Yesterday, Joyce Vance posted “The Week Ahead” in her Substack column, “Civil Discourse,” and it is packed. Joyce is to lawyers what Heather Cox Richardson is to historians – you may have seen her as a consultant on mainstream media. She doesn’t post every day, and when she does, she sometimes digresses into silky chickens (which she raises) and knitting; I love both, so that’s fine with me, but I wouldn’t wish it on y’all. This column, however, is jampacked with five sections, each on something current and earthshaking. It’s too much for a short take, but if you have a little time (not necessarily all at once, since it is sectioned) I highly recommeend it.
Cartoon –
Short Takes –
The New Yorker – The Supreme Court’s Big New Term
Quote – If Roberts is still confused, he could, for guidance, look to comments that Justices Sonia Sotomayor and, especially, Elena Kagan have made since the Dobbs ruling. In late September, at Salve Regina University, in Rhode Island, Kagan noted that people are right to worry about “the whole legal system being kind of up for grabs” after a change to the composition of the Court, with decisions that seem driven by ideology and divorced from legal principles. “It just doesn’t look like law when, you know, the new judges appointed by a new President come in and just start tossing out the old stuff,” she said. Click through for, among other things, examples of cases which are coming up this term and which, even the ones that seem simple, could be incredibly destructive.
CNN – This 100% solar community endured Hurricane Ian with no loss of power and minimal damage
Quote – Babcock Ranch calls itself “America’s first solar-powered town.”… The streets in this meticulously planned neighborhood were designed to flood so houses don’t. Native landscaping along roads helps control storm water. Power and internet lines are buried to avoid wind damage. This is all in addition to being built to Florida’s robust building codes. Some residents, like Grande, installed more solar panels on their roofs and added battery systems as an extra layer of protection from power outages. Many drive electric vehicles, taking full advantage of solar energy in the Sunshine State. Click through for story – One would think this would be convincing evidenve. Except that Republicans don’t believe in spending money to save money. They only believe in spending money to make the rich righer.
Yesterday, it was kind of quiet. I finished getting my meds together for the next two weeks (I had had to use one of my spares the previous night – but I replaced it in the filling process, and anyway, that’s why I keep spares.) I got an email from Virgil’s facility asking for a new application to visit, and the tone was almost apologetic. I did vaguely know that the public facilities kept their own, but all those years he was in private facilities, they were kept at the DOC headquarters, and therefore transferred, and I got spoiled. I emailed it to her by return, along with my request to visit the 9th.. She won’t see it until today, but that’s fine.
Also, I heard from Mitch. He used my name in the greeting, so I don’t know whether he sent it to others, and therefore will quote it in full:
We were in Pa. since the 23rd of Sept., did not decide to extend our time in Pa., but the airline and Tampa airport did, wisely closing on Thursday. We could not get a flight back from Trenton, at all so flew out of Philly, this morning, after 2 nice days staying with friends, and have been home since something like 3:00 PM, here. All is well, here, but we do not know what is going on with a cousin
of Susan’s, who lives in Venice Beach.
Our area didn’t get much impact, though, interestingly, the water in Hillsboro Bay got sucked
out for a while, the other day.
Cartoon – 03 Rob Roy
Short Takes –
It’s Not Just Ginni Thomas But Roberts’ And Coney Barrett’s Spouses, Too
Quote – Jane Roberts’ clients include lawyers or law firms sometimes with active Supreme Court practices, at least some of which were more likely to work with her because of her status as the chief justice’s spouse…. Justice Amy Coney Barrett redacted the clients and even the name of her husband’s law firm in her disclosure, even though he is featured prominently on the firm’s website. Click through for story. Figuring that C&L would have at least glanced at other spouse, I didn’t, but I did look up Neil Gorsuch’s mother, being old enough to remember when she was decimating the EPA under Reagan. She’s dead now, but I noted that she was Catholic, so I looked up his religion. He is Protestant now, but was raised Catholic. His doctoral supervisor when he was at Oxford was a priest.
Oregon Capital Chronicle – Under federal $1 billion agreement, Oregon will expand Medicaid coverage
Quote – Under a new agreement, the federal government will give Oregon $1.1 billion to guarantee continued free health care coverage to tens of thousands of young children in households with low incomes and offer wider coverage to low-income young adults, especially those with special needs. The agreement, announced Wednesday in a conference call with Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services officials and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, also includes expanding Medicaid coverage to include housing and food support. Click through for more details. This actually brought me to tears – because TomCat would have been so proud! Oregon leads the way!
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
I’m not sure when “denial”came to be used to describe a condition, rather than just something a normal person did when falely accused, or a liar did when accurately accused. The first time I was aware of the word in the state-of-mind meaning was from the works of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross; I don’t even remember whether that was directly or indirectly. Now, that seems to pretty much all it means – a stage one passes through while grieving, or the state of belief of an addict that he or she can “take it or leave it,” but always something which is – not exactly involuntary, but not deliberate.
Jared Del Rosso, though he may not be the King of Denial, is here to point out that there are still times when it is very deliberate, and when so exercised, can affect – infect – other people – sometimes one or two, sometimes thousands or millions. What I thought of as the original meaning of denial may not be in common usage any more, but it is still in common use, every day, to whitewash the people who are doing it.
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How to get away with torture, insurrection, you name it: The techniques of denial and distraction that politicians use to manage scandal
An image of a mock gallows on the grounds of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, is shown during a House committee hearing. AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
The U.S. House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection intends to hold another public hearing, likely the last before it releases its official report. The hearing had been scheduled for Sept. 28, 2022 but was postponed because of Hurricane Ian.
Through earlier hearings this past summer, the committee has shown how former President Donald Trump and close associates spread the “big lie” of a stolen election. The hearings have also shown how Trump stoked the rage of protesters who marched to the U.S. Capitol and then refused to act when they breached the building.
As a sociologist who studies denial, I analyze how people ignore clear truths and use rhetoric to convince others to deny them, too. Politicians and their media allies have long used this rhetoric to manage scandals. Trump and his supporters’ responses to the Jan. 6 investigation are no exception.
Stages of denial
Commonly, people think of denial as a state of being: Someone is “in denial” when they reject obvious truths. However, denial also consists of linguistic strategies that people use to downplay their misconduct and avoid responsibility for it.
These strategies are remarkably adaptable. They’ve been used by both political parties to manage wildly different scandals. Even so, the strategies tend to be used in fairly predictable ways. Because of this, we can often see scandals unfold through clear stages of denial.
In my previous research on denial and U.S. torture, I analyzed how the George W. Bush administration and supporters in Congress adjusted the forms of denial they used as new allegations and evidence of abuses in the global “war on terror” became public.
For instance, after photographs of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were released in the spring of 2004, Abu Ghraib was described as a deplorable but isolated incident. At the time, there wasn’t serious public evidence of detainee abuse at other U.S. facilities.
An exhibit on torture includes a section on waterboarding in the International Spy Museum in Washington in 2019. AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
Facing these allegations, Bush and his supporters began justifying and downplaying torture. To many Americans, torture, once deplorable, was rebranded as an acceptable national security tool: “enhanced interrogation.”
As the debate about torture shows, political responses to scandal often begin with outright denials. But rarely do they end there. When politicians face credible evidence of political misconduct, they often try other forms of denial. Instead of saying allegations are untrue, they may downplay the seriousness of allegations, justify their behavior or try to distract from it.
It’s not just Republican administrations that use denial in this way. When the Obama administration could no longer outright deny civilian casualties caused by drone strikes, it downplayed them. In a 2013 national security speech, President Barack Obama contrasted drone strikes with the use of “conventional air power or missiles,” which he described as “far less precise.” He also justified drone strikes, arguing that “to do nothing in the face of terrorist networks would invite far more civilian casualties.”
Scandal strategies in play
Americans watched the Jan. 6 insurrection on TV and social media as it happened. Given the vividness of the day, outright denials of the insurrection are particularly far-fetched and marginal – though they do exist. For example, some Trump supporters have claimed that left-wing “antifa” groups breached the Capitol – a claim many rioters themselves have rejected.
Some of Trump’s supporters in Congress and the media have repeated the claim that the insurrection was staged to discredit Trump. But given Trump’s own vocal support for the insurrectionists, supporters usually deploy more nuanced denials to downplay the day’s events.
So what happens when outright denial fails? From ordinary citizens to political elites, people often respond to allegations by “condemning the condemners,” accusing their accusers of exaggerating – or of doing worse things themselves, a strategy called “advantageous comparisons.”
Together, these two strategies paint those making accusations as untrustworthy or hypocritical. As I show in my new book on denial , these are standard denials of those managing scandals.
“For months, our cities burned, police stations burned, our businesses were shattered. And they said nothing. Or they cheer-led for it. And they fund-raised for it. And they allowed it to happen in the greatest country in the world,” Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz said during Trump’s second impeachment. “Now, some have cited the metaphor that the president lit the flames. Well, they lit actual flames, actual fires!”
These forms of denial do several things at once. They direct attention away from the original focus of the scandal. They minimize Trump’s role in inciting the violence of Jan. 6 by making the claim that Democrats incite even more destructive forms of violence. And they discredit the investigation by suggesting that those leading it are hypocrites, more interested in scoring political points than in curtailing political violence.
Trump supporters and members of the far-right group Proud Boys gather during a ‘Justice for January 6th Vigil’ in New York on Jan. 6, 2022. AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura
Trickle-down denial
These denials may not sway a majority of Americans. Still, they’re consequential. Denial trickles down by providing ordinary citizens with scripts for talking about political scandals. Denials also reaffirm beliefs, allowing people to filter out information that contradicts what they hold to be true. Indeed, ordinary Americans have adapted “advantageous comparisons” to justify the insurrection.
This has happened before. For example, in a study of politically active Americans, sociologists Barbara Sutton and Kari Marie Norgaard found that some Americans adopted pro-torture politicians’ rhetoric – such as supporting “enhanced interrogation” and defending practices like waterboarding as a way to gather intelligence, even as they condemned “torture.”
For this reason, it’s important to recognize when politicians and the media draw from the denial’s playbook. By doing so, observers can better distinguish between genuine political disagreements and the predictable denials, which protect the most powerful by excusing their misconduct.
Article updated to indicate that the House select committee hearing scheduled for Sept. 28, 2022 was postponed on Sept. 27, 2022.
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AMT, as if it wasn’t already hard enough to determine where truth is. Although Del Rosso’s work may actually make it easier. Certainly he shows that no individual and no group is immune from it. That’s a hard truth but it’s a good one to be aware of if one wants to know the truth.
Glenn Kirschner – Judge Cannon continues catering to Trump, shoots down Judge Dearie’s request for info from Trump
Don Winslow Films – #GinniThomasIsAboveTheLaw (I think Don is too cynical about Liz Cheney. If we don’t see any of her testimony, I suspect it will be because she is lying in all of it. I see no point in the nation seeing her claim the election was rigged and/or stolen.)
The Lincoln Project – Tucker Calls Putin
Ring of Fire – MyPillow CEO Texted Trump’s Chief Of Staff To ‘Get The Voting Machines’
Vote Vets – Freedom – AZ Sen
Beau – Let’s talk about a Cuban referendum and party and policy….
Yesterday, the radio opera – operetta, actually – was “The Merry Widow” sung in German (Die Lustige Witwe”), but with some dialogue in Chinese (a good decision, I think. Neither language is easy for someone not born to them to speak, and with a part-European and part-Chinese cast, at least neither wil be burchered. I also caught one line in French – a quote from “Carmen.” Offenbach’s CanCan was also interpolated appropriately). Back in the day there was hardly anyone who was not at least vaguely familiar with “The Merry Widow Waltz” and “Vilia,” but that may bave been a holdover from the movie with Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. Also, in my day, there was a type of lingerie known as a “Merry Widow” – it comprised a bra with an attached mini-corset (it went maybe halfway down the hip) and inded in elastic with clasp garters. And then along came pantyhose, and that was the end of that. But I digress. Viennese operetta has fairly convoluted plots and so much additional hijinks that it’s really not possible tp try tu summarize them, and this one was the granddaddy of them all. It also has the distinction (?) of a serial killer having been so obsessed with it, and particularly the make lead, that he used that character’s name as an alias, which is how he was eventually caught. But I digress again.
Cartoon –
Short Takes –
truthout – Trump Believed He Could Sue Congress to Stop Congressional Impeachments
Quote – Trump’s commentary on his first impeachment trial — which was centered around his attempt in 2019 to coerce Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to find political dirt on now-President Joe Biden in exchange for military assistance from the U.S. — demonstrates his lack of knowledge on the process. “I’ll just sue Congress. They can’t do this to me,” Trump said at the time, according to Haberman’s book. Click through for article, whicj pretty much explains the situation – but doesn’t answer such questions as, if you were President, or another federal official, and you wanted to sue Congress, whould you do it as the President – which would be one branch of government suing another branch – who would be your attorney? But if you filed as an individual – a citizen – how would that do anything to stop an impeachment? It makes my head spin. Of course he wssn’t knowledgeable enough to even ask such questions
The Hechinger Report – How Moms for Liberty wants to reshape education this school year and beyond
Quote – Instead, speakers talked about conspiracy theories surrounding social emotional learning, a framework that includes teaching students how to empathize with others and use mental health coping skills. They talked about gender and sexuality, and they denounced the decisions some schools have made to refer to students by their preferred pronouns. The conference also focused on restorative justice, a concept that attempts to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline through alternative discipline methods. Ryan Petty, whose daughter was murdered in the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, led a session that blamed the gunman’s ability to carry out the killing, in part, on the restorative justice practices in his daughter’s school district. Click through for details. Public schools – actually open to and intend for all of the public – being a function of government, are intended to educate students into citizens. As such, they should teach no opinions, no beliefs, just facts and skills, including how government works, and how it doesn’t work. If you want your child taught opinions and belief, teach him or her at home, or enroll him or her in a private school. That’s not the public school’s job.
Over the past few months I have been doing a lot of text-banking for the Working Families Party, an organization that has the goal of electing candidates who actually care about the working class. Responses range from enthusiastic to vulgarly opposed. I don’t let the infantile rubbish from the MAGA jerks bother me – it’s their problem, not mine.
A few respondents have answered that voting won’t save us, only revolution will. I say, let’s give the polls one last chance, because ballots are better than bullets. Revolution is not nearly as easy as one may think. So, revolutionaries, how are you going to revolt? Throw bricks and Molotov cocktails? You’ll need to be a lot better organized than a wild mob. And if you have images of Minutemen kicking redcoat butt in your mind, remember that the American colonies succeeded only because they got help from the French and the Spanish.
Before you even contemplate starting a revolution, you need to think about what you will do if you succeed. Revolutions and marriages fail for the same reason: What the participants regard as “That’s all she wrote” is, in reality, just the last paragraph of the prolog. The American Revolution succeeded because the Founding Fathers had a plan to create a new kind of country, a new kind of democracy.
The United States they created was deeply flawed – racist, sexist and elitist. We needed a bloody Civil War to end the evil of slavery, and decades more tumult and protest to end legal discrimination against people of color. Women had to wait till the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920 so they could vote, and even after 50 years of marching and hell-raising the ERA still has not been added to the Bill of Rights, though as I write this it may be on the cusp of ratification. Racism, sexism, homophobia and other ills are still rampant; though they are technically illegal, society and culture keep them alive.
I do believe we are at a crossroads, and we have three choices. We can vote out all or at least most of the extremist Republicans who are up for re-election, and turn this country’s course back towards moral and ethical progress. Or we can degenerate further into fascism and oligarchy. Or we can have a revolution.
Revolutions, though, don’t have to be violent. Gandhi used nonviolent means to unite the peoples of India and gain that country’s independence. The former satellites of the Soviet Union, with the notable exception of Romania, threw off the chains of Communism peacefully. Problems still abound as different ethnicities bicker and even fight over who has the right to what land, but at least they initially took the path of irenic change. A successful revolution can involve minimal bloodshed, or none at all.
This is why we need to get out the progressive vote this election. Make sure you are registered to vote, get your progressive kith and kin registered, offer to help people get to polling places, and cast an informed ballot. Do your homework on the candidates, and remember the down-ballot races, because those are where extremists begin their takeover.
The alternatives to using legal, peaceful means to turn our country around are unthinkable.
