Mostly Monday Reads: Splendid Isolation

Posted: August 7, 2023 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: 2016 elections, 2024 presidential Campaign | Tags: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Loneliness Epidemic, Trump lawyers, Trump World, Trump's High Crimes and Misdemeanors | 9 Comments

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

It’s another week of incredible heat here.  Temple and I arrived at Vaughn’s last night to discover their new window units blasting cold air.  At least one corner of the bar was cold.  I was told it’s not so good over there on the opposite side. It was pretty quiet but much cooler than my house. There were quite a few moments last night when Temple and I were alone in the bar while others went out to smoke whatever. I’ve never experienced that before.

I go for short, quick walks with Temple, then scurry her home. I’ve noticed how many of the usual dog walkers do the same. The National Weather Service tells us to stay inside.  Plus, there’s a surge in Covid. The kids have just started school, and I hope they don’t have to isolate again.  It’s not good for kids. I’ve started to wonder if isolation is a new reality. I already go to places where I’m least likely to find a raging Trumper or a Piety Performance.  I’ve been talking to a long-time friend about how worn-out and anxious that makes us. It’s just safer alone or with close friends or family if they’re nearby.

So, it was interesting that I woke up to this article in The Atlantic by Hillary Rodham Clinton. I stayed awake just long enough to read it in my ritual cold water bath with a fan blasting.  Once cooled, I went back to sleep. This is an exciting take on the isolation that Covid and the Trump years have brought to us. “THE WEAPONIZATION OF LONELINESS. To defend America against those who would exploit our social disconnection, we need to rebuild our communities.”

I have to admit that loneliness is not something in my emotional range. I like that safe feeling of being by myself, knowing that I can’t be interrupted by any outbursts or nonsense. I know how to entertain myself for long periods of time. That was a skill my mother taught me. I do realize that we’re more isolated now and that it’s bound to have differing impacts on different people. It’s a long read.  It’s also an interesting one.

The question that preoccupied me and many others over much of the past eight years is how our democracy became so susceptible to a would-be strongman and demagogue. The question that keeps me up at night now—with increasing urgency as 2024 approaches—is whether we have done enough to rebuild our defenses or whether our democracy is still highly vulnerable to attack and subversion.

There’s reason for concern: the influence of dark money and corporate power, right-wing propaganda and misinformation, malign foreign interference in our elections, and the vociferous backlash against social progress. The “vast right-wing conspiracy” has been of compelling interest to me for many years. But I’ve long thought something important was missing from our national conversation about threats to our democracy. Now recent findings from a perhaps unexpected source—America’s top doctor—offer a new perspective on our problems and valuable insights into how we can begin healing our ailing nation.

In May, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy published an advisory, warning that a growing “epidemic of loneliness and isolation” threatens Americans’ personal health and also the health of our democracy. Murthy reported that, even before COVID, about half of all American adults were experiencing substantial levels of loneliness. Over the past two decades, Americans have spent significantly more time alone, engaging less with family, friends, and people outside the home. By 2018, just 16 percent of Americans said they felt very attached to their local community.

I feel very attached to my community, but recently, it’s just been easier to just stay home. Am I the only one here?

An “epidemic of loneliness” may sound abstract at a time when our democracy faces concrete and imminent threats, but the surgeon general’s report helps explain how we became so vulnerable. In the past, surgeons general have at crucial moments sounded the alarm about major crises and drawn our attention to underappreciated threats, including smoking, HIV/AIDS, and obesity. This is one of those moments.

The rate of young adults who report suffering from loneliness went up every single year from 1976 to 2019. From 2003 to 2020, the average time that young people spent in person with friends declined by nearly 70 percent. Then the pandemic turbocharged our isolation.

According to the surgeon general, when people are disconnected from friends, family, and communities, their lifetime risk of heart disease, dementia, depression, and stroke skyrockets. Shockingly, prolonged loneliness is as bad, or worse, for our health as being obese or smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. Researchers also say that loneliness can generate anger, resentment, and even paranoia. It diminishes civic engagement and social cohesion, and increases political polarization and animosity. Unless we address this crisis, Murthy warned, “we will continue to splinter and divide until we can no longer stand as a community or a country.”

The paintings today come from Artnet News. “Lonely Days Can Make for Great Art. Here’s How 10 Artists Found Inspiration in Isolation, From a Bedridden Frida Kahlo to a Jailed Egon Schiele. Whether in imprisonment or exile, these artists channeled their isolation into creative fuel.” I find this true for me whether it’s writing, composing music, or putting my paintbrushes to a blank sheet.

Back to Hillary.

What does all of this loneliness and disconnection mean for our democracy?

Murthy carefully connects the dots between increasing social isolation and declining civic engagement. “When we are less invested in one another, we are more susceptible to polarization and less able to pull together to face the challenges that we cannot solve alone,” he wrote in The New York Times.

It’s not just the surgeon general who recognizes that social isolation saps the lifeblood of democracy. So do the ultra-right-wing billionaires, propagandists, and provocateurs who see authoritarianism as a source of power and profit.

There have always been angry young men alienated from mainstream society and susceptible to the appeal of demagogues and hate-mongers. But modern technology has taken the danger to another level. This was Steve Bannon’s key insight.

Long before Bannon ran Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, he was involved in the world of online gaming. He discovered an army of what he later described as “rootless white males,” disconnected from the real world but highly engaged online and often quick to resort to sexist and racist attacks. When Bannon took over the hard-right website Breitbart News, he was determined to turn these socially isolated gamers into the shock troops of the alt-right, pumping them full of conspiracy theories and hate speech. Bannon pursued the same project as a senior executive at Cambridge Analytica, the notorious data-mining and online-influence company largely owned by the right-wing billionaire Robert Mercer. According to a former Cambridge Analytica engineer turned whistleblower, Bannon targeted “incels,” or involuntarily celibate men, because they were easy to manipulate and prone to believing conspiracy theories. “You can activate that army,” Bannon told the Bloomberg journalist Joshua Green. “They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.”

Egon Schiele, Prisoner! (April 24, 1912). Courtesy of the Albertina.

Clinton’s analysis is just what you would expect.  Full of research, examples, and elucidation of where this might lead.  It’s a heavy read but fully worth it.

This is typical Trump stuff. The lawsuit-happy Trump just keeps on trying to convince himself he isn’t the problem. This is from CNBC. “Trump counterclaim against E. Jean Carroll dismissed, DA can get deposition.”

A federal judge on Monday dismissed a defamation counterclaim by Donald Trump against the writer E. Jean Carroll in her pending lawsuit that accuses the former president of defaming her after she wrote that he had raped her.

Judge Lewis Kaplan, in a separate order made public Monday, ruled that Carroll’s lawyers can give the Manhattan District Attorney’s office a videotape and transcript of their deposition of Trump that they took last fall for the lawsuit.

That order raises the chance that Trump’s sworn testimony in Carroll’s case could be used against the former president as part of the DA’s pending criminal prosecution.

DA Alvin Bragg Jr. charged Trump, 77, earlier this year with falsifying business records related to a 2016 hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels. That case, in which Trump has pleaded not guilty, is set to go to trial next May.

Trump’s counterclaim in the Carroll suit focused on what he argued were her false statements, which he alleged badly harmed his reputation, a day after a jury verdict in May in her favor for $5 million for sexual abuse and defamation in a related civil lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

Carroll during a CNN interview said that she thought in her head, “Oh, yes, he did — oh, yes, he did” — after jurors in that case did not find that Trump had raped her.

In the same interview, Carroll described her encounter in court with Trump’s lawyer Joseph Tacopina right after the jury verdict, when Tacopina shook hands with her attorney, Roberta Kaplan, who is not related to the judge.

“Well, Joe Tacopina is very likeable. He’s sort of like an 18th Century strutting peacock,” Carroll said on CNN. “So, he sticks out his hand — first he congratulated Robbie. And then, he was congratulating people on the team. And as I put my hand forward, I said, ‘He did it and you know it.’ Then we shook hands, I passed on.”

Judge Kaplan, in dismissing the counterclaim, wrote that Carroll’s statements repeating a claim that Trump had raped her were “substantially true” because the jury had found he digitally penetrated her, even if it did not find that he had penetrated her with his penis, as is required for a rape charge under New York law.

Sometime this week, it appears we will have an indictment for Trump in Georgia. “Fulton County insiders expect former President Donald Trump to be indicted this week in Georgia. It would be a state indictment and could be the most significant out of all the indictments since someone can only be pardoned on federal charges.”  This is from Channel 11 in Atlanta, as reported by Dawn White.

Many people in Fulton County are preparing for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to announce an indictment against former U.S. President Donald Trump for allegedly trying to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential Election in Georgia.

This would be Trump’s fourth indictment this year.

An Atlanta-area lawyer tells 11Alive he believes Willis could indict Trump this coming week. It would be a state indictment and could be the most significant out of all the indictments since someone can only be pardoned on federal charges.

“I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.”

That infamous phone call between the then president and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger happened on January 2, 2021. Almost three years later, bright barriers surround the perimeter of the Fulton County Courthouse in preparation for Trump’s possible indictment for election interference in Georgia.

“We’ve never had this happen before, so no one quite knows what’s going to happen,” attorney Darryl Cohen said.

Cohen is a former Fulton County assistant district attorney and said while there’s a lot we don’t know, there’s certain things that are likely to happen.

“There are going to be Trump supporters that love him. There’s going to be Trump haters that hate him, and we don’t know if they’re going to be together or if they’re going to clash,” Cohen said. “We don’t know how many people are going to turn out, so this could all be the beginning of a story that we cannot begin to understand until it unravels.”

Normally someone goes to Fulton County Jail after an arrest, but Cohen believes that’s unlikely for the former president.

“I think that he will be mug shot and fingerprinted at the Fulton County Courthouse. We have a serious, really serious security problem,” Cohen said.

Cohen said if Willis announced an indictment against Trump, it would be assigned to a Fulton County superior judge.

Trump’s not only disconnected from reality, he says things that are not in keeping with his lawyer’s plans.  This is from Politico.  Trump always thinks he can pick the jury and the judge.  Maybe with Cannon, but certainly not in the US District Court. “Trump and his new lawyer are not on the same page about judge’s recusal. The former president’s public statements are already diverging from the advice of his newest lawyer, John Lauro.”

Donald Trump blared Sunday morning that his legal team would be “immediately asking for recusal” of U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan from his latest criminal case, proclaiming (but not revealing) “very powerful grounds” for the demand.

Hours later, his attorney John Lauro would publicly walk back that plan, saying Trump was speaking with a “layman’s political sense” and reacting primarily because Chutkan was nominated to the bench by a Democrat. (She was confirmed 95-0 by the Senate in 2014 after Barack Obama nominated her).

“We haven’t made a final decision on that issue at all,” Lauro said on a podcast hosted by Florida defense attorney David Markus. “I think as lawyers we have to be very careful of those issues and handle them with the utmost delicacy.”

On Monday morning, Trump was again hammering on the recusal issue, calling Chutkan “the Judge of [special counsel Jack Smith’s] ‘dreams’ (WHO MUST BE RECUSED!).”

The back-and-forth on public airwaves and social media underscores the familiar tension between Trump and his legal team, which has been rocked by infighting, departures and conflicting advice in recent months. All of it, however, is secondary to Trump’s own whims and instincts, which have served him politically but are grating against the rules and norms of behavior for those charged with serious federal crimes.

We’ve already learned that Lawyer Lauro has odd predilections about the law himself.  This is from Adam Edelman for NBC News. “If Trump committed ‘a technical violation of the Constitution,’ it’s not a crime, his lawyer says.” Later on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, who sat on the House panel that investigated the Capitol riot, said Lauro’s argument was “deranged.”

If former President Donald Trump committed a “technical violation of the Constitution,” it doesn’t mean he necessarily broke any criminal laws, John Lauro, Trump’s criminal defense attorney, argued Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Lauro appeared to signal how he’d defend the former president in a trial that will stem from the four-count criminal indictment returned last week by a federal grand jury that had been examining Trump’s possible role in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot and his alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

Pressed by NBC’s Chuck Todd about Trump’s alleged pressure campaign to get former Vice President Mike Pence to reverse the election, Lauro claimed that Trump and Pence had merely disagreed over whether a vice president could constitutionally take actions that could lead to a presidential election’s being overturned.

“A technical violation of the Constitution is not a violation of criminal law,” Lauro contended, saying it was “just plain wrong” to suggest that Trump had pressed Pence to break the law.

“And to say that is contrary to decades of legal statutes,” he continued.

“These kinds of constitutional and statutory disagreements don’t lead to criminal charges,” Lauro said. “And one thing that Mr. Pence has never said is that he thought President Trump was acting criminally.”

In response to the latest indictment, Pence said he believes “that anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be president of the United States.” He said Wednesday that Trump surrounded himself after the 2020 election with “crackpot lawyers” who told him only what his “itching ears” wanted to hear.

My thought is that’s a very good way to get all those unindicted co-conspirators on the people’s side because it sure looks like they’re getting the fickle finger of blame from the Trump Team

Anyway, I’m going to go eat a fresh peach and yogurt with some honey in the coldest spot in the house.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

 

 

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