another….When someone other than the pregnant woman is able to sustain the fetus, then — and only then — should those other voices have a say in the discussion about the decisions the pregnant woman makes concerning her body and what is growing within it.”

The ruling is unlikely to be the final word on abortion access in Georgia, since the case will ultimately be decided by the Georgia Supreme Court.

The judge has a solid argument: Why does society have an interest in a viable fetus when we know society won’t lift a finger to financially and medically support the newborn? Why allow the government to intervene at a time when the costs involved for the mother to continue with the pregnancy increase substantially?

Let’s move to a powerful idea that emerged in the VP debate. Wrongo thinks the key to winning the election will be how Harris reaches out to Gen Z (those born between 1997 and 2012). PBS Newshour interviewed Kyla Scanlon, who reminds us that Gen Z now has more people in the workforce than the Boomer generation, but they aren’t faring as well. Scanlon says that Gen Z has had a tough go of it, being essentially born into the tech bubble, growing up during the Great Recession and then graduating or being in college during the pandemic.

From Scanlon: (brackets by Wrongo)

“…I think for a lot of Gen Z’ers, rent is definitely not as affordable as it used to be. Real wages have increased, so [have] wages adjusted for inflation, but rent has increased much more. And that’s sort of the foundation of how everyone experiences the economy. It’s where you live and how you have to pay for where you live….people look at the price of rent, they look at the price of gas, they look at the price of food, they just look at the inflation that we have experienced over the past few years, and it’s sometimes just not enough to even make those real wage gains worth it.”

“It’s also the cost of childcare, eldercare, these things that are economically quite painful, but don’t necessarily show up in traditional economic measurements like GDP….They’re things that are… hidden costs that people experience.”

Scanlon also talked about the negative bias in the media that’s driving how people feel about their economic circumstances. Media sentiment on the economy has trended either skeptical or negative for a very long time, so people are reading negative headlines despite the economists and pundits saying the economy is OK. This is a big disconnect for the younger generations who get most of their news from social media.

In the debate, Vance said a few things that certainly resonate with Gen Z and others. He noted three things in particular:

People are struggling to pay the bills. Times are tough.
The American Dream is fading, and feels unattainable.
We should stop shipping jobs offshore.

It’s hard to disagree with any of that, and Harris shouldn’t cede any of this ground to Trump. How hard is it to build this into your stump speech? She could easily acknowledge that we’re in the midst of a global cost of living crisis. The biggest one in half a century.

But it was left to Vance and Scanlon to say the things that most Americans feel.

Gen Z and their younger cohorts mistakenly think that the economy is a zero sum game, meaning that if China is doing well or immigrants are coming here and finding work, that regular Americans must be doing worse, even though the economic statistics say otherwise.

Harris needs to deliver an economic message that’s grounded in the reality that Gen Z and others are experiencing. It can be as simple as acknowledging what Vance or Scanlon called out as problems for many younger Americans.

All she needs to do is “Just Say It”.

Many of Wrongo’s 12 grandchildren (17-32 years-old) largely feel that the American Dream is beyond their reach. They’re certain Social Security won’t be there for them. Most think that they’ll never own a home.

Why can’t Harris speak to this? Harris and the Dems talk vaguely about “the opportunity economy” but a more emotional and empathetic call out is required. People with economic problems need to trust the head of the ticket, and that trust starts with acknowledging their reality: That things aren’t as good for the younger generations as the economic statistics say they are.

The Dems have an actual track record: Investing in infrastructure and encouraging domestic production of strategic goods. Investment in manufacturing is at an all time high. We’re starting to produce advanced chips in Arizona. Unions are stronger than in recent years.

Harris needs to show empathy for those in Gen Z (and younger) who are not fully participating in the opportunity economy.

It will help her win in November.

Random Election Season Thoughts

The Daily Escape:

Camden Public Library, Camden, ME – September 2024 photo by Daniel F. Dishner Photography

When projecting economic outcomes, economists always caution about “Black Swan” events. While the term has been around hundreds of years, today it means an unforeseen but consequential event. Two potential Black Swan events occurred last week.

The assassination of Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah and Israel’s seeming willingness to keep expanding operations against Lebanon seems very risky. Biden seems incapable of stopping Netanyahu from widening the war against Hamas and Hezbollah, and it’s clear that Netanyahu has never been a good faith negotiator regarding a cease fire. Harris now has to worry about how this impacts her campaign in Michigan.

The floods caused by the remnants of Hurricane Helene could be another “Black Swan”, although it’s difficult to see which candidate it will impact more severely. The flooding disproportionately affected the rural areas that Trump needs to win to keep North Carolina in the red column. Although heavily blue areas like Asheville also will still be recovering in early November. Here’s a map of power outages as of 9/28:

That said, the response to Helene may also highlight to voters the importance of FEMA and NOAA, both of which Project 2025 aims to defund. There are plenty of ads now running that emphasize that Project 2025 would defund NOAA. If the Feds can respond to the damage on I-40 like they did to I-95 in PA or Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge disaster, it may convince people in North Carolina that the government actually can be helpful.

Trump’s growing increasingly unhinged in public appearances is difficult to overlook. He’s adopted fascist language. Overall, he looks both weak and violent, but the mainstream press isn’t persistently covering him in that way. Its clear on Twitter that his crowds are smaller and are increasingly disengaged.

Lets turn to Elon Musk who tweeted this to his tech bros:

Let’s deconstruct this almost impossibly stupid thought:

People who enter illegally are not eligible for citizenship and non-citizens cannot and do not vote in federal elections.
People who are granted asylum can’t vote unless they become citizens, which takes ~5 years.
Even the most generous immigration reform proposal (which is unlikely to pass both Houses of Congress) would only apply to undocumented immigrants who’ve been here for years. And citizenship would require paying a fine, extensive background check, and going to the back of the line behind legal immigrant applicants – a process that could take a decade.
Currently, most of the undocumented population is of Hispanic origin – a demographic whose voting patterns have been moving to the right, not the left.

This is the same guy who after the second Trump assassin was arrested posted on Twitter:

“And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala.”

And this guy has a top security clearance! Musk’s companies, including SpaceX and its subsidiary Starlink, have a $4 billion contract with NASA and multimillion-dollar contracts with the Defense Department.

But there’s a bigger picture in play with a few wealthy South Africans who have joined the tech bros world: Elon Musk lived in apartheid South Africa until he was 17. David Sacks, the venture capitalist who has become a fundraiser for Trump and a troll of Ukraine, left at age five, and grew up in a South African diaspora family in Tennessee. Peter Thiel spent his childhood in South Africa and Namibia, where his father was involved in uranium mining as part of the apartheid regime’s clandestine drive to acquire nuclear weapons.

And Paul Furber, an obscure South African software developer and tech journalist living near Johannesburg, has been identified by two teams of forensic linguists as the originator of the QAnon conspiracy, which helped drive Trump’s Maga movement.

In short, four of Maga’s most influential voices are fifty-something white men who grew up in apartheid South Africa.

And what connects these men’s South African backgrounds with Maga? South Africa under apartheid offered an extreme version of some of what are now important themes of what Republicans want American life to look like today: Income inequality as the natural order of things and a contempt for government.

This is what the rich guys who support Trump want, and a few of the most influential rich guys grew up under apartheid.

Finally, Rachel Bitecofer, a political analyst who in July 2019 predicted that Trump would lose the 2020 election, with the Democratic candidate winning at least 278 electoral votes, has comments on polling that Wrongo hasn’t seen elsewhere about how older people are turning towards Harris:

If true, it will be helpful.

Will The Protagonist Win?

The Daily Escape:

Let’s start with some definitions. According to Proofed, a writing tips blog:

“The protagonist is often (though not necessarily) referred to as the story’s “hero” or central character. At the other end of the spectrum is the antagonist, the character responsible for opposing the protagonist’s objectives.”

Marcy Wheeler, who writes as Emptywheel, had one of the most perceptive columns of the election cycle last week. Speaking about the debate and its aftermath Wheeler said: (brackets by Wrongo)

“…[what] the Vice President did with her animated, often mocking facial expressions….She kept the camera on her the entire time. And more often than not, even her facial expressions conveyed far more than Trump’s rants did.”

The media were surprised, since they had conceived of the debate almost exclusively about how Harris would react to whatever Trump would do. That’s the way they’ve treated Trump since 2015: As the protagonist in a global political drama.

But since the debate, something important happened to the media. Back to Wheeler: (brackets by Wrongo)

“And they left [ the debate] with the certainty that Vice President Kamala Harris was the protagonist of that story.”

Harris the protagonist. Harris, the main character, who’s actions drive the story forward. It wasn’t Trump giving the orders that got the press scurrying. They were marveling at Harris’s crowds, at her command of the issues, at her looking and sounding presidential. At the big energy in the big crowds at her rallies.

But a second possible assassination attempt could have delivered the role of protagonist up for grabs again. Does Wrongo have this right? The guy who was apprehended never had a line of sight on Trump and never shot his weapon. But somehow, Trump has become the victim of another assassination in the Mainstream Media.

It’s most probable that the second assassin is just another mentally ill person looking to give his life meaning. But regardless, Trump worked hard to get the protagonist role back. He tried to use the second attempt to return to being the protagonist. He’s alleged that Democrats have inspired the recent up tick of political violence by characterizing him as a risk to American democracy, as truthfully, he is.

There’s zero evidence that the would-be assassins were motivated or radicalized by Democrats.

The Springfield story is Trump’s second effort to return to being the protagonist. Since it’s predicated on a lie, he can run with it. If the tale of Haitian immigrants stealing people’s pets and eating them were true, then it would only have been a one-day affair. We’d see the police reports. Local and state governments would take some sort of action. The Harris campaign would formulate a response. The story would have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

But then? We’d be back to talking about Harris.

But because it’s a lie, the story doesn’t end. It swirls and gathers strength. The media and local governments try to debunk it. Lots of people believe it anyway. The narrative progresses, trying to get Trump and Vance to admit that they’re lying. They refuse; or equivocate.

And there is no advantageous angle for the Harris campaign to take. If she engages, then it gets even better for Trump, because she becomes a supporting character in his story. And we go from having a conflict between Trump and objective truth to a conflict between Trump and Harris.

And Harris would be no longer talking about the future. She’d be stuck litigating the (obvious) lies of a madman. Just like everyone else has for the last nine years.

But a big lie doesn’t have to change things, no matter how many times Trump plays that card.

Since becoming the protagonist, Harris has leaped in the polls. The New Yorker’s Philip Gourevitch reported on the Morning Consult’s polling of 11,022 likely voters with a margin of error of +/-1 percentage point, taken Sept. 13-15 2024. They summarize:

“Harris leads Trump by a record-high 6 percentage points among likely voters, 51% to 45%, up from a 3-point advantage before their debate last week. Her 51% of support among likely voters, which is also at a record high, is driven largely by her best figures to date among Democrats, Biden 2020 voters, liberals, women, 18- to 34-year-olds and millennials.”

Here’s their chart:

And her image is better than ever: 53% of likely voters have a favorable view of Harris, the largest share they’ve measured this cycle. By comparison, just 44% of voters view Trump favorably.

So one big challenge is for Harris to hold on as the protagonist in the political brawl of 2024. Something that Biden never did, nor have large groups of Trump wanna-be’s over the past nine years.

Harris’s Chances This Fall

The Daily Escape:

Storm over Mt. Tom, Easthampton MA – July 2024 photo by Stef Michael

It’s sad that Biden is unable to carry the torch, but Wrongo’s never been happier with the Democratic Party. The leadership made an incredibly difficult decision to insist that despite winning the nomination of the Party, Biden shouldn’t accept it. The reality was that neither Biden nor the Party could responsibly argue that Biden would be fit to serve another four and a half years in office. Worse, the American people simply weren’t buying that he could.

So the past 30(ish) days constituted the best example in Wrongo’s lifetime of a political party doing what a political party is supposed to do, which is to put the interests of the Party, and by extension the interests of the country, ahead of the interests of any individual. Even if that person happens to be the president of the US.

This shows the central difference between the Democrats and the cult of personality we formerly called the Republican Party. It’s impossible to imagine the Republicans removing Trump as its presidential candidate.

By contrast, the Democrats gradually came to a collective conclusion after the June 27 debate that circumstances had changed enough to warrant bringing maximum institutional pressure on Biden to withdraw from the race. We will never know how well Biden would have done in the election compared to how Harris will do. The Party decided, and the Party made the right decision — as most critically, did Biden himself.

We’ve all seen the energy, enthusiasm, fresh hope, and tons of money that have poured into the Democrats’ coffers. But how realistic is Harris’s path to the White House?

It’s only day four, and Harris, the (very) likely Democratic presidential nominee, is still getting loads of positive press while Democrats are falling all over themselves to give her money and volunteer to work on the campaign. It may be early but it’s worth looking at Harris’s path to winning 270 Electoral College votes in order to keep the White House out of Trump’s hands.

The Harris campaign told Politico about how they see the Electoral College map:

“The Midwest is not where the opportunity is for her….The opportunity with her… is going to be Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania. And however those four states go, the rest of the country will follow.”

That thinking is based on the EC maps produced by 270towin.com. Here’s their current take:

Now Wrongo doesn’t think that PA and MI are currently toss-ups. He thinks that they lean Democratic, making the spread: Harris 260 vs. Trump at 251, with just 27 toss-up EC votes remaining. Wrongo is uncertain that Harris can win North Carolina, despite having a Democratic governor and both of its GOP senators having won last time by less than 2 percentage points. Mark Robinson, the NC Republican gubernatorial candidate is perhaps the worst in the US. Having said that it was acceptable to kill people on the left, and that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, he should be a real drag on the Trump vote.

But Harris may be able to take Georgia and Arizona as well as Pennsylvania and Michigan. Here’s that map:

In fact, in this scenario, Harris could lose either Georgia or Arizona, and still get to 270.

If you’re looking for an upside, Harris has more viable paths to 270 electoral votes than Biden did. However, Trump has more places (Virginia and Minnesota) to expand the map than does Harris (North Carolina). So the map STILL favors Trump, since he has more paths to 270.

So we’ve gone from no realistic path to victory to setting the stage for victory. We shouldn’t forget that Trump essentially has a ceiling. Politico has reported a 700% increase in voter registration at Voter.com in the last 48 hours. The higher the turnout, the better for Harris.

When Biden was running, many people said, “It’s hopeless, Trump will win.” And now, they’re feeling energized. OTOH, some are thinking that “Harris is raising so much money, maybe I don’t need to do anything.”

We can’t be lazy or passive, the stakes are too high. There’s an organization, Focus4Democracy, a group of smart people with decades of experience crafting effective campaign messages. They do a zoom every 2 weeks. The next one is Sunday, July 28 @ 8:00 pm EST. You can register at bit.ly/F4D28July . Their Zooms explain how they test and refine messages that generate more Democratic votes, particularly in battleground states. And they track the results. They also need donations.

Speaking of messaging, Harris’s first appearance as the Democratic nominee in Milwaukee was promising. At the strategic level, here’s what she did:

Highlighted her time as a prosecutor and tied that to Trump’s crimes.
Positioned her campaign as focused on middle-class, kitchen-table issues.
Framed the choice as “striding into the future” vs. “being dragged into the past.”

Here’s some things she did not do:

Describe Trump as a threat to democracy.
Reference the historic nature of her campaign as a black woman.
Reach out to the left.

The things she didn’t do were very smart. She didn’t give any policy details. In a 100-day campaign, she needs to be as light on details and as long on ideas as possible. At some point she’ll need to come up with a couple of concrete proposals.

There was no “democracy” talk. While most Democrats view this election in terms of democratic backsliding, polls consistently show that “democracy” isn’t something voters care much about. To the extent Harris gestured toward democracy, it was to frame the choice as:

“Do we want to live in a country of freedom, compassion, and the rule of law? Or a country of chaos, fear, and hate?”

Branding Trump as “chaos” while framing her agenda as “freedom” seems more effective than talking about “saving democracy,” the way most Dems prefer.

There was no talk of identity politics. Everything about Harris’s nomination is historic. She’s the first Black woman to be nominated for president by a major party. She’s the first Democrat to run against an insurrectionist. The first person to be swapped into a presidential nomination at the final hour. But these firsts are all out there. So unlike Hillary, she doesn’t need to talk about them. And maybe not talking about the historic nature of her candidacy makes it even more powerful in the minds of voters.

Wrongo likes Harris’s energy and focus on the future! In the immortal words of Tom Brady, “Let’s goooo!”

The Biden Dilemma Continues

The Daily Escape:

Grand Tetons with balsamroot, Grand Teton NP, WY – July 2024 photo by Paul Lally Fine Arts Nature Photography

We’re still in the doom loop regarding whether Biden should step down as the Democrats candidate for president in November. A large proportion of pundits and Hollywood types are demanding that the Democrats take the easy way out, and thus, go on to lose this fall.

The dilemma that Wrongo wrote about last week is still with us, and very little has changed.

Except that Biden held a press conference on Thursday that, like the first presidential debate, was designed to quell the chorus calling for him to step aside. Or it was designed to offer red meat to the supposed journalists who asked the questions? The media has been treating Biden like a treasonous convicted felon that should be dropped like a hot rock, and treating the actual treasonous convicted felon like he’s an acceptable candidate.

The press conference turned out to be respectful, and largely concentrated on foreign policy. Biden showed great command of the subject matter, and with the exception of his usual verbal tics, gave long and well-reasoned answers. Some of the most hostile press members didn’t get to ask questions, but most of the areas of concern regarding his health, mental acuity and his commitment to staying in the race were covered in at least some depth.

What’s next? Wrongo has no idea if Biden is going to stay in the race, or what he will do if the chorus of calls for him to step aside continue to grow over the next week.

Wrongo has a huge concern should Biden decide to keep running. Usually presidential debates don’t matter, but in this election cycle, the two debates are more like health and wellness check-in events for both candidates, and that’s Wrongo’s biggest worry should Biden stay in the race: The election will ride entirely on how he performs in the second debate that is scheduled for September 10. By then, the convention will be over and all of the other possible options to head the ticket that are available today will be in the rear view mirror.

The decision about Biden is whether he’s electable. The way we talk about that is: Does he give the Democratic Party the best chance to win in November? We know that there are no guarantees: Biden could stay in and win. Biden could stand down and the new nominee could lose. Nothing is “safe.” The problem for the Democrats is that as of today, given the electoral map, the options of Biden either on or off the ticket both have less than a 50% chance of success. The Party probably feels it has to choose the least-dangerous pathway, and humans are rarely good at doing that. We’ve evolved to believe that if one option is risky, then the other option is likely to be less risky.

Has Wrongo seen enough? Maybe Biden can’t win this one for us. Maybe we have to win it for ourselves.

In a better world, Biden wouldn’t be the candidate in 2024. In that world, Hillary Clinton would just be finishing her second term. There would be a liberal majority on the Supreme Court, and Trump would just be a footnote to the history of presidential politics. But that’s not the reality we’re in. So Dems must decide whether Biden is the best option we’ve got. Regardless of who emerges when the smoke clears:

If we all agree to back the candidate, they will win.

If we all can’t agree to back the candidate, they will lose.

This was the big lesson that came out of the French election. They sluffed off candidates and parties in order to present a united front to the electorate that would prevent their right wing from taking over.

It’s important to remember that in America, the number of voters on the side of democracy easily outnumbers those on the authoritarian side. America’s challenge with beating Trump is how to unite the voters, not divide them. And division comes from the sort of narrative being sown by the media and the pundits. That guy’s “unelectable,” so don’t vote for him.

Despite the press conference, Biden still has yet to prove that he can be a vigorous, effective presence. He has done a number of events, and while all of them have been better than the debate, none of them until this one, has risen to the level “very good.”

This time around may be different. It is true that no incumbent president has lost re-election during a time of economic expansion and low unemployment. It is also true that no 80-year-old has ever been elected president. And that no felon has ever been elected president.

We are presently on course to make history with at least one of these improbabilities.

There are other firsts in this election: Never before has an aspiring president said out loud that he wanted to be “a dictator.” Never before has a sitting president attempted a coup. Never before has the general election featured two men who have served as president. Never before has the general election matchup been settled so early. Never before has a presidential general election debate taken place in June.

A lot of never-before things are happening all around us, right now.

Another historical precedent is that Trump has never won the popular vote. We should not assume that just because it hasn’t happened before, it can’t happen.

Dems need to choose to support Biden or overthrow him, and the sooner the better.

Time To Learn About Project 2025

The Daily Escape:

Mollidgewock campground, Erol, NH – July 2024 photo by Amber Lavaliee. Wrongo and Ms. Right lived in NH for 12 years. This is a quintessential scene.

With all the hot air about Biden’s “will he or won’t he” moment, the subject of the Conservative right’s Project 2025 has not truly been covered by the media. From Judd Legum:

“Project 2025 is a radical blueprint for a potential second Trump administration, spearheaded by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. The plan calls for withdrawing approval for the abortion pill, banning pornography, slashing corporate taxes, abolishing the Department of Education, replacing thousands of experienced federal workers with political appointees, imposing a “biblically based… definition of marriage and families,” and placing the Justice Department and other independent agencies under the direct control of the president.”

From Rick Wilson:

“Project 2025 is Trump’s roadmap, written by Trump loyalists and embraced by Trump’s constellation of sycophants, fellow travelers, hangers-on, and job seekers. It will be the driving force of what Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts boasted was “…a second American revolution.” (Also, in keeping with all things MAGA, Roberts dropped an unsubtle threat into the statement, adding the revolution would be “bloodless if the left allows it to be.”)”

This lefty doesn’t plan to let its adoption be “bloodless”.

While Trump has recently disavowed knowledge of the Project or its authors, of the 38 people responsible for writing and editing Project 2025, 31 were appointed or nominated to positions in the Trump administration and transition. So Trump’s claim that he has “nothing to do” with the people who created Project 2025 is another lie: Over 81% had formal roles in his first administration. When Trump denies something, you should always take it as a full confession of his absolute guilt.

Trump’s name appears in Project 2025 312 times. That’s a yuuge coincidence, since he says he doesn’t know anything about it. More from Rick Wilson:

“I was able to confirm late last week that this decision by Trump to condemn Project 2025 was a deliberate effort prepared by campaign strategist Chris LaCivita and Trump’s pollster Tony Fabrizio after research came back showing that Project 2025 is poisonous with groups outside the hardest core of the MAGA base. The same research led the Trump campaign to demand that the RNC remove the national abortion ban plank (and other policy statements) from the 2024 GOP Platform.”

And just like that, the GOP 2024 platform won’t include abortion. From the WaPo:

“Republican delegates adopted presumptive nominee Donald Trump’s proposed convention platform at a meeting in Milwaukee on Monday, abandoning long-held positions on abortion and same-sex marriage while embracing new plans for mass deportation and a new opposition to changing the retirement age for Social Security.”

The strategy is to bury what Republicans plan to do by having the plausible deniability of the GOP platform.

Back to Project 2025. From Navigator Research, who says that when people know more about it their opposition to it grows:

“Opposition to Project 2025 grows as people learn more about the plan. After reading 19 proposed policies for Project 2025, opposition grows from 49% to 63% (net +14) while support for the plan declines from 31% to 24% (net -7%).”

Now the report is over 900 pages long, so it’s gonna take some time to digest. Here’s a chart:

Still, given the media’s focus on trying to drive Biden out of the presidential race, very few Americans know much about Project 2025. Here’s what Navigator found:

From Navigator:

“Seven in ten Americans have not heard enough to have an opinion about Project 2025, but after hearing about it, two in three Americans become opposed. 71% initially don’t know enough to have an opinion of Project 2025….Additionally, nearly four in five Americans report not having heard anything about Project 2025 either when described as “a series of conservative policy proposals aimed at reshaping the executive branch of the federal government if a Republican is elected president in 2024”

Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Democrats are most likely to have heard “a lot” or “some” about Project 2025, though fewer than two in five have actually heard about it (30%, 39%, and 33%, respectively).

Navigator grouped the Project 2025 policies by what percent, in the view of survey participants, would “hurt the country” and which were “strongly opposed” by survey participants. They found that eight of the nineteen polices were the most unpopular and harmful:

The list of the most unpopular policies includes:

Stopping overtime pay
Eliminating pre-existing conditions from health insurance
Adding new taxes on health insurance
Ending drug price negotiations
Eliminating head start
Cutting Social Security
Monitoring pregnancies by the states
Eliminating NOAA (the federal agency that tracks hurricanes) called the NWS above

But check out the policies that are just below those in the above chart. There are some beauties there as well.

This makes it clear that the threat to our nation is Trump and his minions, not Biden’s health. Maybe more people will pay attention to what Project 2025is, now that Trump is denying he knows anything about it. He’s drawn attention to it, by his denial, and it’s getting more widely known. Let’s hope the more people learn about it, the more they will see it’s horror.

The very public navel-gazing by the media and Democrats over Biden’s capacity for the last couple of weeks has overshadowed the social media attacks on Project 2025. Project 2025 means to lobotomize government agencies by replacing career civil servants with far-right ideologues loyal to Dear Leader. Michael Lewis in his book “The Fifth Risk” wrote that government manages a portfolio of risks that requires “mission-driven” careerists, experts with a dedication to the work, not to making big money from it. Donald Trump’s 2016 administration came to Washington DC to upend that system, to exploit it for profit. They abandoned data collection on anything Trumpers opposed, the NYT review explained:

“…like climate change or food safety regulations, or that they didn’t care about, like poverty, or stuff that they assumed were government boondoggles, which was most everything not involving the Pentagon.”

Look at it this way: If you decide to vote FOR the people pushing Program 2025, Trump will assume you’re all for it. And it will become the law of the land. You will NEVER regain the Rights you will lose in that process! If you vote against P-2025, you can still have your Rights as Americans which have been fought for over the past 250 years.

Now, can somebody please help the Biden campaign re-write their weak tea warning about Project 2025 on the Biden campaign website? (https://joebiden.com/project2025/) The headline is almost a paragraph long. The introduction is boring and wordy. All the truly frightening points about Project 2025 are listed so far below, few visitors will scroll down that far.

The Navigator does a great service by highlighting not only what’s in the text of Project 2025, they’ve shown it to Americans and have learned just how badly people think about it once they learn what’s in there.

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: Media Laziness

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Harris’s Chances This Fall