The Scary Results from Iowa
Polls reveal more than caucus results--as "God chooses Trump"
Greg Mitchell is the author of more than a dozen books and now writer/director of three award-winning films aired via PBS: please see links at bottom of this post. Before all that, he was a longtime editor of the legendary Crawdaddy. You can still subscribe to this newsletter for free.
You certainly know the results of this week’s usual farcical media focus on the sadly unrepresentative Iowa caucusing this week, but you may have missed many of the even more depressing numbers from the latest polling of Iowa participants and other Republicans nationwide. Many go hand in hand with the surge in MAGA men and women proclaiming that God has hand-picked Trump to save America. It reminds me of the old Talking Heads song:
People like us
We don’t want justice
We don’t want freedom
We just want someone to love
Tom Nichols in The Atlantic highlighted some new polling in this regard:
A lot of people, especially in the media, have a hard time accepting this simple truth. Millions of Americans, stung by the electoral rebukes of their fellow citizens, have become so resentful and detached from reality that they have plunged into a moral void, a vortex that disintegrates questions of politics or policies and replaces them with heroic fantasies of redeeming a supposedly fallen nation.
Poll numbers on this issue are dispiriting. A third of Republicans—and four in 10 voters who have a favorable view of Trump—agree with the statement that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” But violence against whom? We are not under foreign occupation. When people talk about “resorting to violence” they are, by default, talking about violence against their fellow citizens, some of whom have already been threatened merely for working in their communities as election volunteers.
But perhaps such views are merely overheated samplings from super-red MAGA pockets, and the heartland voters are more sensible. No such luck. In Iowa, 19 percent of 502 likely GOP caucus attendees said Trump’s statement that he might have “no choice” but to lock up his political opponents made them more inclined to vote for him. One out of five might not seem like a lot, but another 43 percent said they didn’t care one way or another. Trump’s ranting about “terminating” parts of the Constitution made only 14 percent more likely to vote for him, but again, 36 percent didn’t care. What a triumph: Only one in eight Iowa GOP caucus voters supports trashing the Constitution.
My friend Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Inquirer topped his latest column with this commentary, re-printed with permission:
On a frigid night when the American hellscape that is the 2024 presidential election nearly froze over, in the most warped perversion imaginable of what would have been King’s 95th birthday, Donald Trump’s march toward a would-be dictatorship planted a giant boot-print in the deep Iowa snowdrifts.
When the swirling snows finally settled before midnight on Monday, Trump and his openly authoritarian drive to return to the White House as a revenge-minded 47th president captured 51% of the caucus-goers against his divided and often inept rivals, signaling that the 2024 primary season is all but over as soon as it started.
Scientists might note that the polar vortex causing America’s epic cold snap isn’t a message from the angry gods but merely the latest climate catastrophe, as global warming weakens the Gulf Stream, but you’d never hear this from a field of GOP candidates soaked to the skin in fossil fuels and denial.
Flip on your TV, and you’ll hear a lot of chatter over the battle for second place in Iowa, as if that mattered. The networks have too much invested in fancy touchscreens and dramatic “Campaign ‘24″ overtures to tell you the truth — that caucuses and primaries are for functioning political parties, and the GOP has become a cult. The fact that judges have already ruled the all-but-certain 2024 Republican nominee is a fraudster and a rapist even before his 91 felony charges go before a jury means nothing to tens of millions of Americans for whom Trump’s vows to smite their mutual enemies — in the media and on college campuses and Capitol Hill — are a feature, not a bug.
At one Trump Iowa rally this past weekend, a grey-haired backer in a red MAGA hat told a social-media interviewer that he’d love to see repeal of what he called “the Roosevelt law,” meaning the 22nd Amendment that limits Trump to only one more term. He added: “This country needs a dictator. I hate to say it, but this is the truth.”
Yet the TV talking heads still toil to explain Trump’s appeal after Jan. 6 and the two impeachments and the four separate criminal cases. The latest theory is that these voters are convinced they had it better during the 45th presidency, but their economic nostalgia and false memories are just one part of that. They recall it as better because the man in the White House shared their visions of patriarchy and white privilege, as well as of the same educated, left-leaning foes.
While the nattering nabobs were expressing shock over Trump’s Hitler plagiarism when he declared immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of America, Iowa’s so-called evangelicals were voicing approval. A new CBS News/YouGov poll found that 81% of Republicans agree with Trump’s anti-migrant tirade (and 47% of all Americans, almost identical to Trump’s percentage of the vote in 2016 and 2020). The same survey found about two-thirds of GOP voters think efforts to promote racial diversity are “going too far,” and a majority back Trump’s schemes to prosecute his political enemies.
“You get the feeling right now in Iowa that we are sleepwalking into a nightmare and there’s nothing we can do about it,” veteran Iowa Republican lawyer Doug Gross told the New York Times. But maybe it’s time to acknowledge that many of these voters are wide awake and know exactly what they are doing. We don’t even have to wait until January 2025 to see the moral rot of Trump policies. Just look at Gov. Greg Abbott in Trump-fried Texas, where this weekend Abbott’s tin soldiers along the Rio Grande blocked U.S. Border Patrol agents from intervening as three migrants fatally drowned.
Just as in 1968, there are bright stars illuminating our dark, sub-zero night. We just lost one right there in Iowa — not that you heard about it this weekend from the gun-lobby-addled Republicans seeking the White House. Dan Marburger was the beloved principal of Perry High School when a gunman went on a shooting spree earlier this month. Rather than run away, he tried to distract or calm down the shooter — and sustained the wounds that later killed him. His selfless sacrifice no doubt saved the lives of some of his young students.
Most of us will never be called upon for such an act of courage. But we can all do something to save American democracy, rather than fleeing into the void. The poll numbers and the pro-dictator quotes can be demoralizing, yet they don’t represent the majority of U.S. citizens. On our darkest night, let’s not forget there are millions of potential stars that could set the American sky ablaze.
»>Now, don’t miss this Rick Perlstein column on Jeff Sharlet vs. a notable New York Times reporter on the need to label racists racists and the new American fascism….fascism… plus part II of his column coming tomorrow.
Song of the Day
In contrast to the MAGA hordes, Woody Guthrie had rather different view of the lessons of Jesus, here delivered by Bono and U2.
»Greg Mitchell’s Films and Books
Films: Watch award-winning “Atomic Cover-up” at PBS site and via PBS apps now, or free from Kanopy, and see companion book at Amazon. Watch “Memorial Day Massacre: Workers Die, Film Buried” at PBS site and via apps, also companion book at Amazon. Read about “The First Attack Ads: Hollywood vs. Upton Sinclair” or purchase the DVD here for yourself or your library.
Books include: Best-selling “The Tunnels: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall and the Film JFK Tried to Kill.” Award-winners “The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair’s Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics” and “The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood—and America—Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” A New York Times Notable Book, “Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Richard Nixon vs. Helen Gahagan Douglas.”
Also, two acclaimed books with Robert Jay Lifton, “Hiroshima in America” and “Who Owns Death? Against Capital Punishment.” On the media and Iraq, “So Wrong for So Long,” with an preface by Bruce Springsteen. And in a different vein, “Vonnegut and Me,” “Journeys With Beethoven” and “Joy in Mudville: A Little League Memoir.”
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Well, that's definitely an assessment of one of two sides. Trump was an obvious puppet of others' agendas in 2016 and too egomaniacal to see that about himself, and it's only worse as he's aged for the 2024 race. But what is the end game below the surface-level divisions for both sets of political party elites taking media limelight in the U.S.?
Write what you did, and meanwhile, Jake Sullivan who really runs foreign (bleeding into domestic) policy for the aged obviously infirm Biden is at Davos with the global oligarchs updating for 2024 his networking toward these oppressive goals against the American people: 'The “major focus” of the Biden NSC’s work, at least initially, will be on beating the coronavirus pandemic and restructuring the NSC to make public health a permanent national security priority, Sullivan said ...“The way you actually make sure this doesn’t happen again is by sending a very clear message to China that the United States and the rest of the world will not accept a circumstance in which we do not have an effective public health surveillance system, with an international dimension, in China and across the world going forward,” Sullivan said.' (Source: Politico, 11-27-20.)
The hard data's coming in from around the world about the U.S.-led profiteering from covid/big pharma scamming, and more light on the "gain of function" propensities of our own U.S. government to risk unleashing respiratory or other viruses on us --- and then offer us experimental pseudo-vaccines alongside hefty hospital payments for harmful treatment protocols.
Pfizer has an appalling and easily researched track record for what would once have been considered disqualifying fraud of a company never to be trusted. (It's an endemic problem among pharmaceutical corporations.) FDA under Biden/Sullivan is corporate-capture by Pfizer et al., but there'd be no meaningful difference with Trump at the helm as puppet.
Not to mention the added governmental/corporate bonus of putative reason to try fully surveilling the populace and imposing a China-style social credit system because supposititious public health becomes conflated with foreign policy in the U.S.
Sullivan/Biden, as Trump and his cohorts before them, have sidestepped the consumer cost-effective efficacy of nasal rinsing and gargling with povidone iodine solution which I've done, now at age 70, to stop all respiratory symptoms at the head level from going deeper since 2020 --- no covid (although never bothered with bogus testing), no flu, no major colds --- without any medical intervention. Same results among others using this simple method, and no health-damage risks from the experimental (lacking standard scientific safety studies) pseudo-vaccines.
Other countries with less profiteering at the top of the corporate pyramid recommend the rinsing/gargling to their citizens through public health. In the U.S. public health has become a misnomer, as started with Trump and "operation warp speed" and ratcheted up to new levels by Biden/Sullivan.
Public health as global surveillance is just one reason some people are so fed up they'd vote for Trump (the Republican version of oligarchic puppet) who, at least by speeches, comes across as though he opposes the sort of horror show Sullivan/Biden intend for global-sponsored tech surveillance of all regular people.
I know that on balance Trump isn't any better than Biden, and on some things (like a woman's right to choose abortion), much worse, but Trump would be arguably better on not stripping parental rights regarding their minor children's public school social contagion of transgenderism and the trans industry's profiteering pharma/medical corporate sponsors.
Tellingly, when Democrats held majorities in House and Senate after Roe v. Wade, they never passed a national abortion rights bill as they clearly could have --- if they weren't equally with Republican leadership in cahoots to divide Americans on sociocultural and religious issues (Biden v. Trump, Trump v. Biden) while seeking to enact the tech surveillance-controlled world of economically diminished freedom that the Davos elites want for everybody else (as they profit obscenely and build protective new infrastructure around themselves).
None of this is a soundbite-simple thing to convey. But you're too smart not to see it if you want to. So I have to assume you either profit as a public intellectual by being for Biden/Democrats, or you just find comfort in your denial.
Thoreau cautioned that people tended to whack at the branches instead of pulling up the roots of evil. (I think he wrote that, maybe somebody else, the point's good whoever made it.)
In 2024 I find the hypocrisy of the American two-party system obscene. Always a phony media-fostered show by both sides of whacking at the branches. (I'm not a registered R or D, but independent. I screen out almost all political what-if-ing news because it's deceitful distraction signifying nothing real. Tell us what "the powers that shouldn't be" have done once they've done it, and we'll try to stay alive and thrive as best we can despite them.)
This year I won't vote in anything but my local and state elections. Honestly I don't know who on balance would be worse for president, Biden/Sullivan/Zients and Trump/Whoever/Rotating List.
My prayers to our Creator and the infinite love of our eternal Father and Mother hopefully join with contemplative practice of others who seek the greatest and most compassionate good. Jesus lived in a hideous political time of empire as bad (minus the tech encroachments) as ours. I take comfort in trusting there's an ultimate cosmological good to prevail over human evil, so that the end of the story isn't yet here but will be goodness for those who didn't opt out by their hypocrisy, violence, greed and deceit.
Despite facing today's hypocrisy of political reality, I find joy in the creative blessings of every day. That, for me, is the best of the American legacy, not anything likely to be on our political horizon for the 2024 election about voting.
Instead of voting for president this year, I'm praying for God's deliverance from the worst of the presented evils based on what only divine Mind has the capacity to discern as best among all the possibilities taking a partially open future, the importance of learning to love authentically, and humanity's free will into account. (Freed from the errors of blueprint theology and institutional religion's prescribed politics, our prayers matter more than we may know.)
In sum, circumstantially there's overwhelming evidence that our system (both R and D sides complicit legislatively and judicially) supports only big-money preferences in the major U.S. political races --- so in effect, Davos, Black Rock, etc. and the tech and legacy billionaires nationally and globally behind them are running the show. There's always dissent, as a way to let off steam, but actions and results continue to speak louder than words. Just look at resumes of who the presidents of both parties choose as chiefs of staff.
"Our democracy" as the pundits in lockstep call it? What a joke. We don't even have a working republic except for the uber-rich and their puppets. If I were younger and if other Western (or English-speaking) countries had not jumped on the same (sometimes veiled) globalist bandwagon, I'd be emigrating out of here so fast, but circumstances do not currently support that alternative for the "why don't you just leave" mode.
Greg, you're an obviously smart guy, and your musical posts are interesting, so I stay subscribed for those. Don't assume all of your subscriber list agrees with you politically otherwise.
May infinite love be with you!