Tag: Trump’s base

The ‘reasonable” rebels

Washington Post logoConservatives say we’ve abandoned reason and civility. The Old South used the same language to defend slavery.

After the El Paso shooting, Ben Shapiro, a popular conservative podcaster, asked Americans to draw a linebetween the few conservatives who are white supremacists and those who, like him, aren’t. Almost all Americans are “on the same side,” he said, and “we should be mourning together.” In his telling, we aren’t, for “one simple reason: Too many on the political left [are] castigating the character of those who disagree,” lumping conservatives and political nonconformists together with racists and xenophobes.

I grew up in a conservative family. The people I talk to most frequently, the people I call when I need help, are conservative. I’m not inclined to paint conservatives as thoughtless bigots. But a few years ago, listening to the voices and arguments of commentators like Shapiro, I began to feel a very specific deja vu I couldn’t initially identify. It felt as if the arguments I was reading were eerily familiar. I found myself Googling lines from articles, especially when I read the rhetoric of a group of people we could call the “reasonable right.” Continue reading “The ‘reasonable” rebels”

‘Hamstrung’: Ex-FBI counterterrorism expert says bureau fears pursuing white nationalist extremists will be viewed as harassing Trump’s base

AlterNet logoThe ridiculous notion that Islamist extremists like al-Qaeda, ISIS (Islamic State, Iraq and Syria) and Boko Haram have the market cornered on terrorism and mass shootings was was revealed as a farce on Saturday, when a white nationalist in El Paso, Texas carried out a vicious attack that, as of Monday, had claimed 22 lives. This was only the latest in a series of white nationalist attacks, inspiring pleas for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to ramp up its investigations of white nationalist and white supremacist groups. But according to former FBI counterterrorism expert Dave Gomez, the FBI is worried about being seen as targeting President Donald Trump’s base.

Gomez told the Washington Post, “There’s some reluctance among agents to bring forth an investigation that targets what the president perceives as his base. It’s a no-win situation for the FBI agent or supervisor.”

The former FBI agent told the Post that although he believes FBI Director Christopher Wray “is an honorable man,” the FBI is in many ways “hamstrung in trying to investigate the white supremacist movement like the old FBI would.”

View the complete August 5 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

Trump’s Base Isn’t Enough

There shouldn’t be much question about whether 2018 was a wave election. Of course it was a wave. You could endlessly debate the wave’s magnitude, depending on how much you focus on the number of votes versus the number of seats, the House versus the Senate versus governorships, and so forth. Personally, I’d rank the 2018 wave a tick behind both 1994, which represented a historic shift after years of Democratic dominance of the House, and 2010, which reflected an especially ferocious shift against then-President Barack Obama after he’d been elected in a landslide two years earlier. But I’d put 2018 a bit ahead of most other modern wave elections, such as 2006 and 1982. Your mileage may vary.

In another important respect, however, the 2018 wave was indisputably unlike any other in recent midterm history: It came with exceptionally high turnout. Turnout is currently estimated at 116 million voters, or 49.4 percent of the voting-eligible population. That’s an astounding number; only 83 million people voted in 2014, by contrast.

This high turnout makes for some rather unusual accomplishments. For instance, Democratic candidates for the House will receive almost as many votes this year as the 63 million that President Trump received in 2016, when he won the Electoral College (but lost the popular vote). As of Tuesday midday, Democratic House candidates had received 58.9 million votes, according to the latest tally by David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report. However, 1.6 million ballots remain to be counted in California, and those are likely to be extremely Democratic. Other states also have more ballots to count, and they’re often provisional ballots that tend to lean Democratic. In 2016, Democratic candidates for the House added about 4 million votes from this point in the vote count to their final numbers. So this year, an eventual total of anywhere between 60 million and 63 million Democratic votes wouldn’t be too surprising.

View the complete November 20 article by Nate Silver on the FiveThirtyEight.com website here.