Tag Archives: Politico

The Age of Barstool Republicans

Posted on by

There’s a trending piece on Politico titled, “How Republicans Became the ‘Barstool’ Party”. In part a profile of podcaster Dave Portnoy and his “Barstool Sports” empire-ette, the author, Derek Robertson, writes, ” … the Barstool Republican now largely defines the Republican coalition because of his willingness to dispense with his party’s conventional policy wisdom on anything — the social safety net, drug laws, abortion access — as long as it means one thing: he doesn’t have to vote for some snooty Democrat, and, by proxy, the caste of lousy deans that props up the left’s politically-correct cultural regime.”

I think of myself as a connoisseur of barstool conversations. It’s an acquired taste to be sure. But from the Florida Keys to Forks, Washington and various rural outposts in between there’s something to be gleaned from what (mostly) men and women talk about over cheap beer in familiar hang-outs.

As presently populated, the Republican party is, as we all know, chockful of serious crazy. From sanctimonious evangelicals who have no problem cheering on a flagrantly unethical, thrice-married, porn-star-banging philanderer, to shameless racists and anti-Semites toting rifles and torches through American streets in the name of protecting northern European purity … as God intended it.

But, IMHO, the conceit of “Barstool Republican” injects something just as if not more useful than mere delusional religiosity and racism into attempts at understanding conservative politics, circa 2021.

On this side of the yawning chasm the realization settled in quite some time ago that the average Trumper doesn’t give two Lite damns about tax policy, or NATO or whether their obese, Depends-wearing, spray-tanned leader is really just a middle-man money launderer for Russian gangsters as long as he helps them “own the libs.”

The phenotype, “Barstool Republican” builds a handy definitional corral around pretty much every imaginable conservative sub-group. (The term “phenotype” refers to the observable physical properties of an organism​; these include the organism’s appearance, development, and behavior.)

Portnoy’s appeal is a natural, direct line outgrowth of morning drive radio, as heard in virtually every large city in the USA. Think Tom Barnard here in the Twin Cities, or Howard Stern nationally. The ingredients of the appeal — to 18-54 year-old blue collar males primarily — are porn-y vulgarity, regular assertions of hard-won street wisdom and persistent criticism and attacks on the “over-protected”, which as practiced in morning drive usually means racial minorities and women too uptight to shake their booty for a cold beer.

I’m sorry I don’t have any numbers, but this is a crowd I see a lot of “out there” in Sarah Palin’s “Real America”, and one I dare anyone to tell me is smaller than mega-church zealots.

These folks, nursing their $3 tap brew at Middlegate Station in central Nevada or the No Name Pub on Big Pine Key, claim to “hate all politicians”, never suggest any interest in religion, share endless stories of the “assholes and idiots” who commanded them if they were in the military and belly ache constantly about the boss they have today … if they’re currently employed. Then you get to the wildly suspect information they trade about liberal “giveaways”, regulations and “la la land bullshit” about cleaning up the planet.

But as bad as all that is, nothing gets them singing the same chorus as when talk turns to “limp dick” liberals, their “bitch/bull dyke” women, and all the “asinine” rules “those morons” are trying to “shove down our throats.” Much as they hate politics, anyone who takes a slap at that crowd gets their vote … if they’re not busy hunting on election day.

There’s a reason “nihilism” is routinely bandied about when this type of value-free Republican is mentioned. But the thing is they do have values, just not much in the way of standing up for basic rights for … well, you know, the whole liberal litany of the oppressed. And that’s because they see themselves as the oppressed. Primarily by anyone in authority over them.

They are the hard-working/hard-playing straight guys who just want to be left alone to make whatever jokes they want about women, gays, Jews, blacks, Mexicans, Asians and whoever else is getting “special treatment” and who make them feel uncomfortable any time they’re around.

As I say, my suspicion is that Barstool Republicans, whether knocking them back in Oklahoma or out the 494 Strip, represent a far larger bloc of reliable Republican voter than the classic science-and-fact averse evangelical, the focus of so much liberal angst.

They are a crowd some Democrat somewhere, somehow, has to pull over to the light.

Unfortunately, lacking any pastor-like figures other than crude, in-it-for-the-money shock jocks, the Barstool kids might be even less reachable than the moony-eyed parishioners staring up from the pews at your local Abundant Life Dollars-for-Jesus palace.

How Much Worse Can This Get? A Whole Lot.

Posted on by

It’s tough sometimes being a cheery, what me worry?, live-in-the-moment, glass half-full kind of guy. If you’re like me, you look around and say, “They couldn’t fck this up any worse than they have.” But if you said that, like me, you’d be wrong. Very wrong. Take for example the other day after reading two pieces, one from Politico and the other from The Atlantic, back-to back. The effect, on me at least, was to check Google Flights for a one-way ticket to New Zealand.

The Politico piece was titled, “Experts Knew a Pandemic was Coming. Here’s What They’re Worried About Next. Nine disasters we still aren’t ready for.”

Some of the scenarios experts were consulted about include, of course, “The Big One”, the mega-quake that levels Seattle or the Bay Area or LA. Based not just on the level of federal government preparation for a disaster like this entirely forseeable coronavirus pandemic, but the response to post-Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, experts see no way the current underfunded, chaotically-managed federal system is ready to capably respond to a major, long-term disaster hitting a large metropolitan area.

Among other scenarios are: loose nukes, any serious planning for mass migration up from tropical regions as climate changes spikes humidity to unlivable levels, all the bio-terrorist attacks you, me and Hollywood can imagine and so on.

The takeaway is very reminiscent of Michael Lewis’ most recent book, “The Fifth Risk.”

In the months after the Trump election in 2016, Lewis went around to key government agencies, the Energy Department, the Agriculture Department and others and found a common bewilderment. Unlike every previous transition, from say George W. to Obama, the in-coming Trump administration never bothered to send anyone to be educated on the details of how the agencies actually ran. No one showed up. PowerPoints and thick three-ring binders and top agency officials sat ignored … until they were eventually unceremoniously replaced with cronies and grifters like Wilbur Ross, Rick Perry, Ryan Zinke and on and on. And at that point even worse bungling, corruption and mis-management became the order of the day.

Dan Balz of The Washington Post revisits much the same theme in a story yesterday morning, titled “Coronavirus pandemic exposes how US has hollowed out its government.”

But as bad as all that is, #1 on Politico’s list is the international rise of white supremacy. #1, they say. Specifically, the swelling radicalization of home grown, far-right zealot/terrorists inspired and directed via the internet, exactly the way ISIS recruits and trains its holy “warriors”. To this Politico moves on to and melds in the rage-stoking power of “deep fakes” and waves of nefarious misinformation peddling via social media, a la Russia in 2016.

Is there anyone so naive to think that that kind of chaos-inducing activity will not be expanded and improved upon this coming fall? Why would anyone think that? Our adversaries — Putin, North Korea, whoever — don’t have to attack us with guns and bombs. The chaos we inflict on ourselves — because of misinformation and misplaced zealotry — will create all the destruction they could want.

So … while I was still digesting those dystopian, high-probability scenarios, I waded int The Atlantic story. It’s titled, “Nothing Can Stop What is Coming” and it underline something I’ve worried about a lot over the last four years.

In January 2016 yours truly, NostraLambertus, wrote piece titled, “Why Trump Can Win It All, and I Mean ‘All’ “. My concern then was that Trump was appealing to a serious, previously untapped chunk of the population. A sub-set that rarely if ever voted, a crowd for whom he was the long-awaited candidate of their most fevered dreams. For them Trump had an appeal far different and far stronger than any ordinary Republican or Democrat.

I didn’t quite say it at the time. But it’s an appeal that borders on the religious.

The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance begins her piece with a long take-out on QAnon, the wildly popular-though-faceless-and-nameless source of bizarre coded conspiracies. Like the one about the pizza joint in D.C. where Hillary Clinton and other Illuminati-style Democrats were running a child sex ring.

LaFrance takes readers on an unsettling history and survey of QAnon and a half dozen other irrational, obscene, frequently racist and violence-oriented sites like 4chan, 8chan and 8kun, as well as the characters, both conniving and sad, associated with them. All that before rolling up her investigation into a truly scary summation.

She writes, “I have known [a political-science professor at the University of Miami named Joseph] Uscinski for years … . Many people assume, he told me, that a propensity for conspiracy thinking is predictable along ideological lines. That’s wrong, he explained. It’s better to think of conspiracy thinking as independent of party politics. It’s a particular form of mind-wiring. [Emphasis mine.] And it’s generally characterized by acceptance of the following propositions: Our lives are controlled by plots hatched in secret places. Although we ostensibly live in a democracy, a small group of people run everything, but we don’t know who they are. When big events occur—pandemics, recessions, wars, terrorist attacks—it is because that secretive group is working against the rest of us.

“QAnon isn’t a far-right conspiracy, the way it’s often described, Uscinski went on, despite its obviously pro-Trump narrative. And that’s because Trump isn’t a typical far-right politician. Q appeals to people with the greatest attraction to conspiracy thinking of any kind, and that appeal crosses ideological lines.”

She then moves to her closing statement.

She says, “QAnon carries on a tradition of apocalyptic thinking that has spanned thousands of years. It offers a polemic to empower those who feel adrift. … The Seventh-day Adventists and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are thriving religious movements indigenous to America. Do not be surprised if QAnon becomes another. It already has more adherents by far than either of those two denominations had in the first decades of their existence. People are expressing their faith through devoted study of Q drops as installments of a foundational text, through the development of Q-worshipping groups, and through sweeping expressions of gratitude for what Q has brought to their lives. Does it matter that we do not know who Q is? The divine is always a mystery. Does it matter that basic aspects of Q’s teachings cannot be confirmed? The basic tenets of Christianity cannot be confirmed. Among the people of QAnon, faith remains absolute. True believers describe a feeling of rebirth, an irreversible arousal to existential knowledge. They are certain that a Great Awakening is coming. They’ll wait as long as they must for deliverance.”

The nut of it all is pretty obvious: Such people, as described above, are the fiery, white-hot core of Trump’s base. To them he is a key figure in what they regard as a god-like, divine plan. Trump is, in effect, the earthly vessel for the long-awaited cleansing apocalypse. And because of their “mind-wiring” they are unable to be convinced otherwise or to ever abandon him.

This white-hot core is primed and eager to accept anything they’re told by QAnon, who could be anyone. (Former Republican strategist Rick Wilson is convinced QAnon gets most of his inside information from White House communications advisor, Dan Scavino. BTW: Here’s a clip of Wilson in early 2018, imagining a “Mad Max” post-Trump landscape.)

More to point in terms of what’s coming this fall, there’s every reason to believe this “religious” core will act on whatever irrational, magical thinking they’re guided toward by QAnon, some other “divine” source or by Trump himself. There’s certainly no reason to think they’re disillusioned. To the contrary, they’re prepping for the battle. By every indication, they will mobilize and vote for Trump in even greater numbers than they did in 2016.

Likewise, who is prepared to assume they’ll accept Trump’s defeat, if it happens this November?

Artificial Intelligence and Our “Cold Civil War”

Posted on by

While watching all six-plus hour of yesterday’s impeachment inquiry hearings I was continually struck by Carl Bernstein’s recent assertion that the U.S. is now in what has been describing as a “cold civil war.” (A mere eight months ago he was only saying we were close to “ignition” of said war.)

There are probably a dozen or more ways to describe this conflict: Liberals vs conservatives. Elites vs. real Americans. Urban vs. rural. Professionals vs. amateurs. Serious vs. silly. B-students and higher vs. C- and lower. But at some point this new civil war can be distilled to something closer to: Fact vs. fiction.

Some Things That Actually Happened vs. Some Things That Didn’t.

How else to you describe the contrast between the open and shut case of presidential extortion presented by Adam Schiff and the Democrats with the scattershot, “Oh hell, let’s spitball this” hodgepodge of guffaw-inducing nonsense thrown up by Devin Nunes and Jim Jordan? (What? “Nude pictures” of Donald Trump? What?)

Okay, yes, we understand that even Nunes and Jordan understand that Trump did it. And that it isn’t “heresay” when you’ve got first-hand witnesses. And that their only viable line of defense is to cloud up the story with a torrent of strange names lacking any bona fide connection to the extortion at hand, all in hopes of selling the idea that every government everywhere is such a sewer Trump was merely honoring a long, sordid tradition.

But the question, to Bernstein’s point, is who are they selling this sewage to? What sort of people would ever even begin to believe, to use just one example, that Trump was vitally concerned with corruption in Ukraine because, (after he said he was considering recognizing Crimea as Russian territory), a few Ukrainian officials said mean things about him on social media in 2016?

The short answer of course is that they’re selling this and every other absurd, baseless concoction to a remarkably lazy-minded (and large) constituency. The side of the civil war eager to accept that the Ukrainians have the actual physical server containing Hillary’s e-mails. That a Politico story about a few Ukrainians’ outraged over Paul Manafort’s role in gross corruption tipping Democrats off to that fact “proves” the country was aligned to undermine Trump’s campaign … and on and on, including of course the Trump-hating whistleblower and those nude pictures of Donny.

Try as I might to be generous, the constituency for this flagrant claptrap just is not very bright. Or, put another way, it’s a crowd, an upswelling or revolution you might even say, of people adamant that they know a lot but who have plainly — plainly — done way too little to actually know what is true and what is not.

As I’ve suggested many times before, this fundamental laziness explains a lot about why these very same people feel “left behind” in a fast-moving 2019 world.

In that context — and without going all science-fictioning here — the outlines of the divide in this new “cold civil war” become even clearer and more ominous.

Over the past couple years I’ve become fascinated with the quantum advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the warnings about it from people with thoughtful, first-hand experience, not only with what AI may (likely) do to human society but … how soon it will happen.

An algorithm-driven world, where our personal preferences and antipathies deliver more (and steadily more virulent and intoxicating examples) of those preferences is already well upon us. Think your Facebook feed, the rabbit hole of YouTube where every new video is weirder and more provocative than the last.

As noxious and culturally contorting as that is today, with precious few people fully understanding how this stuff works, its sophistication and application is increasing … rapidly.

One effect, say people like writer-philosopher Yuval Harari, is a further hardening of the tribal bubbles we see so much of today. And that is bad enough.

But, he and others also forsee the stark divide between people fully appreciative of facts — of science and sociology, etc. — and those ignorant of reality adding to the creation of a class of what he describes harshly as a “useless” citizens. People, who because of their ignorance of relevant knowledge are of little to no value to the people, companies and institutions propelling a pretty Darwinian society based on algorithms, machine-learning and other forms of AI.

In his book, “Homo Deus” (i.e. “Man God”), Harari notes that where cultures until now needed vast numbers of people of no great talent to populate armies and operate factories, neither is true today. Machines are already doing all that better, more reliably and less expensively. Ask any American auto worker, if you doubt it.

The “civil war” point then becomes clearer.

The appeal today of the Trump-era GOP’s sewer of nonsense and hysteria may be rooted in class and racial animus — the “left behind” feeling ever more marginalized and “disrespected”.

But let’s project — as Harari and others do — ten to fifteen years into the future, when the perpetuated ignorance of this large bloc of citizens leaves them even less relevant and employable.

Who are they going to blame then?

Probably not Sean Hannity or Devin Nunes.

MN GOP: Bribe Seniors To Stop Them From Fleeing Best State In America

Posted on by

crabby_old_manMinnesota has the best quality of life of in the nation, and we must bribe seniors to stop them from escaping it, say two stories from today’s news coverage.

First, we have Politico doing a comprehensive meta-analysis of a variety of quality-of-life analyses. The St. Paul Pioneer Press summarizes Politico’s sunny assessment of our little Minne:

Politico ranked Minnesota as the best state of the union.  Among Minnesota’s neighbors, Wisconsin ranked No. 17. Iowa was No. 7 while North Dakota was 15th and South Dakota was 21st.

The rankings are based on 14 criteria: Per capita income: Minnesota is seventh, at $30,913. Lowest unemployment: eighth, at 3.7 percent. Percent above poverty level: ninth, at 89.5 percent. Homeownership: second, at 72.5 percent. Percent of high school graduates: second, at 92.1 percent. Life expectancy: second, at 81.1 years. (Fewest) infant deaths per 1000 births: fifth, at 4.49. Percent of obese residents: fifth, at 22 percent. Average eighth-grade math score: fourth, at 295. Average eighth-grade reading score: 10th, at 271. GINI index (income inequality): 11th, at 0. Lowest violent crime rate per 100,000: ninth, at 223.2. Percent employed in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) jobs: 13th, at 6.1 percent. “Wellbeing” score: fourth, at 69.7.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the same edition of the Pioneer Press, we learn that Minnesota Republicans have announced a new tax code bribe for seniors who agree to stay in the best state in the nation:

(Senator David Henjem’s) “Retire in Minnesota Act” would phase out Minnesota’s Social Security tax over 10 years, at a cost of $127 million for the first two years.

Republicans said the tax could help Minnesota by encouraging retirees to stay here instead of relocating to one of 38 states that don’t tax Social Security income.

The Retire in Minnesota Act aims to stem the flood of Best State residents escaping to sunbelt states, such as Arizona, South Carolina, New Mexico, North Carolina, Florida, and Texas, all of which have a low tax/low service approach to governance that leaves them ranked in the bottom 15 in the quality-of-life rankings.