We begin today’s roundup with Paul Waldman’s analysis in The Washington Post of the Kyle Rittenhouse acquittal and how it will embolden the extreme right:
Hunter Walker at Rolling Stone has details on texts from insurrectionists and how they were inspired by Trump:
At The Washington Post, Max Boot explains Sen. Joe Kennedy’s “new McCarthyism” in going after, well, anyone who isn’t a Republican — including Biden nominee Saule Omarova, a Cornell University law professor:
Margaret Carlson at The Daily Beast has more:
On a final note, for more on the extremist turn in the GOP, here’s John Nichols analysis of Rep. Liz Cheney’s excommunication from the Wyoming GOP:
Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal on charges related to the incident in which he killed two men and wounded a third — and his elevation on the right into a hero — may make it more likely that people will assume they’ll be let off if they commit acts of violence or even murder. As The Post reports, defense lawyers say “that jurors are increasingly receptive toward the use of deadly force by ordinary citizens who claim they were protecting themselves.”
But there’s another possible effect of this verdict: It could change the face of political protest in America. As they share their glee over Rittenhouse’s acquittal, conservatives may now decide that carrying guns — especially military-style rifles — is itself a powerful form of protest that can be used to intimidate both their political opponents and officeholders.
Carrying guns openly is, perhaps more than anything else, a kind of speech. It’s meant to communicate a clear message: I may decide to kill you.
Hunter Walker at Rolling Stone has details on texts from insurrectionists and how they were inspired by Trump:
Two sources who were involved in planning the Ellipse rally previously told Rolling Stone they had extensive interactions with members of Trump’s team, including former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. The text messages provide a deeper understanding of what that cooperation entailed, including an in-person meeting at the White House. Rally organizers also described working with Trump’s team to announce the event, promote it, and grant access to VIP guests. A spokesperson for the former president did not respond to a request for comment on the record.
At The Washington Post, Max Boot explains Sen. Joe Kennedy’s “new McCarthyism” in going after, well, anyone who isn’t a Republican — including Biden nominee Saule Omarova, a Cornell University law professor:
As a refugee from the former Soviet Union and a critic of Trumpism, I have gotten used to receiving hate mail that tells me to go back to where I came from and accuses me of being a Communist or a Russian agent. (Pretty rich coming from supporters of a person elected president with Russian help!) Still, it is startling to see this level of Red-baiting nativism not just in anonymous hate mail but in the august hearing rooms of the U.S. Senate.
Despite his cornpone act, Kennedy is highly educated. Is he really so ignorant as to imagine that a student at a Soviet university could have written a thesis on Milton Friedman or studied free-market economics?
The lowest blow of all came when the senator said: “I don’t mean any disrespect. I don’t know whether to call you professor or comrade.”
Omarova would have been justified in replying with Army counsel Joseph Welch’s famous rebuke of McCarthy: “Have you no sense of decency?” Instead, she said, “Senator, I’m not a Communist. I do not subscribe to that ideology. I could not choose where I was born.” She went on to recount the suffering her family endured under Joseph Stalin and concluded, “I’m proud to be an American.”
Omarova’s statement was pitch-perfect, but that a presidential nominee has to defend her loyalty to America because she wasn’t born here is a telling, and appalling, comment on the state of the Republican Party in 2021.
Margaret Carlson at The Daily Beast has more:
For starters, Kennedy’s probably been in Russia more recently than Omarova, one of six GOP senators traveling there the week of July 4, 2018, to be wined and dined by Vladimir Putin. But doubting the loyalty of others is Kennedy’s default charge. As the climate change summit in Glasgow was drawing to a close, she Senator explained that his party would have been more involved if the U.S. envoy to the talks weren’t John Kerry, a “woke Trotskyite.”
It gives Kennedy no pause that before he was against the purported Trotskyite, he was for him, endorsing Kerry in his 2004 run for president over George W. Bush. Kennedy was a Democrat back then, working for a Democratic governor, until he lost his first two races for the Senate.
Tired of losing, the Vanderbilt graduate, Oxford scholar, and editor of the law review at the University of Virginia, dusted himself with some hayseed, switched parties, and ran in 2016 for the seat left open by incumbent David Vitter, whose admission that he “failed” his family but had found “forgiveness and love” wasn’t enough to overcome his inclusion in the D.C. Madam’s phone book.
On a final note, for more on the extremist turn in the GOP, here’s John Nichols analysis of Rep. Liz Cheney’s excommunication from the Wyoming GOP:
The Republican Party that Trump is forging disdains Democrats as “socialist” miscreants. But the GOP reserves its greatest energy for punishing its own. Republicans who dissent are despised with a fury that can extend into the realm of stalking and death threats—as the 13 House Republicans who voted for the bipartisan infrastructure bill have learned in recent days.
The Trump-aligned conservatives who imagine that America is threatened by left-wing “cancel culture” have, in fact, developed a genuine cancel culture in their own party. This is the next stage in the narrowing of the GOP circle to include only true believers. Nonbelievers may still be allowed to run in party primaries in most states—including Cheney’s Wyoming—but they will know that they are officially unwelcome. Republicans primary voters will know this as well.
Where does it end? There are plenty of Democrats, and more than a few pundits, who imagine that this process of elimination could leave the GOP as a shadow of its former self. But it’s not so simple as that. Democrats cannot assume that the Republican Party’s determination to punish its own will necessarily weaken it as a political entity.