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To the editor: Virginia Heffernan is right that Trumpism is a cult.

I remember when Fox News debuted in the 1990s. I overheard a co-worker tell another woman that liberals suffer from mental illness. Then they both laughed. I pointed out that I am a liberal. Silence.

Soon after, the first in a series of liberal-bashing Ann Coulter books appeared in the bookstores. This cult relies on little substance and a lot of outrage.

To this day those former co-workers of mine believe liberals are mentally ill. They also believe that President Obama was born in Kenya, Hillary Clinton belongs in jail, and President Trump is honest.

They have sat down every night for decades and watched Fox News, the most successful propaganda machine in modern history. From this well springs this cult that is winning elections aided by gerrymandering and voter suppression.

Should we worry? Yes, we should.

Bethia Sheean-Wallace, Fullerton

..

To the editor: Are Trump followers members of a cult? Was Hitlers reign a cult to Germans?

This is not as complex an issue as Heffernan says.

The simple formula is this: Tell the dissatisfied masses what they want to hear and give them an enemy to blame. Throughout history this is how tyrants have gotten power.

Richard Kopelle, Los Angeles

Continued here:
There would be no Trump cult without Fox News' propaganda - Los Angeles Times

Campus Reform marked its tenth anniversary in 2019, so to commemorate the occasion and the end of the decade, we've compiled some of our most memorable and outrageous stories we've reported on so far.

1. Trigglypuff University of Massachusetts, Amherst(2016)

"then stop acting like a child"

Who can forget the individual who was given the nickname Trigglypuff after yelling fuck you and hate speech is not welcome here while flailing her arms? Theevent at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst featured Christina Hoff Sommers, Milo Yiannapoulos, and Steven Crowder, along with numerous protesters interrupting throughout the night.

The individual yelled, Stop talking to us like children and Hoff Sommers replied, Then stop acting like a child!

2. Gender-inclusive housing and LGBTQ minor University of Minnesota, Duluth (2015)

In 2015, the very same year that the Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling on gay marriage, effectively making it legal in all 50 states, the University of Minnesota-Duluth began to offer gender-inclusive housing and an LGBTQ minor for students. In order to complete the minor, students were required to take an Introduction to LGBTQ studies, Queer Media, and more. The university also converted on-campus apartments into gender-inclusive housing, which was originally intended for LGBTQ students, but the student association president, the LGBT services director, and director of housing and residence life changed that saying that everyone could benefit from it.

[RELATED: Political harassment: See what conservatives had to face on campus in 2019]

3. Arrested for handing out Constitutions Kellogg Community College (2017)

Three students werearrested for handing out pocket Constitutions at Kellogg Community College. The manager of Student Life said that they could not talk to students because it could obstruct the students ability to get an education. Isaac Edikauskas, the Young Americans for Liberty State Chair in Michigan at the time asked a student, Do you like freedom and liberty and the student replied, sure, but the Student Life manager said that the students considered the question too provocative and the student was heading to an educational place." Police soon surrounded the students and asked them to leave. The students questioned the police about what law they were violating and were told they were "violating the school structure.

Alliance Defending Freedom filed a lawsuit against KCC, and the collegepaid$55K to settle the lawsuit.

4. Jesus Loves You hearts Northeast Wisconsin Technical College (2018 2019)

Wisconsin student Polly Olsen waslabeled disruptive for handing out hearts on Valentines Day with phrases such as Jesus Loves You and You are Special, but a campus security officer told her that she could only hand out the Valentines in the reserved free speech area." Olsen said the free speech zone was the size of two buses next to each other and that nobody congregates there." She handed out these Valentines in memory of her late mother, who started the tradition of handing out the hearts before her passing. Olsenwon her lawsuit in September 2019.

5. Second Amendment zone University of Utah (2018)

At the beginning of the 2018-2019 school year, a Utah teaching assistanttried to create a small area in the back of the classroom for those who legally carry guns in the back of a classroom. The syllabus stated, If you feel that it is somehow at all appropriate to bring a gun to class (hint: it is notthis is absurd, antisocial, and frightening behavior), you are restricted to spending your time in class in my second amendment zone a 3x3 taped square on the floor in the very back of the classroom, that will be shared with all other gun carriers. The area also had no desk. A student brought this to the attention of a state legislator who made the issue public. The University of Utah then reassigned the teaching assistant to non-teaching duties." Students are allowed to carry a gun as long as they have a permit or license, according toUtah law anduniversity policy.

6. Law school professors cancel class to allow students to protest Kavanaugh Yale Law School (2018)

Law school professors at Yalecanceled classes to allow students to protest now-Justice Brett Kavanaughs Senate confirmation hearings. One Yale Law School student posted tweets about the cancelations, and students protesting on campus and in Washington, D.C. Students not only protested Kavanaugh, who is a Yale alumnus, but also the schools implicit endorsement of [Kavanaugh], and our administrations complicity in widespread sexual harassment in the legal profession.

[RELATED: WHAT A YEAR: The 5 most insane campus stories we covered in 2019]

7. Former Leadership Institute employee gets phone damaged University of Michigan (2017)

Charles Murraysevent at the University of Michigan was shut down by protesters. Murray was only able to speak for a short time, while protesters kept disrupting the event. One Leadership Institute Field Representative at the time, Nathan Berning, wasconfronted by protesters while documenting the protests. He was allegedly assaulted and had his phone knocked out of his hand. Someone then threw the phone from where the protests were being held to the street below." The incident was caught onvideo.

8. Stories about Trump protests and classes/meetings cancelled over Trump win (2017 - 2018)

After President Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential race in 2016, classes around the nation were canceled and many students protested after and even up to and after Inauguration Day in January 2017.

Canceled Classes/Meetings: A professor at the University of Rochester canceled his meetings with students and said in an email, To be perfectly honest, I have a hard time justifying today sitting face-to-face with you and saying with a straight face: Yes, some of our lives and livelihoods are literally in more danger today than they were yesterday, but hey-lets talk about your thesis statement.

Another professor at the University of Connecticut said she would not take roll and that the election process has been particularly trying for many people. An Iowa State University professor canceled class and called the election one of the most shocking events in history.

Protests: The University of Pittsburgh School of Social Workencouraged students to attend an anti-Trump rally for extra credit, including free transportation to the rally. The University of California-Santa Cruzheld a week-long Peoples Inauguration protesting Trumps election.

And, at the University of California, Irvine professorscanceled classes to allow students to protest Trump.

9. The many speaker protests at University of California, Berkeley (2017)

This would not be an outrageous stories list without mentioning incidents at the University of California, Berkeley.

At the school where the Free Speech Movement began, violent protests erupted when conservative groups at UC-Berkeley invited speakers such asAnn Coulter,Ben Shapiro,David Horowitz, andMilo Yiannopoulos to speak on campus. The UC-Berkeley College Republicans canceled the David Horowitz event after the initial cancellation of the Milo Yiannopoulos event (Yiannopoulous still spoke later that year), and Ann Coulter was canceled butspoke in November 2019.

Shapiro was still able to speak on campus in September 2017 with Young Americans for Freedom. During the same year, conservative students were alsoallegedly hounded,stalked by Antifa, and an Antifa memberfiled a restraining order against a former UC-Berkeley College Republicans president.

10. Hayden Williams (2019) University of California, Berkeley (2019)

Probably one of the most well-known campusincidents of the decade happened when former Leadership Institute Field Representative Hayden Williams suffered a punched to the face while helping table for Turning Point USA and holding a sign that said hate crime hoaxes hurt real victims referencing the Jussie Smollett case in Chicago. He was called racistb*tch, c**t, motherf*cker, etc. The man who punched Williams was eventually arrested and charged. At the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trumpinvited Williams to the stage and announced thesigning of the free speech executive order, which was signed later that month.

Follow the author of this article on Twitter:@francesanne123

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10 years of Campus Reform: The most outrageous stories we've covered so far - Campus Reform

In an unusually ambitious, and not-totally-successful project, the great PBS series Frontline tackles the history of U.S. politics from the rise of Barack Obama to the rise of Donald Trump to the present moment over four hours on Tuesday night.

Yes, four hours. Technically, theyve divided it into two two-hour documentaries, aired back-to-back, one starting at 7 and the other at 9.

Thats a lot. I previewed it all in one night and will summarize it below, but I cant imagine a very large audience will stay to the end. As always, Frontline is smart and substantive. The first part, the Obama segment, was much stronger in my view, but maybe thats because the news is all Trump these days.

Starting with Obamas keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic convention a breakthrough moment before Obama was even a U.S. senator the film presents Obama as the symbol of a generational change, the poet of hope and change, (although, as commentator Matt Bai says in the film, hope and change is not an agenda.)

As Obama rises to the presidency in 2008, against the Republican ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin, the film focuses on Palin, whom the filmmakers seems to think paved the path for Trump. If you want to pinpoint a moment when the right completely rejected the left, it was the Sarah Palin moment, says former McCain campaign chair Steve Schmidt.

New Yorker writer Jelani Cobb says that on Obamas inauguration eve, Republicans gathered at a Washington steakhouse and wondered if they were facing a wholesale rejection of themselves by the country. But rather than trying to co-opt any of Obamas issues or supporters, they resolved to block and defeat his agenda in every way, at every turn.

The Bush presidency was ending in a near financial collapse, and voices on the Democratic left wanted to punish the banks for causing it, which would have appealed to the partys left base, but Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner convinced Obama that that approach would make things worse, advice that steered Obama away from some leftier impulses in the party.

But energy in the Republican Party was on the far right, epitomized by the Tea Party moment, perhaps an important moment in what would become the transition from Obama to Trump. The Tea Party was seemingly launched by a TV reporter, Rick Santelli, going on a crazy rant on TV against the alleged big government takeover of everything.

Obama decided to make health care reform his first term big project. But, although he had favored something much more like single-payer health care, he settled for the relatively moderate Affordable Care Act, which seeks to reduce the ranks of the uninsured by a collection of smaller measures, while preserving most of the features of private health care.(This is me, not the film talking. Considering that Obamacare barely passed by a single vote, I have always assumed that a more radical plan could not have passed. But Obamacare was always assailed as a crazy left plan by its righty critics.)

During the health care debate, Sarah Palin reappeared as one of the voices of various big lies, like the famous death panels. Schmidt identifies Palin, and this moment, as a symbol of the post-truth era, where you could say crazy stuff like death panels, and never back down, and sort of get away with it.

The film also focuses on the sudden meteoric rise of Glenn Beck, symbolizing the rise of Fox News and righty talk radio that (the film says) helped turn Fox into a vast outrage machine. Beck, for example, talks of Obama (whose mother was white) as having a deep-seated hatred of white people.

Another breakthrough moment occurred when an obscure House backbencher, Joe Wilson, R-S.C., yelled out you lie while Obama was addressing the House.

Schmidt, who left the Republican Party in 2018, says that an outburst like that, in the past, would have led to immediate demands that the member apologize, maybe even resign, but instead what happened is that he raised a couple of million dollars overnight. Whats the lesson there: There is no longer a punishment for dishonesty or craziness. Instead, its rewarded.

Obama, hoping to recruit bipartisan support for a health care expansion, avoided single-payer or anything that could be honestly called socialized medicine, but Republicans made the ACA the symbol of their resistance. It passed the House 219-212 with no Republican votes.

The birther movement, contending that Obama couldnt be president because he wasnt born in the United States, was racist and post-fact, and was led by Donald Trump, among others. That infuriated Obama, who singled Trump out for ridicule at the 2011 White House Correspondents Association dinner with Trump in the audience, which so upset Trump that Roger Stone says that was the night Trump decided to run for president.

The whole approach of blocking and vilifying Obama was working for Republicans, who took control of the House in the 2010 midterms.

The Republican 2012 nominee, Mitt Romney, who wasnt that kind of guy, felt he had to make a trip to Vegas to have his bid blessed by Donald Trump. (The footage of Romney trying to look as though he appreciated Trump is slightly painful.)

But the 2012 election was not about bringing the country together. Au contraire, both parties were in stop the other guy mode. Obama was, as you know, re-elected.

Six days after the election, Donald Trump filed an application to trademark the phrase Make America Great Again.

After the horrible Newtown school massacre, Obama tried to take on the gun control issue, but in the newly polarized Congress, progress on divisive issues was impossible. After a modest gun control proposal failed, Obama called it a pretty shameful day for Washington.

The famous police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement continued to divide the nation over guns and race, and Republicans surged to a big wave win in the 2014 midterms.

During his last two years, Obama all but gave up on legislating and did what he could with executive orders.

Not yet an announced candidate, Trump started talking about building a big border wall, and getting Mexico to pay for it. Theres footage of an appearance by Ann Coulter on the Bill Maher show (Politically Incorrect). Maher asked whom she predicted would be the Republican nominee. Coulter says Donald Trump, and the audience bursts into laughter.

Soon after Trump announced his candidacy, Palin endorsed him.

Obama urged us to resist the draw to tribalism: We cant afford to go down that path, he says. It contradicts everything that makes us the envy of the world.

Ill stop there, for fear of going on forever. Part 2, which also airs tonight, at 9, is all about Trump.

See the original post:
Obama and Trump eras get smart, substantive (and long) look on 'Frontline' - MinnPost

Last week, like millions of others across the globe, I emerged blinking and stumbling from my fallout bunker to assess the destruction wrought by World War Three. There were a few surprises in store. Nukes had failed to rain from the sky. Critical infrastructure remained intact. Rationing was not yet in force. People still werent going to see Cats. World War Three, historians will note, consisted of: an assassination, a poorly organized funeral, the histrionic launching of a few sketchy rockets, an Everest of bad tweets and the downing of a passenger plane.

But one thing remained as permanent as the second law of thermodynamics: all of this was Donald Trumps fault. Musing on the crash of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 a couple of days ago, David Frum wrote:

President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama both flinched from doing justice to Soleimani, because they asked, And what will happen next? Trump did not ask that question. Families across half the world are now grieving a consequence that Trumps ego forbade him to imagine or ponder.

This is a frankly astonishing paragraph coming from David Frum. Its loaded with all the piety and surpassing unction that characterized the speeches he wrote for his old boss, George W. Bush. Was Frum asking And what will happen next? when he came up with the phrase Axis of Evil? Were Frum or his boss, or all the other busy pigheads in that administration really thinking through the consequences of sending Task Force Dagger through the sand berms on the Iraqi border?

Trump operates in a context that was designed and engineered for optimum mischief by some of Americas most credentialed morons. Thirty years worth of appalling foreign policy decisions brought down Flight 752 just as much as Iranian rocketry or the assassination of Soleimani did. Tocqueville wrote somewhere that democracies have enormous difficulties sustaining serious and long-term foreign policies. From todays vantage he appears to have been half right. Since the end of the Cold War, and especially since 9/11, the United States has sustained a long-term foreign policy. But it wasnt very serious.

This president, erratic and unorthodox as he is, is often presented as something more uniquely dangerous. A truly grotesque monster. A perfidious agent of foreign powers. An American fascist. But if we were to look at impact on world politics, Trump isnt even the most consequential president of the century, and is not worthy of the pathbreaking radicalism his critics credit him with. Trump, as even David Brooks admits, has used military force less than any other president since Jimmy Carter.

What really was unique was the United Statess response to 9/11. Remember the Bush Doctrine? It has more crazy written out as bullet points than every tweet Trump has ever sent. The Bush doctrine applied the Monroe Doctrine to the entire world. It was a dream as impossible as the one Andy Williams once sang of. Bush reserved the right for the United States to launch wars unilaterally, to launch wars preemptively and to launch wars against any regime anywhere in the world it disapproved of.

The Bush Doctrine envisaged, then created, permanent war against terrorism, an abstract concept that no state in history has or ever will defeat. It was the most radical innovation in national security policy in the history of the Republic, according to Ian Shapiro. For John J. Mearsheimer, the Bush Doctrine was a radical strategy that has no parallel in American history.

On every count, other than creating permanent war, the Bush Doctrine failed. In the Middle East, Washington has sown mayhem and misery, rather than the hope and progress Bush was promising in 2003. Globally, terrorism has increased since 9/11. The Bush policy of forcible regime change, slavishly followed by Barack Obama in Libya, Egypt and Syria, has given a major incentive to every tyrant in the world to acquire nuclear weapons. The pseudo-regimes that have been installed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt and Libya are deeply crooked. Trying to convince the peoples of these countries that liberal democracy is a regime worth having has been as vain as the efforts of Galileo to convince the Inquisition that the earth revolved around the sun.

The cost of this bitter harvest? Afghanistan alone has had more money pumped into it then all of Europe after the largest war in recorded history. The total cost of US wars in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan is $5.6 trillion. With a number that large it seems important to spell it out, so: five point six TRILLION dollars. For a trillion dollars you could pay LeBron Jamess wages for the next 50,000 years. And for much less you could, for example, make JFK an airport people like using, rather than the dump it is currently.

Those who helped design this disaster, or sell it to the American people like Frum and a truly bipartisan coterie of journalists and thinkers Ann Coulter, David Remnick, Jonathan Chait, Max Boot, Rush Limbaugh, Thomas Friedman, William Kristol, Sean Hannity, Ezra Klein and all the rest are lucky theyre not Romans. Theyd now be in exile, or worse. If theyd been around in Georgian England, most of them wouldve ended up like Admiral Byng. Instead half of them guilelessly condemn the Trump administration for the very things theyre guilty of.

In his memoirs, Bush recalls his feelings when the news of the third plane crash at the Pentagon, came through on 9/11. My blood was boiling. We were going to find out who did this, and kick their ass. Nineteen years later, asses, like Soleimanis, are still being kicked. It seems likely for the foreseeable future, regardless of the party, or the president in charge, the United States will be kicking ass, until it has stumps for feet.

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The Middle East mess has nothing to do with Donald Trump - The Spectator USA

It's just possible that the national GOP hates Kris Kobach more than Kris Kobach hates immigrants. Which is high bar to clear! From the moment he declared for the Kansas's US Senate race by misspelling his own name on the registration form, the National Republican Senate Committee accused him of "simultaneously put[ting] President Trump's presidency and Senate Majority at risk." But Chris -- sorry, Kris -- Kobach brushed off the DC insiders' gripes with the dogged confidence of a guy who plans to grift a billion dollars to erect a home-brew border wall.

While Mike Pompeo was Hamlet-ing all over Foggy Bottom, the NRSC could keep Kansas on the back burner. But now that Pompeo says he's foregoing the Senate race to take advantage of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to fuck shit up in the Middle East, the GOP is panicking. The Wall Street Journal reports that internal Republican polling has Kobach almost 20 points ahead of his closest primary challenger, Rep. Roger Marshall (KS-1), and weak against a strong Democrat in the general. And Republicans remember that 18 months ago, that racist nutbag Kobach managed to lose the Kansas gubernatorial election by five percent in a state Trump took by 20 points. So they're not risking a narrow GOP majority in the Senate on that incompetent buffoon, at least not if they can help it.

Yesterday the GOP wheeled out 96-year-old Bob Dole to endorse Marshall to succeed retiring Senator Pat Roberts, and Marshall reported raising $250,000 in just three days after Pompeo noped out.

Marshall, who knocked out fellow Republican Tim Huelskamp in 2016, may look like your average whitebread Republican from central casting. And that's because he is. The anti-choice obstetrician opposes both the Affordable Care Act and the state Medicaid expansion agreed upon last week, which would provide health insurance to 100,000 Kansans.

In a normal year, Marshall would likely coast to victory against any Democratic opponent. But this is not a normal year. No year with Kris Kobach on the ballot is normal of course -- the guy recently held a fundraiser with Peter Thiel and Ann Coulter. Besides which, the state seems to be listing toward the center after former governor Sam Brownback's batshit tax cut experiment blew a giant hole in the Kansas GOP's hull.

Last fall, four state legislators switched their party affiliation to Democratic in light of the shitshow shambles that is the GOP in the age of Brownback and Trump. And one of those legislators, state Sen. Barbara Bollier, is likely to be this year's Democratic senatorial nominee. Unlike on the GOP side of the ballot, Democrats have their ducks in order, with the other strong Democrat in the race, former US Attorney Barry Grissom, dropping out and throwing his support to Bollier. She also picked up a high-profile endorsement from former governor Kathleen Sebelius and netted $1 million in donations last quarter, a record for a Democrat in Kansas.

While the GOP has to worry about a contested primary with everyone trying to knock out Kobach -- just like last time -- Bollier can consolidate her support as a centrist who worked (and walked) across the aisle to get things done. It's an outside shot for a Democratic pickup, but with Pompeo out, Cook Political moved the race from Likely to Lean Republican.

Which puts Your Wonkette in the odd position of cheering for Kris Kobach. But we got used to it in 2018, so bring on the cognitive dissonance. Go, Chris, go!

[KC Star / Roll Call / WaPo]

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If Kris Kobach Wants To Lose Another Seat For The GOP, Who Are We To Argue? - Wonkette