In the News: PRRI American Values Survey, Assassination Attempt on Pelosi, Alito's Victimization Claims

Photo of stack of newspapers by Daniel R. Blume, Wikimedia Commons

1. Philip Bump writes, 

As the 2016 election approached, it became clear that immigration and often-but-not-always submerged concerns about race were a strong motivation for his supporters. The great America for which his mostly White supporters were nostalgic was one in which there wasn’t a focus on or accommodation for discrimination against Black or gay people.

On Thursday, PRRI released its annual American Values Survey (AVS), asking questions that get at the heart of that political impulse. What it shows is that race, immigration and right-wing politics continue to overlap — and overlap in, at times, alarming ways.

 2. Lucian K. Truscott states,

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was among top officials from both political parties who wished Paul Pelosi a speedy recovery and said they were “praying for him.” 

Yeah, this Kevin McCarthy: “I want you to watch Nancy Pelosi hand me that gavel [in 2023].  It’ll be hard not to hit her with it,” McCarthy told the Tennessee Republican Party’s annual Statesman Dinner in August.

Violent right-wing rhetoric and lies led to the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, that killed 10 and injured more than 140 police officers.  Some suffered traumatic brain injuries, broken bones, and heart attacks.  Now violent right-wing rhetoric and lies have led to an attempted assault on Nancy Pelosi that ended up injuring her husband so badly he was hospitalized, and this afternoon underwent brain surgery.

3. Charles Pierce writes: 

Of all the many conservative whiners across the landscape, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito stands alone. … He is free for the rest of his life to make the lives of millions miserable, and then bleat his outrage when he is criticized for having done so.

4. Mark Sumner reports on David DePape, who tried to assassinate Nancy Pelosi:

The attacker, 42-year-old David Depape, has now been identified as a racist, transphobic conspiracy theorist who seems to have expressed his belief in all things “Q.” ...

All the evidence shows that Depape is highly prone to believing in conspiracies. And he found a one-stop shop for all the conspiracies he could handle: the Republican Party and right-wing media. That’s why his page was filled with very familiar lies about the 2020 election, COVID-19 vaccines, and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

 5. Jeff Brumley reports,

Few would be surprised to learn that the latest American Values Survey shows Americans moving increasingly apart on issues such as race, sexuality, politics, immigration, democracy and the overall state and direction of the nation.

Even so, Robert P. Jones, president of Public Religion Research Institute, confessed his astonishment at the depth and breadth of the gulf separating Americans. He spoke during an Oct. 27 release of the national study data.

“As somebody who’s looked at this data for a long time, year after year I’m still continually struck by how — by party, by race, by religion — we are in many ways factions and worlds apart not just politically but culturally, and that we have two political parties essentially defending different histories, living in different realities and even promoting two essentially incompatible views of America,” he said. ...

The breakdown by religion also is telling, with 93% of white evangelical Protestants saying the nation is headed in the wrong direction and 71% saying the country has changed mostly for the worse since the 1950s. White Catholics (81%, 53%), white mainline Protestants (76%, 51%) and “other” Christians (75%, 57%) were next in line.