At the Wall Street Journal, "President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s newly elected government says supporters of former leader Jair Bolsonaro tried to overthrow it."
Also, at the BBC, "Brazilian forces regain control after Congress stormed," and Memeorandum.
And Sky News, here:
Do what you will with this.
From Andrew Sullivan, "Democracy works, survives, and can surprise us (including me). A great night":
Let’s first herald the truly good news. Democracy surprised almost all of us, as it sometimes does. It made some of us look a bit foolish (more on that in a bit). It defied most predictions and historic analogies. The election ended up with a super-close race for both House and Senate — highly unusual for a midterm when inflation is soaring and most people are super bummed about the country. More good news: Joe Biden’s “Jim Crow 2.0” failed to materialize in Georgia. And most important of all: there are (currently) no widespread allegations of fraud or illegitimacy, despite many close races; and the candidates who made election denial their platform lost decisively. The thumping defeat of nutjob Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania — and the way he helped drag down other Republican candidates in the states — is just fantastic. According to the exit polls, “79 percent said they were very (47 percent) or somewhat (33 percent) confident that elections in their state were being conducted fairly and accurately.” Huge and encouraging news. And it behooves me to note that Biden’s speech on democracy last week was in retrospect right in its priorities. Voters are worried about democracy’s survival and Biden’s distinction between MAGA Republicans and the rest obviously worked with some, including Republicans. Voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Biden’s record nonetheless broke for the Dems when the alternative was a MAGA loony. Yes, as I anticipated, there was pushback to Democratic extremism. Republicans look set to win the popular vote overall. Where CRT was on the ballot — in school board races, where it belongs — it lost badly everywhere. The Latino vote kept trending GOP, making even Miami-Dade a Republican bastion. In New York City especially, Asian-Americans’ support for the GOP soared. We even have the first openly gay MAGA congressman. The Squad members of Congress all saw their support slide in their safe districts. On the “LGBTQIA+” question, “26 percent said our society’s values on gender identity and sexual orientation are changing for the better, 50 percent for the worse.” That’s a huge backlash against “queer” and trans extremism, and it’s hurting gays and lesbians. And in the face of media insistence that America is an objectively white supremacist country, 45 percent said racism was either not a problem at all or a minor one. (Fifty-three percent said major.) This is striking: around a third of non-white, non-college voters went Republican. According to exit polls, Asian-Americans went from 77 percent Democrat in 2018 to around 60 percent now. Latinos went from 70 to 60. (One irony is that Republicans gained many minority votes in solid red states, which didn’t have much of an effect on the outcome, but bolsters their raw numbers.) But these trends were overwhelmed by other issues, and did not amount to the kind of decisive rejection of Democratic leftism I favored and suspected would happen. I was wrong. I remain convinced that wokeness is terribly destructive to liberal society, but my obsessions are obviously not everyone’s. And my fault was in not seeing how MAGA extremism — the sheer anti-democratic crazy of the GOP — was seen by independent voters as far more dangerous than the crazy left. I actually agree — see this recent piece, for example — and if I didn’t live in a super-blue city, I might have felt differently about my protest vote. But from the broadest perspective, I was simply wrong to emphasize the impact of the far left as much as I have. You’ve told me this many times. I should have listened more, and I will. Let’s first herald the truly good news. Democracy surprised almost all of us, as it sometimes does. It made some of us look a bit foolish (more on that in a bit). It defied most predictions and historic analogies. The election ended up with a super-close race for both House and Senate — highly unusual for a midterm when inflation is soaring and most people are super bummed about the country. More good news: Joe Biden’s “Jim Crow 2.0” failed to materialize in Georgia. And most important of all: there are (currently) no widespread allegations of fraud or illegitimacy, despite many close races; and the candidates who made election denial their platform lost decisively. The thumping defeat of nutjob Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania — and the way he helped drag down other Republican candidates in the states — is just fantastic. According to the exit polls, “79 percent said they were very (47 percent) or somewhat (33 percent) confident that elections in their state were being conducted fairly and accurately.” Huge and encouraging news. And it behooves me to note that Biden’s speech on democracy last week was in retrospect right in its priorities. Voters are worried about democracy’s survival and Biden’s distinction between MAGA Republicans and the rest obviously worked with some, including Republicans. Voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Biden’s record nonetheless broke for the Dems when the alternative was a MAGA loony. Yes, as I anticipated, there was pushback to Democratic extremism. Republicans look set to win the popular vote overall. Where CRT was on the ballot — in school board races, where it belongs — it lost badly everywhere. The Latino vote kept trending GOP, making even Miami-Dade a Republican bastion. In New York City especially, Asian-Americans’ support for the GOP soared. We even have the first openly gay MAGA congressman. The Squad members of Congress all saw their support slide in their safe districts. On the “LGBTQIA+” question, “26 percent said our society’s values on gender identity and sexual orientation are changing for the better, 50 percent for the worse.” That’s a huge backlash against “queer” and trans extremism, and it’s hurting gays and lesbians. And in the face of media insistence that America is an objectively white supremacist country, 45 percent said racism was either not a problem at all or a minor one. (Fifty-three percent said major.) This is striking: around a third of non-white, non-college voters went Republican. According to exit polls, Asian-Americans went from 77 percent Democrat in 2018 to around 60 percent now. Latinos went from 70 to 60. (One irony is that Republicans gained many minority votes in solid red states, which didn’t have much of an effect on the outcome, but bolsters their raw numbers.) But these trends were overwhelmed by other issues, and did not amount to the kind of decisive rejection of Democratic leftism I favored and suspected would happen. I was wrong. I remain convinced that wokeness is terribly destructive to liberal society, but my obsessions are obviously not everyone’s. And my fault was in not seeing how MAGA extremism — the sheer anti-democratic crazy of the GOP — was seen by independent voters as far more dangerous than the crazy left. I actually agree — see this recent piece, for example — and if I didn’t live in a super-blue city, I might have felt differently about my protest vote. But from the broadest perspective, I was simply wrong to emphasize the impact of the far left as much as I have. You’ve told me this many times. I should have listened more, and I will...
McConnell might be out.
WASHINGTON—Republicans face a week that will be crucial in deciding the future direction and leadership of the party in the wake of disappointing midterm elections. Former President Donald Trump is expected to announce another bid for the White House at 9 p.m. Tuesday in Palm Beach, Fla. House Republicans are scheduled to vote the same day on whether to choose House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) as their candidate for speaker. Some Senate Republicans are pushing to delay beyond this week a decision on whether to hand Sen. Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) another term as their leader. Those moves will come after elections that many Republicans believed would deliver the party a sizable majority in the House and control of the Senate. Instead, they failed to capture the Senate majority and appear headed for only a slim edge in the House. Some Republicans contend that Mr. Trump’s influence and endorsement choices cost the party winnable races in key states, partly by repelling some independent voters. Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears, a Republican who previously supported Mr. Trump, said on Fox Business that she couldn’t do so again after the midterm results. “The voters have spoken, and they’ve said that they want a different leader,” she said. “And a true leader understands when they have become a liability. A true leader understands that it’s time to step off the stage.” In response, a spokesman for Mr. Trump said: “Winsome Sears rode a wave of President Trump’s voters to election victory in 2021. Her comments are a slap to the face to all of the grass-roots Republicans that worked so hard to get her elected. They won’t forget this, and there will be a reckoning.” ...
A reckoning? Or a crackup?
Stay tuned. Trump's expected announce his 2024 presidential bid on Tuesday.
More at the link.
At the New York Times, "DeSantis Campaign Video Hints at National Aims and Draws Trump’s Ire":
It has not been aired on television and there are no plans to use it as a paid advertisement for Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, but that may not be the point, so long as it spreads on social media. Back in April, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican, released “Sweet Florida,” a catchy campaign anthem by two current members of the Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd. That song, with lyrics including “You can take it to the bank he don’t care what Brandon thinks at the White House,” served as the walk-on song for Mr. DeSantis’s campaign events but never went viral outside of conservative circles. As of Monday, it has about 328,000 views on YouTube and another 1.1 million on the conservative video platform Rumble. But while the campaign jingle touted Mr. DeSantis’s record and popularity in Florida, a new video released by his campaign on Friday hints at the governor’s broader national ambitions. Posted to Twitter by his wife, Casey DeSantis, the 96-second video invokes God 10 times and suggests that Mr. DeSantis was sent by a divine power. “God made a fighter,” the narrator says. “God said I need someone to be strong, advocate truth in the midst of hysteria, challenge conventional wisdom and isn’t afraid to defend what he knows to be right and just.” Former President Donald J. Trump, who views Mr. DeSantis as a potential 2024 rival, wasn’t amused. He called the governor “Ron DeSanctimonious” during a rally Saturday in Pennsylvania. Even some of Mr. DeSantis’s Florida allies said privately that the video was a bit much. The new video, which already has at least 2.5 million views on Twitter, was produced in-house by the DeSantis campaign. It has not been aired on television and there are no plans to use it as a paid advertisement for Mr. DeSantis, but that may not be the point, so long as it spreads on social media. It is, by far, the biggest viral candidate video of this year’s midterm cycle, but there is not much competition out there...
People are really impressed with this on Twitter. This woman's very likely to be Arizona's next governor.
At the New York Times, "Lake Won’t Pledge to Accept Election Results, and More News From the Sunday Shows":
Savage Kari Lake is the best Kari Lake.
— Golden Advice 🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲 (@RichardStiller4) October 18, 2022
😂😂😂
Link to full video: https://t.co/lo2D9gV8Qw
(1 of 2) pic.twitter.com/P5DQnyfPU0
"'Im going to win the election, and I will accept that result,' Kari Lake, a candidate for governor of Arizona, said on CNN..."
Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, refused on Sunday to commit to accepting the results of her election, using much of the same language that former President Donald J. Trump did when he was a candidate.
“I’m going to win the election, and I will accept that result,” Ms. Lake said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.” The host, Dana Bash, then asked, “If you lose, will you accept that?” Ms. Lake, who is running against Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, responded by repeating, “I’m going to win the election, and I will accept that result.”
“The people of Arizona will never support and vote for a coward like Katie Hobbs,” she added, setting up a framework in which, if Ms. Hobbs were to win, Ms. Lake could present the result as evidence of election fraud. That is one of the arguments Mr. Trump made, suggesting that the 2020 election must have been fraudulent because the idea of President Biden receiving majority support was unbelievable.
Four years earlier, in 2016, Mr. Trump told supporters, “I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election if I win.”
In the interview on Sunday, Ms. Lake, a former television news anchor, continued to embrace Mr. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen and said, “The real issue, Dana, is that the people don’t trust our elections.”
This is a common argument among Republicans, many of whom have stoked public distrust in elections and then used that distrust to justify restrictions on voting. Ms. Lake said the distrust dated back more than two decades, citing the 2000 presidential election dispute and Democrats’ claims of irregularities in 2004 and 2016, even though the Democratic candidates conceded and there were no extrajudicial efforts to overturn the results...
If you're going to attack "MAGA Republicans" in a primetime address to the nation on the Donald Trump GOP's threats to democracy, just know that you're literally attacking millions upon millions of voters who pulled the lever for the Donald in 2020 (not to mention 2016).
No, not everyone who voted for Trump was MAGA, and Old Joe (Stalin?) duly slides that in as an afterthought. No, he attacked the movement for America First principes as the most dangerous threat to our nation today. Really? That movement includes untold red-blooded patriotic Americans who have nothing to do with any of the "violence" the president decries. Biden makes no clear distinction. I mean, shoot, you don't need to put "MAGA" in front of "Republicans." They're all evil for leftist totalitarians.
Anyone with a brain knows this is all politics, not abouit saving the union from incipient fascist tyranny. Biden's screed was a pre-midterm salvo to demonize the opposition, MAGA or not. That's it. The media's the bullhorn: You know, "Democracy Dies in Darkness" and all the other bullshit posituring by our elite betters in America's newsrooms. It's disgusting and should be repudiated, and with luck it will be in November. Don't trust the polls. Sure, leftists have been mobilized by the pro-life Dobbs ruling in June, but it's not the poor and down and out, who are destitute, homeless, mentally ill, drug-addled, and on Medicaid, public assistance, and SSI.
Nope, it's white, wealthy "progressive" women. They're the one's who're pissed off, and they're driving this so-called surge of pro-choice voter agitation. They don't give a shit about the poor. They're craven virtue-signalers who claim they're better than you (they're not).
Biden? His speech? THIS IS WHY AMERICANS HATE POLITICS.
See, Roger Kimball, at the Spectator, "Biden Declares War on Half the Country":
The malignant and divisive spirit of his speech will not soon be quelled. Joe Biden’s speech at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall on Thursday was one of the most remarkable in living memory. By “remarkable,” I hasten to add that I do not mean “good.” On the contrary, it was a breathtaking act of what the psychoanalysts call “projection,” blaming others for the bad things you do yourself. The speech itself was a malignant act of demagoguery that will have colonels and generalissimos everywhere catching their breath with envy. The neo-totalitarian stage set, replete with red lighting effects and military personal flanking the shouting, gesticulating Biden, was right out of central casting. Next time, perhaps Biden will wear epaulettes along with his signature aviators. The speech was billed as a reflection on the “soul of the nation.” Remember, Biden was sold to the country as Mr. Normality, as someone who would bind up the nations’s wounds after four years of the bad, horrible, no good, unacceptable, supremely divisive Donald Trump. It hasn’t worked out that way, notwithstanding Trump’s occasional zingers and rhetorical molotov cocktails that have kept the fires of outrage burning. In this respect, Biden’s speech typified the new Democratic dispensation, according to which the world is divided sharply in two. The good guys are those who espouse the Democratic agenda. The bad guys are anyone who dissents. What we are seeing, in fact, is the promulgation of a neo-Manichean philosophy. That heretical sect, named for a third-century A.D. Parthian seer called Mani, was an astringently dualistic creed that divided the world into light and dark, the saved and the damned. According to the creed of Biden and the elites who formulate his thoughts and speeches, the radical Democratic agenda of climate change, “green” intimidation, wealth redistribution, and sexual perversion is the gospel of light. Outer darkness is occupied by people who espouse such traditional American values as hard work, frugality, patriotism, individual liberty, and the canons of private property that guarantee those rights. It is a strange and unforgiving religion, one whose primary sacrament is excommunication. Ultimately, as some wag put it, its goal is a world in which everything that is not prohibited is mandatory. That is the background. You often hear the world “democracy” uttered in these heady precincts, usually in the now-noxious phrase “our democracy” (translation: their prerogative”). As I note in a column on “Joe Biden and the Sovietization of America” for the October edition of the Speccie, it is a world in which “democracy” really means “rule by Democrats.” To the question “was the election fair,” what you need to know in order to answer is who won. If it was the Democrats, then the election was fair. If the Democrats lost, then the election was stolen. In any event, Biden’s speech consisted of a series accusations directed at “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans [who] represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.” Lest you think that attack on 74 million Trump supporters was an aberration, note that a week earlier at a Maryland fundraiser, Biden had insisted that the problem for those wishing to conserve the “soul of America” was “not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the…semi-fascism” of the MAGA agenda. The sweeping denunciation of half the country was perhaps the thing that caught the alarmed attention of most observers. Also important was that element of projection I mentioned. Biden’s brief against Trump and “the entire philosophy” of MAGA rested primarily on three accusations...
I don't know as fact, but it sounds like he was forced out for not joining the cult of Trump.
See, "My Farewell to Hot Air Readers" (via Memeorandum):
/p>My final post: Farewell to Hot Air and hello to the Dispatch https://t.co/0r4Tp0dMmm
— Allahpundit (@allahpundit) September 2, 2022
Thank you to Townhall Media for supporting me for so many years. And thank you to @stephenfhayes and @JonahDispatch for the opportunity to join the wonderful site they’ve built (1/2)
I want to say thanks. First, to our readers. It’s been my privilege to write for you. Few are lucky enough to make a living filling up a screen with their mundane thoughts, fewer get to do so on any subject they like. On an average day here I could write about COVID, Ukraine, and the new Frankenfood from Taco Bell. Sixteen years into this job, I still can’t believe they paid me to do it. Your patronage made it possible. I can’t thank you enough. Thank you to Jazz Shaw, John Sexton, and especially Ed Morrissey for making working at Hot Air such a pleasure. A dirty secret: I was quietly furious when Ed came aboard in 2008. What was he doing on my site? But then it became our site, and then Jazz and John joined, and now you’ll never find a more collegial team of writers. In our years together I can’t recall an instance of infighting or office politics. It borders on strange how little drama there was behind the scenes. The pain of separation is eased by knowing that this will remain in their hands. Thank you to Michelle Malkin for having taken a chance on me when she started Hot Air so many years ago. She made my career possible. And above all, thank you to Jon Garthwaite and Townhall Media, who stuck with me even as the GOP changed and I declined to change with it. At this point I must be the only strident critic of Donald Trump serving a pro-Trump populist readership across all of conservative media. And that’s been true *for years.* Since 2020, at least. It was possible only because of Townhall’s sufferance, a show of integrity for which they don’t get enough credit. But I think all of us knew it couldn’t last. When you hire someone to run your hot-dog stand and he starts telling the customers that hot dogs are bad for them, that relationship won’t endure. Even if he’s right about the hot dogs. Thank you to my critics — the earnest ones, who weren’t just axe-grinding because I wouldn’t join a cult. I am not dishonest but am frequently stupid and you were right to call me on my moments of stupidity. Accountability is good. The right needs more of it from its own side, urgently. If the average populist slobberer had a few like you in their ear, we wouldn’t be in the fix we’re in. Lastly, to those who spent the last seven years barking insults at me in the comments for not genuflecting to Trump, I’ll give you this: You’re not phonies. You believe what you say. We have that much in common. I respect honesty and paid you the respect of being honest. It would scandalize you to know how many of your heroes sound like you in public and like me in private. Audience capture has brought most of conservative media to ruin by making it predictable and shrill. I hear Lincoln’s words in my head as I write that: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.” Let’s hope. But let’s also be real: To a certain sort of Very Online Trumpist weirdo, having the right enemies is what politics is all about. To any who insist upon having me as one, I’m okay with it. Few badges of honor shine as brightly as the scorn of authoritarians...
RTWT.
I've met this guy, years ago at the David Horowitz retreat at the Terranea, on the Palos Verdes pennisula.
He's not as he first appears, not be a long (money) shot.
At the New York Times, "Trump Lawyer Proposed Challenging Georgia Senate Elections in Search of Fraud":
SCOOP: John Eastman sent an email to Giuliani two weeks after Jan. 6 arguing they should sue in Georgia to keep searching for the fraud his email acknowledged they had failed to find - and also sought $270k in payments @lukebroadwater https://t.co/z88H3qqUef
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) August 4, 2022
On the day of President Biden’s inauguration, John Eastman suggested looking for voting irregularities in Georgia — and asked for help being paid the $270,000 he billed the Trump campaign. John Eastman, the conservative lawyer whose plan to block congressional certification of the 2020 election failed in spectacular fashion on Jan. 6, 2021, sent an email two weeks later arguing that pro-Trump forces should sue to keep searching for the supposed election fraud he acknowledged they had failed to find. On Jan. 20, 2021, hours after President Biden’s inauguration, Mr. Eastman emailed Rudolph W. Giuliani, former President Donald J. Trump’s personal lawyer, proposing that they challenge the outcome of the runoff elections in Georgia for two Senate seats that had been won on Jan. 5 by Democrats. “A lot of us have now staked our reputations on the claims of election fraud, and this would be a way to gather proof,” Mr. Eastman wrote in the previously undisclosed email, which also went to others, including a top Trump campaign adviser. “If we get proof of fraud on Jan. 5, it will likely also demonstrate the fraud on Nov. 3, thereby vindicating President Trump’s claims and serving as a strong bulwark against Senate impeachment trial.” The email, which was reviewed by The New York Times and authenticated by people who worked on the Trump campaign at the time, is the latest evidence that even some of Mr. Trump’s most fervent supporters knew they had not proven their baseless claims of widespread voting fraud — but wanted to continue their efforts to delegitimize the outcome even after Mr. Biden had taken office. Mr. Eastman’s message also underscored that he had not taken on the work of keeping Mr. Trump in office just out of conviction: He asked for Mr. Giuliani’s help in collecting on a $270,000 invoice he had sent the Trump campaign the previous day for his legal services. The charges included $10,000 a day for eight days of work in January 2021, including the two days before Jan. 6 when Mr. Eastman and Mr. Trump, during meetings in the Oval Office, sought unsuccessfully to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to go along with the plan to block congressional certification of the Electoral College results on Jan. 6. (Mr. Eastman appears never to have been paid.) A lawyer for Mr. Eastman did not respond to a request for comment...
He's got a huge plurality of supporters in this this new poll out from the New York Times.
See, "Half of G.O.P. Voters Ready to Leave Trump Behind, Poll Finds":
Far from consolidating his support, the former president appears weakened in his party, especially with younger and college-educated Republicans. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is the most popular alternative.
As Donald J. Trump weighs whether to open an unusually early White House campaign, a New York Times/Siena College poll shows that his post-presidential quest to consolidate his support within the Republican Party has instead left him weakened, with nearly half the party’s primary voters seeking someone different for president in 2024 and a significant number vowing to abandon him if he wins the nomination. By focusing on political payback inside his party instead of tending to wounds opened by his alarming attempts to cling to power after his 2020 defeat, Mr. Trump appears to have only deepened fault lines among Republicans during his yearlong revenge tour. A clear majority of primary voters under 35 years old, 64 percent, as well as 65 percent of those with at least a college degree — a leading indicator of political preferences inside the donor class — told pollsters they would vote against Mr. Trump in a presidential primary. Mr. Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6, 2021, appears to have contributed to the decline in his standing, including among a small but important segment of Republicans who could form the base of his opposition in a potential primary contest. While 75 percent of primary voters said Mr. Trump was “just exercising his right to contest the election,” nearly one in five said he “went so far that he threatened American democracy.” Overall, Mr. Trump maintains his primacy in the party: In a hypothetical matchup against five other potential Republican presidential rivals, 49 percent of primary voters said they would support him for a third nomination. The greatest threat to usurp Mr. Trump within the party is Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who was the second choice with 25 percent and the only other contender with double-digit support. Among primary voters, Mr. DeSantis was the top choice of younger Republicans, those with a college degree and those who said they voted for President Biden in 2020. While about one-fourth of Republicans said they didn’t know enough to have an opinion about Mr. DeSantis, he was well-liked by those who did. Among those who voted for Mr. Trump in 2020, 44 percent said they had a very favorable opinion of Mr. DeSantis — similar to the 46 percent who said the same about Mr. Trump. Should Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Trump face off in a primary, the poll suggested that support from Fox News could prove crucial: Mr. Trump held a 62 percent to 26 percent advantage over Mr. DeSantis among Fox News viewers, while the gap between the two Floridians was 16 points closer among Republicans who mainly receive their news from another source. The survey suggests that Mr. Trump would not necessarily enter a primary with an insurmountable advantage over rivals like Mr. DeSantis. His share of the Republican primary electorate is less than Hillary Clinton’s among Democrats was at the outset of the 2016 race, when she was viewed as the inevitable front-runner, but ultimately found herself embroiled in a protracted primary against Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont...
Still more.
And Bill Schneider suggested the other day that Trump might announce his 2024 run before the November midterms. We'll see. That's not unprecedented. Howard Dean formally announced his bid for the 2004 Democratic nomination June 23, 2003, but he was campaigning way before then, in the second half of 2002.
If Trump's able to raise a massive war chest --- to the tune of say $2 billion or so --- then he'd certainly scare off much of the competition. But let's see how much DeSantis is able to raise in 2023, should he throw his hat into the ring. He's the one on fire right now. I like him. I hope he's the nominee. He'll crush any Democrat in the 2024 general election.
From Christopher F. Rufo, ,"The New Yorker reveals some of the governor's most effective tactics":
The New Yorker just published a report highlighting my work supporting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ policies on critical race theory and gender ideology. If you can set aside the obligatory editorializing—the disposition of the New Yorker is obviously left-wing—there is some valuable insight into the political strategy that DeSantis has adopted. The article begins with some behind-the-scenes details:In April, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo flew from his home, near Seattle, to Miami, to meet with Florida’s Governor, Ron DeSantis, and to take part in the public signing of the Stop Woke Act. A former documentary filmmaker and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Rufo was the lead protagonist of last year’s furor over the teaching of “critical race theory” in public schools and helped advise the Governor on the Florida law, which aimed to limit discussion of racial history and identity in schools and workplaces. Rufo was especially taken with how personally invested DeSantis seemed in the policy. “He shows up to the tarmac at 6:30 a.m. with a Red Bull energy drink, ready to roll through the policy papers,” Rufo said. The bill had not come from the Governor’s advisers or the grass roots: “It’s driven by him.”From there, the writer, Benjamin Wallace-Wells, recounts the story of DeSantis’ fight against Walt Disney after the company publicly announced its opposition to the Parental Rights in Education law, which prohibits public schools from promoting gender and sexual ideologies in kindergarten through third grade. DeSantis mobilized the public against Disney and quickly signed legislation to strip the company of its special tax and governing status—an aggressive move that most political observers did not anticipate. As Wallace-Wells writes:DeSantis made a second significant move during the debate over the bill, one that Rufo in particular emphasized: the Governor escalated. The C.E.O. of the Walt Disney Company, Bob Chapek, told shareholders during an annual meeting early in March that he opposed the bill and had called DeSantis to say so; DeSantis retaliated with a new bill that stripped Disney (Central Florida’s largest taxpayer) of certain special legislative benefits that it had enjoyed since its establishment, a half century ago. “At the time, I remember some conversation, ‘Oh, DeSantis will never be able to vanquish Disney, Disney’s too powerful, too beloved,’ and at the time Disney had a seventy-seven per cent favorability rating with the public,” Rufo told me. He credited the Florida Governor with two insights: “A, that the bill is popular, and B, that though Disney is an economic and cultural power, it is really a novice political power, and, as many people are saying lean out of it, he leans into the fight, I think, brilliantly”....The Left is starting to understand DeSantis as a major threat—and for good reason. In my view, DeSantis is the most courageous and effective politician in the United States today. He understands how to frame the issues, never buckles under controversy, and has demonstrated a deep knowledge of public policy. He can play the media game, but he can also play the legislative game, moving significant policies through the Florida state legislature with remarkable speed. DeSantis is the man to watch. He is making the necessary transition from “culture war as performance” to “culture war as public policy.” He is writing the new playbook for conservative politics and his enemies are starting to take note.
This never ends well for Mexico, and especially not for U.S. taxpayers, who always get stuck with the bill when the U.S. government rushes in to bail out our southern neighbor every time its economy crashes.
At the Wall Sweet Journal, "Mexico Takes Aim at Private Companies, Threatening Decades of Economic Growth":
Populist president seeks to reclaim state control over oil-and-gas, electricity sectors; ‘It’s a closing off of Mexico’. MONTERREY, Mexico—For the past 20 years, a 1,100-megawatt power plant owned by Spain’s Iberdrola SA outside Mexico’s industrial capital has kept the lights on for scores of companies such as brewing giant Heineken NV, despite winter freezes, a hurricane and the occasional brush fire. But since January, half the gas-fired plant has been forcibly shut down by Mexico’s government, which argues that private energy companies have plundered Mexico like Spanish conquistadors of old. The electricity shutdown forced dozens of firms in Monterrey to return to the inefficient and more costly state-run utility for their power. In September, a fuel-import terminal owned by global investment firm KKR & Co. was closed at gunpoint by Mexico’s energy regulator, months after it closed two other such terminals owned by U.S. companies. Last year, the government took over operating control of the biggest oil find in recent Mexican history, stripping it from a U.S. company that made the discovery. It is also trying to revoke the operating license of Latin America’s largest wind farm, majority owned by Japan’s Mitsubishi Corp., an example of how the government’s policies are hobbling Mexico’s transition to renewable energy. Going after private companies might seem like something from the playbook of Socialist Venezuela rather than Mexico, which in recent decades has transformed itself into one of the world’s most globalized nations, signing free-trade deals with more than 40 countries and using manufacturing exports to become the U.S.’s second largest trading partner. Along the way, it lifted millions of its citizens out of poverty. But Mexico’s populist leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who took office in 2018, is shifting the country to a 1970s industrial policy focused on the domestic market, natural resources such as oil and greater state intervention, from backing state-run energy giants to using the army for major public-works projects. “It’s a closing off of Mexico,” says Gabriela Siller, an economist at Mexico’s Tecnológico de Monterrey. The change is especially stark in Mexico’s crucial energy sector, where the government has launched a broad effort to stop new private investment and restore the dominant position of former government monopolies in both oil and gas and electricity—effectively reversing a 2013 constitutional overhaul that opened both markets to private firms. The moves will cost Mexico billions of dollars in forgone investment; raise domestic energy prices; limit the growth of oil and electricity output; and damage the competitiveness of Mexican companies and hundreds of multinationals that operate here, according to the U.S. government, private companies and economists. It also risks prompting more migration by job-seeking Mexicans to the U.S. The president says, without offering evidence, that past governments were paid off by multinationals to allow them to enter the market and destroy the state oil giant Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, and the state-run utility, Federal Electricity Commission, or CFE, leaving Mexico’s energy security at risk and consumers at the mercy of profiteers. He also argues that Mexico’s turn to an open economy left too many poor people behind. “They had a plan to close all the CFE plants and leave everything to the private sector, to such a degree that half our country’s electricity is now made by private companies,” the president said at a news conference. The CFE has a monopoly on residential power, which it subsidizes heavily. But it lost hundreds of industrial clients over the past decade as firms opted for cheaper electricity provided by private firms. The CFE usually doesn’t subsidize electricity for large corporate clients, and its prices can be up to 30% to 50% higher than those of private power producers. Some privately produced renewable energy is a third of the price of the CFE’s power, according to Mexico’s renewable energy association. In many ways, the decommissioned electricity plant outside Monterrey is a metaphor for Mexico’s stalled economy and a glimpse of the country’s potential economic future. From 2019 through 2021, the first full three years of Mr. López Obrador’s presidency, Mexico’s economy shrank an average of 1.14% a year, according to government data. While the U.S. regained its prepandemic level of economic output by mid-2020, Mexico is among the few countries in the hemisphere, along with the leftist dictatorship of Venezuela, that hasn’t yet recovered, according to estimates from the International Monetary Fund. The Mexican economy is now lagging that of the U.S. and Canada in a sustained way for the first time since shortly after the mid-1990s, when all three countries banded together in a free-trade deal then called the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. Next year, Indonesia is set to overtake Mexico as the world’s 15th-biggest economy, according to IMF estimates. At the same time, migration from Mexico has accelerated to the U.S. for the first time since the early 2000s. In fiscal year 2021, U.S. apprehensions of Mexican migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border more than doubled over the previous year to almost 655,600. That figure is set to rise in 2022, U.S. government data show. Mexico’s average electricity prices for companies are already about 40% higher than the U.S., according to Mexican business chamber Concamin, putting the country at a disadvantage for manufacturing. But economists say Mr. López Obrador’s policies will make matters far worse. Since Mr. López Obrador took power, the government has halted new auctions for oil-and-gas exploration by private firms, new mining concessions and new investments for private electricity generation, including solar and wind farms that can produce electricity at roughly a third the CFE’s average cost, according to figures from Mexico’s energy regulator. Last year, the government passed a law forcing the national electric grid to give priority to electricity produced by the CFE, even though its power is more costly and polluting than that of private firms. The laws retroactively affected an estimated $22 billion in investment by firms such as Iberdrola. Energy regulators have also tied up oil-and-gas firms from Shell to BP to prevent them from opening up new filling stations to compete with state oil giant Pemex, the companies said. The law forcing the grid to use the CFE’s electricity first could raise Mexico’s electricity costs by up to 52%, or some $5.5 billion a year, and boost CO2 emissions by up to 73 million tons a year, a 65% jump from current emissions, according to a recent study by the U.S. government’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. That would prevent Mexico from meeting its carbon reduction goals under the Paris Climate Agreements, say environmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council. Mexico’s Environment Ministry declined to comment. Felipe Calderón, Mexico’s president from 2006 to 2012, tweeted last October, “What Mexicans need is more clean energy…and not more polluting and expensive energy from the CFE. The government’s changes seek to stop renewable energy from private firms and force us all to pay for old fossil-fuel energy.” Thanks to more than 200 lawsuits against the new dispatch rules, a judge last year ordered the government to temporarily block their implementation. The government is appealing the order and has vowed to start implementing the changes despite it. Mexico has halted auctions for new renewable-energy investments. Three such auctions between 2015 and 2017 were so successful they doubled the country’s renewable energy capacity to 15 gigawatts, according to the wind industry association. During the 2017 auction, Mexico set a then-world record low price for wind power per megawatt hour and close to a record in solar, making both forms of energy produced here far cheaper than electricity made by fossil fuels and among the cheapest sources of energy in the world. With no more private investment in wind or solar farms, the country’s renewable energy capacity will stall. Mexico’s state utility is currently building five natural-gas fired power plants and doesn’t plan on opening its first solar farm until 2027. It has no plans for wind farms. “If Mexico can’t create a legal framework to promote renewable energy, then General Motors isn’t going to get rid of its zero carbon plans. Unfortunately, we just won’t consider Mexico as an investment choice,” Francisco Garza, the president of GM in Mexico, recently told a meeting of financial executives. Foreign direct investment during Mr. López Obrador’s first three years averaged $31.4 billion a year versus $35.7 billion a year during his predecessor’s six-year term, according to central bank figures. Meanwhile, for the first time since NAFTA came into effect, Mexico saw a net outflow of investment in publicly traded stocks and bonds for two consecutive years. The government’s policies are causing the country to miss out on a historic chance to attract more U.S. companies that are trying to diversify their supply chains away from China and face growing labor shortages at home, economists say. “The Mexican government needs to do some soul searching about why investment has been so weak,” said Alberto Ramos, chief economist for Latin America at Goldman Sachs. “It’s not just the pandemic. I think it’s the overall business environment, and it’s a pity because there are great opportunities Mexico could be taken advantage of.” KKR said it planned to sue the Mexican government for $667 million in damages linked to the takeover of its fuel terminal. Houston-based Talos Energy said it would pursue international arbitration over the government’s decision to seize operating control of its Zama field, which shares oil with a neighboring field under Pemex’s control. Mexico’s government said it is in talks with Talos, KKR and other U.S. firms to resolve the issues. The three closed fuel terminals all supply gasoline to private oil companies that are competing with state oil firm Pemex to sell gasoline, part of the 2013 overhaul in Mexico that ended Pemex’s monopoly...
At the Friedman Center in Israel, Victor Davis Hanson discusses his new book, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America, with Caroline Glick:
The quote at the title is from this interview with Silas House, a professor of Appalachian Studies at Berea College in Kentucky, at Politico, "‘He’s Dangerous. So Is His Book’: An Appalachian writer says Hillbilly Elegy played to bogus notions on the left and right about the impoverished region. The only thing that benefited was Vance’s political career."
I see so much criticism of Vance on Twitter. It's probably mostly the Lincoln Project perverts. I mean, MAGA-loving Ohioans came out for the Trump-endorsed candidate after all.
Who knows? I don't know Vance beyond the book and the movie, but if he helps Republicans take back the majority in the Senate, he's okay by me.
At the New York Times, "A Trump Win in Ohio":
Most one-term presidents recede from the political scene, with their party’s voters happy to see them go. But Donald Trump continues to dominate the Republican Party a year and a half after he lost re-election. Yesterday’s Republican Senate primary in Ohio confirmed Trump’s influence. J.D. Vance — the author of the 2016 book “Hillbilly Elegy” — won the nomination, with 32 percent of the vote in a primary that included four other major candidates. Vance trailed in the polls only a few weeks ago, running an uneven campaign that suffered from his past negative comments about Trump. But after apologizing for them, Vance received Trump’s endorsement two and a half weeks ago. Vance quickly surged in the polls and will now face Representative Tim Ryan, a moderate Democrat, in the general election this fall... Finishing second, with 24 percent of the vote, was Josh Mandel, a former state treasurer who has drifted toward the far right since Trump’s election. Matt Dolan, a member of a wealthy Ohio family and the least pro-Trump candidate in the race, finished third with 23 percent. Vance’s victory continues his own shift toward a Trumpian far-right nationalism. After Vance’s book came out six years ago, detailing his family’s struggles in rural southern Ohio, he became a conservative intellectual whom liberals liked to cite. More recently, he has turned into a hard-edged conspiracist who claimed President Biden was flooding Ohio with illegal drugs — a blatantly false claim. (This Times essay by Christopher Caldwell explains Vance’s rise in an evenhanded way.) The winner of the Vance-Ryan contest will replace Rob Portman, a fairly traditional Republican, who served in both the George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush administrations. In the coming campaign, Ryan will likely emphasize Vance’s time as a Silicon Valley investor and celebrity author. (My colleague Jazmine Ulloa recently wrote about Ryan.) Ohio is obviously only one state, and other primaries over the next few months will offer a fuller picture of Trump’s sway. More than two-thirds of Republican voters in Ohio yesterday did not back Vance, which suggests — as Blake Hounshell notes — an appetite among many Republicans to make their own decisions. Still, Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican strategist, argues that endorsements understate his influence. “He has remade the Republican Party in his image, and many Republican voters now crave his particular brand of combative politics,” Longwell writes in The Times. Even Republican candidates whom Trump has not endorsed mention him frequently...
Well, considering how J.D. Vance won the Ohio GOP Senate primary last night, perhaps folks might be interesting in this.
At Vanity Fair, "They’re not MAGA. They’re not QAnon. Curtis Yarvin and the rising right are crafting a different strain of conservative politics."
Ms. Alyssa, who was White House Director of Strategic Communications and Assistant to the President during the Trump administration, with Jake Tapper:
From Matthew Continetti, at WSJ, "The Trump GOP resembles the party of Calvin Coolidge in its commitment to economic protection, restricted immigration and non-intervention abroad":
It’s hard to think of two American presidents with less in common than Calvin Coolidge and Donald Trump. For one thing, Coolidge held a variety of public offices, from Massachusetts governor to vice president, before assuming office on Aug. 2, 1923. Mr. Trump had no government or military experience before his inauguration in 2017. Coolidge, moreover, was a budget hawk who never met a line item he didn’t want to cut. Mr. Trump presided over record peacetime deficits even before federal spending took a quantum leap during the coronavirus pandemic. Coolidge was also a man of few words. Trump is not. Yet these personal differences obscure important political similarities. Both Coolidge and Mr. Trump staked their presidencies on voter satisfaction with broadly shared prosperity. Both supported restricting immigration into the United States. Both wanted to protect American industry from foreign competition. Both sought to avoid overseas entanglements. Mr. Trump’s views now dominate the Republican Party. For anyone who grew up with the GOP of Ronald Reagan, the two Bushes and John McCain, this can be strange and bewildering. But in many respects, it’s a return to the principles of the 1920s, of Coolidge and his predecessor Warren Harding. Their conservatism was delegitimized by the crises of the 20th century. The Great Depression robbed the right of its claim to promoting prosperity. FDR’s New Deal created a federal government that Republicans did not comprehend or control. Then World War II discredited the right’s noninterventionist foreign policy. What emerged from the rubble was a postwar conservative movement that embraced alliances, military intervention, forward defense, free trade and open immigration to defeat communism and fuel economic growth. This postwar conservative internationalism—known to its critics on the right as “globalism”—may have been an aberration. Today, the GOP is reverting to its pre-World War II identity as the party of low taxes, economic protection, restricted immigration, wariness of foreign intervention and religious piety. This retro-Republicanism could turn out to be a popular mix, but history shows that it is also a combustible one. By the beginning of the 1920s, the American electorate had soured on its experiences with the Progressive movement and the Great War. The influenza pandemic of 1918-20, the Red-hunting of Wilson administration officials A. Mitchell Palmer and J. Edgar Hoover, and postwar recession all contributed to civil unrest. Change came in the form of a garrulous Republican politician from Ohio named Warren Harding. “Our supreme task,” President Harding said in his inaugural address, “is the resumption of our onward, normal way.” Harding promised to reduce social tensions. He disavowed foreign intervention and withdrew U.S. occupation forces from postwar Germany. His secretary of state pursued disarmament treaties with the great powers. He opposed Wilson’s League of Nations. For Harding, “normalcy” meant nation-building at home. He raised tariffs and restricted imports. And he venerated the Constitution. In a speech delivered in 1920, he called the document “the very base of all Americanism, the ‘Ark of the Covenant’ of American liberty, the very temple of equal rights.” When Harding died in office in 1923, Calvin Coolidge did not depart from this constitutionalist path. To Coolidge, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution offered the last words in a centuries-long argument over popular sovereignty. “If all men are created equal, that is final,” he said. “If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.” Coolidge argued that success in self-government was related to religious faith. Political freedom depended on traditional morality and self-control. He called on Americans to preserve the inheritance of the Founders, to follow “the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed.” Coolidge opposed immigration. He and Harding signed into law two restriction acts that shut off entry to the U.S. for the next 40 years. As he closed the door to mass migration, however, Coolidge also celebrated the contributions of earlier waves of immigrants. “Whether one traces his Americanism back three centuries to the Mayflower, or three years [to] steerage,” he told the American Legion in 1925, “is not half so important as whether his Americanism of today is real and genuine. No matter by what various crafts we came here, we are all now in the same boat.” But there was no room for additional passengers. Coolidge was out of office for less than a year when the stock market crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression upended the established order. His Republican successor as president, former secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover, struggled to contain the economic fallout and social disorder. “This election is not a mere shift from the ins to the outs,” Hoover said in the run-up to the 1932 election. “It means deciding the direction our Nation will take over a century to come.” The nation opted for New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal created a bureaucratic structure of government, centralized in the nation’s capital, which quickly won the enmity of conservatives. The upheaval of the 1930s drove the partisans of strict constitutionalism and nonintervention in economics and foreign affairs from positions of power and influence. The GOP was a leaderless rump until the election of 1938, when it found a new spokesman in Ohio senator Robert A. Taft. As the son of President William Howard Taft, he had been raised to uphold the constitutionalist, free-market, noninterventionist traditions of his party. The reach of state power under FDR and its concentration in the executive branch reminded him of the new authoritarian governments in Europe. The New Deal, he said, was “absolutely contrary to the whole American theory on which this country was founded.” Taft’s philosophy contained all the principles of his father, Harding and Coolidge. As he put it in 1938, “The regulation of wages, hours, and prices and practices in every industry is something which is, in effect, socialism; which is government regulation of the worst sort; which means a totalitarian state.” For Taft, Roosevelt’s preparations for war against Germany were the foreign-policy equivalent of the New Deal. He had worked for Herbert Hoover at the American Relief Administration during the final years of the Wilson presidency, and what he saw amid the rubble of the Great War confirmed his loathing of great-power competition. Europe was a charnel house of nationalism, dynastic politics and class struggle. Taft wanted the U.S. to avoid it and warned against mobilizing American armed forces too quickly. “Our armament program should be based on defending the United States and not defending democracy throughout the world,” he said in response to Roosevelt’s 1939 State of the Union address, in which the president warned of the rise of Nazism and called for increased defense spending The GOP was a leaderless rump until the election of 1938, when it found a new spokesman in Ohio senator Robert A. Taft. As the son of President William Howard Taft, he had been raised to uphold the constitutionalist, free-market, noninterventionist traditions of his party. The reach of state power under FDR and its concentration in the executive branch reminded him of the new authoritarian governments in Europe. The New Deal, he said, was “absolutely contrary to the whole American theory on which this country was founded.” Taft’s philosophy contained all the principles of his father, Harding and Coolidge. As he put it in 1938, “The regulation of wages, hours, and prices and practices in every industry is something which is, in effect, socialism; which is government regulation of the worst sort; which means a totalitarian state.” For Taft, Roosevelt’s preparations for war against Germany were the foreign-policy equivalent of the New Deal. He had worked for Herbert Hoover at the American Relief Administration during the final years of the Wilson presidency, and what he saw amid the rubble of the Great War confirmed his loathing of great-power competition. Europe was a charnel house of nationalism, dynastic politics and class struggle. Taft wanted the U.S. to avoid it and warned against mobilizing American armed forces too quickly. “Our armament program should be based on defending the United States and not defending democracy throughout the world,” he said in response to Roosevelt’s 1939 State of the Union address, in which the president warned of the rise of Nazism and called for increased defense spending. In the view of Taft and other noninterventionist conservatives, war would expand government, lead to rationing, and invest FDR with a dangerous amount of authority. The U.S. should defend the mainland and the Caribbean basin, Taft said, but otherwise it should leave the conflagration in Europe to burn itself out. His priority was the home front. “There is a good deal more danger of the infiltration of totalitarian ideas from the New Deal circle in Washington,” he told a St. Louis audience on May 20, 1940, “than there will ever be from any activities of the communists or the Nazi bund.” Taft neither joined nor spoke for the antiwar America First Committee, but he welcomed its appearance on the national stage. The organization was established in 1940 in Chicago. Its founders included graduates of some of the nation’s elite educational institutions, and it drew support from Republicans, Democrats, Progressives, conservatives and even figures within the Roosevelt administration.... In its protectionism, resistance to immigration, religiosity, and antipathy to foreign entanglements, Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement resembles the conservatism of the 1920s—with one significant difference. In the 1920s, the right was in charge. It was self-confident and prosperous. It saw itself as defending core American institutions. A century later, in the early 2020s, the right has been driven from power at the federal level. It has been locked out of the commanding heights of American culture: technology, media, entertainment, the academy. Its rhetoric has often veered into apocalypticism and conspiracy theory...
