John Lewis ‘loved this country so much that he risked his life and his blood …’

Just as with the events of World War II and the holocaust, we are losing our living memory of the Civil Rights movement. With each passing year, there are fewer people remaining who actually bore the blows of batons and the blasts of fire hoses, fewer who rode those buses, made those marches, crossed that bridge. And none of them is John Lewis.

To say that John Lewis was a towering figure of the Civil Rights movement, is underselling him. An eternal agent of peaceful protest, “the conscience of congress,” and a man of such earned dignity, that his presence, in the congress and the nation, was palpable. Some people have gravitas, but Lewis had gravity—pulling others toward their better natures, and toward action. Saying that Lewis the calm center of the movement, is wrong. John Lewis was never calm. He was outraged, ever day and every hour, in the best possible way, seeking “good trouble” right into his final days.

As Lewis himself said when he talked about his pancreatic cancer in 2019. “I have been in some kind of fight—for freedom, equality, basic human rights—for nearly my entire life.” How could anyone be sure they were on the right side of history? If they were fighting alongside John Lewis.

How long has John Lewis been a key figure in the nation? His New York Times obituary was partially written by a man who left that paper in 1978.

It’s difficult to speak about Lewis without pointing at the past. Yes, he endure horrific beatings. Yes, he was a Black man elected to Congress from the South at a time when that alone seemed miraculous. Yes, books can be written about everything he did as one of the “Big Six.” Books have.

But John Lewis wasn’t frozen in 1960s amber. His will wasn’t just in the Civil Rights achievements that came in his 20s, but in the Civil Rights act of 1991. It was also in the 2003 authorization of the National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall. It was in the sit in that brought 170 House Democrats conducted to bring attention to the need for changes in America’s gun laws in 2016. Lewis was also a pivotal player in the impeachment of Donald Trump. His support for that vote, and his knowledge that this was still another situation where doing the right thing was be the easy thing, was key to giving others the courage to move forward. 

Too often in the last decades, Lewis was forced to spend his energies not on moving the nation forward, but in the struggle to keep it from sliding back. He fought back attempts to derail and defund the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in Congress, only to see courts and the Trump White House undercut his efforts.

Lewis saw the protests following the police murder of George Floyd as not just a continuation of the struggle from the 1960s, but as a new chapter in that story. He reached out to younger leaders, both giving them the wisdom of his experiencing, and listening to their own stories. Martin Luther King III said that his father was inspired by John Lewis. John Lewis was inspired by many of those he saw leading the Black Lives Matter movement and by the breakthroughs they have achieved. We may be losing our living memory of the events that first brought John Lewis to the attention of the nation, but John Lewis saw that America is still expanding its ranks of Black leaders—and, unfortunately, the ranks of those who have seen firsthand that peaceful protest is still met with violence. If the Congress is in need of a new conscience, there are a million progressive, young Black women and men ready to take on that role.

As he often does, President Barack Obama may have summed it up the best. “John Lewis,” said Obama, “loved this country so much that he risked his life and his blood so that it might live up to its promise.”

Donald Trump has not yet commented on Congressman Lewis’ passing. Hopefully, it stays that way.

The original version of Lewis’s speech, and the changes he made to soften his words and make them acceptable to those worried about offending the Kennedy administration, can be found here.

Statement from Jimmy Carter on the passing of John Lewis pic.twitter.com/neoHpc0jBt

— The Carter Center (@CarterCenter) July 18, 2020

John Lewis, civil rights icon and longtime congressman, dies

John Lewis, who went from being the youngest leader of the 1963 March on Washington to a long-serving congressman from Georgia and icon of the civil rights movement, died Friday. He was 80.

In December 2019, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

As a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Lewis was a committed participant in some of the key moments of the movement — an original Freedom Rider in 1961, a principal speaker at the March on Washington in 1963, one of those brutally clubbed during a 1965 march in Selma, Ala. Through it all, he faced taunts, beatings and dozens of arrests.

“In the face of what John considered the evils of segregation, he was fearless,” said longtime SNCC activist Courtland Cox.

By his middle years, he was in Congress and sometimes referred to it as its “conscience.”

Tributes poured in late Friday night from across the political spectrum, with Democrats and Republicans offering condolences on Lewis’ passing.

“Today, America mourns the loss of one of the greatest heroes of American history: Congressman John Lewis, the Conscience of the Congress,“ House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said late Friday.

In 2009, he was a witness to the inauguration of Barack Obama, the first African American president.

“Generations from now,” Obama said when awarding him a Medal of Freedom in 2011, “when parents teach their children what is meant by courage, the story of John Lewis will come to mind — an American who knew that change could not wait for some other person or some other time; whose life is a lesson in the fierce urgency of now."

In 2017, he came under attack from Obama’s successor, Donald Trump. “All talk, talk, talk — no action or results,” Trump tweeted of Lewis as the two traded insults. Lewis subsequently invoked Trump to encourage his admirers: “Do not get lost in a sea of despair,” he tweeted in June 2018. “Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”

Through it all, the son of the deeply segregated Deep South had an outsize impact on public life.

John Robert Lewis was born in Troy, Alabama, on Feb. 21, 1940, one of 10 children of Eddie and Willie Mae Lewis. According to “March,” his three-part autobiography in graphic novel form, he dreamed from a young age of being a preacher. He was in charge of taking care of his family’s chickens and would practice sermons on them: “I preached to my chickens just about every night.”

His early years predated the big burst of activism that would begin in the mid 1950s. “Growing up in rural Alabama,” he wrote in “March,” “my parents knew it could be dangerous to make any waves.” Even after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, nothing much changed in his rural community.

As a teen, Lewis met both Rosa Parks and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. In 1957, he went to the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, where he connected with some of the people who would become leading lights of the civil rights movement: Diane Nash, James Bevel, Jim Lawson, Bernard Lafayette and C.T. Vivian. (Vivian died earlier Friday at the age of 95.)

“By the fall of ’58, my eyes were opening in many ways,” he wrote in “Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement,” his 1998 memoir. Lewis would help launch SNCC, an organization founded as an offshoot of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by King and dedicated to the principles of nonviolence.

The movement had begun to blossom. It took a further step forward with the first sit-in in Greensboro, N.C., at a lunch counter at a Woolworth’s in February 1960. The Nashville activists were soon emulating the tactic, starting with lunch counters and moving on other establishments, such as movie theaters. During one sit-in, a restaurant owner turned a fumigating machine on Lewis and Bevel and left. “Were we not human to him?” Lewis wondered.

“What we found, as we pushed our protests deeper into the heart of segregated society,” Lewis wrote in “March,” “was that our nonviolent actions were met with increasingly more violent responses.”

In May 1961, Lewis headed south with the first Freedom Riders, an integrated group of bus riders who traveled from Washington to integrate the facilities of interstate bus terminals. Lewis was the first of the riders to be assaulted, during a stop in Rock Hill, S.C. He was punched and kicked. Lewis would be assaulted again in Montgomery, Ala., where he was knocked unconscious.

“I could feel my knees collapse and then nothing,” Lewis recalled, according to “Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice” by Raymond Arsenault. “Everything turned white for an instant, then black.”

For his trouble, he would subsequently be jailed, ending up in Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Farm. In the fall of 1961, however, the campaign yielded results: All interstate travel facilities were integrated.

“The fare was paid in blood,” Lewis wrote in “March,” “but the Freedom Rides stirred the national consciousness and awoke the hearts and minds of a generation.”

SNCC veteran Cox said in 2020: “John’s fundamental belief of confronting the evils of segregation that was pervasive in the South allowed him to ‘march into hell for a heavenly cause.’”

The so-called “Big Six” leaders plan the March on Washington in July 1963 (from left): SNCC’s John Lewis, the National Urban League’s Whitney Young Jr., labor leader A. Philip Randolph, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., CORE’s James Farmer Jr., and the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins.

In 1963, Lewis became SNCC‘s chairman. That made him the head of one of the six leading civil rights organizations working on the Aug. 28 March of Washington for Jobs and Freedom that was being planned by A. Philip Randolph, a labor leader and elder statesman of the civil rights movement. Randolph had been trying to organize such a march since 1941.

The others were King, James Farmer Jr. (Congress of Racial Equality), Roy Wilkins (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and Whitney Young Jr. (National Urban League).

Lewis was the youngest of the so-called “Big Six” and, as soon became evident, the most militant. In the final hours leading up to the event, some of his fellow leaders panicked over what Lewis planned to say.

“In the original draft of his speech,” David Remnick wrote in 2009, “the demand for racial justice and ‘serious revolution‘ was so fearless that, in the last minutes before the program began, Dr. King, Bayard Rustin, Roy Wilkins, and other movement organizers negotiated with him to remove any phrases that might offend the Kennedy administration.”

Lewis’ line that “the revolution is at hand” alarmed the old guard of the movement. So did his assertion that “we will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did.” Lewis, as always, was committed to nonviolence, but his fellow leaders feared he would be misconstrued.

Randolph spent hours mediating between Lewis and other leaders, trying to get Lewis to edit his speech. The discussion was heated and emotional, but ultimately Lewis made some changes.

“I was angry, but when we were done, I was satisfied,” Lewis later wrote in “Walking With the Wind.”

“The speech still had fire. It still had bite, certainly more teeth than any other speech made that day. It still had an edge, with no talk of ‘Negroes’ — I spoke instead of “black citizens” and “the black masses,’ the only speaker that day to use those phrases.”

Shortly after Lewis spoke, King took the podium and offered his “I Have a Dream” speech. Lewis would later write he didn’t consider it King’s best speech, but added: “Considering the context and setting and the timing of this one, it was a truly a masterpiece, truly immortal.”

The year 1964 brought the Freedom Summer, a SNCC-led attempt to register and educate as many voters as possible in Mississippi. Lewis recruited students from around the country to join the effort, including Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who would be brutally slain along with James Chaney.

On March 7, 1965, Lewis was again involved in a milestone of the movement. “In Selma, Lewis led a march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge straight into a blockade set up by Alabama state troopers. The first nightstick came down on Lewis’s skull,” Remnick wrote in 2009.

In the foreground of this photo from Selma’s “Bloody Sunday,” John Lewis  is being beaten by a state trooper. Lewis  suffered a fractured skull.

In his memoir, Lewis said Alabama’s “Bloody Sunday” was a strange day from the get-go. “It was somber and subdued, almost like a funeral procession,” he wrote in “Walking With the Wind“ of the march he led with Hosea Williams. “There were no big names up front, no celebrities. This was just plain folks moving through the streets of Selma.”

Calling him “a personal hero,” Sen. John McCain described Lewis‘ actions that day as exemplary of America’s most basic dreams.

“In America, we have always believed that if the day was a disappointment, we would win tomorrow,” McCain wrote in 2018‘s “The Restless Wave.” “That’s what John Lewis believed when he marched across this bridge.”

The footage of the beatings that day in Alabama pushed President Lyndon B. Johnson to action on civil rights legislation. “Something about that day in Selma touched a nerve deeper than anything that had come before,” Lewis later wrote.

After Selma and with each passing month, SNCC became more militant. The organization grew to reflect the disappointment of those who saw progress as coming too slow. “Something was born in Selma, but something died there, too,” Lewis wrote in “Walking With the Wind.” “The road of nonviolence had essentially run out.” (King’s assassination in 1968 was another devastating blow against those advocating nonviolence.)

In 1966, Lewis lost the chairmanship to Stokely Carmichael, champion of the slogan “Black Power.” “My life, my identity, most of my very existence, was tied to SNCC,” Lewis recalled in “Walking With the Wind.” “Now, so suddenly, I felt put out to pasture.”

In 1968, he worked on the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy. On the night of the California primary, he was with the campaign at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when Kennedy was shot and killed by Sirhan Sirhan.

Lewis moved on to the Voter Education Project in 1970, and in 1977 made his first stab at electoral politics, running unsuccessfully for a House seat in Georgia.

After a stint on Atlanta’s City Council, he tried again for the House in 1986 and won, edging out fellow activist Julian Bond. He remained in the House after that, an ardent Democratic partisan but one who said that his mission never changed.

“My overarching duty,” Lewis wrote in 1998, “as I declared during that 1986 campaign and during every campaign since then, has been to uphold and apply to our entire society the principles which formed the foundation of the movement to which I have devoted my entire life.”

Lewis spent years pushing for a National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, introducing legislation every year until it finally passed in 2003. “Giving up on dreams is not an option for me,” he wrote when the museum opened in 2016.

President Barack Obama embraces  John Lewis after the congressman introduced the president by the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., on the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” in 2015.

Though not an author of much in the way of major legislation, some issues drew out his eloquence. In March 2010, in the final stages of the fierce debate over the Affordable Care Act, he fought for its passage. "This may be the most important vote that we cast as members of this body,” Lewis said. “We have a moral obligation today, tonight, to make health care a right and not a privilege."

In 2016, he was one of the leaders of a unique sit-in on the House floor in support of gun-safety legislation. “Give us a vote. Let us vote. We came here to do our job,” he said. (The sit-in failed.)

As time passed, he came to be seen as the living embodiment of the civil rights movement.

Many awards came his way: a Lincoln Medal from Ford’s Theatre, a Preservation Hero award from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the NAACP Spingarn Medal, the Liberty Medal from the National Constitution Center, a Dole Leadership Prize named for Bob Dole, and a John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for lifetime achievement, among others. Stephan James portrayed him in the 2014 movie “Selma.” Universities showered him with honorary degrees. In 2016, the U.S. Navy announced that it was naming a ship, a replenishment oiler, after him.

During his congressional career, Lewis often led bipartisan delegations of lawmakers to the Edmund Pettus Bridge to reenact the Bloody Sunday march. Those members would come away from the trips vowing to work for a more equitable society, which gratified Lewis.

In 2013, he launched a trilogy titled “March,” graphic novels written with Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell that chronicled the early decades of his life. In 2016, the third installment became the first graphic novel to win a National Book Award. “I grew up in rural Alabama — very, very poor with very few books in our home,” Lewis said in accepting the award.

The “March” books used the inauguration of Obama as a framing device. Lewis was initially a Hillary Clinton supporter in 2008, but Obama’s election shined a spotlight on Lewis. The new president signed a photograph to him: “Because of you, John.”

The Trump years were different. Lewis had sparred with Republicans before — even calling for the impeachment of President George W. Bush — but the jousting with Trump escalated quickly. Saying he didn’t believe Trump was “a legitimate president,” Lewis announced he would not attend the inauguration.

Trump responded on Twitter. “Congressman John Lewis should spend more time on fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart (not to … mention crime infested) rather than falsely complaining about the election results. All talk, talk, talk — no action or results. Sad!,” he said.

Lewis remained a prominent foe of Trump. “I think he is a racist,” Lewis said of the president in January 2018.

Lewis’ cancer diagnosis at the end of 2019 led to an outpouring of support. “There is no more important New Year's resolution, and it begins right now: pray for John Lewis,” tweeted NPR’s Scott Simon. On that day, Obama tweeted: "If there’s one thing I love about @RepJohnLewis, it’s his incomparable will to fight. I know he’s got a lot more of that left in him.“

In 2009, Lewis met with a white man named Elwin Wilson, who was among those who assaulted Lewis and other Freedom Riders in 1961. Following Obama’s election in 2008, Wilson said he had an epiphany and traveled to Washington to apologize for his violent acts and seek Lewis’ forgiveness. Lewis gave it freely.

“It’s in keeping with the philosophy of nonviolence,” Lewis later told the New York Times. “That’s what the movement was always about, to have the capacity to forgive and move toward reconciliation.”

John Bresnahan contributed to this article.

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The creep of the QAnon cult threatens to consume what’s left of the Republican Party

The bizarre and otherworldly QAnon cult—the conspiracist Donald Trump fanatics who believe that liberal Democrats and their allies have been secretly operating a global pedophilia ring that is going to end in mass arrests called “The Storm”—has not only been spreading farther and deeper into mainstream conservative politics, but the entire Republican Party appears on the verge of being completely consumed by it.

Trump himself retweets QAnoners’ authoritarian paeans to his presidency and its attacks on his critics. His former national security adviser posted video of himself and a group of friends taking the “QAnon Oath.” Trump’s son Eric tweets out open support of the “Q” conspiracy theories. Trump’s favorite cable-news channel features reporters who openly embrace the theories. Dozens of Republican candidates openly spout QAnon claims and rhetoric, and GOP organizations have used their Facebook accounts to promote QAnon theories.  

The fantastic aspects of this conspiracism—particularly the obdurate insistence by the growing hordes of True Believers that “Q has always been right” in the face of the mounting reality that not one of the theories’ predictions or claims has yet proven accurate—make it difficult in many ways to take it seriously. In an ordinary world, it would be dismissed as a joke.

But the up-is-down belief system inherent in conspiracist worldviews like QAnon has spread so far that it not only has infected democratic discourse with garbage disinformation, but its underlying nature is profoundly violent—which presents the very real threat (one we’ve already seen playing out) of unhinged QAnon believers acting out and wreaking potentially significant levels of harm.

After all, there is a reason the FBI warned last year that QAnon was a likely vector for fueling domestic terrorism: “The FBI assesses these conspiracy theories very likely will emerge, spread, and evolve in the modern information marketplace, occasionally driving both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts.”

Yet it continues to seep into mainstream Republican politics with almost nary a raised eyebrow. Oregon’s QAnon-loving GOP Senate nominee, Jo Rae Perkins, can even call for the imposition of martial law in her home state (to battle “antifa”) without any notable pushback. The Republican Party has resolutely—and silently—refused to withdraw its support for a single one of the 64 GOP candidates with QAnon connections.

Media Matters’ Alex Kaplan compiled a complete list of QAnon candidates:

  • Thirteen candidates have secured a spot on the ballot in November by competing in primary elections.
  • Of those 13 candidates, five are from California, two are from Illinois, and there is one each from Colorado, New Jersey, Oregon, Georgia, Ohio, and Texas.
  • One candidate in Florida is running as an independent, who is also on the ballot in November.
  • One candidate, in Georgia, is heading to an upcoming primary runoff.
  • One candidate in New York is running as a Republican write-in.
  • In total, 59 of the candidates are Republicans, two are Democrats, one is a Libertarian, and two are independents.

“They've done absolutely nothing to discourage QAnon followers from believing as they do,” QAnon researcher Travis View told Politico, adding that this only stokes the community’s fervor. “I mean, QAnon is premised on the idea that there is a secret plan to save the world, so they take the silence more as part of that secrecy.”

The White House and its allies have offered disingenuous retorts that verge on ballsy dishonesty when asked about the friendliness of Trump and his allies. When Flynn posted his 53-second clip to Twitter on the Fourth of July, he was participating in a ritual already being shared widely that week as video posts by the QAnon community (Perkins among them) under the hashtag #TakeTheOath (which in fact is the same loyalty oath taken by members of Congress). The trend was in fact inspired by a person using the Q identity on the message board 8kun to “symbolically take the oath on social media platforms.” At the video’s end, Flynn recited the QAnon slogan: “Where we go one, we go all!”

Flynn lawyer Sidney Powell told the Washington Examiner that there was no intent on Flynn’s part to embrace QAnon conspiracy theories—rather, he claimed, Flynn only “wanted to encourage people to think about being a citizen." He claimed the phrase "Where we go one, we go all" was first engraved on a bell on one of President John F. Kennedy's sailboats—which in fact is a falsehood first propagated by the Q persona in a message-board post. Powell also told CNN that “implying anything wrong with words long ago inscribed on a bell to encourage the unity of the human race is malevolent and just plain wrong. There is nothing more to the story."

Experts laughed at Flynn’s denial. “This is absolutely pro-QAnon," researcher/author Mike Rothschild told CNN. Moreover, Flynn’s public embrace was a major validation for the cult’s True Believers, he explained.

"The Q community is really excited by all of this. Flynn is a hugely important figure to them, seen as a warrior who infiltrated the deep state by pretending to plead guilty," Rothschild said. "The video of Flynn actually taking the oath is, to them, total validation that they were right, that Flynn is a warrior who fights for them, and that they can be digital soldiers on his level."

This underlying vision—of being a heroic warrior for truth battling against the vilest of evils—is what attracts so many followers to QAnon, and simultaneously creates permission in their minds for committing the most atrocious acts of violence one can imagine. We’ve already seen this playing out in domestic-terrorism incidents that, fortunately, did not reach fruition:

  • A QAnon fanatic armed with an AR-15 and an armored truck blocked traffic on the Hoover Dam and demanded the inspector general’s report on the government investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email practices in June 2018.
  • A California man arrested in December 2018 with bomb-making materials in his car told investigators he intended to use them to "blow up a satanic temple monument" in the Springfield, Illinois Capitol rotunda. His larger intentions, he said, were "make Americans aware of Pizzagate and the New World Order, who were dismantling society."
  • An Illinois woman who became a fanatical QAnon devotee livestreamed herself on a cross-country trip, armed with a collection of illegal knives, to New York City, where she hoped to “take out” Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. NYPD officers arrested her there.
  • The young man who murdered Gambino mob boss Frank Cali, who gorged himself on QAnon theories online, told investigators he committed the crime because he believed that Cali was part of the “Deep State” operation to sabotage Trump’s presidency.
  • The Los Angeles locomotive engineer, also a QAnon fan, who drove his engine at high speed off the tracks near the docks where the US Naval Ship Mercy was stationed as part of the federal response to the COVID-19 pandemic—it halted about 800 yards away from the ship—told arresting officers he was hoping to ram the ship because he believed the claims (primarily from QAnon theorists) that the patients were going to be secretly carted off to Guantanamo: “You only get this chance once. The whole world is watching. … I had to. People don’t know what’s going on here. Now they will.”

The QAnon cult has always had this violent idea of heroism at its dark heart, even among the once-respectable Republicans who have been consumed by it. One of the most prominent of these is Michael Scheuer, the former CIA analyst, college lecturer, and onetime Fox News regular whose career as a pundit metastasized from virulent Islamophobia to unapologetic anti-Obama “Birtherism.”

Nowadays, Scheuer can be found penning lengthy defenses of QAnon and its nonsense, claiming that dire consequences lay just around the corner for the usual laundry list of Trump critics and journalists who dared question the regime: “Maybe all of the following, gallows-headed traitors will write a Q on their palm and claim innocence by insanity?” he mused last December after Trump’s impeachment.

The supposed “Storm” arrests are only the beginnings of Scheuer’s fantasies, however. Another essay, penned a year before the QAnon screed, laid out his vision of a citizens’ uprising—replete with lynchings and domestic terrorism—in response to the “treason” of attacking Donald Trump:

American patriots have so far, praise God, been remarkably disciplined in not responding to tyranny and violence with violence. For now they must remain so, armed but steady. But the time for such patience is fast slipping away; indeed, that patience is quickly becoming an obviously rank and self-destructive foolishness. If Trump does not act soon to erase the above noted tyranny and tyrants, the armed citizenry must step in and eliminate them.

It is, of course, far better if Trump does so, and I pray and believe he will. That said, the sheer, nay, utter joy and satisfaction to be derived from beholding great piles of dead U.S.-citizen tyrants is not one that will be missed if Trump does not soon do the necessary to save the republic.

The QAnoners’ fantasies, like everything dreamed up on the far right, are certain to remain unrealized. But the likelihood that many, many people are going to be hurt in their looming attempt to make them manifest is also just as certain.

US Rep. Amash officially won’t seek reelection to Congress

LANSING, Mich. (AP) - U.S. Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, a former Republican who backed the impeachment of President Donald Trump, is officially not running for reelection.

Amash had suspended his congressional campaign in February and later explored seeking the Libertarian Party's nomination for president. Thursday was Michigan's deadline to ...

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It’s not just Trump—voters are abandoning the Republican Party like it’s a sinking ship

Republican Party fortunes have taken a decisive turn for the worse. Gallup released remarkable data Thursday showing a dramatic 13-point shift in party affiliation since the beginning of the year.

In January, the GOP had a two-point edge on Democrats in terms of voters who either identified as Republicans or leaned Republican—47%-45%. Now Democrats and Democratic leaners enjoy an 11-point edge, 50%-39%. Check out the graph below.

What's so stunning is that it's not just Trump shedding support, it's the entire Republican brand. Think about that. Heading into the GOP-led Senate's January impeachment trial, more Americans generally embraced Republicans than Democrats. But after Senate Republicans acquitted Trump in early February in their sham, no-witness trial, party support shifts in favor of Democrats.

By March, as the coronavirus starts grabbing more headlines, Democrats gain a two-point edge. Democrats then nudge up slightly in April.

But around May, Republicans really begin to tank. That plunge comes in the wake of news in late April that the coronavirus death toll surpassed the 58,220 Americans who died in the Vietnam War. In early May, it becomes clear that Trump and the White House have simply surrendered to the virus and pivoted toward reopening state economies without any national testing/tracing plan in place. At that point, Republicans at both the state and federal levels become willing accomplices in Trump's reckless scheme to reopen America before any of the proper tools are in place. 

In addition, George Floyd's brutal death on May 25 at the hands of Minneapolis police officers sparks national outrage, and Trump starts implementing an authoritarian crackdown to combat nationwide protests, most of which are peaceful. 

It's during that late May/June timeframe that GOP affiliation plummets five points in a month while Democratic affiliation rises three points. Just wow.

Party affiliation does fluctuate in the Gallup surveys dating back to 1991, but the outfit says "double-digit Democratic advantages have been relatively uncommon." Democrats held a 10-point advantage in January 2019 just after they routed Republicans in the 2018 midterms.

"Four months before Election Day, Democrats appear to be as strong politically now as they were in 2018 when they reclaimed the majority in the House of Representatives and gained seven governorships they previously did not hold," Gallup writes.

Congrats, Republicans. Couldn't be happening to a nicer crew of folks. 

The Pentagon wants to ban the Confederate flag on military bases—but Mark Esper might intervene

Politico reports that top military leaders are "pressuring" Defense Secretary Mark Esper to ban Confederate flags on military bases, and that those officials discussed such a ban at a top-level meeting yesterday. The premise here is that the Pentagon wants Mark Esper to go directly against Dear Dumb Leader, Donald Trump, who most specifically has been campaigning against Confederate flag bans, against renaming military bases to strip the names of Confederate leaders, and against removing statutes of Confederate-traitors-and-the-horses-they-rode-in-on.

Let's all put on our pundit hats and take a guess where Mark Esper is going to come down on this, shall we?

The facts are these: Mark Esper has supported Trump through every rotten thing Trump has done to the military. He stood by while Trump pardoned war criminals and removed top brass who opposed it. He enabled Trump's reach-down to punish a military official who provided damning testimony during the congressional impeachment investigation against Trump. He followed orders to dispatch troops in preparation to sweep Black Lives Matters demonstrators from Washington, D.C. streets by force, if necessary. Mark Esper remains defense secretary right now because he has methodically made sure to keep on Donald Trump's good side, even if keeping on Trump's good side means standing aside while Trump does grotesquely corrupt or anti-American things.

So if the joint chiefs and other top officials are requesting Esper do the obviously decent thing here, but Donald Trump's ever-frothing Twitter feed is absolutely purple-faced with rage against anyone who would dare do such a thing, one would have to be a bit dense to presume Esper was suddenly going to decide the nationwide symbol of slack-jawed white supremacy needed to be given the boot.

Oh, and while the Marine Corps, for example, tried to ban Confederate flags on their own authority, Esper put those policies on hold, ostensibly in preparation for a "department-wide" policy on the matter.

Politico's report also suggests a potential dodge for Esper. Esper could unveil a new policy prohibiting "racially or socially divisive symbols" in general, and the Confederate flag might be counted as one of those "divisive" symbols, perhaps without mentioning it (thus leading individual commands to make the decision without Esper having to do something brave) or perhaps mentioning it in a long list of other "divisive" symbols (in an attempt to water down the impression that the flag was specifically targeted).

Both of those might be plausible evasions in normal bureaucratic times, but Trump is single-minded about the things he chooses to be single-minded about. Any policy—any policy—that Fox News reports has the effect of banning the Confederate flag will send him into fits, and Esper will be blamed.

So this seems to be yet another situation, as in Trump's pardoning of war criminals or Trump's retaliations against military officers, in which Esper must choose between doing the obviously right and decent thing, and chucking that thing in order to polish Trump's boots. The odds that Esper would have stood by while Trump was a rat bastard all the other times, but this issue is the one he'll break from Dear Leader on, seem kind of low.

The Pentagon wants to ban the Confederate flag on military bases—but Mark Esper might intervene

Politico reports that top military leaders are "pressuring" Defense Secretary Mark Esper to ban Confederate flags on military bases, and that those officials discussed such a ban at a top-level meeting yesterday. The premise here is that the Pentagon wants Mark Esper to go directly against Dear Dumb Leader, Donald Trump, who most specifically has been campaigning against Confederate flag bans, against renaming military bases to strip the names of Confederate leaders, and against removing statutes of Confederate-traitors-and-the-horses-they-rode-in-on.

Let's all put on our pundit hats and take a guess where Mark Esper is going to come down on this, shall we?

The facts are these: Mark Esper has supported Trump through every rotten thing Trump has done to the military. He stood by while Trump pardoned war criminals and removed top brass who opposed it. He enabled Trump's reach-down to punish a military official who provided damning testimony during the congressional impeachment investigation against Trump. He followed orders to dispatch troops in preparation to sweep Black Lives Matters demonstrators from Washington, D.C. streets by force, if necessary. Mark Esper remains defense secretary right now because he has methodically made sure to keep on Donald Trump's good side, even if keeping on Trump's good side means standing aside while Trump does grotesquely corrupt or anti-American things.

So if the joint chiefs and other top officials are requesting Esper do the obviously decent thing here, but Donald Trump's ever-frothing Twitter feed is absolutely purple-faced with rage against anyone who would dare do such a thing, one would have to be a bit dense to presume Esper was suddenly going to decide the nationwide symbol of slack-jawed white supremacy needed to be given the boot.

Oh, and while the Marine Corps, for example, tried to ban Confederate flags on their own authority, Esper put those policies on hold, ostensibly in preparation for a "department-wide" policy on the matter.

Politico's report also suggests a potential dodge for Esper. Esper could unveil a new policy prohibiting "racially or socially divisive symbols" in general, and the Confederate flag might be counted as one of those "divisive" symbols, perhaps without mentioning it (thus leading individual commands to make the decision without Esper having to do something brave) or perhaps mentioning it in a long list of other "divisive" symbols (in an attempt to water down the impression that the flag was specifically targeted).

Both of those might be plausible evasions in normal bureaucratic times, but Trump is single-minded about the things he chooses to be single-minded about. Any policy—any policy—that Fox News reports has the effect of banning the Confederate flag will send him into fits, and Esper will be blamed.

So this seems to be yet another situation, as in Trump's pardoning of war criminals or Trump's retaliations against military officers, in which Esper must choose between doing the obviously right and decent thing, and chucking that thing in order to polish Trump's boots. The odds that Esper would have stood by while Trump was a rat bastard all the other times, but this issue is the one he'll break from Dear Leader on, seem kind of low.

Donald Trump isn’t serious about being reelected

Donald Trump wants to win reelection. 

He’s not serious about winning reelection. 

How do you square those two statements? You look at what vestiges of a “campaign” he’s running and you realize that there’s nothing in what he says or does to suggest he’s actually doing what is necessary to get to 50% of electoral college votes. 

Fundamentally, Trump is in deep electoral trouble. His map is … quite impossible at this point with states like Alaska, Montana, and Texas competitive, and new states like South Carolina creeping into unexpected contention. His campaign is bleeding money on nonsensical expenses like advertising in places like Ohio, which will not decide the election, and insanely high legal expenses as he tries to sue his critics (and reality, at times) into silence. His attempts at generating a white backlash against the movement for Black Lives is going nowhere. His campaign is incompetent, and yet the same people who delivered Trump’s Tulsa humiliation (speaking in front of 6,000 when he had promised 1 million) are still in charge of the joint. 

The Trump campaign truly is a disaster. But, we are warned, don’t be complacent! He can still turn things around! 

There are reasons not to be complacent: We have a second historic opportunity (after 2018) to utterly annihilate the GOP and reshape American politics for a generation. No one took it easy in 2018 despite polling predicting big Democratic gains. No one is relaxing this year. 

But it’s not being “complacent” to simply realize that absent some impossible-to-imagine event, Trump isn’t turning anything around. And the reason is because he’s not trying to turn things around. He is in the mess that he is now because of the very things he can’t stop doing. And it starts with the words that come out of his mouth. 

All campaigns have a message. It’s literally the bedrock of any electoral effort: “You should vote for me because _______.” But what is Trump’s? 

He had that whole “Hunter Biden in the Ukraine” thing that went nowhere except for the history books as a rare presidential impeachment. There was an aborted attempt to create a thing called “Obamagate.” 

Then he was really into protecting Confederate statues, but that has seemingly been set aside as Salvadoran MS-13 gangs make a cameo after their abject failure to deliver Republican victories in 2018. And don’t forget that we were supposed to vote for him because presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden was “sleepy” and “hiding in his basement.” Except, of course, that it was Trump himself who was literally hiding in his basement.  

There’s a lot of whining about poor him and presidential harassment mixed in with whatever loony Q-inspired theories emerge from the Twitterverse or Fox and Friends. There’s calling the Black Lives Matter movement a “symbol of hate” while blaming Dr. Anthony Fauci for his continued indifference to actually doing something about a national mass death event that has killed 140,000 and counting. 

What else? There’s attacking Joe Biden for wearing a mask because that was somehow a thing, as well as repeated unsupported attempts to tie Biden to the Chinese Communist Party. Why he, in the pocket of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, would want to bring attention to the issue of foreign involvement in the election is beyond any rational attempt to explain. 

And this week’s masterstroke of political communication? 

If it�s Goya, it has to be good. Si es Goya, tiene que ser bueno. pic.twitter.com/9tjVrfmo9z

— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) July 15, 2020

Obviously Trump and the GOP were never going to win core Democratic constituencies: youth, voters of color, single women, and urban whites. But the Republican Party finds itself in dire straits because of defections among college-educated suburban white women. 

And tell me, what, of that list above, is going to win a single college-educated suburban white woman? Quite the opposite, in fact—every single one of those items merely reinforces the very reasons those women fled from Trump and his party in the first place: his idiocy, his inability to handle a national crisis (much less several of them), his refusal to listen to science and the experts, the racism, the sexism, and his boorish bullying behavior.

And as that tweet from Ivanka shows, their unserious and shallow base impulses. Quite clearly, the tweet was designed to “own the libs” who have been organizing a boycott of Goya products after the company’s CEO publicly lavished praise on Trump. I’m sure their cheering section of deplorable dead-enders cheered along with it. But that’s not winning them any elections! And at this late stage of the campaign, everything they say or do should be laser-focused on winning votes. 

But they can’t do it! They can’t run a disciplined, focused, and appeal-building campaign because the person at the top, Donald Trump, has zero interest in broadening his appeal, much less being disciplined and focused. 

In 2016, Trump lucked into the “but her emails” bullshit narrative the GOP had spent years building. It was simple enough and stupid enough for him to repeat ad nauseam. But he doesn’t have the benefit of any pre-laid right-wing narratives this year, and he’s made it impossible for the Republican machine to singularly focus on or even create any of their typical manufactured outrages. Huntergate? Obamagate? Yeah, nice try, a--holes. 

So that’s where we are. 

Donald Trump wants COVID-19 to go away, but he won’t do anything to make that happen. He certainly can’t sic his lawyers on the virus to either threaten it into oblivion or pay it off for its silence.

In that same way, Trump wants to be president for four more years, but he won’t do what he needs to do to make that happen. 

He’s failed upwards too many times in his unjustly charmed life. But too many people now know how dangerously incompetent he is. His luck has finally run out. 

Roger Stone says McCarthy, Stefanik advocated against pre-election clemency

Roger Stone on Wednesday accused two top House allies of President Donald Trump of privately advocating against Trump's decision to keep him out of prison last week.

House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) were among those who advised Trump to consider avoiding clemency for Stone ahead of the 2020 election, worrying it could be bad politics for Republicans, Stone said during an appearance on a podcast hosted by fellow Trump supporter Charlie Kirk.

"Congressman Matt Gaetz from my home state of Florida, who I know was out there when Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik were arguing against any clemency for Roger Stone because it might cost the Republicans seats," Stone said as he listed those who supported his bid to stay out of jail despite his conviction on charges of lying to congressional investigators probing Russian interference in the 2016 election. "I know that Matt Gaetz was standing tall, both privately and in public, on my behalf."

A source familiar with the exchange confirmed that McCarthy and Stefanik were among a group of GOP lawmakers who shared a ride on Air Force One in late May, as Trump traveled to observe the launch of a SpaceX rocket in Florida. When Trump joined lawmakers, the subject of Stone arose. According to the source, Trump revealed quickly that he intended to extend clemency to Stone, his longtime confident and political adviser, but wanted counsel on timing.

Gaetz indicated the president should give Stone an immediate reprieve while McCarthy and Stefanik advised him to consider waiting until after the election, the source said.

Attorney General Bill Barr had advocated against clemency for Stone as well. But Trump ultimately opted to keep Stone out of prison altogether, commuting his sentence on July 10, just four days before he was due to report to a Georgia facility. The commutation left Stone's convictions standing, and he has vowed to keep fighting them on appeal, though Trump could always pardon him fully at a later date.

Stone's indication that McCarthy and Stefanik — two of Trump's most prominent House defenders during the Russia investigation and impeachment inquiry — fought against immediate clemency is notable because few elected Republicans have spoken publicly on the matter. Aides to the lawmakers did not respond to requests for comment.

Of those who did speak, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) called it "unprecedented, historic corruption" and Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) said he disagreed with the decision. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), on the other hand, endorsed Trump's commutation decision, saying it was appropriate because Stone was a first-time non-violent offender.

Stone was convicted last year on multiple counts of lying to the House Intelligence Committee about his efforts to contact WikiLeaks and gain advanced knowledge of its plans to release hacked emails from Hillary Clinton and her campaign advisers. He was also convicted of threatening a witness in the case and was twice rebuked by the judge in his trial for violating gag orders.

Stone was sentenced in February to 40 months in prison, and his efforts to postpone the start of his jail term failed when Judge Amy Berman Jackson rejected a last-ditch attempt to delay his sentence until September.

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