Georgia Indicts trump and his Big Lie

At last.

Stephen Fowler over at NPR has the basics: 

A grand jury in Georgia has indicted Donald Trump for his role in failed efforts to overturn the state's 2020 election results, implicating the former president as the head of a sweeping conspiracy to subvert his defeat.

It's the fourth indictment in as many months for Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. And it's part of a massive case brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis under Georgia's racketeering law, ensnaring a number of defendants that the DA alleges acted as part of a coordinated effort to pressure officials to change the election outcome.

In an indictment handed up Monday, an Atlanta-based grand jury outlined a series of charges against Trump, including violation of the Georgia RICO law and solicitation of a violation of an oath by a public officer.

RICO by the by is a racketeering charge, meaning trump and others engaged in a wide-ranging conspiracy to commit multiple crimes. Emptywheel - you know what I need to call her by name, so hello Marcy Wheeler! - has more details on the implications of trump getting hit by RICO:

To explain how, I want to first show that the indictment is, fundamentally, about protecting the integrity of Georgia’s government and elections. To see that, it helps to read counts 2 through 41 before reading the RICO charge, which is laid out in 70 pages describing 161 overt acts, many of which took place outside of Georgia...

LIES TO AND SOLICITATION OF GEORGIA OFFICIALS

Count 2 though Count 7: False claims and illegal requests made, many by Rudy Giuliani, before the fake electors scheme. These were lies told to official bodies of Georgia state government, and charging them is an attempt to prevent corruption in state government.

Count 23 through Count 26 charge Rudy, Ray Smith, and Robert Cheely with false claims and solicitations on December 30 — similar in structure and purpose to Counts 2 through 7.

Count 28 charges both Trump and Mark Meadows for the January 2 call to Brad Raffensperger. Count 29 charges Trump for the lies he told during the call.

Counts 38 and 39 charge Trump with lies and solicitations of Brad Raffensperger on September 17, 2021.

FAKE ELECTORS

Count 8 through Count 19: These are a series of six paired charges tied to various kinds of fraud involved with the fake electors. In each pair, the first count charges David Shafer, Shawn Still, and Cathleen Latham for doing the fraudulent thing, and the second count charges Trump, Rudy, John Eastman, Ken Chesebro, Ray Smith, Robert Cheely, and Mike Roman with soliciting the fraudulent thing. They’re a near parallel to the Michigan charges against the fake electors, except that in Georgia only the three most culpable fake electors are charged, and there’s a mirror charge for Trump’s side of the conspiracy.

ATTEMPTS TO ENTRAP RUBY FREEMAN

Counts 20 and 21 and : These charge two efforts to defraud Ruby Freeman by offering her help when in fact they were an attempt to entrap her.

Count 30 and Count 31 charge aspects of a plot to get Kanye’s publicist to travel from Illinois to Georgia to entrap Ruby Freeman into making false claims.

LIES ABOUT GEORGIA

Count 22 charges Jeffrey Clark for his attempts to get DOJ to claim the Georgia election was fraudulent.

Count 27 charges Trump and Eastman with lying about Georgia’s results in a lawsuit.

TAMPERING WITH COFFEE COUNTY TABULATORS

Count 32 through Count 37 charge Sidney Powell, Latham, and two others for tampering with the Coffee County vote tabulators. Again, this has a parallel in the Michigan charges against Matt DePerno and two others.

LIES DURING THE INVESTIGATION

Count 40 charges David Shafer with false statements told during the investigation.

Count 41 charges Robert Cheely with perjury for false claims made during the investigation.

As I understand it, these are the charges on which the RICO conspiracy is built. The RICO conspiracy gives prosecutors additional tools and penalties with which to prosecute this (similar to the conspiracy law charged at the federal level)...

That's a lot of criming (relax, Spellchecker, we can use slang while blogging), but what are the implications surrounding these particular indictments compared to the other three (and counting) trump and cohorts are facing? Why is this one a bigger deal than most?

One of the common elements in the Georgia indictment is the word "lies". Over and over, DA Willis spells out how trump and company lied and kept lying to other state officials in order to get them to violate the integrity of the 2020 election results. They have trump lying in a lawsuit, they have one underling Robert Cheely charged with straight-up perjury to the grand jury, they had people lying to county-level elections official Ruby Freeman to get her to "confess" to rigging ballots.

All of these lies, serving to the Big Lie that trump pushed and keeps pushing about the 2020 results. trump's Big Lie that the election "was stolen" and he "fairly" won.

I blogged about trump's Big Lie before, and why he can't stop:

Trump has made it clear he views the world in the simplest of terms: That people are divided into Winners and Suckers, and that HE (champion and most excellent of the former group) shall never be lumped in with the latter.

So just on this mindset alone, trump cannot admit – not to others, not to himself – that he lost... 

In one respect, trump lost in 2016: The Popular vote clearly went for Hillary. But due to the broken and anti-democratic nature of the Electoral College, trump squeaked into winning three battleground states with literally mere hundreds of votes that gave him their Electoral Votes instead. It should be noted that trump promptly crowed – against all evidence – that he had won a LANDSLIDE, not just the College but also the Popular vote, and claimed it was the greatest victory in history (ignoring the Electoral and Popular vote blowouts of 1984 and 1932 (we don't count Nixon's 1972 blowout because the cheating exposed by the Watergate scandal negates that)).

Trump can't crow like that this time. The illusion of the Electoral College can't grant him that excuse. So he has to settle on denial. Constant, whining denial that he's the victim of voter fraud and to get us to pity him back into office...

The horrifying thing was how easily trump got fellow Republicans to buy into his Big Lie all because the GOP fears the loss of political power:

The Republicans are stuck with the Big Lie because it happens to fit this One Truth:

The Republican Party cannot and will not share power with a Democratic Party they view as un-American and thus illegitimate.

Somewhere back in time - you can argue happening between the rise of the conservative Southern Strategy in the late 1960s or the rise of Saint Ronnie in the 1980s or the corruption of Newt's Contract On America in the 1990s - the Republican Party bought into the idea that only they were true God-fearing God-chosen Gun-worshiping patriots...

But the Republicans have a problem. Where their One Truth was merely a world-view that did not expose itself to self-destructive implosion (Republicans could keep believing it and still function rationally in polite society), the Big Lie is a direct attack on the Real World that sooner rather than later is going to hit the Brick Wall of Unbreakable Facts. The Big Lie compels trump's believers into direct action - SEE the January 6th Insurrection - and these actions have legal consequences where the Big Lie has not and cannot prevail.

The Republicans are betting on their Big Lie carrying them forward into the future. But it's a Big Lie stuck in the past of a failed 2020 election, pushed constantly by a Big Liar in trump who cannot avoid his impending fate either in civil or criminal courts.

With the Georgia indictments, we are at that moment of Truth for the Republican Party as a whole. DA Willis and her team are making a direct rebuke to trump's Big Lie, confronting it with facts and evidence that not only were the voted counted fairly but that trump and his people intentionally worked to subvert those fair counts.

I am paraphrasing Jean-Luc Picard here, in one of the greatest quotes about the quest for justice. Courtrooms are crucibles: In a courtroom we burn away irrelevancies (the lies and misunderstandings) until we are left with a pure product - the truth (based on fact), for all time. For all of trump's bullshitting at his rallies, for all of the deflection and deception by the Far Right media, for all the spineless quibbling of other Republican leaders who fail to hold trump to the factual truth, in a court of law those lies and deceptions cannot withstand scrutiny. trump will confront - at last - the lies he's been telling to everyone and even to himself, and that those lies have no power to keep him in power.

The reason why I remain so optimistic - giddy, even - about the criminal cases leveled against trump is that these courtrooms are going to be the few places where trump will be held accountable for the ongoing costs of destruction and ruin he has built up over the decades. trump's greed, trump's racism, trump's sexism, trump's rage, trump's delusions of grandeur... All of that finally getting added up and presented as a bill way past due that he has to pay.

Let trump face his lies and failures before the 2024 elections. Let the nation come to terms with the reality that trump should never hold any elected office again.

Let justice be done. Let truth prevail. At last.

What If: How 2024 Could Play Out

(Update: Many thanks to Tengrain for including this article on Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please leave a comment below, or Bluesky me at @paulwartenberg or Spoutify me at @paulwartenberg and Tweet me at... at... DAMN YOU MUSK THE X IS TERRIBLE)

So... All things being equal (although they're not) we are looking at a 2024 Presidential decision between the incumbent Joe Biden and the indicted donald trump.

In this day and age, a first-termer like Biden is always going to run for a second term. And with this corrupt Republican Party, a past-termer like trump is going to run again in order to use the legal protections of the Presidency to negate any criminal convictions that might occur from any three four okay it could get as high as five trials facing him between now and November 2024.

The question we face is not "Will an indicted trump survive a competitive primary against a dozen opponents?" -  because that GOP primary won't be competitive: trump is polling above 50 percent among likely primary voters and so the Republicans are stuck with a potential felon as front-runner - the question will be "How will this be any different from 2020?"

We're facing one of the rare repeats in Presidential campaigning, where the same major party candidates face off in back-to-back election years (anything before 1800 will not fit as party tickets did not exist before then). To my knowledge, there's only been John Q. Adams vs. Andrew Jackson (1824 and 1828),  Martin Van Buren vs. William Henry Harrison (1836 and 1840), Benjamin Harrison vs. Grover Cleveland (1888 and 1892), William McKinley vs. William Jennings Bryan (1896 and 1900), and last with Dwight D Eisenhower vs Adali Stevenson (1952 and 1956).

Half of those repeats happened due to unusual circumstances: with shifts in how candidates got on ballot,  to formations of new parties, to extreme failures of Electoral College results that justified a losing candidate (Jackson in 1828, Cleveland in 1892) running again out of a sense of revenge/defending the popular will over the electoral will.

Losing candidates throughout Presidential campaign histories tended to have the good sense to walk away if they lost the popular vote. Occasionally you'll get the Ambitious types - the Clays - or the Ideological obsessives - the Bryans - who can dominate their party well past their expiration dates and keep running until the party had enough (third time losing) and moved on to fresher talent. By the 20th Century as the Democrats and Republicans stabilized and created deep talent pools, most losing candidates were one-and-done, so rematches stopped happening. Until now, with trump unable to admit he ever loses and able to dominate the modern Republican Party to pretty much bully his way back into a remake of the 2020 elections.

By common logic, we ought to project the results for 2024 to reflect the results of 2020 since it's the same candidates - Biden vs. trump - running pretty much the same platforms - Biden's economic policies of job growth, women's rights, and rebuilding manufacturing/infrastructure vs. trump's anti-immigrant, anti-trade, tax-cuts for the rich, "drain the swamp" destruction of a functioning federal government - all over again.

The actual Electoral Map of 2020, despite
what trump claims, via 270towin.com

However, there are noticeable differences this time.

When 2020 happened, we were in the midst of a global COVID pandemic, which required most states to switch - or heavily promote - a mail-in ballot voting process that expanded regular voter turnout. As a result, there were massive gains compared to previous elections - 158 million total voters compared to 136 million in 2016 and 129 million in 2012 - to where we can't be certain if voter turnout will keep going up or drop back to 2016 levels now that the pandemic has shifted (to a tolerable endemic). It all depends on if the 81 million who voted for Biden (which broke the record for most popular votes for a candidate) and the 74 million who voted for trump (which also broke the previous record) decide to vote again if the mail ballot option isn't there.

Another difference has been the ongoing Republican objective of voter suppression to restrict turnout to their favor. Several battleground states that Republicans control - like Georgia and Arizona - are facing efforts to either make it harder to vote or forcing in new and partisan elections officials who will happily override results in 2024 to favor their own. States like Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania were close electoral wins for 2020 Biden: If the Republicans in those states stir up chaos to undo any popular vote wins Biden could reclaim in 2024, there could well be actual 'stolen' electoral votes.

(Other close electoral win states like Michigan and Wisconsin may not be in play this time, as 2022 midterm gains by Dems will reduce the risks of electoral scamming by trump and his ilk)

These are the states at play as things stand in mid-2023.
Those three states mean the difference between
a Biden win or trump chaos.

One thing that happened post-2020 was trump's direct meddling into the election results using - abusing really - the office of the Presidency to try and force several close states to flip Biden's results and just give trump their Electoral wins. trump also staged "Fake Electors" schemes to give those state legislatures an "alternative" to the official Electors going with Biden. It's questionable - possibly unlikely - trump will be in a position to pull those same stunts again, especially as Michigan already issued criminal charges to their fake electors and Georgia (and the other states) are close to charging their fakes (nobody's gonna volunteer for possible jail time should they fail). However, it may not be trump attempting any Fake Elector stunts in 2024, it will be the Republican state legislators who saw where trump screwed up and where they could make it legal.

If there's any good news, it's that most GOP Red states expected to vote Republican (trump) in 2024 won't need to cheat (much) for the Electoral votes: Any voter suppression will only reflect in the Popular vote numbers, but it's unlikely they can suppress enough to overcome the larger voter turnout of Blue states like California, New York, and Illinois. It's only the battleground states - the Red states Biden won - that will be in play for these schemes to defraud the voters.

It then becomes a question of how Biden's administration will handle the potential cheating in those states. Any intervention by the Justice Department will get attacked by Republicans as "Biden meddling just like trump did," even if Biden doesn't call state election officials directly or threaten others with arrest the way trump and his allies really did. If Fake Electors again show up in 2024, the DOJ could find it hard to fight back, especially if a Republican-controlled House of Representatives overstep and accept Fake Electors to favor trump. It may depend on third-party voting rights groups like League of Women Voters or the Brennan Center to step up and defend the popular vote if that vote went Biden.

That is the one thing we should expect in the 2024 election results: A Popular vote win favoring Biden. In trump's previous two campaigns he never won the Popular vote, and in most respects he has done nothing to improve his position with voters who are not already part of his MAGA cult. The only way trump and the Republicans can cut into Biden's popularity - ignore the constant polling showing Biden in the low 40s pre-election: By election time those numbers tend to improve for incumbents who remain relatively popular over their opponent - is to drag Biden into the mud with scandalmongering and bad economic trends - which is why "Hunter Biden's Laptop" remains the hot topic on Fox Not-News and why House Republicans still want to nuke the federal budget so that Biden takes the blame. 

Another thing to consider is the consequences of trump's criminal misdeeds finally setting an accountability moment for the voters at large. If trump is found guilty in any of the trials he's facing in the next six-eight months, all the voters - even Republican ones - are going to have to decide if they can truly support a jury-convicted felon.

I know I've said before - a lot of others have observed it too - that Republicans WILL vote for a convicted trump, the issue becomes "how many actually will?" 

I've noted before there are factions within the ranks of the party: The die-hard MAGA true-believers who are actually reveling in trump's criminality, the cynical Republican elitists who will mock trump behind closed doors but openly support every trumpian Big Lie in order to beat back Democratic chances, and the Traditional voters who are hard-wired to vote Republican even when it's against their personal interests. Of those factions, only the MAGA voter base will obviously vote trump: There could well be a possibility that the Traditional GOP voters - the ones who grew up to Ike and Reagan and the lofty ideals of a benign conservative utopia - may recoil from a trump convicted on serious matters of espionage, obstruction, tax fraud, and/or subversion of a lawful election.

There's a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll that suggests this possibility of some Republicans refusing to vote for a convicted trump (article by Jason Lange):

About half of Republicans would not vote for Donald Trump if he were convicted of a felony, a sign of the severe risks his legal problems pose for his 2024 U.S. presidential bid, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll that closed on Thursday...

The two-day Reuters/Ipsos poll, which closed before Trump's late-afternoon court appearance, asked respondents if they would vote for Trump for president next year if he were "convicted of a felony crime by a jury." Among Republicans, 45% said they would not vote for him, more than the 35% who said they would. The rest said they didn't know.

Asked if they would vote for Trump if he were "currently serving time in prison," 52% of Republicans said they would not, compared to 28% who said they would...

This is just one poll, and such things are inaccurate projection until real events prove otherwise (polling science has kinda gotten worse since 2012). The poll at least suggests in this moment enough GOP voters still respect the legal process of trial-by-jury, and understand the implications that supporting a jailed candidate reflects badly on their party and on the nation. More polls will likely follow, and differing results may occur. But it's looking like trump's boast of "shooting somebody on 5th Avenue and not lose any voters" isn't holding up to reality.

Elections always matter, and elections rely on voter turnout. If trump is found guilty, if trump becomes the second man in American history to campaign for President from a jail cell (hi, Eugene Debs!), there is a strong chance trump's voter turnout will suffer far greater than anything that could happen to an unconvicted Joe Biden.

...which may explain, again, why House Republicans are desperate to impeach Biden five different times before 2024 rolls around.

All of this could also be moot by 2024 if trump gets convicted on some of the more serious charges, especially if those convictions trigger the 14th Amendment clause disqualifying insurrectionists from public office. That would kick trump off the general election ballots at the least - depending on the timing, it would negate any primary results - and would be great news for the Republican Also-Rans (up yours, DeSantis) vying for the Replacement gig should trump be banned. Personally, it's a result I keenly desire, because in my view trump has been and will be the worst possible human to ever run for the Presidency.

There are some who disagree with that hope, and Steve M. over at No More Mister Nice Blog does bring up a valid point:

I understand why people want to do this, but what's the likely result? It's hard to imagine Trump being pulled off the ballot in any state he could win in the general election. It's hard to imagine him being pulled off primary ballots in enough states to deny him the nomination. Meanwhile, the effort to remove him from the ballot confirms right-wingers' sense that anti-Trump forces are the real threat to democracy. That's a base motivator for the GOP.

Republicans already believe that the Trump indictments are an attempt to prevent them from voting for the candidate of their choice. Since Trump is actually a criminal, I think what's being done right now is the appropriate compromise: We're charging Trump with crimes while also allowing citizens to vote for him. They know he's facing multiple felony counts. They're making an informed choice. Let the democratic process play out...

Steve quotes that Reuters/Ipsos poll and holds out some hope:

Will nearly half of the GOP electorate really abandon Trump if he's found guilty of felonies? I'm skeptical. But this suggests that some Republican voters will.

And that could be an opportunity for the Republican Party. Even if Trump sweeps the primaries, he might seem like damaged goods to a significant segment of the GOP electorate if he's subsequently convicted of crimes. Maybe there'll be an effort to deny him the nomination, or replace him on the ballot between the convention and the general election. Who knows? A significant portion of the party's voters might approve.

Or maybe not. We'll see how GOP voters really feel once Trump has his day(s) in court and the right-wing media is portraying the proceedings as Stalinist show trials. I think most of the party will rally around him. But this poll suggests that he could lose just enough Republicans to be unelectable in November. It's probably best if the angry base isn't deprived of the opportunity to vote for him, and he loses anyway.

It's a nice sentiment, and like him I do hope enough Traditional Republican voters make the sensible move and NOT vote trump (they don't even have to vote Biden, they could even leave the Presidential choice blank while voting straight Republican down the rest of the 2024 ballot). But we've already seen trump never accepts losing - hence the 2020 schemes that has him facing criminal charges - and it's going to be a question of how far into the trumpian Big Lie madness the GOP state officials have fallen.

One other hope is if trump is convicted, and trump is still on the ballot, there's every motivation by Democratic voters (and No-Party voters leaning Center-Left) to show up in droves to ensure a goddamned felon - likely convicted for acts against the United States - gets nowhere near the White House again.

Again. Elections matter, and voter turnout win elections.

Get the vote out, Democrats. Get the vote out, Indy voters, for the Democratic Party. And for the love of GOD and COUNTRY, Republicans, stop supporting a crooked trump.

Update 7/21/24: Welp. This did not age well...

A Quick Reminder Why trump's Indictments Matter

With all the upcoming storm and fury that the trumpian criminal (and civil) cases will bring, I feel the need to re-up an earlier post I wrote about why these indictments are important and vital (and that yes I have an emotional stake in all this). If there's a way to make "Why It Matters" a permanent link on the side bar, I would do that (edit: I did):

With all this... animosity I've clearly been showing towards donald trump, I have to be honest and admit Yes I am biased, and Yes I am a little too eager to see trump perp-walked to a jail cell where he can rot for the rest of his short days.

You might want to ask me "Why." Why all this hate for the man?

It's not that he's rich (whatever millions he has doesn't make him much different from other rich men), or that he lies about being richer (although the gaslighting is part of the reason I despise trump). 

It's not that he's done anything directly towards me to raise my ire. trump's never come to my door to punch me in the face, or spike my car tires, or give a book I've published a one-star review. The closest he's done was ruining the USFL in 1987. However, taking away the Tampa Bay Bandits wasn't personal, it was just heartbreaking for myself and thousands of local sports fans.

It's not that he's a Republican political figure, although my disdain for that party has been decades long watching them sink into a Culture War miasma that's wrecking the national psyche for the last 25 years.

There are reasons to hate trump, and I listed a number of them back in 2016 regarding his unfitness to serve as President, only to watch since then every argument I made proved correct.

I would argue the reason I want to live long enough to see trump in a jail cell is the horrifying reality that this man has a long history of violating laws and cultural norms, to where he has never been held accountable for any of it. This is something which offends anyone who has a sense of justice in their soul...

Like any person with a desire to see justice done, to see our system of laws hold everyone equal to those laws, trump's ongoing misdeeds from 2017 onward triggered in me this thought: "He can't keep getting away with it..."

At some point, an honest defense of our nation's Constitutional system has to acknowledge the damage trump has done, is still inflicting, on the United States' well-being.

Which is why it matters. It matters to me, it matters to millions of fellow Americans, it matters to our future that all the things trump is under criminal investigation for today - the January 6th Insurrection, his tax fraud scams, that unfinished bribery allegation, his theft of classified documents, and the election interference in Georgia and other states - must finally bring him to heel.

It is a moral imperative as much as a legal imperative that at some point - for any of the crimes trump's committed in his pursuit of greed and power - donald trump must be indicted. It's not schadenfreude, it's not envy, it's not partisan hackery, it's not foolishness on my part or anyone else's. 

It is a straight-up moral imperative that trump stand in an American court of law and be held accountable for the laws he's openly violated. It is a moral imperative that every excuse, every deflection, every lie that trump keeps uttering to avoid the facts all come to an end.

Gods help us. Let Justice Be Done.

Will There Ever Be a Reckoning for What trump Did?

As donald trump gets marched into yet another courthouse today to get arraigned for criminal charges, that question remains at the fore. While trump is getting charged, and is facing his day in front of a judge and jury, will trump face any consequence for the sins he's committed?

There remains the actual matter of how the trials will end. trump is unlikely to plead to anything - his own narcissism and belief of being "above the law, they let you do it" will stop him from ever accepting guilt on even a misdemeanor deal - so it's going to determine if a jury finds him innocent or guilty on any of these matters.

Criminal cases are different from the civil cases trump has faced - and recently lost - before. The burden of proof on the state is higher, and the jury needs to be unanimous on all guilty verdicts. Meaning trump can pray for at least one die-hard conservative who survived voir dire process to nullify everything into a mistrial, which trump would crow as vindication and delay matters until after the November 2024 elections.

On the other hand, prosecutors have to have a strong case going into these matters in the first place, meaning Special Counsel Jack Smith has enough evidence to sway even a MAGA jury into realizing how badly the laws were broken. Considering the track record the Justice Department's had against the January 6th rioters so far - few acquittals and plenty of plea deals - they know how to present this kind of case to a jury to secure a conviction on at least ONE of the charges. trump's never faced anything this serious before, and is going up against prosecutors who know how trump is going to try to defend himself and will be prepped to outflank him.

What's also at stake here is the nation as a whole. We're entering literally uncharted waters now. We've never had a former President - the highest office in the land - face criminal charges of any kind post-admin. At most we've dealt with corrupt congresscritters going to jail for bribery and other unethical acts, we had to deal with the Confederate leaders like Jefferson Davis for their insurrection of Civil War (which led to the 14th Amendment provision blocking their like from any further office). This is new, and uncomfortably close for a lot of pundits towards crossing a line into partisanship.

In previous matters where a corrupt official found themselves cast adrift by their political party when caught in the act (Hi, Richard Nixon!), for trump almost the entire Republican Party has rallied to his defense. The nature of partisanship has gotten so severe that the modern GOP cannot cut themselves free of trump, and are tying his fate to theirs.

That also has a lot of the punditry worried, especially at the Atlantic (paywalled, by the by) that I still quote from often (blame TNC). Let's start with Ronald Brownstein:

The germ of election denialism that Trump injected into the American political system has spread so far throughout the Republican Party that it is virtually certain to survive whatever legal accountability the former president faces.

With polls showing that most Republican voters still believe the election was stolen from Trump, that the January 6 riot was legitimate protest, and that Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 results did not violate the law or threaten the constitutional system, the United States faces a stark and unprecedented situation. For the first time in the nation’s modern history, the dominant faction in one of our two major parties has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to accept antidemocratic means to advance its interests...

Sean Wilentz, a Princeton historian who specializes in American politics, told me that U.S. history has no exact precedent for a party embracing a leader so openly hostile to the core pillars of democracy. Presidents have often been accused of violating the Constitution through their policy actions, he said, but there is not another example of a president moving as systematically to “manipulate the apparatus of government or elections in order to subvert the will of the people.”

The closest parallel to Trump’s actions, Wilentz said, may be the strategies of the slaveholding South in the decades before the Civil War. Those included violent attacks on abolitionists, suppression of antislavery publications, and the promulgation of extreme legal theories such as the denial of basic rights to Black people in the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, all of which were designed to protect slavery against the emerging national majority dubious of it. That decades-long “antidemocratic thrust” from the South, Wilentz noted, “finally culminated in the greatest violation of the American Constitution in our history, which was secession.”

And Adam Serwer notes the GOP voting base - and thus the GOP officials pandering to that base - is still with trump:

If you’re wondering how Trump has survived as a candidate for office, you can look squarely at the conservative elites in politics and media—including many people who would prefer to be rid of him—who have staked out the position that trying to overthrow the government is not illegal if a Republican does it. Those defending Trump after his indictment over his attempted autogolpe are not opposing the politicization of justice; they are demanding it...

The hard-core authoritarian right that has risen in Trump’s shadow, the one contemplating political purges, noncompetitive elections, and iron-fisted state repression of its political opposition, has no commitment to democracy as an ideal, and its continued support is no mystery. The group is small in number, even if a committed political vanguard can have influence beyond its numbers, especially given its growing acceptance in mainstream-Republican circles.

The majority of conservative elites, however, retains some philosophical commitment to democracy and self-governance. They have nevertheless repeatedly failed the most basic test of democratic citizenship posed to them, defending the right of their public to choose their leaders. Right-wing media knowingly encouraged the delusions of the conservative base that the election was stolen out of fear that their audiences would flee. Republican lawmakers, now including Trump’s own primary opponents, have validated the idea that Trump is a victim of political persecution rather than someone who engaged in a conspiracy to keep himself in power, because they fear the electoral cost of opposing him. Immobilized by their own cowardice, both groups remain indefinitely in his thrall.

It is that blind devotion to an obviously corrupt figure like trump that is sounding five-alarm bells. Quoting from Tom Nichols about the danger trump represents now:

Long before now, however, Americans should have reached the conclusion, with or without a trial, that Trump is a menace to the United States and poisonous to our society...  The GOP base, controlled by Trump’s cult of personality, will likely never admit its mistake: As my colleague Peter Wehner writes, Trump’s record of “lawlessness and depravity” means nothing to Republicans. But other Republicans now, more than ever, face a moment of truth. They must decide if they are partisans or patriots. They can no longer claim to be both.

The rest of us, as a nation but also as individuals, can no longer indulge the pretense that Trump is just another Republican candidate, that supporting Donald Trump is just another political choice, and that agreeing with Trump’s attacks on our democracy is just a difference of opinion... I have long described Trump’s candidacies as moral choices and tests of civic character, but I have also cautioned that Americans, for the sake of social comity, should resist too many arguments about politics among themselves. I can no longer defend this advice...

This is painful advice to give and to follow. No one, including me, wants to lose friends or chill valued relationships over so small a man as Trump. But our democracy is about to go into legal and electoral battle for its own survival. If we don’t speak up—to one another, as well as to the media and to our elected officials—and Trump defeats us all by regaining power and making a mockery of American democracy, then we’ll all have lost a lot more than a few friendships. We face in Trump a dedicated enemy of our Constitution, and if he returns to office, his next “administration” will be a gang of felons, goons, and resentful mediocrities, all of whom will gladly serve Trump’s sociopathic needs while greedily dividing the spoils of power.

This is the real danger we're facing: The likelihood of donald trump getting criminally convicted by a jury and still eke-ing out a win - thanks to a still-broken Electoral College system and likely Republican voter suppression - for the Presidency in 2024 that would negate any prison time for himself (and then mass pardons for all of his lackeys to join him in the White House to commit more crimes).

Remember, there's only these restrictions - must be 35 years or older, must be a natural-born citizen, must have lived in the United States for 14 years - on running for President. There's no law blocking a convicted criminal running for that office, only the moral and ethical limits of any party willing to back him. Eugene Debs, after all, ran for President from his jail cell in 1920 and garnered about 1 million votes. Thing was, Debs was a fringe candidate for a fringe party and that was 3 percent of the total. This time it's different: trump will be representing one of the two major parties able to rally at least 62 million and at most 74 million to trump's banner. Even with trump sitting in a jail cell come November 2024, Republicans will vote for a convicted trump.

This is the fear: That trump and his Republican followers will never face a true reckoning for the damage they've done to our nation, and threaten to inflict even more.

This is where the ones who can stop that - the 81 million voters who sided with Joe Biden in 2020, the Democratic voters, the No-Party independents - need to stand up, now and in 2024. We need to keep fighting for our right to vote even as the Republican-controlled states try to purge the rolls and rig the results. We need to show up - even more than 81 million strong - to ensure there is no chance the likes of a corrupt trump and a corrupt GOP seizing the Presidency.

Because they're - not just trump - openly promising to make sure they never lose that power again.

For the LOVE OF GOD, America, stop voting for a corrupt Republican Party and their crooked banner carrier donald trump.

Third trump Indictment the Charm, And Still More To Come

Ask, and it shall be given you. Seek, and ye shall find. Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.
-- Matthew 7:7 

Well, I demanded indictments and BY GOD Special Counsel Jack Smith delivered with regards to trump's involvement in the January 6th Insurrection. Via Dareh Gregorian and Ryan J. Reilly at NBC News:

Former President Donald Trump was indicted Tuesday on charges he conspired to defraud the country he used to lead and attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of presidential power to Joe Biden. 

“The purpose of the conspiracy was to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by using knowingly false claims of election fraud to obstruct the government function by which those results are collected, counted and certified,” the indictment from special counsel Jack Smith’s office says. 

The indictment marks a historic moment for a nation less than 250 years old — the first time a former president has faced criminal charges for trying to overturn the bedrock of democracy, a free and fair election. While Trump's failure to reverse his defeat was a credit to the guardrails of that democracy, the ability to prosecute him may renew the stress test on the constitutional design.

The allegation that Trump used "dishonesty, fraud, and deceit" to subvert the 2020 election with "pervasive and destabilizing lies about election fraud" comes after a sprawling investigation that included testimony from dozens of White House aides and advisors ranging in seniority up to former Vice President Mike Pence.

The indictment accuses Trump of taking part in three criminal conspiracies: "to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud and deceit" to obstruct the electoral vote process; to "impede the January 6 congressional proceeding at which the collected results of the presidential election are counted and certified;" and "against the right to vote and to have that vote counted."

There is a link to the indictments provided here.

I would like to refer to Emptywheel for her legal expertise, but she's only posted a quick review and promises to have more later (and gives us clues as to who the yet-indicted co-conspirators are):

It’s late here, so this may be my only analysis before you all wake up.

But I wanted to lay out the structure of the Trump indictment.

The indictment charges him, alone, with four crimes:

18 USC 371 (conspiracy to defraud the US)

18 USC  1512(k) (conspiracy to obstruct the vote certification)

18 USC 1512(c)(2) (obstructing the vote certification)

18 USC 241 (conspiracy to violate civil rights)

They all are entirely overlapping. That is, Trump’s conduct, and those of 6 alleged co-conspirators, is cited in all those charges.

These are four charges for the same crime. So if the DC Circuit or SCOTUS overturns how DOJ has applied 1512, there are two back stops.

The other most important part of this indictment is who is named as a co-conspirator (and who might well be charged, as far as we know, today, separately by sealed indictment):

• Co-Conspirator 1, an attorney who was willing to spread knowingly false claims and pursue strategies that the Defendant’s 2020 re-election campaign attorneys would not. (Rudy Giuliani)
• Co-Conspirator 2, an attorney who devise and attempted to implement a strategy to leverage the Vice President’s ceremonial role overseeing the certification proceeding to obstruct the certification of the presidential election. (John Eastman)
• Co-Conspirator 3, an attorney whose unfounded claims of election fraud the Defendant privately acknowledged to others sounded “crazy.” Nevertheless, the Defendant embraced and publicly amplified Co-Conspirator 3’s disinformation. (Sidney Powell)
• Co-Conspirator 4, a Justice Department official who worked on civil matters and who, with the Defendant, attempted to use the Justice Department to open sham election crime investigations and influence state legislatures with knowingly false claims of election fraud. (Jeffrey Clark)
• Co-Conspirator 5, an attorney who assisted in devising and attempting to implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding. (WaPo says this is Kenneth Chesebro, and I think that’s sound.)
• Co-Conspirator 6, a political consultant who helped implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding. (Note: Emptywheel doesn't speculate but others are thinking it's Boris Epshteyn)

I argued since April 2022 that DOJ could — and should — charge Trump first and build in the stuff around him. I reiterated that a few weeks ago.

There’s a lot here...

One thing I would note is how Jack Smith spelled out more indictments are coming, not just for the conspirators but that trump is still on the hook for other matters the grand jury haven't voted on yet. For example, there's charges related to the Fake Electors scheme that Conspirator Number 6 oversaw that haven't been directly indicted yet (possibly waiting for Georgia's indictments on their Fake Electors to set up the charges for that state and several others).

Why these charges matter is that Smith presents as a legal matter before the courts strong evidence that donald trump has been - still is - lying about the 2020 election results, and using those lies to conspire against the Constitution and the United States and the People it represents.

Throughout the indictments, time and again Smith and his team point out where trump had been told the election results were fair, there was no proof of stolen or faked ballots, and yet trump still schemed to undo those results. Worse, trump and his co-conspirators were planning out ways to disrupt the formalities of our electoral system through means of violence: First towards trump's own Vice President Pence and towards Congress, and then violence towards any Americans who would rise up in protest against trump's coup attempt.

For all of trump's screaming that these indictments are a "WITCH HUNT", for the love of God the whole world witnessed what happened on January 6th when trump's rally turned into a riot that smashed into the halls of the Capitol. There's been hundreds of court cases that convicted - or forced plea deals - almost half of the trumpian MAGA rioters by now. There's been two-plus years of Congressional hearings and grand jury inquiries into trump's misconduct that presented enough evidence that the Justice Department can now take to trial.

We've seen real witch hunts, by the by: Far Right Republican pursuits after Bill Clinton in the 1990s that only uncovered adulterous affairs that had nothing to do with financial or political crimes; Far Right Republican allegations against Obama for everything they feared but could never prove; Far Right Republican attacks on Hillary's handling of Benghazi and her emails, which all turned into nothingburgers that could never stand up in a court of law.

We've never been in a moment like this, with a former President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice) facing criminal charges for attacking constitutional norms and in most respects the nation itself. All because we've never had as blatant a con artist and would-be mafia boss like trump reach that level of power before.

Gods help us, our nation needs this moment to force trump into the crucible of a courtroom, to face the reality of the schemes he's plotted and the sins he's committed. Anything to stop him from his constant Big Lies that have brought us to this place. Anything to stop him before he can lie and bully his way back into the Presidency where the law will be impotent to hold him accountable (ever again, if he gets his wish of dismantling every federal system to stay in power for the rest of his aging life).

Let Justice be done. For everything that the United States represents in the long arc of human history.

I'm Just Sitting Here Watching the Indictment Wheels Go Round and Round

It is Tuesday August 1st 2023.

I was promised indictments for donald trump and his associates/handlers/lackeys involved in both the January 6th insurrection in Washington DC, as well as indictments in Fulton County Georgia covering trump's attempts to bully state elections officials into throwing the results and scheming fake electors to steal the 2020 Electoral College count.

Goddammit. The sooner we get these charges before a judge, the sooner we get trump in a courtroom before the November 2024 general election, and the sooner we can see trump dragged off in handcuffs when a jury finds him guilty - one hopes - on at least ONE of the multiple charges he's facing.

I am tired of the delays.

Indict him on everything, for the Love of Mom, Baseball, Apple Pie, and good music, just do it, and let God - and a competent jury - sort it all out.

Lemme quote from Lennon:

Ah, prosecutors asking questions
Lost in confusion
Well, I tell them trump insurrected
Bring the solution

Well, they shake their heads and they look at me, as if I've no legal mind
I tell them there's a hurry, I'm hoping trump finally sees doing time

I'm just sitting here watching the wheels of justice go round and round
I really love to watch them charges roll
No longer riding on the media go-around

I just hope to see trump go (to jail)
I just hope to see trump go (to jail)
I just hope tooooooooo see trump go (to jail)

(piano flourish at the end)

Update about seven hours later: ASK AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE. Special Counsel Jack Smith indicts trump on four charges related to January 6th insurrection. More to follow.

Free My Mind from the 2023 Blues

My head is not in a good spot right now.

I tried taking most of this month off to get some writing done - or even edit some writing projects down to a manageable self-published thing - but... I couldn't focus.

I find myself just sitting in the recliner, feeling overwhelmed, not feeling inspired or motivated, and just... not there.

I really noticed I'm having serious problems by how I'm NOT even using these blank hours/days to binge-watch any of the geek shows out there. The money going to several streaming services right now are just WASTED as I zone out. I even rented a copy of Season One of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds back before 4th of July... and I still haven't even popped Disc One in to the player. And I've heard the show is good, I mean Third Season of Next Gen good. What the hell is stopping me?

It was that realization: My chronic depression is back, it's severe, and I really need to find someone on my Blue Cross HMO to see about treatment and getting out of this funk.

I'm at the point where a massive announcement of donald trump getting indicted in BOTH Georgia and Washington DC this week won't get me in a better mood. Well, okay, actually yeah I would be highly buzzed if that happens, but I know I'll be back in the recliner getting moody again.

Alas.

I Survived Tampa Bay Comic Con 2023

I've not gone to as many of these comic cons over the past few years - PANDEMIC, people! - and I skipped last year's Tampa Bay Comic Con because I didn't see many celebrities of personal interest. This year, I skipped Orlando MegaCon's for mostly that reason - also because they were in the North/South Pavilion again and I hated all the walking I had to do for that one to get to the discussion panels I wanted to visit - and so decided to go to this year's Tampa Bay con to keep my interests peaked.

This time around, my nephew Drew's birthday fell on the same day, and there was a breakfast event for the family, meaning I delayed my arrival to the comic con just as the nearest parking garage filled up (whoa). Previous experience is that the lines to get in are insane even BEFORE the opening - they start taking in the outside line around 9:00am to take tickets, and open the vendor's floor at 10:00am - so when I got there by 10:30am the line was still stretched across the Tampa Riverwalk and it took another 30 minutes just to get into the air conditioning.

Nephew Drew was planning to attend as well, but was going with friends from university and coming in later (I warned him), and so he was off on adventures of his own (although we agreed to meet up so I could buy him a birthday present of his choice). Here then was how the comic con looked.

As I am not an autograph hound, I wasn't there for the celebrities doing the signings and the meet-and-greets. Alas, I discovered that this year's con did not include many discussion panels, at least not with artists or authors of interest. The one writing panel was about working with magic rules in fantasy works, something I've already studied and not much into my leaning towards scifi. It had also started at 10:30am and was almost over by the time I got there by 11:25am (argh).

I did get to see a giant Pikachu, however.

WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW???

Also, I saw a Grimace. He was there to tempt more victims to his #GrimaceShake experience.

Nephew Drew showed up by the time my stomach was growling, so I met him in line for some food in the first floor cafe area, along with his friend (Drew, you're gonna need to remind me his name and his cosplay, thank you).

No, Drew did NOT go as Oppenheimer in honor of the Barbieheimer Experience. He didn't have the fedora and stove pipe for props yet. He did come as a character from a 1979 Japanese live-action movie called The Man Who Stole the Sun - my nephew has gotten into anime/Japanese film in a big way - so be grateful Drew showed up in a suit and tie.

There was, rather shocking to me, a decided lack of Oppenheimer cosplay: Usually the cosplayers will dress up in the hottest hippest geek trend to show off their costuming skills. I barely saw any Barbies - I counted five - and the only thing I could think of was that the film's production efforts of taking every pink outfit on the planet was the reason why there wasn't enough pink clothing to go around.

Maybe next year.

Anywho. Back to the visuals!

There were a couple of things missing this year - I did not see an R2-D2 display area (there was only one R2 rolling the floor and I could not find the time to pose with him) and I did not find a Lego display area. I just realized I didn't see the 501st cosplaying that extensively this year. I wonder if they were all up on the 4th floor which I did not visit because it was all stairwells and I didn't care to look for elevators.

None of the celebrities doing the main auditorium discussions drew my interest, so this was kind of a quiet comic con for me. Drew did find his birthday present - a Lego kit - and I hope he has fun putting it together.

Here's hoping I find more interest to intrigue me for next year's comic con.

The Whitewash of History, on DeSantis' Orders

Update: Thank you Batocchio for including this article on Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Everyone visiting, please leave a comment below, or Tweet me at... at... oh, right. Twitter's dead.

This past week bore witness to the next stage of Ron DeSantis' open war against Woke (or Critical Race Theory, or Thou Shalt Not Shame our White Boys): The utter disassembly of American/Florida History when it comes to talking about race-based slavery in our nation's development. 

What DeSantis wants to impose - through his hand-picked Board of Education - grade school class studies teaching that "slavery helped the slaves develop work skills" as a "personal benefit" for gainful employment. You're not reading that wrong, that's how the regional and national media are reporting it (this link via CBS News):

Florida's 2023 Social Studies curriculum will include lessons on how "slaves developed skills" that could be used for "personal benefit," according to a copy of the state's academic standards reviewed by CBS News. 

The lessons in question fall under the social studies curriculum's African-American studies section, and be taught to students in sixth through eighth grade, according to the state standards. 

The lessons for that grade level will include teachings on understanding the "causes, courses and consequences of the slave trade in the colonies," and instruction on the differences and similarities between serfdom and slavery, the curriculum says. Students will also be asked to describe "the contact of European explorers with systematic slave trading in Africa" and look at the history and evolution of slave codes. 

The line about "personal benefit" is included as a "benchmark clarification" to a lesson that asks students to "examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves," such as agricultural work, domestic service, blacksmithing and household tasks like tailoring and painting. 

My first reaction hearing the news: THIS IS DESANTIS' AND THE FAR RIGHT REPUBLICANS IDEA OF PUTTING A POSITIVE SPIN ON HUMAN CHATTEL SLAVERY, WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK.  (yes it was all internal CAPS LOCK screaming)

My following reaction was a bit calmer and more of an earnest question: "Will these classes also detail the physical and emotional traumas that slavery inflicted on the men, women, and CHILDREN who were chained up, collared like animals, and whipped for the sadistic enjoyment of the masters?" 

Will the study materials include the photographs of the scars on their backs?

Say hello to the BENEFITS of slavery.
"Whipped Peter" - photo from the National Gallery

Here is DeSantis - here is the WHOLE OF THE MODERN REPUBLICAN PARTY, finally proving themselves the Party of John C. Calhoun and not the Party of Lincoln - trying to make it sound like slavery were career opportunities for the tens of the thousands of captured Africans dragged to America's shores, that all those long sweating days in the cotton fields and in the smith shops and in the rape cages were "work skills" they could put on their resumes when they go job hunting down the road.

Except in slavery there WAS no "down the road," no freedom to go find your own work, you were either worked to death on the plantation where they bought you from the auction blocks, or you were traded off to another plantation - oft-times without your family and loved ones - to pay off the debts of your overseers / masters and worked to death there.

The nation is littered with gravesites of tens of thousands of slaves who died in chains. Claiming all that work was a "BENEFIT" is an obscenity that should never be taught.

But that's what DeSantis and the other Far Right Republicans want to teach. They WANT future generations of White kids to grow up to the "comforting myth" that slavery was a benefit to the slaves, they WANT to convince Black kids that there was no difference between the horrors of antebellum chattel slavery and the current-day failures of fair treatment in education and workplaces.

This is the American Conservative gaslighting effort to set the stage, to twist the "debate" on slavery in their long-term goal to make it okay to bring back race-based slavery in some form. We've already seen - I have, as far back as 2010 - the Far Right push to undo their legacy of the 14th Amendment Citizenship clause so they can deny the rights of any class of people they want. How easy would it be for them to deny the constitutionality of the 13th Amendment and create the excuse of "slavery" as a "vocational skill program"?

This is a nightmare.

Betty Cracker at Balloon Juice is a fellow Floridian, and she's as angry about this whitewash as I am. She's livid that DeSantis and his GOP lackeys are trying to rewrite the horrors of Rosewood and Ocoee Massacres as "both siderisms": 

I think the Ocoee Massacre remains the most deadly election-related race massacre in U.S. history to this day. So how did black people perpetrate violence? At Ocoee, in self defense, a black man named July Perry shot and killed two members of the KKK lynch mob that had surrounded his house because a friend was thought to have taken refuge there after attempting to vote in Florida while black (Note: this was in 1920, the friend was a WWI veteran who had been told by a local judge he did qualify to vote even in that Jim Crow era). 

The mob eventually lynched Perry anyway, killed more than 30 other black people, burned their houses and businesses to the ground, and established Ocoee as an all-white “sundown town.” But it’s important to know that both sides acted violently and had violence perpetrated upon them (Note: Betty is being sarcastic, by the by).

In this instance, DeSantis has layered on plausible deniability by enlisting crackpot people of color to do the dirty work, including Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, Jr. and the department’s African American history task force. Trump had to hand out “Blacks for Trump” shirts to white people. DeSantis is building a diverse coalition of right-wing cranks to whitewash black history and enact a far-right agenda...

DeSantis is doing all of this to win over Far Right Republicans on the national level as he campaigns for 2024, desperate to outdo the overt racism that trump spews by passing laws and breaking protocols that sinks to the deepest needs of the "deplorable" MAGA base. In the process, he's going against entire centuries' worth of facts, against the truth of how damaging human chattel slavery was - and still is - to all of humanity across the board.

Slavery has no benefit. None. Slavery not only brutalized the Black Americans who suffered under the chain and whip, slavery also turned White Americans into brutes, broken monsters who got drunk and violent on the power they wielded over other lives. Even the non-owning Whites both North and South in the pre-Civil War era profited from the physical and emotional damage that slavery caused, and it still created the "White Privilege" class system that skews our legal system and social norms to this day.

For all the problems we have today, trying to forge a stronger system of justice and equality, the modern Republican Party is trying to revert our nation's long arc of history back to the 1850s. They WANT us to accept slavery, they WANT us to dehumanize the Black (and in the process the Latino and Asians who are "foreigners" to the eyes of the White Man, and then the Woman whose rights back in those days were just as non-existent) to where they have no rights at all.

Goddamn them, Goddamn DeSantis for shoving down our throats his political agenda of lies and deceit and race-driven fear.

Hey, Republicans: If Slavery was so great at teaching "work skills," why didn't they offer those "work skills" to the poor Whites who wanted to get ahead in their career paths? Hmm? Anyone of Anglo-Euro origins willing to put a collar on their neck and chains on their wrists to work 12 straight hours in the fields? Anyone?

For the LOVE OF GOD, Humanity, stop voting Republican.

The Age of Barbieheimer

Okay, with all the chaos going on in the political world, are we the United States ready as a nation to handle a cultural moment like having two movies not compete but complement and co-exist with each other?

Because we're at that moment July 21 2023 where the Hollywood tradition of "counterprogramming" - where a movie release of obvious blockbuster proportions makes it difficult to release other films, except  giving a smaller sometimes more artistic movie a chance to attract audiences that are not attuned to that blockbuster - offered us the movie Barbie - a comedic, lighthearted, brightly colored goofball type of movie based on "Intellectual Property" (IP) bringing in an established and fervent fanbase designed solely to entertain and make $500 million at the box office - versus Oppenheimer - a dramatic, darkly lit serious biographical epic focusing on the man most responsible for the atomic bomb and the world-shattering implications of such a weapon, and designed to be Oscar Awards bait - to be the highlights of a movie summer season.

Except something weird happened. The movie-going fanbases got into the "counterprogramming" effort - we are now as a species in a kind of post-modern awareness of tropes - and started complementing each other's films to where a contingent of filmgoers openly planned to watch both films as a double-header.

The event got its own Wikipedia page: Barbieheimer. The meme of the year.

Via Rebecca Rubin at Variety:

At a glance, the audience overlap isn’t clear. “Oppenheimer,” starring Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr. and Emily Blunt, is a somber character study about the theoretical physicist who led the development of the atomic bomb. “Barbie,” featuring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, is a neon-hued fantasy comedy about Barbie-Land expats who go on a quest for self-discovery in the real world. Visually, “Oppenheimer” is moody and intense, while “Barbie” is a physical manifestation of the color pink. Yet the contrast is the very thing that’s galvanizing film lovers.

“This could have been something dividing the masses, but instead it’s bringing everyone together,” says Nicole Boisseau, a 21-year-old Richmond, Va. student. Her dad, Jay Boisseau, who also has tickets to both films at Alamo Drafthouse on opening weekend, says that jokes aside, the mismatched scheduling works out for viewers. “Since they are so different, it’s not like you’re going to spend six hours watching the same thing,” he notes.

And as Rubin points out, as the fandoms got more into the idea of the double-feature, the situation got weirder as people noticed that the two films are going to be stunningly similar in archetypal ways:

But his daughter believes the movies have more in common than meets the eye. “They’re both questioning the nature of humanity.” (She’s serious. During one hilarious scene in the “Barbie” trailer, Margot Robbie’s life-size doll turns to her friends at a dance party to ask: “Do you guys ever think about dying?”)

That wham line from the trailer did indeed spark a new wave of discussions among the Barbie faithful, as more clues from other trailers and teasers pointed to that film sending their character on a Hero's Journey to find out what is wrong with herself (more specifically, what is wrong with the young girl that Barbie represents). The "something weird" got weirder... and more profound.

The audiences began realizing that instead of a cheap, fun, almost perfunctory piece of entertainment - like the animated Super Mario Bros movie released earlier this year that performed to box office expectations - they were getting a Barbie movie from a film auteur willing to explore the deeper ramifications of the doll's cultural impact since its introduction in 1959, alongside a bioepic film about the inventor of nuclear Armageddon from an equally imposing film auteur who knows how to stir emotional awe and enlightenment out of the darkness itself:

Some cinephiles believe it’s because the two filmmakers inspire a particular kind of loyalty in their fans. Nolan, who has delivered commercial winners like “The Dark Knight,” “Inception” and “Interstellar,” and Gerwig, the indie favorite behind “Lady Bird” and “Little Women,” are the rare directors who can draw audiences on their name alone.

“It comes down to the filmmakers, who are widely respected. They complement each other in a weird way,” says Meredith Loftus, 30, of Los Angeles. She compared the scheduling to an unusual double-header in 2008 of Nolan’s superhero epic “The Dark Knight” and the kitschy musical “Mamma Mia!,” which opened on the same day...

I'd discussed Nolan's Dark Knight before, when honoring Tiny Lister's passing, and how Nolan took an IP themed "product" - Batman - and crafted a noir-ish operatic epic that not only won the box office but wowed the film critics. I'd written elsewhere how The Dark Knight deserved Oscar love and yet got snubbed in such a way that the outrage reshaped the awards to accept more films for Best Picture (and opened the door for action thriller-type movies like Mad Max Fury Road to achieve the honor of getting nominated).

We're now facing a similar moment with Greta Gerwig taking an IP themed Barbie and turning it into an Oscar contender. Seriously, more than just the (deserved) Set Design and Costuming nods the film's likely to get (just the fact alone that the production used up every pink paint and dye on the planet should get the awards).

We're talking about a movie where the early reports about the plot - confronting the themes of Stepford Wives-ish suburban conformity, the gender roles that Barbie (and Ken) impart to the girls and boys who play with them (and reflect back onto themselves), the struggle between matriarchy and patriarchy as the fantasy of Barbies who can do everything - doctor, lawyer, President, mermaid - crash into the harsh real world where men are mostly in control and Barbies are treated as sex objects, even the fact that Barbie is an "Intellectual Property" of Mattel that the company (represented by Will Ferrell's CEO) insists on "keeping in a box" ("biting the hand" humor indeed) - that clearly makes the film more philosophical and wistful than a simple Product Placement movie is expected to be.

Anchoring all that are performances that fans are already expecting to be excellent. Margot Robbie arguably was born to play Barbie her whole life - naturally blond, dancer's legs, the slim body that the Barbie doll is (in)famous for - but with an expressive face that can convey incredible gravitas (and she's been Oscar nominated before, so unless Meryl Streep and Helen Mirren and Natalie Portman and Jennifer Lawrence and Angela Bassett all come out with jaw-dropping lead actress roles this autumn, Robbie should get her due). Ryan Gosling - he of the Photoshopped washboard abs - is also getting critical acclaim for his role as Ken, the "boyfriend" that culturally has been reduced to just another accessory for Barbie but whose exposure to the real-world "Alpha Male" movement threatens the stability of the fantasy Barbieland back home (Gosling has also received Oscar nominations before, so as long as Leo DeCaprio and Jamie Foxx and Timothee Chalamet and Andrew Garfield and Denzel Washington and Tom Hanks don't come out with serious lead actor roles this autumn, Gosling should get his due).

In the face of all that, the expectations for Oppenheimer are lower in terms of box office but higher in terms of critical acclaim: There is already Oscar talk for actor Cillian Murphy, and Nolan is bound to get another shot at Best Director. Given the A-list talent - Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr, Emily Blunt, Kenneth Branagh, Florence Pugh, Rami Malek - on-board other acting nominations are likely, and a lot of technical award nominations as well.

There's not much spoilers to what the audiences will know about the plot: We all know what happened July 16th 1945 when the Trinity Bomb test took place and the Atomic Age was no longer a product of Science Fiction. We all know there were serious debates among the physicists, military leaders, and politicians about the ramifications of weaponizing the atom. And we all endured the decades of Duck And Cover, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Doomsday Clock, Mutually Assured Destruction, "Shall We Play A Game?", and the post-Cold War nightmare of rogue nations carrying suitcase bombs.

Like all the other epic biographical films of before - Lawrence of Arabia, Gandhi, Weird: The Weird Al Story - Oppenheimer tries to delve into the background and motivations of a real-world figure whose personal life is still not well-known or understood. The general awareness is of a scientist who pushed during the Second World War for the creation of nuclear weapons before Nazi Germany could unleash them first, only to realize the dangers he himself brought to the world and later tried to atone for the damage he'd caused.

The best we remember Oppenheimer is his famous quote about what he thought when he saw the first nuclear mushroom cloud: 

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.'

From all this, director Nolan is clearly creating a serious, almost bleak film that is going to be more adult, more frank about the human condition than Barbie ever could be. And yet, Nolan has a visual style - a desire to make things as realistic as possible, and yet as stunning as possible - that will also clearly dazzle the eye and leave audiences gasping. Look to his earlier stand-alone works like Inception or Interstellar: While based on Science Fiction/Fantasy, the visuals and technology on display were grounded in realism to where audiences could believe such things were possible. One of the fun facts of Interstellar was how Nolan's push to computer-generate an actual black hole (singularity) led to scientists discovering - and proving - previously unknown traits that black holes exhibit in real life. 

The fact that Nolan is claiming his film contains no CGI - no computer animation to enhance images, implying he's somehow mocked-up a nuclear explosion using practical effects - is going to be a major draw for people wondering how he pulled that off.

And in this telling, Nolan is likely going to use the similar Hero's Journey framework - detailing Oppenheimer's path from a student of nuclear physics to Destroyer Of Worlds - that Barbie will follow, creating a compare-and-contrast of two major figures that affected the entire post-war world of the last-half of the 20th Century.

It's no wonder Barbieheimer (or Barbienheimer?) is a thing.

This will be a day long remembered by the geekdom:

The only remaining argument is "Which order to see both movies?" If you go see Barbie first, you want to get the frivolity and fun out of the way before dealing with the nuclear nightmares that Oppenheimer elicits, and coming to terms with death in a sober manner. If you see Oppenheimer first, it means you want to wrap up the day/evening with the floating party that is the Barbie life by seeing the movies and then dance the hidden pains away.

Go to it, America.

Today is the day.

Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Barbie Worlds...

Update 7/23/23: I survived Barbieheimer. I went to Barbie first at 11:15 AM and then Oppenheimer at 1:40 PM.

Wait, why was Barbie more expensive than Oppenheimer? Barbie was the first showing, isn't that usually a cheaper deal?!

Taking a Break from Blogging July 2023 Version

I need to take a brief hiatus - again - from blogging to focus on writing a bigger project this month.

I need the well wishes, please and thanks. 

Here is a video of Mal hitting me with his tail.

Planning Our Escape from Twitter to... Where?

Well, after six months of insane mismanagement by Elon Musk, this past weekend of enforcing data limits on viewing is pretty much the death knell of Twitter. It's now a question how quickly this ship will sink into the Atlantic. Anne Laurie over at Balloon Juice has a number of details - especially how Musk is failing to pay his bills - which would be better to read at her article before returning back here, please and thanks. Here's a GIF of Titanic failure to pass the time until you return.

via GIPHY

Ever since Musk overpaid for Twitter - seriously, 44 BILLION?! - he has fired most of his workforce, tried to cheat employment safety guidelines, sought to make Twitter users PAY for something that had been free for them for more than a decade, allowed haters and racists back in order to spike reader interest, and eventually committed to this act of self-immolation as if to drive even addicted Tweeters - sighs and points to mirror - to flee for their lives.

I mean, I know I promised to walk away from Twitter, and I tried... for about a week, before I got pulled back by the fact most people I know were still using it, and because it was still a quick and powerful way to gain near-instant news. A lot of people pledged to get off the ship back then, and yet... We were too used (too addicted) to the app.

But we're looking at the likely abandonment of Twitter within this month as more people get frustrated with Musk's growing incompetence at managing things. It does not help Musk that more alternatives to his app are cropping up.

I had for example jumped onto CounterSocial last November. Only because a favorite for everyone else - Mastadon - was too frustrating for me to install and set up. It wasn't intuitive or helpful. Sadly not a lot of people I knew crossed onto CS, there was no audience to share, so I hadn't kept up with it.

Soon after, an alternative called Spoutible showed up, and I was able to register onto that relatively easy. It mimics a lot of features on Twitter and it should be the easiest app to shift to, except not everybody has, partly because of early controversy with Spoutible's owner being a jerk and mostly because (see below)...

Another app called BlueSky showed up a couple months ago, promising to be the best possible replacement, and it's using the Beta testing process to encourage users to invite their friends in order to make BlueSky more desirable (for those of us who never sat at the cool kids' table, this is high school all over again sigh) to join. As Twitter collapsed this weekend, BlueSky invites skyrocketed (pun intended).

And just this Monday, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook I mean Meta announced the speedup of a new app tied into the Facebook/Instagram services called Threads, which dropped this morning late Wednesday night and already got 30 million users to where Musk is threatening to sue Zuck out of spite. While shifting over to an app most people already have - Facebook has 2.99 billion users globally and Instagram which ties into Threads has 2.35 billion - would be a no-brainer, there are security and privacy concerns about the transition that makes me wary.

As you see, while Twitter is sinking, we humans are overwhelmed with choices we didn't have when Twitter started back in 2006. The instant sharing of tweets - faster than newswires and RSS feeds, easier to send to millions of readers than emails or texts - was a novel and unique software app for its day. But now that Musk is punching holes into his own luxury liner to make it sink faster, the survivors queuing for the lifeboats can't make a clean decision on which arriving cruise ship to join.

I mean, we could even go join up on Discord and tie-in to our multiplayer gaming habits, but that just breaks down to such specific cliques that general sharing could never be a reality. And hell, I am digressing here.

So, if you're keeping up at home:

Twitter: still there at https://twitter.com/PaulWartenberg playing the trumpet with the band until the ship sinks for good.

CounterSocial: Can be found at https://counter.social/@pwartenberg but I'm not sure how often I will show up, but send me a tell when you get there.

Spoutible: I'm at https://spoutible.com/PaulWartenberg and I am trying to make it a habit of cross-posting my blog flogs to increase traffic from there.

BlueSky: (I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not... /cries)

Threads: Nope, not unless they PAY me to do it.

And I'm curious, are there OTHER social apps out there playing for Twitter's market share...?

(Keeps playing Herb Alpert's "Rise" until the waters reach the deck)

"Gentlemen, it has been a priv---" (suddenly gets invite to BlueSky) "Every sucker for himself! I'm out of here!" (flees)

Update 7/21/23: Holy sh-t I DID get an invite to BlueSky. You can find me there as @paulwartenberg.bsky.social