If It Wasn't For Bad Faith They'd Have No Faith At All

Denny Carter's here, everyone say hey!

Hello to the good Wonkette folks. My name is Denny Carter. You may know me from such places as Bluesky, the official app of sports, where I alternate between analyzing the NFL and analyzing the ways in which fascists leverage bad-faith arguments to advance their wretched, radical, anti-democracy views into the political mainstream, both in the US and abroad. Or you may know me from my frequent appearances in Tabs, the Wonkette newsletter with which you start your day.

I started Bad Faith Times back in 2022. I was downright giddy to see that a handful of Bad Faith Times blogs have made their way into Wonkette newsletters over the past few months. That brought a lot of new folks to BFT, some of whom now support the site. I very much appreciate that. Wonkette readers seem like a good, knowledgable group of pro-democracy zealots in a time of rising authoritarianism. For that I’m grateful.

But what is “bad faith”? Think of the ways state-level Republicans have destroyed access to reproductive care since the GOP hardened into an anti-democracy party following Barack Obama’s election. Republicans in red states across the country expect us to believe they really, truly care about the cleanliness of abortion clinics, about the width of hallways in those clinics. And if those clinics have some dirt on the floor or a hallway that’s an inch too narrow, they get shut down. Republicans get to tell the media that they had no choice but to stop the clinic from operating, as the clinic posed a danger to women, whom they love and support, and the constitutional-rights-having fetal tissue within them.

You know and I know the whole point of this little bad-faith exercise was to shut down the damn clinic and restrict or end abortion access in the state. They could not honestly say that, however, because — under the legal precedent formerly known as Roe — that was blatantly unconstitutional. Enter bad faith: the magic elixir for fascist politics.

Bad faith can be found in any number of the right wing’s hobby horses. They pretend to care about a truthful, historically accurate AI that can guide government decision-making when their actual goal is to craft AI that operates within the structure of their warped, backward, ahistorical worldview. Again, they can’t be honest about this. We’ve seen the wrestling lady who runs the Education Department express dire concern about racism in American public schools — without, of course, specifying that her concern is about racism toward white students. Officials in the Trump regime’s Equal Opportunity Commission say with grave concern that good, decent American workers are facing discrimination in the workplace. This, they say, will not be tolerated. What they mean, naturally, is that white men are facing systemic discrimination because some US companies have more readily considered job candidates of color. The faith is bad and getting worse.

Every month in this space, I’ll share BFT blog posts I’ve published over the previous 30 days, along with some thoughts on those pieces, how they were received, and how they might be relevant in the coming weeks and months. Not every BFT blog is explicitly about bad faith politics, but most are, and I’m always open to pitches about how bad faith arguments are being used legislatively and judicially and otherwise. I can be reached at dennyc13@gmail.com.

The American Right Is Into Reparations Now

(That’s a link. You can click it!) I wish I were recalling an SNL sketch when I say the Trump regime is searching high and low for those who have been victimized by government and workplace diversity programs meant to expand job applicant pools and give real chances to people of color and women and LGBTQ folks.

It’s terribly real though. The regime has a goddamn hotline a white man can call to report a local person of color getting a job over him, and the federal government will investigate the company and find out why this white man was not awarded the job. This intentional misinterpretation of civil rights and equal opportunity law is not new. It has, however, hardened into something wicked and powerful in the hands of people who reject multicultural democracy as a scourge. If you see civil rights as something to be overcome, then yes, you’re going to twist racial equality efforts into something that will damage marginalized communities while further empowering dominant groups. That this is so widely accepted, I think, is a total failure of the American education system. That’s a blog for another day.

One Day His Name Will Be Wiped Away

No analysis of bad faith here. Just a reminder to good folks out there that the 2024 election did not mark the end of history and that one day, maybe soon, the name and legacy of the worst American to ever live will be washed away.

A Blaring Warning for the Democratic Party

I wrote (extensively) about the total failure of the UK Labour Party’s popularist approach to politics as the UK’s fascist party surges (popularism is a lot different than populism, for the record). The idea behind popularism — that center-left parties should focus exclusively on kitchen table issues — is a guaranteed loser because it cedes all other issues to the far Right, which can shape how the public perceives immigration and LGBTQ rights and foreign policy.

We’ve seen some prominent Democrats, including Gavin Newsom, toy with popularism since the start of the second Trump term. The UK Labour Party has learned a hard lesson in embracing this bloodless approach to politics, and now they find themselves polling behind the Greens. It’s a brutally clear warning to elected Democrats as they wait to take majorities in at least one chamber of Congress this year.

The Normies Care More About Inflation Than You Think

Now I will immediately contradict myself and introduce a blog looking at data that says Americans care more about inflation than anything else, by a wide margin. The Price of Shit going up and up and up with no end in sight is on the minds of voters who don’t spend all day every day doomscrolling and eating the world’s pain. They see their grocery bill rising every week and they want it to stop.

They will elect anyone who they think will accomplish this. I know this because they elected an openly fascist insurrectionist with close ties to the world’s most famous (late) pedophile because he pledged to make eggs slightly cheaper.

I know it drives you absolutely insane when elected Democrats post online about the price of bread amid videos of the president’s paramilitary goon squad terrorizing opposition strongholds. They’re posting this shit for a reason though. Normies are demanding lower prices. That normies can care about two things simultaneously — the price of groceries and the president’s secret police, for example — seems to escape most Democrats.

JD Vance Is ‘Not Happy’ Renee Good Was Killed, But…

The smarmy internet troll we call vice president — the Worst Millennial — was put in charge of crafting an unreality in which Minnesota resident Renee Good’s murder at the hands of the president’s secret police was justified.

Vance seemed to relish this role, shoehorning into the public discourse around Good’s execution a version of events that is often pushed to the top of your X platform feed. Vance clearly did not care about the killing of Good by a masked agent working for the president, but he had to pretend to care if he was going to influence the way this murder was covered and consumed by a social media-addicted American public. Vance, who grew up online, is a veritable master of bad-faith politics.

They Make You Sound Crazy

To accurately describe the Trump regime is to sound totally and completely unhinged and unwell.

Imagine trying to explain to a normie that the DHS account on the X platform regularly uses 14 words in its posts as a nod to white supremacists. It’s very much designed to make a cleareyed person sound crazy. That’s the whole point.

Shamelessness: The Key To A Post-Truth Society

BFT contributor John Fosberry Jr. — a valued member of the fantastic Bad Faith Times discord community — wrote about ignorance as a high virtue in modern American culture.

Fosberry writes that Americans, even those who “are generally good people at heart, are thoroughly convinced their personal Youtube algorithm or TikTok feed is more correct than peer-reviewed professionals in their fields.” This in turn creates a society in which anyone can be an expert on any topic, thereby killing the mere idea of expertise. It’s how we ended up with a eugenicist as our HHS secretary — a guy who says with a straight face that it is un-American to trust the advice of people who have dedicated their entire lives to the pursuit of better, more robust health policy.

Instead, and without a shred of shame, we have a nation that takes cues from a roided-out Instagram health influencer cosplaying as a health and science expert. As Fosberry writes, as a country we need to bring back shame.

Your Guide To Bluesky, The Official App of Sports

I’m a sports guy, as you might know. I cover the NFL for Rotoworld and have been in the football-analyzing industry since 2012. It’s a passion of mine that turned into a job because I tend to take enjoyable things and turn them into work. So it goes.

I’m in position to lure folks away from X and toward Bluesky, a decentralized social media site that is not controlled and manipulated by corrupt, Trump-aligned billionaires. In a sport-obsessed nation, I think it’s incumbent on sports enjoyers to tell friends and loved ones that Bluesky has seen an explosion of sports content over the past year. Bluesky is not the site it was in 2023 or 2024 — not even close. Pulling people out of the fascist muck and mire of X and directing them to Bluesky is a small but important thing.

I think it’s vitally important to get regular folks away from Elon Musk’s influence. Musk has created a fascism machine with the bones of what used to be Twitter, a pro-democracy tool without which Trump would have won in 2020. Musk has killed Twitter and replaced it with something much darker, something incompatible with democratic self-governance. I’ve written a lot about Musk’s red pilling over the past two and a half years and I’m convinced that we can have the X platform or we can have democracy, but we cannot have both. European leaders, it seems, are waking up to this reality.

We Must Establish The Run Against Authoritarism

Doing the little things in our fight against authoritarian terror adds up to the larger, transformational things that other teetering democracies have achieved. We’re seeing that in Minnesota. Good, brave, freedom-loving Americans are flooding the streets in defense of their neighborhoods and towns, doing what they can to push back, however small.

I wrote about the idea of running the football — patiently, a few yards at a time with everyone chipping in — as a way to approach what will be a protracted fight against a regime that now has an extrajudicial paramilitary force with an unending supply of money and guns. Even those who don’t enjoy the sportsball might like this blog.

Alex Pretti was executed in the streets of Minnesota for establishing the run, for helping a woman off the ground as she was attacked by men with guns. Pretti was doing a little thing, a loving thing, a necessary thing. I wrote here about Pretti, who was a Real Man.

They Did It For The Content

The early January kidnapping of Nicholas Maduro made it clear how important social media has become for a regime teeming with posters. There’s a reason Pete Hegseth, who makes Instagram-style workout videos with the troops, was monitoring his X timeline during the military operation to kidnap Maduro and his wife.

Everything these people do — from blowing up boats for no particular reason to invading and occupying American cities — is in service of content. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

I’ll see you next month, or over at Bad Faith Times.