thenation--2020-12-18--Unchecked Republican Lies Opened the Door for Trump

If Donald Trump is not the worst president of all time , then his only competition is Andrew Johnson , his predecessor in the impeached-and-not-reelected category .
( To be perfectly accurate , Johnson was never actually elected ; he succeeded Abraham Lincoln . )
Not coincidentally , the period following Lincoln ’ s assassination in the aftermath of the Civil War is likely the last time American politics were as chaotic—and perhaps as dangerous—as they are today .
Trump ’ s election tweets are unhinged , but there is a self-serving logic to his pretend putsch .
It allows @ @ @ @ @ @ @ grifter .
He raised more than $ 200 million for this phony fight and invited potential Republican rivals to smear themselves in the bullshit he left behind .
An added benefit is the fact of how much attention his shenanigans draws away from the legitimate actions of the man who beat him in the presidential election and even more advantageous is the fact that he is presiding venally and incompetently over what is already one of the largest mass death experiences the nation has ever faced .
( I imagine I ’ d @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t writing about this . )
Polls tell us that nearly 80 percent of Trump voters believe their man was the election ’ s rightful winner .
Trump will therefore succeed in undermining whatever faith his 74 million voters previously had in their political system .
He may also inspire mass violence against duly elected officials .
( We got a taste of this from the Proud Boy stabbing spree in Washington , D.C. , last weekend . )
We ’ ve seen worrisome threats against the people responsible for ensuring a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and Arizona .
Michigan had to close the doors of its legislative offices because of “ credible threats of violence ” before the Electoral College vote .
And it ’ s not just Trump doing the stoking .
On Twitter , the Republican Party of Arizona called on supporters to be willing to “ die for something ” and asked if members would give up their lives for the cause .
The most immediate political concern is the attempt by Trump and 126 Republican House members to overturn the result of the presidential @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the 222 Republicans in Congress—which is nearly 90 percent of them—who refused in a Washington Post poll simply to acknowledge the fact that Biden won the election .
More than 60 percent of Republicans in the House joined Trump ’ s stupid lawsuit contesting Texas ’ s election results .
And Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy , the GOP Senate and House leaders , respectively , voted against recognizing reality when Biden ’ s victory was put up by the Democrats for an ( unsuccessful ) vote .
There are a lot of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ almost comical one is that if these people think the election was corrupted by whatever conspiracy of the day Trump ’ s lawyers have come up with in their more than 50 failed attempts to challenge the vote counts , then they were likely not elected either .
A second problem is that if they are serious , they are also crazy .
And if they ’ re not serious , then they are trying to overthrow the legally elected government of the United States , which sounds a lot like treason .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ in a letter he sent to Nancy Pelosi calling on the House to refuse to seat any of the Republicans who joined Trump ’ s suit because they are violating the Constitution and are “ traitors.
” That may be a stretch politically , but logically , Pascrell has a point .
And it is one that the members of the mainstream media need to take to heart .
We know that our democracy is at stake and that the country may be on the precipice of significant political violence .
If ever @ @ @ @ @ @ @ self-destructive addiction to false equivalence , now is the time .
There is only one fundamental truth in this election : Biden won the Electoral College by 306-232 and the popular vote by more than 7 million .
The only reason the contest briefly looked close was that Republican state legislators in battleground states purposely prevented the counting of mail-in ballots in advance , apparently to engender a crisis just like the one we now face .
That the Republican Party has been able to get away with its antidemocratic behavior and anti-reality @ @ @ @ @ @ @ indulgence of network and cable news bookers who pursue conflict without concern for truth .
During Barack Obama ’ s first year in office , Newt Gingrich was the single most frequently booked guest on NBC ’ s Meet the Press .
He was the only ex–House speaker ever to be invited , and the actual Speaker of the House , Nancy Pelosi , had a grand total of zero appearances that year .
It was also despite the fact that Gingrich had already grown increasingly insane .
With little pushback , Gingrich @ @ @ @ @ @ @ detect “ a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us , ” and spread the lunatic theories of convicted felon Dinesh D ’ Souza .
Gingrich also argued that , under Obama ’ s presidency , the country was “ being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s .
This philandering , inebriated African socialist , who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions , is now setting the nation ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dreams in his son.
” All through the Obama era , as Trump pumped up his racist campaign of lies against America ’ s first Black president , Republican Party leaders were invited time and time again on these programs to further his falsehoods .
Asked on Meet the Press whether Obama was a Christian or a Muslim , Speaker of the House John Boehner could not bring himself to give a straight answer .
“ Listen , ” he told the host , David Gregory , “ the American people have the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ think .
I can ’ t—it ’ s not my job to tell them.
” Majority leader Eric Cantor did much the same .
Given this , it should hardly surprise anyone that as late as 2016 , long after Obama reluctantly produced official Hawaiian records documenting his birth , fully 72 percent of Republican voters told pollsters they either doubted or actually did not believe that he had been born in the United States .
In other words , Trump was pushing against an open door with his pathological lying and racist @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that there would be no sanction in the media so long as he provided the ratings that stoked their profits .
Now those same network executives need to decide which side they are on : democracy or fascist rebellion .
Network bookers should refuse to amplify the words of anyone who denies Biden ’ s victory without immediately pointing out that that person is a liar .
Nothing is “ disputed.
” Nothing is “ controversial.
” Nothing is “ lacking in evidence.
” There is only truth or lies .
These multimillion-dollar @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about their Q-ratings ( likability measurements ) to challenge the politicians who lie to their faces .
But this time , the sanctity of the political system and perhaps the safety of their fellow citizens depends on their growing a spine and insisting that their interviewees acknowledge the truth before opining on any other matter .
This should be simple .
The news divisions of the major networks , together with CNN ( and to a lesser extent , the liberal-branded MSNBC ) , have all sacrificed much of their credibility during the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ opportunity to win it back .
Fox News faces an interesting dilemma .
It has always been more of a propaganda outlet than a news network , and this reached ridiculous proportions under Trump .
But now , with even nuttier networks like Newsmax and One American News nipping at Fox ’ s heels , it has a chance to rebrand itself as what it pretends to be : a conservative news alternative to the centrist mainstream , allowing the others to swim alone in the fetid waters that was previously Fox ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t have any great hopes that this will actually happen anytime soon .
Despite Rupert Murdoch ’ s troglodyte ideological commitments , money has always come first for him—and there is still plenty of short-term profit in pushing Trump ’ s line .
Even so , one can hope that the best long-term bet—at least as seen by his children—will be in participating in American democracy , not offering aid and comfort to those who seek to destroy it .

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If Donald Trump is not the worst president of all time, then his only competition is Andrew Johnson, his predecessor in the impeached-and-not-reelected category. (To be perfectly accurate, Johnson was never actually elected; he succeeded Abraham Lincoln.) Not coincidentally, the period following Lincoln’s assassination in the aftermath of the Civil War is likely the last time American politics were as chaotic—and perhaps as dangerous—as they are today.
Trump’s election tweets are unhinged, but there is a self-serving logic to his pretend putsch. It allows him to continue his life as a grifter. He raised more than $200 million for this phony fight and invited potential Republican rivals to smear themselves in the bullshit he left behind. An added benefit is the fact of how much attention his shenanigans draws away from the legitimate actions of the man who beat him in the presidential election and even more advantageous is the fact that he is presiding venally and incompetently over what is already one of the largest mass death experiences the nation has ever faced. (I imagine I’d be writing about that if I weren’t writing about this.)
Polls tell us that nearly 80 percent of Trump voters believe their man was the election’s rightful winner. Trump will therefore succeed in undermining whatever faith his 74 million voters previously had in their political system. He may also inspire mass violence against duly elected officials. (We got a taste of this from the Proud Boy stabbing spree in Washington, D.C., last weekend.) We’ve seen worrisome threats against the people responsible for ensuring a fair count in Michigan, Georgia, and Arizona. Michigan had to close the doors of its legislative offices because of “credible threats of violence” before the Electoral College vote. And it’s not just Trump doing the stoking. On Twitter, the Republican Party of Arizona called on supporters to be willing to “die for something” and asked if members would give up their lives for the cause.
The most immediate political concern is the attempt by Trump and 126 Republican House members to overturn the result of the presidential election. They are no doubt among the 222 Republicans in Congress—which is nearly 90 percent of them—who refused in a Washington Post poll simply to acknowledge the fact that Biden won the election. More than 60 percent of Republicans in the House joined Trump’s stupid lawsuit contesting Texas’s election results. And Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, the GOP Senate and House leaders, respectively, voted against recognizing reality when Biden’s victory was put up by the Democrats for an (unsuccessful) vote.
There are a lot of obvious problems with this position. One almost comical one is that if these people think the election was corrupted by whatever conspiracy of the day Trump’s lawyers have come up with in their more than 50 failed attempts to challenge the vote counts, then they were likely not elected either. A second problem is that if they are serious, they are also crazy. And if they’re not serious, then they are trying to overthrow the legally elected government of the United States, which sounds a lot like treason. Democratic Representative Bill Pascrell made this point in a letter he sent to Nancy Pelosi calling on the House to refuse to seat any of the Republicans who joined Trump’s suit because they are violating the Constitution and are “traitors.” Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung The Liberal Media The Plot Against America Eric Alterman The Sycophants at Fox News Eric Alterman Believing ‘Wall Street Journal’ Op-Eds Can Be Deadly Eric Alterman
That may be a stretch politically, but logically, Pascrell has a point. And it is one that the members of the mainstream media need to take to heart. We know that our democracy is at stake and that the country may be on the precipice of significant political violence. If ever the mainstream media needed to shake its self-destructive addiction to false equivalence, now is the time. There is only one fundamental truth in this election: Biden won the Electoral College by 306-232 and the popular vote by more than 7 million. The only reason the contest briefly looked close was that Republican state legislators in battleground states purposely prevented the counting of mail-in ballots in advance, apparently to engender a crisis just like the one we now face.
That the Republican Party has been able to get away with its antidemocratic behavior and anti-reality ideology is due in part to the indulgence of network and cable news bookers who pursue conflict without concern for truth. During Barack Obama’s first year in office, Newt Gingrich was the single most frequently booked guest on NBC’s Meet the Press. He was the only ex–House speaker ever to be invited, and the actual Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, had a grand total of zero appearances that year. It was also despite the fact that Gingrich had already grown increasingly insane. With little pushback, Gingrich, at the time, professed to detect “a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us,” and spread the lunatic theories of convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza. Gingrich also argued that, under Obama’s presidency, the country was “being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son.” Current Issue View our current issue
All through the Obama era, as Trump pumped up his racist campaign of lies against America’s first Black president, Republican Party leaders were invited time and time again on these programs to further his falsehoods. Asked on Meet the Press whether Obama was a Christian or a Muslim, Speaker of the House John Boehner could not bring himself to give a straight answer. “Listen,” he told the host, David Gregory, “the American people have the right to think what they want to think. I can’t—it’s not my job to tell them.” Majority leader Eric Cantor did much the same. Given this, it should hardly surprise anyone that as late as 2016, long after Obama reluctantly produced official Hawaiian records documenting his birth, fully 72 percent of Republican voters told pollsters they either doubted or actually did not believe that he had been born in the United States.
In other words, Trump was pushing against an open door with his pathological lying and racist incitements. He had learned long ago that there would be no sanction in the media so long as he provided the ratings that stoked their profits. Now those same network executives need to decide which side they are on: democracy or fascist rebellion. Network bookers should refuse to amplify the words of anyone who denies Biden’s victory without immediately pointing out that that person is a liar. Nothing is “disputed.” Nothing is “controversial.” Nothing is “lacking in evidence.” There is only truth or lies. These multimillion-dollar anchors have almost all proven too concerned about their Q-ratings (likability measurements) to challenge the politicians who lie to their faces. But this time, the sanctity of the political system and perhaps the safety of their fellow citizens depends on their growing a spine and insisting that their interviewees acknowledge the truth before opining on any other matter.
This should be simple. The news divisions of the major networks, together with CNN (and to a lesser extent, the liberal-branded MSNBC), have all sacrificed much of their credibility during the Trump presidency. They should welcome the opportunity to win it back. Fox News faces an interesting dilemma. It has always been more of a propaganda outlet than a news network, and this reached ridiculous proportions under Trump. But now, with even nuttier networks like Newsmax and One American News nipping at Fox’s heels, it has a chance to rebrand itself as what it pretends to be: a conservative news alternative to the centrist mainstream, allowing the others to swim alone in the fetid waters that was previously Fox’s own pond. I don’t have any great hopes that this will actually happen anytime soon. Despite Rupert Murdoch’s troglodyte ideological commitments, money has always come first for him—and there is still plenty of short-term profit in pushing Trump’s line. Even so, one can hope that the best long-term bet—at least as seen by his children—will be in participating in American democracy, not offering aid and comfort to those who seek to destroy it.


thenation--2020-12-18--Bernie Sanders: ‘Democracy Has Gotten a Reprieve With Biden’s Victory. That’s All It Is.’

This Q & A was excerpted from an hour-long conversation between Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and Nation National Affairs Correspondent John Nichols during the first-ever Nation Festival .
Access the full video archive of the Nation Festival now , including this interview .
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders joined the first-ever Nation Festival in mid-November , along with Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir of Iceland , author Naomi Klein , Black Lives Matter cofounder Alicia Garza , and more than a dozen other national and international leaders .
Sanders and I spoke when it had become clear that Joe Biden won the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to accept the result .
JN : Did you ever imagine we ’ d be in a place where the defeated president was refusing to concede ?
BS : No , I really have not .
It turns out with this election , it wasn ’ t about health care or climate change or the economy or racial justice .
It really came down to whether or not we were going to retain American democracy .
What frightens me more [ is that ] if you had a president who was off-the-wall and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ thing .
But what I think we should worry about even more is that this authoritarian president has completely transformed the Republican Party into a cultlike party .
I know many of these Republicans .
They ’ re not stupid .
They ’ re not crazy .
And yet , with very few exceptions , they are afraid to stand up and say , “ Oh , Mr. President , you lost the election.
” They can ’ t do that because they ’ re so terribly afraid of his hold on his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an even scarier and more important issue , and that is not only “ How does somebody like Trump get over 70 million votes ?
” but that the last polling I have seen is that 60 percent , 70 percent of his supporters think he won the election .
JN : You ’ ve always recognized structural insufficiencies in democracy .
If we fail to address them , Trump won ’ t be the last of his kind , will he ?
BS : I want to underline that point a dozen @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s crazy and is completely undisciplined .
What happens if you have the next person around who is not crazy and is not undisciplined , who does not go around attacking people like Dr. [ Anthony ] Fauci or the [ network ] correspondents ?
Then you ’ re in real danger .
We have gotten a reprieve .
Democracy has gotten a reprieve with Biden ’ s victory .
That ’ s all it is .
We did not win a rejection of what Trump stands for .
We have got @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we at a place where democracy is now so very threatened , and what do we do about it ?
” That is the question that every American should be discussing .
JN : Your 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns sought to open up a debate about reconnecting the Democratic Party with working-class concerns .
What needs to happen ?
BS : The problem that we have—as I see it , and people may disagree with me—is it is one thing to be a Democrat and say , “ We ’ re going @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s good .
But you ’ re not explaining to people why things are the way they are .
JN : After the election , a number of people—like former Ohio governor John Kasich and some other so-called never-Trump Republicans , but also some Democrats—suggested that Democrats didn ’ t do better in the election because of the left , because of talk of the Green New Deal , Medicare for All , defunding the police , democratic socialism .
You pushed back .
Tell me what ’ s going on there with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it ’ s what always goes on .
The establishment will use any and every reason to attack progressive ideas , even when those ideas are enormously popular .
Now , I ’ m not a great fan of polling or exit polls , but there was some exit poll done by Fox , I think , that asked the question , “ Do you believe that the government should provide government-run health care to everybody ?
” And 72 percent of the people said yes .
When you talk about Medicare for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , very good .
Green New Deal , the polling is very , very good .
There are a million reasons why a candidate loses .
It has to do with the candidate .
It has to do with the district .
It has to do with the opponent .
But I think the main problem is the Democratic Party is not clear about what it stands for .
For access to the full Nation Festival archive , visit TheNation.com/festival .

This article appears in the December 28, 2020/January 4, 2021 issue.
This Q&A was excerpted from an hour-long conversation between Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and Nation National Affairs Correspondent John Nichols during the first-ever Nation Festival. Access the full video archive of the Nation Festival now, including this interview.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders joined the first-ever Nation Festival in mid-November, along with Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir of Iceland, author Naomi Klein, Black Lives Matter cofounder Alicia Garza, and more than a dozen other national and international leaders. Sanders and I spoke when it had become clear that Joe Biden won the presidency, but Donald Trump was refusing to accept the result.
—John Nichols
JN: Did you ever imagine we’d be in a place where the defeated president was refusing to concede?
BS: No, I really have not. It turns out with this election, it wasn’t about health care or climate change or the economy or racial justice. It really came down to whether or not we were going to retain American democracy.
What frightens me more [is that] if you had a president who was off-the-wall and very fringy, that would be one thing. But what I think we should worry about even more is that this authoritarian president has completely transformed the Republican Party into a cultlike party. I know many of these Republicans. They’re not stupid. They’re not crazy. And yet, with very few exceptions, they are afraid to stand up and say, “Oh, Mr. President, you lost the election.” They can’t do that because they’re so terribly afraid of his hold on his base. That then takes us to an even scarier and more important issue, and that is not only “How does somebody like Trump get over 70 million votes?” but that the last polling I have seen is that 60 percent, 70 percent of his supporters think he won the election.
JN: You’ve always recognized structural insufficiencies in democracy. If we fail to address them, Trump won’t be the last of his kind, will he?
BS: I want to underline that point a dozen times. This is a guy who’s crazy and is completely undisciplined. What happens if you have the next person around who is not crazy and is not undisciplined, who does not go around attacking people like Dr. [Anthony] Fauci or the [network] correspondents? Then you’re in real danger. Current Issue View our current issue
We have gotten a reprieve. Democracy has gotten a reprieve with Biden’s victory. That’s all it is. We did not win a rejection of what Trump stands for. We have got to ask ourselves, “Why are we at a place where democracy is now so very threatened, and what do we do about it?” That is the question that every American should be discussing.
JN: Your 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns sought to open up a debate about reconnecting the Democratic Party with working-class concerns. What needs to happen?
BS: The problem that we have—as I see it, and people may disagree with me—is it is one thing to be a Democrat and say, “We’re going to expand health care.” That’s good. But you’re not explaining to people why things are the way they are.
JN: After the election, a number of people—like former Ohio governor John Kasich and some other so-called never-Trump Republicans, but also some Democrats—suggested that Democrats didn’t do better in the election because of the left, because of talk of the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, defunding the police, democratic socialism. You pushed back. Tell me what’s going on there with that debate.
BS: Well, it’s what always goes on. The establishment will use any and every reason to attack progressive ideas, even when those ideas are enormously popular. Now, I’m not a great fan of polling or exit polls, but there was some exit poll done by Fox, I think, that asked the question, “Do you believe that the government should provide government-run health care to everybody?” And 72 percent of the people said yes. When you talk about Medicare for All, usually the polling is very, very good. Green New Deal, the polling is very, very good.
There are a million reasons why a candidate loses. It has to do with the candidate. It has to do with the district. It has to do with the opponent. But I think the main problem is the Democratic Party is not clear about what it stands for.
For access to the full Nation Festival archive, visit TheNation.com/festival.


thenation--2020-12-18--Live: The ‘System Check’ Book Club

Live: The ‘System Check’ Book Club

The best Zoom holiday party is happening Saturday and we want you to join us !
As 2020 comes to a close , join Dorian Warren and Melissa Harris-Perry , co-hosts of the System Check podcast from The Nation , for a very special , live event : The System Check Book Club .
Beginning at 5 pm Eastern on Saturday , December 19 , Dorian and Melissa sit down with the authors of some of their favorite books from 2020 , including Maria Hinojosa , Rumaan Alam , John Nichols , Jeanne Theoharis , and Scott Farris , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ This has been a difficult year , but there is plenty to salvage for the fight ahead , so tune in to the System Check Book Club for a holiday feast of words and wisdom .
Remember , the most important system we have is the system of ideas .
So join Melissa , Dorian and the authors who are reshaping the world of ideas for the better .
If you like the show , subscribe to System Check on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or wherever you get your podcasts for new @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on Twitter and Facebook for regular updates .
The System Check Book Club is produced in partnership with Community Change Action , Anna Julia Cooper Center , and the New York Public Library .

The best Zoom holiday party is happening Saturday and we want you to join us! As 2020 comes to a close, join Dorian Warren and Melissa Harris-Perry, co-hosts of the System Check podcast from The Nation, for a very special, live event: The System Check Book Club. Beginning at 5 pm Eastern on Saturday, December 19, Dorian and Melissa sit down with the authors of some of their favorite books from 2020, including Maria Hinojosa, Rumaan Alam, John Nichols, Jeanne Theoharis, and Scott Farris, and preview terrific titles coming in 2021. This has been a difficult year, but there is plenty to salvage for the fight ahead, so tune in to the System Check Book Club for a holiday feast of words and wisdom. Remember, the most important system we have is the system of ideas. So join Melissa, Dorian and the authors who are reshaping the world of ideas for the better.
If you like the show, subscribe to System Check on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes every Friday, and follow us on Twitter and Facebook for regular updates.
The System Check Book Club is produced in partnership with Community Change Action, Anna Julia Cooper Center, and the New York Public Library.


thenation--2020-12-18--Wresting Our Country Back

Wresting Our Country Back

Democracy prevailed this year thanks to the spectacular efforts and determination of grassroots activists and electoral allies across the country .
But it was far too close—and it took all of us .
You could feel it , in the calls to landlines , texts to cell phones , even the few door knocks—and the sustained mobilization of tens of thousands who knew this was a fight like no other in American history .
Despite ruthless GOP voter suppression , voters turned out more votes for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris than for any other ticket ever .
It ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was far from the first choice of many progressives , who nevertheless understood he was the only choice given the existential threat of a second term for Donald Trump and his corrupt , incompetent , and dangerous administration .
And The Nation helped us get there .
From Senate to statehouse , we covered the races that were critical in this year ’ s elections , and we championed a powerful , emerging generation of activists and progressive politicians .
Today , as I look back on four years of powerful journalism at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what we can achieve going forward .
And I ’ m excited—and I hope you are too .
The progressive values , leaders , and movements we championed throughout the Trump presidency played a pivotal role in wresting our country back .
We carried the banner for racial justice , climate action , health care reform , criminal justice reform , immigration rights , economic justice , a principled foreign policy , and so many other ideas—all of which helped assemble and energize the broad coalition of Americans who gave Joe Biden the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Now , The Nation is readying to keep on championing those goals , as we seek to hold Biden to his promises and persuade him to go even further toward building a progressive future for our country .
Your support has never been more important than it is at this moment .
So , I ask you to make an especially generous year-end contribution to The Nation , as we stand on the precipice of a new beginning for our beleaguered democracy .
A generous Nation supporter has created a fund to match @ @ @ @ @ @ @ contribute by December 31 will have twice the impact on our journalism and influence .
Progressives defined the 2020 agenda and provided much of the “ Get out the vote ” organizing that pushed Biden over the finish line .
Now we have another chance to depose Mitch McConnell with the January runoffs in Georgia .
Once more , progressives will give their all to win both seats and—by taking back the Senate—make sure President Biden has a fighting chance to enact what could and should be the most progressive agenda in history @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and our journalists will be at the forefront , pushing the Biden administration on progressive issues—including climate change , health care reform , and living wages—just as we were one of the leading sources of visibility and political oxygen for the anti-Trump resistance .
As always , your support is at the heart of our success .
Our fearless independence depends on it .
More than any other publication in America , The Nation has the mandate , history , track record , commitment , and independence to undertake the caliber of journalism @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this next chapter of America ’ s story unfolds .
Please consider making a year-end contribution to support that journalism to the extent your means allow , knowing every dollar will be matched—doubling your impact—if we receive your gift by December 31 .
We have much to look forward to , and even more to accomplish together .

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Democracy prevailed this year thanks to the spectacular efforts and determination of grassroots activists and electoral allies across the country. But it was far too close—and it took all of us. You could feel it, in the calls to landlines, texts to cell phones, even the few door knocks—and the sustained mobilization of tens of thousands who knew this was a fight like no other in American history.
Despite ruthless GOP voter suppression, voters turned out more votes for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris than for any other ticket ever. It’s all the more impressive knowing Biden was far from the first choice of many progressives, who nevertheless understood he was the only choice given the existential threat of a second term for Donald Trump and his corrupt, incompetent, and dangerous administration.
And The Nation helped us get there. From Senate to statehouse, we covered the races that were critical in this year’s elections, and we championed a powerful, emerging generation of activists and progressive politicians. Today, as I look back on four years of powerful journalism at The Nation, I am hopeful about what we can achieve going forward. And I’m excited—and I hope you are too.
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thenation--2020-12-18--‘Mank’ Recovers the Radical Roots of ‘Citizen Kane’

Long exalted as one of the greatest achievements of cinema , Citizen Kane has suffered the fate common to canonized art : It has become familiar and safe .
To be sure , the lore around the film often fixates on how controversial it once was .
As a filmic roman à clef about William Randolph Hearst , the film naturally angered the powerful press baron and his many allies in Hollywood , who spared no effort in trying to suppress it .
Gossip columnists ran scurrilous stories designed to destroy director Orson Welles and others involved in the production @ @ @ @ @ @ @ made a bid to buy all the prints with the goal of destroying them .
But the personal spite of long-dead plutocrats is not necessarily relevant to contemporary audiences .
More pertinent , but often ignored , is the fact that the movie was a product of the Popular Front culture of the 1930s and ’ 40s , the once-robust alliance between liberals and leftists to fight fascism .
William Randolph Hearst , the onetime populist who in the 1930s devolved into a Red-baiting anti–New Deal reactionary , was the perfect target for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s voluminous FBI file , one agent made this critique of the movie : “ Citizen Kane is nothing more than an extension of the Communist Party ’ s campaign to smear one of its most effective and consistent opponents in the United States.
” As was its wont , the FBI was too quick to conflate communism with broader radicalism .
But the law enforcement agency was right to note that Welles , while making the film , had been shaped by an energetic left-wing environment .
This is a fact @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the inventive film techniques in Citizen Kane , often ignored .
As Michael Denning noted in his magisterial history The Cultural Front ( 1996 ) , “ Many of those who celebrate Citizen Kane as a film masterpiece distance Welles from the culture of the Popular Front .
Formalist and auteurist critics have generally ignored Welles ’ s political aesthetic.
” One of the singular virtues of David Fincher ’ s new movie Mank ( now screening on Netflix ) is that it recuperates the context that made Citizen Kane not just a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but also an urgent intervention against homegrown authoritarianism .
Mank , about the travails of writer Herman Mankiewicz as he writes the first draft of Citizen Kane , is both an account of the making of Citizen Kane and an extended pastiche of Citizen Kane .
Shot in black and white , with many off-kilter camera shots as a distancing device and moving back and forth in time , Mank mimics Orson Welles ’ s signature directorial style even as the narrative undercuts some of the Welles legend .
Joe Biden Needs to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Bob Dylan Wrote the Second Great American Songbook The least interesting part of Mank is its half-hearted litigation of the long-standing dispute over authorship of Citizen Kane , with collaborators Welles and Mankiewicz both claiming primary authorship .
When the film won the Academy Award for best original screenplay in 1941 , neither Welles nor Mankiewicz attended the ceremony .
Mankiewicz said later that if he had been there to pick up the Oscar , he would have said , “ I am very happy to accept this award in Mr. Welles ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ written in Mr. Welles ’ s absence.
” Mank , following in the footsteps of Pauline Kael ’ s famous 1971 polemic “ Raising Kane , ” takes the same stance : Mankiewicz was a mistreated writer and Welles a credit hog .
The truth is more complicated .
Mankiewicz was crucial , not just because he wrote the first draft but also because he had been a longtime crony of William Randolph Hearst and his mistress Marion Davies .
Throughout the 1930s , Mankiewicz had spent many an hour as a dinner @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s palatial estate .
In writing the script , Mankiewicz drew not only on the vast journalism that surrounded Hearst but also an intimate awareness of Hearst and Davies in their daily life .
Welles took Mankiewicz ’ s script and not only rewrote it but , more crucially , retold it with cinematic flare .
New Yorker critic Richard Brody makes a judicious apportionment of credit when he argues , “ Mankiewicz ’ s work was fundamental , and Welles ’ s revisions were transformative.
” This sort of fair-mindedness is absent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with Mephistophelian aplomb by Tom Burke , is a fiendish , wheedling purchaser of souls .
Unjust to Welles , Mank redeems itself with its rounded , multisided portrait of Mankiewicz , a full-bodied presence thanks to Gary Oldman ’ s performance .
Although only 43 in 1940 while working on Citizen Kane , Mankiewicz already looks decades older , an alcoholic wreck of man .
His quick wit , once the toast of Broadway , keeps Mankiewicz not only employed writing scripts but a guest much sought after by the rich and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dine with Hearst and Davies .
But Mankiewicz keeps self-sabotaging himself with bilious quips .
Even as he plays the clown , he has enough dignity to resent his status as a court jester to plutocrats .
Even though Mankiewicz can make a ducal salary writing for the movies , he knows he doesn ’ t share the class interest of Hearst or the studio heads .
When the Depression hits , Louis B. Mayer ( Arliss Howard ) quickly abandons his robust vulgarity and delivers an unctuous , smarmy speech to his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ take a rollback in pay ( which he falsely claims will be returned to the workers in good times ) .
The cynical Mankiewicz is cagey enough to roll his eyes at Mayer .
But the contradictions in Mankiewicz ’ s own position come to a head when he sees Hearst and the Hollywood ruling class close ranks in 1934 and use every means fair and foul to destroy Upton Sinclair ’ s socialist bid to become governor of California .
In particular , they use Hollywood magic to produce deceptive radio ads @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of our own age .
( David Fincher has a long-standing fascination with media manipulation , as seen in his best movie , The Social Network ) .
During the election , Mankiewicz comes alive to his own complicity with the system and the fact that his preferred role as a clown is just another form of acquiescence to the status quo .
It ’ s Mankiewicz ’ s awareness of , and discomfort with , his own status as the well-paid pet of the rich that fueled the writing of Citizen Kane @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to write about the world of Hearst with authority—but enough of an outsider to see through its comforting lies and pernicious politics .
Citizen Kane wasn ’ t the work of just one man—either Welles or Mankiewicz—but the product of a whole troupe of creators all shaped by the Popular Front .
These creators all knew how theater and Hollywood worked , which made them sensitive to the fact that showmanship can often be used in the service of fascism .
There ’ s a peculiar kind of critical empathy in Citizen Kane @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Kane ’ s soul even as it exposes his political foulness .
In a 1945 speech , Welles said , “ Fascism , we know , sells itself by making its appeal to the emotions rather than to reason , to the senses rather than to the mind .
Showmanship is fundamental to the fascist strategy.
” Welles , Mankiewicz , and their army of collaborators were no mean showmen themselves , which made them all the more sensitive in their portrait of a reactionary mogul .
This is the crucial but often @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Mank has made visible to a modern audience .

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Long exalted as one of the greatest achievements of cinema, Citizen Kane has suffered the fate common to canonized art: It has become familiar and safe. To be sure, the lore around the film often fixates on how controversial it once was. As a filmic roman à clef about William Randolph Hearst, the film naturally angered the powerful press baron and his many allies in Hollywood, who spared no effort in trying to suppress it. Gossip columnists ran scurrilous stories designed to destroy director Orson Welles and others involved in the production. MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer even made a bid to buy all the prints with the goal of destroying them.
But the personal spite of long-dead plutocrats is not necessarily relevant to contemporary audiences. More pertinent, but often ignored, is the fact that the movie was a product of the Popular Front culture of the 1930s and ’40s, the once-robust alliance between liberals and leftists to fight fascism. William Randolph Hearst, the onetime populist who in the 1930s devolved into a Red-baiting anti–New Deal reactionary, was the perfect target for Popular Front outrage. In Orson Welles’s voluminous FBI file, one agent made this critique of the movie: “Citizen Kane is nothing more than an extension of the Communist Party’s campaign to smear one of its most effective and consistent opponents in the United States.”
As was its wont, the FBI was too quick to conflate communism with broader radicalism. But the law enforcement agency was right to note that Welles, while making the film, had been shaped by an energetic left-wing environment. This is a fact that later critics, who focused on the inventive film techniques in Citizen Kane, often ignored. As Michael Denning noted in his magisterial history The Cultural Front (1996), “Many of those who celebrate Citizen Kane as a film masterpiece distance Welles from the culture of the Popular Front. Formalist and auteurist critics have generally ignored Welles’s political aesthetic.”
One of the singular virtues of David Fincher’s new movie Mank (now screening on Netflix) is that it recuperates the context that made Citizen Kane not just a venerable biopic about a vainglorious media mogul but also an urgent intervention against homegrown authoritarianism. Mank, about the travails of writer Herman Mankiewicz as he writes the first draft of Citizen Kane, is both an account of the making of Citizen Kane and an extended pastiche of Citizen Kane. Shot in black and white, with many off-kilter camera shots as a distancing device and moving back and forth in time, Mank mimics Orson Welles’s signature directorial style even as the narrative undercuts some of the Welles legend. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung More From Jeet Heer The Indigenous Roots of Robbie Robertson’s Rock and Roll Revolution August 14, 2023 Why Does This Racist Keep Getting Silicon Valley Money? August 11, 2023 When Phallocrats Go Limp August 4, 2023
The least interesting part of Mank is its half-hearted litigation of the long-standing dispute over authorship of Citizen Kane, with collaborators Welles and Mankiewicz both claiming primary authorship. When the film won the Academy Award for best original screenplay in 1941, neither Welles nor Mankiewicz attended the ceremony. Mankiewicz said later that if he had been there to pick up the Oscar, he would have said, “I am very happy to accept this award in Mr. Welles’s absence, because the script was written in Mr. Welles’s absence.” Mank, following in the footsteps of Pauline Kael’s famous 1971 polemic “Raising Kane,” takes the same stance: Mankiewicz was a mistreated writer and Welles a credit hog.
The truth is more complicated. Mankiewicz was crucial, not just because he wrote the first draft but also because he had been a longtime crony of William Randolph Hearst and his mistress Marion Davies. Throughout the 1930s, Mankiewicz had spent many an hour as a dinner guest at San Simeon, Hearst’s palatial estate. In writing the script, Mankiewicz drew not only on the vast journalism that surrounded Hearst but also an intimate awareness of Hearst and Davies in their daily life.
Welles took Mankiewicz’s script and not only rewrote it but, more crucially, retold it with cinematic flare. New Yorker critic Richard Brody makes a judicious apportionment of credit when he argues, “Mankiewicz’s work was fundamental, and Welles’s revisions were transformative.” This sort of fair-mindedness is absent in Mank, where Welles, played with Mephistophelian aplomb by Tom Burke, is a fiendish, wheedling purchaser of souls. Current Issue View our current issue
Unjust to Welles, Mank redeems itself with its rounded, multisided portrait of Mankiewicz, a full-bodied presence thanks to Gary Oldman’s performance. Although only 43 in 1940 while working on Citizen Kane, Mankiewicz already looks decades older, an alcoholic wreck of man. His quick wit, once the toast of Broadway, keeps Mankiewicz not only employed writing scripts but a guest much sought after by the rich and famous. Hence his standing invitation to dine with Hearst and Davies. But Mankiewicz keeps self-sabotaging himself with bilious quips. Even as he plays the clown, he has enough dignity to resent his status as a court jester to plutocrats.
Even though Mankiewicz can make a ducal salary writing for the movies, he knows he doesn’t share the class interest of Hearst or the studio heads. When the Depression hits, Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard) quickly abandons his robust vulgarity and delivers an unctuous, smarmy speech to his MGM “family” asking them to take a rollback in pay (which he falsely claims will be returned to the workers in good times).
The cynical Mankiewicz is cagey enough to roll his eyes at Mayer. But the contradictions in Mankiewicz’s own position come to a head when he sees Hearst and the Hollywood ruling class close ranks in 1934 and use every means fair and foul to destroy Upton Sinclair’s socialist bid to become governor of California. In particular, they use Hollywood magic to produce deceptive radio ads and newsreels, a precursor to disinformation of our own age. (David Fincher has a long-standing fascination with media manipulation, as seen in his best movie, The Social Network).
During the election, Mankiewicz comes alive to his own complicity with the system and the fact that his preferred role as a clown is just another form of acquiescence to the status quo.
It’s Mankiewicz’s awareness of, and discomfort with, his own status as the well-paid pet of the rich that fueled the writing of Citizen Kane. He was enough of an insider to write about the world of Hearst with authority—but enough of an outsider to see through its comforting lies and pernicious politics.
Citizen Kane wasn’t the work of just one man—either Welles or Mankiewicz—but the product of a whole troupe of creators all shaped by the Popular Front. These creators all knew how theater and Hollywood worked, which made them sensitive to the fact that showmanship can often be used in the service of fascism. There’s a peculiar kind of critical empathy in Citizen Kane: The movie peers inside Charles Foster Kane’s soul even as it exposes his political foulness.
In a 1945 speech, Welles said, “Fascism, we know, sells itself by making its appeal to the emotions rather than to reason, to the senses rather than to the mind. Showmanship is fundamental to the fascist strategy.” Welles, Mankiewicz, and their army of collaborators were no mean showmen themselves, which made them all the more sensitive in their portrait of a reactionary mogul. This is the crucial but often forgotten political background to Citizen Kane that Mank has made visible to a modern audience.


thenation--2020-12-19--Georgia Senators Loeffler and Perdue Are Campaigning Against Democracy

In a historic show of civic engagement and support for the American experiment , nearly 5 million Georgians cast ballots in a high-turnout November 3 election that produced a Democratic presidential victory in the state for the first time since 1992 and set up a pair of runoff elections that could give Democrats control of the US Senate for the first time since 2014 .
That was generally understood as a triumph for democracy , if not for the Republican Party that has dominated Georgia politics in recent years .
In fact , the result has so unsettled Georgia ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ now campaigning against not just their Democratic rivals but democracy itself .
Last week , Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue endorsed a bizarre legal scheme by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to overturn the results from four battleground states that played a pivotal role in deciding the 2020 election for President-elect Joe Biden : Michigan , Pennsylvania , Wisconsin , and Georgia .
Bernie Sanders : ‘ Democracy Has Gotten a Reprieve With Biden ’ s Victory .
That ’ s All It Is.
’ The Right Answer Is to Throw Money @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Assault on Democracy to Congress—and It Will Be Awful That ’ s right , Loeffler , an appointed senator seeking to win a January 5 special-election runoff , and Perdue , an incumbent seeking to win a second term in a regular runoff on the same day , proposed to disenfranchise their constituents , all 5 million Georgians who voted for a presidential candidate in the November 3 election—the 2,475,141 who backed Biden and 2,462,857 who backed Trump , the roughly 62,000 who voted for Libertarian Jo Jorgensen and everyone who cast a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ party or Mickey Mouse .
All of them .
Why ?
Because Donald Trump said so , tweeting a one-word order to his minions : “ Overturn.
” Paxton , a scandal-plagued Republican who in 2015 was indicted on multiple counts of securities fraud and who now faces a federal investigation for criminal wrongdoing in his current position , asked the US Supreme Court to effectively bar Georgia and the other states from registering their combined 62 votes for Biden when the Electoral College convened on December 14 .
That would have dropped @ @ @ @ @ @ @ well short of the 270 required to be elected .
The strategy was then to have Republican-controlled state legislatures assign the electoral votes to Trump , giving the president 294 votes and a win .
Trump went all in for the strategy , tweeting : “ We will be INTERVENING in the Texas ( plus many other states ) case .
This is the big one .
Our Country needs a victory !
” and “ There is massive evidence of widespread fraud in the four states ( plus ) mentioned in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the tapes and affidavits !
” Loeffler and Perdue jumped in just as enthusiastically as the defeated president , announcing , “ We fully support President Trump ’ s legal recourses and Attorney General Paxton ’ s lawsuit.
” The pair confidently chirped , “ This isn ’ t hard and it isn ’ t partisan .
It ’ s American.
” Honest observers saw the lawsuit—a grab bag of discredited and disproven conspiracy theories—as distinctly un-American .
Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr , a Republican who appeared with Trump during the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , “ With all due respect , the Texas attorney general is constitutionally , legally and factually wrong about Georgia.
” The Supreme Court sympathized with Carr ’ s viewpoint , issuing a one-page statement that completely rejected Paxton ’ s suit with this explanation : “ Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections.
” On December 14 , the Electoral College confirmed Biden ’ s 306-232 win , with Stacey Abrams announcing that Georgia ’ s 16 electoral votes were in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ chastened Loeffler and Perdue , a pair of wealthy dilettantes whose Senate careers have been marred by charges of self-dealing .
But of course , it didn ’ t .
While savvier Republicans quietly warned that staying on board Trump ’ s crazy train could tip the election to her challenger , Democrat Raphael Warnock , Loeffler tweeted on December 15 , “ I will never stop fighting for @ realDonaldTrump because he has never stopped fighting for us !
” And she and Perdue , who faces Democrat Jon Ossoff , embraced @ @ @ @ @ @ @ make it harder to vote in the runoffs .
The senators called Republican lawsuits targeting runoff voting “ reasonable and actionable steps we can take immediately to further ensure the integrity and accuracy of our January 5 elections.
” In fact , the lawsuits sought to complicate the process of casting absentee ballots in an election where hundreds of thousands of Georgians have already voted .
On Thursday , federal judges dismissed two of the lawsuits , rejecting unfounded GOP claims that difficult signature verification processes and restrictions on the use of drop @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Unfortunately , courtroom failures have not dimmed Loeffler and Perdue ’ s determination to diminish , dismantle , and , if necessary , overturn democracy .
Perhaps an election result will .
When President-elect Biden campaigned in Georgia on Tuesday for Warnock and Ossoff , he ripped into the Republicans for their efforts to disenfranchise voters .
“ Your two Republican senators fully embraced what Texas was telling the Supreme Court , ” Biden said in Atlanta .
“ They fully embraced nullifying nearly 5 million Georgia votes .
You might want @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ”

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In a historic show of civic engagement and support for the American experiment, nearly 5 million Georgians cast ballots in a high-turnout November 3 election that produced a Democratic presidential victory in the state for the first time since 1992 and set up a pair of runoff elections that could give Democrats control of the US Senate for the first time since 2014.
That was generally understood as a triumph for democracy, if not for the Republican Party that has dominated Georgia politics in recent years.
In fact, the result has so unsettled Georgia’s embattled Republican senators that they are now campaigning against not just their Democratic rivals but democracy itself.
Last week, Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue endorsed a bizarre legal scheme by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to overturn the results from four battleground states that played a pivotal role in deciding the 2020 election for President-elect Joe Biden: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia. More From John Nichols A GOP Debate Without Trump Is the Definition of Pointlessness August 11, 2023 A Win for Abortion Rights, a Win for Democracy: Ohio Voters Reject Issue 1 August 9, 2023 The Biggest Threat to Donald Trump Could Be the Constitution Itself August 4, 2023
That’s right, Loeffler, an appointed senator seeking to win a January 5 special-election runoff, and Perdue, an incumbent seeking to win a second term in a regular runoff on the same day, proposed to disenfranchise their constituents, all 5 million Georgians who voted for a presidential candidate in the November 3 election—the 2,475,141 who backed Biden and 2,462,857 who backed Trump, the roughly 62,000 who voted for Libertarian Jo Jorgensen and everyone who cast a write-in ballot for the Greens or another party or Mickey Mouse.
All of them.
Why? Because Donald Trump said so, tweeting a one-word order to his minions: “Overturn.”
Paxton, a scandal-plagued Republican who in 2015 was indicted on multiple counts of securities fraud and who now faces a federal investigation for criminal wrongdoing in his current position, asked the US Supreme Court to effectively bar Georgia and the other states from registering their combined 62 votes for Biden when the Electoral College convened on December 14. That would have dropped Biden down to 244 electoral votes, well short of the 270 required to be elected. The strategy was then to have Republican-controlled state legislatures assign the electoral votes to Trump, giving the president 294 votes and a win.
Trump went all in for the strategy, tweeting: “We will be INTERVENING in the Texas (plus many other states) case. This is the big one. Our Country needs a victory!” and “There is massive evidence of widespread fraud in the four states (plus) mentioned in the Texas suit. Just look at all of the tapes and affidavits!” Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung
Loeffler and Perdue jumped in just as enthusiastically as the defeated president, announcing, “We fully support President Trump’s legal recourses and Attorney General Paxton’s lawsuit.” The pair confidently chirped, “This isn’t hard and it isn’t partisan. It’s American.”
Honest observers saw the lawsuit—a grab bag of discredited and disproven conspiracy theories—as distinctly un-American. Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, a Republican who appeared with Trump during the campaign, issued a statement that explained, “With all due respect, the Texas attorney general is constitutionally, legally and factually wrong about Georgia.”
The Supreme Court sympathized with Carr’s viewpoint, issuing a one-page statement that completely rejected Paxton’s suit with this explanation: “Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections.” Current Issue View our current issue
On December 14, the Electoral College confirmed Biden’s 306-232 win, with Stacey Abrams announcing that Georgia’s 16 electoral votes were in the Democratic column.
That should have chastened Loeffler and Perdue, a pair of wealthy dilettantes whose Senate careers have been marred by charges of self-dealing. But of course, it didn’t.
While savvier Republicans quietly warned that staying on board Trump’s crazy train could tip the election to her challenger, Democrat Raphael Warnock, Loeffler tweeted on December 15, “I will never stop fighting for @realDonaldTrump because he has never stopped fighting for us!” And she and Perdue, who faces Democrat Jon Ossoff, embraced a new voter suppression strategy designed to make it harder to vote in the runoffs.
The senators called Republican lawsuits targeting runoff voting “reasonable and actionable steps we can take immediately to further ensure the integrity and accuracy of our January 5 elections.” In fact, the lawsuits sought to complicate the process of casting absentee ballots in an election where hundreds of thousands of Georgians have already voted. On Thursday, federal judges dismissed two of the lawsuits, rejecting unfounded GOP claims that difficult signature verification processes and restrictions on the use of drop boxes are needed to maintain election security.
Unfortunately, courtroom failures have not dimmed Loeffler and Perdue’s determination to diminish, dismantle, and, if necessary, overturn democracy.
Perhaps an election result will.
When President-elect Biden campaigned in Georgia on Tuesday for Warnock and Ossoff, he ripped into the Republicans for their efforts to disenfranchise voters.
“Your two Republican senators fully embraced what Texas was telling the Supreme Court,” Biden said in Atlanta. “They fully embraced nullifying nearly 5 million Georgia votes. You might want to remember that come January 5.”


thenation--2020-12-21--The Frenzied Paris of Virginie Despentes

Midway through the last book of Vernon Subutex , Virginie Despentes ’ s trilogy of Hollande-era Paris , a character at rest lying on her belly is reading “ a Zadie Smith novel.
” In the course of three volumes that all have an abundance of proper nouns , this is almost the first indicating a work of literature ; literature is almost the only facet of culture referred to in such a desultory way .
Pop music , much of it Anglophone , is referred to by contrast dozens of times , and the hyper-specificity of these references—to Mary @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Cure , the Bee Gees , Bowie—gives them an effect like that of a soundtrack .
A similarly loving detailing is applied in rendering the period ’ s defining bars ( Rosa Bonheur , in Buttes Chaumont Park ) and food outlets ( “ McDo ” ) .
Social media are also , in their own way , constitutive , responsible for plot twists like a manhunt arranged by hashtag .
Despentes , who is French , is an occasional filmmaker , and she has demonstrated , for a literary author , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , as if the difference between books and film or TV were a question not of kind but of degree .
She told a public-radio host she ’ d intended for Vernon Subutex—a trilogy of some 1,240 pages—to be a single , short book .
But that ’ s the thing about writing , she said , contrasting it to movies : “ You ’ re not limited by any budget .
If you decide all of a sudden to go from 50 pages to 1,500 , it ’ s a question of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ interface between Despentes ’ s creations and the social reality surrounding them has become , lately , something like a measure of her power .
( “ We are embarrassed of our strengths , ” she says deploringly of women in 2006 ’ s King Kong Theory , a book of essays . )
This is reflected by the biography used in American editions of Vernon Subutex—the second volume came out in the US in July , translated by Frank Wynne—which features as a major accomplishment , as her own accomplishment , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s film Baise-Moi , based on her novel and made in partnership with “ the porn star ” Coralie Trinh Thi .
Vernon Subutex I came out in January 2015 , by coincidence on the same day as the shooting at the Charlie Hebdo offices ; Vernon Subutex II followed it closely that June ; Vernon Subutex III was published in May 2017 , a lag allowing for the densest incorporation , in that volume , of current events : the attack on the Bataclan nightclub , the labor movement Nuit Debout , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Orlando .
The book resembles social media in that current events like these keep time .
Characters take part in Nuit Debout , which involved the occupation of a central square in Paris , and emphasis is placed on their as well as Paris ’ s capacities for change , with much discussion of transitioning , tattooing , aging , exposure to the elements , addiction , and losing and gaining weight .
Despentes was born in 1969 in Nancy—a city described in her novel Bye Bye Blondie as “ morbid and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ —and belonged to the first generation of Frenchwomen who could open a bank account without a father or a husband to cosign , as she notes in King Kong Theory .
She began taking birth control at 14 , left home at 17 , and would later refer to the period following as the time before she “ became Virginie Despentes.
” Selling out— “ the promotional part of my job as a publicized author ” —reminds her , she writes , of sex work .
That was a job she appreciated for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ King Kong Theory ; her clients ’ vulnerability gave her an understanding of men in their humanity , for one .
If fame and fortune seem from her recent work to have been similarly interesting , opening to her frontiers of human experience , they also have their drawbacks : jealous reactions to her appearing on TV and , in certain settings , an “ infinitely more confused sexuality.
” A meta-fictional turn in her body of work correlates to this worldly success .
That periodization— “ became Virginie Despentes ” —is also @ @ @ @ @ @ @ name she gave herself , after the Lyon neighborhood where , in a borrowed apartment , she had lived .
This etymology corresponds to a truism of biography on which Despentes insists—that she comes from where she comes from and , just as much as she is self-created , her personal history is determining .
Social determinism is just another piety to her .
And yet the appellation has the ring of the inevitable .
She writes of the rape she suffered hitchhiking as an incident that “ constitutes ” as well as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Novels , stories , songs , movies .
I always think I ’ ll be able one day to be done with it , ” she says of her rape in King Kong Theory , a book she begins by declaring her project to write for and from the position of the ugly , the unwanted .
Vernon Subutex follows an eponymous Parisian and his circle of acquaintances .
Vernon , owner and operator of a record shop that has had to close , is evicted in the course of the opening chapter @ @ @ @ @ @ @ opposite of a plot out of Balzac in which events are precipitated by a protagonist ’ s ambition .
Vernon , who is homeless , needs a place to crash .
As he trundles along from harbor to harbor , dragging the story after him , he encounters a cast of dozens : a film professor of Algerian descent ; a trans , Brazilian aesthetician ; a failed screenwriter who is French , racist , and an anti-Semite ; a union man who ’ s just as bitter ; a stockbroker ; a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ; and a mercenary special operative and lesbian of many conquests known as the Hyena .
Some of these people know Vernon from the record shop ; its ability to bring them together is duly mourned .
The others cross his path in search of one of the belongings left to Vernon , a set of confessional tapes made by Vernon ’ s friend the pop star Alex Bleach , since deceased .
A film producer is also after these recordings , which implicate him along with unnamed politicians in sex trafficking and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ characters , marveling at the improbability of their convergence , make a getaway to the countryside .
For books with so much plot , this trilogy is amazingly interior .
It is a string of torrential confessionals in which each character gets at least one chapter .
They reflect , at length , on their own social situations , which provides many of them with just cause for resentment .
Meanwhile Bleach considers the freedom of real rebellion in youth to be , despite a lifetime of aftereffects on the body , its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ aristocracy ” ; Aïcha , the professor ’ s daughter , devotes herself to Islam to her secular father ’ s consternation , finding the religion “ sweetens her and gives her structure ” ; high-strung Frenchwoman Sylvie allows herself the worry that her adolescent son “ lacks a gift for happiness.
” In its psychological insight , Vernon Subutex resembles Despentes ’ s earlier novels—like Bye Bye Blondie , about a woman who as a teenager was incarcerated in a mental hospital against her will as Despentes was ; Pretty Things , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ impersonates the other after her suicide ; or Baise-Moi , about two women thrown together in a brilliant friendship who undertake a killing spree—and the main mechanism of innovation over these prior novels is multiplication .
There are more than two dozen protagonists .
The gaps between them are charged ; your attention is held by the shifts in perspective .
The frequency of cultural reference is highest in Vernon Subutex , another vector of its extremity .
This accretion of proper nouns and place-specific slang resembles the “ world-building ” of science @ @ @ @ @ @ @ these features to Vernon Subutex—detail and verisimilitude , the contemporary quality of the language—insufficiencies of Wynne ’ s translation are worth mentioning .
In French , the insouciance of argot is crucial to its texture .
This slang , with its array of nouns , verbs , and adjectives , is efficient in cutting the emotion of the monologues .
One difficulty , then , with this translation— “ He smoked skunk from Holland so potent it gave an instant headache ” —is that it gives rise to an elegiac mood where the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that it doesn ’ t .
Vernon Subutex III , which comes out in the United States in May , was a best seller in France in the week of its release .
Since then , Despentes , whose first novel was thought unpublishable , has turned to polemic for a national audience .
Her invective against Roman Polanski , an accused rapist , in the daily Libération—on the occasion earlier this year of Adèle Haenel ’ s desertion of the César Awards when Polanski was revealed to be a recipient—leveled its charge @ @ @ @ @ @ @ grouping them together : “ Your love of the strong is morbid ” ( Wynne ’ s translation ) .
Despentes later composed a letter to be read over the radio in support of Justice Pour Adama , a French analogue of Black Lives Matter , addressed “ to my white friends who don ’ t get the problem ” ( other translations have been mine ) .
A third , less publicized intervention in French politics was published in February alongside contributions by luminaries such as Bruno Latour in the otherwise modest @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Que Nous Devons à la ZAD , a compendium of reflections on an encampment , called a ZAD ( zone à defend ) , that for 10 years was kept up by activists to prevent the building of an airport outside Nantes .
Despentes ’ s essay—the title translates as “ For the Peasants of Tomorrow ” —deals with the contributions these environmentalists made , through the force of their commitment to stay in place , to the national imaginary .
She notes that she has never been there .
But the “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is rests , Despentes writes , on an overwhelming message that “ there is no alternative.
” The ZAD , a self-managed community where , according to its members , police for years did not intervene , offered a proof to the contrary , “ a grain of sand of counter-propaganda.
” This is also what Despentes has found to do with her power .
Vernon Subutex is written as if to act not as literature exactly , in its typical arena , tbut rather head-to-head with the dominant culture—up against the edifice @ @ @ @ @ @ @ multiplication and diversity , the scale and the frenzy of invention in this trilogy , and Despentes ’ s own larger-than-life resourcefulness all have an aspect of horror , suggesing in their negative the vastness and intractability of the power in her sights .

Midway through the last book of Vernon Subutex, Virginie Despentes’s trilogy of Hollande-era Paris, a character at rest lying on her belly is reading “a Zadie Smith novel.” In the course of three volumes that all have an abundance of proper nouns, this is almost the first indicating a work of literature; literature is almost the only facet of culture referred to in such a desultory way. Pop music, much of it Anglophone, is referred to by contrast dozens of times, and the hyper-specificity of these references—to Mary J. Blige, Snoop Dogg, the Cure, the Bee Gees, Bowie—gives them an effect like that of a soundtrack. A similarly loving detailing is applied in rendering the period’s defining bars (Rosa Bonheur, in Buttes Chaumont Park) and food outlets (“McDo”). Social media are also, in their own way, constitutive, responsible for plot twists like a manhunt arranged by hashtag. Books in Review Vernon Subutex 2 By Virginie Despentes; Translated by Frank Wynne Buy this book
Despentes, who is French, is an occasional filmmaker, and she has demonstrated, for a literary author, a surprising agnosticism regarding that choice of medium, as if the difference between books and film or TV were a question not of kind but of degree. She told a public-radio host she’d intended for Vernon Subutex—a trilogy of some 1,240 pages—to be a single, short book. But that’s the thing about writing, she said, contrasting it to movies: “You’re not limited by any budget. If you decide all of a sudden to go from 50 pages to 1,500, it’s a question of time and work.”
The extent of interface between Despentes’s creations and the social reality surrounding them has become, lately, something like a measure of her power. (“We are embarrassed of our strengths,” she says deploringly of women in 2006’s King Kong Theory, a book of essays.) This is reflected by the biography used in American editions of Vernon Subutex—the second volume came out in the US in July, translated by Frank Wynne—which features as a major accomplishment, as her own accomplishment, the censoring in France of the author’s film Baise-Moi, based on her novel and made in partnership with “the porn star” Coralie Trinh Thi. Vernon Subutex I came out in January 2015, by coincidence on the same day as the shooting at the Charlie Hebdo offices; Vernon Subutex II followed it closely that June; Vernon Subutex III was published in May 2017, a lag allowing for the densest incorporation, in that volume, of current events: the attack on the Bataclan nightclub, the labor movement Nuit Debout, a reaction in Paris to the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. The book resembles social media in that current events like these keep time. Characters take part in Nuit Debout, which involved the occupation of a central square in Paris, and emphasis is placed on their as well as Paris’s capacities for change, with much discussion of transitioning, tattooing, aging, exposure to the elements, addiction, and losing and gaining weight.
Despentes was born in 1969 in Nancy—a city described in her novel Bye Bye Blondie as “morbid and icy,” “a morgue”—and belonged to the first generation of Frenchwomen who could open a bank account without a father or a husband to cosign, as she notes in King Kong Theory. She began taking birth control at 14, left home at 17, and would later refer to the period following as the time before she “became Virginie Despentes.” Selling out—“the promotional part of my job as a publicized author”—reminds her, she writes, of sex work. That was a job she appreciated for many reasons, as she writes in King Kong Theory; her clients’ vulnerability gave her an understanding of men in their humanity, for one. If fame and fortune seem from her recent work to have been similarly interesting, opening to her frontiers of human experience, they also have their drawbacks: jealous reactions to her appearing on TV and, in certain settings, an “infinitely more confused sexuality.” A meta-fictional turn in her body of work correlates to this worldly success. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung
That periodization—“became Virginie Despentes”—is also literal: “Despentes” is a name she gave herself, after the Lyon neighborhood where, in a borrowed apartment, she had lived. This etymology corresponds to a truism of biography on which Despentes insists—that she comes from where she comes from and, just as much as she is self-created, her personal history is determining. Social determinism is just another piety to her. And yet the appellation has the ring of the inevitable. She writes of the rape she suffered hitchhiking as an incident that “constitutes” as well as it “disfigures” her. “Novels, stories, songs, movies. I always think I’ll be able one day to be done with it,” she says of her rape in King Kong Theory, a book she begins by declaring her project to write for and from the position of the ugly, the unwanted.
Vernon Subutex follows an eponymous Parisian and his circle of acquaintances. Vernon, owner and operator of a record shop that has had to close, is evicted in the course of the opening chapter. What ensues is something like the opposite of a plot out of Balzac in which events are precipitated by a protagonist’s ambition. Vernon, who is homeless, needs a place to crash.
As he trundles along from harbor to harbor, dragging the story after him, he encounters a cast of dozens: a film professor of Algerian descent; a trans, Brazilian aesthetician; a failed screenwriter who is French, racist, and an anti-Semite; a union man who’s just as bitter; a stockbroker; a bartender; a world-weary adult film star; and a mercenary special operative and lesbian of many conquests known as the Hyena. Some of these people know Vernon from the record shop; its ability to bring them together is duly mourned. The others cross his path in search of one of the belongings left to Vernon, a set of confessional tapes made by Vernon’s friend the pop star Alex Bleach, since deceased. A film producer is also after these recordings, which implicate him along with unnamed politicians in sex trafficking and rape. Despite his machinations the other characters, marveling at the improbability of their convergence, make a getaway to the countryside. Current Issue View our current issue
For books with so much plot, this trilogy is amazingly interior. It is a string of torrential confessionals in which each character gets at least one chapter. They reflect, at length, on their own social situations, which provides many of them with just cause for resentment. Meanwhile Bleach considers the freedom of real rebellion in youth to be, despite a lifetime of aftereffects on the body, its own consolation, a kind of “aristocracy”; Aïcha, the professor’s daughter, devotes herself to Islam to her secular father’s consternation, finding the religion “sweetens her and gives her structure”; high-strung Frenchwoman Sylvie allows herself the worry that her adolescent son “lacks a gift for happiness.”
In its psychological insight, Vernon Subutex resembles Despentes’s earlier novels—like Bye Bye Blondie, about a woman who as a teenager was incarcerated in a mental hospital against her will as Despentes was; Pretty Things, about twin sisters, one of whom impersonates the other after her suicide; or Baise-Moi, about two women thrown together in a brilliant friendship who undertake a killing spree—and the main mechanism of innovation over these prior novels is multiplication. There are more than two dozen protagonists. The gaps between them are charged; your attention is held by the shifts in perspective. The frequency of cultural reference is highest in Vernon Subutex, another vector of its extremity. This accretion of proper nouns and place-specific slang resembles the “world-building” of science fiction.
Because of the centrality of these features to Vernon Subutex—detail and verisimilitude, the contemporary quality of the language—insufficiencies of Wynne’s translation are worth mentioning. In French, the insouciance of argot is crucial to its texture. This slang, with its array of nouns, verbs, and adjectives, is efficient in cutting the emotion of the monologues. One difficulty, then, with this translation—“He smoked skunk from Holland so potent it gave an instant headache”—is that it gives rise to an elegiac mood where the accomplishment of Despentes’s prose is that it doesn’t.
Vernon Subutex III, which comes out in the United States in May, was a best seller in France in the week of its release. Since then, Despentes, whose first novel was thought unpublishable, has turned to polemic for a national audience. Her invective against Roman Polanski, an accused rapist, in the daily Libération—on the occasion earlier this year of Adèle Haenel’s desertion of the César Awards when Polanski was revealed to be a recipient—leveled its charge against the system that anointed him, grouping them together: “Your love of the strong is morbid” (Wynne’s translation). Despentes later composed a letter to be read over the radio in support of Justice Pour Adama, a French analogue of Black Lives Matter, addressed “to my white friends who don’t get the problem” (other translations have been mine).
A third, less publicized intervention in French politics was published in February alongside contributions by luminaries such as Bruno Latour in the otherwise modest volume Éloge des mauvaises herbes: Ce que nous devons à la ZAD, a compendium of reflections on an encampment, dubbed a ZAD (zone à défendre), that for 10 years was kept up by activists to prevent the building of an airport outside Nantes. Despentes’s essay—the title translates as “For the Peasants of Tomorrow”—deals with the contributions these environmentalists made, through the force of their commitment to stay in place, to the national imaginary. She notes that she has never been there. But the “whole edifice” of society as it is rests, Despentes writes, on an overwhelming message that “there is no alternative.” The ZAD, a self-managed community where, according to its members, police for years did not intervene, offered a proof to the contrary, “a grain of sand of counter-propaganda.” This is also what Despentes has found to do with her power. Vernon Subutex is written as if to act not as literature exactly, in its typical arena, but rather head-to-head with the dominant culture—up against the edifice that she identifies. That logic of multiplication and diversity, the scale and the frenzy of invention in this trilogy, and Despentes’s own larger-than-life resourcefulness all have an aspect of horror, suggesing in their negative the vastness and intractability of the power in her sights.