America faces a crisis of democracy, as the intellectual soil of the Republican Party has eroded. Authoritarian sentiments have overtaken the country’s conservative movement, which has come to realize it lacks the numbers to succeed democratically. Long-held laissez-faire conservative policies have no answers for modern problems like the climate crisis, global pandemics, monopolization, or wealth inequality. Social conservative policies on race, gender, and religion have no answers for a diverse, increasingly secular society where two incomes are required to make ends meet. Conspiracy theories have replaced policy principles as the unifying elements of the GOP, and one load-bearing pillar of our two-party system is buckling under their weight. But this crisis of democracy is exacerbated by a crisis of information.

Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” But the converse is also true: When the public is woefully misinformed there can be terrible consequences for democracy.

A few recent polls illustrate some shocking discrepancies between public opinion and basic reality. The Harris poll found that 51 percent of Americans believe that unemployment is nearing a 50-year high, even though the actual unemployment rate is nearing a 50-year low.

An Associated Press poll showed that Donald Trump is perceived as more corrupt than Joe Biden by only 8 percent of voters, despite the former’s lifetime reputation for real estate corruptions and multiple concurrent indictments. Whatever the knocks on Biden may be, there have been virtually no history, current evidence, or even significant whispers of personal corruption.

It is consequently unsurprising that in the latest Quinnipiac poll 51 percent of voters thought that Trump would do a better job handling a national crisis compared to 44 percent for Biden—despite the reality that Trump badly mismanaged the COVID crisis, while Biden enacted a raft of beneficial legislation and steered the country to economic recovery. Of course, as my Washington Monthly colleague Bill Scher noted, there can be a significant lag time between good economic conditions and presidents receiving credit for them. Inflation, though now tapering, has colored voters’ perceptions of the economy, but those views may change by Election Day of next year. Also, real ongoing structural economic issues—especially, the worsening housing crisis—can make people feel that their material conditions are worse than macroeconomic indicators might suggest. Still, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that a broken media environment has led to degradation of public knowledge.

Media critics such as Jay Rosen, Dan Froomkin, and Will Stancil have long argued that imbalances in the fundamental constructs of both traditional and social media are responsible for the pervasive misinformation in American society and its deleterious impact on the health of our democracy. The conservative movement maintains a large and relentless propaganda machine with a massive audience, spanning every media platform. It is dominant in most traditional media channels. Fox News usually leads the ratings in cable news. Right-wing talk and Christian radio are often the only options on the AM band. Local TV news leads with sensationalist stories about crime and danger that activate conservative instincts, and the right-wing Sinclair Broadcast group owns stations reaching over 40 percent of American households. Conservative interest groups have been rapidly buying up local newspapers around the country.

The social media situation is even worse. As Max Fisher’s recent book The Chaos Machine persuasively argues, the algorithms that drive engagement (and profits) to social media companies tend to overemphasize far-right content. Conservative groups dominate the top Facebook pages, while YouTube relentlessly drives even viewers with left-leaning profiles to right-wing, conspiratorial content. And now Elon Musk is rapidly converting X, the former Twitter, into a far-right space while alternatives such as BlueSky, Post, and Mastodon struggle to gain traction.

There is no real left-wing counterpart to this. Cable news channel MSNBC caters to a center-left audience, but its reach is much smaller than Fox News. More importantly, much of MSNBC’s programming—particularly in the daytime hours—is not partisan or ideological but neutral journalism. Explicitly progressive content in traditional media outlets is virtually nonexistent. Progressive social media content is often eclipsed by the right, and what does exist tends to lack coordination or message discipline.

What conservatives bemoan as the “liberal media” is in reality a bevy of organizations like The New York Times, National Public Radio and CNN which have general editorial slants that may veer from center-right to center-left depending on the issue, but typically attempt above all to maintain an air of balance and neutrality between opposing partisan sides. Jay Rosen calls this posture the “View from Nowhere,” and describes it as a pretense at neutral objectivity that by its very existence imposes an artificial equality between partisan perspectives that the actual facts do not support.

Trump’s outrageous lies have precipitated a minor shift in which many traditional media organizations have become more comfortable with presenting a less artificially balanced perspective on political arguments, but this is mostly specific to Trump personally. Statements from other Republican leaders and conservative organizations are still typically treated at face value, despite often being obviously misleading or false.

As commentators Will Stancil and Oliver Willis frequently point out, the media imbalance often leads to strategic errors on the part of Democratic politicians. Democrats pass bills and put out press releases hoping that doing and saying popular and effective things will reap intrinsic rewards. But when conservative media is blatantly propagandistic and traditional media is doing its best to pursue artificial balance, those rewards fail to materialize. In turn, the public remains wildly misinformed about objective realities—such as which political actors are actually working to solve problems and do popular things.

Building a more effective and unabashedly liberal media apparatus has long been a challenge, as evidenced by the ‘00s-era failure of Air America Radio to compete with conservative talk radio. More educated and open-minded audiences are inherently resistant to one-sided claims and tend to consume a more sophisticated media diet. Yet a true liberal media would enrich that diet, correcting a destructively imbalanced information environment. It’s an expensive and difficult task, but as an old Chinese proverb says, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.”

Five days out from an increasingly likely government shutdown, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is once again demonstrating a willingness—if not a downright enthusiasm—to cave to the demands of far-right members of his caucus.

The Washington Post reports on the latest from the spending negotiations, with McCarthy now embracing steep cuts to a slew of safety net programs that provide food assistance for children, veteran housing benefits, and home heating assistance. It’s an astonishing proposal that also includes a potential 80 percent cut in funding for low-income schools, as well as the slashing of funding for food assistance for poor pregnant mothers. The list represents yet another attempt to placate the very people McCarthy himself accused last week of being behind a “whole new concept of individuals that just want to burn things down.“ (As I said this weekend, the assertion is laughable; McCarthy is far more familiar with these people than he lets on.)

Will these latest concessions convince his fractured party to play ball? Who knows. Even if McCarthy succeeds in flipping the far-right, his plans are dead on arrival at the Senate and White House, proving that the top Republican is unserious about avoiding a shutdown. But regardless of how negotiations shake out, it’s McCarthy’s eagerness to screw over some of the most vulnerable people in society that shouldn’t be forgotten. For all the talk of a new GOP, Republicans are pushing for the same thing as usual: cutting programs that help poor people.

Joe Biden became the first president to ever walk a picket line on Tuesday as he rallied striking autoworkers in Michigan.

Donald Trump has taken a rather different tack with the United Autoworkers strike. Last week, the GOP frontrunner expressed sympathy for the UAW and announced that he would be traveling to the Detroit area to speak to autoworkers. In doing so, he generated myriad headlines about how he was courting striking autoworkers, in a populist departure for a Republican presidential candidate.

Then, his campaign disclosed that Trump will actually be addressing a nonunion auto-parts plant that is effectively undermining the strike.

These two approaches to the UAW’s fight perfectly encapsulate the two parties’ disparate orientations toward labor issues writ large.

Democrats and Republicans both wish to portray themselves as champions of the American worker. To an extent, this has always been true; to win power in a democracy, you need to claim some affinity for the most populous social class. But the competition for America’s populist mantle has intensified in recent years.

For decades, non-college-educated voters have been drifting rightward while university graduates shifted left. Trump’s 2016 campaign accelerated these trends, peeling off a critical mass of working-class Obama voters in pivotal Rust Belt states.

This development, in combination with an ascendant progressive movement, led the Democratic Party to align itself more tightly with organized labor, and loosen its attachment to a meritocratic conception of social justice. Whereas Barack Obama sometimes posited access to higher education as the antidote for inequality, Biden has concentrated both rhetorically and substantively on improving employment prospects for blue-collar laborers. In his first address to Congress, the president advertised that “nearly 90 percent of the infrastructure jobs created” in his economic plan “do not require a college degree; 75 percent don’t require an associate’s degree.” At the same time, the Biden administration has abandoned its Democratic predecessor’s fight with teachers unions over education-reform policy. And it has also curried favor with unions in the manufacturing sector by federally subsidizing domestic production and seeking to re-shore critical industries. More fundamentally, the president’s National Labor Relations Board has taken aggressive steps to abet union organizing.

Meanwhile, at the state level, Democrats have sought to improve working conditions by raising the minimum wage and creating statewide boards empowered to set minimum standards in certain sectors.

The Democrats will never be mistaken for a labor party. Unions are too weak in the U.S. for a party unequivocally committed to workers’ interests to wield national power. This reality was made manifest in the fight over Biden’s proposal to establish a special tax credit for union-made electric vehicles. Although the AFL-CIO fought hard for that provision, Democratic senators in low-union-density states resisted it, as it would have effectively encouraged auto companies to ramp up production in Michigan instead of building new factories in West Virginia, Georgia, or Arizona. Further, myriad business lobbies exert influence within the Democratic tent, as do upper-middle-class voters whose aversion to higher taxes constrains the party’s redistributive ambitions.

Nevertheless, organized labor is the most powerful mass-membership institution within the Democratic coalition. And as competition for working-class voters’ allegiances has intensified, the party has increased its support for organized laborers in their conflicts with management.

The GOP’s bid to claim the title of “workers’ party” has been far more superficial. The party has popularized cultural controversies that cleave highly educated liberals from the median working-class voter, even when those conflicts have few policy implications or material stakes. Trump, for his part, has an eye for publicity stunts that convey an ostensible solidarity with working people, as when he used the bully pulpit to pressure Carrier Global Corp to refrain from relocating production to Mexico, advocacy that failed to avert hundreds of layoffs at that firm once the media spotlight had shifted.

Trump and the GOP can make substantive appeals to blue-collar workers in discrete sectors. Although Republican officialdom has no interest in siding with unions in their conflicts with management, it is perfectly comfortable backing extractive industry in its disputes with environmentalists. And it is plausible that some workers in the fossil-fuel and mining industries have material reasons to favor Republicans over Democrats, although the substantive difference between the two parties on these issues is commonly exaggerated (under Biden, U.S. oil production hit record highs).

When it comes to policymaking that concerns all working people as working people, however, Republicans remain as committed to the interests of bosses as they’ve ever been. Under Trump, the GOP restricted workers’ rights to organize certain categories of workplaces, made it easier for employers to bust unions, denied guaranteed overtime pay to 12.5 million workers, effectively transferring $1.2 billion from their paychecks to their bosses’ bank accounts, proposed a rule allowing companies with fewer than 250 workers to cease reporting workplace injuries and illness statistics to Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), asked the Supreme Court to uphold the right of employers to include forced arbitration clauses in contracts (thereby denying workers the capacity to press complaints against their bosses in open court), and restored the right of serial labor-law violators to compete for government contracts, among other things.

Biden and Trump’s approaches to the UAW strike illustrate these two distinct orientations in miniature.

Biden initially resisted calls for him to walk the picket line with striking autoworkers. There is no precedent for a president to intervene in a private-sector labor dispute in quite that manner. And the administration needs the cooperation of auto executives in order to meet its goals for the electric-vehicle transition. Nevertheless, with the UAW withholding its 2024 endorsement, Trump threatening to woo the union’s membership, and persistent lobbying from the AFL-CIO, Biden chose to do the unprecedented.

Speaking to workers in Michigan, Biden declared, “Wall Street didn’t build this country, the middle class built this country. The unions built the middle class. That’s a fact. Let’s keep going, you deserve what you’ve earned. And you’ve earned a hell of a lot more than you’re getting paid now.” Asked by a reporter whether he was specifically endorsing the UAW’s demand for a 40 percent pay increase over the life of the next contract, a chorus of chanting workers pressured Biden into saying “yes.”

Trump, by contrast, never actually endorsed the UAW in its fight with the management of the Big Three automakers. Rather, he suggested that the real threat to UAW members’ interests are the environmentalists pushing the “all Electric Car SCAM” (a narrative that weaves a tapestry of lies around a single important half-truth). He then insinuated that he would be addressing striking workers, a gambit that succeeded in generating a week of headlines about the Republican front-runner’s heterodox courting of the union vote:

And yet, as Jacobin’s indispensable labor reporter Alex Press noted, Trump’s rally with striking autoworkers proved to be entirely fictional. In reality, the Republican candidate accepted the invitation of a (seemingly) conservative small business owner to speak to a crowd of nonunion auto-parts manufacturing laborers, whose ongoing work directly reduces the leverage of striking workers in their sector.

The business in question, Drake Enterprises, is a prime venue for a diatribe against electric vehicles; since EV powertrains require far fewer parts than internal combustion engines, the green transition poses a profound threat to parts makers. But holding a rally at a nonunion shop amid a strike is the opposite of demonstrating solidarity with striking unionists.

One party is capable of rallying to labor’s side, when presented with sufficient intra-coalitional pressure and electoral incentive. The other party will project a populist image while channeling workers’ grievances toward targets other than their employers and partnering with low-road businesses to erode labor’s bargaining power. Whatever else comes out of the UAW’s strike, it has at least made the choice facing American workers clear.

PEN America just released a new report that illuminates how far-reaching the right-wing movement against free expression in schools has become. Book bans increased by 33 percent during the 2022–23 school year, compared to 2021–22—which was already an exceptional year for literary censorship.

More than revealing the scale of the bans, the report also offers insight into a few of the organizations behind them: Moms for Liberty, Citizens Defending Freedom, and Parents’ Rights in Education. According to the report, a staggering 86 percent of book bans last year occurred in school districts with a local chapter of one of these three groups.

The groups use a range of tactics to shape the ideology of their local curricula—from taking over school boards to enlisting parents to protest, to promoting restrictive legislation. To understand the extent of their commitment is to understand what it will take to fight back.

These groups make little effort to hide their intentions. The Vermont chapter of Parents’ Rights in Education hosted an event earlier this year for “parents fed up with transgender and DEI education,” while the national organization claims that schools are “utilizing material from Marxist doctrine” to perpetuate “anti-American, anti-white, and anti-capitalist sentiments amongst students.”

They don’t just air grievances. Their website offers free trainings for parents to help them testify to school boards—or even get elected to them. They advocate for bathroom bills and teacher restrictions and laws requiring school staff to out queer students to their parents. And of course, they’re pushing for book bans—though the organization’s executive director would have you believe these aren’t real bans, because you can still purchase the books in question “via booksellers or the Internet.”

Citizens Defending Freedom is even less subtle—their site boasts endorsements from disgraced former Trump adviser Mike Flynn and disgraced current MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. They successfully campaigned for the Texas State Board of Education to dissociate from the American Library Association (which they call a “woke organization”), and want other states to do the same. One chapter recently challenged over 100 books as “age-inappropriate” for Fort Worth’s school libraries, including The Handmaid’s Tale—even though banning The Handmaid’s Tale sounds like something out of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Then there’s Moms for Liberty. When it launched in 2021, the organization was originally focused on fighting against Covid-19 protections—like mask and vaccine mandates—in schools. Now they spend their time electing school board members who share their concerns, and flooding board meetings with parents who are outraged that their kids are reading books about interracial relationships, hurricanes, and male seahorses carrying eggs.

When Moms for Liberty gets a book banned, not only does it deprive one district of that specific text; it can set a dangerous standard. Earlier this year, the group successfully banned a graphic-novel version of The Diary of Anne Frank from a Florida high school—which included passages about puberty that other adaptations omitted. Flash-forward to last week in Texas: a teacher was fired for assigning the same book to her eighth grade reading class.

Never mind that those eighth graders are the same age Frank was when she wrote her diary, experiencing puberty themselves and asking similar questions about their bodies—including, as Frank wrote, curiosities about “the little hole underneath.” Parents are supposed to pretend that exposure to that level of graphic detail will permanently warp the minds of their 14-year-olds.

Meanwhile, in February, a South Carolina high school teacher assigned her AP English students Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. Two students objected to the book’s discussion of Blackness in America, and reported their teacher to a school board member who was endorsed by Moms for Liberty. Because a state proviso explicitly prohibits lessons that make students “feel discomfort” about their race, the curriculum was immediately abandoned, and the books taken away.

But for all the dystopian stories about students’ being “protected” from an honest education, these censorious groups have to reckon with a powerful adversary: the students themselves.

According to the PEN report, students across the country are pushing back. In Lancaster, Pa., middle school students staged a walkout to protest the potential removal of LGBTQ content from their school libraries. In Plattsmouth, Neb., a school board meeting had to be moved to a larger venue because a flood of students and parents were set to protest a similar move. And two high school sophomores in Orchard Park, N.Y., have founded an organization of their own to fight book bans: Students Protecting Education.

These students are speaking up, organizing, and crucially, recognizing just how much power is held by school boards. As know-nothings continue to invest time and resources into showing up at meetings and winning these seats, those who care about the freedom to read can’t afford not to do the same.

Too often, even the most well-intentioned adults forget how mature and intelligent kids can be. They can handle challenging material. They can learn and grow from discomfort. And as their rights to do those things are challenged, they might just lead their own resistance.

The Guardian US and the Chicago Project on Security and Threats (Cpost) at the University of Chicago are co-hosting an event on Tuesday focusing on dangers to democracy and anticipated threats to the 2024 election.

The Guardian’s Fight for Democracy project has been working with Cpost since June 2023, reporting on the project’s Dangers to Democracy surveys which dive into Americans’ views on political violence, conspiracy theories and threats to US elections. The first survey found that a staggering 12 million American adults, or 4.4% of the adult population, believe violence is justified to restore Donald Trump to the White House.

The latest September survey found that Trump’s presidential candidacy and the now mounting indictments against him are radicalizing Americans on both sides of the aisle to support violence to achieve political goals.

More specifically, the survey found that 5.5% of Americans, or 14 million people, believe the use of force is justified to restore Trump to the presidency, while 8.9% of Americans, or 23 million people, believe force is justified to prevent Trump from being president.

The Guardian is committed to reporting on these threats as the 2024 election approaches, including what election officials and other policymakers are doing to combat them, how voters may be affected, how misinformation might amplify them, and how the country could be better prepared to prevent another violent attack like what occurred on 6 January 2021.

In the past few months alone, the Guardian has tracked Republican efforts to use conspiracy theories to oust Wisconsin’s respected and bipartisan top election official, reported on various rightwing attempts to skew electoral maps to dilute the power of minority voters, and featured deep dives into the people trying to hold Trump and his allies accountable for attempting to steal the 2020 election.

The Fight for Democracy team will continue to track these efforts and more as the next presidential election nears and threats become more pervasive, including publishing Cpost’s latest findings.

“We are now in the age of what I call ‘violent populism’ where violent ideas by a dedicated minority are moving from fringe to mainstream, creating an environment where incendiary political rhetoric can stimulate violent threats to our democracy,” said Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago who directs Cpost.

The September survey found that Americans are more deeply distrustful of their democratic institutions and democratically elected leaders and more supportive of violence than in January 2023, when the survey about political violence was started, according to Pape.

The survey has been assessing nine measures of antidemocratic attitudes, including the beliefs that elections won’t solve America’s fundamental problems and that political elites are the most corrupt people in the US. Eight of the nine measures are worse today than at the beginning of 2023, Pape said.

Still, a vast majority of all Americans think Republicans and Democrats in Congress should make a joint statement condemning any political violence.

“We need to lean into this finding with bipartisan cooperation among our frontline democratic institutions to safeguard democracy,” Pape said. “If incendiary rhetoric stimulates political violence, calming rhetoric can diminish it.”

Almost everyone in journalism is a fan of "Succession," which meant that the HBO show heavily shaped the reaction to last week's announcement that Rupert Murdoch was stepping down as the chair of Fox Corp. and News Corp. All eyes landed on Lachlan Murdoch, the eldest son who is taking over from his father as the official head of the right-wing media empire. Influenced by the soap opera machinations of "Succession," most discourse was over what direction the younger Murdoch would take the company and whether his father was actually stepping down — or whether he was secretly controlling his son.

It's all interesting stuff, but in focusing on the internal family dynamics of the Murdochs, the discussion was too quickly turned away from what is likely to be the much bigger story for right-wing media: The multitude of outside challengers to the Fox News throne. For years now, there's been a growing network of well-funded GOP propaganda outlets that, using social media to expand their reach, have positioned themselves well to cannibalize the Fox News audience. Murdoch's departure may provide the opening they've needed to get even more money and influence. This should alarm everyone, because as god-awful as Fox News is, the competitors are worse: They lie more often and more boldly. They're more explicitly racist, homophobic, and sexist. And they worship Donald Trump like a god.

A new CNN-University of New Hampshire Survey Center poll underscores how, as bad as Fox News is, its increasingly strong competition is even scarier. Aaron Blake at the Washington Post analyzed the statistics on media consumption and found some alarming results.

While 43 percent of likely New Hampshire GOP primary voters who watch Fox News and 45 percent of conservative radio listeners say they're voting for Trump in the GOP primary — similar to his overall share of 39 percent — those numbers rise to 65 percent for Rogan's listeners and a remarkable 76 percent of Newsmax viewers....

Newsmax viewers are also significantly more favorable toward Trump. While 64 percent of likely GOP voters who watch Fox have a favorable view of Trump, 95 percent of Newsmax viewers do.

A full 90% of the polled Joe Rogan listeners are supporting either Trump or unapologetic charlatan Vivek Ramaswamy. At least those who have long been skeptical of claims that Rogan and his audience are "independent" now have rock solid proof that they were always right-wing shills. The bad news is that Rogan is already one of the most successful contenders for the Fox News throne. He gets an estimated 11 million listeners an episode. The highest-rated show on Fox News, "The Five," typically has between 2 and 3 million viewers.

The perception in the GOP base is that Fox News is too hamstrung by facts to be an effective purveyor of right-wing propaganda.

Rogan is probably the most successful but is just one in a growing crowd of propagandists who want to take a bite out of the Fox News audience. Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire claims over a million subscribers. Charlie Kirk's TPUSA has reportedly grown into a $80 million company. PragerU claims over 8 billion video views. Still, Fox News has maintained its position as the 800-pound gorilla of right-wing media.

Unsurprisingly, then, many of these smaller competitors didn't bother to hide how much they hoped, without Rupert Murdoch in charge, Fox News would falter, giving them a chance to gobble up more of the MAGA audience. Steve Bannon raved that Fox is "TV for stupid people." Glenn Beck implied that Lachlan Murdoch hates conservatives. (In reality, most reports suggest the younger Murdoch is more right-wing than his father.) Newsmax went in for kill by publicizing Trump's snide anti-Murdoch comments, and claiming Murdoch is in bed with the hated Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

Right now, as historian Nicole Hemmer told Slate, these contenders see Fox News as a wounded animal that will be much easier to take out than it was a few years ago. That's because, she explained, "I still don't think people outside of right wing circles fully appreciate how disillusioned and even angry many on the right are towards Fox."

Bluntly put, the perception in the GOP base is that Fox News is too hamstrung by facts to be an effective purveyor of right-wing propaganda. Murdoch envisioned Fox News being just news-like enough to garner a reputation as a legitimate press outlet. For a long time, that was fine with the audience, who also wanted to participate in the illusion that this is "news." But what the Fox competitors offer is a different vision: One where any fact that gets in the way can be dismissed out of hand, and "truth" is whatever the right-wing audience wants to believe.

These tensions came to a head during the aftermath of the 2020 election, when Fox initially reported the truth, which is Joe Biden had won the White House. As court documentation made clear, what happened then was that the audience revolted and, fearful of losing audience share to even shadier outlets, Fox pivoted towards championing Trump's false claims that the election was stolen.

In the short term, that worked. Viewers, satiated with the lies they desired, stayed on board. But in the longer term, there were serious consequences. Fox News lost a massive defamation lawsuit to Dominion Voting Systems, who was repeatedly smeared in "news" segments advancing the Big Lie. Murdoch then fired one of the network's most aggressive liars, host Tucker Carlson. The one-two punch convinced many viewers that Fox News had lost its taste for disinformation. Fox has been able to claw some of its audience back, by playing fast and loose with the facts. A lot of viewers, however, worry Fox will never provide the high-octane bullshit they crave, and so they're permanently relocating to media outlets that are even less ethical.

Fox alternatives know that their relative freedom to lie is a selling point to right-wing audiences. Earlier this year, the New York Times published a story about which podcasts are the worst purveyors of disinformation, and Bannon's "War Room" topped the list. His response? To brag about it openly and praise his audience for "helping us spread misinformation." For the MAGA crowd, lying is good and consuming lies is how they demonstrate their right-wing bona fides. Fox News, which is hamstrung by fear of lawsuits and Murdoch's lingering desire to be treated as a respectable figure, has lost esteem with the lie-addicted GOP base.

No one should write a premature obituary for Fox News yet, however.

By all accounts, Lachlan Murdoch is more right-wing than his father, and less worried about the consequences of blasting out disinformation. There's a not-small chance that, under the younger Murdoch's leadership, Fox will start to move harder to the right and, despite all the lawsuits, more determined than ever to mislead viewers. After all, the market pressures that led Fox News to embrace the Big Lie haven't gone away. If anything, they're getting worse, as the network faces increasing challenges from small but hungry outlets who will say anything, no matter how false or outlandish, to get an audience.

But whether Fox News survives or not, one thing is certain: Right-wing media will get worse. All the incentives push GOP propagandists into more lurid and dishonest rhetoric. In a crowded field, the way to stand out is to outdo other right-wing outlets with racist vitriol, wild conspiracy theories, and violent rhetoric. As long as there's a huge audience ready to pay for so much ugliness, there will be shameless people eager to create it.

During a campaign trip to South Carolina, Donald Trump took some time to visit the gun store that sold weapons to the racist Jacksonville, Florida, mass shooter.

Trump visited Palmetto State Armory on Monday, where he admired a handgun engraved and decorated in his honor. He repeatedly said he wanted to buy a gun there—which would be a violation of federal law given his many indictments.

A lot of the media has focused on whether Trump actually purchased a gun and violated the law, but less attention has been paid to Trump’s decision to visit Palmetto State Armory, as opposed to any other gun store in South Carolina.

In late August, a white man opened fire in a Dollar General store in a predominantly Black Jacksonville neighborhood, killing three people, all of whom were Black. The shooter, who then killed himself, used a Glock handgun and an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, at least one of which was painted with a swastika. Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters said the shooter “hated Black people” and acted alone.

At least one of the guns came from Palmetto State Armory, a store in Summerville, South Carolina. The Jacksonville sheriff’s office shared photos of the firearms used in the attack on its Facebook page. One of the guns is clearly engraved with the Palmetto State Armory logo. The shooter had also drawn swastikas on the gun.

When the Jacksonville shooting happened, Trump did not issue any statement on the tragedy. But you could argue that this campaign stop is a kind of tacit statement. He put the spotlight on Palmetto State Armory, praised its inventory, and tried to offer it business.

Palmetto State Armory has openly embraced far-right ideology. In 2020, it began marketing its products using imagery and language associated with the “boogaloo,” slang for racist violence and even a call for full-on race war. It has also come to mean war to topple the government.

The Jacksonville shooter shouldn’t have been able to buy the guns in the first place. He was held in Florida state custody in 2017 for mental health issues, disqualifying him from owning a gun under a statute called the Baker Act.

With so many eyeballs on Trump, Palmetto State Armory would never have gotten away with selling him a gun. But as Philadephia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch pointed out, the store “could sell an AR-15 to a young, mentally troubled white supremacist.”

Landmark net neutrality rules rescinded under former President Donald Trump could return under a new push by U.S. Federal Communications Commission chair Jessica Rosenworcel. The rules would reclassify broadband access as an essential service on par with other utilities like water or power.

“For everyone, everywhere, to enjoy the full benefits of the internet age, internet access should be more than just accessible and affordable,” Rosenworcel said at an event at the National Press Club. “The internet needs to be open.”

The proposed rules would return fixed and mobile broadband service to its status as an essential telecommunications service under Title II of the Communications Act. It would also prohibit Internet service providers from blocking or throttling lawful Internet traffic and from selling “fast lanes” that prioritize some traffic over others in exchange for payment.

The move comes after Democrats took majority control of the five-member FCC on Monday for the first time since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021 when new FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez was sworn in.

Rosenworcel said the FCC will vote in October to take public comment on the proposed rules.

Net neutrality is the principle that internet providers treat all web traffic equally, and it’s pretty much how the internet has worked since its creation. But regulators, consumer advocates and internet companies were concerned about what broadband companies could do with their power as the pathway to the internet — blocking or slowing down apps that rival their own services, for example.

The FCC in 2015 approved rules, on a party-line vote, that made sure cable and phone companies don’t manipulate traffic. With them in place, a provider such as Comcast can’t charge Netflix for a faster path to its customers, or block it or slow it down.

The net neutrality rules gave the FCC power to go after companies for business practices that weren’t explicitly banned as well. For example, the Obama FCC said that “zero rating” practices by AT&T violated net neutrality. The telecom giant exempted its own video app from cellphone data caps, which would save some consumers money, and said video rivals could pay for the same treatment. Under current chairman Ajit Pai, the FCC spiked the effort to go after AT&T, even before it began rolling out a plan to undo the net neutrality rules entirely.

A federal appeals court upheld the rules in 2016 after broadband providers sued.

However, the FCC junked the Obama-era principle in 2017. The move represented a radical departure from more than a decade of federal oversight.

Congress returns to Washington Tuesday with a government shutdown less than five days away and lawmakers are still scrambling for ways to avoid it.

That wasn't supposed to be the case.

It has been less than three months since House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., reached an agreement with President Biden that set spending levels for the year. That agreement was part of a bipartisan debt limit package that overwhelmingly passed the House in a 343-117 vote.

McCarthy negotiated that plan. House Democrats agreed. So did Senate Republicans. And Senate Democrats. But a small group of hard-line conservatives in the House immediately rejected the plan for failing to agree to deeper spending cuts. The group pressured McCarthy into backing away from the agreement.

Details of a possible Senate-led spending stopgap began to emerge Monday night as Senate leaders worked on a bill. Any Senate-led solution would require unanimous agreement to move fast enough to avoid a shutdown, and even then, a deal would almost certainly require votes from House Democrats in order to pass.

For the past several months, McCarthy has accepted the conservative demands as he attempts to navigate a razor-thin majority of just four votes.

McCarthy has said, repeatedly, that he does not want to see the government shut down.

"I don't think anybody wins a shutdown," McCarthy told reporters in the Capitol last week. "Think for one moment what a shutdown does. It stops paying our troops. How do you have more leverage in that situation? I've watched shutdown after shutdown, everybody loses."

House Republicans spent the weekend setting up a plan to hold votes on several of the 12 annual funding bills that include deep spending cuts. Those bills align with conservative demands, but they will not prevent a shutdown.

Senate takes spending steps

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has been working with Republican counterparts on their own solution, though the fate of a bill is far from certain.

Last week, Schumer moved a legislative vehicle forward that could be used as a stopgap spending bill and sent to the Republican-led House. The Senate could take a procedural vote to start floor work on the plan Tuesday evening when they return from their holiday recess.

"As I have said for months, we must work in a bipartisan fashion to keep our government open, avoid a shutdown and avoid inflicting unnecessary pain on the American people. This action will give the Senate the option to do just that," Schumer said.

However, the process could take days even with the objection of one member of the Senate.

It's unclear if the Senate could muster enough bipartisan support for the plan if it includes additional aid for Ukraine or several, recent U.S. public disasters, including the deadly fires in Maui, a key objective for Democrats.

House could still block a stopgap spending bill

Even if the Senate is able to move quickly on a stopgap, it's unclear if McCarthy would allow a Senate plan to get a vote. Florida GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz has threatened to begin the formal process to remove McCarthy as speaker if he does not comply with far-right demands.

McCarthy is also under pressure from former President Trump, who has pushed for spending cuts. Trump is in close contact with some of the GOP holdouts in the House and has posted publicly in favor of cuts.

"The Republicans lost big on Debt Ceiling, got NOTHING, and now are worried that they will be BLAMED for the Budget Shutdown. Wrong!!! Whoever is President will be blamed, in this case, Crooked (as Hell!) Joe Biden!" Trump posted Sunday on his social media site Truth Social.

Trump went on to criticize Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who has been supportive of a stopgap spending bill and has said he supports the agreement McCarthy reached with Biden during the debt limit talks.

A small bipartisan group of lawmakers known as the Problem Solvers Caucus has begun work on a plan to use a House procedure known as a discharge petition to get around McCarthy and force a vote on spending. That plan could take weeks and would require at least 218 votes, meaning Democrats and Republicans would have to agree to the strategy.

For now, that leaves the fate of government spending largely in McCarthy's hands.

Tomorrow night, seven GOP candidates will debate in California. Their task is a complicated one: to set themselves apart from President Donald Trump while making themselves appealing to voters who largely still support him. To woo those Republican primary voters, these candidates may end up taking some positions that put them outside the mainstream of public opinion — which could hurt them if they wind up making it onto the general election ballot next year.

According to a 538 analysis, the people who vote in Republican primaries look very different demographically and think very differently than Americans as a whole when it comes to key political issues. We took a look at Cooperative Election Study data from Harvard University, a survey of at least 60,000 Americans on a range of issues taken before the 2020 elections and the 2022 midterms. We found that on key topics like immigration, abortion and government regulation, what GOP primary voters want is not the same as the country as a whole. That could box the ultimate Republican nominee into positions that are pretty unpopular with the general public.

GOP primary voters are whiter, older and more evangelical than Americans overall

The vast majority of Republican primary voters (92 percent) were white in 2020, the last presidential election year, compared to 69 percent of the general electorate, according to our analysis of the CES data. (Republican primary voters were those verified as active registered voters who voted in the Republican primary, while the general electorate refers to all respondents who were at least 18 years old. For more information on methodology, see the italicized section below.) They’re also older: Eighty-three percent was age 45 and older in 2020. That year, 45 percent of the general electorate was under 45 and 55 percent was 45 and over. There was a similarly sized difference between the Republican and general electorate in 2022.

Another demographic point hints at the different values shaping political views: Sixty percent of Republican primary voters identify as born-again or evangelical Christians, while only 34 percent of the general electorate does. It’s a group that has more traditional, conservative views on gender roles and marriage, among other issues, which helps explain the big differences we see on hot-button topics like abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.

These demographic differences mean that the group of voters choosing the Republican candidate have a completely different history, worldview and peer group from the generally younger and more diverse voters that could head to the polls in the November elections. That can shape the candidates’ views on a number of issues, from immigration to the future of the environment.

GOP voters are more anti-immigrant than Americans overall

Trump’s candidacy in 2016 was based, in part, on his anti-immigrant views, including his promise to build a wall on the southern border with Mexico. Immigration policy emerged as a major partisan split in that initial campaign, and Trump ran on the issue again in 2020. In the 2024 race, most of his leading opponents largely support his policies: continue building the border wall, spend more to secure the border and ban sanctuary cities.

Immigration remains a top issue for likely Republican primary voters, according to a recent FiveThirtyEight/Washington Post/Ipsos poll. But it’s also an issue where they differ a great deal from the general voting population, which means even if the candidates’ hardline stances are popular in the primary, the ultimate nominee may have to pivot in the general election.

In the last two cycles, Republican primary voters departed from the general electorate on almost every issue the survey asked about regarding immigration. (We used both 2020 and 2022 data in our analysis. The presidential election year in 2020 may be most similar to 2024 in terms of who votes and why, but we also looked at 2022 as a point of comparison because that data is more recent.) But the biggest gap was on the question of whether respondents supported increasing “spending on border security by $25 billion, including building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.” In 2020, 89 percent of Republican primary voters supported that proposition, compared with 45 percent of the general electorate. (Two years later, there was a 39-percentage-point difference between the Republican and general electorate on this question.) Among the general electorate, a slim majority — 55 percent in 2020 and 51 percent in 2022 — opposed that policy. If anything, the voters who turned out in the last presidential year were more divided on this issue than those who voted in the midterms.

Republican primary voters were also much more likely to support increasing border patrols, withholding federal funds from police departments that don’t report immigration status to federal officials and reducing legal immigration. The differences in these issues ranged from 20 to 35 points. The general public was also much more likely to support a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, by 68 percent both years, while 62 and 64 percent of Republican primary voters opposed such a move in 2020 and 2022, respectively.

All of this means that there’s much more of an appetite for hard-line stances on immigration among GOP primary voters than among the public as a whole. It’s also something that Republicans just care more about: Immigration is a less salient issue for the electorate as a whole, with 9 percent ranking it as a top issue in a Center for Immigration Studies poll released in June. So while Republican voters might be prioritizing promises to curb immigration, the general electorate may be less motivated on the issue.

Republican primary voters are much less supportive of abortion rights

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, abortion has emerged as a major issue for the general electorate, with abortion-rights supporters and the Democratic Party winning elections across the country. In this year’s primary, the GOP candidates have waffled so far on abortion and it’s not hard to see why — embracing positions that primary voters agree with could end up being a huge liability in the general election.

According to the 2020 CES data, only 16 percent of Republican primary voters said they support the proposal to “always allow a woman to obtain an abortion as a matter of choice,” compared with 56 percent of the general electorate, a 40-point difference. In 2022, there was a 39-point difference between the two groups. Republican primary voters were also more likely to say that abortion should be permitted only in the case of rape of incest, that all abortions should be banned after the 20th week of pregnancy, that employers should be allowed to decline abortion coverage in insurance plans and that federal funds shouldn’t be used in abortions.

So it’s not hard to see why Republican candidates are having trouble taking a stand on this issue — particularly since there actually isn’t a big divide when it comes to the restrictive abortion policies that more than 20 states have embraced since last summer. (Though some legislation remains tied up in courts.) In 2022, only 24 percent of Republican primary voters agreed that abortions should be illegal in all circumstances, just 7 points higher than the general public. That was down from 32 percent in 2020, and could mean that the near-total abortion bans in those states may be too extreme for even Republican voters.

Less government spending and control is a big issue for Republicans

During the 2020 election, then-President Trump called Democrats’ Medicare for All proposal “socialism.” Attacking universal health care as a Trojan horse of socialism has a long history in conservative American politics.

Health care may be less of a rallying cry in 2024, but the idea of expanding Medicare remains a dividing line, and that may be in part because it can serve as a proxy issue for different ideas in how big the government should be. The Republican Party passed a resolution denouncing socialism earlier this year, after Republicans won a majority in the House of Representatives. That suggests that socialism and big government in general will remain a line of attack against Democrats and their likely nominee, President Joe Biden — but that’s a position that will resonate much more with Republican primary voters than the public as a whole. A solid majority, 68 percent, of the general public supported the idea of expanding Medicare into a single comprehensive public health program in 2022, 46 points more than Republican primary voters. That’s similar to the gap from 2020, which was 49 points.

Suspicion of government regulation shows up in other places, too. Republican primary voters view environmental regulation with more skepticism than the general public does. There was a nearly 40-point gap in support for issues such as giving the Environmental Protection Agency the power to regulate carbon emissions, giving the agency more power to enforce the Clean Water and Clean Air acts, and requiring states to use a minimum amount of renewable energy in 2022. Those gaps were similar in 2020.

Republicans haven’t changed their views on climate change much in the past decade, even as most adults started to see it as a major threat, according to the Pew Research Center. (The CES doesn’t ask this question directly.) Fifty-four percent of all adults think climate change is a major threat, while only 23 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning adults do, according to Pew’s figures published in August. That’s especially true of young voters: Fifty-nine percent of voters under the age of 30 think addressing climate change should be a priority, according to an NPR/Marist poll from July.

Republican voters seem to care more about whether a candidate shares the same views than whether they’re electable, which means they’re likely to be evaluating the primary race on these issues. Because of those pressures, the primary can steer the candidates further and further from the mainstream.

Methodology

The Cooperative Election Survey is administered by YouGov and consists of a nationally representative sample of American adults. The 2020 pre-election survey included 61,000 adults (referred to as the general electorate above), of which 3,593 were considered Republican primary voters. The 2022 pre-election survey included 60,000 adults, of which 4,121 were considered Republican primary voters.

The general electorate was the broadest group of adult Americans: all adults aged 18 or older, regardless of their status as active registered voters. If we limited our analysis only to those who were active voters at the time of the survey, the analysis might not be representative of the broader general electorate that is currently eligible to vote, as an individual’s status as an active registered voter can easily change. We compared adult Americans to voter-validated electorates from the last two elections and found that opinions were fairly similar across all groups. Republican primary voters consisted of respondents who the CES verified as active registered voters who voted in the Republican primary, according to Catalist (2020) or TargetSmart (2022) records. For 2020, we included respondents who voted specifically in the presidential primary, as some states hold those primaries separately from their state or federal primaries.

There are currently two clown shows — sorry, but let’s be honest — going on in the Republican Party. One is the intraparty fighting that seems extremely likely to cause a government shutdown a few days from now. The other is the fight over who will come a distant second to Donald Trump in the presidential primaries.

There are many strange aspects to both shows. But here’s the one that has long puzzled me: Everyone says that with the rise of MAGA, the G.O.P. has been taken over by populists. So why is the Republican Party’s economic ideology so elitist and antipopulist?

Listen to the rhetoric of the people making Kevin McCarthy look like a fool or of the presidential candidates, and it’s full of attacks on elites — but also of promises to cut taxes for the rich and slash government spending that benefits the working class. For example, Nikki Haley — who is making a credible bid to be Trump’s also-ran, given Ron DeSantis’s implosion — is calling for big cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

As I write this, McCarthy is reportedly trying to appease MAGA dissidents with a temporary funding bill that would cut nonmilitary discretionary spending outside of Veterans Affairs by 27 percent — meaning savage cuts to things like the administration of Social Security (as opposed to the benefits themselves).

The thing is, such proposals are deeply unpopular. It’s true that Americans tell pollsters that the government spends too much, but if you ask them about specific types of spending, the only area on which they say we spend too much is foreign aid, which is a trivial part of the budget. Oh, and most Americans still support aid to Ukraine.

So there would seem to be an opening for politicians who are right wing on social issues like immigration and wokeness but are also genuinely populist in their spending priorities. Such politicians exist in other countries. For example, Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister, whose party has deep links to the nation’s fascist past, ran last year on a platform calling for earlier retirement for some workers and increases in minimum pensions and child benefits.

So why aren’t there such figures in the G.O.P.? To be fair, during the 2016 campaign Trump sometimes sounded as if he might turn his back on Republican economic orthodoxy, but once in office he pursued the usual agenda of tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy combined with benefit cuts for the rest.

Part of the answer may lie in the American right’s general mind-set, which valorizes harshness, not empathy. People who are drawn to MAGA tend to imagine that solving society’s problems should involve punishing people, not helping them.

Also, we shouldn’t underestimate the power of ignorance: MAGA politicians, who generally disdain any kind of expertise, may not have any clear idea of what the federal government does and where tax dollars go.

Finally, there’s the Clarence Thomas factor.

What I mean is that part of the explanation for the absence of genuine Republican populists may involve the gravitational pull of big money, which is both broader and subtler than the way it’s often portrayed.

If the accusations against Senator Robert Menendez are true — and it’s not looking good — old-fashioned bribery, payments to politicians in exchange for favors, hasn’t gone away. But it’s probably not shaping party ideology.

Campaign contributions, on the other hand, definitely do shape ideology; DeSantis was touted as a rival to Trump because he got a lot of support from big donors who believed he would serve their interests and had real political skills. (Being rich doesn’t necessarily come with good judgment.)

But there’s a sort of gray area that doesn’t involve outright bribes in the sense of money given in return for specific actions but nonetheless involves a form of soft corruption. For the fact is that public figures whom the very rich see as being on their side can reap considerable personal rewards from their positions.

Recent revelations about Justice Thomas show how this works. ProPublica reports that he has received many favors from ultrawealthy conservatives, notably lavish free vacations. These reports are shocking because we don’t expect such behavior from a Supreme Court justice, and Thomas may have violated the law by failing to disclose these gifts. But does anyone doubt that many politicians who favor tax cuts for the rich and reduced benefits for the working class, even as they rail against elites, receive similar favors?

And the hermetic information space of the American right surely facilitates this soft corruption. Suggestions of improper influence on right-wing officials and politicians won’t get much coverage on Fox News, except possibly for claims that they’re the victims of a liberal smear campaign.

Now, I don’t know how important these different factors are to the fact that America’s “populists” are anything but populist in practice. But we do need to ask why people who denounce elites somehow always manage to avoid targeting corporations not named Disney and billionaires not named George Soros.

"Sometimes, it's who you most suspect." That's what a friend of mine texted to a group chat after the Sunday Times, the Times and Channel 4 Dispatches released a disturbing investigative report documenting rape and other sexual allegations against British comedian Russell Brand. The actor denies the allegations, but unsurprisingly, most of the public does not seem to believe his denials. In part, it's because the evidence against Brand is overwhelming: five separate accusers, digital documentation, and a litany of witnesses ready to corroborate how Brand's behavior was an "open secret in radio and TV production." In part, it's because being a skeeze was always central to Brand's persona. And in part, it's because there have been comments over the years, from celebrities like Katy Perry and Kristen Bell, about Brand's predatory behavior.

The Onion, as they often do, said it best, with the headline, "Nation Could Have Sworn Russell Brand Was Already Convicted Sex Offender."

And yet, like clockwork, the MAGA masses are rallying to Brand's side, treating these allegations like they are evidence that the "deep state" is trying to take Brand out for some vague reason.

As Joy Saha documented at Salon, the usual suspects — Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, and Jordan Peterson — defended Brand this week and floated conspiracy theories to distract from the serious allegations. Elon Musk, of course, got involved, writing on the platform he rebranded X, "They don't like competition." Greg Gutfeld elevated the conspiracy theory to Fox News.

History shows the quickest way to be a hero to the MAGA crowd is to be credibly accused of rape, ideally by a large number of women.

Do any of these conspiracy theorists believe their own B.S.? I'm skeptical that any of these men actually mean a single word they say. They are, after all, arguing that Brand is such an all-powerful threat to the mysterious "They" that "They" organized a conspiracy of dozens of people — reporters, editors, fact-checkers, witnesses, and accusers — for the purpose of smearing an innocent man with allegations such as he "forced his penis down her throat" so hard she had to punch him to escape. That's a lot of work for the mighty "They" to take out one dude. Keeping that many conspirators quiet is nearly impossible. You'd think "They" would have simpler methods of dealing with people "They" want to get rid of.

Nah, the more likely explanation is that Brand's defenders believe he did it. They're just angry that anyone would deny a man his patriarchy-given right to rape as many high school girls as he pleases. After all, this is the same crowd that supports Donald Trump, a man whose history of sexual assault has been put beyond dispute both in a court of law and by his own infamous tape bragging about how he likes to "grab them by the pussy." History shows the quickest way to be a hero to the MAGA crowd is to be credibly accused of rape, ideally by a large number of women.

We see this in the same rally-round-the-pig response MAGA had to Andrew Tate, a man whose total worthlessness as a human being was evident long before he was arrested for rape and human trafficking in Romania. Tate, an "influencer" who preyed on school kids too young to know better, wasn't exactly coy about his misogyny or violent impulses before his arrest. He openly bragged about hitting women and trapping them in the house and even offered to teach his followers how to get into sex trafficking.

Despite — or really because — of all this, the MAGA reaction to Tate's arrest was to treat the guy like a hero. Tucker Carlson interviewed him for Twitter and Elon Musk heavily hyped the video. Needless to say, it wasn't a hard-hitting interview exploring the evils of sexual violence. It was a softball meant to portray Tate, who is accused of choking women so hard he broke blood vessels in their faces, as the real victim.

One could argue, I suppose, that this stampede of support for the worst possible men isn't meant as a celebration of rape per se. There's always the "just trolling" defense. In this case, the argument would be that it's just that MAGA types just really love to "trigger" the feminists. Throwing a pity party for an accused rapist is a virtual form of ponytail-pulling, in this rendering. But even if that were true, it's ultimately a distinction without difference. Once you're throwing ticker tape parades for sexual predators, it really stops mattering if it's just out of anti-feminist spite.

The new allegations against Rudy Giuliani are a grotesque reminder that, for much of MAGA, Trump's appeal was due in large part to the perception that he created an atmosphere where open predation towards women was acceptable. Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide who has since spoken out about the coup plotting she witnessed under Trump, has a new book out. In it, she accuses Giuliani of groping her on January 6, 2021, seemingly because he was excited by the unspooling Capitol insurrection. To add insult to injury, she describes John Eastman, another coup plotter, as flashing a "leering grin" while Giuliani manhandled her.

Giuliani, for his part, is denying the allegations, and his denials are being greeted with a great deal of scoffing. After all, he's currently tied up in litigation with a former aide accusing him of bullying her into unwanted sexual intercourse. His accuser, Noelle Dunphy, has produced grotesque receipts, including a tape of Giuliani declaring, "Come here, big tits. Your tits belong to me."

Even without the Dunphy lawsuit, Hutchinson's claims were believable simply because she was working under Donald Trump. We've all heard the "Access Hollywood" tape in which Trump brags, at length, about how he enjoys sexually assaulting women. It makes perfect sense that he would attract compatriots who craved an environment where men can just grope whatever woman they wished. The least surprising thing in the world is if these men saw young and pretty aides like Hutchinson as party favors Trump was offering up to these co-conspirators.

There's a tendency in the mainstream press to talk about rape and sexual abuse as something "everybody" disapproves of. When a credibly accused assailant gets a surge of support, the assumption is these folks believe the accused is innocent. When it's impossible to imagine they believe that — no one can think Trump is innocent — then the assumption is that the sexual predation is a flaw that supporters are reluctantly accepting because they like other traits of the accused.

But there is a third possibility, one that this evidence shows is the likeliest one: sexual abuse as a vice signal.

Being seen as a sexual abuser makes a person more popular with some on the right, especially the extremely online MAGA set. It's a subculture of people who valorize bullying and hate women, especially women who they think are uppity. Sexual violence has been a primary outlet for that urge to humiliate women and put them "in their place." This isn't about a sincere belief that every accused rapist is a victim of a "deep state" conspiracy. It's just that MAGA's knee-jerk urge when they hear these allegations of sexual violence is to side with the perpetrator.