Category: FYI

Propaganda is a funny business. It is not just rhetoric, the art of persuasive speech and writing. It is a mass media affair attempting to influence mass opinion.

We just witnessed the latest variant from the Democrats and major media (but, as the joke goes, we repeat ourselves). The term the propagandists fixated upon was “weird.”

For a week, we heard it everywhere. “Republicans are weird.” “J. D. Vance’s speech was weird.” “They’re just plain weird.”

But social media being what it is, the mass media campaign to characterize the Democrats’ opponents as “weird” was noticed and instantly mocked in multiple venues.

Conservative podcaster Matt Walsh offered his 1412th episode, “Weird Democrats Think The Nuclear Family Is Weird,” making the most common point: folks who advance the outré in sex and culture have no business calling other people weird. Walsh also focuses in on Senator Manchin’s participation in viral talking point, noting that Machin is calling weird Vance’s discussion of the collapse of the family in America. Manchin’s belittling of this topic as “weird” is not even plausible: of course the topic is worth discussing! “This is what it looks like when a talking point unravels.”

Kat Tenbarge covered this yesterday in “Democrats made ‘weird’ an effective weapon, and then Republicans turned it on LGBTQ people,” which the publisher NBC blurbed “‘Weird’ has quickly become one of the most effective political attacks on the internet.” The reader can judge whether “weird” was indeed, an effective, rather than defective, attack.

The use of “weird” by Democrats appears to have come from a July 23 appearance by Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

“We do not like what has happened, when you can’t even go to Thanksgiving dinner with your uncle because you end up in some weird fight that is unnecessary,” Walz, who is in contention to be Harris’ vice presidential pick, said. “Well, it’s true. These guys are just weird.”

The quote was sandwiched in between criticisms of former President Donald Trump and his vice presidential nominee JD Vance, who Walz asserted knows “nothing” about “small-​town America.” Walz’s criticism hinged on the right’s focus on culture wars, including its negative characterizations of women without children, its book-​banning efforts and sowing division.

The idea that this spread in a normal viral fashion is probably a stretch though. Memos go out. Ideas are pushed and talking heads on TV are given orders. They have been caught many times, and comedian Dave Smith, in his commentary on the “weird” meme, discussed his own experience catching left-​liberal Democrat commentators and how the biz word — and why they readily conform to the narrowcast of talking point memos.

To innocents who expect people to speak their own minds, the idea of a mass propaganda campaign may be … too weird to accept. “Psychological operations” do not happen. This is just the free flow of ideas!

Well, some ideas just freely flow. But many of the most seemingly viral are indeed coordinated campaigns. And “weird” was (most likely) one.

It probably did not win, though. It was merely the word of the week. Another desperate and mostly ineffective attempt to influence mass opinion.

Or so we can hope.

• “Democrats are staging a coup by the elite’s elite,” by J. T. Young — ‘As party brass scramble to oust President Biden, America is witnessing an attempted coup by the elite’s elite. Gone is any pretext that this is the “demos” or the people, governing. Today’s Democratic Party is about the aristocracy ruling.’
• “Why Are There So Few Assassinations?” by Richard Hanania — ‘The era from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century was a kind of golden age of political assassinations. Over a twenty-​year period, the political leaders or reigning monarchs of the US, France, Russia, Italy, and Spain were all murdered. … And then things just stopped. Other eras would see isolated political assassinations, but the period from 1881 to 1914 was like nothing that happened before or since. It might seem natural to ask what went wrong during this one period in history. But given what we know about the world, I think the better question is why there have been so few political assassinations in other eras.’
• “Donald Trump Assassination Attempt: 2023 Television Ad Features 20-​Year-​Old Shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks,” with video — ‘Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-​year-​old shooter who tried assassinating former US President Donald Trump at his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on Sunday was allegedly featured in a BlackRock advertisement in 2023.’
• “5 lessons from working at a homeless shelter,” by Ed Latimore — ‘I watched about 500 homeless people get processed.… Most of them were guys who’d done 5 – 10+ years in prison, and their friends/​family moved on. Since they’re convicted felons, the criminal justice system makes it virtually impossible for them to get work.’
• “The Temu App Is Like the TikTok App,” by Scribbler — ‘The app for China-​based TikTok isn’t the only one to avoid if you worry about cybersecurity and whether any of your personal data might end up on the servers of the Chinese Communist Party.… Any app made by a company based in China and thus answerable to the party-​state is suspect.’

“Justice Sotomayor’s dissent was one of the most impressive pieces of progressive quackery ever produced by SCOTUS,” tweeted historian Brion McClanahan.

Jonah Goldberg, on the other hand, wrote that “I think that while Sotomayor’s dissent is a bit over the top, her concerns are more well-​founded than I would have thought.” But a day later he took it back: “Having read more, and having talked to a half dozen legal beagles I trust, I’m less dismayed than I was yesterday. I do think the ‘Absolute Immunity’ stuff is unnecessary. I also think ACB’s concurrence is better than Roberts’ opinion.”

They were discussing the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. the United States.

“The chief justice insisted that the president ‘is not above the law,’” explains the Associated Press. “‘But in a fiery dissent for the court’s three liberals,’ Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, ‘In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.’

Reading from her opinion in the courtroom, Sotomayor said, “Because our Constitution does not shield a former president from answering for criminal and treasonous acts, I dissent.” Sotomayor said the decision “makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of government, that no man is above the law.”

The protection afforded presidents by the court, she said, “is just as bad as it sounds, and it is baseless.”

Sotomayor’s case against an imperial, unaccountable president seems quite reasonable at first blush, but Glenn Greenwald devoted a huge chunk of an episode of his System Update (Rumble) to mocking it. 

“The narrative that we were fed” about the Trump v; U.S. ruling and the doctrine of presidential immunity generally, Greenwald said, “was an absolute fairy tale about American history and political life. To listen to Democrats and their media allies tell it, you would think that presidents have a long history in the United States of being criminally accountable for the illegal acts they undertook in office; that it has always been the case that presidents enjoy no immunity that any other citizen of the United States doesn’t enjoy; and that all of a sudden, out of the blue, a conservative, fanatical court driven by ideological and political considerations to protect Donald Trump, invented out of whole cloth some kind of new immunity that never previously existed.” 

Greenwald, who has been fighting the notions of executive immunity for decades now, in his journalistic work, expressed his incredulity over the Sotomayor reaction, and reaction of most media Democrats. They seem to be burying their past commitments to a notion they now say they find abhorrent.

But Greenwald does not call Sotomayor’s dissent “progressive quackery,” though.

The blurb explains the title:

Joe Biden’s new tariffs on Chinese goods mark the decisive rejection of an economic orthodoxy that dominated American policy making for nearly half a century.

Rogé Karma, “Reaganomics Is on Its Last Legs,” The Atlantic, May 18, 2024.

The article explains the bipartisanship of the new economic policy:

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden announced plans to impose steep new tariffs on certain products made in China, including a 100 percent tariff on electric cars. With that, he escalated a policy begun during the Trump administration, and marked the decisive rejection of an economic orthodoxy that had dominated American policy making for nearly half a century. The leaders of both major parties have now turned away from unfettered free trade, a fact that would have been unimaginable less than a decade ago.

And that bipartisan nature is made exceedingly clear:

A president announcing a new policy does not mean that the political consensus has shifted. The proof that we are living in a new era comes instead from the reaction in Washington. Congressional Democrats, many of whom vocally opposed Trump’s tariffs, have been almost universally supportive of the increases, while Republicans have been largely silent about them. Rather than attacking the tariffs, Trump claimed credit for them, telling a crowd in New Jersey that “Biden finally listened to me,” and declaring that he, Trump, would raise tariffs to 200 percent. Most of the criticism from either side of the aisle has come from those arguing that Biden either took too long to raise tariffs or didn’t go far enough.

Mr. Karma explains how this trend is not insignificant, not a blip in the winds of policy change:

The shift on trade is part of a broader realignment that Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has aspirationally called the “new Washington consensus.” What unites Biden’s tariffs with the other core elements of his agenda, including massive investments in manufacturing and increased antitrust enforcement, is the notion that the American government should no longer passively defer to market forces; instead, it should shape markets to achieve politically and socially beneficial goals. This view has taken hold most thoroughly among Democrats, but it is making inroads among Republicans too — especially when it comes to trade.

But this perspective, of how politicians “passively” “deferred” to “market forces,” suggests that active opposition to market forces makes any kind of sense. Truth is, as economist Eugen von Böhm-​Bawerk explained, “there is one … thing that not even the most imposing dictate of power will accomplish: It can never effect anything in contradiction to the economic laws of value, price, and distribution; it must always be in conformity with these; it cannot invalidate them; it can merely confirm and fulfill them.” The consequences of policies that seek to use State regulatory powers to guide market outcomes tend not to conform to politicians’ and regulators’ expectations, for at no point do they magically alter the laws of supply and demand.