Lazy Caturday Reads: Everything Is Awful.
Posted: June 27, 2026 Filed under: just because | Tags: 250th Anniversary of Declaration of Independence, cat art, caturday, Confederate flag, DEI, Donald Trump, Great American State Fair, immigration and U.S. economy, Massachusetts, Matt McCarthy, North Carolina, Ohio, surrealism 4 CommentsGood Day!!
Surreal cat art by Matt McCarthy
Note: The surreal giant cats in today’s post are the work of Matt McCarthy.
As I was reading Dakinikat’s post yesterday, I realized how discouraged I have become lately. Everything is just awful. And it doesn’t help that my chronic sciatica has been acting up lately.
Rick Wilson was so right way back in Trump’s first term when he wrote his book, “Everything Trump Touches Dies.” We’re approaching the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It should be a special time for the country, but Trump has taken over the anniversary and made it all about himself. We’ve had to watch him wreck the East Wing of the White House, pave over the rose garden, and hang ugly gold decorations all over the Oval Office. He destroyed the south lawn of the White House for a cage fight that was could only be seen with expensive tickets or on paid TV. On the Fourth of July Trump plans to mark the anniversary itself with a MAGA rally. I just want to cry.
Right now, Trump has something called the Great American State Fair going on. That link goes to a MAGA website. Trump wasn’t satisfied with a bipartisan celebration, so he set up his own organization, Freedom 250. Some commentary on the not-so-great fair:
Farrah Tomazin at The Daily Beast: Trump’s Empty ‘Great State Fair’ Exposed in Damning Photos.
The spectacle on the National Mall in Washington D.C. is ready to receive thousands of visitors. Instead, it is virtually deserted.
Not that there is much to see. Amid the sprawling stretches of open space, there is a 110-foot Freedom 250 ferris wheel and a tacky plywood “Triumph Arch” dominating the center of the grounds, a replica of the monument Trump wants to build near D.C.’s sacred Arlington Cemetery.
There are no corn dogs or funnel cakes. No roller coasters or merry go rounds. And by Friday morning, Pennsylvania became the latest of several Democratic states to declare it was not taking part.
The plan was to have representation from all 50 states. But some had opted out due to the high cost to taxpayers or not being able to secure any businesses to sponsor a booth. Others had chosen not to attend after the supposedly nonpartisan event suddenly seemed political, with Trump himself kicking off the fair with a MAGA rally earlier this week.
The Daily Beast was at the fair in the late afternoon and early evening, hoping to see a flood of people arrive after school and work.
As temperatures climbed, a clump of fairgoers waited under the hot DC sun for a ride on the Freedom 250 Ferris wheel—the festival’s marquee attraction —even as much of the surrounding fairgrounds remained conspicuously quiet.
Elsewhere, a jazz band played to an audience of about 10 people. (Don’t ask about the food: On its first full day, a power shortage hit the food pavilion, resulting in melted ice cream and concerns about spoiled goods.)
The most energetic vibe wasn’t at the Ferris wheel or the live rodeo; it was packed into an evangelical Christian tent, singing and dancing to a worship band, present despite some rather famous lines in the Constitution about church and state.
You can check out the photos at the link. I was going to put some in this post, but I decided to stick with cats, because at least they don’t make me feel sad and hopeless.
You can see more photos at The Atlantic in this piece (gift link) by Kelsey Ables, photos by Lawren Simmons: The Great American State Fair Isn’t Very Great.
The U.S. capital has been outfitted of late with visual trappings that many associate with authoritarianism, such as banners depicting Donald Trump’s face and featuring his slogans. So perhaps it was only a matter of time before the president erected his own Potemkin village: the Great American State Fair, where almost nothing is what it pretends to be.
Stretching across a large swath of the National Mall, the fair has dozens of pavilions for 56 states and territories and numerous executive-branch departments, in addition to a Ferris wheel, a rodeo, and other displays from companies and organizations, many of them Trump-aligned. It’s advertised by Freedom 250, the White House–created group behind many semiquincentennial events, as a “world-class exposition and modern-day World’s Fair.”
By Matt McCarthy
For a president enamored with the gilded and the grand, the exterior of this fair is surprisingly austere. Trompe l’oeil sheets cover slapdash structures lining both sides of the Mall with an illustration of architecture that is supposed to be beaux arts but is so stripped down that it makes the nearby brutalist buildings look practically baroque. A boxy model of Trump’s proposed triumphal arch in the center of the Mall appears as if it could have been designed in Minecraft and ordered from CVS for same-day pickup.
Perhaps because of this aesthetic of illusions, the earnest state pride evident in some of the pavilions turns out to feel especially delightful. Consider: the Science Museum Oklahoma’s president going on about how hers is “the most surprising state you’ll ever experience,” or the Ohioan dispensing with midwestern cheer state-shaped tattoos and tokens for free Frosties through the end of the year. Here and there, the big, proud personalities of the states shine through (see: Idaho’s potato-sack dress). Together, they nearly instill an appreciation for this eclectic batch of states that have united into a country. But like any sense of patriotism these days, it’s complicated just as quickly. Right as I was about to crack open a bag of potato chips from Michigan, with “Take Me Home, Country Roads” stuck in my head from a karaoke video game in the West Virginia booth, I wandered into the State Department pavilion, where I was offered a paper replica of the limited-edition Trump passport.
In a certain sense, the Great American State Fair bottles the central tension of federalism: a push and pull between irrepressible state personalities and the federal government. But it’s also not that academic. Put simply, the president is bringing down the mood.
Boy, you can say that again. “The president is bringing down the mood.” He ruins everything.
None of the New England States contributed to the exhibits, but a few individuals showed up. From The Boston Globe: We checked out Trump’s Great American State Fair. It is, and isn’t, what you’d think.
Down the lush green grass of the National Mall, past the 110-foot Ferris wheel and the scaled-down reproduction of President Trump’s proposed Triumphal Arch, the Massachusetts booth at the Great American State Fair was essentially a do-it-yourself project.
Its singular attraction? Maple syrup.
That was one of the oddities of the 16-day extravaganza, which began on Thursday, to mark the nation’s 250th birthday. Perhaps fittingly for America in 2026, it opened with a mix of the wholesome, the partisan, and the just plain bizarre.
The fair is a production of Freedom 250, the organization launched by Trump last year to give the type of MAGA-spin on the semiquincentennial festivities — think the White House UFC fight — that the bipartisan,congressionally created America 250 organization would not.
The event, Trump’s brainchild, assigns each of the 56 US states and territories a booth among more than 150 exhibits that “showcase the very best of America.” He kicked it off with a rally Wednesday night. And as people began visiting the Greco-Roman-style pavilions, the sprawling exposition reflected America’s Tilt-A-Whirl politics as it celebrates a milestone anniversary.
Despite the region’s pivotal role in the American Revolution, New England was largely a fair draft-dodger. Five of the six state governments declined to participate in what Democrats dismissed as a Trump-centric carnival. Nationwide, a few other states also skipped it.
After Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey balked at the price tag — she estimated hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund it — a 72-year-old Trump supporter from Greenfield, Mass., took matters into her own hands.
“I was upset about it,” the woman, who declined to give her name out of fear of political repercussions, told the Globe as she manned the Massachusetts booth Thursday morning. “Why have an empty spot when they come in? They see nobody, nothing.”
Instead, they saw maple syrup.
It might not be the first thing that comes to mind when people think of Massachusetts, but the state has more than 300 producers, so she reached out to some near her town. Winston’s Sugar House in Shelburne Falls answered the call, donating tiny bottles.
As fairgoers started trickling in Thursday morning, the bottles were arranged on two tables along with brochures about the state’s maple syrup industry and otherother Massachusetts pamphlets in front of the unique backdrop the fair organizers created for every state and territory.
Within minutes, the bottles started disappearing as fairgoers grabbed for the freebies.
But at least Massachusetts had a display — a fact many visitors noted. A few doors down, empty chairs, potted plants, and collage-style backdrops were all that greeted visitors eager to see the offerings of Rhode Island, Maine, Vermont, or Connecticut.
Kevin M. Levin writes at Substack: Of Course a Confederate Flag Showed Up at the Great American State Fair.
Nobody who has been paying attention to the Trump administration’s handling of America’s 250th anniversary should be surprised that a Confederate flag turned up at the Great American State Fair on the National Mall. It was discovered at the North Carolina booth and in its own small way tells you everything you need to know about this whole production.
By Matt McCarthy
The controversy erupted after footage circulated showing the North Carolina exhibit featuring altered versions of the state flag with the Confederate battle emblem superimposed over the design. Governor Josh Stein’s office condemned the display, calling it a misrepresentation of North Carolina and demanding that organizers remove it.
The flag was pulled. Problem solved, in the narrowest possible sense.
But the details here matter. North Carolina’s official state flag has never included the Confederate battle symbol in any version of its design. Not in 1861, not in 1885, not ever.
Whoever put together that video display didn’t just stumble into Lost Cause territory by accident. They had to go out of their way to attach a symbol that the state itself had never chosen to fly.
As historian Stephen Jackson noted, unlike former flags from Georgia and Mississippi, the official flag of North Carolina has never incorporated the Confederate battle flag in its design. The alteration wasn’t heritage. It was invention.
Corporate sponsor Mt. Olive Pickle Company withdrew from the exhibit after learning about the display, saying the company stands on values of human dignity, opportunity, and freedom.
They’d better watch out. Trump doesn’t like anything that smacks of “DEI.” Remember, it’s white people who discriminated against in Trump world. A bit more:
The episode is a concentrated version of the sloppiness that has defined this event from the start. At least ten states declined to send official delegations. Oregon Governor Tina Kotek’s office was explicit about why her state withdrew, citing the cost of participating and growing concerns that the event was shaping up to be a more partisan affair than originally presented.
When you’re trying to celebrate the birth of the nation and you can’t get half the nation’s states to show up, something has gone wrong at the planning stage.
By Matt McCarthy
The fair itself has drawn criticism for its cheap and shoddy appearance. The Washington Post’s Philip Kennicott offered this review:
America’s 250th might have been celebrated with a genuine festival of state fairs, or a 21st century version of the national and international expositions of art and science that were popular in the 19th century. The Trump administration could have let the Smithsonian stage a giant festival of American folkways, music, dance, art, craft and food. It could have defaulted to something like a theme park, which would at least have produced a seamless illusionism and a facsimile of the same folkways that are absent in the Trump show.
And it might have given the states the time, funding and freedom to create their own pavilions, representative of the magnificent diversity of this country’s architecture and design. Instead, everything is stuffed into a fake agora with Doric columns and arched niches painted onto cheap theatrical flats, which look like someone scaled up the photo murals found in a tatty Greek diner that sells gyros, moussaka and heart-bomb platters of pastitsio.
Growing up in Atlantic City in the 1980s, I watched Donald Trump build his casinos into monuments of gaudy spectacle, none more so than the Taj Mahal. The man has always had a gift for making expensive things look tacky and tacky things look expensive, sometimes simultaneously.
Read the rest at the link.
Dakinikat wrote yesterday about the horrible Supreme Court decision to allow Trump to end temporary protected status for Haitians and Syrians in the US. This is a disaster for these immigrants and for the economy. It will expose as many as a million asylum-seekers to arrest and deportation. Most of these people have established homes, jobs, and lives here; and if they are sent back home, they could even be killed.
NBC News on Wednesday: Supreme Court allows Trump to remove protections from thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants.
The Supreme Court cleared the way Thursday for the Trump administration to remove legal protections from thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants in the United States, meaning they could be subject to deportation.
The court, on a 6-3 vote on ideological lines, ruled in favor of the administration, which asked to continue with its plan to strip Temporary Protected Status from about 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians.
The ruling could also boost the administration’s efforts to remove similar protections from people from other countries as part of President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration policy.
Writing for the majority, conservative Justice Samuel Alito said that judges overstepped their authority in second-guessing the administration’s decisions. The court also rejected a claim that the decision to remove protections for Haitians was discriminatory.
By Matt McCarthy
The law in question “expressly restricts” courts from reviewing determinations made by the Department of Homeland Security on whether to terminate or extend TPS protections, he added.
As for the claims of discrimination against Haitians, Alito said the statements cited by plaintiffs were not “overtly racial” and were “insufficient to show that the termination of Haiti’s TPS designation was based on the race of the Haitian people.”
In dissent, liberal Justice Elena Kagan accused the majority of soft-pedaling Trump’s comments about Haitians.
“The statements fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the president’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country,” she wrote.
Kagan extensively quoted Trump himself, including his 2018 statement that Haiti is a “shithole country” and comments he made during the 2024 election baselessly claiming that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s pets.
Without protected status, affected people are subject to deportation via the normal legal process. But they can seek other avenues to remain in the U.S. by, for example, claiming asylum.
This is going to cause serious problems here in Massachusetts, where many Haitian immigrants have settled and hold important jobs. And they are vitally important to the economy. A recent study found that Massachusetts needs 60,000 new immigrants every year to “sustain the work force.”
The Boston Globe: Supreme Court ruling could leave thousands in Massachusetts vulnerable to ICE arrests.
Thousands of immigrants in Massachusetts will likely be at risk of being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement following a Supreme Court ruling that paves the way for the Trump administration to revoke the legal status of approximately 330,000 Haitians and Syrians across the country.
“A lot of people are going to be in an extremely vulnerable position as a result of this,” said Kerry Doyle, a former legal adviser for ICE under the Biden administration who now practices immigration law in Massachusetts.
Massachusetts politicians and activists this week promised to fight to pass federal legislation extending the TPS program, and legal advocates said they would work to help those who lose their status find ways through the immigration court system to remain here legally.
“We will continue to use every tool, every legal tool to protect and defend the immigrant communities in Massachusetts and across the Greater Boston area,” said Iván Espinoza-Madrigal, the executive director of Lawyers for Civil Rights, at a demonstration outside the State House Thursday.
For those affected by the decision, however, the immediate situation looked grim. Geralde Gabeau, the executive director of the Mattapan-based Immigrant Family Services Institute, perhaps the most prominent group serving Haitians in Massachusetts, was somber when she spoke to advocates and reporters at the State House. She recounted a story from a local teacher whose student asked if she would take the child home in case their parents were deported.
“This is not acceptable,” Gabeau said. “We have seen a lot of bad, terrible news coming from the Supreme Court. This is going too far.”
By Matt McCarthy
Remember Springfield, Ohio, the town where JD Vance claimed immigrants were eating cats and dogs? The town had deliberately invited Haitian immigrant to come there to live and work. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine is not happy.
WBNS10: DeWine calls policy to remove Springfield’s Haitian immigrants a ‘mistake’ after SCOTUS ruling.
The governor said changing the immigration status of Haitian immigrants under TPS is not in the best interest of the United States or Ohio.
Gov. Mike DeWine, an outspoken supporter of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, called the policy to remove them a mistake after the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to end legal protection for migrants fleeing violence and natural disaster in Haiti and Syria.
The 6-3 decision overturns lower court orders and allows the Department of Homeland Security to swiftly end temporary protected status, a program that protects a total of 1.3 million people from 17 countries.
DeWine said Thursday’s ruling means that the over 10,000 Haitians legally living in Ohio, mostly in the Springfield area, will now be in the country illegally. They will be subjected to immediate deportation. He added that it will now be illegal to employ them.
“The situation in Haiti could hardly be much worse. The violent gangs run most of the country. The government barely functions. And, the economy is in shambles,” DeWine said.
In his statement, DeWine pointed to the federal government’s own advisory against traveling to Haiti.
“Our Federal Aviation Administration prohibits U.S. carriers from flying there because of the danger to planes of being shot at by the gangs,” DeWine said. “But, more importantly, changing the immigration status of these individuals is not in the best interest of the United States nor Ohio.”
Read more at the link. Trump and his handpicked justices are ruining our country.
One more disturbing story from NBC News: Pete Buttigieg targeted by ‘false report’ to authorities involving his 4-year-old twins.
Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Friday that he and his family in Michigan were targeted by a “false report” to state authorities claiming he was a danger to his 4-year-old twins.
By Matt McCarthy
Michigan State Police confirmed in a statement that they had received an anonymous report regarding Buttigieg. State police and Child Protective Services then responded and “determined the report was false,” the statement said.
Buttigieg, a Cabinet official in the Biden administration and a potential 2028 presidential candidate, wrote in a Substack post that a police officer and Child Protective Services worker appeared at his home “a few days ago” following an allegation that had been made against him involving his children.
He said his children were removed from the home he shares with his husband, Chasten, before the twins went through separate forensic interviews the next morning. Buttigieg said he was then interviewed as part of the investigation.
During that interview, Buttigieg said, an officer told him that an anonymous caller had reported him to CPS, with the caller saying “that he had spoken to a woman who claimed to have met me at a conference several years ago in Alabama, where she said I told her that I had committed unspeakable violent crimes, and the caller believed my children were still at risk.”
Buttigieg said he told the officer he had never been to the town in Alabama.
“Then the officer made clear that he believed this was politically motivated, and said it would not be referred to a prosecutor,” Buttigieg wrote. “Nothing in the forensic interview with the children, which was conducted by trained personnel, had led to concerns.”
Buttigieg said he was apart from his children for 24 hours.
That is horrible. I can’t believe those poor kids had to go through forensic interviews.
Sorry this post is so depressing, but that’s the state of our country today. If you have something positive to share, please do so in the comment thread. I’d be very grateful.
Tuesday Reads: The News Is Surreal
Posted: October 19, 2021 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Bill Cassidy, Capitol insurrection, Colin Powell, Donald Trump, January 6 Committee, rape, Steve Bannon, surrealism, violence against women 11 Comments
Bridget Bate Tichenor, Untitled
Good Morning!!
Today the House January 6 Committee will vote to find Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress, and Trump has of course filed a lawsuit to prevent them getting documents related to his attempted coup. The Washington Post reports:
On the Bannon contempt vote:
Bannon was a private citizen when he spoke to Trump ahead of the attack, the committee said, and Trump has not asserted any such executive privilege claims to the panel itself.
Koga Harue Umi, The Sea, 1929
“Mr. Bannon appears to have played a multi-faceted role in the events of January 6th, and the American people are entitled to hear his first-hand testimony regarding his actions,” the committee wrote in the resolution.
The resolution lists many ways in which Bannon was involved in the leadup to the insurrection, including reports that he encouraged Trump to focus on Jan. 6, the day Congress certified the presidential vote, and his comments on Jan. 5 that “all hell is going to break loose” the next day.
Once the committee votes on the Bannon contempt measure, it will go to the full House for a vote and then on to the Justice Department, which would decide whether to prosecute.
Trump has also found time to weigh in on Colin Powell’s death. The Hill: Trump criticizes media for treating Powell ‘beautifully’ in death.
Former President Trump lambasted the media on Tuesday for what he said was too-favorable coverage of former Secretary of State Colin Powell after his death on Monday.
“Wonderful to see Colin Powell, who made big mistakes on Iraq and famously, so-called weapons of mass destruction, be treated in death so beautifully by the Fake News Media. Hope that happens to me someday,” Trump said in a statement.
Trump called Powell “a classic RINO,” an acronym for “Republican in name only.”
“He made plenty of mistakes, but anyway, may he rest in peace!” Trump added.
Classy.
Trump also attacked Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy. The Hill: Trump goes after Cassidy after senator says he wouldn’t support him for president in 2024.
Former President Trump blasted Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) on Monday after the senator said in an interview he would not vote for the real estate mogul if he ran for president again in 2024.
Cassidy during an interview that aired Sunday on “Axios on HBO” said that he did not believe Trump would be the GOP presidential nominee again.
“President Trump is the first president, in the Republican side at least, to lose the House, the Senate and the presidency in four years. Elections are about winning,” Cassidy told Axios’s Mike Allen….
In a statement on Monday, Trump called Cassidy a “RINO,” an acronym for “Republican in name only,” and reiterated a notion he had hoisted on other Republicans that Cassidy had “begged” for his endorsement in 2020 “and used it all over the place to win re-election.”
Eugenio Granell The Pi Birds Night Flight
“Now, Wacky Bill Cassidy can’t walk down the street in Louisiana, a State I won by almost 20 points,” the Trump statement read. “He could not even be elected dog catcher today, the great people curse him.”
Trump did defeat President Biden by nearly 20 points in 2020 in Louisiana, winning about 58.5 percent of the vote. Cassidy did even better, winning 59.3 percent of the vote.
“Wacky Bill is a totally ineffective Senator, but Louisiana does have a great Senator in John Kennedy,” Trump said, referring to the state’s other GOP senator, whom he endorsed over the summer soon after Kennedy indicated he would run for reelection.
Cassidy was among the seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump for inciting an insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, though Trump was ultimately acquitted after leaving office later that month.
It’s still very difficult for me to believe that this moron was actually president.
According to historians Thomas Lecaque and J.L. Tomlin at The Bulwark, Bannon is setting the stage for another insurrection: Steve Bannon Out in the Open. The erstwhile Trump adviser is refusing to talk to the Jan. 6 committee, but most of his energetic anti-democratic activities are in plain sight.
…Bannon’s troubling activities did not stop after January 6. Far from it. He is still out in the streets, at rallies, on conference calls, and on his podcast trumpeting it to the heavens: The insurrection isn’t over, it’s only just begun.
On September 22, the day before the committee issued its subpoena, Bannon more or less confirmed his involvement with January 6th. He has continued to push the idea that the Biden administration is illegitimate—“We told you from the very beginning, just expose it, just expose it, never back down, never give up and this thing will implode”—and said that he wanted to help “kill this [Biden] administration in the crib.”
Bannon is neither hiding nor defensively trying to justify his past actions. Rather, he is continuing to push the Big Lie and all of its permutations, tying together a web of far-right ideas and allies. Like most good propagandists, he knows that the veil between fact and belief is very thin in a highly partisan political environment. What pushes an overt lie into semi-gospel is sometimes merely it’s repetition. Bannon’s podcast, “War Room,” continues to promote conspiracy theories about the 2020 election—the day after his subpoena running a segment titled “50k Illegal Ballots in One County Alone.” His guests have included Trumpist members of Congress, like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene; conspiracy theorists Jack Posobiec and Mike Lindell; anti-vaxers; and other subpoenaed Trump administration figures. Topics run the gamut from the border to the debt ceiling to “how schools are indoctrinating kids” to “the battle of Lepanto” (sure to appeal to far-right Crusade-cosplaying insurrectionists and mass murderers alike). Perhaps most provokingly given his subpoena defiance, an episode on October 13 was entitled “The Continued Search for the Truth of January 6th.”
f Bannon were only a podcaster, were only pushing his ideas on one of the many far-right channels that have popped up in the last half-decade, that would be bad enough. But Bannon is incredibly active in person as well—a natural organizer and demagogue. It’s worth taking a look at just three of the events at which he has recently spoken.
Read all the details at the link.
Skunder Boghossian, Night Flight of Dread and Delight
At the Washington Post, authoritarianism expert Brian Klaas wrote about the history of election audits: Opinion: Republican ‘election audits’ have been used before — by dictators.
Surreal Caturday Reads: Insane Conspiracy Theories and Cats
Posted: May 16, 2020 Filed under: Surreality | Tags: cat art, conspiracy theories, Donald Trump, surrealism, surrealistic cats 39 Comments
Topiary Cat at home evening, created by Richard Saunders
Good Morning!!
Our so-called “president” is a malignant narcissist with rapidly advancing dementia and we’re in a losing battle with a pandemic that the “president” has decided not to deal with at all. Instead he has been trying gin up outrage among his cult followers by claiming a vast conspiracy against him led by former president Obama. He began his morning by rage-tweeting about another supposed conspiracy against him by multiple social media sites–based on claims by right wing nut Michelle Malkin.
I highly recommend exploring The Atlantic magazine’s “Shadowland” project, which explores current and past conspiracy theories and their impact on American and world history. I’ve posted a couple their articles recently. We are going to need to understand this kind of conspiracy thinking as we get closer to the 2020 presidential election. Some background: “Shadowland”: A New Project From The Atlantic on the Power and Danger of Conspiracy.
Conspiracy thinking has shaped the world for centuries, destroying great institutions, eradicating knowledge, endangering democracies, and ending lives. These theories threaten not just individual facts, but the idea that empirical truth exists at all. And now, with a president of the United States who advances conspiracy thinking about a pandemic that has led to 82,000 reported deaths in America, it becomes an existential threat.
In an effort to better understand how we got here, and how we might find a way out, The Atlantic today launches “Shadowland,” an exploration of how conspiracy theories have shaped America, and why they are more powerful, and dangerous, now than ever.
Leonora Carrington’s Self Portrait (1938)
Shadowland takes you down the rabbit hole through an interactive project portal, built with the mobile reader in mind; the product and visuals are central to the storytelling. It represents some of the most ambitious work of the year, even as The Atlantic continues to apply the full weight of its newsroom to cover the biggest stories of our age: the global pandemic, the Trump presidency, and the spread of illiberalism across the planet.
The project debuts with “The Prophecies of Q,” executive editor Adrienne LaFrance’s cover story on QAnon for The Atlantic’s June issue. With its legions of followers, fabrications about the coronavirus, and dark predictions about the “deep state,” QAnon’s power—and the rejection of reality it represents—only grows. LaFrance warns that QAnon “is a movement united in mass rejection of reason, objectivity, and other Enlightenment values. And we are likely closer to the beginning of its story than the end … To look at QAnon is to see not just a conspiracy theory but the birth of a new religion.”
Read the rest at The Atlantic link.
Susan Glasser on “Obamagate”: “Obamagate” Is Niche Programming for Trump Superfans.
Donald Trump will not shut up about Barack Obama—not now, not ever. On Thursday morning, amid the gravest economic crisis in a century and a deadly pandemic that will have killed more than a hundred thousand Americans by the end of this month, Trump yet again accused his predecessor of culpability in “the biggest political crime and scandal in the history of the USA.” Obama, he said, should be hauled before the Senate to testify. “He knew EVERYTHING,” Trump added in his tweet, one of dozens of attacks in the past few days in which he has targeted “Obamagate.” What crime, exactly, was Trump accusing Obama of? What should he testify about? Trump never said, and it’s a safe bet that he never will.
Field of Dreams – Heidi Taillefer #Surreal #Cat
On Monday afternoon, at a press conference on the White House lawn, Trump made that clear, in a memorable exchange with Phil Rucker, of the Washington Post, that echoed the paranoid fulminations of Trump’s hero Joseph McCarthy at his worst. “What crime, exactly, are you accusing President Obama of committing?” Rucker asked. “Obamagate,” Trump replied. “It’s been going on for a long time,” he added, without offering specifics. “What is the crime, exactly, that you’re accusing him of?” Rucker asked again. “You know what the crime is,” Trump answered. “The crime is very obvious to everybody.” Days later, that is still where we are: Trump is accusing Obama of a grave crime but refusing even to say what Obama allegedly did, while repeating over and over that the former President is guilty of something, a technique of political agitprop that recalls not only McCarthy but every wannabe dictator for whom the rule of law has little or nothing to do with accusations of illegality.
Perhaps, to Trump and his defenders, “Obamagate” really is such a known commodity that defining it is superfluous, even if it is not at all obvious to those who don’t populate Trump’s alternate reality of conspiracy theories and outright lies, a world in which Obama figures as a regular and sinister presence. This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that the gap between partisan truths in Washington is so wide it’s practically a vortex. In many ways, the “Obamagate” exchange on Monday reminded me of the first day of the public impeachment hearings last fall in the House Intelligence Committee, in which Democrats spent hours outlining what they knew of the Trump Ukraine-shakedown scheme that had triggered the impeachment proceedings, while Devin Nunes, the Republican ranking member, offered up an array of little-known intrigues that seemed entirely unrelated to the matter at hand, including an alleged plot to “obtain nude pictures of Trump,” which, he said, was part of a “three-year-long operation” by Democrats, “the corrupt media,” and “partisan bureaucrats to overturn the results of the 2016 election.” I remember thinking: Naked pictures? What was he even talking about? It appeared to have something to do with a 2017 phone call to Representative Adam Schiff from two Russian pranksters claiming to represent the Ukrainian government and offering nude pictures of Trump with a Russian celebrity. Or something. If you had been following along with Fox News and the darker corners of the right, you knew exactly what Nunes was talking about.
Read the rest at The New Yorker
Andre Ferez, Russian artist
The New York Times on Trump’s latest crazy obsessions: A Sitting President, Riling the Nation During a Crisis.
Even by President Trump’s standards, it was a rampage: He attacked a government whistle-blower who was telling Congress that the coronavirus pandemic had been mismanaged. He criticized the governor of Pennsylvania, who has resisted reopening businesses. He railed against former President Barack Obama, linking him to a conspiracy theory and demanding he answer questions before the Senate about the federal investigation of Michael T. Flynn.
And Mr. Trump lashed out at Joseph R. Biden Jr., his Democratic challenger. In an interview with a sympathetic columnist, Mr. Trump smeared him as a doddering candidate who “doesn’t know he’s alive.” The caustic attack coincided with a barrage of digital ads from Mr. Trump’s campaign mocking Mr. Biden for verbal miscues and implying that he is in mental decline.
That was all on Thursday.
Far from a one-day onslaught, it was a climactic moment in a weeklong lurch by Mr. Trump back to the darkest tactics that defined his rise to political power. Even those who have grown used to Mr. Trump’s conduct in office may have found themselves newly alarmed by the grim spectacle of a sitting president deliberately stoking the country’s divisions and pursuing personal vendettas in the midst of a crisis that has Americans fearing for their lives and livelihoods.
A bit more:
Since well before he became president, Mr. Trump’s appetite for conflict has defined him as a public figure. But in recent days he has practiced that approach with new intensity, signaling both the depths of his election-year distress and his determination to blast open a path to a second term, even at the cost of further riling a country in deep anguish.
Rene Magritte, Cat in a Hat
His electoral path has narrowed rapidly since the onset of the pandemic, as the growth-and-prosperity theme of his campaign disintegrated. In private, Mr. Trump has been plainly aggrieved at the loss of his central argument for re-election. “They wiped out my economy!” he has said to aides, according to people briefed on the remarks.
It is unclear whether he has been referring to China, where the virus originated, or health experts who have urged widespread lockdowns, but his frustration and determination to place blame elsewhere have been emphatic.
Ken Goldstein, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco, said that Mr. Trump and his campaign were going on the offensive in nasty ways in an attempt to shift the attention of the public away from him and onto other targets, and ultimately onto Mr. Biden.
“If this election is about Trump, he probably loses,” Mr. Goldstein said. “Trump’s only hope is to make the election about Biden.”
Jack Shafer argues at Politico that we should ignore the idiot “president”: How Not to Listen to Donald Trump.
It turns out President Donald Trump’s status as the most accessible person to ever hold the office is more a curse than a blessing. Day after day, he fills the air with the ack-ack of disinformation and misdirection, needlessly alarming the public and sending reporters on wild goose chases to either confirm or disprove his allegations. On Thursday, in an interview with Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo, Trump repeated his newest figment that Joe Biden and Barack Obama are guilty of some unnamed crimes for which they are deserving of “50-year sentences.”
Strong meat! The heinous crimes—to which he has applied the “Obamagate” moniker and calls “the biggest political crime and scandal in the history of the USA, by FAR”—is a relatively new creation of the Trump Disinformation Laboratory. He only started talking about it on May 10 and has yet to specify exactly what Obamagate is aside from telling reporters in a press conference that it’s “obvious” and that he wants Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., to investigate it.
By Daniel Merriam
Despite a lack of interest from his minions in Congress (Graham has said he has no plans to grill Obama), Trump’s foggy demagoguery has mobilized the entire press corps to determine what the hell Trump is talking about. Explainers from Reuters, the Washington Post, the Guardian, CNN, and elsewhere struggle to decipher Trump’s vague but strident accusations with little success. We can say this much with certainty. It appears linked to the counterintelligence operation against Gen. Michael Flynn in late 2016, and the requests from Obama administration officials that his identity be “unmasked” from intelligence reports so they could understand who, exactly, was talking to the Russian ambassador. Flynn lied to the FBI about speaking to the ambassador about sanctions and later pled guilty to lying to the FBI about those conversations. (Unmasking, by the way, is a routine, not nefarious thing, which the Trump administration has requested thousands of times.) But until Trump uses his words to make his charges about Obama more specific, we can only guess at what the actual crime might be.
Why must we fetch every bone that Trump hurls into the high, prickly brush? Well, he’s the president, and he wouldn’t make such an extreme charge if it weren’t true, would he? But he does, and he does all the time. This tidy list from Business Insider demonstrates his historic capacity for making baseless but grotesque claims of criminality and deception: implicating Ted Cruz’s father in the Kennedy assassination; claiming that Obama wasn’t born in the United States; surmising that Justice Antonin Scalia did not die of natural causes; accusing Joe Scarborough of complicity in the death of an intern; asserting massive voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election; saying windmills cause cancer; connecting the Clintons to Jeffrey Epstein’s death; and the Bidens-in-Ukraine baloney.
I’m not sure ignoring Trump’s insanity will work as long as he has rabid support from around 40 percent of the electorate (who knew there were so many idiots in the U.S.?). I tend to agree with The Atlantic’s point of view–we need to become more aware of the programming these Americans are receiving from Trump and his friends in the media and on-line forums.
What do you think? What other stories are you following today?
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