In News: GOP Lackluster Performance and Effects of Covid; Limits of Abortion Extremism; Gerrymandering; Jericho March in Arizona; International Ramifications of U.S. Elections; Clarence Thomas

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

Jonathan V. Last offers an intriguing reason Republicans are now underperforming politically, one I haven't seen elsewhere: quite simply, their approach to the pandemic killed off a lot of their voters. One reason the Republicans underperformed this election cycle: they killed off a lot of their own voters during Covid. As he says, "Republicans accounted for about 80 percent more of the excess deaths than Democrats."

As GOP Channels Putin: Commentary on Republican Long Game in Cozying Up to Russia's Strongman Autocrat

Heather Cox Richardson, "Letters from an American, 7 December 2019":

In June 2019, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that democracy is obsolete. He believes that a few oligarchs should run the world while the rest of us do as we are told, and he is doing his best to destroy both American democracy and the international structures, like NATO, that hold it in place. The interests of reactionary American leaders and Russian president Putin run parallel. Astonishingly, that affinity has recently come out into the open. Some of our leaders are publicly echoing Putin’s propaganda, apparently willing to work with him to undermine the principles on which our nation rests so long as it means they can stay in power. 

Will we permit the destruction of American democracy on our watch?

More Reports on Shared Goal of Putin and U.S. White Evangelicals: Deconstructing Democracy

The story reported by Peter Montgomery, which I shared with you on Friday — that the neo-Confederate League of the South, classified as a hate group by Southern Poverty Law Center, is inaugurating a Russian-language section on its website — has now been reported by other venues including Newsweek and The Hill. As Peter Montgomery reports (and this is echoed in the other two articles I've linked; I'm also repeating what I posted Friday),

God, Guns, and White Supremacy: More Valuable Commentary about U.S. White Evangelicals' Infatuation with Strongman Putin and What's Driving It

I keep trying to think of a historical explanation for the nonchalance of GOP leaders and voters about treason at the highest levels of government now, after the Southern strategy gave the GOP a solid base of white evangelical voters from the Old Confederac—

Oh, wait.

— 𝚆𝚒𝚕𝚕𝚒𝚊𝚖 𝙳. 𝙻𝚒𝚗𝚍𝚜𝚎𝚢 (@wdlindsy) July 17, 2018

Here's some more commentary for you that I've read today, which shows the clear connections between the white supremacist nationalism that binds together white evangelicals in the U.S. and Russia, as white American evangelicals look to Putin's authoritarian assault on democracy as a model for an American society in which a religious minority will be, they hope, permitted to impose their moral and religious ideas on the majority by force:

More National Prayer Breakfast Commentary: "The [Republican] Party Needs to Face That Element Within Them, Which Is Essentially a White-Supremacist Element That Putin Is Playing"

More good commentary about the connection of the National Prayer Breakfast to the treasonous behavior of the political party now controlling the U.S. federal government — this commentary has come to my attention since I posted my collection of other pieces early today: