Finally Friday Reads: Republicans are only about Power and Money

“I can see why Chuck Grassley likes the Junior Trumplican Senator from Missouri being on his committee.” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

I’m struggling a little, so this may be short. My dear cat Dinah, 15 years old, has been getting frail since about September. I’ve been taking her to the vet and the emergency vet for a few months, and there’s been nothing solid to go on other than that she’s a geriatric cat. This last week has been different. I need to get her to the Vet again this afternoon, and I’m already exhausted from a midnight trip to the ER on Wednesday. Bear with me.

Watching Senator John Neely Kennedy of LA back as a theatrical idiot has been interesting.  He’s an Oxford graduate who has cooked up some kind of swampbilly act to get elected to seats in the Republican party. He is such an embarrassment. That is what you have to do these days to get money and votes in what used to be the Party of Lincoln. The entire Republican Party has become a club of rich, endlessly greedy, insane, no-nothings. They’ve always had that element, but dark money has completely empowered them to get elected, do their will, and entertain their right-wing bigots. Once the ruling class decided they could put idiots in the presidency like Reagan and Dubya and just take what they want, that was it. The next thing was putting idiots on SCOTUS to twist the laws that used to contain them. Now they’re focused on no more serious Republicans in governance at all.

My reply to this is and will always be that all Senator John Neely Kennedy does any more is throw-up in his mouth. That’s because he knows in his brain what he’s doing where most of the Senators are there because they have no clue and vote the way their corporate overlords demand.  The money and insanity of figures like Elon Musk have set the ideal of a two-party system off track. I honestly don’t think it’s retrievable at this point. Their local political loons love the money and power. I can attest that Senator John Neely Kennedy was once a serious person. I don’t have the psychology chops to figure out exactly what species of loons he’s morphed into.

Case in point from Talking Points Memo today. “Chris Rufo — Known For ‘DEI’ and ‘CRT’ Panics — Tries to Make ‘the Indian Question’ a Thing
Rufo often gets treated as a “respectable” conservative. His latest podcast episode — framing Indian-Americans as a problem in need of solving — is more evidence that he shouldn’t be.” I cannot even fathom what kind of perverted brain had to come up with this. Christopher Mathias has the story.

To the degree that a “respectable” or “moderate” right exists today in America, Christopher Rufo is considered part of it. He is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, the tony midtown think tank that holds black-tie galas; he recently enjoyed a polite sit-down interview with Ezra Klein on Klein’s massively popular New York Times podcast; and he has over 120,000 subscribers on Substack, a publishing platform whose owners have celebrated Rufo as one of their “best” political writers who readers can “trust.”

This veneer of legitimacy has helped Rufo mainstream an arguably fascist agenda. The 42 year old, after all, largely masterminded the destructive, racist moral panics targeting “Critical Race Theory” and “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI) programs. He helped spearhead the spurious attack on “gender ideology” in public schools, smearing queer-supportive educators as “groomers.” He helped foment conspiracy theories about fraud at Somali daycare centers in Minneapolis, providing the pretext for ICE’s deadly incursion into the city. And he played a central role in spreading the ugly lie that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were stealing and eating people’s pets.

He’s been up front about how he approaches these propaganda campaigns — and how to get those in power to act upon them. “You have to be very aggressive,” he explained once in a speech at Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian liberal arts school where he is a Distinguished Fellow. “You have to fight on terms that you define. You have to create your own frame, your own language. And you have to be ruthless and brutal in pursuit of something good.”

This past weekend Rufo introduced an alarming new term that feels like an escalation, even for him: the “Indian Question” — that is, what to do about the very existence of Indian people, citizens and noncitizens alike, in America? Rufo’s new phrase formed the title of the latest episode of “Rufo & Lomez,” the BlazeTV podcast he co-hosts with Jonathan Keeperman, a lesser known and less “respectable” proprietor of white nationalist talking points, who previously plied his trade anonymously, from behind the pseudonym “Lomez,” until he was unmasked in a 2024 Guardian exposé.

The prompt for this discussion of the “Indian Question” was a viral, racist post  by Bo French, the GOP candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner. “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it,” French wrote on X earlier this month, posting a photo of largely south Asian college students cheering on the University of Texas football team. “The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” In a follow up post, French made the barely concealed subtext of his message more explicit: “Like body-cams exposed criminals, social media is exposing how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners,” he wrote.

As TPM’s Josh Kovensky noted, French’s tweet — an articulation of the white supremacist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory — roiled the right, eliciting some rare, if tepid, denunciations from prominent Republican officials in Texas, and exposing faultlines in the GOP’s coalition over the exact boundaries of MAGA’s ethnonationalism. Are some non-white ethnicities more allowed than others? Are some immigrant groups more prone to being “assimilated” into white, Christian culture?

Keeperman and Rufo’s “Indian Question” episode amounts to an hour-long defense of French’s post. Keeperman offered a tortured tautology about why the south Asian college kids cheering a comeback victory for the Longhorns — some of whom were wearing cowboy hats and throwing up the “Hook ‘em Horns” hand sign — were not properly “assimilated” into American culture: because he said so.

“Successful assimilation is precisely that you wouldn’t notice it, we wouldn’t have anything to talk about,” he said. “The mere fact of us being able to notice that, no, this is not an assimilated group, this is just a bunch of Indians at the game, is itself sort of definitionally the case that they’re not yet assimilated.”

I know I overshared this article but this is exactly what I mean. It also hits home since I, like many others, have spent all of my natural born years on what used to be Indian Territory. I was born in the Cherokee Strip of Oklahoma and spent most of my life in the land of the various Sioux Tribes. Because, my mother knew how horribly our indigenous were treated, she made sure I travelled with her around the states learning as much as possible about Native History.

I am appalled this kind of thing still exists in this century. But then, we’re seeing so many policies thrown around by Republicans that should remain in American History book only, I’ve just about had it with them all.  It’s what it ever was.  It’s your basic land and natural resources grab.  We’re seeing that with AI datacenters now. That’s the only change as they just suddenly exist as something necessary.

Of course, so-called Culture Wars issues are the last resort of mucking up their base since so many of them completely belong in other time periods or planets maybe. This is from The Atlantic. “The GOP’s Culture-War Hail Mary. Will it work?”  Elaine Godfrey has the lede.

Last week, as the war with Iran dragged into its seventh month, gas prices shot up to an average of $4.50 a gallon, and polling showed President Trump about twice as far underwater with American voters as he was at this point in 2018, Republican senators determined that the time had come to discuss something else entirely: youth sports. “Girls’ sports are for girls. Boys’ sports are for boys,” Senator Marsha Blackburn said in a news conference.

With 32 days to go until the midterm elections, Republicans’ closing strategy is obvious: They’re going all-in on trans. (It seems to have worked for them before, after all. More on that in a minute.) In Texas, Republicans are running an unsettling AI-generated ad that shows the Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico dressed as Maria von Trapp and singing about girls with mustaches. A spot in Iowa accuses the Senate candidate Josh Turek of supporting “sex changes for kids.” On X, former Representative Matt Gaetz offered a tidy summary of his party’s agenda: “I hate the war too,” he told a concerned voter. “But the Democrats want to trans your kids.”

Partly, this is because Republicans don’t have much else to say. The administration’s immigration-enforcement strategy isn’t exactly popular. Voters have lost faith in the GOP on economic issues. Meanwhile, the president is obsessing over Corinthian columns. But Republicans also have some reason to believe that making trans happen is a useful strategy: It’s helped them before.

Will these kinds of things really cover up headlines like this one from the AP? Are their people out there really that stupid to not recognize their lives are getting worse.  I certainly see it daily whenever I have to buy groceries.  Price increases aren’t even subtle. “US hiring slows and unemployment ticks higher with a month remaining before Americans head to polls.”  How much more convincing does anyone need?  Paul Wiseman has the analysis.

U.S. employers added a disappointing 29,000 jobs and the unemployment rate ticked up last month, the government reported Friday, a month before voters go to the polls in pivotal midterm elections at a time of discontent over the high cost of living and the state of the economy.

Hiring dropped from a revised 133,000 in August, the Labor Department said. The unemployment rate rose to a still-low 4.2% from 4.1% in August.

Economists had expected September payrolls to come in around 90,000.

Labor Department revisions also shaved 60,000 jobs off combined July and August payrolls.

The new hiring data could draw the Federal Reserve’s attention back to hiring and jobs, given that one of the central bank’s two mandates is to seek maximum employment. Many Fed officials have said in recent weeks that they are primarily focused on their other mission, which is combating inflation. With the job market looking a bit weaker, the Fed may be more inclined to keep its key rate unchanged when it meets next month, rather than raise it.

Well, none of that’s going to the inflation problem, that’s for sure.

Anyway, I’ve plagued you with bad news long enough. I’m going back to more important thing like my cat and watching my garden grow. Please do everything you can to go vote and get others to do so too so we can start seeing if and how these problems can be solved reasonably.

What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?