the daily howler

THURSDAY: The New York Times speaks with the Donald Trump 12!

THURSDAY, JANUARY 16, 2025

How we Blues (may have) lost one vote: As part of its ongoing series of focus group sessions, the New York Times has spoken with twelve men who voted for Candidate Trump. The report appears beneath this headline:

‘Where’s Our Place in Society?’: 12 Men Who Backed Trump Grapple With America

The twelve men all voted for Trump. Four of the twelve say they're Democrats. One says he's an Independent.

How did the Democratic Party lose those four or five votes? There's no surefire way to know, but we were interested by this exchange with Rich, age 54, a Latino Democrat from the state of New York who works in construction:

RICH: Years ago, I would listen to a different left-leaning podcast. And then I felt lied to.
MODERATOR: Is there something they lied about, do you think, Rich?
RICH: Russia. And I felt like they lied to me about the lacrosse kids with Duke. They just were so emphatic that they were guilty. I just checked out. They lost me.
Years ago, I was a big Ed Koch fan, and I remember going to see him. And he said to me and my group: If you agree with me 80 percent, vote for me. If you agree with me 100 percent, go see a therapist. And I kind of live my life that way when I listen to news.

So the colloquy went. This voter says he felt lied to about the Duke lacrosse case, but he also cited Russia.

Earlier, he had said this:

RICH: I like Tucker Carlson. And I like Joe Rogan. I just feel they’re genuine, authentic, and they come across like they’re saying what they really feel and not putting their finger in the air and deciding where the political winds are going. I like who they interview.
MODERATOR: Is there an interview you liked that comes to mind?
RICH: Recently Tucker interviewed the Russian right-hand man of Putin, and I found it interesting. I’m open to his point of view.

Based on his full set of statements, we'll guess that Rich may be a Democrat who's on his way to being a Republican. That's his perfect right, of course—and then again, maybe not!

It's also true that a political party—or a political movement—isn't trying to win every voter. This is a very important point.

At any given point in time, many voters will be out of reach. You're trying to win the most persuadable voters. In this case, that may not be Rich.

That said:

We were surprised to see him cite the Duke lacrosse case. You rarely see that incident mentioned these days. As the leading authority on the matter reports, it takes us all the way back to 2006.

Many segments of Blue America aggressively prejudged that incident in line with preferred Storyline. Many parts of Blue America behaved in ways which were quite unwise—and after the prejudgments about that case blew up, many of us did the same darn thing eight years later with respect to the UVa fraternity case.

Over here in Blue America, we've sometimes worked to earn our way out. In some cases, a person sees us doing these things and a Trump voter gets his wings.

We voted for Candidate Harris ourselves. For whatever reason or reasons, Rich didn't.

Final question: What exactly does Rich think about Putin's right-hand man—about his "point of view?" We wish the New York Times had asked. What would this voter have said?

FLYWEIGHTS: American carnage, eight years on!

THURSDAY, JANUARY 16, 2025

What they're permitted to say: Eight years ago, he gave his first speech as the American president.

The speech had a slightly unusual theme. That theme was "American carnage."

Fun fact—and at this point, is there any other kind:

In President Carter's "malaise speech." he never said the word "malaise." In this later president's "American carnage" speech, he said "carnage" only once:

TRUMP (1/20/17): ...January 20th, 2017 will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again.
The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Everyone is listening to you now.
You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement the likes of which the world has never seen before.
At the center of this movement is a crucial conviction: that a nation exists to serve its citizens.
Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves.
These are the just and reasonable demands of a righteous public.
But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.
This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.

For the record, the forgotten men and women of our country hadn't exactly "come by the tens of millions" on that particular day.

Perhaps that wasn't what the new president meant. There followed a deeply disordered, baldly idiotic dispute about how many people had come to the inauguration.

That baldly idiotic dispute was a harbinger of what was to come. You could call it a harbinger of the carnage which has unfolded in the past eight years.

In the passage posted above, you can see the only use of the word "carnage" that day. Given the nature of the occasion, it was widely viewed, rightly or wrongly, as an odd choice of words.

That said, the new president was saying that he would attack poverty in our inner cities, along with an education system which was leaving kids deprived of knowledge.

Beyond that, he would attack the existence crime and gangs and drugs, but also the loss of the manufacturing base which left rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the American landscape.

Language choices to the side, those were familiar objectives. Eight years later, David Brooks has now described what he sees when he looks across that same landscape.

His column was written in reaction to yesterday's Hegseth hearing. He wasn't impressed by what he saw. By the end of his column, we'd have to say that he's coming around to our own long-expressed point of view.

For the record, we disagree with Brooks' statement concerning what "we" deserve. In fact, we don't even know who he means by "we" in that declaration—but we agree with the way he concludes:

We Deserve Pete Hegseth
[...]
If you are holding hearings for a prospective secretary of defense, you would think you might want to ask him about these urgent issues...If you’re a Democrat trying to sink a nomination, you would think you’d want to ask substantive questions on life-or-death issues like these in order to expose the nominee’s ignorance and unpreparedness.
But did this happen at the Pete Hegseth hearings in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee this week? If you thought those kinds of questions would dominate the hearings, you must be living under the illusion that we live in a serious country.
We do not. We live in a soap opera country. We live in a social media/cable TV country. In our culture you don’t want to focus on boring policy questions; you want to engage in the kind of endless culture war that gets voters riled up. You don’t want to focus on topics that would require study; you focus on images and easy-to-understand issues that generate instant visceral reactions. You don’t win this game by engaging in serious thought; you win by mere attitudinizing—by striking a pose. Your job is not to advance an argument that might help the country; your job is to go viral.
Pete Hegseth is of course the living, breathing embodiment of this culture. The world is on fire and what’s his obsession? Wokeness in the military. I went through high school trying to bluff my way through class after doing none of the reading, and in Hegseth, I recognize a master of the craft. During the hearings Hegseth repeatedly said he was going to defend the meritocracy. In what kind of meritocracy is being a Fox TV host preparation for being secretary of defense? Maybe in the one Caligula fancied when he contemplated making his horse a consul.
[...]
All of this has been corrupted by the war for short attention spans. In the 19th century we had the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Today it would be the Lincoln-Douglas TikTok wars followed by “Three Takeaways From the Lincoln-Douglas Debates” followed by a panel of pundits (like me) analyzing whether Stephen Douglas helped himself with swing voters in DuPage County.
Can this kind of country prevail in a global conflict of systems? Maybe, but maybe not.

Given the broken state of our culture, can our failing nation expect to prosper—to function, to "prevail?"

We've long said the answer is no. After watching the Hegseth hearing, David Brooks has given voice to a similar point of view.

("I finished watching the hearings sick to my stomach," he says at one point in his column.)

Back in November, the incoming president said he would nominate the baldly ludicrous Matt Gaetz to be the attorney general. At that time, the ridiculous Gaetz was widely compared to Caligula's famous horse.

Before long, Gaetz was thrown under the bus. In his column, Brooks transfers the bridle to the hotheaded Hegseth, whose nomination for secretary of defense will almost surely be going through.

Then again, there is the more "qualified" Pam Bondi, who yesterday offered this mandated non-answer during her own Senate hearing:

DURBIN (1/15/25): Are you prepared to say today, under oath and without reservation, that President Trump lost the presidential contest to Joe Biden in 2020?

BONDI: Ranking member Durbin, President Biden is the president of the United States. He was duly sworn in and he is the president of the United States. There was a peaceful transition of power. President Trump left office and was overwhelmingly elected in 2024.

Posing as a flyweight, that's what Bondi said. What you see there is part of the carnage the powers that be have chosen.

To wit:

Under current tribal arrangements, a person like Bondi has been given permission to say that Biden was in fact "sworn in."

Such people are permitted to say that there was "a transition of power." They're even permitted to say that Joe Biden is the president of the United States. Indeed, they allowed to say it two times!

They aren't permitted, to this very day, to say that Joe Biden won the 2020 election or to say that Donald Trump lost. They aren't permitted to make that blindingly obvious statement—to give a direct, responsive answer to a question of the type this tribal spear-chucker was asked.

(As a matter of loyalty, they may feel obliged to throw in an irrelevant assessment of the 2024 election—the one they weren't asked to assess. Bondi said her owner won that election "overwhelmingly." That strikes us as a stretch, but it's a breath of fresh air compared to her North Korean-adjacent avoidance of the question she was actually asked.)

Bondi's refusal to answer Senator Durbin's is part of the carnage with which we've all been left in the wake of the past eight tears.

Back in 2017, an incoming president spoke of "American carnage." Then, at the end of his term, he saddled us American citizens with an astounding amount of same.

We refer to the undisguised lunacy which followed the November 2020 election—the transparently lunatic claims from the Trump camp, followed by the transparently lunatic conduct of January 6, 2021.

The videotape of that day's violent conduct is never shown to Red America by the Fox News Channel. For ourselves, we flash on the fall of Troy, as described by Professor Knox, as we think about that day's carnage:

PROFESSOR KNOX (1990): The whole poem [known as the Iliad] has been moving toward this duel between the two champions, but there has never been any doubt about the outcome...And the death of Hector seals the fate of Troy; it will fall to the Achaeans, to become the pattern for all time of the death of a city.
The images of that night assault—the blazing palaces, the blood running in the streets, old Priam butchered at the altar, Cassandra raped in the temple, Hector's baby son thrown from the battlements, his wife Andromache dragged off to slavery—all this, foreshadowed in the Iliad, will be stamped indelibly on the consciousness of the Greeks throughout their history....

So went the carnage when sacred Troy fell. That said, it seems to us that the lunacies of the past eight years have come from more than one quarter.

Our incoming president has engaged in outright lunacy again and again and again and again, and then he's done so some more. In another form of American carnage, our brightest and best—the "highly educated" men and women of Blue America's major news orgs—have never been willing or able to describe these waves of disordered behavior for what they apparently are.

Having said that, let us add this:

After President Biden did in fact win that election, variations on carnage continued. The new president adopted unexplainable policies at the southern border—policies he never tried to explain. Nor did he ever try to explain the economic difficulties which—all across the developed world—were following the dislocation brough on by the Covid disaster.

For reasons which went unexplained, the new president kept declining to explain. In the face of what seemed to be growing evidence, tribunes of our own Blue America kept saying that nothing was wrong with his capability or with his frequently non-existent behavior.

They kept saying he was sharp as a tack. They even said that the southern border was locked up tight as a drum.

(Midway through his fourth year in office, he finally took executive actions to tighten up the border. What had he waited so long? Did anyone ever explain?)

Shortly after last November's election, the Atlantic's Tim Alberta—he had long been NeverTrump—explained what was wrong with this conduct, which almost surely helped produce our current state of American carnage:

ALBERTA (11/8/24): As someone who has spilled a lot of ink on Donald Trump's lies over the past decade—
GOLDBERG: A couple of books worth.
ALBERTA: —a couple of books worth, I just want to say this when we talk about propaganda. Arguably, the three most determinative things in this election were propaganda from the Democratic Party.
Number one: "Joe Biden is fine and totally fit to be president for another four years." He wasn't.
Number two: "The border is closed. It's under control. There's nobody coming in." That was not true.
And number three: "Hey, don't worry about inflation. Prices are fine. Bidenomics! Everything's great. You guys don't know what you're talking about. Actually, the economy is in great shape."
This is propaganda to millions of Americans who said, "None of that is true, and therefore, I don't trust you." They might not trust Trump, but they don't trust Democrats either.

This helps explain why we lost, he said. In our view, he was describing behavior which bordered on the semi-crazy.

In our view, the behavior Alberta described was less lunatic than the behavior from TrumpWorld which followed that disordered person's loss in 2020, but it was disordered conduct too. Joined by other lunacies here within our own Blue America, that disordered behavior helps explain the carnage we now face.

David Brooks seems to have come around to our own general point of view. He has stated what is blindingly obvious—it isn't clear that our failing nation can survive the waves of carnage of the past eight years.

We've been advancing that point of view for roughly a decade now. We largely agree with the conclusion Brooks draws at the end of his new column:

We live in a soap opera [flyweight] country...Can this kind of country prevail in a global conflict of systems? Maybe, but maybe not.

For ourselves, we'll go with most likely not. But even as Brooks' column appeared, the clown cars just kept rolling along at the Fox News Channel, and the clown cars were filled with flyweights.

Inevitably, the clown car "judge" had employed her favorite nickname for the governor of one of our failing nation's most important states.

She had referred to him by a nickname; instead of using his actual name, she named him simply as "Greasy." Can a large modern nation expect to prevail with clowns like this in the saddle, around the clock, at one of its most influential "news" orgs?

Bondi can't say that Biden won. On the Fox News Channel, a silly clown like Judge Jeanine is hailed for her greatness when she plays the inveterate loudmouth, day after day after day.

At the Times, they avert their gaze from this round-the-clock carnage. In his new column, Brooks has broken rank.

Tomorrow: What the flyweight said

WEDNESDAY: How will President Biden be remembered?

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 15, 2025

Also, how did we earn our way out? Even as we've "moved on" with our subject matter this week, we haven't abandoned this important basic belief:

Those of us in Blue America need to develop a stronger sense of how and why we lost the last election.

More pungently, we need to develop a stronger sense of the ways we Blues may have earned our way out—of the ways we may have managed to drive voters away over the past five or six decades, but also in just the last handful of years.

How did we lose to a guy like Trump? All too often, we Blues seem to have no earthly idea. That led to an interesting discussion on this morning's Morning Joe—a discussion featuring Ed Luce, U.S. national editor at the Financial Times.

You can see the videotape of the segment here. For better or worse, for richer or poorer, the videotape appears at the Morning Joe site beneath this challenging headline:

History will remember Biden as being the "bridge back to Trump." argues writer

Ouch! Is that how President Biden will be remembered? The conversation was trigged by Luce's new column for the FT, with which we largely (though not totally) agree.

Luce's column triggered a solid discussion. Dual headline included, the column starts like this:

Joe Biden’s tragic curtain call
Hubris kept him too long in the presidential race and he will be remembered chiefly for easing Trump’s return
If the essence of Greek tragedy is that the hero is undone by his flaws, Joe Biden gets star billing. He defeated Donald Trump, stood up to Russia, enacted more reforms than Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and bequeaths a robust economy. That made Biden a hero to America’s left and beyond. Yet most of his achievements will now be erased. His legacy is Trump’s return. After Biden, the deluge. He largely has himself to blame.
The Greek tragic hero’s defect is hubris. Last week, Biden said he could have won the 2024 election had he stayed in the race. This was in spite of the fact that just 27 per cent of Americans last June thought he had the cognitive ability to be president again. It is likelier that Trump would have won a far bigger victory. Whatever blame Kamala Harris deserves, her vote came within 1.5 percentage points of Trump’s.
Much has yet to be reported about the conspiracy of silence around Biden’s waning capacities. Though he was shielded from press conferences and other unscripted events, it was an open secret in Washington that his mind was in decline. Biden’s inner cabinet of family and longtime aides should take some of the blame. It was also a media failing. The rare journalist who blew the whistle risked loss of access and ostracism on liberal social media.
But the buck stops with Biden. Had he redeemed his vow to be a one-term “bridge” to the post-Trump era, the Democratic party would have had time to find a stronger candidate than Harris—someone who could have distanced themselves from what was unpopular about Biden’s economy. Instead, an isolated Biden was cut off from public sentiment...

Will President Biden be remembered as the person who let Trump return to power? We don't know the answer to that, but we'd say it's entirely possible.

We agree with Luce about that possibility. We're less inclined to blame Biden himself for the way he initially stayed in the race, then left in late July.

Why are we less inclined than Luce to blame President Biden himself? Simple! If he was affected by cognitive decline—since August 2023, it has seemed to us that he probably was—we don't know the extent to which he can be blamed for his failure to exercise better judgment.

With respect to that apparent decline, we agree with Luce when he says that a lot of reporting remains to be done—reporting about those within the Biden camp, but also about those within the mainstream press corps.

We don't know what that reporting would show. Moving right along, we'd say this:

In our view, a great deal remains to be said about the various (possible) ways we Blues (may have) lost votes in the past several years—about the various ways we may have earned our way out.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but we humans are disinclined to blame ourselves when things go disastrously wrong. Keeping that basic fact in mind, how did we manage to lose to Candidate Donald J. Trump?

In our view, it isn't as simple as saying that everyone's racist but us. In our view, the possible answers are many. It just isn't that simple at all.

Luce's column triggered a lively discussion on Morning Joe. (Early warnings from David Ignatius and Ezra Klein were mentioned.) We hope many more such discussions will follow.

In our view, we Blues have been earning our way out over the course of the past sixty years. We ourselves were physically present when this whole thing started, way back in the fall of '65.

In November, all this unwise tribal behavior finally hit the fan. We Blues need to discuss our roads to defeat. This morning's Morning Joe provided a bit of a start.

FLYWEIGHTS: "Greasy" uses too much product!

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 15, 2025

The inspiring Hegseth doesn't: Full disclosure! We're so old that we can remember the murders in New Orleans.

The rampage in question took place in the early morning hours of January 1 of this very year. Fourteen days later, the murderous rampage has disappeared from our failing nation's failing discourse.

To all intents and purposes, the murderous rampage in New Orleans has basically ceased to exist. It was a very big deal at the time. It gave way to the Los Angele fires, then to the Hegseth hearings.

That said, also this: Before the murderous rampage occurred, we had the drone attacks on New Jersey.

Those drone attacks were extremely big on the flyweight-infested Fox News Channel for a period of roughly a week. Now, The Attacks on Exit 11 are gone, absent any attempt at explanation.

So it goes, on a day-to-day basis, within our failing discourse. So it goes in the wake of the "democratization of media," in a world where corporations sell us their imitations of "news"—where they sell us heir "news product"— on a seven day per week, 24-hour basis.

Topics come and topics go; many are mere pseudo=topics. But on one major "cable news" channel, the flyweights hold sway. So things stood late yesterday afternoon. Indeed, let's say a few of their names:

Panelists, The Five, 1/14/25
Judge Jeanine: Resident finger-tugging loudmouth
Jessica Tarlov: Designated punching bag
Jesse Watters: Silliest boy in "cable news"
Dana Perino: Ought to be ashamed of herself
Greg Gutfeld: Has asked three times if Hunter Biden is "banging" or "[BLEEP]ing" Jill Biden

Yesterday, at 5 p.m. Eastern, so went the flight of the flyweights, along with that one disordered.

Yesterday, it finally happened! After an array of holiday absences, the four Red American co-hosts were finally reunited, along with their Blue American punching bag. This is the standard alignment of panelists on this, the most watched program in American "cable news."

After an array of holiday vacations, the flyweights had all returned to the nest. That said, the clown cars are general on this "cable news" channel.

Just consider what Laura allowed.

For ourselves, we've never forgotten our evening of love right there at the D.C. Improv! By now, though, something like a quarter century has passed, and last Friday evening, there she was, welcoming Mel Gibson onto her Fox News Channel show, The Ingraham Angle.

We're so old that we can remember when Gibson seemed to be way out on the edge. Today, he's barely a part of the passing crowd.

First, though, as a matter of fairness, let's mention this:

Judged by the basic norms of the culture, Gibson has been a major actor and a highly talented filmmaker. The leading authority on his career produces a bit of the background:

Mel Gibson
Mel Columcille Gerard Gibson (born January 3, 1956) is an American actor and filmmaker. The recipient of multiple accolades, he is known for directing historical films as well for his action hero roles, particularly his breakout role as Max Rockatansky in the first three films of the post-apocalyptic series Mad Max (1979–1985) and as Martin Riggs in the buddy cop series Lethal Weapon (1987–1998).
Born in Peekskill, New York, Gibson moved with his parents to Sydney, Australia, when he was 12 years old...Director Peter Weir cast him as one of the leads in the World War I drama Gallipoli (1981), which earned Gibson a Best Actor Award from the Australian Film Institute.
In 1995, Gibson produced, directed, and starred in the war film Braveheart for which he won the Golden Globe Award for Best Director, the Academy Award for Best Director, and the Academy Award for Best Picture. He later directed and produced The Passion of the Christ (2004), a biblical drama that was both financially successful and highly controversial.

As of 2004, he was still "highly controversial!" Needless to say, he was born as one of us—as an East Coast Irish Catholic!

At one time, he was controversial. By now, he's been surpassed by an endless array of major players. Still and all, there he was on The Ingraham Angle last Friday night, speaking about the possible origin of the Los Angeles fires.

What he said is a major anthropology lesson. In his conversation with Ingraham that night, he said this, in part, about the possible origin of the fires:

GIBSON (1/10/25): Well, you know. I know they were messing with the water. Letting reserves go for one reason or another. They’ve been doing that a while. California has a lot of problems that sort of baffle the mind as far as [sighs] why they do things.
And then, in the events like this, you sort of look—"Well, is it on purpose?" Which, it’s an insane thing to think. But one begins to ponder whether or not there is a purpose in mind. What could it be? You know?

Say what? One starts to ponder that? The Oscar winner continued:

GIBSON (continuing directly): What do they want? The state empty? I don’t know.
[...]
Reminds me of the old cattle barons clearing people off the land, you know.
But I don’t know. I have, you know, I can make all kinds of horrible theories up in my head, conspiracy theories and everything else. But it just seemed a little convenient that there was no water, and that the wind conditions were right and that there are people ready and willing and able to start fires.
And are they commissioned to do so, or they just acting on their own volition? I don’t know.
But they seem pretty well equipped, some of these people that they’re catching. You know, I’ll sift through the—I’ll sift through the remains of my, of my place and see if I can find any clues for you.

Those are the things he said.

Gibson's Malibu home had been lost in the fires. No one could blame him for being upset. But as of last Friday, the week's events had him thinking about the way the old cattle barons had succeeded in clearing people off the land.

He knew he was voicing conspiracy theories. He said he knew that he was giving voice to "an insane thing to think."

Still, he went ahead and said what he said. As he did, he seemed to assume a welter of "facts not in evidence" concerning the week's destructive fires.

He gave voice to "an insane thing to think;" as he did, he seemed to refer to an array of "facts not in evidence." And he did so before an audience of millions, speaking in prime time on our flailing former nation's most-watched "cable news" channel!

As he did, Laura made a modest effort to steer him back to less "insane" types of expression. That said, her efforts were very minor. Basically, she let this conduct go.

You can watch the entire tape of this exchange thanks to Tommy Christopher's report for Mediaite. As you can see by clicking this, his report appears beneath this headline:

Mel Gibson Gets Conspiratorial On Fox News Over "Convenient" California Wildfire Devastation: "Were They Commissioned?"

Did "they" somehow "commission" the fires? Mel Gibson's inquiring mind apparently wanted to know.

At that site, you can watch the full exchange. You can also see a transcript of the exchange, with Ingraham's remarks included.

We've always claimed that we could change her. In the face of imperfect health, we're no longer sure!

Gibson has always been a bit like this. Laura Ingraham isn't a flyweight, but it's her job to let such exchanges go with only the most minor attempts at pushback or clarification.

On Fox, the drones were attacking Exit 20. Now, some entity known only as "they" might have "commissioned" the fires! So it goes as millions of citizens have wild unfounded speculations shoveled into their heads.

It's a lesson in anthropology! It's a lesson in anthropology that we humans are inclined to think and to speak that way. It's a lesson in corporate power and profit-seeking that people like Laura are willing to let such conduct go.

Also, that people at major orgs like the New Yorek Times avert their gaze from such conduct—have been doing do for three or four decades by now.

That exchange rook place last Friday night. Late yesterday afternoon, the whole gang was together again on that same channel's gong-show spectacular, The Five.

The Five is infested by flyweights. We've decided it's time to start saying their names. We've done so above.

As you can see by clicking this, it's currently the most-watched program in "cable news." At one point during yesterday's program, the analysts screamed and ran into the yard when Judge Jeanine opened her trap and made an uber-flyweight remark.

No modern nation can expect to prosper or survive in the face of pseudo-journalism of this all-too-human type.

Just like that, the judge in question made a soul-draining remark concerning the use of hair product. When she did, the analysts screamed and ran out into the yard.

How dumb do the flyweights know they can get, working under the cover of darkness on this imitation "news program?" Tomorrow morning, bright and early, we'll show you what this flyweight former judge said.

Flyweights to the side of us, nut cases over there! As our discourse dies beneath this assault, the finer people at the New York Times pretend this doesn't exist.

Final point:

We've said the names of a few of the flyweights. Elsewhere in our failing nation, people need to report what these flyweights do.

Tomorrow: Flyweight judge expounds

TUESDAY: Did Trump conspire (or hope) for a riot?

TUESDAY, JANUARY 14, 2025

Jack Smith wouldn't quite say yes: Within the past week, we asked a basic question about the events of January 6, 2021:

On January 6, 2021, did President Trump know there was going to be a riot at the Capitol Building?

That was our basic question. Extending our reach a bit, the questions get juicier still:

Prior to January 6, 2021, did President Trump or his agents plan for a riot at the Capitol Building?

Did he or his agents conspire with the groups who came to Washington planning to engage in violence?

We don't know the answer to either one of those questions. Our guess would be that the answer to the first question is no, but we have no way of knowing for sure. We don't even know the answer to this:

Prior to January 6, 2021, did President Trump intend for the (typically ridiculous) speech he gave to trigger a subsequent riot?

We can't even say that we know the answer to that!

To us, the evidence seems to suggest that he didn't know that violence was going to happen. Below, you see the most relevant passage from today's New York Times article on Jack Smith's final report.

Please note—the article never mentions any claim that Trump or his associates colluded with groups like the Proud Boys in planning a violent attack. Apparently, Smith found no evidence that any such collusion occurred.

(That doesn't mean that collusion didn't happen. It just means there's no evidence that it did.)

The closest we come is this passage about any criminal liability which might have ensued from Trump's (ridiculous) speech that day. Did Trump intend for his (ridiculous) speech to trigger violence that day? Here is the passage in question:

Four Takeaways From the Special Counsel’s Report on the Trump Election Case
The Justice Department released a 137-page volume early Tuesday morning laying out the details of the investigation that the former special counsel Jack Smith conducted into President-elect Donald J. Trump’s attempts to overturn his loss in the 2020 election.
[...]
Smith blamed Trump for the Capitol riot, but explained why he did not charge him with incitement.
Reflecting the strength of the First Amendment’s protections for free speech, Mr. Smith never explicitly accused Mr. Trump of inciting the riot by his supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. His indictment and other court filings put a heavier emphasis on Mr. Trump’s actions in the weeks and months leading up to that attack.
Still, in his report, Mr. Smith laid out his analysis of Mr. Trump’s culpability for the mob violence while explaining why he decided not to add a formal charge of incitement to the indictment.
On a moral level, the prosecutor squarely assigned responsibility for the attack on the Capitol to Mr. Trump. He portrayed the rioters as heeding Mr. Trump’s words in the fiery speech he delivered near the White House shortly before the attack.
That context, Mr. Smith wrote, showed that “the violence was foreseeable to Mr. Trump, that he caused it,” that it benefited his plan to interfere with Congress’s certification of President Biden’s Electoral College victory, and that he made a conscious decision to leverage the riot for more delays rather than stopping it.
Against that backdrop, Mr. Smith wrote, prosecutors concluded that “there were reasonable arguments to be made” that Mr. Trump’s speech incited the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6. The speech, Mr. Smith argued, satisfied the Supreme Court’s standard for incitement to overcome any First Amendment defense—“particularly when the speech is viewed in the context of Mr. Trump’s lengthy and deceitful voter-fraud narrative that came before it.”
But Mr. Smith said there were also arguments that the available evidence fell short of what would be needed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt one crucial element of the legal test for incitement: that Mr. Trump intended for the mob violence to unfold as it did.
He wrote that his team did not develop sufficient direct evidence—like an explicit admission or a communication with his co-conspirators—to establish that Mr. Trump had the criminal intent “to cause the full scope of the violence that occurred on Jan. 6.”

Did Trump "intend for the mob violence to unfold as it did?" We have no way of knowing the answer to that question. Also, based on the Times report, we're prepared to guess that Smith doesn't know the answer either.

Is it possible that Smith got out over his skis a bit in some of his assumptions and accusations? Everything is possible, as it generally is.

For the record, there doesn't seem to be a word about Trump actually conspiring with the groups which actively drove the violence. On a lesser level of intention, did he intend for the people who heard his speech to march to the Capitol Building and stage a riot?

Everything is possible! Using a fair amount of slippery language, Smith says it can't be proved.

In our view, Trump behaved like the nutcase he is on the day in question and in the weeks before that. That said:

On January 6, 2021, did he know or hope that violence was going to happen? We can't say it's clear that he did.

If we had to take a guess, this would be our guess:

We'd guess that he didn't intend for a riot to happen, but that he was thrilled when it did.

FLYWEIGHTS: The flyweights eat at the infrastructure...

TUESDAY, JANUARY 14, 2025

...of our failing nation: We awoke today to what we'd call a stumblebum conversation.

It occurred in the first half hour of this morning's Morning Joe. At issue was the FBI background check—or the lack of same—which has been conducted—or possibly not—on the poverty-stricken Pete Hegseth.

(To appreciate the depth of Hegseth's impoverishment, see yesterday afternoon's report.)

How thorough was the FBI's alleged background check? Possibly not that thorough! The conversation to which we refer turned on this news report in the New York Times:

Democrats Say F.B.I. Did Not Interview Critical Witnesses About Pete Hegseth
Senate Democrats on Monday said that an F.B.I. background check on Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick to lead the Pentagon, omitted key details on major allegations against him, in part because it did not include interviews with critical witnesses.
One missed opportunity came when the bureau did not interview one of Mr. Hegseth’s ex-wives before its findings were presented to senators last week, according to people familiar with the bureau’s investigation.
The clamor comes on the eve of Mr. Hegseth’s confirmation hearing...
“There are significant gaps and inadequacies in the report, including the failure to interview some of the key potential witnesses with personal knowledge of improprieties or abuse,” Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut and a member of the committee, said in an interview.

NBC News has posted a similar report. To read that report (no paywall), you can just click here.

Should the FBI have interviewed Hegseth's (two) ex-wives? More to the point, who sets the parameters for such a background check? Who decides what issues the FBI will pursue in producing some such report?

During this morning's first half hour, Joe and Mika spoke with NBC's Ali Vitali about these important questions. Most charitably put, Vitali was completely unable to explain the basics of this matter.

A stumblebum conversation ensued, of a familiar type. NBC's Ken Dilanian arrived on the scene in the program's second half hour, providing much needed clarification.

Early in the 7 o'clock hour, NBC's David Rohde (currently, NBC News) seemed to make the basic facts even a bit more clear.

During the program's first half hour, Vitali seemed to have no ability to explain the basics of the matter under review. Viewers forced to watch as Mika said somethign very much like this:

"A background check isn't a background check unless it's a background check."

So true! But why had the FBI proceeded in the way it did? What are the basic facts concerning the way these background checks get conducted?

Vitali didn't seem to know. Neither did Joe or Mika. This produced a stumblebum convo involving three vastly-paid media figures. "Democracy dies" in such ways.

In such ways, the American discourse continues to burn to the ground. With apologies for the repetition, we thought again of Camus' fictional Oran—a city which was (metaphorically) burning down in the pages of The Plague:

CAMUS: [O]ur townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they haven't taken their precautions.
Our townsfolk were not more to blame than others; they forgot to be modest, that was all, and thought that everything still was possible for them; which presupposed that pestilences were impossible. They went on doing business, arranged for journeys, and formed views. How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views. They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.

The citizens of Oran were ordinary people; they weren't a collection of intellectual or moral Einsteins. The same is true of us the American people—and that's nowhere more true than when our nation's failing discourse is massacred by the flyweights.

As we noted yesterday, David Wallace-Wells is (almost surely) no sane person's idea of a flyweight. He has written extensively on climate change. At this link from NYU, you can see his lengthy colloquy with Professor Michael Mann about this major topic.

Wallace-Wells is no sane person's flyweight. That doesn't mean that every assessment he offers is automatically right.

We say that because he offered a fairly substantial list of assessments in Saturday's lengthy opinion column for the New York Times. Below, you see the passage in which an array of assessments appeared:

You Don’t Get Disasters Like the Palisades Fire Without Human Failure
[...]
“The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself,” Joan Didion wrote way back in the 1960s. And on X and Truth Social and, indeed, Fox News, they were playing the hits, too—the fires were not the result of climate change or an extraordinary wind event meeting an extraordinary drought but the responsibility of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles and the city’s fire chief, until this point anonymous nationally, who had the audacity to be a woman.
It was a remarkable reversal, conservatives demagoguing California fire disaster, but after the conspiratorial deluge of Hurricane Helene, it need not have been surprising. Had the Los Angeles Fire Department’s budget really been cut? The fire hydrants were dry primarily because of the demand from the fires themselves, it turned out. There had been no political showdown about a fish called a smelt, and the California supply of water did not hang on its fate...

And so on from there. Remarkably, Wallace-Wells was willing to say the name of a major news org; he said the name "Fox News." He seemed to say that that major news org has been demagoguing the fires.