July 1, 2020

There's A Devious Way To Help Get Donald Trump Out Of Office

It's a highly effective and proven tactic that will make space for Joe Biden to smash Trump into oblivion in November.

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/theres-a-devious-way-to-help-get





A recent article in Politico laid bare just how bad things are in Trumpland. The article notably reported on his advisors desperate attempts to get him to focus on fighting Biden rather than everyone else: Trump advisers acknowledge that tearing down Biden will require a level of discipline he isn’t demonstrating. They have pleaded with Trump — who has used his Twitter account to vilify critics from MSNBC host Joe Scarborough to former National Security Adviser John Bolton — to stop focusing on slights that mean little to voters. Biden's low-profile during the pandemic has made it that much harder for Trump to land a punch, his advisers said. And this where the public comes in. Trump’s petty vindictiveness and non-existent attention span means he can be very easily thrown off course. The Never Trump Republicans Rick Wilson and George Conway founded the Lincoln Project to do exactly this. They have been creating astonishingly effective viral videos attacking Trump on a whole host of issues designed specifically to annoy Trump. They have questioned his health, accused him of being a traitor, and called him a racist — and they have made absolutely sure he sees their videos:

In the past few months, the Lincoln Project — a PAC with not much funding, as far as PACs go — has successfully established itself as a squatter in Trump’s mental space, thanks to several factors: members each boasting hundreds of thousands of social media followers, rapidly cut ads that respond to current events and a single-minded focus on buying airtime wherever Trump is most likely to be bingeing cable news that day, whether it’s the D.C. market or his golf courses across the country. And every time Trump freaks out — or every time the media covers his freakout — the Lincoln Project scores an incalculable amount of earned media, and millions of views online to boot. If regular Americans help amplify these efforts by forcing Trump to engage with these ads or any other celebrity/media figure’s negative comments about him, Trump will respond. And the more he responds, the less Joe Biden needs to spend time portraying him as a dangerously incompetent buffoon, and the more he can focus on campaigning and spreading a positive message for his Presidency. In other words, the job of every concerned American citizen is to now troll Trump at every given opportunity.

If you are not particularly good at trolling, then find those who are, spread their message or help fund their efforts. How low do you want to go? Given this is an all out emergency, pretty much everything is fair game. From his hairpiece to his bone spurs, marriage to Melania and weird relationship with his daughter, no topic should be taboo when spreading rumors and innuendo about the president on social media. Reservations should made at Trump events you have no intention of going to in order to deflate his crown size, and if anyone wants to make another Trump blimp, it should get funded immediately and flown over (or near) the White House. Celebrities, particularly ones Trump has singled out before, should coordinate attacks and get in as many spats with the president as possible. This might appear to be childish — and to a degree it is — but one has to remember who we are dealing with here. Trump is a child, and the more childish he becomes, the less likely he is to be re-elected. You are not trolling Trump for fun, but for the sake of American democracy and the health of the entire planet. So go forth and make the president’s life miserable.

snip

July 1, 2020

The Voting Disaster Ahead

Intentional voter suppression and unintentional suppression of the vote will collide in November.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/06/voter-suppression-novembers-looming-election-crisis/613408/



On June 9, primary day, hundreds of people surrounded Park Tavern, a sprawling brewery and restaurant in Atlanta’s Piedmont Park. They queued in six-foot increments, and the line wrapped around the parking lot. Two nearby polling locations were closed, so this was where 16,000 Atlantans were slated to cast their ballots. Across the metro area, more than 80 voting locations had been closed or consolidated over concerns about the coronavirus. What’s worse: The new state-ordered voting machines had stopped working. Some people waited for more than three hours to vote; others left before casting their ballots. Georgia’s meltdown was not an anomaly. The 2020 primary began with a malfunctioning app in the Iowa caucus, rendering the first-in-the-nation contest moot. One month later, on Super Tuesday, voters met hours-long waits in Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, and Sacramento. Another month passed, thousands of Americans were dying of the coronavirus, and state officials began canceling primaries. Wisconsin’s state legislature forced its April primary through anyway. Milwaukee voters stood masked in a hailstorm, waiting to vote at one of just five polling places. Any other year would have seen 180 voting locations.

The widespread failures during the primary elections foreshadow a potentially disastrous November election. States such as New York have been racing to make accommodations for voting by mail. But other states are making voting more difficult for residents: Oklahoma is fighting to keep its law requiring that absentee ballots be notarized; Texas will not accept medical vulnerability to the coronavirus as sufficient grounds for absentee voting. Even though greater access to the vote might help a sizable number of Donald Trump’s voters, this opposition to it comes from the top. “Mail ballots, they cheat,” the president has said. The barriers to ballot access were unacceptable before the pandemic, Leah Aden, an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund who is actively litigating several voting-rights cases, told me. Black voters, on average, wait 45 percent longer to vote than white voters; Latino voters wait 46 percent longer.* One study, from the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, found that black and Latino voters in Florida were more than two times as likely to have their mail-in ballots rejected as white voters—because of a mix of voter error and how the state processes ballots. To leave that already flawed system unchanged in a pandemic is injurious, Aden said. “The failure to operate in the context that we’re in, which is a pandemic, and proactively use your resources to address the emergence of that: That is also a form of voter suppression.”

Several states, such as Georgia, Virginia, and Massachusetts, have reported record turnout for their primary elections, and will probably see double to triple that in the general. “It’s likely that we’re not going to fix these problems by November,” Michael McDonald, a professor at the University of Florida who studies elections, told me. “In some cases, there really aren’t any good solutions.” More polling places will not magically appear. The average poll worker is more than 60 years old—and therefore vulnerable to COVID-19. In Wisconsin, roughly 7,000 poll workers said they would not work during the April election because of their fears of the coronavirus. Voters had to scramble to find new polling places, and figure out ways to get to them. The result? Long lines and a spike in absentee voting. “Habituation is one of the things that makes people vote,” Henry Brady, who studies electoral politics at UC Berkeley, told me. Some people are encouraged to vote because it’s easy enough to do. In 2011, Brady and a team of researchers examined how changing polling places could affect the outcome of an election—and they found that alternating a location may have reduced voting by as much as 2 percent. Some people voted absentee instead of in person when their polling place was changed—but the study examined California, where an excuse is not required for absentee voting. “You’re probably going to lose a lot more voters in places where vote-by-mail is not as easy.”

During the 2016 primary, residents in Maricopa County, Arizona, faced voting delays of up to five hours. After state officials cut county budgets, Maricopa reduced its number of polling places by 70 percent—from 200 to 60—meaning one polling place was available for every 21,000 voters. Officials in dozens of other states, including Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Alabama, similarly closed or changed polling locations. Before the Voting Rights Act was gutted in 2013, each of these states had previously fallen under the section of civil-rights legislation that allowed the federal government to block changes to elections that could adversely impact people of color in places with a history of disenfranchisement. When polling places are closed, many black and brown people are forced to travel farther to vote, at disproportionate rates, according to a report from the Legal Defense Fund. The pandemic will result in an unusually large number of mail-in ballots come November. And if a voter forgets to sign the ballot envelope, if they sign the envelope but the signature does not match the one on file with the elections office, or even if an election official misreads information that is correctly written, a mail-in ballot can be discarded. In 2016, the United States Election Assistance Commission reported that more than 300,000 mail-in ballots were rejected. “That number could be substantially higher—could be a million or more in 2020—if we don’t take action,” McDonald told me. “And even if we do take action, we’re still going to see an unusually large number of ballots rejected.”

snip

July 1, 2020

The Spirit of '70

https://www.affidavit.art/articles/spirit-of-70


Kathleen Cleaver on the set of Zabriskie Point.

The amber waves of Zabriskie Point’s opening credits harden into its first scene; the psychedelic pumps and skitters of Pink Floyd’s “Heart Beat, Pig Meat” die down so the characters, college students contemplating a strike, can speak. Kathleen Cleaver of the Black Panther Party is there (playing a student, but also herself). So is activist Frank Bardacke. Discussion has turned to the list of demands. A blonde woman wants to abolish the ROTC. The Panther next to Cleaver lays it out: where have all these fearless white revolutionaries been for the last three hundred years? “Molotov cocktails is a mixture of kerosene and gasoline,” he says. “White radicals is a mixture of bullshit and jive.” There are scattered protestations from the white radicals in the room. Are you willing to die? asks one. A Black student retorts: Black people are dying. Mark, our pale, blue-eyed, shag-haired hero, stands up. He is prepared to die, too, he tells the assembly. But “not of boredom.” How to watch this film today, as the radicalism of the fabled 1960s walks the land once more? I began this essay during a pandemic. Since then, George Floyd’s murder by cop has compelled people to break quarantine and take to the streets, sometimes to confront the police. Molotov cocktails, indeed, have arced through the teargas, thrown by radicals of all races. It is the Movement rephrased for the present. But it is also, more importantly, something new. And in the context of this erupting urgency, Michelangelo Antonioni’s lush, confused film is all the more cautionary, a warning about the problematics of allyship and the seduction of myth. The students launch their strike. Antonioni works his own staged scenes (a standoff in the library, a stricken cop, a Black Panther gunned down) into newsreel of an actual campus uprising at San Francisco State in 1968.


A still from the author's film Walk Thru Walls.

Zabriskie Point is set amid the social strife of the late 1960s—it was released one month before the massacre at Kent State, two months after police murdered Fred Hampton while he slept—but is focused on the story of one disaffected white youth, a rebel without a cause and all that. The plot is violent in an ambient, aimless way. Thus, the film glosses over the great omission of the American myth, the fact that white supremacy has always walked hand in hand with freedom, progress, and the frontier. It was 1968. Antonioni was riding high on the success of his first English language film, 1966’s Blowup, a dark vision of swinging London, and America was next. America was important, thought the Italian auteur, because America was a future-facing, frontier country, and its youth the most futureward of all. An assistant to the director spotted Mark Frechette at a Boston bus stop shouting obscenities: “He’s 20,” she told her boss, “and he hates.” Antonioni cast him immediately. He found his starlet, Daria Halprin, dancing in a documentary on the counterculture. In Mark’s handsome, almost sociopathically wry face, in Daria’s flowering, innocent limbs, the auteur saw his metaphor: the Movement’s firebrands turning inward, to self-immolation. Mark and Daria were not actors. They were real, beautiful, white American youths. Daria was the daughter of a Bay Area choreographer, and Mark was a Boston native and itinerant handyman bidding to join Mel Lyman’s cult. Both use their real names in the film. Antonioni used (or tried to use) their real idealism. The director wanted rawness, authenticity, wildness—the West in the Continental mind—and he got it: a shallow-focus misapprehension of the Movement as only a 50-something European man could see it, through a lens as grandiose as it was bitter.

And so, Zabriskie Point is a gorgeous mess. The plot is dumb, the acting (who knew?) is wooden, the dialogue is a labored caricature of America structured by binaries like students/cops, free/trapped, and nature/civilization. The film valorizes free love as much as lost causes. Mark buys a gun, but it never goes off. Daria explodes a building with her mind. Contemporary film critics thought it was a joke. “I want to avoid all clichés about young Americans,” Antonioni had said. He failed. “Corny? You bet your ass it’s corny,” wrote John Burks in a ruthless but romantic review for Rolling Stone. “Antonioni has constructed his movie of so many lame metaphors and bad puns that it’s staggering.” Mark, ever authentic, went on the Dick Cavett Show and told the host, who hadn’t seen the movie, to save his money. Antonioni’s film was mired in nostalgia for a time that was still unfolding. But, just maybe, the golden gobs of idealism on the director’s lens made for a truer document of modernism’s gasping dreams and its aleatory fallout than he realized. Even its critics admit the gangly plot is slung between images of scintillating pathos and splendor: the opening scene of student radicals rapping in a classroom; the final sequence of a mansion crammed with consumer goods exploding in tingling slow motion; and the centerpiece, some 20 minutes of striking Death Valley landscape, Mark and Daria flirting through it like pretext. The actors’ lives, too, bear out images to punctuate the era. With the money and fame from Zabriskie Point, Mark was finally let into Lyman’s cult. Daria, his lover for a time, followed him to Boston, but didn’t dig it, and went back to the Bay Area. In 1973, Mark was arrested after a botched bank heist (he claimed it was the closest he could get to robbing Richard Nixon), and died in prison two years later in a suspicious weightlifting accident. Meanwhile, Daria married and divorced Dennis Hopper, star of Easy Rider, the kind of era-defining movie Antonioni had wanted Zabriskie Point to be.

*

Zabriskie Point is an alien outcropping near the east rim of Death Valley that overlooks the sepulchral beauty of wind-hardened canyons of yellow- and rose-gold sand. On any given morning, dozens of photographers gather there to make images of the sunrise. Many leave after just a few seconds of light: evidently, the best part is over quickly. Antonioni’s film meanders through this scenery for around 20 minutes. As Antonioni said in 1969, during production, “A boy and a girl meet. They talk. That’s all. Everything that happens before they meet is a prologue. Everything that happens after they talk is an epilogue.” The film’s rocky plot is a vehicle for getting Antonioni’s two stars untangled from Los Angeles (prologue), beyond what he saw as a soulless commercial wasteland of billboards and fast food stands and facades, and out to the real stuff: mounds of pulverized minerals. Everything on either side of Zabriskie Point is the politics of the 1960s, the Movement, the ravages of capitalism and the pigs. In other words, the politics of landscape—conquest, development, when the freedom of the desert was not the freedom to fuck in a national park but to claim, to exploit, to “mine.” They talk, saying nothing much, keeping time, as politics presses in. Suddenly a hundred other couples, like ghosts, nip and prod and pleasure each other in the dust. Then, it’s over. Even in 1970, even to Antonioni’s dazzled eye, the drift into the desert felt predictable. “I always knew it would be like this,” says Mark, post-coital. Maybe he means sex. Maybe he means the desert, or Hollywood film. Maybe he means the revolution. The phrase, cynical and beatific, hangs over the film like haze.

snip


"ZABRISKIE POINT"

Richard Brody on Michelangelo Antonioni's "Zabriskie Point" (1970).

https://www.newyorker.com/video/watch/zabriskie-point

July 1, 2020

Trump's Escalation Just Took A Significant Turn For The Worse

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/trumps-escalation-just-took-a-significant



There’s a scene in 1997’s Titanic where the captain, realizing that his actions have led to the inevitable sinking of his ship and the certain death of over 1500 people, gives up. He walks away from his crew, locks himself in the wheelhouse, and waits to die with his ship. That will not be Donald Trump. There’s another scene in which Bruce Ismay, the owner of the doomed vessel, gets onto a lifeboat to flee the sinking ship he had previously said was unsinkable. He had ordered the captain to recklessly go faster and had limited the number of lifeboats available. Now that the deadly consequences of his terrible decisions were playing out in real time around him, Ismay took no responsibility and bravely ran away, leaving others to pay the price. That will not be Donald Trump. Instead, Donald Trump will be Charlton Heston in Beneath the Planet of the Apes in which he destroys everything because he’s a racist, self-centered asshole.

Reality Slaps Trump In The Face

Up until the Tulsa rally, Trump had convinced himself that no matter what the polls said, he was winning, and winning big. His unbearably racist “silent majority” was unstoppable and he would get all the angry white voters he would need to win the Electoral College again. But then no one showed up for his triumphant return to the stage in deep red Trump country. Where before, throngs of adoring red hats would greet him with rapturous applause, barely a third of the arena was filled. Politico reports that this appears to have been a wake up call for Trump: In the week since his Tulsa rally, the president has grudgingly conceded that he’s behind, according to three people who are familiar with his thinking. Trump, who vented for days about the event, is starting to take a more hands-on role in the campaign and has expressed openness to adding more people to the team. He has also held meetings recently focusing on his efforts in individual battleground states. Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, who effectively oversees the campaign from the White House, is expected to play an even more active role.

Thank goodness Trump is giving Jared more responsibilities! Once he solves Middle East peace, the opioid crisis, tensions with China, Muslims in general, and Mexico, and fixes our criminal justice system, the VA, and PPE stockpile, he will totally get Trump reelected. No problem! He may even have some spare time left over to set up that secret back channel to Russia that he was working on. But aside from the humiliating Tulsa non-rally, the coronavirus is now, as predicted by every healthcare expert, tearing its way through all of the red states that laughed at the coastal blue states who begged them to take it seriously. The difference is that it’s going to be so much worse in Trump country. As I wrote about back at the end of April, most red states do not have the resources of states like New York, California, or Washington. The big cities in Texas have resources but they’re going to be swamped with cases from the surrounding rural areas that have no resources at all. And what’s a poor state like Tennessee going to do?

On top of that, you have Republican governors refusing to do more than the bare minimum to stem the carnage. Some of them won’t even do that much. To compound the nightmare, millions of white Republican voters are refusing to take any precautions at all because something something “mah freedumbs!” Naturally, the economy, which had a tiny little burst of hope as the country reopened, is contracting again like a groundhog fleeing from its shadow, portending dismal times ahead. Since the economy is the only thing Trump (inexplicably) has going for him, this is a bad thing in terms of his reelection. It’s bad in every other context but that is an article for another time. Trump lied and spun and blustered as hard as he could. He ordered his regime to do the same and most of the right wing media followed his lead for as long as they could. But reality has a funny way of asserting itself regardless of what you want. Trump is losing. Badly.
https://twitter.com/cmclymer/status/1277626734800703490
In ordinary times, we would be sharks circling for the kill, in a frenzy from all the blood in the water. But these are not ordinary times. We should be absolutely terrified of the next 6 months and be prepared to fight, quite literally in the streets, on election day.

Trump’s Transition To Mad Bomber Is Underway.......

snip