Jon Chait remarks on a phrase that's become common on the right recently:
“The Federalist Society doesn’t know what time it is,” said Russell T. Vought, the former Trump budget director who is orchestrating his planning.... A conservative who knows what time it is recognizes that the left is poised to permanently seize power, and that the old rules of politics (following the traditional norms of liberal democracy) no longer apply in the face of this emergency.
The phrase appears to have been popularized by either David Reaboi or Michael Anton, both fellows at the Claremont Institute....
I wouldn't comment on this except for the fact that I happen to be watching The Sopranos right now.¹ In one of the first-season episodes someone (Paulie?) says, "Hey, I know what time it is" in the same sense that Chait highlights. So the political right has apparently appropriated a phrase that originated either in north Jersey or with the mob. Or both.
¹Yeah, it took me 25 years. So sue me.
They've always been huge fans of Corleone massacres.
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I'm in my late 40's, raised in Michigan, and I'm certain I've heard that phrase my whole life. I think it's mostly been an idiom in African American vernacular. It feels like a pair with "That guy's out to lunch."
“I know what time it is.”
I would say the origin of that phrase goes back to Long Island during my teenage years when my mother would yell up the stairs to say the music was too loud and ask if I knew it was after midnight. (I should have copyrighted the phrase back then.)
Well, maybe not. But similar phrases with the same sense go back to songs from Chicago in the ’60s and Rodgers and Hart in the ’30s. I think the phrase has been in the language a long time and the origin may be too hard to pin down.
Wasn't there some kind of Cold War scare-mongering tv ad using the phrase, like with Ronald Reagan?
I think the phrase may associate with a vague memory of this ad,
It's 10 pm. Do You Know Where Your Children Are?
https://tedium.co/2019/04/04/public-service-announcement-psa-history/
Does anybody really know what time it is? (Chicago, 1969)
Yeah, and I remember the next line, too!
The Time Has Come Today (Chambers Brothers, 1968)
Does anybody really care?
Ahh, OK -- they've glommed onto it as yet another dog-whistle phrase. Yeah, they probably picked it up off The Sopranos, but really that only matters cause of the association with an iconic violent group, something they gobble up like chickens on ticks.
This is an absurd statement unless you believe the left is about to mount a coup. If nothing else, the structure of the US Senate makes it hard for us to plausibly "permanently" seize power via elections.
The hell do these idiots get this idea?
I can't imagine.
It couldn't be that the left's protests did hundreds of billions in damage and no one went to jail, and the one right-wing protest that did maybe a few tens of million resulted in dozens of people going to jail. (Every Confederate monument that's no longer in place counts as the amount of damage that it would cost to get it back up.)
It couldn't be that after almost 40 years of trying to restrict additional illegal immigration and unfair "work-based" immigration, the proportion of children of immigrants to children of citizens has never been higher.
It couldn't be that the Right won every vote - on the ERA, on Prop 8, and so on - and gay marriage was imposed by a handful of well-placed Harvard alumni.
No one went to jail? Dear Lord sir, have you no shame?
Typical RWNJ attempt to rewrite history. For starters, the BLM protesters weren't "leftists" OR "rightists"; they were BLACK. For continuers there were tens of thousands of people charged as a result of the BLM protests and at least thousands of them were imprisoned. Further, "hundreds of billions in damage" is a gross overstatement by at least an order of magnitude. Finally, the BLM protesters had valid grounds for protest; the 1/6 insurrectionists did not.
Furthermore:
The BLM protests were the largest in U.S. history, with tens of millions marching in the streets and exercising their 1st Amendment rights. “The left” may wish they were all leftists, as the right likes to portray them, but the protesters included a broad cross-section of Americans.
The protests were overwhelmingly peaceful. A WaPo study determined 93% of all marches were nonviolent. In the majority of those that did turn violent, it was the police that initiated violence to deny protesters their legal rights. That is, it was the opposite of protesters trying to seize power. The state imposed its power illegally.
If you’re looking for an example where a small minority of violent extremists participated in protests designed to seize power, look no further than the January 6 insurrection.
Needs sarcasm fontIt’s good that the monuments to traitors have been removed. God bless
Projection, projection, projection. With Repugnants it's ALWAYS projection. Or outright lying thievery.
I think they get it from looking at the youth of today. Boys wearing pearls, girls deciding to be asexual, kids accepting trans peers without beating them up. Atheism is the fastest growing religion. The list goes on of what is as massive a social change as the 60's.
The world is ending right before their eye and they are helpless to do anything about it (except create HOA's and gerrymandered "Safe" districts.)
... and support a piece of shit for president.
Projection.
Anadackos beat me to it, but that is the obvious and clear answer to "where did they get this idea?".
A conservative is somewhere between 12 and 3 o'clock. The Federalist Society is South of 3 o'clock, aka the dark side. To the right of the Federalist Society is closer to 6 o'clock, aka rock bottom.
That's what time it is.
Now my name is MCA, I've got a license to kill
I think you know what time it is, it's time to get ill
– Beastie Boys, ‘Paul Revere’, 1986
It’s 40-year-old NYC hip-hop slang, who knows why they’re just picking up on it now
Same era, but more in the sense that KD is referencing. Public Enemy, “Don’t Believe The Hype” has a line from Flava Flav to the effect of “Yo, Chuck, step up to the mic and let these people know what time it is.”
Apparently Kool Moe Dee was a big fan of the Sopranos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JB-JBGs5KUo
Without invoking conspiracy theories do you think it was by chance that 3 liberal icons were assassinated in the sixties? The last one would have quite possibly beaten Nixon for the presidency. History changed and with a little imagination you can count the ways.
Never having watched the Sopranos, I'd interpret the time deal differently. With the whine that "the Left is seizing power using democracy!!", I'd figure that the "time" the wingnuts are harkening back to is the pre-democratic feudal ages, or possibly the European ages of conquest, in which the bizarre notion of "white supremacy" was hatched to justify outright theft and enslavement.
Back to crowning anybody who could overcome the rest by sufficient force, in other words. Force combined with a total lack of ethics and morality. This is what I see in the trumped-up magadudes, at least.
It's an old expression. Not sure how old, but the first time I heard it was in the song The Sadder But Wiser Girl from The Music Man, and I'm guessing Meredith Willson (who wrote the musical) didn't invent it either.
"I spark, I fizz, for the lady who knows what time it is!"
You can listen to it on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUJhOBIH6kk
Not exactly a new idea:
"The time is out of joint; O cursed spite!
That ever I was born to set it right."
Ha. I was wondering if the expression could be traced back to Shakespeare and was just looking for it. I haven't found a quote that seems to capture the same thing -- i.e., being aware and in the know -- but there are a number of pages left to go through ...
You know, it occurs to me, if conservatives are now using the expression, is this their pushback to "woke"? Might be!
I remember that being used in the 90ies ‘knowing what’s what’ and it definitely came from rap music
I was gonna say, see I'm Your Pusher by Ice-T. It was all over hip hop in the 1980s.
Even so, gentlemen, it was used in a very popular musical written in the late 40's and early 50's, and made into very popular movie in the 60's. It's been around. It's been in use. And I'm guessing the woman who wrote the musical didn't invent it either. Not surprised rap musicians picked up on it.
"It's Tool Time!"
Let me just note that the Conservative coalition that Ronald Reagan put together is falling apart. It may soon not be able to win national elections. Some other entity will rise to take its place, I'm sure. It will likely even be called the Republican Party, and it will win elections.
However, understand something: the party of "government is the problem" is cracking up. The party of "privatize Social Security" has as its standard bearer someone who is vocally and strongly in favor of not touching Social Security, with many supporters who want the government to keep its hands off "my" SS.
This same party can't seem to agree on who to make Speaker of the House.
They are not wrong to see an existential threat. As is always the case in politics, it's exaggerated, and made lurid with the "leftist" party.
Reagan, Conservative and small government are irrelevant for this people that talk about "emergency". What they support is best described as Putinisim.