Don’t miss Matt Shuham’s rundown of the events in Michigan today. Five candidates for governor, including the two frontrunners, were kicked off the ballot for collectively submitting tens of thousands of forged signatures on their ballot petitions. The hearing itself included about as much comedy as you might expect. One ejected candidate complained that the whole situation was the state’s fault for not warning candidates not to hire forgers to collect signatures for them. Another complained that the state hadn’t told them soon enough how many forgeries they were submitting. Needless to say they all agreed it was an outrage, that the state should deem their forged signatures legitimate (for some unexplained reason) and generally give them a forgery mulligan.

But there’s some electoral politics stuff going on here in the background I wanted to be sure is on your radar.

I’ve gotten a great deal of pushback to my “Candor” post in which I argued that a “functional majority” of the country in fact supports the gun status quo. It’s not big money or the gun lobby. It’s us. This is what we seem to want. One longtime reader said my comments amounted to a city slicker demonization of rural America. Another good friend said I was discounting the role of opinion shaping institutions like Fox News. And yet another said I was mistaking preference for inertia.

I took these criticisms seriously because these are each serious people. As so often is the case the disagreements are as much semantic as they are based on different readings of the facts at hand. I said a “functional majority” since I’m pretty sure if we held a plebiscite the status quo wouldn’t come out on top. But we don’t govern by plebiscite. Pro-gun America has all sorts of built in advantages — regionalism, the rural-urban split, intensity and a lot more. Inertia is certainly a big factor too. And what about all the polls that show overwhelming, sometimes verging on unanimous support for things like red flag laws and background checks?

As I noted yesterday, early reports of mass shootings are subject to the fog of war. Initial details are incomplete or wrong. We already have some substantial revisions to what happened when the shooter initially entered the school. As I noted, the first reports suggested that the gunman had shot his way past three officers — one school police force officer and two municipal police officers. The picture now looks significantly different — though the overall picture, I would argue, is much the same.

According to the latest reports, a school security officer exchanged gun fire with the shooter prior to the shooter entering the school. The two municipal police officers exchanged gunfire with the shooter once he was already in the school but — apparently — before he had actually begun shooting kids. They apparently felt they were outgunned. So they called in backup.

Here is the part of the story that is new and deeply disturbing. Apparently police on the scene waited for a significant period of time — like tens of minutes — while parents outside the schools begged them to go in and kill the shooter. Parents even brainstormed about whether they should go in and rush the shooter themselves since the mass shooting was unfolding as everyone waited outside.

In the interests of fairness and honesty with ourselves, we should be clear that this isn’t about standing up to the “gun lobby.” Yes, the NRA and other related groups play an important role coordinating messaging and operationalizing the desires of gun obsessives. But President Biden’s comment was one of the few times for me that he really did sound like someone speaking from a bygone era. A vast swathe of the population wants things exactly how they are. No restrictions on guns at all. The collateral damage is just tough shit basically.

Since I don’t really have anything to add to what we’re seeing tonight about the school massacre in Texas, I thought I would share a few data points that seem significant to me.

The Columbine school massacre was 23 years ago (April 20th, 1999). In a real sense every subsequent school massacre has been a copycat of that event. Fourteen people died at Columbine, including the two shooters. So twelve victims. It’s not even that high a number compared to numerous other subsequent massacres.

I’ve said this before. It’s the only thing I can think to add to the conversation after yet another mass shooting.

The inability of the U.S. to do literally anything about the scourge of mass shootings is itself one of their greatest draws, the magnetic heart of their attraction. Mass shootings are fundamentally about losers, rage and the draw of total power. For a few minutes a school shooter holds the power of life and death. That power speaks for itself. But that’s only part of it. Nothing reinforces the power of the gun like the way a whole country remains in thrall to them. The gun — and all the fetishes and cultural baggage surrounding them — is the one totally unassailable, unchallengeable thing in American society.

The practical impact of this signature forgery scandal in Michigan is that it may significantly reshape this year’s gubernatorial campaign in the state. One or both of the leading candidates to challenge incumbent Democrat Gretchen Whitmer may not even appear on the ballot. This may open a path to the nomination for Tudor Dixon, a down-the-line Trumper who just yesterday received the endorsement of the powerful DeVos family. She’s also been praised by Trump himself, though as yet Trump hasn’t endorsed anyone in the race. For whatever reason, she was the only GOP contender who submitted a petition list with very few forged signatures.

As I’ve argued, I don’t think we should care that much about whether Elon Musk purchases Twitter. Having a mercurial scofflaw purchase the company should simply remind us that it’s a private company, not the 21st-century public square or anything like it. Social media companies have a deep interest in convincing us of these things and then luring the public into a faux corporatized speech jurisprudence in which they of course are always in charge. So while it seems increasingly unlikely that Musk’s purchase of Twitter will go through, let it burn is probably the best policy response. But as Musk has been all over the news and increasingly associating himself with the far-right, I’ve been increasingly interested in his main company, Tesla.

So many aspects of our corruption are so clear and so profound in their implications that most of the political class and elite publications aren’t even able to grapple with them. This article in the Times only glances at the surface of it. What was once an enduring alliance between the U.S. and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has transformed into something more like an alliance between the Kingdom and the GOP, with a fairly open effort to undermine the Presidency of Joe Biden on behalf of the latter. And it’s not just the GOP. There’s a particular role for Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law who is toasted in the Kingdom as something like the de facto leader’s best friend.

The racist mass shooting in Buffalo seems to have brought us to something of a turning point in the American right’s embrace of “Great Replacement” theory as an operating framework of politics. Rather than running away from Great Replacement thinking, they’ve essentially said, “But it’s true. We can’t help that this one guy took things too far.” Indeed as you can see from our headline piece, Matt Schlapp of CPAC is now suggesting ways to limit political violence within the framework of Great Replacement politics. If you’re worried about immigrants “replacing us” the best strategy is to make more of “us,” by which he means ban abortion and thus increase the birth rate of “us.” Sort of a kinder gentler Great Replacement theory, though possibly not that kind or gentle if you have an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy.

Schlapp didn’t explicitly refer to white babies and brown babies. But I’m not sure he really had to.