Editors’ Blog

Last month, my colleague Hunter Walker published an in-depth look at Nashville city councilwoman Zulfat Suara efforts to fight a Tennessee state Republican push to rename a portion of John Lewis Way in Nashville after Donald Trump.

I understand that people are outraged by the Tucker Carlson/Kevin McCarthy video stunt. It’s natural and understandable to react negatively and angrily to liars and traitors. But this is not at all the best or most effective response. The first response is simply mockery. That’s the most logical response and also the most effective. Watch these videos. They’re moments when the insurrectionists weren’t breaking down doors or hitting Capitol Police over the head with flag poles. This is like showing a Zapruder film containing just the part where JFK is happily waving to the crowd in Dealey Plaza. He’s having a great time. Why does Oswald get such a bad rap? Similarly, it’s been shown that probably 99% of the time Osama bin Laden wasn’t blowing up anything. And yet, look at what’s gotten all the focus.

This is more Saturday Night Live skit than outrage.

Vice President Mike Pence officially moved to block a federal grand jury subpoena for his testimony on events surrounding Jan. 6 on Friday, arguing, as he was expected to, that he is shielded by the Constitution’s Speech and Debate Clause from being compelled to testify about some of the topics that appear to be at the heart of special counsel Jack Smith’s probe.

One of the most apt critiques I read of my post on the deep archeology of Fox News focused on what we might call the counter-revolution of capital, and whether I’d ignored it in telling this thumbnail history of the Movement Conservative counter-establishment. I didn’t ignore it. It’s closely related to, but distinct from, the history I described. They’re like two separate rivers which flow together in the 1970s to create the rightward turn of American politics usually identified with the Reagan revolution. Many of you also referenced a now almost legendary document called the Powell Memo, a genteel call to arms which many now point to as the founding document of the business counter-revolution which began in the 1970s, a kind of Rosetta Stone for unlocking the origins of the modern American right.

I really want to echo David’s point from Friday about this Democratic staff report into Jim Jordan’s “weaponization” hearings. If you’ve been waiting a very long time for no nonsense Democrats to jump in front of Republicans, grab a whole buttload of facts and just pound them over the head with them … well, your moment may have arrived.

The document is more than three hundred pages long and the details are simply amazing. You probably didn’t figure that Jordan was going to unearth a lot of legitimate scandals or secret antifa cells at the FBI or other arms of federal law enforcement. But even if your bar was low, the levels of incompetence and pro-insurrectionist content is still pretty wild.

From TPM Reader NB …

I wanted to comment with a slightly different perspective on your recent discussion of the “lab leak” theory of the origins of COVID: The FBI is terrible at molecular bioscience.

The evidence emerging from the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News has the quality of liberal fever dreams. What’s the worst you can possibly imagine about Fox? What’s the most cartoonish caricature, the worst it could possibly be? Well, in these emails and texts you basically have that. Only it’s real. It’s not anyone believing the worst and giving no benefit of the doubt. This is what Fox is.

For those of us who have been waiting years for elected Democrats to engage the GOP misinformation war on those terms, a glimmer of hope.

At a conference today in New Delhi, Russia Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, even now the smiley face of the Russian state, was discussing the Ukraine war as the “the war which we’re trying to stop, and which was launched against us using the Ukrainian people.” The comment was met with a round of guffaws and laughter from the audience. Even in the global south it’s not playing well. See it after the jump.

I did a piece yesterday in The Dispatch trying to frame and contextualize the six TPM Reader emails I posted (see below) with different perspectives on the origins of COVID and the so-called “Lab Leak Theory.” I was struck again by the basic fact: It is all but impossible to discuss the issue as a question of scientific investigation as opposed to a contest amongst — or between? with? — all the stresses and beliefs and collective wounds of the COVID pandemic era. Perhaps, put differently, the public conversation has almost no relation to the actual scientific inquiry. That meta discussion is itself fascinating in a way but only if you can step way, way back from it and see it as an artifact of a society in turmoil. I at least am unable to do that. We’re simply too close, too in the midst of that turmoil. The purveyors of lies and aggrieved special pleading are still too up in arms and demanding. TPM Reader JS captured something at the heart of the matter when he told us that lab leak discourse “is some kind of shibboleth for people who want to feel vindicated that something they didn’t agree with from someone official about COVID, whether it was masks or the vaccine — they want [to] have this sort of liquid position of not actually believing it but thinking that countervailing opinions aren’t being given enough oxygen.”