"Florida is where woke goes to die," according to the Sunshine State's governor, Republican Ron DeSantis, who has based much of his expected 2024 presidential campaign on being "anti-woke."

https://www.rawstory.com/new-wsj-poll-shows-america-is-not-with-desantis-on-his-anti-woke-policies/

https://archive.is/JgnBk



https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/1590169048050200576
But a new poll from The Wall Street Journal is devastating to many of the policies being promoted and enacted by Governor DeSantis in his "free state of Florida," calling into question how he and other Republicans who embrace his ideas will fare on the national stage.

"Patriotism, religious faith, having children and other priorities that helped define the national character for generations are receding in importance to Americans," warns the WSJ, with some on social media pointing to a graphic that purports to capture how much America has changed in the past 25 years. The importance of issues of patriotism, religion, having children, and community involvement have dropped dramatically across America. The one that has increased? Money. One Democratic strategist calls it "eye-popping."

https://twitter.com/KennethBaer/status/1640349617194762241
Money is also the only issue on which Democrats and Republicans both agree.

https://twitter.com/BradWilcoxIFS/status/1640328969646899200
But the real siren for Republicans comes in answers to so-called "culture war" questions. The gap between Democrats and Republicans, expectedly, is huge, but DeSantis – should he launch a presidential run – will confront conservative and independent voters (not to mention, of course, Democrats) who aren't as keen on, say, banning books, as he might like.

Asked, "Which of these concerns you more about schools today?," a whopping 61% chose "some schools may ban books and censor topics that are educationally important." Just 36% opted for "some schools may teach books and topics that some students or their parents feel are inappropriate or offensive." And more than half the country (56%) say they have some or a great deal of confidence in public schools. Just one-third (33%) said very little or none.

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Since announcing his impending “arrest” (which hasn’t happened yet), the former president has resumed his role as the media’s main character—he’s even returning to Fox News—and has Republicans rallying behind him. It’s feeling eerily like 2016.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/03/donald-trump-indictment-watch-news-cycle-media

https://archive.is/vAhOB



For the past week or so, we’ve been hostage to another strange Trump news cycle, a flashback to the many we lived through in the half dozen years between his escalator ride at Trump Tower to his helicopter exit from the White House. For a while, it looked like Donald Trump was out of our lives and retreating to his own Palm Elba. Now all of a sudden everything is 2016 again and we’re glued to CNN news alerts.

After initial reports of possible charges in the Stormy Daniels hush money case, the “Trump arrest” news cycle truly kicked into gear early on the morning of March 18 with post on Truth Social: “THE FAR & AWAY LEADING REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE AND FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK. PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!” Two hours later, a spokesman said the former president had not written his post with direct knowledge of the timing of any arrest, while adding, “President Trump is rightfully highlighting his innocence and the weaponization of our injustice system.”

But it didn’t matter that Trump’s spokesman seemed to walk back Trump’s “truth,” as posts on his Truth Social platform are ironically called, or that “TUESDAY” (March 21) came and went with no indictment from the Manhattan DA’s office. (The grand jury is reportedly meeting again Monday.) None of those things mattered, as Trump, yet again, hijacked the news cycle—this time by announcing his impending arrest. As The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser wrote of this chaotic moment: “The political class’s collective capacity for analyzing and digesting events that have not yet occurred, which still might not occur, and whose details are presumably crucial to understanding how they will play out, was on full display.”

Here we get to the central dilemma of covering Trump. By virtue of the fact he was president, and is currently leading the 2024 Republican pack, much of what Trump says and does is arguably newsworthy. But Trump is at best a bad actor and at worst a complete sociopath, known to “flood the zone with shit” in the immortal words of Steve Bannon. So the idea that we, in the media, should take his word for it when he makes some wild claim seems at best misguided. Though it would be impossible to ignore a pending indictment of a former president, could the breathless, nonstop indictment watch have been avoided? Theoretically, yes? But there is a muscle memory many of us have from covering Trump, a kind of Stockholm syndrome from the constant nonstop flood of news. And it’s easy to fall back into old patterns.

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https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins

The hottest new baddie of the sports world is taking over Wollman Rink.

https://www.thrillist.com/events/new-york/pickleball-central-park-wollman-rink



Pickleball is the newest baddie of the sports world. And on the heels of the latest (and astonishing) statistic that there are more than 36 million picklers across the country, Wollman Rink and CityPickle have teamed up to transform the iconic Central Park rink into a temporary home for 14 bright blue pickleball courts.

From Friday, April 7 to Monday, October 9, New Yorkers will be able to play the mix of tennis, badminton, and ping pong at one of the city’s most legendary landmarks through hour-long court rentals (from $80 per hour) every day of the week from 7 am–9 pm.

For all the newbies out there, each game of pickleball spans around 10 to 15 minutes, so each rental period affords plenty of time for working on form and getting the competitive energies flowing. CityPickle, New York City’s official pickleball club, will also be offering $6 paddle rentals for those who haven’t committed to purchasing a personal kit. And if the shiny new courts inspire you to up your game, picklers can also sign up for lessons, clinics, leagues, and tournaments run by CityPickle.

CityPickle and Wollman Park Partners (Equinox, Related, HB Sports & Entertainment) are also behind meaningful programming with organizations like the Challenged Athletes Foundation, Boys Club of New York, YMCA of Greater New York, Solutions Now, and Fountain House to provide free play, coaching, and camps at the new courts, in an effort to uplift our local community. CityPickle at Wollman Rink opens on Friday, April 7 at 7 am in Central Park.

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Report highlights gendered disinformation online and calls for women-centred reform of ‘social media’ platforms.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/hungarys-perfect-propaganda-machine-attacks-women


Ágnes Kunhalmi, a vocal critic of Viktor Orbán, speaking with the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, at the Party of European Socialists congress in Berlin last October

Women in Hungary who speak out against the autocratic actions of the government of Viktor Orbán face vicious misogynistic attacks online, according to a new report from #ShePersisted, a global initiative based in the United States combating gendered disinformation against women in politics. The study, A Perfect Propaganda Machine, investigates how Orbán’s far-right Fidesz party uses ‘social media’ to silence and undermine political opponents, especially women, through disinformation campaigns, online harassment and doxxing. The research involved interviews with Hungarian women political leaders, public figures and activists, as well as the monitoring of ‘social media’ in the country.

‘This “perfect propaganda machine” element was unique to Hungary,’ said the Italian gender expert Lucina Di Meco, co-founder of #ShePersisted and co-author of the report. ‘The media environment has been entirely taken over by the governing party.’ Since 2018, the Hungarian government has consolidated more than 450 media outlets under the pro-government Central European Press and Media Foundation (KESMA), which is controlled by an ex-Fidesz leader. Almost 78 per cent of Hungary’s news and public affairs media are pro-Fidesz, according to the media monitor Mertek.

Big Tech failure

Hungary is the first of five country case studies to be released in #ShePersisted’s ‘Monetising Misogyny’ series. The other countries are Brazil, India, Italy (whose report was published on the same day as Hungary’s, March 21st) and Tunisia. Across these countries, #ShePersisted found that Big Tech companies had failed to address gendered disinformation attacks against women in politics on their ‘social media’ platforms. The initiative is calling for the reform of digital-platform standards via negotiations driven by women leaders.

In Hungary, the most common disinformation narratives used against women in politics include portraying them as ‘untrustworthy’ or ‘foreign agents’ trying to ‘destroy conservative norms’, tied in some way to the Hungarian-American businessman and philanthropist George Soros, the report says. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, with whom Orbán often aligns himself in defending ‘traditional values’, banned Soros’ Open Society Foundation, along with other pro-democracy groups, from operating in Russia in 2015. Women leaders and activists who stand up for human rights and champion democracy are also denigrated as ‘unqualified’, ‘stupid’ and ‘unfit for office’, the report finds. They are further accused of misappropriating public funds for personal gain or acting as ‘weak puppets’ for powerful male leaders on the left.

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Unchecked corporate pricing power is a factor in US inflation

https://www.ft.com/content/151cb429-d024-4d5c-9edf-5b4a2b104a66



There is a strong correlation between the rising share of corporate profits in gross domestic product and the sharp price rises in the US after the Covid pandemic, according to a paper published by the University of Massachusetts.

Having made windfall profits on the back of commodity price fluctuations and supply bottlenecks, large companies have been emboldened to raise prices further to increase profit margins.

They found that there was little evidence that the models used to explain the inflation of the 1970s — such as excess aggregate demand, money supply expansion or increased wage costs that prompted a spiral — applied to this recent rise. Covid-19 price rises are predominantly a sellers’ inflation, they say. Where cost increases are being experienced by all their competitors, companies have felt safe to pass them on in the expectation of an “implicit agreement” that rivals will do the same.

It had been around a long time before the Radical Right discovered it—and its targets have ranged from “the international bankers” to Masons, Jesuits, and munitions makers.

https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content. I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent. Here is Senator McCarthy, speaking in June 1951 about the parlous situation of the United States:



Now turn back fifty years to a manifesto signed in 1895 by a number of leaders of the Populist party:



Next, a Texas newspaper article of 1855:



These quotations give the keynote of the style. In the history of the United States one find it, for example, in the anti-Masonic movement, the nativist and anti-Catholic movement, in certain spokesmen of abolitionism who regarded the United States as being in the grip of a slaveholders’ conspiracy, in many alarmists about the Mormons, in some Greenback and Populist writers who constructed a great conspiracy of international bankers, in the exposure of a munitions makers’ conspiracy of World War I, in the popular left-wing press, in the contemporary American right wing, and on both sides of the race controversy today, among White Citizens’ Councils and Black Muslims. I do not propose to try to trace the variations of the paranoid style that can be found in all these movements, but will confine myself to a few leading episodes in our past history in which the style emerged in full and archetypal splendor.

Illuminism and Masonry

I begin with a particularly revealing episode—the panic that broke out in some quarters at the end of the eighteenth century over the allegedly subversive activities of the Bavarian Illuminati. This panic was a part of the general reaction to the French Revolution. In the United States it was heightened by the response of certain men, mostly in New England and among the established clergy, to the rise of Jeffersonian democracy. Illuminism had been started in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, a professor of law at the University of Ingolstadt. Its teachings today seem to be no more than another version of Enlightenment rationalism, spiced with the anticlerical atmosphere of eighteenth-century Bavaria. It was a somewhat naïve and utopian movement which aspired ultimately to bring the human race under the rules of reason. Its humanitarian rationalism appears to have acquired a fairly wide influence in Masonic lodges.

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related


Sean Wilentz: Richard Hofstadter and the “paranoid style” as an American phenomenon

INTERVIEWS

September 15, 2020

https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/1735-sean-wilentz-richard-hofstadter-and-the-paranoid-style-as-an-american-phenomenon

Released this spring, Library of America’s collection Richard Hofstadter: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Uncollected Essays 1956-1965 gathers together an indispensable historian’s essential works on the irrationalism, demagoguery, and conspiratorial thinking that have long influenced American politics and culture. The pertinence of Hofstadter’s preoccupations to the contemporary American moment can hardly be overstated: In the last few months alone, for instance, New Yorker writers Jelani Cobb, Luke Mogelson, and David Remnick have all cited Hofstadter’s work as a touchstone for making sense of events in 2020.

The editor of LOA’s Hofstadter volume is Sean Wilentz, George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton University. His many books include The Politicians and the Egalitarians: The Hidden History of American Politics (2016); Bob Dylan in America (2010); and The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008 (2008). The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2005) was awarded the Bancroft Prize, and he has received two Grammy nominations for his writings on music. Earlier this year, Wilentz participated in Library of America’s webinar on the anthology American Conservatism: Reclaiming an Intellectual Tradition with that book’s editor, Andrew J. Bacevich. Via email, Wilentz answered our questions about Hofstadter and the unmistakable relevance of his work in 2020.



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related

https://twitter.com/business/status/1638840028385398785
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-22/domino-s-pizza-s-eight-year-italian-foray-ends-in-liquidation

https://archive.is/rWSaL



Domino’s Pizza Inc.’s franchise in Italy has entered into liquidation, after a short-lived struggle to win over customers in the birthplace of pizza. A Milan-based judge opened liquidation proceedings for Domino’s franchise partner, ePizza SpA, last week, according to a filing with the local chamber of commerce seen by Bloomberg News.

A court-ordered liquidation could result in a recovery for creditors of 5% of their exposure, according to a draft restructuring plan seen by Bloomberg News that was submitted last year by the Milan-based firm and its financial advisors.

The last of Domino’s 29 Italian branches closed last summer, ending a foray that began in 2015 with the US brand touting pizza toppings that included pineapple and barbecue chicken, an unusual take in a country more accustomed to thin-crust margheritas. Over the years, the American fast-food chain’s partner borrowed heavily for ambitious plans to open 880 stores.

The pandemic, however, hobbled ePizza. Covid-related lockdowns deprived the company of 35% of its revenues from 2020, as did rising competition. Once largely bricks-and-mortar focused, Italian pizzerias ramped up their home delivery offerings through third-party services such as Deliveroo Plc or Glovo, hurting demand for Domino’s pies.

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