The nihilists are winning
Proud Boy stans and Q-pilled activists take over state GOPs
Welcome to a Tuesday evening edition of Progress Report.
I’ve got some news to break, but before we get started, some election news:
Wisconsin State Supreme Court Primary: Janet Protasiewicz, the leading Democrat-aligned candidate, waltzed to the top spot in the primary for an open seat on the high court. That puts her through to the general election in April, which will determine the balance of power on the high court, and thus the fate of abortion rights and democracy in the state. She’ll face the arch-conservative Dan Kelly.
Virginia CD-4 Special Election: State Sen. Jennifer McClellan will be the first Black woman to represent the state of Virginia in Congress. She cruised to victory in the blue district that includes Richmond and stretches to the bottom of the state.
New Hampshire Legislature: Democratic Rep. Chuck Grassie prevailed in the special re-run election after he tied his Republican challenger in November. Democrats are now two seats from flipping the state House.
All told, it was a very, very good night for Democrats, which is better than a good night for Republicans. And now, let’s get to the main course.
At least five statewide Republican parties are now being led by publicly declared election deniers, further ingraining the conspiracy theorist caucus into the permanent fabric of the GOP.
Last weekend, Republicans in Florida and Michigan both chose MAGA-breathing Trump devotees to run their state parties, proving that the former president’s grip on the rank-and-file members’ brains is as tight as ever.
In Florida, the nod went to Christian Ziegler, who serves as a Sarasota County commissioner, Republican Party vice chair, and close ally of the Proud Boys.
Ziegler was in Washington to make trouble on January 6th, 2021, though he insists that he attended Trump rallies but did not storm the Capitol. That’s impossible to verify at the moment, but Ziegler has been known to join antagonistic mobs every now and again. In 2017, he joined the Proud Boys in crashing a rally of grassroots Democratic and pro-immigrant activists.
There he is in the photo below, conveniently wearing red:
Potentially committing treason feels like it should be disqualifying, but instead, it was likely an asset in a race among Florida GOP members.
Michigan Republicans, fresh off a walloping in November that cost them every statewide election and their legislative majorities, opted to double down on what didn’t work and go even further to the right when selecting a new leader.
Failed secretary of state nominee, election denier, and QAnon adherent Kristina Karamo is so extreme that not even Trump would endorse her, but in a party filled with the kind of people that tried to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer over Covid protections, those are resume builders. Karamo is now in charge of trying to rebuild a party that finds itself out of power in every way due to the lunacy of people like herself.
In Idaho, Republicans, more likely to fall in elections to white nationalists than Democrats, chose former legislator Dorothy Moon to run their show. Moon has refused to acknowledge the results of the 2020 election, and this past fall, she lost her mind over a drag show at the Boise Pride Festival. After Moon issued a scathing letter in which she accused Boise’s Democratic mayor of trying to “sexualize” children, some of the event’s biggest sponsors pulled out.
The Arizona GOP’s new chair, meanwhile, actually worked for Trump, as the COO of his presidential campaigns. Prestigious! While he positioned himself to donors as a more sane choice, Jeff DeWit pandered hard to the far-right election denier crowd by babbling about election integrity and touting endorsements from Kari Lake, Mark Finchem, and Trump himself. He now owes them.
By the way, nobody in Florida or elsewhere in the nation cared about this horrid comparison made during a hearing on banning gender-affirming care in Florida, because it’s just what is expected at this point.
All of this should be a scandal; instead, each instance, save for the Michigan chair election, they were viewed through the prism of electoral politics, as if having insurrectionist Q-pilled extremists running one of two main parties is a normal and safe thing. The GOP chair race in Florida was portrayed entirely as a proxy war between Trump and Ron DeSantis, even in local Floridian media.
A National Problem
Perennially aggrieved Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene on Monday demanded the dissolution of the United States over the course of several rage-filled tweets that decried wokeness and supporting Ukraine in its ongoing fight against Russian aggression. The tweets generated coverage from major news outlets around the country, which largely consisted of matter-of-fact stories that reminded the reader of Greene’s prolific history of other racist, anti-semitic, homophobic, and paranoid statements, while passing no moral judgment on the sort of hatred that their parent companies spend millions to make sure the public knows they reject.
This may be the worst paragraph I’ve ever read, courtesy of NBC News:
Firing back at Greene’s tweets were the usual suspects, including Liz Cheney, who was driven out of Congress by Republican voters last year for not being more like Marjorie Taylor Greene. Tonight, Greene appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show to double down on her idea for splitting up the United States, a process that she hopes does not require another civil war.
House Republican leadership has offered no comment on the comments, not that anyone expected them to do so; Kevin McCarthy just recently gave Greene plum committee assignments, and you don’t give 41,000 hours of Capitol security footage taken during the Jan. 6th insurrection to Tucker Carlson if you’re looking to heal the union.
Carlson, by the way, was outed over the weekend as a fraud who knew from the start that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election without help from China or perverts or space aliens or whatever he’s peddled on his Fox News show.
In any other time in our history, each of these events would constitute a national scandal that threatened to end the careers those involved. Today, it’s considered a slow news cycle, and it’s hard to imagine that will change any time soon.
When Joe Biden ran for president in 2020, the central premise and promise of his campaign was that he would be able to restore this country to normalcy. He’s accomplished a lot in terms of hard policy while in office, but that core intangible cannot be achieved.
There was never going to be a “return to normal” after Donald Trump. He was (and could again be) a uniquely destructive force in American life, but he was far from an inexplicable convulsion or aberration. Trump was able to cause unprecedented damage only because the foundations of society had already been crumbling for decades.
As new generations of increasingly radical and well-funded conservatives, neoliberal Democrats, Wall Street profiteers, and corporate-owned media came into prominence, a nihilism settled over our institutions and became entrenched in the decisions made by those in power.
The incentives for good are largely static; what’s changed so fundamentally, even over the past few years, is the collapse of disincentives that often kept politicians and corporations from being their worst selves in the pursuit of power and profit.
Newt Gingrich was ultimately admonished and dethroned by Republicans, Tom DeLay wound up in prison, but nothing has happened to a single lawmaker that encouraged the Jan. 6th insurrection.
George Santos is not being forced out of office. Nobody seems to care that Chris Rufo, the white nationalist and pseudo-intellectual running Ron DeSantis’s academic ethnic cleansing, is actually a fraud whose supposed degree from Harvard is more a certificate that anyone can buy.
Is anything going to Norfolk Southern, the company responsible for coating rural Ohio in toxic chemicals, poisoning its water, and killing all of its fish? Don’t hold your breath (unless you’re actually in East Palestine, Ohio.)
When there is no pressure from the opposition or focus from the media, these outrages go unchecked and unchallenged. At some point, they become normalized, part of the pitter patter of our everyday lives, more boring than remarkable, no matter how horrible they seem in isolation.
There's a scene in The Big Lebowski in which Walter explains why he’s so alarmed by the black-clad German crooks in town, and the main quote is one of my favorites: “Say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude; at least it's an ethos.”
Now, we don’t actually have to choose. Nihilism and Nazism are on the ascendency in large swaths of the country.
In Florida, Republicans are banning books and making medical care illegal. They’re also on the glide path to opening up conceal carry of handguns to everyone, unbothered by the fact that a three-year-old just accidentally killed himself with his parents’ gun in a county just outside Orlando. They know there will be no threatening backlash, because it’s become accepted that their vile decisions are inevitable. That’s political nihilism, and it’s killing people. Just wait until 15 million people lose Medicaid over the next six months to see how much pressure is going to be put on politicians by the media.
Good News Is Not Dead
The Republican dream of seceding from the union is is patently racist and stupid, the sort of idea that a first grader might suggest after watching a few chilling hours of CSPAN. But it’s also not hard to feel as if what we still call the United States is more a pair of confederations pulling away from one another.
It’s true that a few number of the elections that put Democrats in power last year were extremely close, with right-wing psychos like Kari Lake falling just short, but for the most part, even in states with close margins, the differences between red and blue governance have never been more different.
In Republican states, trans people are being punished in every conceivable way, even the most modest guns restrictions are falling by the wayside, and federal funding is going to prisons instead of housing.
In Minnesota, Democrats are putting their trifecta right to use, passing one critical bill after another without hesitation or concern for politics. They’re focused on expanding the rights and wellness of the state’s nearly six million residents, which has led already to the codification of abortion rights and bills on voter re-enfranchisement, marijuana legalization, and mandatory paid family and medical leave making progress through the legislature.
Where the federal government won’t act, many states are stepping up. Colorado is verging on ending the rent control pre-emption that made life hell for working people. Michigan Democrats are pushing forward on gun control bills after the mass shooting at Michigan State University earlier this month, while they’re likely to pass a repeal of the odious and historically racist “right to work” law that has hobbled unions.
If there’s an answer to this semi-national nihilism, it’s in not accepting the shrug off that allows egregious ethics violations, corruption, and bigoted policies to flourish. Maybe all the obsessiveness on Mueller and the Russia investigation took people’s eyes off the ball and exhausted them, but the end of shame and consequences is playing out right in front of us. It can’t be allowed to normalize, because it only ever gets worse.
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Love your work! Minnesota has yet to pass marijuana legalization or paid family/medical leave though hope they will both pass. Just to correct the record.