A conversation with David Daley, bestselling author of "Ratf*cked: Why Your Vote Doesn't Count," about his new book, "Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right's 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections"
Sadly and tragically for our country, I agree with every word about Roberts and voting and everything else your guest said. I will try to listen to the podcast if my blood pressure will allow it. I grew up in small towns in central and west Texas in the 1950’s and 1960’s with a few black and a few more Latino people, far removed from the civil rights struggles; however, I did have a conscience and pay attention to the sickness in people’s souls that would murder 4 little girls going to church(when I was 10) and so much more, and I believe in right and wrong, good and evil. Rush Limbaugh and then Fox News have slowly yet thoroughly poisoned the soul of our country, and Trump may likely have helped delivered the final blow. I am still in shock, and I fully expect the Supreme Court to install him no matter what. I literally pray I am wrong, my own wife tells me I am deranged and obsessed, but I can see the future coming. I hope all my good fellow Christians enjoy their theocracy run by the most UnGodly group imaginable. Apparently they are fine with this. See my good Christian brethren Mike Johnson and his Clay Higgins take the other day. God help us. The future will not be pretty. Everyone tells me to calm down, it will be “ok,” it is just “politics,” but the cruelty and chaos and pure EVIL coming is going to be tragic and perverse, and is wholly avoidable, if all the non psychopaths and noncriminals and nonracists would stop and think for one second, and step out of the R cult. I will never understand this, never.
I've stopped talking about it. Actually, that has helped. I just focus on what I can have a tangible impact on. I will vote in the federal election out of habit, but, sorry Greg, I don't believe it will matter.
Well then, how about voting as if it will matter because while it may not matter to you, there are an awful lot of us out here for whom it will matter. It’s not just about you now, is it.
Thanks for this comment, Rick. I am also in shock. I vacillate between gallows humor and utter disbelief that so many people have been so thoroughly fooled. There is nothing about MAGA, not a single thing, than Jesus would approve of. They worship Moloch, whether they know it or not.
Re: the podcast, I will say, Dave and I had a good time and laughed a lot. It's as light as something this terrifying can be.
Thanks, Greg. I will still listen! I have just read and listened and watched and observed SO MUCH these last nine years in utter disbelief and horror. It is exhausting. How many times have we all said, THIS IS CRAZY, this is vulgar, this is cruel, this is illegal, and virtually the entire universe treats it like another day at the office. Still!!! Witness the unhinged rantings every day now, and all we can or will talk about is the polls……..If we survive, people truly will look back on these days with contempt and disdain and disgust just like we have all done our entire lives about 1930-1940’s Germany.
🤪😝😜😝Sometimes the Democrats remind me of the old Chicago Cubs, it's always next year or election. If the right wing can arrange this why can't Democrats un arrange it?
In a related story, the Cubs won the WS in 2016, a week before the election. We were going to have a Cubs championship or HRC in the White House. We were not going to have both...
Years ago, maybe as many as 10 or more, I remember reading a profile of Roberts in the WSJ. The takeaway was that his success, going all the way back to boarding school, was that he was nice to everyone. He would just give that smuggo closed lip smile and say hello to the janitor, and before we knew it, the Nicest Man in the US was on the Yellow Brick Road to controlling how you and I define nice, and everything else we experience. That's what galls me: the unbridled urge to CONTROL other people.
The small town and rural counties abrogation of the Voting Rights Amendment is what allows so many red states to remain red. That was the key to minority party control and the set up for this and the past several elections. GOP didn't have the demographics so they took over the geographics.
I’ve been around long enough to follow John Roberts and in the beginning I admired him. Slowly I began wondering what’s his game? It became very clear as more conservative judges were approved and there was a solid majority on his court he began to act. The rest is history… down the tubes we go. The wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Yes, I was fooled by Roberts, too, and although a common enough name, could he be related to Kevin Roberts, the shovel wielding dog killer? My surprise would not be great. And just because it's on my mind after finishing the excellent book by Amy Sohn, "The Man Who Hated Women," the Comstock Act is “based on 150-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day,” but it, somehow, still stands, while the Voting Rights Act is all but gone. Priorities, amirite?
I was raised to believe that EVERYBODY has a right to vote, and nothing stood in the way of that, and up until about 20 years ago, I still believed that to be true. Then I started paying more attention and was as appalled by voter suppression as I was to find out that the Supreme Court was NOT an august body of nonpartisan people, chosen and confirmed ONLY for their wisdom of the Constitution and the law, and were, in fact, just another political arm of the easily corruptible Republican Party.
Even after this great revelation, I still harbored some trust of John Roberts. Am I the only person that noticed that Roberts started Joe Biden's 2021 presidential Oath of Office at about 11:50 AM, a full ten minutes before the Constitutionally prescribed time of 12 noon? No one mentioned it at the time, but Joe Biden was president by 11:53, which, in the grand scheme of things seems like not a big deal, but I'd never seen that before. And I thought, "oh, even John Roberts wanted to put Trump in the rearview mirror ASAP." What a dope I was.
I've been telling people that 2024 is the first presidential election since 2016 that I'm primarily voting FOR someone, and not just AGAINST someone else. And that's true, but even when Kamala takes the mantle of the presidency, there will still be a drag from the right, ALWAYS. And the drag on democracy and forward movement ultimately lands at the far-right Supreme Court, where John Roberts, wolf in sheep's clothing, still holds the most sway. Alito and Thomas will NEVER retire while a Democrat is in office. They will have to die before any Democratic president gets a shot at balancing this crooked Court, and even then, Democrats had better hold the Senate because we've already seen that ANY Republican Senate majority leader will stop a nomination from happening FOREVER, if that's what's called for, simply to hold onto raw power.
I've also been telling people, and I feel compelled to preach about it, even to the choir, that this MUST be a blow-out election for Democrats. The presidency, the Senate, and the House. WE have to have some power now to be able to right some wrongs that have been done over the last decade, well, maybe even the last 40 years, but let's at least start with the last decade. Have you seen those ridiculous signs at Trump rallies lately, "TOO BIG TO RIG?" Yeah, that. Vote BLUE!!
I think there is something to the anodyne nature of his name. So boring. Like Mike Johnson, Mike Davis, Kevin Roberts, Paul Ryan, etc. If his last name was, say, Olear, a three syllable name very few people have, perhaps he'd generate more attention. I think part of the strategy is to blend into the background. Hide behind the robe.
And yes: voting FOR someone. It's a nice feeling. This time, we are voting FOR her and also AGAINST him, so best of both worlds, I hope. I want her to smash him. I want him to lose by 10 million votes.
And if trump somehow wins, or if SCOTUS tries to fuck up the KH victory, Joe should immediately resign and let KH be president for the last few months. She's better equipped to use immunity powers to deal with it. If nothing else, it will fuck up his 47 merch.
We will see. Perhaps, despite a lot of pessimism, the good guys will win. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a democratic majority in Congress and a black woman POTUS…
I’m too old to work, but not too old to contribute to the Democratic candidates on a monthly basis.
Harris as a two term president will have opportunities nominate Supreme Court judges. Good times are here again! Billserle.com
That’s what I’ve done this election cycle. I’m on Social Security that could go bye-bye in a trumpublican future, but I’ve donated to BLUE candidates; even those who may have no real chance but it’s still a better investment than anything trump is hawking.
The founding fathers were, despite among other flaws their embrace of slavery, enlighten men. They created a Constitution that has been admired worldwide as a beacon of freedom, putting the good of We the People in the forefront of Democracy. They created a framework of government that addressed the evils that plagued their then existence, importantly an all powerful monarch. The Constitution is a very flawed document, not because of what it says but because of what it doesn't say. The Founder's created a framework that was meant to be a living document, changeable by future generations of well intentioned people to adapt to current times and mores.
Article 3, Section 1 created a judiciary. The Judiciary Act of 1789 filled out the details. Both were intended to be staffed by a likeness of the Founding Fathers, honorable, well intentioned men. In the system of checks and balances, Congress is empowered to oversee the judicial system.
Sadly the Founders never contemplated the likes of Leonard Leo, Harlan Crow, the Koch Brothers, Mitch McConnell and John Roberts. The kool-aid drinking members of the Federalist Society are today's Brown Shirts. While the high level corruption of the Judiciary has been in the making for several decades, this group super charged it. Could the Founders ever contemplate McConnell denying Garland the bench but then Storm Trooper rushing Coney Barrett to that bench. Did God contemplate a snake in his perfect Garden? Did both God and the Founders miss one important issue, Power Corrupts and Power is like alcohol to an alcoholic?
I wonder if the Constitution would have been a document of greater construction if women participated in it's drafting. It's framework's biggest flaw, the underlying supposition that all men are created equal, all want what is best for the country. This flaw, it addressed the concern over a monarch but never addressed a cabal of evil.
Over centuries the Constitution has survived numerous threats. Like the Bible it continues to be a source of inspiration. The biggest question, for how much longer?
Remember, not all of the founders were in favor of slavery. They had to compromise with the southern slaveholder states in order to get the Constitution ratified. They were hoping that their compromise could be corrected in future sessions however the growth and explosive success of opening up our new country got in the way so the problem only got worse; not fixed.
I think it all started to go off the rails when the GOP refused to compromise. When Republicans were like, "We don't care, we want Clinton to lose." Newt Gingrich started that. Newt Gingrich, who was one of the Opus Dei converts. Mitch did the same thing, and here we are. Even in the lead-in to the Civil War, Congress compromised. We're lucky we've survived this long, the way GOP refuses to govern.
I blame almost everything going on now on Newt Gingrich, another fuckhead that won't die. I watched FRONTLINE's "The Choice" this week, and there was Newt Gingrich as one of the talking heads. Ugh! At the end I went to YouTube comments about this excellent every four-year show that PBS does on the presidential candidates and found what I expected. MAGAts going off about how "biased" it was. And there were several people that corrected them, saying that, no it wasn't biased, Trump is just a shitty person. Everything told in the documentary was absolutely true. The truth has a liberal bias, I guess.
I don't do podcasts, but I HAVE just bought his book. Lord knows how I am going to read all the recommended books I've bought--including your new one--before election day. It would require finishing at least a couple a day.
But I am sadly aware the even a Blue Wave isn't going to stop the Right Wing fuckery. So I will soldier on. Of course, a Red Wave could get a subpoena to Amazon and prosecution for daring to read such stuff. Not that I would really MIND being deported to England or Ireland.
November will either bring relief, in the form of a KH tsunami, or I may be in real danger. It's so weird and uncomfortable. Nov 5 can't get here soon enough...
I know that in the takeover of the NC legislature and governorship in 2010, they had legislation already written that gave them free rein to run roughshod all over Black voters in the state and then they gerrymandered the heck out of us just like they did in Wisconsin. Unlike Wisconsin though, NC is still under their thumb and second to Texas as the most gerrymandered-also thanks to J. Roberts and his right wing cohorts in the Court.
The super-rich and the six #GOP toolwankers on #SCOTUS are desperate to have a Republican president in 2025, otherwise their 30 year GOP plan to end democracy will fail. #GOPtraitors
TGIF🎉🎉🎉
Sadly and tragically for our country, I agree with every word about Roberts and voting and everything else your guest said. I will try to listen to the podcast if my blood pressure will allow it. I grew up in small towns in central and west Texas in the 1950’s and 1960’s with a few black and a few more Latino people, far removed from the civil rights struggles; however, I did have a conscience and pay attention to the sickness in people’s souls that would murder 4 little girls going to church(when I was 10) and so much more, and I believe in right and wrong, good and evil. Rush Limbaugh and then Fox News have slowly yet thoroughly poisoned the soul of our country, and Trump may likely have helped delivered the final blow. I am still in shock, and I fully expect the Supreme Court to install him no matter what. I literally pray I am wrong, my own wife tells me I am deranged and obsessed, but I can see the future coming. I hope all my good fellow Christians enjoy their theocracy run by the most UnGodly group imaginable. Apparently they are fine with this. See my good Christian brethren Mike Johnson and his Clay Higgins take the other day. God help us. The future will not be pretty. Everyone tells me to calm down, it will be “ok,” it is just “politics,” but the cruelty and chaos and pure EVIL coming is going to be tragic and perverse, and is wholly avoidable, if all the non psychopaths and noncriminals and nonracists would stop and think for one second, and step out of the R cult. I will never understand this, never.
Amen, Brother.
You just covered everything I hear daily. Calm down, it’s never going to happen, it’s just politics!! Lord help us!
I've stopped talking about it. Actually, that has helped. I just focus on what I can have a tangible impact on. I will vote in the federal election out of habit, but, sorry Greg, I don't believe it will matter.
Well then, how about voting as if it will matter because while it may not matter to you, there are an awful lot of us out here for whom it will matter. It’s not just about you now, is it.
The numbers always matter. I want her to win by 10 million votes.
I hope you're right and I am wrong.
People in my own family.
"Trump is going to overturn gay marriage."
"That will NEVER happen."
Plenty of Germans said much the same in the 1930s.
Thanks for this comment, Rick. I am also in shock. I vacillate between gallows humor and utter disbelief that so many people have been so thoroughly fooled. There is nothing about MAGA, not a single thing, than Jesus would approve of. They worship Moloch, whether they know it or not.
Re: the podcast, I will say, Dave and I had a good time and laughed a lot. It's as light as something this terrifying can be.
Thanks, Greg. I will still listen! I have just read and listened and watched and observed SO MUCH these last nine years in utter disbelief and horror. It is exhausting. How many times have we all said, THIS IS CRAZY, this is vulgar, this is cruel, this is illegal, and virtually the entire universe treats it like another day at the office. Still!!! Witness the unhinged rantings every day now, and all we can or will talk about is the polls……..If we survive, people truly will look back on these days with contempt and disdain and disgust just like we have all done our entire lives about 1930-1940’s Germany.
🤪😝😜😝Sometimes the Democrats remind me of the old Chicago Cubs, it's always next year or election. If the right wing can arrange this why can't Democrats un arrange it?
In a related story, the Cubs won the WS in 2016, a week before the election. We were going to have a Cubs championship or HRC in the White House. We were not going to have both...
Years ago, maybe as many as 10 or more, I remember reading a profile of Roberts in the WSJ. The takeaway was that his success, going all the way back to boarding school, was that he was nice to everyone. He would just give that smuggo closed lip smile and say hello to the janitor, and before we knew it, the Nicest Man in the US was on the Yellow Brick Road to controlling how you and I define nice, and everything else we experience. That's what galls me: the unbridled urge to CONTROL other people.
Clarence Thomas is reportedly very nice as well, in the same sort of way.
Nice like poison syrup.
The small town and rural counties abrogation of the Voting Rights Amendment is what allows so many red states to remain red. That was the key to minority party control and the set up for this and the past several elections. GOP didn't have the demographics so they took over the geographics.
Well put, Billy.
I’ve been around long enough to follow John Roberts and in the beginning I admired him. Slowly I began wondering what’s his game? It became very clear as more conservative judges were approved and there was a solid majority on his court he began to act. The rest is history… down the tubes we go. The wolf in sheep’s clothing.
I really started having doubt with Roberts when re oversaw the first impeachment.
My contempt for him reached extreme heights during the impeachment. He looked irritated he had to be there, like he was wasting his time. Traitor.
I was impressed by him at the confirmation hearing, and I was fooled, too. He's very good at what he does, as Dave says.
What will it take before the sleepy majority wakes tf up? I guess we'll find out.
I would have said, "A plague." But there was one and people stayed asleep.
Yes, I was fooled by Roberts, too, and although a common enough name, could he be related to Kevin Roberts, the shovel wielding dog killer? My surprise would not be great. And just because it's on my mind after finishing the excellent book by Amy Sohn, "The Man Who Hated Women," the Comstock Act is “based on 150-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day,” but it, somehow, still stands, while the Voting Rights Act is all but gone. Priorities, amirite?
I was raised to believe that EVERYBODY has a right to vote, and nothing stood in the way of that, and up until about 20 years ago, I still believed that to be true. Then I started paying more attention and was as appalled by voter suppression as I was to find out that the Supreme Court was NOT an august body of nonpartisan people, chosen and confirmed ONLY for their wisdom of the Constitution and the law, and were, in fact, just another political arm of the easily corruptible Republican Party.
Even after this great revelation, I still harbored some trust of John Roberts. Am I the only person that noticed that Roberts started Joe Biden's 2021 presidential Oath of Office at about 11:50 AM, a full ten minutes before the Constitutionally prescribed time of 12 noon? No one mentioned it at the time, but Joe Biden was president by 11:53, which, in the grand scheme of things seems like not a big deal, but I'd never seen that before. And I thought, "oh, even John Roberts wanted to put Trump in the rearview mirror ASAP." What a dope I was.
I've been telling people that 2024 is the first presidential election since 2016 that I'm primarily voting FOR someone, and not just AGAINST someone else. And that's true, but even when Kamala takes the mantle of the presidency, there will still be a drag from the right, ALWAYS. And the drag on democracy and forward movement ultimately lands at the far-right Supreme Court, where John Roberts, wolf in sheep's clothing, still holds the most sway. Alito and Thomas will NEVER retire while a Democrat is in office. They will have to die before any Democratic president gets a shot at balancing this crooked Court, and even then, Democrats had better hold the Senate because we've already seen that ANY Republican Senate majority leader will stop a nomination from happening FOREVER, if that's what's called for, simply to hold onto raw power.
I've also been telling people, and I feel compelled to preach about it, even to the choir, that this MUST be a blow-out election for Democrats. The presidency, the Senate, and the House. WE have to have some power now to be able to right some wrongs that have been done over the last decade, well, maybe even the last 40 years, but let's at least start with the last decade. Have you seen those ridiculous signs at Trump rallies lately, "TOO BIG TO RIG?" Yeah, that. Vote BLUE!!
All excellent points, Steve. Thank you.
I think there is something to the anodyne nature of his name. So boring. Like Mike Johnson, Mike Davis, Kevin Roberts, Paul Ryan, etc. If his last name was, say, Olear, a three syllable name very few people have, perhaps he'd generate more attention. I think part of the strategy is to blend into the background. Hide behind the robe.
And yes: voting FOR someone. It's a nice feeling. This time, we are voting FOR her and also AGAINST him, so best of both worlds, I hope. I want her to smash him. I want him to lose by 10 million votes.
And if trump somehow wins, or if SCOTUS tries to fuck up the KH victory, Joe should immediately resign and let KH be president for the last few months. She's better equipped to use immunity powers to deal with it. If nothing else, it will fuck up his 47 merch.
10 million uteri.
We will see. Perhaps, despite a lot of pessimism, the good guys will win. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a democratic majority in Congress and a black woman POTUS…
I’m too old to work, but not too old to contribute to the Democratic candidates on a monthly basis.
Harris as a two term president will have opportunities nominate Supreme Court judges. Good times are here again! Billserle.com
That’s what I’ve done this election cycle. I’m on Social Security that could go bye-bye in a trumpublican future, but I’ve donated to BLUE candidates; even those who may have no real chance but it’s still a better investment than anything trump is hawking.
He will cut so much stuff. It will be horrifying. I hope people realize it.
I share your optimism, Bill. The column is called PREVAIL, after all, not SLOW DEATH.
The founding fathers were, despite among other flaws their embrace of slavery, enlighten men. They created a Constitution that has been admired worldwide as a beacon of freedom, putting the good of We the People in the forefront of Democracy. They created a framework of government that addressed the evils that plagued their then existence, importantly an all powerful monarch. The Constitution is a very flawed document, not because of what it says but because of what it doesn't say. The Founder's created a framework that was meant to be a living document, changeable by future generations of well intentioned people to adapt to current times and mores.
Article 3, Section 1 created a judiciary. The Judiciary Act of 1789 filled out the details. Both were intended to be staffed by a likeness of the Founding Fathers, honorable, well intentioned men. In the system of checks and balances, Congress is empowered to oversee the judicial system.
Sadly the Founders never contemplated the likes of Leonard Leo, Harlan Crow, the Koch Brothers, Mitch McConnell and John Roberts. The kool-aid drinking members of the Federalist Society are today's Brown Shirts. While the high level corruption of the Judiciary has been in the making for several decades, this group super charged it. Could the Founders ever contemplate McConnell denying Garland the bench but then Storm Trooper rushing Coney Barrett to that bench. Did God contemplate a snake in his perfect Garden? Did both God and the Founders miss one important issue, Power Corrupts and Power is like alcohol to an alcoholic?
I wonder if the Constitution would have been a document of greater construction if women participated in it's drafting. It's framework's biggest flaw, the underlying supposition that all men are created equal, all want what is best for the country. This flaw, it addressed the concern over a monarch but never addressed a cabal of evil.
Over centuries the Constitution has survived numerous threats. Like the Bible it continues to be a source of inspiration. The biggest question, for how much longer?
Remember, not all of the founders were in favor of slavery. They had to compromise with the southern slaveholder states in order to get the Constitution ratified. They were hoping that their compromise could be corrected in future sessions however the growth and explosive success of opening up our new country got in the way so the problem only got worse; not fixed.
And their parting gift to us was the Electoral College. Ugh. Also the two senators system. Also ugh.
I think it all started to go off the rails when the GOP refused to compromise. When Republicans were like, "We don't care, we want Clinton to lose." Newt Gingrich started that. Newt Gingrich, who was one of the Opus Dei converts. Mitch did the same thing, and here we are. Even in the lead-in to the Civil War, Congress compromised. We're lucky we've survived this long, the way GOP refuses to govern.
I blame almost everything going on now on Newt Gingrich, another fuckhead that won't die. I watched FRONTLINE's "The Choice" this week, and there was Newt Gingrich as one of the talking heads. Ugh! At the end I went to YouTube comments about this excellent every four-year show that PBS does on the presidential candidates and found what I expected. MAGAts going off about how "biased" it was. And there were several people that corrected them, saying that, no it wasn't biased, Trump is just a shitty person. Everything told in the documentary was absolutely true. The truth has a liberal bias, I guess.
I don't do podcasts, but I HAVE just bought his book. Lord knows how I am going to read all the recommended books I've bought--including your new one--before election day. It would require finishing at least a couple a day.
But I am sadly aware the even a Blue Wave isn't going to stop the Right Wing fuckery. So I will soldier on. Of course, a Red Wave could get a subpoena to Amazon and prosecution for daring to read such stuff. Not that I would really MIND being deported to England or Ireland.
November will either bring relief, in the form of a KH tsunami, or I may be in real danger. It's so weird and uncomfortable. Nov 5 can't get here soon enough...
I know that in the takeover of the NC legislature and governorship in 2010, they had legislation already written that gave them free rein to run roughshod all over Black voters in the state and then they gerrymandered the heck out of us just like they did in Wisconsin. Unlike Wisconsin though, NC is still under their thumb and second to Texas as the most gerrymandered-also thanks to J. Roberts and his right wing cohorts in the Court.
But John Roberts told me things had changed!
Roberts is the literal snake in the woodpile(those are usually the deadlier ones). Those in he grass are trying to get away.
Well put.
The super-rich and the six #GOP toolwankers on #SCOTUS are desperate to have a Republican president in 2025, otherwise their 30 year GOP plan to end democracy will fail. #GOPtraitors
Yes, because KH will slay that dragon.
Oh! I'd love to see that picture!!
Roberts belongs to the boys that believe only White Male Property owners should vote.
Indeed.
Two great shows this week, Greg. I learned and laughed a lot!
Thanks, Lynell! Dave and I had a lot of fun.