The Derangement of the Conservative Mind (Cont'd)
Plus: MAGA embraces the bloodlust
As the week winds down, let’s catch-up:
Announcing the arrest of a suspect in the January 6 pipe bomb case, the FBI’s goggle-eyed Kash Patel declared: “When you attack American citizens, when you attack our institutions of legislation, when you attack our nation’s Capitol, you attack the very being of our way of life.”
You mean like this?
No, Pete you were not “EXONERATED.” Quite the opposite, in fact. ‘Signalgate’ report contradicts Hegseth’s claim of ‘total exoneration’ - The Washington Post
The Defense Department’s top watchdog assessed in a report released Thursday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s actions in the “Signalgate” affair “created a risk to operational security,” contradicting claims made by Hegseth and his aides that he received a “total exoneration.”
The highly anticipated inquiry by the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General determined that by using the unclassified chat app Signal to share advance details about a forthcoming bombing operation in Yemen, Hegseth’s actions “created a risk to operational security that could have resulted in failed U.S. mission objectives and potential harm to U.S. pilots.” The report cited Hegseth, too, for using his unclassified personal device to relay that information via group chat to other top Trump administration officials and for not retaining all associated messages, in violation of federal recordkeeping laws.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before. SCOTUS hands Trump another big win. “Supreme Court Clears Way for Texas to Use Republican-Friendly Redistricting Maps”- The New York Times
But the Trump/Bondi DOJ faceplants. Again. “Grand jury declines to reindict Letitia James” - CNN Politics
Rubio leaves his mark: “U.S. Diplomats Report Broken Morale and Abandoned Careers” - The New York Times
Hegseth’s snuff video “shows second strike hit before survivors could flip boat, lawmakers say .”
After watching a video of the strike, Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) told reporters: “What I saw in that room is one of the most troubling scenes I’ve seen in my time in public service.” He told one outlet: “They posed zero threat to anyone in the region, and we killed them.”
The worst of the worst? Not really. “More than 80 percent of immigrants arrested during Trump’s crackdown in Washington, D.C. had no criminal record, according to federal data.” The reality on the ground contrasts with Trump’s suggestion that the operations would target “violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals.”
No matter how bad your week was, Mike Johnson’s was worse. A quick sample of the headlines: “Republican Anger Erupts at Johnson as Party Frets About Future” - The New York Times; “Speaker Johnson struggles to keep control of the House floor” - NBC News; “The GOP Women Are Humiliating Mike Johnson” - Joe Perticone
And, finally, your daily dose of dystopia: The AI Chatbots can move public opinion bigly.
Two new papers – with experiments conducted in four countries – demonstrate that chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs) are quite effective at political persuasion, moving opposition voters’ preferences by 10 percentage points or more in many cases.
“LLMs can really move people’s attitudes towards presidential candidates and policies, and they do it by providing many factual claims that support their side,” said David Rand, professor of information science and marketing and management communications and a senior author on both papers. “But those claims aren’t necessarily accurate – and even arguments built on accurate claims can still mislead by omission.”
The researchers reported these findings today in two papers published simultaneously, “Persuading Voters using Human-AI Dialogues,” in Nature, and “The Levers of Political Persuasion with Conversational AI,” in Science.
Happy Friday.
The Derangement of the Conservative Mind
Two new reports on the devolution of what used to pass for “conservatism.”
First: Campus conservatism is in trouble by Elisha Krauss
“The majority of the young conservatives I encounter are severely disappointed at the abject failure of many in the movement who accepted disillusioned young men with no core moral or political beliefs, allowing them to join conservative groups and poison them with racism and sexism. In an attempt to gain favor with a loud but small group of the alt-right, they have lost their moral compass.”
Second: An outstanding deep-dive by John McCormack & Michael Warren into the once-respected Intercollegiate Studies Institute (a group with which I was once, in the distance mists of time, vaguely affiliated): “The Closing of the Conservative Mind.”
Last April, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute invited eight college students to what an ISI staffer described in an email as an “exclusive retreat and dinner with Tucker Carlson” in Florida.
Founded nearly 75 years ago, ISI is a prominent conservative collegiate intellectual institution in the United States. ISI also runs the Collegiate Network, a collection of alternative conservative newspapers on college campuses across the country, and the eight student journalists had been selected by ISI to attend the retreat and dinner because their campus newspapers were top-performing publications. After a Journalism 101 session at the Art Ovation Hotel in Sarasota, the students filed into a shuttle for a 90-minute trip to Carlson’s home on Gasparilla Island, where Carlson dispensed career advice.
“Thanks to @TuckerCarlson for joining three generations of @amconmag editors/executive directors for a dinner with campus journalists from @ISI’s @collegiatenet,” ISI President Johnny Burtka posted on Twitter alongside a photo of himself, Carlson, then-Collegiate Network Executive Director Dan McCarthy, and The American Conservative editor Curt Mills. “It was an unforgettable evening that our students will cherish for years to come.”
One person left out of Burtka’s photo was Carlson’s special guest at the dinner that night: Alex Jones, who appeared on Carlson’s podcast that aired the next day, April 9.
Jones is one of America’s most prominent conspiracy theorists. He was ordered to pay $1 billion in defamation damages for claiming the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre was “staged” with crisis actors, and he has repeatedly said the September 11 terrorist attacks were an “inside job” committed by the U.S. government.
“I said the CIA is going to fly planes into the World Trade Centers and blame it on [Osama] Bin Laden,” Jones told Carlson on the April 9 podcast. “You called 9/11!” Carlson told Jones. “How come you were the only one who figured this out?”
“You’ve never been a racist or an antisemite or a crazy person,” Carlson told Jones, who used his show InfoWars to promote vicious antisemites like the Hitler-loving, Holocaust-denying Nick Fuentes and Kanye West.
“Trump’s MAGA Base Revels In Cruelty”
A follow-up to something I wrote earlier this week about all the dead canaries in the coal mine.
Almost more disturbing than the shift in Trump himself is how his supporters have followed him off the cliff. He has taught them to despise and dehumanize their political “enemies,” and now in Trump 2.0, their cruelty and lack of empathy rival his.
But is this really sustainable as a political strategy? Looking at the November 4th results and Trump’s plummeting poll numbers, perhaps not. Today, there are clear signs that all the cruelty and dehumanization is beginning to backfire.
Once upon a time, there were conservatives — like, say, John McCain — who would push back against outbursts of raw racism like what we saw from the White House this week. But, reported The Big Picture, “MAGA voices like Meghan McCain were on board with the hate. She remarked on her podcast that Trump’s rant about Somalis in the U.S. represents how she feels; while she may have worded it a bit differently, she confirmed,
“I agree with him.”
The MAGA choruses have chimed in.
The New Republic’s Greg Sargent is connecting the dots:
“Right now, it’s being reported that Trump’s stormtroopers are going to start arresting Somalis in Minnesota. So I think with this he’s kind of priming the MAGA masses, ginning up their bloodlust, letting them know that the spectacle of arrests is coming and they should get their popcorn ready. Again, the through line with that White House video where they were celebrating people getting pinned to the ground and handcuffed—the spectacle of suffering is the oxygen that they breathe, basically.”
If you do a Google search for “ICE raid this is what I voted for” you will get a quick sense of how MAGA supporters are “celebrating the cruelty of Trump’s deportation regime.” Writes Sargent:
“I think maybe the through line here is what you might call the joy of dehumanization. For MAGA, that’s a great, joyous occasion. Anytime that they can dehumanize whoever is the subject of the two-minute ‘hate of the moment,’ it’s time for a party.”
You want some examples?
Take Megyn Kelly. Please.
“I really do kind of not only wanna see them killed in the water, whether they’re on the boat or in the water, but I’d really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time so they lose a limb and bleed out.”
Sick shit. But it’s coming straight from the top.
Friday Dogs
Advent puppy.
“I really do kind of not only wanna see them killed in the water, whether they’re on the boat or in the water, but I’d really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time so they lose a limb and bleed out.”
"And they'll know we are Christians by our love, by our love!
Yeah they'll know that we are Christians by our love."
Wow you evicerated Patel in the first six inches of your column!!