Rush Hour for the #resistance
Symbolic victories and real stakes for democracy
Welcome to a Tuesday night edition of Progress Report.
Apologies for being slightly late on this, according to my own personal unpublished calendar and deep desire to post as much as possible for you. I’ve been under the weather, under the gun with some major projects, and for rhetoric’s sake, under a third thing — take your pick.
Tonight I want to discuss a little-noticed piece of news and its huge implications for society, then jump into some stories about the state of our democracy. I’ll be back tomorrow with a whole lot of legislative policy stories, too.
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Rush Hour for Scumbags
As outrageous as it is that Amazon is paying $40 million for a “documentary” about Melania Trump, such brazen corruption has become so common over the past month that it’s the other name attached that makes the project more than simply the latest act of tech company bribery at Mar-a-Lago.
There is no obvious creative or business reason why Brett Ratner should be directing the feature-length infomercial about the once and future First Lady. As a director, Ratner made stuff like the Rush Hour series, a bad X-Men movie, and a flop Hercules flick starring The Rock. He is a clear homophobe, and it’s hardly his natural respect for strong women that makes him a strong choice, either: In 2017, more than half a dozen women, including the actress Olivia Munn, accused him of sexual assault and harassment. Elliot Page, who then went by Ellen Page, later posted about incidents in which Ratner sexually harassment him.
If Ratner has any special qualification, it’s that the almost non-existent public reaction to his hiring, which would have once outraged liberal America, is more proof of the national elite acquiescence to MAGA and the emptiness of the reforms that now follow our mass movements.
A symptom of the dizzying cycle
American history is most often recited as the story of a flawed nation locked in a perpetual effort to better itself, slowly but surely working through a checklist of original sins and their permutations, -isms and ameliorations, a society that eventually broadens before repeating the cycle. The 20th century was a battle of progress and resentment, boundaries broken and backlash, but importantly, more integration than regression.
If Donald Trump’s election after the first Black president felt like America at its worst, the reaction to his ascent and social uprisings that occurred during his term in office offered hope that his brand of reactionary politics would be history, too.
Instead, when presented with a choice between the virulent toxicity of Trump’s movement and a Black and South Asian woman, Americans went with the former, validating — wittingly or not — a politics of boisterous bigotry and very blatant hate speech. Things you couldn’t imagine being said a few months ago are now being casually uttered with impunity.
Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan that the American office needs more “masculine energy” as a response to workplace equality efforts.
The right has hijacked coverage of the apocalyptic LA wildfires by accusing the city’s fire chief of being a “DEI hire,” a Swiss Army Knife of a slur that’s used to attack the legitimacy of a woman or minority in a position of power. It was more than a distraction; she had to answer to it on Fox News.
Republican senators spent this morning vociferously defending a drunk fraud who has been repeatedly accused of sexual assault, and not only defending him, but arguing with a straight face that he should be the secretary of defense. Swelling nihilism means that the only real discussion afterwards was about whether Pete Hegseth had the votes needed for confirmation.
And then, again, there are Democrats eagerly pledging support for an immigration bill that makes unconstitutional detainment and deportation the law of the land.
Each of these incidents is an explicit rebuke to a social movement or initiative that began during the liberal #resistance to Trump’s first term, which crescendoed with the Black Lives Matter marches of the Covid summer before being snuffed out by class divides and Democratic establishment inertia. Movements sparked by tragic injustices were co-opted by politicians and marketers, who failed to advance tangible priorities and instead offered up rhetoric and corporate initiatives that functioned mostly as PR initiatives for executives, no matter how earnest the practitioners.
White collar MSNBC liberals cheered those corporate DEI programs and the banishment of media sex pests, as well they should have, but the sense that these largely cosmetic initiatives were the tip of the spear and that society was undergoing some more radical change proved to be fatally misguided. Matt Lauer lost his career and Derek Chauvin is in jail, but injustice continued to fester.
Democrats wore kente cloths and took a knee in June 2020 but failed to codify voting rights or police reform. They whiffed on abortion rights, immigration reform, and a broad economic justice program, too. There were complicating factors in each instance, but cynicism is rarely checked by nuance.
Me Too didn’t lead to more female directors or executives, nor did women suddenly gain new rights. The racial wealth gap did not narrow, and DEI programs were quickly pulled as soon as they became PR liabilities. These are stubborn problems and I’m not blaming Democrats for their existence, but their persistence help to explain the spiral we see now witnessing.
What many of us saw as progress turned out to be mere feints forward, not nearly tangible enough for people to fight to maintain. There are plenty of centrists, interested only in maintaining power, who will tell you that Democrats went too far in catering to one group or another, but the truth is that the moral stances they took were not backed up with real society-shifting action.
Banishing Brett Ratner and his ilk should have been the beginning, not the end. Now, liberalism has to start over, and the stakes are even higher.
Mississippi: Back during his first term, I mused that Donald Trump was so singularly focused on his own ego that Democrats could have probably convinced him to support Medicare for All if they’d just named it TrumpCare. Now, a Democratic lawmaker in Mississippi is taking the concept one step further by introducing the Donald J. Trump Voting Rights Restoration Act.
The DJTVRRA would automatically restore the voting rights of rehabilitated felons, other than rapists and murderers, once they complete their sentence obligations. As funny as the name is, the explanation goes beyond irony: Trump himself is a felon now, yet he was allowed to vote in Florida during this past election.
North Dakota: The Supreme Court on Monday upheld the constitutionality of two Native American-majority legislative districts, rebuffing claims by non-Natives that the districts constituted an illegal racial gerrymander.
The justices did not offer any written explanation, but their affirm of a three-judge district court panel is perhaps a good sign for the Louisiana “reverse racism” gerrymander case currently before the nation’s top court.
Minnesota: Things are getting extra nasty in what’s supposed to be the nicest state in the union.
With Democrats boycotting the beginning of session after the two parties could not reach a power-sharing agreement, Republicans went ahead and elected a new House speaker anyway. In so doing, the GOP violated state law, according to the Minnesota secretary of state, because they still do not have enough seats to form a quorum.
As I’ve been chronicling, Republicans wound up with a temporary one-seat majority in the state House after the Democrat elected to represent the town of Roseville turned out not to live in the district. What was supposed to be a cooperative detente has become a battle over control of the chamber for the entire session, which Republicans believe they should possess due to their current one vote majority. Their boycott was meant to prevent Republicans from voting in their own speaker, and now the whole ordeal is likely to go before the Minnesota Supreme Court.
Incidentally, a judge ruled on Tuesday that Minnesota Republicans are also illegally withholding a seat from a duly elected Democrat who won his race by just 14 votes, so they should cut that out, too.
Florida: Not content with having lifted the threshold from 50% to an astronomical 60% of the vote required to pass a constitutional amendment, Gov. Ron DeSantis is calling for lawmakers to make it even more difficult for citizens to get their preferred policies on the books.
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Jordan, your combination of wit and ability to cut right to the deeper problems always makes this newsletter a joy to read. 🙏
Could you publish your financial statement to show how much money you .need to operate?