Biden Ad: Trump too weak to lead

Biden is doing what Trump does: attack at the opponent's strongest point. 

Click: 60 seconds

It is the "swift boat" approach. It seems odd. One appears to be making an impossible argument.

Swift boating seems to work in politics.

It is not intuitive that one would attempt to claim that Einstein were stupid or that Michael Jordon were bad at basketball. 

But it also wouldn't be intuitive that Trump, with his bone spurs, would criticize the war record of John McCain, who spent five years being tortured as a prisoner of war, but that is what Trump did.

"Swift boating" is the term of art in politics for a political attack that directly--perhaps outrageously--criticizes a political opponent for the very characteristic that is a bedrock of their biography and brand. In 2004 John Kerry was well known as a person who (unlike nearly every other Ivy Leaguer of his era) actually served in combat in Vietnam. He had medals and citations for bravery and earned three purple hearts. George Bush, by contrast, used political connections to join the Texas Air National Guard and had sketchy records of actually showing up for duty.  

The GOP swift boat attack on Kerry was that he wasn't really a hero, indeed that he was a coward, that the enemy fire he faced wasn't all that dangerous, that men under his command didn't respect him, and that his speeches after returning to America gave aid and comfort to the enemy.

The attacks made people wonder. People inclined not to like Kerry (i.e. Republicans) were given an excuse to discount his military service. Independent and weak supporters of Kerry grew skeptical.

Swift boating is a technique: don't acknowledge the hypocrisy or improbability. Just attack.

Take eyes off Don Junior, Erik, Ivanka, and Jared by criticizing Biden for outrageous nepotism. Criticize Biden for a record of unwanted sexual advances. Criticize Obama for politicizing the Justice Department. Criticize China for downplaying COVID-19.

Biden is attacking Trump for being weak.  It is unintuitive. Trump's brand is strength, so the intuitive thing is acknowledge the strength and criticize Trump for using that strength to bad purposes. Call Trump a con man: strong but cynical, dishonest, and self serving. That, after all, is his record, with vendors, bondholders, his "University," his steaks, his supposed deep Christian faith. He gives ample evidence that he deceptively downplayed the virus response in the hope of keeping the economic indicators positive. He calmly calculated to put his own interests ahead of the country's. That is an easy sell.

The hard sell is to say that Trump was actually weak, frozen, panicked. He wasn't calculating. Biden says he was too panicked to know what to do. He was incompetent.  Note the difference here. In a con, Trump is competent but villainous. In Biden's ad, Trump's villainy came from incompetence itself.

This blog has repeatedly described Trump's core brand as the cruel, decisive, dominating bully, one whose supporters love watching him swat at opponents. Just yesterday this blog described him as playacting the Marlboro Cowboy, not using a mask, a guy too tough to care about the disease. This ad attacks that image of masculine strength . It makes one think. Is he really all that brave? Are his shows of cruelty and strength just bravado?

In the case of the first mention of the 2004 swift boat attack, the public's reaction was incredulity. Same with Trump's criticism of McCain. But after time, the very fact of continuing  attacks made the courage of Kerry and McCain a matter of debate, rather than a certainty. 

There is time to develop this theme. Trump's brand may change from being the "strong, dominating leader" into the "guy who makes a show of being the strong, dominating leader." Those are very different things.

Donald Trump, hero. Too tough to worry about some stinking virus.

Money. Babes. Trump has it all. And he doesn't wear a mask.

     “Yeah, the guys riding around with, you know, AR-15s think he is really cool. All the suburban, like, women, higher-educated people that voted Republican before, break [away from Trump to Biden], that hurts there. Then you look at the seniors — Florida and Arizona."

      

       Joe Scarborough, MSNBC, Morning Joe

Quinnipiac University released a poll this week:

 If the election for president were being held today, and the candidates were Joe Biden the Democrat and Donald Trump the Republican, for whom would you vote?

This snapshot reveals some startling divides in this country.

1.  One is predictable. Republicans like Trump and Democrats like Biden. 

The "Never Trump" pundit class of old school Republicans who liked Ronald Reagan and balanced budgets are apparently a small minority. GOP voters are all in on Trump. 

And amid the Facebook groups supporting Bernie Sanders, who call this blog "establishment," "moderate," "centrist," and therefore disgusting beyond redemption, ("Fuck you, Peter!") the actual erosion from voting Blue appears to be small, and essentially equivalent between Democrats and Republicans. 

2.  Gender gap:  Men like Trump and women prefer Biden. Trump has a 7 point lead among men; Biden has a 18 point lead among women.  The gender gap explains the Biden lead. 

3. Education gap: Among white voters, college educated people prefer Biden, non-college prefer Trump. Seen more closely, Trump does not dominate among men; he dominates among non-college men. There is a 19 point difference between support for Trump or Biden depending on whether the man went to college.

Now look at this snapshot in which voters are broken out by age and race.

First, what most readers would have expected, that black voters overwhelmingly oppose Trump. White men like Trump a lot, because non-college white men like him a lot.

4. No age gap. Older voters support Biden at the same levels as younger voters. This is change. "Great again" did not give young people affordable college or health care. Trump was elected because old white men voted overwhelmingly for him. But the virus issue is changing that. Trump is up front wanting to reopen the economy now, too soon, sure, but too soon is ok with him and he gets criticized for it, thus proving his commitment to that cause. Seniors seem to recognize that he is openly trading a higher death rate among them for a a stronger economy.

Democrats sneer; Trump shove it right back.

Trump still trails among the young. He earned their dislike. He isn't--yet--picking up their votes in exchange for the senior votes he is losing. 

This is good news for Democrats, but Trump brings two powerful brand messages to the table. 

One is rough masculinity. He earned that brand and has paid a price for it. He grabbed pussies and bragged that when you were a star they let you, and he was a star. He is married to a model. He has sex with porn stars and has the money to pay them to shut up. He he is a playboy celebrity tycoon, living the high life. The "Playboy Philosophy" of the 1960s still has traction.

He also has the brand of Mr. Strong Economy. He says we should stop worrying so much about the virus and get the economy open, and by not wearing a mask, he is doing a version of ancient generalship, leading from the front, taking risks, walking the walk. Trump not wearing a mask is political craft. It is messaging. 

He is a real male, a fighter, a risk taker, a hero for the economy.

Mr. Tough Guy

Women and college educated men, and people old enough to feel their own frailty and mortality, may think it foolish, and they scoff and disapprove. The more they scoff, the stronger Trump's brand becomes, because it shows him fighting against Democratic weenies.  Like the Marlboro Cowboy, he is too tough to care.

Once he is through making Biden look like a creepy frail senile loser, Trump may look like the better choice, the brave hero to the working man.

This isn't over.

Tara Reade said she was alone with Biden

Not likely, according to someone who had the same job she had.

An up close look at life in a Senatorial mailroom.

Art Baden, 1976 era.

Art Baden is a retired insurance broker, who now lives in Ashland, Oregon. He grew up in New York, went to college at the University of Wisconsin and then followed his interest in politics to DC, where he landed a job in the office of Senator Thomas Eagleton, in the mailroom.  

Like other politically interested people, a Democrat then and now, he read the news of Tara Reade's evolving accusations of Joe Biden with some worry. Was she credible? Democrats have created for themselves a mantra: believe the woman. But there are unusual problems with Reade. Her story about Biden has changed from telling and re-telling, evolving from "uncomfortable" into rape. She had previously, and long after the incident, been praising Biden in tweets. The story she now recounts echos a story in a novel written by her father. She has used aliases. She has left a series of landlords and former friends who call her manipulative and dishonest. 

Art Baden has another reason to be skeptical. He had been there, not in Senator Biden's mailroom, but in one like it. His own observation was that Senators don't wander alone in empty hallways, they are accompanied every minute of every day in Senate hallways in which other people are present. Mailroom employees don't have access to Senators. That is what senior staff crave and monopolize. It just didn't seem plausible.

Guest Post by Art Baden:

I just read an article on CNN.com about Tara Reade’s allegations against Joe Biden involving her time working in his Senate office. Back in 1976-1977 I held a similar position as she is purported to have held, working for then Democratic Senator Thomas F. Eagleton of Missouri.  I worked in the Senator’s mailroom; sorting through the hundreds of letters he received daily from supporters, detractors, his constituents, and others.  

Art Baden currently

That was the job Tara Reade had in Biden’s office in 1993.  And according to one of her supervisors interviewed by CNN, she was let go due to poor performance. 

The first step in the process every morning was opening all the mailbags, running all the letters through the slicing machine.  Then opening them all and pulling out the ones that were from people the Senator knew personally or who held positions of import.  A letter from a big contributor, a local official in Missouri, an important business person or labor official, for example, would be immediately turned over to either the Senator’s personal secretary (they were still called secretaries back then, not Administrative Assistants) or to the legislative aid working on the issue addressed in the correspondence.

Some of the letters were thoughtful missives from constituents addressing a specific issue that should be reviewed by a legislative aid and those were forwarded on, unless there was already a pre-written response ready for word processing to plug-in to a letter.

Some of the letters were angry, or incoherent rants.  At least once a week there would be a letter from someone complaining about extra-terrestrials beaming powerful rays into the writer’s brains.  We were always on the lookout for anything that seemed potentially threatening and those were quickly forwarded to the appropriate authorities.

Most of the letters, however, were form letters that had been generated by various interest groups – pro or against some legislative issue then working its way through Congress – anti abortion, pro-choice, anti-war, more funding for St. Louis airport, for against a new dam proposed by The Army Corps of Engineers – you get the picture.

We sorted through all that correspondence and sent them in batches to the word processing team that worked in an annex building up the street.  That team would generate typed responses primarily using pre-written paragraphs created by the legislative team.

After lunch came the next phase – getting the mail out.  All the letters from word processing would either be run through the signing machine, or for more important letters would be signed by one of the mail room staff who could forge the Senator’s signature. Or for the most important letters, given to the Senator himself to sign and write a personal hand written note.  Then a mad rush to get it all to the Senate Post Office to meet the daily collection deadline.  It was as close to an assembly line job as I’ve ever had.

There were 5 of us in the mailroom, one supervisor who also oversaw the word processors, a mailroom manager and 3 flunkies, one of whom was me.

What I remember for certain is that, in that role, I hardly ever came in contact with the Senator and I can’t remember a single conversation with him.  He never came into the mailroom, nor did his Secretary, Chief of Staff, or any of the ranking legislative staff.  We were located away from his personal office.

The Senator had a total staff of probably 30 or 40 people.  Some were in the Senator’s office; some were staff of Committees or sub-committees of which he was Chair.  

By the time I was working for Eagleton, he had been in office a long time, had lots of Seniority, lots of power and lots of staff.  

Similarly, by 1993, Biden had been in office for 20 years, and was Chairman of The Senate Judiciary Committee.

So Tara Reade’s story seems so unlikely to me.  Even the nice things she had previously said about Biden; how would she know?  I never had enough contact with Eagleton to make any personal judgment about him.  

As for her allegations that she was alone with him in a hallway in the Senate office building where he raped her? 

There is no way Biden would ever have been alone in a hallway with her.  Their senior staff takes up every second of a Senator’s time.  If he were in the hallway of the Senate office bldg on his way to the Senate floor, Union Station (AMTRAK) to go home to Wilmington, or anywhere else he would have been in the company of any number of senior legislative or campaign aids.  I never saw a Senator walking alone.  Staff always accompanied them.  And if he were, unlikely as it seems to me, alone, the hallways of the Senate office bldgs are always full of staffers, lobbyists and reporters, from early morning well into the evening.  It’s difficult for me to imagine any way he would have had either the time or opportunity to do what she alleges he did to her.

Toe the line, or else.

Click: Winning message

GOP primary election ads show what is forbidden and punished.

Bipartisanship is heresy. 

Oregon's rural 2nd Congressional District is considered a safe-red seat. The various Republican candidates got a total of 112,000 votes. The Democratic candidates got a total of 71,000 votes. The incumbent Republican is retiring from Congress, as this blog had long predicted. Four people ran big, well-funded professional campaigns to replace him, with plausible candidates and well done ads.

Their ads were nasty, often funny. They pointed out the problems with each other candidate, and the problems were glimpses of heresy. They reveal what Republican candidates think primary voters want to hear.

Toe the line.

Jimmy Crumpacker entered the race as a blank slate other than his name, so he created what he thought was the ideal candidate for the race, someone who checked the boxes. In an interview with me he told me this Republican primary election was a marketing task, and he expected to win it with the only tool that mattered, he said, campaign money. He said he had lots of it, and could raise more of it, and was going to spend it on ads, and he did. 

The first job was to teach people his name and make it into a positive.  He was a gun-packing, send immigrants packing, Trump backer. Thats Jimmy Crumpacker.

His ads run through a checklist of presumably desirable attributes. He was a hunter. He cut brush on his parents' rural property in the District. He was "a sixth generation Oregonian."  He opposed abortion. He was a businessman, not a politician. He supported timber and agriculture.

He appeared so formidable at first that the anti-abortion Oregon Right to Life made a startling decision to endorse and run ads for Crumpacker, urging anti-abortion voters to focus their support on him as the one best chance to defeat the two-time candidate for statewide office, Knute Buehler. Buehler had displayed moderation on abortion. He was presumed to be the front runner based on his previous campaigns and ability to raise money himself, including from Nike founder Phil Knight. The anti-abortion group feared that votes would be split among the other three anti-abortion candidates, former State Senators Jason Atkinson and Cliff Bentz, and allow the abortion-choice-curious Buehler a winning plurality in a split race.  

Click: Perry Atkinson: dismayed, betrayed.

This decision was a self inflicted wound for the organization. Their logo celebrates fifty years of anti-abortion effort, led for much of it by Perry Atkinson, a longtime Christian broadcaster, anti-abortion activist, and former Chair of the Oregon Republican Party. They casually ditched his son, Jason Atkinson, also anti-abortion and a family values candidate, for a person utterly new on the political scene with no credentials for anti-abortion leadership.

Still, this issue demonstrates an area in which independence is impossible: abortion. To be a Republican in good standing, one must oppose abortion. That means making hardball choices to concentrate votes on a candidate who can best carry that flag. The result is that Oregon Right to Life looks cynical rather than principled. Worse yet, they look foolish. They backed a candidate who lost, while a different anti-abortion candidate won despite their endorsement. And worst of all, by election day, their preferred candidate was best known for being laughably phony. They got conned.

The campaigns all demonstrated a second area of required conformity: Trump-loving. Each campaign mentioned Trump, showed images of Trump, and assured voters that the candidate would personally support Trump. 

Knute Buehler had, in a statewide race for Governor in 2018, carried out during the Kavanaugh nomination fight, said he opposed that nomination. In this race Buehler's opponents jumped on that, as well as statements suggesting independence from Trump. Those were fatal negatives. Buehler was described as unreliable, not fully on board with Trump.

Click: Anti-Crumpacker ad: He is from Portland!

The city of Portland was a negative. Portland is the population cluster for the state. An ongoing, reliable theme for political speech outside of Portland is to attack it. 

Ads opposing Crumpacker mocked him for being a phony, actually a carpetbagger from Portland, with an eastern boarding school education, brand new hunting clothes worn over a button down shirt, a hunting license acquired for a photo shoot, and a history of support for the Portland ballet. Men in tights!

The ads were devastating. 

Portland figured into attacks on Buehler, too, with ads taking a clip of a longer speech in which Buehler praised infrastructure improvements that would deal with traffic congestion in Portland. That was enough; he mentioned Portland among whatever else. Traitor.

Cliff Bentz was criticized for bipartisan cooperation with Democrats in creating a tax bill. Traitor. 


Jason Atkinson was criticized for working with sportsmen to protect a fishery, and therefore getting kudos from a conservation group. That was the lingering problem for Atkinson. He rode a bicycle. He fly fished. He cared about rivers for fish, not just for irrigation. He cooperated in a coalition to protect a river in the District. He gave off a light scent of being concerned about the environment. Traitor.

Off-brand for a real Republican

All the ads showed the real enemy: Nancy Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Chuck Schumer. Governor Kate Brown. Republicans were all agreed on who the enemies are. Heresy is cooperating with Democrats on anything.

The election results are in: the winner was eastern Oregon former State Senator Cliff Bentz, with 31% of the vote. Bentz was less the winner than the candidate who failed the heresy test the least visibly.  Bentz is not wrong on abortion (Buehler), not from Portland (Crumpacker), and not maybe sort of moderate on conservation (Atkinson.)

Crumpacker and Buehler destroyed each other, Right to Life pulled the rug out from under Atkinson. 

That left Bentz.

Political realignment continues

Getting to 270 Electoral Votes for Democrats doesn't mean winning Wisconsin. 

It means winning Arizona.

Archie Bunker votes for Trump.  When they retire to Arizona, Edith secretly votes for Biden.

Democrats wonder if they can put together the "Obama coalition." They probably cannot, and it isn't the way the party alignment is moving. 

The Obama coalition was a mix of the two coasts and the Upper Midwest. There were liberal, diverse, mostly urban cities in the Northeast and West Coast, people who were comfortable-enough with diversity and still sore from how Bush allowed the financial crisis of 2008 to unfold. Obama added the supposed "blue wall" of the Upper Midwest states of Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.  Obama had the good policy choice to have bailed out--amid criticism--General Motors and Chrysler while Mitt Romney opposed that. Michigan and Ohio residents remembered and rewarded Obama in 2012.

2012 Obama Coalition

Obama's victories were likely the last waves in a retreating tide of realignment taking place since Lyndon Johnson linked Democrats to civil rights for Black Americans.  Republicans became a party centered on the sensibilities of the "Solid South," now solidly Republican. It was the rural party, the White party, the Christian traditionalist party. In the American South the vote is largely color-coded. Whites vote Republican; Blacks, ,college towns, and committed liberals vote Democratic. Like any generalization, there are exceptions, but Democrats and Republicans each have their niche. Race was part of the glue that held Republican together but it was a bigger, more complex mix that included support for traditional ethno-religious symbols, for gun rights, and opposition to abortion.  

Those people live everywhere in America, not just the South. They live in the Rocky Mountain west, where they are a sizable majority, and in rural and suburban parts of everywhere, but especially the Upper Midwest, where they are a minority outvoted, barely usually,by the cities in their states. Detroit tilts Michigan; Chicago tilts Illinois; Milwaukee tilts Wisconsin.

Realignment: Trump took the Upper Midwest

Trump upset that. 

Trump appealed to the non-college white voter. Manufacturing has moved offshore and Democrats took the position that the jobs would be replaced by better ones thanks to retraining and education. It works for some people, but less so for the non-college voter. Democrats have been accused of abandoning those voters, replacing them on the coasts with the college educated, women, immigrants, and people of color who felt marginalized by Trump's appeal to white males. In fact, both parties abandoned those people, but Trump voiced their fears and their interests, so reclaimed them.

Wisconsin is a special problem for Democrats. It is 90% white, "America's Dairyland" is largely rural, and 58% of its voters are non-college. Worse, some 459,000 non-college people failed to vote in 2016 according to a Brookings study. Wisconsin will be a stretch, and without it, Democrats lose in 2020.

A Democrat like Biden may be able to hold Michigan and Pennsylvania this year. The virus has hit those two states particularly hard. Joe Biden has constantly played up his Scranton, Pennsylvania roots. But the Upper Midwest is no longer a blue wall for Democrats. They have lost the Archie Bunker vote. The GOP has become the party of populist Trump, not the party of Mitt Romney.

For Democrats to win the White House they need the Upper Midwest or something else. They need to swap Wisconsin for Arizona and maybe North Carolina and Florida--and then, eventually Georgia and Texas.

A Republican Party built around blue collar ethno-nationalist populism creates backlash.   Many women, especially women in suburban neighborhoods, find Trump offensive. Urban people, educated people, people who buy coffee at Starbucks, office workers, non religious, people of color, people in college environments all tend against populist Republicanism. 

Now, amid the response to the virus, Trump chose to support the young workers rather than seniors. There is widespread acknowledgement that Americans are becoming restless and impatient with the economic shutdown. The most compliant group are seniors. The shutdown is largely for their benefit. Arizona and Florida are retirement havens. Trump's messaging could not be more clear to seniors: some extra numbers of them may need to die in sacrifice to the bigger necessity of re-opening the economy.

Biden is laying low. He is letting Trump dig his own political grave, if, in fact the net-net fallout from the virus shutdown is that voters think Trump rushed things. It may well work, but it is entirely possible that seniors will be outvoted here by young people eager to get back to work and play. In any case, Trump's policies accelerate a trend that is underway. The Republican Party is becoming the party of non college working people, of big business, of Whites, of rural areas, of traditional values conservatives, of Christians, and who win presidential elections by combining the Solid South, the Mountain West, and the Upper Midwest.

Protests in Oregon

Democrats continue their trend toward being the party of diverse urban areas, of women, of educated professionals, of college towns, of people of color, and who win presidential elections by combining the West Coast, the urban Northeast down to Virginia and North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Illinois with votes out of their cities, plus the states of Arizona and Florida thanks to Democrats' identification with support for the interests of seniors.

Either way, this will be a close run election--probably. The virus creates some of the same potential for upset that the October 2008 financial collapse did. By October, 2020 Americans can have decided we are reopening America and it is glorious morning. Or Trump could look like Nero, who fiddled while American died.

Doug Sosnik examined this re-alignment in more detail, in a paper: Click

Brain Damage

     "I like watching football. I used to like watching those hard hits. The refs have ruined football, but it needed to be ruined because what people like me enjoyed watching is killing people. The fact that the players were OK with with the risk doesn't change that."

           Robert Warren, Age 93, sheltered in place in an assisted living facility

Bob Warren created a stir last month. He said something ahead of its political time. He said it before Trump said it.

He wrote here that we should open up the general economy because it was crazy to arrange society for the benefit of a small group of vulnerable people, people like himself. People who were old and sick. People who were going to die pretty soon anyway.

When public figures like the Texas Lieutenant Governor first said it, the liberal media, blogosphere, and Democratic officeholders went crazy. Whatever happened to the sanctity of life? What about old people who want to live? They said they were shocked and offended that someone would say aloud some version of the Eskimos being placed on the ice meme.

The GOP is OK with letting grandma die!! 

They also pointed out the hypocrisy, since the political right has as a defining issue opposition to abortion. Unborn life is precious but old people aren't.

Democratic framing

Now, two months later, the issue has changed. Americans have tired of social distancing. Nearly a thousand people showed up at county offices in my home community to demand an end to government tyranny. Let the vulnerable shelter, let the rest of us work and play, the protesters said. And besides, the virus is just bullshit anyway, hardly anybody gets it, and if one is worried, protect yourself. It is every person for himself. 

Warren himself lives in comfortable, boring lockup. His assisted living facility does what is common practice. Isolate the residents. The dining room is closed and group activities are cancelled. People stay in their room and food is brought to them.

Open the economy and let the worried protect themselves. That is the Trump position, the position of Fox news hosts, and it is increasingly the standard Republican candidate and officeholder position. This contrast with Democrats, the job killing, worry wort, tyrants, as they frame it. 

Polls show that Trump is losing some support among what had been his strongest demographic, seniors, and Biden is slightly ahead in Florida polls. There are far, far more young people than seniors and they appear to be voting with their feet and mask-less faces. They are back in restaurants and bars, mingling. Young people consider the virus to be a small risk, one worth taking. Democrats are taking the short straw in this divide. They are leaning against a majority. Worse, they are leaning against what people want to do.

Warren cannot bring himself to say we should ban football, although that is the only realistic way to provide the safety he says we need. He demonstrates the Democrats political peril. We are the land of the free and the home of the brave. 

Guest Comment by Bob Warren 

Football is another coronavirus, a silent killer.

A cataclysm is often described as a violent event, often causing great change and the Corona virus certainly qualifies as a “game changer.”  While the loss of life directly attributable to this pandemic is tragic, some good may still be garnered if the current policy of discouraging and prohibiting public gatherings should result in the cancellation of the football season. 

Bob Warren, sheltered.

I myself confess to being a longtime follower of the sport and enjoy every aspect of the game, the overall strategies, the athleticism and yes, the violence that is an essential aspect of the sport. However, my enthusiasm for the sport has waned as continuing research into CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) a serious brain disorder previously known to us as “punch drunk”) confirms that the disease, caused primarily by the brain being repeatedly struck, or concussed, has been a primary factor in the premature deaths of an ever growing list of retired football players.  

The debilitating effects of concussions, like exposure to radiation, is both cumalative and permanent. Time does not heal the wounds of either disease. Recently a long suspected link between the disease and total time of exposure has been established tying those who have participated for the longest period of time in the sport as the most vulnerable to CTE. Unfortunately, short of an autopsy there is no way to determine the presence of these insidious injuries to the brain. Only after death occurs, often caused by suicide or extreme physical disability, and the brain is sliced open to reveal the tell-tall lesions can a diagnosis be certain.          

An ever growing number of premature and unnatural deaths have now been traced to this deadly condition as part of the CTE research now being conducted at Boston University. After the death of ex-Steeler great Mike Webster, the first to be diagnosed as a victim of CTE, and the suicide of  legendary pro footballer Junior Seau, did full awareness of this devastating disease emerge to spur research. 

Perhaps the greatest stumbling block in exposing the inherent dangers of CTE has been the utterly hypocritical response of the NFL and its Commisioner, Roger Goodell. Directed by Goodell, the NFL adopted an obstructionist policy of denial and obfuscation, stubbornly ignoring a growing mass of evidence that signified that something was terribly wrong. The immense profitability of the NFL was being threatened by some heretofore unknown malady, an unthinkable and unacceptable concept to the NFL and its franchise holders, a group of money-grubbing multi-millionaires. Unknowingly, we may have been “dumbing down” a goodly number of our youth as the popularity of the sport has soared. 

Perhaps the time has come to view all aspects of the sport realistically and determine the inherent risk factors from a life and death viewpoint, just as we have been forced to do in dealing with the Corona Virus.

Chants: "Arrest Bill Gates!!"

Conspiracy theories erupt regarding COVID-19. Don't trust. You are surrounded by predators. 

Donald Trump understands that. He gets it. He gets that other people feel that way, too.

Conspiracy thinking happens on both left and right. It isn't partisan and it isn't political.

Make THIS much money from COVID-19

Maybe Bill Gates created the virus to make money selling vaccines. 

5-G technology created COVID-19 by mutating another virus. 

Barack Obama created it because he hates Americans. 

The Chinese created it by accident from their Wuhan lab. 

Or maybe the virus doesn't actually exist and this is a hoax inflating death counts to give governments license to take away our freedoms.

Most media reports show people we profile as the Tea Party white working class Trump base. There are Trump 2020 signs, confederate flags, and now familiar image of pickup trucks and people holding guns. 

That isn't the full story on conspiratorial thinking. There is left populism, too, and it shares the mistrust and suspicion that things are not what they appear to be. Supporters of Sanders share memes on Facebook and Twitter that explain Sanders' failure to celebrate a big win in the Iowa caucuses as a multi-month ultra-secret con, arranged by Buttigieg, Hillary, the DNC, Iowa Democrats, computer companies, and the media to deny Sanders an election night victory dance.

The fact that the conspiracy involved essentially everybody, and that no one knew about it, and that it could have been foiled by Sanders simply having stepped up to the camera to say he was thrilled by his apparent win, does not diminish the credibility of the conspiracy. It enhances it. Only an extraordinarily adept and powerful conspiracy could pull off something this complicatet. See? It's proof that it's worse than you think. 

Debunking conspiracies

The conspiratorial left see people and institutions representing liberal reform to be Potemkin villages of deceit. It sees Sander's failure to win overwhelming majorities in New Hampshire, South Carolina, and on Super Tuesday to vote count fraud and ubiquitous voter suppression, carried out in secret for the benefit of Biden and against Sanders. MSNBC, CNN, the NY Times, the Washington Post, NPR, Huffington Post, Politico, are all just "corporate media," and in on the con.

This blog's description of this group as the pro-Trump left drew outrage from many of them. How can you say we like Trump? We oppose Trump! Indeed, they do. It is just that they hate rapist, racist, corporate-owned devils like Biden even more. So they won't vote, or will vote Green or even for Trump. Screw those Democratic frauds. 

Michael Trigoboff shares an insight that part of Trump's crossover appeal is his own conspiratorial thinking. Trigoboff earned his Ph.D. at Rutgers, had a long career in the software industry, and now observes politics, academia, and the computer industry from his role as a Computer Science professor at Portland Community College in Portland, Oregon.

Guest Post by Michael Trigoboff

Trigoboff

I listened to this FiveThirtyEight podcast today. The guest was Joseph Uscinski, a political science professor at the University of Miami whose expertise includes conspiracy theories. The topic was why conspiracy theories are spreading amid the pandemic. Dr. Uscinski made some very interesting points about conspiracy theories in general:

• Both sides of our current political polarization are equally likely to entertain conspiracy theories. They are just about different topics. The right pays that sort of attention to the “deep state.” The left sees conspiracies in Wall Street. Elites on either side (e.g. Fox, MSNBC) direct conspiratorial thinking in their particular ideological directions.

• Conspiracy theory thinking is associated with level of mistrust and cynicism. These are personality traits, not ideological beliefs.

The discussion went on from these two points to a thought about how Donald Trump practices politics:

                

• Donald Trump treats the mistrustful/cynical subset of the population as a political constituency.

Political analysis usually breaks down the population by where they stand on particular issues or (more recently on the Democratic side) by gender and ethnicity. Donald Trump is doing it on an entirely different level, based instead on emotional orientation and personality type.

This explains a number of things that have been puzzling about our current politics:

• Why is Donald Trump's 42% level of support so durable?
  (Personality types don’t change.)
  
  
• Why did a significant number of Bernie Sanders supporters go on to vote for Donald Trump in 2016?
  (Same attitude, different conspiracies. They liked someone who presented himself as a conspiracy fighter.)
  
  
• Why are what the Democrats like to think of as intellectual arguments based on "science" so politically ineffective?
  (Directed at the wrong target, completely irrelevant to what is actually happening politically.)

I previously have described the current political situation as Democrats attempting to play chess while Donald Trump, in WWE style, is body-slamming them and hitting them in the head with a folding chair. That was the best I could do until today.

But this new idea is higher-resolution, more accurate, and potentially much more useful.