Mostly Monday Reads: Squall at the Square

“The End Times are nigh. The Prodigal Son returns to Madison Square Garden.” John Buss @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

I was lucky that working with students last night interfered with any attempt to turn on the Fascist Rally at the World’s Most Famous Arena. This wasn’t exactly Ali against Frazier or Holyfield vs Lewis. This was more like #DonOld vs the Majority of the country. The opening bouts were lame.

My short take on this is it was basically a Crazy Old Cult Leader warming his brood up for the Ultimate Kool-Aid moment.  Unfortunately, we previewed that on January 6, so I hope that law enforcement agencies are prepared. The Ultimate Chaos Agent is making his play for a coup

This brings me to this dangerous conspiracy theory making the rounds.  To think, I was simply walking the dog around the block!  I got told a conspiracy theory by a short-order cook at a local bar who has said crazy things before, so I thought I’d look into it to prove him wrong.   His favorite spiel is that the right wing and the left wing are the same, and the government is corrupt. Which is partially correct.  Look at Jill Stein and Robert Kennedy hooked up with the Fascists and Putin. If you take populism to its furthest corners of the right and the left, they eventually bump butts with each other.  However, the left wing and the right in the United States do not wield the same power, and they are not of equal size.  There’s no real leftist power in this country. The billionaire class has been funding the extreme right-wing for decades now, and it shows. Polls on issues show that most Americans agree on the major things.  The problem is that the political system does not play towards consensus.

This guy insisted the DOD is sneaking a policy to Congress to approve the use of military force on civilians. Now, if DJT was in power, I believe he’d try that, although it would take a lot more than a policy of the DOD or an act of Congress to amend the Constitution.  Even when I came back to show him the actual act to show him it says nothing of the kind, he insisted he’d read it, and that’s what he said. But when I invested it, I thought, wow, that looks like the will of the Ultimate Chaos Agent!

This link leads to DOD DIRECTIVE 5240.01 (DOD INTELLIGENCE AND INTELLIGENCE-RELATED ACTIVITIES, AND DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE COMPONENT, ASSISTANCE TO LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES AND OTHER CIVIL AUTHORITIES.) It’s short, and the language is easy to comprehend. So, I did some research, and now I think it’s important enough of the conspiracy theory in light of the Prepare for War rally in Madison Square. Here’s what I found with a little dank rabbit hole exploring.  “Far-Right Suggests Military Just Authorized Lethal Force Against Americans Ahead of the Election. It Didn’t.  As Trump warns about an “enemy from within,” a Defense Department directive set off a firestorm on alt-tech social media. But the Insurrection Act is the real threat, experts say.”  This is from a Blog Called The War Horse and it’s written by Sonner Kehrt.

Just as former president Donald Trump told Fox News  last week that he wanted to use the U.S. military to “handle” what he called the “enemy from within” on Election Day, an obscure military policy was beginning to make the rounds on social media platforms favored by the far right.

The focus? Department of Defense Directive 5240.01.

The 22-page document governs military intelligence activities and is among more than a thousand different policies that outline Defense Department procedures.

The Pentagon updated it at the end of September. Although military policies are routinely updated and reissued, the timing of this one—just six weeks before the election and the same day Hurricane Helene slammed into the Southeast—struck right-wing misinformation merchants as suspicious.

They latched onto a new reference in the updated directive—“lethal force”—and soon were falsely claiming that the change means Kamala Harris had authorized the military to kill civilians if there is unrest after the election.

That’s flat-out not true, the Pentagon and experts on military policy told The War Horse.

“The provisions in [the directive] are not new, and do not authorize the Secretary of Defense to use lethal force against U.S. citizens, contrary to rumors and rhetoric circulating on social media,” Sue Gough, a Department of Defense spokesperson, said Wednesday night.

But as Trump doubles down on his “enemy from within” rhetoric, DOD Directive 5240.01 continues to gain traction among his supporters as ostensible proof that Harris, not Trump, wants to use the military against American citizens.

By early last week, “5240.01” began to spike on alt-tech platforms such as Rumble, 4chan, and Telegram, as well as on more mainstream platforms like X, according to an analysis by The War Horse and UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center.

On Ron Paul’s Liberty Report, a YouTube show, the former Texas congressman told viewers that the policy meant that the country is now a “police state.” Republican Maryland congressman Andy Harris told Newsmax host Chris Salcedo last Wednesday that he was concerned the Defense Department was pushing through policies without congressional oversight.

“This is exactly what the Democrats said Trump would do. And they’re doing it,” he said. “This means that after an election, they could declare national emergency and literally call out the Army in the United States.”

Former Trump national security adviser and retired Army Lieutenant Gen. Michael Flynn tweeted the policy update out to his 1.7 million followers, just as he shared the week before a video suggesting the military had manipulated the weather to focus Hurricane Helene’s deadly fury on Republican voters in the South.

“Republican election fraud season is in full swing.” John Buss, @repeat1968

I really see this as a way to ensure their well-armed militia shows up at the local courthouse or state house well-armed when the vote count starts meaningfully leaning towards a Harris/Walz Administration.  The ACLU has had this policy firmly in its FOIA grip since 1982.  The documents are out there with no commentary or urgent lawsuits filed.  You would think they’d be interested.

The Center for Informed Policy at the University of Washington is more interested in those conspiracy theories. “Rumors rapidly spreading about reissued Department of Defense Directive 5240.01” explains the right wing’s angst on this one in its 2024 U.S. ELECTIONS RAPID RESEARCH BLOG.

Key Takeaways

• Early last week, rumors started to spread between multiple social media platforms and across political communities online about a recently reissued Department of Defense Directive 5240.01 that documents procedures when there is a potential use of lethal force.
• Some online communities have speculated that the directive’s changes are timed with the upcoming election, with some suggesting without evidence that the intent behind the change is that the government is planning to use force against Americans.
• The viral spread could be exploiting a data void – a situation where there is no reliable information about a topic in search results — given there are no published fact-checks or traditional journalist coverage of the directive’s changes.

Just Security calls it “Much Ado About Nothing.” Oddly enough, this was an article my neighborhood weirdo was about to show me when he read the title and then suddenly closed it, and just as I said oh, Just Security is a reliable source.  They conclude with this, which is similar to a thought in The War Horse. That’s the real danger is the Insurrection Act that Trump used to go after George Floyd Protestors with the National Guard. His stated goal was to support local law enforcement in Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C., on May 30, 2020.  You probably will remember this culminating with the upside-down bible event. The ACLU is very interested in that event.

To be sure, there are good reasons to be concerned about the federal government’s power to use the armed forces domestically against Americans, but the new language in Directive 5240.01 is not one of them. The Insurrection Act represents a far greater danger. It gives the president broad discretion to use the military as a domestic police force and contains virtually no safeguards to prevent abuse. The Brennan Center for Justice, where we work, has put forward a comprehensive proposal for reforming the Insurrection Act, and a bipartisan group of former national security officials convened by the American Law Institute has similarly called for Insurrection Act reform. Those who are currently sounding the alarm about Directive 5240.01 would do well to refocus their energies on that critical task.

I just messaged it off to one of the MSNBC Anchors I chat with on occasion, so I’m about to see if I can get someone serious journalism on it with the hope of getting rid of the data void.

So, before I tackle the main event, I have one more nerdy article to suggest.  This is about the odds makers.  This is from Good Authority. The analysis is provided by Josh Clinton. “Poll results depend on pollster choices as much as voters’ decisions. Simple changes in how to weight a single poll can move the Harris-Trump margin 8 points.”

There is no end of scrutiny of the 2024 election polls – who is ahead, who is behind, how much the polls will miss the election outcome, etc., etc. These questions have become even more pressing because the presidential race seems to be a toss-up. Every percentage point for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump matters.

But here’s the big problem that no one talks about very much: Simple and defensible decisions by pollsters can drastically change the reported margin between Harris and Trump. I’ll show that the margin can change by as much as eight points. Reasonable decisions produce a margin that ranges from Harris +0.9% to Harris +8%.

This reality highlights that we ask far too much of polls. Ultimately, it’s hard to know how much poll numbers reflect the decisions of voters – or the decisions of pollsters.

The 4 key questions for pollsters

After poll data are collected, pollsters must assess whether they need to adjust or “weight” the data to address the very real possibility that the people who took the poll differ from those who did not. This involves answering four questions:

1.   Do respondents match the electorate demographically in terms of sex, age, education, race, etc.? (This was a problem in 2016.)

2.   Do respondents match the electorate politically after the sample is adjusted by demographic factors? (This was the problem in 2020.)

3.   Which respondents will vote?

4.   Should the pollster trust the data?

To show how the answers to these questions can affect poll results, I use a national survey conducted from October 7 – 14, 2024. The sample included 1,924 self-reported registered voters drawn from an online, high-quality panel commonly used in academic and commercial work.

After dropping the respondents who said they were not sure who they would vote for (3.2%) and those with missing demographics, the unweighted data give Harris a 6 percentage point lead – 51.6 % to 45.5% – among the remaining 1,718 respondents.

You may read more details about those factors at the link.  I try not to put my students to sleep during statistics lectures, so I certainly won’t do it to you.  The reporting and clips on the Madison Square Garden Rally kept me up most of the night. I felt like the child in grade school watching the teacher thread the film through those blue projectors only to see things my Dad didn’t want to remember about World War 2. I don’t know about you, but my school district did not hold back on the World War 2 experience. One of my high school teachers wrote a book on his experience as a prisoner taken during the Battle of the Bulge.  I was surrounded by friends’ parents and my parents’ friends who were Veterans.  We watched the films of the 1936 Olympics and heroes like Jesse Owens and, of course, all the Hitler and Mussolini public speeches. If you were like little me, I couldn’t understand who could fall for any of that.

I also saw films of the United States turning away Jewish people in ships fleeing Europe and films of the internment of Japanese-Americans. All of these seemed surreal to me at the ripe old age of 11.

Now, I know more. Now I can identify people that just love to goosestep with whom I would not share the location of any modern day Anne Frank.

Tom Toles Editorial Cartoon

CNN Analyst Stephen Collinson has this analysis. “Trump unveils the most extreme closing argument in modern presidential history.”  The MAGA movement is about hating and eliminating everyone who isn’t like them.

Donald Trump anchored his bid to win a second White House term next week on searing anti-migrant fear at a rally at Madison Square Garden, doubling down on his promise for a massive deportation program on Day 1 to reverse an “immigrant invasion.”

As the ex-president’s allies defend him against Democratic claims he is a “fascist” and an authoritarian in waiting, based in part on warnings by his ex-chief of staff John Kelly, Trump on Sunday delivered a screed that may augur the most extreme presidency in modern history if he beats Democratic nominee Kamala Harris on November 5.

“The United States is an occupied country,” Trump said, as Democrats projected messages on the exterior of the storied New York City arena, reading “Trump is Unhinged” and “Trump praised Hitler.”

The huge rally was billed as the launch of the final stage of Trump’s bid to pull off one of the greatest comebacks in American political history after trying to overturn the result of the last election and leaving office in disgrace in 2021. Before he spoke, some of the ex-president’s top supporters flung race-based and vulgar rhetoric. Former congressional candidate David Rem called Harris the “antichrist” and “the devil,” while others lashed out at Hillary Clinton, “illegals” and homeless people. Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”

This is from Politico. The analysis is by Andrew Howard. “Fallout spreads from racist rhetoric at Trump’s MSG rally. “What you saw last night is a divisive America. That’s race-baiting. It’s all the things that we were doing in the ‘30s and ‘40s,” former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci said Monday.”

Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally Sunday evening was supposed to provide his closing argument against Kamala Harris. Instead, Trump and his supporters are being forced to answer for hateful and racist rhetoric delivered from the podium Sunday night with just eight days left in the campaign.

The comments, while reminiscent of many made by Trump in the campaign’s final weeks, were made by a comedian early in the night’s schedule and were supposed to be jokes. Now, they are dominating the news cycle and putting Trump’s campaign on the backfoot with just under a week until the election.

Longtime Trump adviser Peter Navarro is calling the comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, “the biggest, stupidest asshole that ever came down the comedy pike” after he called Puerto Rico a “floating island of hot garbage” during his often-vulgar opening set.

And Trump’s opponents are using the rally as proof of the former president’s divisiveness, going as far as likening the rhetoric from Sunday’s rally to the sinister 1939 Nazi rally that took place in the same venue.

“My reaction is that was a combination of 1933 Germany, 1939 Madison Square Garden last night,” former Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Monday morning. “What you saw last night is a divisive America. That’s race baiting. It’s all the things that we were doing in the ‘30s and ‘40s.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.), called Sunday night’s event a “hate rally.”

“This was not just a presidential rally, this was not just a campaign rally. I think it’s important for people to understand these are mini January 6 rallies, these are mini Stop the Steal rallies,” she said on “Morning Joe.”

Florida GOP Rep. Byron Donalds blamed the media for the backlash surrounding Sunday’s rally during an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Monday, saying the media is too focused on “fear-mongering” and not “the facts and the substance.”

“So to the New York Daily News, is it a racist rally if you have a Black man from Florida who’s originally from New York speaking at the rally? I don’t think so,” Donalds said. Still, Donalds distanced himself from Hinchcliffe’s comments.

“I didn’t agree with what the comedian said. None of us did,” Donalds said. “When it came out, we were all like, ‘Wait what? Who? Did that get out? No, no, no.’ Nobody agreed with that. Nobody.”

Last night, Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott, up for reelection this year in a state heavily populated with Puerto Ricans, wrote on social media that the “joke bombed for a reason,” and “Puerto Ricans are amazing people and amazing Americans!”

Yet another Floridian, GOP Rep. María Elvira Salazar, was also quick to condemn the comedian. “This rhetoric does not reflect GOP values,” she wrote in a post on X Sunday evening.

Early Monday morning, the Harris campaign was quick to jump in, highlighting headlines in 17 newspapers, eight clips from TV shows, and 29 other statements from politicians, celebrities and journalists.

Famous Puerto Ricans rushed to bolster Harris, including pop-phenom Bad Bunny, along with Jennifer Lopez and Ricky Martin.

Hinchcliffe’s backlash-inducing comments were not limited to Puerto Rico. The comedian also made a crude remark about “carving watermelons” after seeing a Black man in the audience. Another opener, businessman Grant Cardone, likened Harris’ advisers to “pimp handlers.”

And Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who has shaped many of Trump’s immigration policies, said Americans are having their jobs “looted and stolen from them” and sent to foreign countries.

I always turn to Historian Heather Cox Richardson for the final thoughts.

I stand corrected. I thought this year’s October surprise was the reality that Trump’s mental state had slipped so badly he could not campaign in any coherent way.

It turns out that the 2024 October surprise was the Trump campaign’s fascist rally at Madison Square Garden, a rally so extreme that Republicans running for office have been denouncing it all over social media tonight.

There was never any question that this rally was going to be anything but an attempt to inflame Trump’s base. The plan for a rally at Madison Square Garden itself deliberately evoked its predecessor: a Nazi rally at the old Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939. About 18,000 people showed up for that “true Americanism” event, held on a stage that featured a huge portrait of George Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas.

Like that earlier event, Trump’s rally was supposed to demonstrate power and inspire his base to violence.

Apparently in anticipation of the rally, Trump on Friday night replaced his signature blue suit and red tie with the black and gold of the neofascist Proud Boys. That extremist group was central to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and has been rebuilding to support Trump again in 2024.

On Saturday the Trump campaign released a list of 29 people set to be on the stage at the rally. Notably, the list was all MAGA Republicans, including vice presidential nominee Ohio senator J.D. Vance, House speaker Mike Johnson (LA), Representative Elise Stefanik (NY), Representative Byron Donalds (FL), Trump backer Elon Musk, Trump ally Rudy Giuliani, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., right-wing host Tucker Carlson, Trump sons Don Jr. and Eric, and Eric’s wife, Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump.

Libbey Dean of NewsNation noted that none of the seven Republicans running in New York’s competitive House races were on the list. When asked why not, according to Dean, Trump senior advisor Jason Miller said: “The demand, the request for people to speak, is quite extensive.” Asked if the campaign had turned down anyone who asked to speak, Miller said no.

We could see the signs that he knew he probably wouldn’t win the minute Biden backed out. We could taste the panic in the air. We know his campaign is already spending more time in the Court trying to fuck with elections than with the ground game he delegated to Musk, who is out there basically running a personal game show with a million-dollar giveaway for attention.

Marc Elias and his team have been in court for the Harris/Walz campaign, which has been fighting Trump’s legal team that is  “flooding the zone” with lawsuits and election tricks.   #DonOld is clearly not physically or mentally capable of carrying on a campaign that requires giving cogent speeches and long hours. The only thing he excels at is creating chaos.  “Marc Elias, Voting Rights Attorney, joins Nicolle Wallace on Deadline White House with a look at the work that Trump allies and attorneys are doing ahead of the 2024 Election in order to create doubt and confusion which will enable Donald Trump to deny the results of the 2024 Election should he lose again. ”

Here are the arguments for the Ultimate Chaos Agent in the Wallace/Elias interview.

The question is, will creating chaos be enough to bring the Republic and the voting and judicial systems to their knees?  Can he knock out the Constitution, or will We the People knock him out on November 5th.  We need the KO. These things keep me awake at night with my stomach churning and jumping like a kid about to take his ACTs.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?