Military-style weapons get the star treatment in Hollywood

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Now that serious discussions are underway in Congress about how to reduce gun violence, it is time to consider a factor that is often ignored: Hollywood’s glorification of military-style firearms.

Our team of researchers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania has documented the increasing use of firearms since the late 1980s — including military-style weapons — in movies and television shows available without restriction to children, namely, those with PG-13 and TV-14 ratings. CONTINUED

Dan Romer (Annenberg Public Policy Center), The Hill

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A 1955 book on right-wing extremists predicted the Jan. 6 attack

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The year was 1954, and the Cold War was in full swing. Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) was seeing Soviet spies in every corner of the government. And a young sociologist at Columbia University, Daniel Bell, convened a seminar to come to grips with the menace of McCarthyism.

Bell enlisted an academic dream team that included historian Richard Hofstadter and sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset. A year later, the group of seven intellectuals published their findings as an essay collection, edited by Bell. “The New American Right” argued that McCarthy’s conspiratorial anti-communism was here to stay. …

The authors wrote that far-right activists who wrapped themselves in the American flag actually posed a grave threat to the country’s core principles. In the name of protecting U.S. democracy, they warned, the radical right would employ the language and methods of authoritarianism. CONTINUED

Theo Zenou (Cambridge U.), Washington Post

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What Ordinary Republicans Think About January 6

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… I live in a deep-red part of America. According to the New York Times neighborhood political calculator, only 15 percent of my neighbors are Democrats. That’s one reason why I laugh when Beltway Republicans and Acela-corridor conservatives purport to explain Trump’s appeal to me. They’re “explaining” the actions of my best friends, my neighbors, and many, many members of my family.

I understand it all. Perfectly well. But understanding does not necessitate agreement.

Here’s one thing I understand—one thing that’s directly relevant to the prime-time hearings about January 6: Rank-and-file Republicans are shockingly ignorant of Trump’s misdeeds. It is simply not the case that they understand everything that Trump has done and support him anyway. They have far, far more knowledge of Democratic misconduct and media malfeasance than they have of anything Trump has done. …

The Trump coalition is broadly built on two categories of Republican voters—those who know exactly who Trump is and either don’t care about his flaws or love him precisely because he’s so pugilistic and cruel, and those who even now don’t know who he is and would very much care if they know the whole truth. It’s the latter group that can deny him a second bite at the presidential apple, and it’s the latter group that most needs to watch the January 6 hearings in prime time. CONTINUED

David French, The Third Rail

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Asked four ways, Americans are more likely than not to want Roe v. Wade upheld

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With the Supreme Court expected to issue its opinion on a key abortion case in the coming weeks, pollsters such as YouGov have worked to measure Americans’ opinions on the landmark decision of Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion access nationwide. While Roe v. Wade is not directly on the Court’s docket, a leak from the Supreme Court in May indicated that a majority of Justices are ready to overturn the 1973 decision.

A compilation of data from four recent YouGov Polls indicates that more Americans do not want Roe v. Wade overturned than want it overturned, even when they are asked in different ways. The surveys included an experiment to test how question-wording affects support for overturning Roe v. Wade. CONTINUED

Douglas Rivers, YouGov

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Republicans Were Set to Self-destruct. Democrats Didn’t Let Them.

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… Watching political ads of many Republican candidates, listening to their speeches, and reading their statements, one might easily conclude that we are all surrounded by existential threats to our country, ourselves, and our way of life. …

In fact, our political debate is increasingly dominated by synthetic “issues,” carefully constructed to elicit outrage. These are often built around conspiracy theories or isolated events, some taken out of context, which many average Americans will go through a whole lifetime without ever encountering.

Nevertheless, the party associated with this fear-mongering and needless panic is basically certain to gain ground in the next elections. Democrats have effectively thrown the GOP a lifeline, constructing a ladder for Republicans to climb out of the demographic hole that they’ve dug for themselves. CONTINUED

Charlie Cook

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A look at how Americans have viewed the Jan. 6 Capitol attack

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Ahead of the House select committee’s first public hearings on its investigation into the events of Jan. 6, 2021, most Americans — 70% — think it’s at least somewhat important to find out what happened on that day and who was involved, according to a recent CBS News poll.

But Republicans don’t see it as important. They are more divided, with a slim majority saying it is not very or not at all important to find out what happened. Few Republicans think it’s very important. This is reflective of the way many Republicans have viewed what happened that day. Most have said they don’t see it as an insurrection and don’t want their party to focus much on it. …

Most Americans have described what happened on Jan. 6, 2021 as an insurrection and have said it was an attempt to overturn the election and the government. But just about one in five Republicans have seen it that way. Nearly half of Republicans have said what happened at the Capitol was patriotism, and a majority of them have described it as protecting freedom. CONTINUED

Jennifer De Pinto, CBS News

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