Tag Archives: Republican Party

Columnists Are Deeply Concerned About the Election

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I’m still avoiding “news” about Tuesday’s election, but many people who write for a living are expressing these two points:

  • Republican politicians no longer even pretend to care about morality.
  • The election will be a choice between democracy and autocracy.

They don’t need to mention that democracy may lose.

From “The New Nihilists” by Sarah Longwell for Persuasion:

These midterms are proving how deep the GOP rot runs.

The crop of Republican candidates running in the midterms has taken immorality to a whole new level. [She then cites scandalous behavior by three of their Senate candidates, Lake, Oz and Walker.]

What was the response from GOP leaders and media figures? In essence: “LOL, nothing matters”. 

It’s a baffling turn for those of us who grew up in an era where the Republican Party built its public brand around morality and character….Until a few years ago, the GOP still defended virtue rhetorically, even when it fell short and engaged in double standards….

In 2022, by contrast, the GOP ignores or perverts virtue altogether. [Their leader] has spawned hundreds of GOP candidates who ape his lies about the 2020 election, his corruption, and his combative style. Candidates of low character—like Lake, Oz, and Walker—are the rule in the GOP, rather than the exception. According to the old saying, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue—and Republicans have resolved their hypocrisy in favor of vice.   

From “Well, America, You Were a Good Idea While You Lasted” by Charles Pierce for Esquire:

The GOP have finally abandoned the last shreds of common decency, the rule of law and other American ideals.

It was this weekend that I finally gave up. I have watched the steady descent of American conservatism—and its primary public vehicle, the Republican Party—into the terminal depths of the prion disease it acquired when Ronald Reagan, Richard Viguerie and Jerry Falwell first fed it the monkey-brains back in the late 1970s….

I mocked it and inveighed against it. Better people than I … have spent four decades warning us what was coming unless the prion disease was kept in check….

The public episodes are now too numerous to mention…. They are beyond anyone’s reach. They are beyond logic and reason. They left democratic norms and customs far behind decades ago. They are beyond political compromise. They are beyond checks and balances, and they have drifted off into the void of a space far beyond the Constitution.

From “We Need to Be Clear About Who Pushed Us to the Breaking Point” by Jamelle Bouie for The New York Times:

The Democratic Party is, at this moment, the only viable political party with a serious commitment to free and fair elections. And in a country where power alternates between two major parties, this means American democracy is in real trouble….

It is simply the truth of the matter. If you oppose the effort to nullify Democratic election victories and create systems of minority rule (the Republican running for governor of Wisconsin said, for example, that “Republicans will never lose another election in Wisconsin after I’m elected governor”), then there’s only one real choice on the ballot….

Democrats did not make democracy a partisan issue. Republicans did. They did when they stood with Donald Trump in the wake of Jan. 6; they did when they embraced “Stop the steal” and election-denying candidates; they did when they made light of the threats against Nancy Pelosi and the assault on her husband.

There is nothing stopping Republican candidates and Republican voters and Republican leaders from pursuing their partisan and ideological goals while keeping their commitment to free and fair elections. There is nothing stopping them from rejecting antidemocracy extremists in their midst and affirming the vital principles of popular sovereignty, rule of law and political equality. There is nothing stopping them, in other words, from making a different set of choices about the kind of political party they wish to be part of.

It’s not Democrats who left the voting public with only one choice if they want to protect democracy as they know it….

Bouie adds that this kind of politics appeals to some:

When politicians and other political leaders 
 drop the pretense of virtue and embrace a politics of cruelty and malice, in which nothing matters but the will to power — voters act accordingly. Some may recoil, but just as many will embrace the chance to live vicariously through leaders who celebrate vice and hold virtue in contempt.

Others have other things on their mind (by Michael de Adder for The Washington Post):

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President Biden Speaks to the Nation Again, but Ignores a Big Part of the Story

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Last night, President Biden gave a televised speech about the right-wing attack on democracy. But he didn’t express the obvious truth that most Republican politicians are in on it. Maybe he actually believes it’s just those extreme MAGA Republicans we have to worry about, not the average ones who are lukewarm on democracy and the rule of law. Anyway, here’s most of what he said:

Just a few days ago, a little before 2:30 a.m. in the morning, a man smashed the back windows and broke into the home of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the third-highest-ranking official in America. He carried in his backpack zip ties, duct tape, rope and a hammer.

As he told the police, he had come looking for Nancy Pelosi to take her hostage, to interrogate her, to threaten to break her kneecaps. But she wasn’t there. Her husband … was home alone. The assailant tried to take Paul hostage….

The assailant entered the home asking: “Where’s Nancy? Where’s Nancy?” Those are the very same words used by the mob when they stormed the United States Capitol on January 6th, when they broke windows, kicked in the doors, brutally attacked law enforcement, roamed the corridors hunting for officials and erected gallows….

It was an enraged mob that had been whipped up into a frenzy by a president repeating over and over again the Big Lie, that the election of 2020 had been stolen. It’s a lie that’s fueled the dangerous rise in political violence and voter intimidation over the past two years.

Even before January 6th, we saw election officials and election workers in a number of states subjected to menacing calls, physical threats, even threats to their lives…. 

This intimidation, this violence against Democrats, Republicans and nonpartisan officials just doing their jobs, are the consequence of lies told for power and profit, lies of conspiracy and malice, lies repeated over and over to generate a cycle of anger, hate, vitriol and even violence.

In this moment, we have to confront those lies with the truth. The very future of our nation depends on it. My fellow Americans, we’re facing a defining moment, an inflection point. We must with one overwhelming unified voice speak as a country and say there’s no place, no place for voter intimidation or political violence in America. Whether it’s directed at Democrats or Republicans. No place, period. No place ever.

I speak today near Capitol Hill, near the U.S. Capitol, the citadel of our democracy. I know there’s a lot at stake in these midterm elections, from our economy, to the safety of our streets, to our personal freedoms, to the future of health care and Social Security, Medicare. It’s all important. But we’ll have our differences, we’ll have our difference of opinion. And that’s what it’s supposed to be.

But there’s something else at stake, democracy itself. I’m not the only one who sees it. Recent polls have shown an overwhelming majority of Americans believe our democracy is at risk, that our democracy is under threat. They too see that democracy is on the ballot this year, and they’re deeply concerned about it. [Note: The president failed to point out that Democrats are worried about a real threat to democracy, while Republicans are worried about an imaginary one premised on the Big Lie. Voting by mail? Truckloads of counterfeit ballots?]

So today, I appeal to all Americans, regardless of party, to meet this moment of national and generational importance. We must vote knowing what’s at stake and not just the policy of the moment. Institutions that have held us together as we’ve sought a more perfect union are also at stake. We must vote knowing who we have been, what we’re at risk of becoming.

Look, my fellow Americans, the old expression, “Freedom is not free,” it requires constant vigilance. From the very beginning, nothing has been guaranteed about democracy in America. Every generation has had to defend it, protect it, preserve it, choose it. For that’s what democracy is. It’s a choice, a decision of the people, by the people and for the people. The issue couldn’t be clearer, in my view.

We the people must decide whether we will have fair and free elections, and every vote counts. We the people must decide whether we’re going to sustain a republic, where reality’s accepted, the law is obeyed and your vote is truly sacred.

We the people must decide whether the rule of law will prevail or whether we will allow the dark forces and thirst for power put ahead of the principles that have long guided us.

You know, American democracy is under attack because the defeated former president of the United States refused to accept the results of the 2020 election. If he refuses to accept the will of the people, if he refuses to accept the fact that he lost, he’s abused his power and put the loyalty to himself before loyalty to the Constitution. And he’s made a big lie an article of faith in the MAGA Republican Party, the minority of that party [Unfortunately, recent polls say up to 60% of Republicans accept the lie.]

The great irony about the 2020 election is that it’s the most attacked election in our history. And, yet, there’s no election in our history that we can be more certain of its results. Every legal challenge that could have been brought was brought. Every recount that could have been undertaken was undertaken. Every recount confirmed the results. Wherever fact or evidence had been demanded, the Big Lie has been proven to be just that, a big lie. Every single time.

Yet now extreme MAGA Republicans aim to question not only the legitimacy of past elections, but elections being held now and into the future. The extreme MAGA element of the Republican Party [is] its driving force. It’s trying to succeed where they failed in 2020, to suppress the right of voters and subvert the electoral system itself. That means denying your right to vote and deciding whether your vote even counts.

Instead of waiting until an election is over, they’re starting well before it. They’re starting now. They’ve emboldened violence and intimidation of voters and election officials. It’s estimated that there are more than 300 election deniers on the ballot all across America this year. We can’t ignore the impact this is having on our country. It’s damaging, it’s corrosive and it’s destructive.

And I want to be very clear, this is not about me, it’s about all of us…. It’s about the durability of our democracy. For democracies are more than a form of government. They’re a way of being, a way of seeing the world, a way that defines who we are, what we believe, why we do what we do. Democracy is simply that fundamental.

We must, in this moment, dig deep within ourselves and recognize that we can’t take democracy for granted any longer. With democracy on the ballot, we have to remember these first principles. Democracy means the rule of the people, not the rule of monarchs or the moneyed, but the rule of the people.

Autocracy is the opposite of democracy. It means the rule of one, one person, one interest, one ideology, one party. To state the obvious, the lives of billions of people, from antiquity till now, have been shaped by the battle between these competing forces, between the aspirations of the many and the greed and power of the few, between the people’s right for self-determination, and the self-seeking autocrat, between the dreams of a democracy and the appetites of an autocracy.

What we’re doing now is going to determine whether democracy will long endure and, in my view, it is the biggest of questions, whether the American system that prizes the individual bends toward justice and depends on the rule of law, whether that system will prevail. This is the struggle we’re now in….

There’s been anger before in America. There’s been division before in America. But we’ve never given up on the American experiment. And we can’t do that now.… We have to face this problem. We can’t turn away from it. We can’t pretend it’s just going to solve itself.

There’s an alarming rise in the number of our people in this country condoning political violence, or simply remaining silent, because silence is complicity. To the disturbing rise of voter intimidation, the pernicious tendency to excuse political violence or at least, at least trying to explain it away. We can’t allow this sentiment to grow. We must confront it head on now. It has to stop now….

Look, even as I speak here tonight, 27 million people have already cast their ballot in the midterm elections. Millions more will cast their ballots in the final days leading up to November the 9th — 8th, excuse me…. Once again we’re seeing record turnout all over the country. And that’s good. We want Americans to vote. We want every American’s voice to be heard. Now we have to move the process forward. We know that more and more ballots are cast in early voting or by mail in America. We know that many states don’t start counting those ballots till after the polls close on Nov. 8.

That means in some cases we won’t know the winner of the election for a few days — until a few days after the election. It takes time to count all legitimate ballots in a legal and orderly manner. It’s always been important for citizens in the democracy to be informed and engaged. Now it’s important for a citizen to be patient as well. That’s how this is supposed to work.

This is the first election since the events of January 6th, 2021….I wish I could say the assault on our democracy ended that day, but I cannot.

As I stand here today, there are candidates running for every level of office in America — for governor, Congress, attorney general, secretary of state — who won’t commit, that will not commit to accepting the results of the election that they’re running in. This is a path to chaos in America. It’s unprecedented. It’s unlawful, and it’s un-American.

… So I ask you to think long and hard about the moment we’re in. In a typical year, we’re not faced with questions of whether the vote we cast will preserve democracy or put us at risk. But this year we are. This year I hope you’ll make the future of our democracy an important part of your decision to vote and how you vote….You have the power, it’s your choice, it’s your decision, the fate of the nation, the fate of the soul of America lies where it always does, with the people, in your hands, in your heart, in your ballot….

It’s a Global Problem — They’d Make It Worse

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I’m avoiding polls and speculation about the upcoming midterm election and don’t see political advertisements, but political news and commentary does get through. Today, Paul Krugman discussed the state of the economy and pointed out that Republican politicians don’t have a plan to address what they say is the country’s biggest problem (since the climate crisis isn’t real, women shouldn’t have equal rights and democracy is overrated):

Few things I’ve written in recent years have generated as much hate mail as a relatively low-key, somewhat nerdy newsletter I put out just before the release of data on gross domestic product for the second quarter of 2022. In that newsletter I explained why, despite a lot of misinformation in the news media, a recession is not defined as two quarters of declining G.D.P. and the first half of 2022 was unlikely to meet the actual, multidimensional criteria used by the committee that determines whether a recession has started.

The reason for the hate mail was, of course, that Republicans were eager to declare a “Biden recession” and falsely accused the administration of a double standard when it said that we were not, in fact, in a recession.

Well, Thursday’s advance G.D.P. report for the third quarter of 2022 showed why a recession call based on two quarters of somewhat bizarre data would have been all wrong. Economic growth has rebounded, back up to 2.6 percent at an annual rate — putting G.D.P. back in line with strong employment growth, which has continued throughout the year. Do you really want to say that we were in a recession from January through June but have miraculously recovered?

… Suffice it to say, we weren’t in a recession earlier this year and aren’t in a recession now, although we could find ourselves in one in the future as delayed effects of rising interest rates kick in.

Politically, however, it may not matter much, because Republicans have largely given up on the recession story. Instead, their economic attacks, in both debates and campaign ads, have been focused overwhelmingly on inflation, especially gas prices.

It therefore seems worth pointing out that the Republican Party doesn’t have a plan to fight inflation. Actually, it doesn’t have any coherent economic plan at all. But to the extent that Republicans have laid out what they will try to do if they win the midterms, their policies would make inflation worse, not better.

When pressed about how, exactly, they would reduce inflation, Republicans often fall back on some version of “Gas was only $2 a gallon when Trump left office!” So let’s talk about that comparison.

First, it’s remarkable how the right has reimagined January 2021 as a golden moment for America. At the time, about 20,000 Americans were dying from Covid every week; there were still nine million fewer jobs than there had been before the pandemic. Indeed, the still-depressed state of major economies, including that of the United States, was the main reason world oil prices were unusually low, which in turn was the main reason gas was cheap.

A better comparison would be with 2019, the year before the pandemic, when gas averaged $2.60 a gallon. Bear in mind that average wages have risen about 15 percent over the past three years, so gas would be as affordable now as it was in 2019 if its current average price were $2.99. As of Wednesday, it was $3.75. So yes, gas has become less affordable, but not by nearly as much as Republicans claim.

And despite Republican rhetoric, Biden administration policies have had little impact on gas prices, which have been driven by events affecting world markets — notably Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and to some extent by bottlenecks in refining, which grew worse for several weeks starting in mid-September but have eased again.

So what is the Republican plan to bring gas prices down? There isn’t one.

What about inflation more generally? You can make the case that large deficit spending early in the Biden presidency fed inflation (although it had little effect on the most politically salient prices, for energy and food, which have soared around the world).

If you’re worried about the inflationary impact of budget deficits, however, you should know that almost the only concrete economic policy idea we’re hearing from Republicans is that they want to extend the Trump tax cuts, which would 
 substantially increase the deficit.

It’s true that many Republicans adhere to an economic ideology that doesn’t see deficits caused by tax cuts as a problem, either because they believe — in the teeth of all the evidence — that tax cuts somehow pay for themselves, or because they believe that government spending, not deficits per se, is what causes problems.

But if you believe that cutting taxes without any plausible plan for offsetting spending cuts isn’t a problem even in a time of inflation, markets beg to disagree. Look at what happened to the pound and British interest rates after Liz Truss, the quickly deposed prime minister, announced an economic plan that, broadly speaking, looks a lot like what Republicans are proposing here. (There’s more to it than that, but still.)

The bottom line is that while the G.O.P.’s election strategy is all about blaming the Biden administration for inflation, the Republican Party doesn’t actually have any plan to reduce inflation. To the extent it has an economic plan at all, it would make inflation worse.

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I’ll add that inflation is a global problem (it’s higher in Europe than in the Us) and oil companies are making tremendous profits with gas prices this high. What would a Republican Congress do to restrain oil company profiteering? The question answers itself.

If You Can Keep It

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A headline from the New York Times:

Voters See Democracy in Peril, but Saving It Isn’t a Priority

That’s the conclusion they drew from their latest poll. They should have said it’s not the highest priority, but headline writers aren’t known for accuracy.

In this poll, they asked registered voters “What do you think is the MOST important problem facing the country today?” Forty-five percent of the registered voters said that either “the economy (including jobs, stock market)” or “inflation or the cost of living” are the biggest problem (26% picked the economy and 19% picked inflation).

It’s not clear why anybody would say the economy is our biggest problem. Job growth has been excellent since the pandemic eased. Average wages have increased. Store shelves aren’t empty. But we don’t know where those voters get their news, so it’s hard to know what myths they accept. Some probably equate the stock market with the economy (like the people who wrote that question for the poll), while others are upset by their portfolios going down (after going up for so long).

It’s true that inflation is a problem (for some people more than others) and it’s in the news a lot, so it makes sense that 1 in 5 registered voters said it’s the country’s biggest concern at the moment. Presumably, when inflation slows down, probably next year, it won’t bother them so much. For context, it’s worth noting that of the world’s 23 leading economies, the U.S. has an inflation rate near the middle (9 countries have higher inflation and 13 have lower). The Federal Reserve is responding to inflation aggressively, but current inflation is a global phenomenon.

So what about democracy being “in peril”? It was the third most popular answer at 9%. Unfortunately, given what’s going on these days, that 9% is less than reassuring. Roughly half of that 9% thought it’s the Democrats who are attacking our democracy. The Big Lie is now gospel for Republicans, including most of them running for office this year (In case you’re wondering, climate change only got 3%.)

Since the state of the economy tends to determine election results and majority parties tend to lose midterm elections, things don’t look good for the Democrats next month unless women, reacting to our renegade Supreme Court, turn out in record numbers.

All of which leads me to ask: how did we get to a place where half the country prefers a party led by an ex-president who tried to overturn the last election — and on top of that is a truly horrible person? And on top of that is dedicated to bringing back the 1950s (except for that decade’s high taxes on the rich), when anybody who wasn’t a white, supposedly Christian man was treated like a second-class citizen?

Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times thinks this situation isn’t all that strange:
“The U.S. Thinks It Can’t Happen Here. It Already Has”. After slavery was finally abolished and we’d killed enough American Indians, there was the legalized oppression of Jim Crow

If we date the beginning of Jim Crow to the 1890s — when white Southern politicians began to mandate racial separation and when the Supreme Court affirmed it — then close to three generations of American elites lived with and largely accepted the existence of a political system that made a mockery of American ideals of self-government and the rule of law….

For most of this country’s history, America’s democratic institutions and procedures and ideals existed alongside forms of exclusion, domination and authoritarianism. Although we’ve taken real strides toward making this a less hierarchical country, with a more representative government, there is no iron law of history that says that progress will continue unabated or that the authoritarian tradition in American politics won’t reassert itself.

That’s all true, but I’d look to more recent history to understand when our democracy began to weaken. It was baby-faced provocateur Newt Gingrich who taught his fellow Republicans to demonize Democrats using words like “traitor”, “sick” and “anti-child” (he actually sent them a memo in 1996). Then there was the fervid search for a way to use the legal system to remove Bill Clinton from office. The national media helped in the 2000 campaign by portraying unexceptional George W. Bush as a regular guy and Al Gore as a lying robot, but it was the Republican majority on the Supreme Court who used Bush v. Gore to make sure their side won. Lots of Republicans never accepted Obama as president, believing that somebody like him wasn’t really an American. He won two elections, but Senate Republicans denied him the ability to add a Democrat to the Supreme Court. We then had the farcical 2016 campaign, when the biggest story in America was Hillary Clinton’s email server and the Republican FBI director decided to intervene at the last moment. Enough of us were disgusted by four years of a president with no redeeming qualities to deny him a second term, but a recent poll suggests he’d beat Joe Biden in 2024.

So we’re left with one of our major parties not accepting the results of an election, using a Supreme Court full of ideologues to take away our rights, aching to put a semi-fascist authoritarian back in the White House (assuming, I suppose, that he’s not under house arrest) and planning to make America worse in a number of ways if they get the chance.

If you want to know more about their plans, read “Our Institutions Will Not Save Us From Republican Authoritarianism”, subtitled “If the [Republican Party] wins in 2022 and 2024, here’s how it’ll capture Congress, the courts, and the executive branch to make America into Hungary” or ““Kari Lake’s Candidacy [in Arizona] Shows Us How Democracy Self-Destructs”, which includes the following:

Marx used to say that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction…. No—it turns out that it’s actually democracy that contains the seeds of its own destruction. If the people who want a “Christian” nation with no secure voting rights and a weak independent press get 51 percent of the votes, they can impose that and more on the rest of us.

I sometimes think it’s mainly a matter of how people get the news. My main sources of political news are The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New York Times and a few independent journalists. It’s hard to believe that many decent human beings would want today’s Republican Party to be in charge of anything if they knew more. If, for example, they didn’t listen to people who tell them stories like this: schools are installing litter boxes for children who identify as cats. But lots of decent people don’t read The Washington Post. They watch Fox News and listen to talk radio instead.

That’s where we are and where we might be going. It’s like the man supposedly said back in 1789, according to the notes of James McHenry, a Maryland delegate to the Constitutional Convention. Mr. McHenry wrote:

A lady asked Dr. Franklin, Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy. A republic replied the Doctor if you can keep it.  

Anti-Semitism as Independent Thinking

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Say it without quite saying it and then pretend to be outraged when people notice. Michelle  Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times has noticed:

In a sketch on the German comedy show “Browser Ballett,” a man in a Nazi uniform, replete with jackboots and a red swastika armband, is marching down a street in 1933 when another man hisses, “Nazi.” The Nazi, aghast at the insult, confronts him.

“When you’re running out of arguments it’s easy to play the Nazi card,” says the Nazi. He continues, “Just because someone doesn’t share the mainstream opinion he isn’t automatically a Nazi.” Flustered, the other man replies: “But being a Nazi is already mainstream. You National Socialists already have the power.” To which the Nazi, with a condescending grin, says: “Oh, I forgot. In your world everyone is a Nazi.”

It’s a perfect satire of how the modern right operates. The right-winger starts with a bigoted provocation and, when criticized, defaults to aggrieved claims of persecution and accusations of oversensitivity. He revels in the power he’s amassed even as he poses as a victim. This dynamic has been particularly stark since the musician Kanye West, who now goes by Ye, declared his intention to go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.”

Usually, mainstream conservatives are a bit more nuanced in their antisemitism. They decry the Luciferian puppet master George Soros, or, as Dxxxx Txxxx did in a 2016 campaign ad featuring images of prominent Jews in finance, refer to “those who control the levers of power” and “global special interests.” Marjorie Taylor Greene attributed the 2018 California wildfires to space lasers controlled, in part, by the Rothschild banking family. Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate for Pennsylvania governor — and not, in general, an opponent of religious education — has recently attacked his Democratic opponent, Josh Shapiro, for sending his kids to an “exclusive, elite” Jewish day school, saying it shows “disdain for people like us.”

Such insinuating rhetoric lets Republicans speak to antisemites and then take umbrage when other people notice. The umbrage itself then becomes part of the political message: Those people won’t let you say anything anymore! Usually, this performance depends on language with at least a shred of ambiguity, allowing the speaker to adopt a posture of put-upon faux naĂŻvetĂ©. “Apparently now it’s some kind of racist thing if I talk about the school,” huffed Mastriano.

Ye, however, doesn’t bother with ambiguity. Last week, after Sean Combs, the rapper known as Diddy, criticized him for his “White Lives Matter” T-shirts, Ye posted an exchange on Instagram accusing Combs of being controlled by Jews. That got Ye’s Instagram account frozen, so he went on Twitter, where he was welcomed back by the site’s likely future owner, Elon Musk. There, after announcing his vendetta against the Jewish people, Ye addressed us directly: “You guys have toyed with me and tried to blackball anyone whoever opposes your agenda.”

If Republicans were capable of shame they might have felt some. Ye, who long ago embraced Dxxxx Txxxx, had just given an interview to Tucker Carlson in which he lambasted the media’s “godless agenda” and railed against abortion. Always thirsty for celebrity validation, conservatives ate the interview up. The account for the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee tweeted, “Kanye. Elon. Trump.” And now here was Ye showing, in a completely unvarnished way, just what his right-wing conversion entails. (As it turns out, Carlson already knew; Vice has since revealed that Ye’s most paranoid and unhinged comments were edited out.)

It’s not surprising that few conservatives are rushing to distance themselves from Ye, committed as they are to defending their right to malign their enemies without consequence. Antisemites, after all, may be the original trolls. As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in “Anti-Semite and Jew,” first published in English in 1948, antisemites “know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.” It was antisemites who perfected the pose of just asking questions; the Holocaust denier David Irving famously demanded that Deborah Lipstadt, a scholar of the Holocaust, debate him.

Criticizing Ye requires acknowledging that there’s such a thing as going too far, and values higher than owning the libs. A few conservatives made the pivot; the hosts of “Fox & Friends Weekend,” who’d earlier condemned Ye’s Instagram suspension, called his tweets “ugly” and “unfortunate.” Others, however, stuck to the typical right-wing script.

On Twitter, Todd Rokita, the Indiana attorney general last in the news for attacking a doctor who performed an abortion on a 10-year-old rape victim, accused the media of targeting Ye for his “independent thinking” and for “having opposing thoughts from the norm of Hollywood”. The right-wing media figure Candace Owens — who’d worn a White Lives Matter shirt alongside Ye — [acted] outraged that anyone would interpret a man promising to wage his own personal war on the Jewish people as antisemitic.

“First and foremost, what is ‘death con three?’” she asked…. She added, indignant, “It’s like you cannot even say the word ‘Jewish’ without people getting upset.”

The absurdism here is darkly funny, but it shouldn’t distract us from the serious thing that’s happening. What’s striking about Ye’s naked antisemitism isn’t that he crossed a line but that, for some of his powerful allies, he didn’t….On Monday night, Owens was on Carlson’s show — one of the most-watched cable news shows in the country — praising Ye for standing up for oppressed white people. His tweets about Jews didn’t come up.