Melle Rant: How to create extremists from normies who are just trying to get on with their life:

The current split we’re seeing in the Republican Party is not a sudden split of ‘consciousness’ or ‘doing what’s right’, but rather a split between two factions of their billionaire donors: Langone et al. vs. Mercers et al. 1/14

Policy-wise, these two groups agree on nearly everything, but there is a rift in strategy. One group funds & supports conspiracy theories, right-wing & white-supremacist extremist groups, etc.

They do so for two primary reasons: 2/14

First, people’s lives are in turmoil. Millions are food and housing insecure. Capitalist alienation & atomization is rampant. Our political system represents corporate interests & the 1% - leaving crumbs for everyone else. People are hurting. 3/14

Conspiracy theories & RW extremist groups speak to people’s pain, but rather than place blame where it belongs: capitalism, authoritarianism, racism, sexism etc. they deflect blame towards anything but the truth: immigrants, black & brown people, deep state, lizard people... 4/14

Billionaires support conspiracy theories because they keep people confused and angry at any boogeyman other than the TRUE cause of their pain & alienation: the very system that allows for Billionaires while peoples’ lives are falling apart. 5/14

Lots of ordinary Republicans are endorsing violence. We'd like that number to drop, but the precipitating causes deserve our focus even more than trying to persuade that violence is inappropriate. The main trouble is they trust & follow bad leaders. 1/

Lots of Rep leaders, led by the president & other extremists, encouraged direct action. That explicit behavioral leadership is the biggest risk for violence. We've seen other presidential violence effects when Trump has targeted individuals, spiking death threats against them. 2/

Related is the dangerous lie Trump and many Rep leaders have broadcast, claiming w/o a shred of credible evidence that the election was somehow fraudulent. @LilyMasonPhD & I found in Nov that the false belief that Dems cheated *doubled* Rep support for anti-Biden violence. 3/

Specifically: Reps supporting a military coup were 9% if no cheating & 16% if cheating belief, 8% vs. 14% for National Guard resistance by states, and 16% vs. 30% for ordinary citizens to prepare weapons to resist in their communities. Paired w/ action calls, that's bad. 4/

In Oct, we asked partisans if they trust their party's leaders to tell them the truth about the election results. 90% of Dems said prob or def yes, as did 87% of Reps. Notably, definitely was 54% for Dems but 32% for Reps. So some doubt there, but not enough. 5/

The problem with #politics is that it exaggerates and makes (empty) slogans out of what we know. This applies to the #minimumwage too, where proponents of increasing it claim it will raise people's wages and opponents claim it will kill jobs. Neither is very accurate or finds

support in economic theory. Let's look at what a minimum wage law does, and then at what we can expect from it. Because the former is rarely admitted and the latter goes both ways. So, first, a minimum wage law is not an increase in anybody's wage, it is only a prohibition of

paying employees less than a stated amount. Raising the minimum wage law does not mean whoever is making less gets an automatic raise. What it does mean, especially after a transition period, is that there will be no jobs that create less value than is necessary for employers to

afford paying that minimum amount (plus taxes, benefits, overhead, etc.). No business can afford employing people for jobs creating less value for the business than they cost. So, no: increasing the minimum wage does not raise wages. It weeds out jobs (and workers!) that are less

productive than the decreed wage level requires for breaking even. It raises the average and median wages because low-wage jobs become unaffordable. Increasing businesses' salary costs will mean some lay people off, others refrain from hiring, and yet others reorganize to either

My two cents on the political economics of the first political crisis in Italy… with a shrinking Parliament. What are the incentives for Italian Senators, if they put themselves first and the country’s welfare next? Take the 2018 elected Senate, no subsequent party change

Let me assume that next election will be with a pure Proportional system -- no majority premium, no minimum thresholds. Strong simplifying assumption, I know: deciding the new electoral system is another interesting game on its own! I use yesterday SWG electoral polls

5 Stars movement (15.7% expected vote share) down from 111 to 31 seats: 80 current Senators going from MP salaries to….basic income (scary, um?). Democratic Party (19.6%) from 53 seats to 39 + 6 seats (counting Renzi’s Italia Viva). Forza Italia (6.3%) from 57 seats to only 13!

Even the most voted party Salvini’s League (23.5%) may lose seats: from 58 to 47. The big winner is Meloni’s Italian Brothers (16.3%) from 18 to 33 seats. So not surprisingly, Meloni & Salvini want early elections to get back in power. But the others?

5Star MPs will try to hold on to their seats: early elections cost each of them at least € 250k. Their leader may want to bet all their chips on a new Conte government, but do they have enough leverage to control their troopers if other govenments (options to stay on) emerge?

For two months we've been feted with snarky Jabs noting #typographical and #othererrors in #electionchallenge lawsuits.

You know, #mistakes?

Well after House Dems pushed through the sham impeachment we all witnessed, now we have 30 House Democrats asking questions after the FBI released photos of about 180 suspects, some of the the faces looked familiar. Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill was the first to come forward.

As I have pointed out in a previous posting, many of the rioters found to their dismay and bewilderment that there was no plan, at least that they could discern, for the mob to carry out that day. 1/63

The only thing they knew is that there had been a call to action--and to a large extent to arms as well--to disrupt the certification of Biden’s electoral college win. 2/63

According to Ali Alexander (formerly known as Ali Akbar) the idea was to show up so angry and in such overwhelming numbers that it would “change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body, hearing our loud roar from outside.” 3/63

(In fact, there is mounting evidence that Ali and other organizers of the event intended for the rioters to get INSIDE the fenced-in perimeter and even the building itself, which would in themselves have been unlawful actions--but that is a subject for another thread.) 4/63

Ali’s description might well fit the motives of many in the mob that assembled on January 6. But the more interesting and important question is: What did Trump and the activists and event organizers expect (or a least hope) that the *members of Congress* would do that day? 5/63

Now that the political calculus has changed in US...

I don't accept the notion that one must critique both right & left in the same way or even give equal time to critiquing them in order to have a fair & faithful public witness. Why?

1. Critiques that aim for equal time will end up missing underlying dynamics of power & responsibility. Those w/ power are responsible in different ways than those w/out it. And those who claim the name of Christ have distinct repsonsiblities from those who don't.

2. Critiques that posit right/left as mirror images miss that while each may operate on different principles, they do so w/in the same set of social shaping forces. IOW, they might be swimming in different directions but they're in the same stream

3. Critique emerges from a specific ethos & is directed to a certain audience. Critiquing those outside your tribe is so much easier than those w/in it. B/c of this, faithfulness might sometimes mean more focused critique of your own group & less of your ideological opponent.

4. Critique of opponents requires extra work to do fairly b/c it means understanding their arguments as they understand them. It requires asking right questions, hearing answers, & being able to find true sources of disagreement, not superficial ones.

A number of Trump appointees have tried to burrow into long-term public service jobs. Biden is firing them, which right wing commentators are trying paint as politicization. The reality is that this is correcting a Trump-era pattern of deprofessionalization. 1/

Lets step back to general principles here: political appointees selected on the basis of ideology are expected to resign when a new President comes into power. Career officials stay. For some positions its a little more complex but that is the basic governing logic. 2/

Trump blurred these basic differences between appointees and career staff. He ran out of time in his effort to turn potentially hundreds of thousands of career officials into appointees, and Biden reversed that policy. A good step to protect competence. 3/

Thats the big picture stuff, so lets focus on the specific case. The U.S. Agency for Global Media funds International broadcasters. The most famous is Radio Free Europe. Seven months ago a Trump appointee Michael Pack took over.

Pack engaged in extreme politicization of the agency. He hired people without relevant qualifications, stacked advisory boards with ideologues & conspiracy theorists, called reporters "deep state" & interfered in programming and political reporting to push a pro-Trump slant. 5/

A couple of articles in today's Toronto Star has prompted me to address them. They are mentioning the misconduct of the Conservative Party, but not in the way that they should. The following are just excerpts of the full article, but you can google the full story if interested.

The news sources are playing it as "it's just politics between rival parties", but we all know that the right-wing movement has nothing to do with politics. It's all fake drama, lies, blatant misinterpretations of anything the Liberals put forth.

The Conservative Party is sabotaging our federal government (the federal & the provincial conservative premiers are in cahoots). They are doing this in order to get Erin O'Toole into the PM position so that he can continue the destruction of Canada that Stephen Harper started.

The intention was to get conservatives in at the provincial level, in order to rip up our Charter, destroy confederation, and line us up with other destructive countries that run an authoritarian government.

The news sources are not addressing the misconduct by the right-wing party on their FaceBook pages or their Twitter accounts. They aren't letting CDNs know what the right-wing intentions are. None mention that they have caused risings of the "Yellow Vests", The O&G Convoys,

The Libertarian-billionaire funded Right pretend free speech is threatened from an authoritarian Left, yet 90% of UK campaigners say their free speech is threatened by hostile right-wing politicians & media using them as “fodder for phoney culture

Nearly two-thirds of campaigners say politicians are increasingly negative & less tolerant towards charities which actively fight for social justice, with politicians “shutting down channels of communication, & attacking campaigners & their allies as a threat to the common good”.

Examples include criticism of the @nationaltrust by the "Common Sense group" of Tories for publishing a report into historical slavery links at some of its country house properties. The MPs used an antisemitic conspiracy to accuse the Trust of "cultural Marxist", “woke” agenda.

Also cited was Priti Patel’s targeting of “do-gooders” and “lefty” "activist lawyers" in a speech at Tory party conference, despite Law Society complaints that the home secretary’s earlier comments about “activist lawyers” had led to a racist assault on an immigration lawyer.

Unicef was accused last month of a “political stunt” by Jacob Rees-Mogg after it funded food support for deprived children in south London, while Tory MPs reported Barnardo’s to the charities regulator after it published a blog discussing racial inequality and white privilege.

THREAD:
1) I’m a Democrat, running for Congress in 2022 from Wisconsin’s Sixth District. This is (part of) my story.

I grew up in Southfield, a city in the suburbs of Detroit, MI. My brother still lives in the Detroit area, but our parents are deceased.

2) My undergraduate degree is a BA with a major in political science (with an emphasis in political economy) and a minor in public administration, from Albion College, in MI. I got my JD (law degree) from Washington & Lee University School of Law, in VA.

3) I practiced law for nearly 20 years, taking time off now & then for various reasons, including when my grandmother died & I handled her estate, & from August 2018, when I lost my job after being diagnosed w/Stage Four uterine #cancer, which I beat, to the present.

4) My husband was born and raised in this district. We lived here, and got married here, from 2003-10, then moved to Milwaukee for work, then moved back to the district in August 2018, when we bought a house here. We’re staying.

5) I have an extensive skill set, based on a broad range of experience, including: having worked as an attorney, a human resources manager, an administrator, a researcher, & an author.

1/There is a lot of hope and denialism going on in QAnon communities ahead of inauguration day so I will try and capture some of them throughout the day, and as the acts of President Trump are enacted and decoded for secret meanings.