Tag Archives: conservatives

Why climate skeptics are less likely to wear coronavirus masks

by DakotaMacDonnel Posted on April 30, 2020

There are many ways in which the coronavirus pandemic intersects with climate change — so many that Grist launched a whole newsletter about them. This week, the pollsters at Morning Consult unveiled another link between the two issues: Concern about climate change correlates with the way people are responding to the virus.

The poll, conducted online between April 14 and 16 on a national sample of 2,200 adults, found that people who said that they are not concerned about rising temperatures are less likely than the general public to take steps to prevent the spread of COVID-19. (The poll was weighted for age, educational attainment, gender, race, and region and has a margin of error of 2 percentage points.)

Forty-four percent of all the adults surveyed said they “always” wear a mask to grocery stores, public parks, and other public places. Fifty-four percent of folks who said they’re concerned about climate change said they always wear masks, but just 30 percent of people who are unconcerned about climate change said they always wear masks in public places. That’s a 24-point difference.

The survey defined climate-concerned adults as people who said they’re worried about climate change and agree that it’s driven by human activity. Climate-unconcerned respondents were those who said they were “not too concerned” or “not concerned at all” about climate change. (Must be nice!)

The disparity between climate hawks and climate skeptics was also evident in responses to other survey questions about disinfecting and social distancing, albeit on a smaller scale. The researchers said that the relatively small gap between climate concerned and unconcerned adults on the question of social distancing — a modest 8 percent — could be due to the fact that local, state, and federal officials started getting out the message about distancing earlier and were clearer about it than they were about disinfecting surfaces and wearing masks. (The CDC only advised Americans to start wearing masks in public in early April.)

Morning Consult cites experts who say there could be two reasons why people who aren’t concerned about climate are less likely to take steps to mitigate the coronavirus pandemic. A general skepticism of science and scientists is one of them. Previous polling has shown a partisan disparity in the way people regard scientists, primarily environmental scientists. In a 2019 poll, 43 percent of Democrats had “a great deal” of confidence in scientists, compared to 27 percent of Republicans. Much of conservatives’ mistrust of science is the result of a long, deliberate disinformation campaign from fossil fuel companies. Now, many of the same conservative pundits and leaders (including the president) who have sown doubt about climate change are also spreading misinformation about the coronavirus.

Concerns about personal autonomy can also help explain the divide in the poll, Emma Frances Bloomfield, an assistant professor in communication studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, told Morning Consult. “Everything that science asks us to do is really sacrificing personal convenience for community convenience and well-being,” Bloomfield said. “And for a lot of people, the coronavirus is invisible, just like climate change is invisible.”

The pandemic has asked a lot of Americans. The climate crisis will surely ask more of us. The question, as we get deeper into the pandemic and more Americans are affected or know someone who has been touched by COVID-19, is whether authority-averse and science-skeptical adults will start drawing connections between their personal choices and scientist’s warnings, or if the pandemic will force everyone deeper into their ideological foxholes.

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Why climate skeptics are less likely to wear coronavirus masks

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Why Are Former Presidents Supposed to Shut Up About Their Successors?

by YettaPreiss Posted on June 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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Since leaving office, Barack Obama has made a few veiled criticisms of Donald Trump. Conservatives are pretty unhappy about this. It’s tradition for ex-presidents to maintain a dignified silence about their successors, after all.

This is mostly true, but when did it become a tradition? It certainly hasn’t been one forever. Herbert Hoover was a constant presence on the radio blasting FDR during the Depression, and Harry Truman remained a gadfly after he left office.

Eisenhower changed things up. After beating Hitler and serving two terms as president, he decided to adopt the elder statesman role. Then Kennedy died before leaving office, LBJ slunk back to Texas a broken man, and Nixon resigned in disgrace. By hook or by crook, the “tradition” of ex-presidential silence was two decades old by the time Reagan became president. It’s mostly held ever since.

Is there a good reason for this? The pretense seems kind of precious to me. Why treat sitting presidents like china dolls who can’t take some heat from their predecessors? Ex-presidents are among the greatest politicians alive, and usually the effective leaders of their party, at least for a while. They typically command a throng of admirers. The most natural thing in the world would be for them to maintain a robust political presence if they want to. Why shouldn’t they?

Ditto for losing presidential candidates. This is usually less of an issue, since most people don’t really want to listen to losers. But not always. Hillary Clinton should never run for office again—and she’s said she won’t—but why shouldn’t she stay loudly involved in politics if she can help lead the loyal opposition until Democrats coalesce around a new party leader?

Does anyone know the answer about this tradition? Is it really just an Eisenhower thing that somehow congealed into conventional wisdom? Do other countries have anything similar?

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Why Are Former Presidents Supposed to Shut Up About Their Successors?

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The Conservative Beef With ESPN Is All About Curt Schilling

by DelilaATPK Posted on May 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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ESPN has been losing viewers for a while now, and there are various theories to account for it. Maybe millennials just aren’t into sports that much. Or maybe cord cutting of all types is the culprit. Or maybe ESPN has gotten too liberal.

That last one is a favorite among conservatives, and I don’t really get it. I’m not a heavy ESPN viewer, but I watch enough to have some sense of its political leanings. And I haven’t really discerned much. Mostly they seem to call games and then argue about whether Tom Brady can play football into his fifties. You know, sports stuff.

But today, Paul Hiebert at the polling firm YouGov presents this chart:

First off, I’m impressed that YouGov has been polling this question since 2013. I wonder why?

In any case, this chart suggests that the problem isn’t liberalism in general, but the fact that ESPN fired Curt Schilling. The Caitlyn Jenner thing hurt for a few months, but by April of 2016 all was forgiven and Republican support of ESPN was back to normal. It was the Curt Schilling affair that killed them. Just to refresh your memory, here’s the Facebook meme he shared that was the final straw:

This was after Schilling “shared a meme that compared extremism in today’s Muslim world to Nazi Germany in 1940 and told a radio station that Hillary Clinton ‘should be buried under a jail somewhere,’ in apparent violation of an ESPN policy on commentary relating to the presidential election.”

So politics is part of the answer after all. But not a slide into liberal politics. Conservatives were mad because Schilling engaged in venomous conservative politics, and eventually ESPN fired him before he did something that could get them sued. Conservatives are always the victims, aren’t they?

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The Conservative Beef With ESPN Is All About Curt Schilling

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Who Really Lives in a Bubble, Anyway?

by AdeleJIZap Posted on January 9, 2017

Mother Jones

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Who really lives in a bubble? The cosmopolitan residents of big cities or the tradition-minded residents of small towns and rural areas?

I don’t know, and I’m not going to try to answer this question. I just want to remind everyone what the actual theory here is. The theory is that although country mice might not personally experience much diversity in their lives, they are saturated with it in the media. They know all about us city mice and how we live because they watch TV and movies, listen to music, and read magazines that relentlessly portray our lives and our beliefs. Nearly all of this media is produced by urban folks, and for the most part it presents cosmopolitan urban lives sympathetically and accurately. Even TV news gets in the act. The three network evening news broadcasts pull an audience massively greater than anything Fox News gets.

Most urban residents, by contrast, don’t know much about small-town life because it’s almost never portrayed in the media except comedically or satirically. They may think of themselves as open-minded and tolerant, but in fact they have little idea of how rural Americans really behave and are openly disdainful of most of their beliefs.

I’m not especially taking sides on this, just pointing out the actual argument that conservatives make. The “bubble” here isn’t a question of whether you have a Somali family living down the street or have never traveled outside the US. The bubble is whether you have some genuine understanding of both American rural life and American city life. Conservatives argue that the country mice do much better on this score than the city mice.

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Who Really Lives in a Bubble, Anyway?

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Now Even Conservatives Are Calling Them "Tax Cuts For the Rich"

by SteffenWheen Posted on December 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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National Review editor Rich Lowry thinks that although Donald Trump’s fans love his populist blather, they might start to lose patience with some of the big programs that Congress tries to pass. For example:

Obamacare “repeal” without a replacement, a deficit-increasing traditional Republican “tax cut for the rich,” and even — although this is much less likely — Medicare reform. Trump may find his political capital depleting rapidly in the cause of passing conventional Republican legislation that isn’t as important to him as his populist calling cards.

I don’t want to make too much of this, but when was the last time you heard a conservative, let alone the editor of NR, refer to tax reform as a “traditional Republican” “tax cut for the rich”? That’s the way liberals jeer at supply-side voodoo. Conservatives insist that tax cuts like Trump’s (or Paul Ryan’s) are “broad based,” “capital deepening,” and “job creating.” They are most definitely not “tax cuts for the rich.”

But now they are. What does this mean?

Originally posted here – 

Now Even Conservatives Are Calling Them "Tax Cuts For the Rich"

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Here’s How Facebook Got Worked

by EnidGroom45106 Posted on November 15, 2016

Mother Jones

There are lots of wingnut sites that traffic in conspiracy theories and urban myths. But that’s not all. There are also fake news sites, deliberately crafted to look real and fool people into believing outrageous stories. The most infamous at the moment is the Denver Guardian, which peddled a fake story written in pseudo-AP style about an FBI agent involved in investigating Hillary Clinton’s emails who was found murdered. Sites like Google and Facebook should work harder to eliminate junk like this from their search results and news feeds, and in Facebook’s case it turns out they have a pretty good idea of how to do it. But Gizmodo reports that they were afraid to pull the trigger:

According to two sources with direct knowledge of the company’s decision-making, Facebook executives conducted a wide-ranging review of products and policies earlier this year, with the goal of eliminating any appearance of political bias. One source said high-ranking officials were briefed on a planned News Feed update that would have identified fake or hoax news stories, but disproportionately impacted right-wing news sites by downgrading or removing that content from people’s feeds. According to the source, the update was shelved and never released to the public. It’s unclear if the update had other deficiencies that caused it to be scrubbed.

“They absolutely have the tools to shut down fake news,” said the source, who asked to remain anonymous citing fear of retribution from the company. The source added, “there was a lot of fear about upsetting conservatives after Trending Topics,” and that “a lot of product decisions got caught up in that.”

This demonstrates the benefit of working the refs. Back in May, an ex-Facebook employee accused Facebook of manipulating its Trending Topics feed to favor liberal stories. Conservatives naturally went ballistic, and their shitstorm of abuse worked: Facebook caved in and agreed to change its process even though there was never any real evidence of liberal bias in the first place.

That was a victory, but not the real victory. The real victory is that it put the fear of God into Facebook, which became hypersensitive to anything that might affect right-wing sites—even if those sites were plainly bogus. And as Mike Caulfield points out, bogus right-wing stories like the Denver Guardian’s get a lot of attention on Facebook:

To put this in perspective, if you combined the top stories from the Boston Globe, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and LA Times, they still had only 5% the viewership of an article from a fake news site that intimated strongly that the Democratic Presidential candidate had had a husband and wife murdered then burned to cover up her crimes.

Facebook probably could have stopped this kind of thing, but their earlier run-in over the Trending Topics feed made them afraid to do anything. That’s how Facebook ended up promoting dozens of right-wing conspiracy theories during a presidential campaign. They had been worked.

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Here’s How Facebook Got Worked

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Court’s CFPB Ruling Is Part of a Dangerous Trend

by MargaritaTejada Posted on October 12, 2016

Mother Jones

Conservatives are thrilled about yesterday’s court decision regarding the CFPB. Here’s Iain Murray:

In a rare victory for the Constitution and American political tradition, the US Court of Appeals from the DC Circuit today found that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was “structurally unconstitutional.” The offending structure consists of an independent agency with a single, all-powerful executive director. The Court found that structure fell between two stools — an agency with a single head needs to be accountable to the President, while an independent agency needs to have internal checks and balances by having a multi-member commission format like the SEC and others.

This judgment echoes the arguments the Competitive Enterprise Institute and its co-plaintiffs have been making in a separate court case, where my colleague Hans Bader argued, “The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s lack of checks and balances violates the Constitution’s separation of powers. Its director is like a czar. He is not accountable to anyone, and can’t be fired even if voters elect a president with different ideas about how to protect consumers.”

There’s no telling if this ruling will hold up on appeal, but if it does, the CFPB director will now serve at the pleasure of the president. This means that President Trump could fire Jeopardy champion Richard Cordray and instead install Apprentice champion Omarosa to oversee America’s financial industry. Luckily, it appears we will be spared that indignity.

I don’t expect this ruling to have a big impact in real life. Basically, it means that a new president will be able to install a new CFPB director immediately instead of having to wait a year or two for the old one to finish out her term. In the long run that’s likely to have a neutral effect on party control of the bureau. As for being able to fire the director without cause, that’s mostly hemmed in by political considerations anyway.

At a practical level, then, I don’t have much heartburn over this. On a more abstract level, though, it represents a disturbing trend from conservatives. In this case, their real problem with the CFPB is that they don’t want to regulate the financial industry at all. Likewise, their problem with Obamacare is that they don’t want to provide poor people with health coverage. Their problem with the EPA’s Clean Power Plan is that they hate regulations that offend their business backers.

But conservatives can’t go to court on those grounds, and there’s nothing obviously illegal or unconstitutional about any of these liberal initiatives. So instead they contrive some other hair-splitting argument. The CFPB is too independent. The individual mandate violates a shiny new constitutional doctrine custom built just for Obamacare. The Clean Power Plan uses the wrong interpretation of the word “system.” These arguments vary in their legitimacy, but that hardly matters. Their goal is not legal brilliance. Their goal is to provide conservative justices with a facade they can use to overturn liberal legislation.

And it works, because these days conservative justices treat hot button cases—and, tellingly, only hot button cases—as a way to enforce their political opinions when they can’t do so through the ballot box. This is not a healthy trend.

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Court’s CFPB Ruling Is Part of a Dangerous Trend

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They Hate Us, They Really Hate Us

by petemcvey8 Posted on August 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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So I’m reading a Jay Nordlinger piece over at The Corner, and he’s pretty unhappy with both Donald Trump and his new campaign guru, Steve Bannon. I’m nodding along as Nordlinger refers to some of the crude hatred that Bannon spews, when I come to this:

It occurred to me that the two phrases already mentioned — “turn on the hate” and “burn this bitch down” — are perfect mottos for the new GOP: the Trump GOP.

I thought of what Roger Scruton said to Mona Charen and me, in a podcast last year:

“I think that, in the end, there is something that unites all conservatives, which is that they are pursuing something they love. My view is that the Left is united by hatred, but we are united by love: love of our country, love of institutions, love of the law, love of family, and so on. And what makes us conservatives is the desire to protect those things, and we’re up against people who want to destroy them, and it’s very simple.”

Seriously? You think lefties are motivated by hatred of our country, hatred of our institutions, hatred of the law, hatred of the family, “and so on”? I know that liberals and conservatives don’t see eye to eye on this stuff, but you’ve at least talked to a few liberals now and then, haven’t you? The ones I know don’t feel anything close to this way. It’s true that there are some aspects of country/institutions/law/family that we’d like to change, but then again, that’s true of conservatives too. Right?

Anyway, if this is truly what you believe, then it’s a little hard for me to see much daylight between you and Trump. What’s your real beef with him, Jay?

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They Hate Us, They Really Hate Us

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Democrats and Republicans Have Mirror Image Race Problems

by SonWinburn Posted on July 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Sunday, Chuck Todd asked Donald Trump about former KKK grand wizard and famous white nationalist David Duke:

On Tuesday, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman asked about Trump’s reply to Todd:

And here is longtime Republican policy wonk Avik Roy:

“Conservative intellectuals, and conservative politicians, have been in kind of a bubble,” Roy says. “We’ve had this view that the voters were with us on conservatism — philosophical, economic conservatism. In reality, the gravitational center of the Republican Party is white nationalism.”

….He expands on this idea: “It’s a common observation on the left, but it’s an observation that a lot of us on the right genuinely believed wasn’t true — which is that conservatism has become, and has been for some time, much more about white identity politics than it has been about conservative political philosophy. I think today, even now, a lot of conservatives have not come to terms with that problem.”

Trump’s politics of aggrieved white nationalism — labeling black people criminals, Latinos rapists, and Muslims terrorists — succeeded because the party’s voting base was made up of the people who once opposed civil rights. “Trump tapped into something that was latent in the Republican Party and conservative movement — but a lot of people in the conservative movement didn’t notice,” Roy concludes, glumly.

The problem for Republicans is simple to describe: it’s not that their leaders are racist, but that they’ve long tolerated racism in their ranks. They know this perfectly well, and they know that they have to broaden their appeal beyond just whites. But they’re stuck. If they do that—say, by supporting comprehensive immigration reform or easing up on opposition to affirmative action—their white base goes ballistic. In the end, they never make the base-broadening moves that they all know they have to make eventually.

For Democrats, the problem is the mirror image. Bashing Donald Trump and his supporters for their white nationalism helps with their base, but it’s the worst possible way to attract working-class whites who might be attracted to traditional Democratic economic messages. Once you say the word “racism,” the conversation is over. Potentially persuadable voters won’t hear another word you say.

As long as this remains the case, Democrats will routinely win the presidency because their non-white base is growing every year. But Republicans will routinely win the House—and sometimes the Senate—because way more than half of all congressional districts are majority white. Result: endless gridlock.

I wish I knew the answer.

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Democrats and Republicans Have Mirror Image Race Problems

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Why Is Donald Trump Trying to Raise Money From Legislators in Iceland?

by RussellKossak Posted on July 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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The latest weirdness from the Donald Trump campaign is its June fundraising efforts. Trump is apparently having trouble raising money from the usual Republican suspects, but wants to avoid the embarrassment of yet another FEC report showing that he has no money. So he’s turning to small-dollar fundraising via email. This shouldn’t have been a problem. Conservatives mastered this approach to raising money a long time ago, so all Trump had to do was hire one of the many firms who have accumulated gigantic email lists and specialize in wringing donations out of ordinary citizens.

But apparently he didn’t do that. For the past few days, reports have come in of people overseas being spammed with Trump fundraising emails. And not just any foreigners: members of foreign parliaments. This is peculiar, to say the least. First, it’s illegal. Foreigners aren’t allowed to contribute to presidential campaigns. Second, it’s easy to avoid. Just purge your email list of addresses ending in .uk, .dk, etc. Any experienced email shop would already have done this. So where did Trump’s email list come from?

Josh Marshall has been following this for several days, and he has a theory:

So Tim Watts is my new best friend in the Australian federal parliament. MP Tim Watts. Needless to say, we’re pals now because he’s getting bombarded by the Trump campaign asking for money to fight ‘Crooked Hillary’….When I chatted with Tim last night (US Time) he said he’d gotten two more Trump emails in the last 7 hours hours. But when he showed me the emails, something pretty weird was immediately apparent.

They weren’t actually just from Trump. One was from the Trump campaign. The other was from a pro-Trump Super Pac called Crippled America PAC.

Now, normally (i.e., completely separate from anything to do with Trump) it would be entirely unremarkable that someone was getting fundraising emails both from a campaign and also Super PACs supporting the campaign. They’re likely both buying lists from the same vendor or even different vendors of likely Trump voters.

But remember, Tim is a foreign citizen and part of the government in another country. We’ve already speculated about the various ways all these foreign legislators could have ended up on Trump’s list. The more we’ve looked into it, it seems increasingly implausible that he got this list from a list vendor. Not impossible just not likely at all. It now seems more probable that the Trump Organization simply had these emails in some business related database and decided to dump them into the email hopper for the fundraising blitz or just found some site that had a zip file of foreign government officials and used that.

….Given what I’ve said above, the existence of this list almost has to originate in Trump Derpland. A virtual certainty. So how did the same list end up in the hands of a Trump SuperPac? I looked up Crippled America PAC and as of their last filing just a couple weeks ago, they’re total budget was $40. No m or b after that $ sign, forty bucks, the price of a fancy dinner. So obviously CAP was just stood up and actually started operating just now. And now they’re showing up in Tim’s inbox.

Marshall believes that this is a pretty obvious sign of coordination between the Trump campaign and a Trump Super PAC, which is a big non-no. What’s more, they didn’t even bother trying to hide it. There are undoubtedly ways they could have coordinated while still passing legal muster, but either they didn’t have time for that or didn’t know they weren’t allowed to coordinate or just didn’t care.

Wherever the list came from, I guess it’s a pretty lousy one: I’ve gotten several Trump fundraising emails too, and I’m pretty sure there’s nothing in my background that suggests I’d be soft touch for a Trump donation. Conversely, I never received a Ben Carson email while he was busy with his campaign grift. Apparently he at least cared enough to hire a decent vendor.

A sample from Monday is on the right. It comes from contact@victoryemails.com, whatever that is. I got another one from rnc@gopvictory.com, which I suppose originates from the Republican National Committee? All very strange.

Originally posted here – 

Why Is Donald Trump Trying to Raise Money From Legislators in Iceland?

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