Author Archives: Hue White

USA Today seems to have something of an intellectual mess on its hands, as it published a letter from high-schooler Chelsea Mitchell concerning running against transgender athletes – and then edited it to ideological, rather than editorial, requirements. It’s unfortunately behind an expensive paywall, so I can’t verify Limbaugh-replacement Erick Erickson’s statement of facts in the matter:

Last week, Chelsea Mitchell wrote an op-ed in USA Today about the impact to her, as the fastest girl in Connecticut, when biological males were allowed to compete as girls.

One of the things Mitchell wrote was this:

The CIAC allows biological males to compete in girls’ and women’s sports. As a result, two males began racing in girls’ track in 2017. In the 2017, 2018, and 2019 seasons alone, these males took 15 women’s state track championship titles (titles held in 2016 by nine different girls) and more than 85 opportunities to participate in higher level competitions that belonged to female track athletes.

That’s because males have massive physical advantages. Their bodies are simply bigger and stronger on average than female bodies. It’s obvious to every single girl on the track.

…

USA Today has now edited Mitchell’s piece to remove the word “male” with an editor’s note that the use of the word is “hurtful language.”

Mitchell, of course, was talking about biology and the biological differences between the sexes.

And more than just that, according to Erickson.

A quick survey of the web shows this is mostly a conservative issue, but progressive (or at least so I’d think) site Outsports has coverage:

In a fashion befitting the sponsor of the lawsuit — the Alliance Defending Freedom — Mitchell proceeded to mix in the “transphobe’s playbook” I described in a previous Outsports article. In the race Mitchell cited, she lost to two other high school girls, Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood. Both Miller and Yearwood are transgender. Mitchell is cisgender. Mitchell beat both of them to win the state title at 55 meters in 2020.

Throughout the opinion piece she referred to transgender girls and women as “males,” “a male body,” “male runners” and “biological males.” Weaponized misgendering is the first play in the playbook: Immediately sell the point that transgender women are not women.

In every filing by the ADF on this particular case, they engaged in consistent misgendering. They went as far as to try to have the judge in the lawsuit removed because he would not allow the ADF’s lawyers to misgender Miller and Yearwood in court.

Also consider this sentence in Mitchell’s piece: “I am unlikely to succeed, because I’m a woman.” That’s the underlying, and comically false, idea that anti-trans groups also sell: The concept that cisgender women are too inept to compete successfully in sport.

The sport of victimhood is alive and well in the United States. There may be articles that properly address the real and serious questions of cis- vs trans- competition out there, but at least Outsports thinks the question is already settled – and they’re into full cultural warfare mode.

But regardless of whether the word “male” is a hurtful word or just a statement of fact, USA Today should have a commitment to faithfully transmitting the opinions of op-ed writers when they choose to publish them. Words are the primary mode of communications for a newspaper, followed by pictures; one hopes that the authors choose their words with care, hoping to convey the subtle nuances of their thoughts, and thus their precise positions, on the issue at hand. Changing them retroactively, unilaterally or even with permission, distorts those positions and betrays the author.

And the ruination of the code of ethics of editorial publishing.

In 2014/2015 the Northwestern University Wildcats football team attempted to unionize, and was rebuffed by the University and the National Labor Relations Board. This has led to the introduction of a bill in Congress by Senators Booker (D-NJ) and Sanders (D-VT) to permit exactly that.

That has led to this statement by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA):

“College athletes are students and not employees of their college or university. This bill would directly undercut the purpose of college: earning a degree. The NCAA and its member schools support student-athletes through scholarships – many of which cover their full cost of education debt free – and numerous other benefits. NCAA members also are committed to modernizing name, image and likeness rules so student-athletes can benefit from those opportunities but not become employees of their school. We will continue to work with members of Congress to focus on issues that align with our priorities. But turning student-athletes into union employees is not the answer.”

And what strikes me is this: if the athletes aren’t employees, then just where is all this entertainment product coming from? Are they attributing these literally billions of dollars to the color commentators? The random motions of the crowds in the stadiums?

The NCAA’s statement does the author no favors.

Out of Politico:

Just for the orange.

Please visit the orange detoxification institution in your area.

Just to keep readers up to date on the recount in Maricopa County, AZ, now we have this:

The Pennsylvania-based IT company that was in charge of running the hand recount of Maricopa County ballots is no longer involved in the audit.

The contract with Wake Technology Services, Inc. ended May 14, the original completion date for the hand count, and the company chose not to renew its contract, according to Randy Pullen, an audit spokesperson and former state GOP chair.

“They were done,” he said. “They didn’t want to come back.”

Wake TSI was the subcontractor that developed and oversaw the procedures for recounting the county’s nearly 2.1 million ballots, working under Cyber Ninjas, the state Senate’s main contractor performing the overall audit of the county’s general election results. [azcentral]

Just a normal business incident, or more a symptom of a toxic environment? Well, based on this:

Ryan Macias, former acting director of testing and certification at the U.S. Election Assistance Commission who has observed the audit for the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office, said Tuesday that this represents the “continuation of the mismanagement and constant change which we have been observing since the beginning.”

Smells like the latter, although whether Macias is unbiased or not has some bearing on that conclusion.

It’s probably premature to suggest Wake is getting out before the lawsuits from either side begin to fly, but that’s what I’m expecting. Either those thousands of missing votes will fail to appear and the Republicans will sue Cyber Ninjas and their contractors, or they will magically appear and the Democrats will sue for fraud.

Wake should never have accepted the contract.

A few months ago Drs. James S.J. Schwartz and Tony Milligan in The Space Review tried to summarize space ethics:

So what, then, do space ethicists actually do? At the highest level of generality, we are simply here to ask the ethical questions that, sooner or later, will need to be asked. And it is a feature of the practice of ethics, and not a bug, that it produces productive disagreements about the answers. But more specifically, there are five broad roles that characterize the vast majority of space ethics research. There are no doubt others that will emerge in the future, as space ethics is an evolving discipline. But the following list captures its “settled” roles and responsibilities.

1. Space ethics identifies principles for arriving at rational compromises between different stakeholders in space. …

Unfortunately, their brief review of Why space ethics seems woefully inadequate:

In a sense, this goes to the heart of the matter, and why space ethics matters: it helps us to identify and reconsider assumptions that space advocates as well as space skeptics often fail to realize that they are making. In some cases, these assumptions turn out to be entirely reasonable. In others, they turn out to be highly questionable. If you are expecting space ethics to tell you that space exploration is the greatest thing ever, and that we should plunge ahead at all deliberate speed, then you may be in for a disappointment. You are also in for a disappointment if you are expecting space ethics to validate calls to renounce space exploration and to accept our terrestrial horizons.

I tend to be a bit of a pragmatic barbarian when it comes to philosophy. I wanted to see them motivate (space) ethics as a What goes around comes around deal. Not the sometimes-poetic Karma! approach, but the hard-nosed You screwed over that guy two months ago, so now we’re screwing you over now.

They didn’t go there.

Consequently, it all seems a bit airy and academic, and not imbued with urgency.

The Lincoln Project, despite its own travails, continues on:

This is trolius, if I recall rightly. I bet I misspelled that.

Or even fascinating. An illustrative story:

Allan Creasy, 39, had worked in restaurants and bars for more than two decades, most recently as a bartender at Celtic Crossing, an Irish bar in Memphis, where he was voted the city’s best bartender three times over the years by readers of the city’s alt-weekly newspaper, the Memphis Flyer.

Like others, Creasy saidthe pandemic proved to be the tipping point for him, exacerbating long-standing labor issues in the industry and drawing attention to how low his wages were: $2.13 an hour before tips — the minimum wage for tipped positions in Tennessee and at the federal level.

After three months back at the bar after the initial lockdown, Creasy decided to quit and pursue a career change.

“I didn’t come back to the same job I left previously,” he said. “It was very difficult to constantly have to police people about mask-wearing. It was very difficult to try to bartend and run out to the back parking lot to deliver to-go food, and to deal with Uber Eats drivers and the like, while making significantly less money than I’d been making previously.”

And the pay had gotten worse — with his income dropping from about $60,000 a year around 2011 to less than $40,000 before the pandemic, he said.

“I’ve seen the number of people who are passionate about the restaurant industry slowly ebb away over the last 20 years,” he said. “In my opinion, it’s because the server’s minimum wage hasn’t changed. There is this belief that servers and bartenders are interchangeable.”

Creasy, who has a bachelor’s degree in history, has been doing fundraising and social media work for a local political action committee since. He’s making about the same amount of money he did at the bar but doing something that feels closer to his heart with less risk. [WaPo]

If stories like these are common, this could have quite the impact on American society, as those working sub-minimum jobs finally figure out that they need more – and can make more, if only they start working towards it. These jobs may not disappear, but they may force prices up at all restaurants – and that’ll perturb what we currently see as American society.

Some people won’t like that. I, personally, think it’ll be a great thing, and I look forward to seeing how things change. Robots? Automats? Better wages? More cooking at home?

Remember former President Trump’s fear-mongering campaigning during the 2018 midterm races, the theme being that caravans of rapists were coming from Mexico and further south, and if the Republicans didn’t win big in the mid-terms, well, just let your imagination roam wild?

The Republicans sustained heavy losses in the mid-terms.

But it appears they’re at it again, if the messaging used by the Republican candidate in the special election to replace Rep Haaland (R-NM), who was nominated and confirmed to Interior Secretary, is anything to judge:

Melanie Stansbury, the Democratic candidate in next week’s special congressional election [in New Mexico], spent last weekend touting Joe Biden’s agenda, vowing to strengthen infrastructure and fight climate change, drought and hunger.

Her Republican opponent used the same preelection push to warn that she would be heading to Washington to “defund the police” and back legislation to close all federal prisons within 10 years, releasing infamous criminals out on the street.

“Think about who’s in federal prison right now: El Chapo, the co-founder of al Qaeda, the Oklahoma City bomber, the Unabomber,” state Sen. Mark Moores told a luncheon of three dozen Republican women on Friday. “That is how radical this agenda is, and we have to stop it.” [Politico]

Close all federal prisons within 10 years? Someone with a fervid imagination, I should imagine, has gotten loose. While the article attributes this to the proposed BREATHE Act, I know of no serious movement to close federal prisons.

No, this is pure fear-mongering.

The temptation, the strong temptation, is to attribute this lack of imagination and abuse of voters to the third- and fourth-raters infesting the GOP these days. I’ll even give in to it.

But it’s important for Democrat Stansbury to directly address these claims and refute them. If her messaging team is clever, they’ll roll a clip of the January 6 insurrection and then Stansbury can ask where those who participated in that treason should be incarcerated, if not in federal prisons?

Perhaps she could ask her opponent, Moores, for his advice on the matter.

Chaos and disaster.

Steve Benen seems a bit puzzled over Republican leadership outcry over social media platforms, which are private companies protected by the 1st Amendment, banning certain conservative figures from using those platforms due to policy violations – advocacy of false information, violence, that sort of thing. In the context of a newly signed Florida law which forbids companies from banning users on pain of large fines – yes, that sounds like a DOA law to me, too – he concludes:

With this in mind, lawsuits challenging [Governor DeSantis’ (R-FL)] new measure are inevitable, and the policy is likely to struggle in the courts. That said, the fact that Florida Republicans invested time, energy, and resources into such an initiative says a great deal about the party’s weird preoccupation with conspiracy theories surrounding Big Tech. [Maddowblog]

Except it’s not weird. Sure, I’ll stipulate to this:

Right off the bat, there’s a serious flaw in DeSantis’ premise: As NBC News’ report explained, “Research on social media has frequently shown … that conservative politicians and websites can be so effective on social media that they often dominate measures such as Facebook’s ranking of top links. Facebook has also relaxed its rules so that conservative pages are not penalized for violations.”

But it’s an irrelevancy. The Republicans, who are watching their base shrink through demographic attrition and disgust while refusing to reform their message or themselves, have to continue to dominate those rankings. This is because the social media platforms are the primary means for communicating cheaply and effectively with their base. Sure, email and mass mailings can be used, but neither is as good as a shared social media experience, because they inherently have the network effect: first people learn about the latest liberal outrage, and then they can talk about it among themselves, which gets them even more stirred up.

This is all about keeping the emotions roiling, and social media has no equal when it comes to that.

The Republicans cannot continue to stir the pot if the tech companies providing these platforms keep banning people and organizations who provide the fuel for the fires. DeSantis is trying to cut the herd off at the pass by passing and signing this law, warning Big Social Media to lay off enforcement of their own rules.

And does it have a chance?

DeSantis may think so, not based on sophisticated legal analysis but on the composition of SCOTUS: he may be banking on ideological loyalty saving his bacon.

But while it’s dangerous to bet on SCOTUS – I wouldn’t put any money into a betting pool connected to any particular decision by them – my suspicion is that SCOTUS would reject this law, and probably 9-0.

But let’s hope that the Federal Courts rebuff this law with such snap that the Florida GOP becomes dispirited.

A reader remarks on bitcoin:

I just wish I had bought some Bitcoins back in 2012 – 2016 when I was actually thinking about doing so.

Hindsight and so on – but, to be honest, I’m glad I did not. I prefer my investing theses, as ill-formed as they sometimes can be, to at least have some sort of virtue working for them – a good or a service that makes sense.

Bitcoin has yet to charm me, as readers of this thread know.

So I don’t like the idea of the emotional anguish that might have beset me for being invested in something that still seems to provide a weakly needed service.

Speaking of, it supposedly had a bit of a recovery today. Here’s a trailing nine month chart from Buy Bitcoin Worldwide:

It has a ways to go to reach its previous high, and it’s not at all obvious that such a price is in reach, what with the Chinese affirmation of hating on cryptocurrencies.

WaPo has a new article for masochists.

And, no, I have no real idea where bitcoin is going next.

Jennifer Rubin @ WaPo:

We don’t usually get petunias, but here’s a few.

Nadia Gill comments on Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao, director of Nomadland, a movie about American nomads – a subculture with which Zhao was unfamiliar. First, setup:

Zhao’s success has come at a time when critics are questioning the legitimacy of filmmakers telling stories as community outsiders. Last year, the filmmaker Lulu Wang publicly criticized Ron Howard’s decision to direct a film about the Chinese pianist Lang Lang. “As a classically-trained pianist born in China, I believe it’s impossible to tell Lang Lang’s story without an intimate understanding of Chinese culture and the impact of the Cultural Revolution on artists and intellectuals and the effects of Western imperialism,” Wang tweeted. [Persuasion]

Which is understandable, especially for oppressed minorities, But Gill gets to the heart of the matter:

Zhao and her trio of films about the American West teach us that identity alone cannot predict who is able to see and share the truth. Some abilities are hidden from plain view: They are of the heart and the mind. If we wish to create a rich environment for storytelling that enhances our understanding of communities that are not our own, we would be wise to care more about the filmmaker’s character than their identity.

Being a member of a culture does not necessarily bring perception to the observation, to the story; sometimes, the cultural myths serve the interests of the elite all too well in obscuring important truths. For example, my understanding is that the Catholic hierarchy has long hosted, and shielded, pedophiles and the like; it’s not a new phenomenon. But revelations to the general Catholic public of same is relatively new, which means the myths of the holiness of the Catholic hierarchy obscured for decades or even centuries, rather than revealed, the truth of Catholic culture. A Catholic film maker from fifty or one hundred years ago might have made a film in ignorance of that very real problem.

I understand Lulu Wang’s concerns, but there can be tremendous value in the viewpoint of the outsider, who may see that which the member of the culture has been trained to not see.  And I think Zhao is getting at that with this:

In an interview last year, Zhao explained her philosophy: “I find that sometimes when I go into a community that’s not my own, or a community that has a lot of issues attached to it, I have to resist wanting to say something about how I think they could be better, or how I think the government has wronged them.”

And perhaps not erasing those myths from the story is part of it.

Sequelae:

a morbid condition following or occurring as a consequence of another condition or event. [The Free Dictionary]

Noted in “Long Covid: How Bungle Reporting on a Thorny Topic,” zeynep, Insight:

Let me start by saying that I do not at all dismiss the threat of long COVID—lingering illness months after the initial acute phase ends. Such post-viral sequelae have been observed for many other pathogens, and it’s well-documented that there is a cluster of debilitating conditions we call myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) in a large number of sufferers who deserve―above all—respect, attention and resources.

And what is it? A meteorological tsunami. Tsunamis are commonly driven by earthquakes as underwater mountains of earth collapse, bestirring the ocean into awesome destruction by flooding of land. A Meteotsunami can cause the same, but is driven by meteorological phenomenon, such as storm fronts.

And the results can be far more subtle:

Waiting for his first nibble of the morning, [Marvin] Katz remembers feeling the boat lightly rock. Then he looked toward shore and saw the breakwater had nearly been wiped clean: Some people were clinging to the rocks, others were floundering in the mouth of the harbor amid an entanglement of fishing rods and bait boxes.

“It just happened so fast. The water rose in seconds,” Katz, an 87-year-old Wilmette resident, recalled nearly 65 years later. “It was like an elevator was pushing it up. We looked up and realized all these people were in the water drowning and there was no one to help.”

Katz steered the powerboat alongside a 50-year-old man struggling to stay afloat and pulled him aboard. In the time it took to rescue him, the frenzied cries for help quieted and no one was left above water.

In a matter of minutes, an 8- to 10-foot “freak wave” spanning from north suburban Wilmette Harbor to North Avenue Beach in Chicago had submerged the lakefront, killing eight people. [Chicago Tribune]

In a phrase, rip currents had swallowed them up and killed them. More here.

Here’s the Virginia bluebells, off to their roughly two week lifecycle.

An epithet is “a characterizing word or phrase firmly associated with a person or thing and often used in place of an actual name, title, or the like,” and I had to love Jennifer Rubin’s implicit proposal for a new epithet:

Modus vivendi:

1. manner of living; way of life; lifestyle.
2. a temporary arrangement between persons or parties pending a settlement of matters in debate. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in “The latest violence between Israel and Palestinians will end when both sides can declare victory. But it will be no more than a truce,” Tim Lister, CNN/World:

In some ways this suits both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas. Through confrontation they reinforce their respective bases and hollow out voices of moderation. Hamas can claim it is the true representative of Palestinians — just as the aging President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, postpones elections. Were negotiations — promoted by the international community — to restart, Hamas would be the loser as its modus vivendi is armed resistance to the Jewish state.

In the wake of the news of the failure to prevent the sale of a chain of newspapers of good repute, including the Baltimore Sun and the Orlando Sentinel, to a hedge fund of ill-repute, Alden Global Capital, Karl Bode has an observation:

we're slowly replacing a functional press with PR spam, hedge fund dudebros, trolling substack opinion columnists, foreign and domestic disinformation, brand-slathered teen influencers, and hugely consolidated dumpster fires like Sinclair Broadcasting https://t.co/oKyDCCNn2K

— Karl Bode (@KarlBode) May 21, 2021

I’m a little fascinated by the swipe at Substack, an entity that has become a haven for dissident thinkers, such as Andrew Sullivan, who (at least claimed) that expressing doubts about the woke community’s intellectual grounding resulted in his having to leave New York Magazine and what passes for the conventional journalistic/intellectual community, which he claimed had become infected with an illiberal intolerance based in the woke community. Bode’s is the sort of ad hominem swipe that greatly reduces the credibility of those who use it; his characterization of it as a home for opinion writers, while perhaps a bit limited, validates it, as opinion, informed and reasoned, is what the liberal intellectual world runs on.

But his larger point is, I think, something to legitimately worry about. For me, it’s the difficult-to-remedy problem of substituting the private sector metric of financial success for an organic measure of success in the free press sector, best characterized as acknowledgments of journalistic excellence. After all, money is easy to count; awarding Pulitzer Prizes, not so much; the common citizen is a poor judge of journalistic excellence, given the popularity of the inferior Fox News. Thus, financial success becomes a pathological and existential metric of success.

Regardless, the larger question of whether Bode (and Tumulty at WaPo) are right to bemoan a free press in deep trouble, or are merely concerned about their world changing out underneath them, is worthy of meditation. While the final answer will only come from post-change measurements, subjective or objective, the motivations for predicting and heading off changes deleterious to the benefits of the free press to society are obvious. While I distrust Bode’s personal judgment on the matter, the matter itself remains important, even critical, and I hope individuals and entities capable of the feat will step forward and offer Alden the opportunity to offload the entities they’ve just acquired before they can gut them.

Graham Lawton of NewScientist (8 May 2021, paywall) says ecocide is a word with a long history, but it’s a new one on me. Regardless, ecocide reminds me of attempts by environmental activists to find ways to incorporate Nature into the legal system, such as with chimps and with lakes (I have a post somewhere about regarding lakes as persons but cannot find it). Lawton gives us some context:

A widely reported research paper set out to discover how much of Earth’s land is ecologically intact, meaning that its ecosystem remains in a pristine, pre-industrial state. The answer: just 3 per cent. To frame it differently, in the past 500 years, humans have degraded 97 per cent of the terrestrial biosphere.

There is, I think, only one word for such levels of destruction: ecocide. Like genocide, it isn’t a word to be thrown around casually. But what else does justice to that degree of destruction?

Speaking of justice, that is exactly what some activists would like ecocide to lead to. Their long-standing goal is to have ecocide recognised in international law alongside crimes like genocide.

Those who bring destruction on nature could find themselves at the International Criminal Court (ICC) next to the perpetrators of the most heinous crimes against humanity. This idea has long been on the fringes of environmental activism, but it now has a genuine chance of being written into the statute books.

Like laws for crimes against peace, an ecocide law would trace its roots to wartime atrocities, in this case the annihilation of forests in South-East Asia, first by the UK’s Royal Air Force during the guerrilla war known as the Malayan Emergency and later by the US Air Force in the Vietnam war. In 1970, the destruction inspired Arthur Galston, a plant biologist at Yale University whose PhD research had led to the development of agent orange, to coin the word “ecocide”.

And you have to have a law before you can have a crime.

It’s an interesting concept, and gives rise to all sorts of questions, from whether the Hoover Dam and its brethren are considered, or will be considered, sites of mass ecocide, to whether or not a crop such as Afghani poppies, torched by adversaries, qualifies as ecocide. What of accidental ecocide? Is it excused, or is the law enforced as a way to make accidents so expensive that planners would be forced to take the law into account?

I think Lawton is a little ahead of himself here:

The 2002 treaty that created the ICC [International Criminal Court] originally included an ecocide law, but it was scaled back after objections from the UK and US (wilful environmental destruction in wartime is a crime, but nobody has been prosecuted for it).

But campaigners stuck to the task and criminalisation has slowly gathered support. Last year saw a significant breakthrough when two of the ICC’s member states, Vanuatu and the Maldives, asked the court to “seriously consider” criminalising ecocide. President Emmanuel Macron of France has backed their request and the government of Belgium has also indicated support.

The left wing, beyond the left of most Democrats, would back such an international law. The mainline Democrats would not.

And the Republicans’ eyes would positively bug out at the thought of being subject to such a law. They have a bad enough time tolerating the EPA as it is, even if one of their own, President Nixon, was its father.

And Lawton knows the road is long and perhaps too rough:

Last month, I hosted a New Scientist event called A Rescue Plan for Nature. We invited a distinguished panel to answer questions submitted by the audience. One was on whether ecocide should be a crime.

I expected a resounding yes, but didn’t get one. Partha Dasgupta, an economist at the University of Cambridge, said: “It’s something we could aspire to in the future but it’s far too early.” Even though there is a strong philosophical argument in favour, he said, the practical danger is that we get bogged down in legal definitions and end up achieving nothing.

I have great respect for Dasgupta and his answer gives me pause. Making ecocide a crime has enormous instinctive appeal. But as a real-world measure, would it do anything? Pursuing alleged war criminals though the ICC has proved time-consuming and difficult enough. When it comes to ecocide, who would be in the dock?

I wonder how many 20-somethings, here and abroad, are looking at this subject as a possible career.

Here’s the link to the paper Lawton cites.

Extirpate:

to remove or destroy something completely [Cambridge Dictionary]

Noted in “Where Might We Find Ecologically Intact Communities?” Andrew J. Plumptre, et al, frontiers in Forests and Global Change:

Figure 4. Changes in percentage of ecoregions in biomes selecting first areas of HF ≤ 4; then removing areas where species have been extirpated and finally removing areas where species are at low density. Results are presented for ecoregions with minimum polygon of 10,000 km2.

According to my browser, there were at least fifty uses of various forms of the word extirpate.

Karen Tumulty of WaPo finds hope in the news that 35 House Republicans voted for the bipartisan commission on the January 6th Capitol insurrection, despite the opposition of Rep Kevin McCarthy and the rest of what we so laughingly call the House GOP leadership:

Political analysts, including esteemed handicapper Charlie Cook, have noted that while there are few signs that Trump’s base has or will turn on him, there is some evidence that their fervor for him no longer burns as hot as it once did.

In a recent column for National Journal, Cook cited a raft of previously unreleased polling data conducted by Hart Research for NBC News and the Wall Street Journal. It showed, among other things, that the share of Trump loyalists who said they had “very positive” feelings about him had declined from the 83-to-94-percent range during his presidency down to 75 percent in an April survey. More and more of them described their feelings about Trump as “somewhat positive” or even “neutral.” …

Republicans in what’s left of the party’s battered establishment wing have been having quiet conversations among themselves about the need to help protect these courageous GOP lawmakers from Trump’s wrath by raising money for them and possibly by bringing in firepower from super PACs.

I think the wildcard that Tumulty is ignoring is the influence of the religious leaders on their flocks. When Trump unexpectedly won in 2016, the clerics and “prophets” and all the other grifters who had put a bet on Trump found the skies had opened and it rained all over them – wealth, power, and prestige. They’ll do their damndest – word play intended – to cling to all those things, as will certain members of their flocks who, too, discovered those things in their devotion to Trump.

That includes such strategies as pushing out the rational and semi-rational Republicans, such as Cheney, Sanford, and anyone who voted for impeachment or the bipartisan commission. An irrational base, easily led and milked, is their goal. They won’t be easily discouraged, because they’ve had their taste of all the foul honey.

And the devotion of the base has been astounding. The only real question is whether Trump is caught out doing something truly horrific, such as being on the edge of bankruptcy. Not being worth billions would be a real turnoff for the prosperity church creatures. Certain types of sexual deviancy might also cause it.

But if Trump dies, someone else will pick up the reins. In fact, there’ll be a good fight over them.