J.D. Vance, the False Prophet of Blue America →

Sarah Jones, writing for The New Republic:

Set aside the anti-government bromides that could have been ripped from a random page of National Review, where Vance is a regular contributor. There is a more sinister thesis at work here, one that dovetails with many liberal views of Appalachia and its problems. Vance assures readers that an emphasis on Appalachia’s economic insecurity is “incomplete” without a critical examination of its culture. His great takeaway from life in America’s underclass is: Pull up those bootstraps. Don’t question elites. Don’t ask if they erred by granting people mortgages and lines of credit they couldn’t afford to repay. Don’t call it what it is—corporate deception—or admit that it plunged this country into one of the worst economic crises it’s ever experienced.

No wonder Peter Thiel, the almost comically evil Silicon Valley libertarian, endorsed the book. (Vance also works for Thiel’s Mithril Capital Management.) The question is why so many liberals are doing the same.

I’ve been one of those liberals, pushing this book and some of the ideologies within it. I think this piece may flatten out the depth a bit, but I felt it necessary to post it, since it is one of the few on-the-contrary piece I’ve seen about what has otherwise been a universally praised book.

I think one of the reasons liberals have flocked to it is because it’s written in a “language” people unfamiliar with the terrain can understand, while acting as a door into that terrain, and because of that, I still think it is worthy of reading.

There’s No Such Thing as a Good Trump Voter →

Jamelle Bouie, writing for Slate:

It’s worth repeating what Trump said throughout the election. His campaign indulged in hateful rhetoric against Hispanics and condemned Muslim Americans with the collective guilt of anyone who would commit terror. It treated black America as a lawless dystopia and spoke of black Americans as dupes and fools. And to his supporters, Trump promised mass deportations, a ban on Muslim entry to the United States, and strict “law and order” as applied to those black communities. Trump is now president-elect. Judging from his choices for the transition—figures like immigration hardliner Kris Kobach and white nationalist Stephen Bannon—it’s clear he plans to deliver on those promises.

Whether Trump’s election reveals an “inherent malice” in his voters is irrelevant. What is relevant are the practical outcomes of a Trump presidency.

Since the day after the election, I’ve been, for the most, pushing an ideology that mostly resembles what Bouie dismantles here. I was familiar with his argument/this argument; he made it already on, I believe, Slate’s Trumpcast podcast. I understand what he’s saying and while I don’t think he’s wrong, I don’t think he’s giving enough credence to compartmentalization, and just how far some people will go, or feel they have to go. Again though, as I’ve been quick to point out, my station in life allows me the latitude to worry about compartmentilization. Others don’t have that luxury.

Before the election, many wondered out loud about where the vitriol Trump had released in a certain class of Americans would go after the election. They assumed a Trump defeat. Now that Trump has won, I think it’s still a major question to grapple with.

Where Even Nightmares Are Classified: Psychiatric Care at Guantánamo →

Sheri Fink, writing for The New York Times:

In recent interviews, more than two dozen military medical personnel who served or consulted at Guantánamo provided the most detailed account to date of mental health care there. Almost from the start, the shadow of interrogation and mutual suspicion tainted the mission of those treating prisoners. That limited their effectiveness for years to come.

Psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses and technicians received little training for the assignment and, they said, felt unprepared to tend to men they were told were “the worst of the worst.” Doctors felt pushed to cross ethical boundaries, and were warned that their actions, at an institution roiled by detainees’ organized resistance, could have political and national security implications.

Rotations lasted only three to nine months, making it difficult to establish rapport. In a field that requires intimacy, the psychiatrists and their teams long used pseudonyms like Major Psych, Dr. Crocodile, Superman and Big Momma, and referred to patients by serial numbers, not names. They frequently had to speak through fences or slits in cell doors, using interpreters who also worked with interrogators.

Wary patients often declined to talk to the mental health teams. (“Detainee refused to interact,” medical records note repeatedly.) At a place so shrouded in secrecy that for years any information learned from a detainee was to be treated as classified, what went on in interrogations “was completely restricted territory,” said Karen Thurman, a Navy commander, now retired, who served as a psychiatric nurse practitioner at Guantánamo. “‘How did it go?’” Or “‘Did they hit you?’ We were not allowed to ask that,” she said.

Dr. Rosecrans said she held back on such questions when she was there in 2004, not suspecting abuse and feeling constrained by the prison environment. “From a surgical perspective, you never open up a wound you cannot close,” she said. “Unless you have months, years, to help this person and help them get out of this hole, why would you ever do this?”

Remember this piece when Donald Trump again calls for the return of torture, including waterboarding and “much worse.”

Bloomberg in 2015 on Steve Bannon: 'This Man Is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America' →

Joshua Green, writing for Bloomberg:

Breitbart, who also lived in Los Angeles, had a profound influence on Bannon. When they met, Breitbart was starting his website, after having worked with Drudge and having helped Arianna Huffington launch the Huffington Post. Bannon lent his financial acumen and office space. He marveled at Breitbart’s visceral feel for the news cycle and his ability to shape coverage through the Drudge Report, which is avidly followed by TV producers and news editors.

“One of the things I admired about him was that the dirtiest word for him was ‘punditry,’ ” says Bannon. “Our vision—Andrew’s vision—was always to build a global, center-right, populist, anti-establishment news site.” With this in mind, he set out to line up investors.

Bannon continued making documentaries—big, crashing, opinionated films with Wagner scores and arresting imagery: Battle for America (2010), celebrating the Tea Party; Generation Zero (2010), examining the roots of the financial meltdown; The Undefeated (2011), championing Palin. In the Bannon repertoire, no metaphor is too direct. His films are peppered with footage of lions attacking helpless gazelles, seedlings bursting from the ground into glorious bloom. Palin, for one, ate it up and traveled to Iowa, trailed by hundreds of reporters, to appear with him at a 2011 screening in Pella that the press thought might signal her entrance into the 2012 presidential race. (No such luck.) Breitbart came along as promoter and ringmaster. When I spoke with him afterward, he described Bannon, with sincere admiration, as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party movement.

You’re a Trump supporter. You tell me that I’m overreacting to Trump’s statements at rallies, that it was all bluster and locker room talk, that I should give him a chance—the space—to succeed. I swallow my pride and agree.

Explain to me, then, considering all those facts, what Steve Bannon is doing in the White House.

Autocracy: Rules for Survival →

Masha Gessen, writing for the New York Review of Books:

But Trump is anything but a regular politician and this has been anything but a regular election. Trump will be only the fourth candidate in history and the second in more than a century to win the presidency after losing the popular vote. He is also probably the first candidate in history to win the presidency despite having been shown repeatedly by the national media to be a chronic liar, sexual predator, serial tax-avoider, and race-baiter who has attracted the likes of the Ku Klux Klan. Most important, Trump is the first candidate in memory who ran not for president but for autocrat—and won.

I have lived in autocracies most of my life, and have spent much of my career writing about Vladimir Putin’s Russia. I have learned a few rules for surviving in an autocracy and salvaging your sanity and self-respect. It might be worth considering them now.

I waited a couple of days to read this piece. It got passed around quickly; at some points, it was obvious that people were just reading the headline and clicking share, continuing to take photographs of the people taking photographs of the people taking photographs of the most photographed barn in America.

The picture that Gessen paints is bleak. Terrifying. But her comparison, overall, of the situation unfolding now in the United States to what was playing out in Weimar Republic-era Germany, and post-Soviet Russia, as well as present-day Poland and Turkey, is absurd. They’re not even remotely the same. She pays lip service to that idea a couple of times, but not much more.

As I’ve been preaching since Tuesday, this is not the time for complacency. It is also not the time for hysteria. I remain steadfast in my belief that what we’re witnessing now is not the beginning of a movement, but instead, is the last gasp of a declining set of beliefs. From a distance, the two can look similar.

For now, save your outrage for the outrageous.

The Devil and Father Amorth: Witnessing “the Vatican Exorcist” at Work →

William Friedkin (yes, the director of ‘The Exorcist’) , writing for Vanity Fair:

Rosa had no apparent medical symptoms. It was Father Amorth’s belief that her affliction stemmed from a curse brought against her by her brother’s girlfriend, said to be a witch. The brother and his girlfriend were members of a powerful demonic cult, Father Amorth believed.

I sat two feet away from Rosa as her torment became visible. Her family stood against a wall to my right. Father Amorth invited everyone to join him in saying the Lord’s Prayer and Hail Mary. Then he invoked Saint Joseph, Padre Pio, Father Amantini, and the Blessed Virgin, asking for their protection.

Rosa’s head began to nod involuntarily. Her eyes rolled back, and she fell into a deep trance. Father Amorth spoke in Latin in a loud, clear voice, using the Roman ritual of Paul V, from 1614. He asked the Lord to set her free from demonic infestation. “EXORCIZO DEO IMMUNDISSIMUS SPIRITUS.” (I exorcize, O God, this unclean spirit.)

Rosa’s body began to throb, and she cried out, before falling back into a trance. Father Amorth placed his right hand over her heart. “INFER TIBI LIBERA.” (Set yourself free.)

She lost consciousness. “TIME SATANA INIMICI FIDEM.” (Be afraid of Satan and the enemies of faith.)

Without warning, Rosa began to thrash violently. The five male helpers had all they could do to hold her down. A foam formed at her lips.

I’m not totally sure why this didn’t become one of those articles that everyone passes around for a couple of days on the internet, but it’s crazy interesting and well read and we could all use a distraction right now and I mean, c’mon—it’s William friggen Friedkin writing about actual exorcisms!

When Hillary and Donald Were Friends →

Maureen Dowd, writing for The New York Times Magazine:

In the “single compact arena” of New York, E.B. White wrote, a gladiator and a promoter can come together in a city vibrating with great undertakings. “These two names, for the last two or three decades, represent what has been incredible and vulgar about this country at the same time,” says the Manhattan ad man and television personality Donny Deutsch. “We can trace our downfalls or upticks as a society through them.” The story of how Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton rose and reinvented themselves and embraced and brawled is the story of New York itself. It is a tale of power, influence, class, society and ambition that might have intrigued Edith Wharton, whose family once owned a grand home down the block from what is now Trump Tower.

When we discuss this campaign cycle in the future, another component of the history, that isn’t being discussed so much now, will be how intertwined these two people—and their families—were so far in advance of their actual battle. Star-crossed lovers, even.

The Media Never Raised the Bar for Donald Trump →

Brian Beutler, writing for New Republic:

Donald Trump’s closing argument is that he can use a teleprompter. Not necessarily that the words he reads off the teleprompter are true or intelligent, just that he can say all of them out loud and in order. In the final days of this campaign, we have returned to where we began, with an odd fixation on whether this man who aspires to the presidency can avoid saying anything ignorant, bigoted, inscrutable, or otherwise disqualifying for an hour or so at a time, once or twice a day.

There has been much talk in the past year or so about what we will talk about “when we look back on this election.” I think this element—the shocking false equivalency of the two campaigns—is the sneaky favorite.

The Media vs. Donald Trump →

Ezra Klein, writing for Vox:

There is a case to be made that the media created Donald Trump. It was, reportedly, his anger at being dismissed by political pundits that led him to run for president in the first place. And it was, arguably, the media’s wall-to-wall coverage of his every utterance that powered his victory in the Republican primary.

But slowly, surely, the media has turned on Trump. He still gets wall-to-wall coverage, but that coverage is overwhelmingly negative. Increasingly, the press doesn’t even pretend to treat Trump like a normal candidate: CNN’s chyrons fact-check him in real time; the Washington Post reacted to being banned from Trump with a shrug; BuzzFeed News published a memo telling reporters it was fine to call Trump "a mendacious racist" on social media; the New York Times published a viral video in which it simply quoted the most vile statements it heard from Trump’s supporters.

This is not normal.

This piece is a bit meandering, a little at war with itself, but I think it reflects overall what I’ve been saying from the start—the Left thinks the media is biased and the Right thinks the media is biased. You know what that means? The media is doing something right.

What We Learned About Trump's Supporters This Week →

Ryan Lizza, writing for The New Yorker:

On Friday, a researcher with Gallup brought some much-needed data and clarity to this debate. Jonathan Rothwell, an economist who drew on eighty-seven thousand interviews in the organization’s polling database, expected to find that Trump’s strongest base of support existed in areas of America adversely affected by international free-trade agreements and lax immigration policy. He made a surprising discovery.

There are certainly people out there who have casted their lot in with Trump as an economic penny-in-a-fountain. Their stories are easy to find if you’re willing to read and/or listen enough (I have). But those people, unfortunately, are part of a group that also includes the type of people that Rothwell details here—folks who, consciously or not, see the Great in Trump’s infamous slogan as a synonym for White. And while I don’t think folks, who by no fault of their own, have found themselves staring down the barrel of a job market, an economy, that they no longer recognize, I’m reminded here of the chorus of an H2O song that I listened to as a teenager:

Guilty by association
Judged for who I know
Can’t keep all my friends out of trouble
When they got no place to go