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2025-03-27 15:27:34

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The American public knew before Donald Trump that top administration officials had conducted airstrikes on Yemen via a Signal chat, and now it appears that the president has been left in the dark on other intelligence matters too.At an Oval Office news briefing Wednesday evening, Trump casually admitted that he was not aware that several U.S. army members had gone missing during a training exercise in Lithuania.“Have you been briefed about the soldiers in Lithuania who are missing?” a reporter asked.“No, I haven’t,” Trump said.Reporter: Have you been briefed about the soldiers in Lithuania? Who are missing?President Trump: No, I haven't. pic.twitter.com/IP4NKoSsUu— Acyn (@Acyn) March 26, 2025Earlier that day, the U.S. Army released a statement that four soldiers had disappeared on training grounds in a swamp near Pabradė, along the border with Belarus. The soldiers were conducting “scheduled tactical training” at the time of their disappearance, according to the Army. The M88 Hercules armored recovery vehicle they had been using was discovered 16 feet underground a day after the soldiers went missing, reported NBC News. But the armymen were known to be missing as early as Tuesday at 4:45 p.m., the Lithuanian military said, so why Trump was still unaware of the situation more than 24 hours later is unclear.Search efforts are “underway,” the Army said in their statement, specifying that the operation has been a joint effort between U.S. military officials, the Lithuanian Armed Forces, Lithuanian law enforcement, the Lithuanian Fire and Rescue Department, and other groups. Helicopters operated by Lithuanian Air Forces and the State Border Guard began a search and rescue mission on Tuesday, according to the country’s military press office.“I would like to personally thank the Lithuanian Armed Forces and first responders who quickly came to our aid in our search operations,” said Lieutenant General Charles Costanza, the V Corps commanding general. “It’s this kind of teamwork and support that exemplifies the importance of our partnership and our humanity regardless of what flags we wear on our shoulders.”The lapse in Trump’s knowledge begs the question, however, as to just how much intel the president has been left out of within the folds of his own administration.During another White House press briefing on Monday, Trump fumbled by admitting that he was not only not invited to his Cabinet’s Signal exchange, in which his top officials discussed when, how, and where they would bomb Houthi targets in Yemen, but that he actually had no idea it had happened.“I don’t know anything about it,” Trump said at the time, noting that a reporter’s question regarding the group chat was the first he had heard of it. “But I know nothing about it, you’re saying that they had what?”
https://newrepublic.com/post/193235/donald-trump-intelligence-group-chat-lithuania

2025-03-27 15:27:34

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Kari Lake, the failed Arizona politician and current special adviser to the president at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, has withdrawn the termination of a federal grant to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, one of the agency’s media properties, to end a legal fight. Lake gave notice in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Wednesday that the grant termination was being withdrawn, and also sent a letter to RFE/RL’s president, Stephen Capus, notifying the organization that the grant agreement was restored. But the letter added a caveat: The grant was restored “without prejudice,” meaning that Lake and the Trump administration can still terminate the grants at a later date if they so choose.Lake officially serves as a special adviser to the president in charge of the agency while she awaits Senate confirmation to take over as director of Voice of America, also part of the USAGM. Earlier this month, President Trump signed an executive order gutting USAGM, resulting in all VOA employees being fired and other outlets, such as RFE/RL, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, operating with minimal resources while they challenged the order in court. Now it seems that at least RFE/RL has some temporary relief to be able to serve its mission of reporting in 27 languages to 23 countries around the world, many of which don’t have a functioning free press. But the USAGM’s other media outlets aren’t so fortunate, and for now are still at the mercy of a Trump appointee known for peddling election lies and even lying about the agency she’s now trying to run.
https://newrepublic.com/post/193234/kari-lake-radio-free-europe-liberty

2025-02-10 23:30:36

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Vice President JD Vance is exactly as irrelevant to Donald Trump as he is to everyone else. In an interview Sunday with Fox News’s Bret Baier, Trump threw Vance under the bus when asked about the future for the former never-Trump Republican who sold out his principles, his dignity, and even his own family, to boost Trump’s shot at unchecked power. His reward? Nothing, it seems. “Do you view Vice President JD Vance as your successor, the Republican nominee in 2028?” Baier asked.“No,” Trump replied. “But he’s very capable!“I mean I don’t think that it—you know, I think we have a lot of very capable people,” Trump continued. “So far, I think he’s doing a fantastic job. It’s too early, we’re just starting.”“But by the time you get to the midterms, he’s going to be looking for an endorsement,” Baier pressed. “Yeah, a lot of people have said this has been the greatest opening, almost three weeks, in the history of the presidency,” Trump said, weaving into a rant about how amazing he is at being president.Baier: Do you view JD Vance as your successor?Trump: No.. pic.twitter.com/tjlbPEQoX5— Acyn (@Acyn) February 10, 2025It’s possible that Trump tried to sidestep answering because he already has a candidate in mind for 2028, and—spoiler alert—it’s not Vance. Although he isn’t allowed to run again, Trump has repeatedly floated the idea of doing so, both on the campaign trail and since winning the presidency. It doesn’t seem as if Trump cares very much about what is legal and what’s not.In lieu of actually governing, Vance seems to be filling his empty hours posting on X about a range of random topics, including rubber-stamping the rehiring of a racist to DOGE, undermining the checks and balances that underpin our democracy, and complaining about dog cross-breeding.
https://newrepublic.com/post/191372/donald-trump-jd-vance-humiliated

2025-02-10 23:30:35

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A federal judge has indefinitely extended the deadline for federal workers to accept Donald Trump’s buyout offer.The president had posed a “fork in the road” ultimatum for federal employees via the Office of Personnel Management late last month: Either opt for a “deferred resignation” that would pay them through September, or face a possible furlough. The temporary restraining order on the program put in place by U.S. District Judge George O’Toole will remain in place while the court weighs the legality of the buyout, reported CNN Monday.Eligible federal workers had originally faced a midnight deadline on Thursday to accept or deny Trump’s offer. O’Toole imposed an initial restraining order, just hours before the offer expired, delaying the deadline to late Monday. “The pressure that comes from that deadline where people have to make their choice about their livelihood,” argued Elena Goldstein, an attorney for the plaintiffs: “Irreparable harm will continue. They will be asking what they actually accepted. OPM is making it up as they go along.”Unions for federal employees were behind the lawsuit, calling OPM’s “Fork Directive” a “sweeping and stunningly arbitrary action to solicit blanket resignations of federal workers,” according to court filings.Attorneys for the Justice Department counterclaimed that Trump had “campaigned on reducing the federal workforce” and that the mass dismissal program should come as no surprise to Washington’s civil servants. The administration “knew they’d come to a disappointment to a lot of the workforce … so this would be an off-ramp for those employees,” said Justice Department attorney Eric Hamilton, per NBC News.
https://newrepublic.com/post/191374/donald-trump-federal-worker-buyout-legal-hurdle

2024-12-20 22:39:42

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Elon Musk is hoping to dispel the widely circulating notion that he, not President-elect Trump, is really calling the shots.On Thursday, X user Lulu Cheng Meservey called such speculations indicative of a wider “strategy” to sow discord between Musk and Trump. “By jabbing Trump about not being the alpha, the idea is to provoke him to sideline Elon and to fray the relationship,” Meservey wrote.Musk agreed, writing in a quote-tweet Friday, “The political & legacy media puppets all got their new instructions yesterday and are now parroting the same message to drive a wedge between [Trump] and me. They will fail.”The “President Musk” rhetoric began after the billionaire, whose financial support for Trump and other Republican candidates made him 2024’s biggest political donor, helped tank a bipartisan spending bill. Musk unleashed a fusillade of criticism on his social media platform, X, as well as a threat to fund primary challenges against representatives who voted to pass the deal.Later that day, President-elect Trump came out against the deal, and after a failed vote on a revised bill Thursday, House Republicans are scrambling to put together an eleventh-hour plan to avoid a government shutdown.Musk has since tried to shift blame and downplay his role in the outcome. He’s also apparently hoping to shut down Democrats’ suggestions that his outsize role in the legislative process indicates that he’s the one truly pulling the strings in the incoming Trump administration.Many Democrats leapt on the events of the week to say just that: “The leader of the GOP is Elon Musk,” tweeted Representative Brendan Boyle. “I don’t know why Trump doesn’t just hand him the Oval Office,” said Representative Greg Cesar. “It’s clear who’s in charge, and it’s not President-elect Donald Trump,” posted Pramila Jayapal, saying Trump followed the lead of “Shadow President Elon Musk.” (Jayapal’s were the comments that specifically drew Meservey’s, and in turn Musk’s, ire.)Whatever the state of Musk and Trump’s relationship after the world’s wealthiest man flexed his political muscles this week, the notion that Musk is delivering marching orders seems to have struck a nerve with team Trump. On Thursday, a Trump spokesperson insisted that the president-elect, and no one else, was in charge, saying, “President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Full stop.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/189622/elon-president-musk-reaction

2024-12-19 18:44:32

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House Speaker Mike Johnson has begun the steady descent out of Donald Trump’s favor.A source close to Trump told NOTUS Thursday that the president-elect initially supported Johnson’s plan to keep the government funded, but was surprised to find that the whopping 1,547-page bill was filled with plans to spend billions of dollars on Democratic priorities, farmers, and disaster relief. Senator Josh Hawley told CNN Wednesday that Trump had said Johnson had not told him everything in the massive spending bill.Trump has been a staunch ally of the Louisiana Republican, including in May when Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene tried to have him removed from the speakership. Johnson has remained cozy with the president-elect, but all of that could change in the wake of his continuing resolution, which is particularly unpopular with unofficial, unelected co-President Elon Musk. Trump’s defection could spell trouble for Johnson, who needs to be speedily reelected next year so that Congress can go on to certify the results of the presidential election. Trump spoke with Fox Digital Thursday and indicated that Johnson would have no trouble getting reelected … so long as he is able to clean up the spending bill. “If the speaker acts decisively, and tough, and gets rid of all of the traps being set by the Democrats, which will economically and, in other ways, destroy our country, he will easily remain speaker,” Trump said.Meanwhile, members of Johnson’s own party appear to have already moved on. Representative Thomas Massie said Wednesday night he would not vote for Johnson as speaker in January, and some lawmakers are even suggesting Musk as a potential replacement.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189573/donald-trump-mike-johnson-ally-budget

2024-12-19 17:36:52

@nprofile…pyzj
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Trump floated completely abolishing the debt ceiling on Thursday, surprising Democrats and Republicans alike. The shocking demand comes as the president-elect revealed his opposition to the bipartisan spending bill, bringing the federal government another step closer to a shutdown. Trump told NBC News over the phone that it would be the “smartest thing” Congress could do. “I would support that entirely.… The Democrats have said they want to get rid of it. If they want to get rid of it, I would lead the charge,” Trump said.He went on to assert that the debt ceiling is a frivolous, imaginary concept intended to scare people into abiding by it. “It doesn’t mean anything, except psychologically,” he said.This isn’t necessarily new for Trump, who signed laws to lift the debt ceiling three separate times during his first term while also suggesting the debt ceiling be killed off in 2017. “It complicates things, it’s really not necessary,” he said of the debt ceiling then. Still, it goes against the rest of his party, as Republicans often campaign against raising the debt ceiling, let alone abolishing it entirely. That’s not the case with Democrats. Pennsylvania Democratic Representative Brendan Boyle has been advocating for his Debt Ceiling Reform Act since 2023, a law that would weaken Congress’s ability to use shutdown as a threat to pass legislation. The bill currently has 55 Democratic Party co-sponsors. Already, at least one Democrat has backed Trump’s demand. “I agree with President-elect Trump that Congress should terminate the debt limit and never again govern by hostage taking,” Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote on X.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189565/trump-debt-ceiling-government-shutdown

2024-12-18 22:37:20

@nprofile…6kn7
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House Speaker Mike Johnson appears to be getting cyberbullied by “efficiency” czar Elon Musk, over his continuing resolution.Johnson’s resolution, which was released Tuesday, grants $10 billion in economic assistance for farmers, $100 billion for disaster relief, and enough money to keep the government open until March. It also opens the door for pay raises for members of Congress, among a slate of other things buried in the 1,547-page bill.But not everyone is happy, especially Musk, the unelected billionaire who wants to slash government funding for pretty much everything except the military through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.“Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” Musk wrote in a post on X Wednesday. The right-wing technocrat’s threat is no joke, as his deep pockets and misinformation efforts were essential to Donald Trump’s victory in November. “Stop the steal of your tax dollars! Call your elected representatives now. They are trying to railroad this thing through today!” a miffed Musk posted on X an hour later. Musk’s threats didn’t stop coming Wednesday, as he descended into a deluge of hysterics over what some internet trolls dubbed the “omnibus” bill, and Republicans have already begun cheering Musk on.“In five years in Congress, I’ve been awaiting a fundamental change in the dynamic. It has arrived,” wrote North Carolina Representative Dan Bishop in a post on X. Bishop lost a bid to become his state’s attorney general but was rewarded for loyalty when Trump nominated him for a position in the Office of Management and Budget.“By now, they should know that I mean what I say,” Musk replied.From his slew of pissed-off posts, it seems that Musk is mostly mystified by the bill’s length and the fact that it may allow a pay bump for members of Congress.“This is insane! This is NOT democracy! How can your elected representatives be asked to pass a spending bill where they had no input and not even enough time to read it!!??” Musk wrote in another post. Musk, the unelected bureaucrat, sure has a lot of opinions about what democracy is. Did Musk have an alternative? No, of course not. His answer to the government funding running out is just to wait until Trump can arrive to save the day.“No bills should be passed Congress until Jan 20, when @realDonaldTrump takes office. None. Zero,” Musk wrote, as if Trump’s very presence in the White House would magically fund the essential services the government offers. Musk shared a post from one account called Wall Street Mav, which advocated to “just close down the govt until January 20th. Defund everything. We will be fine for 33 days.”“YES,” Musk wrote in response. And so the wannabe co-president openly advocated for a government shutdown. Of course, it makes sense. Why struggle to cut government funding when you could simply advocate that the government stop funding itself?During an interview with Newsmax Wednesday morning, Johnson had gushed over his direct line with Musk and co-efficiency czar Vivek Ramaswamy and indicated that they were all on the same page about the measure.“I was on a text chain last night with Elon and Vivek about DOGE, cause I’m super excited about that, and I said, ‘Guys, these are the necessary things.’ They don’t like spending either, they said, ‘We know this is not you personally, Mr. Speaker,’ and we got to get through this,” Johnson said.“Everybody understands the necessity,” he said. Do they? Because Musk seems to be doing his best to tank the stopgap measure via a major social media meltdown.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189539/elon-musk-bullying-mike-johnson-government-shutdown

2024-12-18 18:09:29

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After CNN reported Wednesday that the House Ethics Committee has secretly voted to release its report on its multiyear investigation into former Representative Matt Gaetz after all, the former Florida representative immediately lost it.“House Ethics will reportedly post a report online that I have no opportunity to debate or rebut as a former member of the body,” Gaetz fulminated in a lengthy post on X emphasizing that he has not faced criminal charges for his conduct.“In my single days, I often sent funds to women I dated—even some I never dated but who asked. I dated several of these women for years. I NEVER had sexual contact with someone under 18. Any claim that I have would be destroyed in court—which is why no such claim was ever made in court,” Gaetz wrote. “It’s embarrassing, though not criminal, that I probably partied, womanized, drank and smoked more than I should have earlier in life. I live a different life now.”According to CNN, the Ethics Committee secretly voted earlier this month to release the report after the House’s final votes this year—though “it is unclear if the committee will once again change course now that it has voted.”According to the committee, the report contains its findings regarding allegations that Gaetz had “engaged in sexual misconduct and/or illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, and/or accepted a bribe, improper gratuity, or impermissible gift, in violation of House Rules, laws, or other standards of conduct.” It previously appeared that Gaetz would successfully dodge the likely embarrassing revelation. In November, two days before the Ethics Committee was set to vote on releasing the report, the former Florida lawmaker resigned from the House of Representatives, following the announcement of his since-thwarted nomination to be President-elect Trump’s attorney general.Then, in a party-line vote last month, Republicans blocked the report’s release. The reversal reported Wednesday means some Republicans on the panel defected from party lines, siding with the Democrats in voting to let the report see the light of day.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189522/matt-gaetz-reaction-house-ethics-vote-release-report

2024-12-13 00:54:34

@nprofile…6kn7
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Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, gushed over Elon Musk Thursday, calling the technocrat billionaire who helped elect Donald Trump “the foremost champion of free speech in the tech industry.”Blumenthal’s compliment for the far-right troll king came less than a week after he and Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn released a statement announcing that they had collaborated with X, Musk’s social media company, on changes to their new bill, the Kids Online Safety Act. That bill, by their own admission, featured a number of changes that had been spearheaded by the increasingly toxic social media platform.“Led by X, the new changes made to the Kids Online Safety Act strengthen the bill while safeguarding free speech online and ensuring it is not used to stifle expression,” Blumentahl and Blackburn wrote in a statement. “These changes should eliminate once and for all the false narrative that this bill would be weaponized by unelected bureaucrats to censor Americans.”“We thank Elon and Linda for their bold leadership and commitment to protecting children online and for helping us get this bill across the finish line this Congress,” the pair added, implying that Musk and X’s CEO Linda Yaccarino had been directly involved in the process.X has been supporting the KSOA, which has already passed the Senate, since the summer, so Blumenthal’s obvious posturing raises some concerns and questions. It is possible, of course, that this is all just politics: The Democratic senator is simply making nice with a powerful player with a sizable platform who could easily become a huge problem for both him and his currently bipartisan bill. It is possible, however, that Blumenthal is trying to play a longer game, hoping to influence the man who both stands to influence everything in the incoming Trump administration and who currently influences everyone (or at least everyone on X) via the endless stream of pro-Trump, right-wing propaganda he posts. That, however, is a losing battle for obvious reasons: Musk has little affinity—to put it mildly—for progressives like Blumenthal, Democrats in general, or the policy goals of any left-leaning group or politician. Attempting to influence Musk, moreover, is a mug’s game. For every Democrat in his ear, there are a hundred (likely more) arch MAGA loyalists. Democrats like Blumenthal might better spend their time warning their constituents of the creeping power of technocrats like Musk, who are plotting to dismantle essential features of the federal government via draconian cuts to public services and welfare programs while pushing legislation that would effectively allow them to regulate their own industries and policies that would make them vastly richer than they already are.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189352/democratic-senator-fawning-elon-musk

2024-12-12 23:45:43

@nprofile…6kn7
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Donald Trump’s sudden appointment of one of his staunchest allies, two-time failed MAGA candidate and former news anchor Kari Lake, to run the federally-funded international broadcasting service Voice of America has resulted in widespread concern and outrage amid fears that she could transform it into a reactionary propaganda arm of the Trump presidency. Lake, for her part, has done little to assuage those fears. “I am honored that President Trump has asked me to lead the Voice of America,” Lake wrote in a statement on social media. “@VOANews is a vital international media outlet dedicated to advancing the interests of the United States by engaging directly with people across the globe and promoting democracy and truth.”“Under my leadership, the VOA will excel in its mission: chronicling America’s achievements worldwide,” she continued.But rules passed in 2020 could get in the way of her plans. Recent regulations prevent the head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media from hiring or firing Voice of America’s network leadership without the express approval of the International Broadcasting Advisory Board, a seven-person panel composed of presidential appointees, reported former Washington Post journalist Paul Farhi.Of course, Trump has also not yet appointed anyone to lead the U.S. Agency for Global Media, further stretching the possibility of Lake’s appointment to the public network.Meanwhile, Trump’s appointees to the not-yet-existent Department of Government Efficiency have promised to leverage recent Supreme Court decisions to slash and burn spending from beloved domestic public broadcasters. In a joint op-ed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy published in The Wall Street Journal last month, the duo said they would cut $500 million a year from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds NPR and PBS, among other seismic blows to national programs.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189355/heres-kari-lakes-voa-appointment-crumble

2024-11-21 17:30:39

@nprofile…6kn7
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CNN reports that Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent turned conservative media B-lister, is up for consideration to run the agency for which he once worked. Bongino, who has periodically faced various social media sanctions for posting incendiary content over the years, is on Trump’s Secret Service short list, along with the former head of his personal detail, Robert Engel, and the head of his current Secret Service detail, Sean Curran. Engel was with Trump on January 6, 2021, and testified to the House January 6 committee about Trump’s speech at the Ellipse that day. Bongino has run for Congress three times, twice in Maryland and once in Florida; he lost all three times. After failing to launch a political career, he went into punditry, becoming a commentator on right-wing talk radio and social media. He quickly became known as a leading election denialist, January 6 insurrectionist defender, and Covid-19 conspiracist. Bongino would go on to host his own show on Fox News from 2021 to 2023, and today hosts The Dan Bongino Show on Rumble. He was critical of ousted Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle in the wake of the July assassination attempt against Trump, calling her “utterly unqualified” and accusing her of “putting politics ahead of presidential protection.” That may well have endeared him to the president-elect, who has a personal stake in who takes over the agency in charge of protecting himself and his family. Trump also was a guest on Bongino’s podcast in October—an encounter that could hardly be called a hard-hitting interview, with multiple compliments exchanged. It’s no secret that Trump watches a lot of television and seems to be favoring a “central casting” approach to his second-term appointments. Among those peppered throughout his agency picks are former Fox News host Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense, daytime talk show host Dr. Mehmet Oz as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and his pick for secretary of transportation—former congressman, Fox News host, and reality TV star Sean Duffy. Should Bongino get the nod to head the Secret Service, he will fit right in with all of those personalities. That said, heading up the Secret Service is not the best platform for maintaining one’s media infamy—unless, of course, Bongino warps the role to suit his personal needs and desires. The job, which normally has a low media profile, could very likely become part of Trump’s media circus in the hands of someone whose first priority is maintaining their own high profile or remaining a fixture on right-wing media. For someone like Trump who loves high TV ratings, that’s probably just what he wants. Whether that suits the numerous other people under Secret Service protection remains to be seen.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188678/dan-bongino-trump-secret-service

2024-11-21 17:30:39

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Nancy Mace’s thinly veiled transphobia is getting old fast—just ask Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “What Nancy Mace, and what Speaker Johnson are doing, [is] endangering all women and girls. Because if you ask them, ‘What is your plan on how to enforce this?’ they won’t come up with an answer,” Ocasio-Cortez told reporters after being asked about Mace’s string of targeted anti-transgender resolutions against Delaware’s Representative-elect Sarah McBride, the first ever openly trans woman in Congress. “The idea that Nancy Mace wants little girls and women to drop trow … because she wants to suspect and point fingers at who she thinks is trans is disgusting,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “They’re doing this so that Nancy Mace can make a buck, and send a text, and fundraise off an email. They’re not doing this to protect people.” Mace, a GOP representative from South Carolina, introduced a resolution on Tuesday that would forbid trans women from using the restroom that aligns with their gender identity in the U.S. Capitol Building. The only trans elected official in the Capitol Building is Representative-elect Sarah McBride.“Sarah McBride doesn’t get a say. I mean, this is a biological man,” Mace said. She added that McBride “does not belong in women’s spaces, women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms, period, full stop.” Mace has continued to shame and harass McBride online. She posted a video of her taping a sign reading “biological” right over a “men’s” bathroom sign in the Capitol building. Early Wednesday morning she posted a video stating that she’d be filing another resolution to “ban biological men from women’s spaces on all federal property all across the country.” Mace was thus empowered after House Speaker Mike Johnson officially stated that transgender women would be banned from women’s restrooms throughout the Capitol complex. But as Representative Ocasio-Cortez noted, it is very unclear how Johnson plans to enforce this ruling. Democratic Representative Mark Pocan was also swift to react to Johnson’s decision. “As Chair of the Equality Caucus, I requested a meeting with Speaker Johnson to discuss his bathroom ban and open his eyes to the reality that this policy is cruel, completely unenforceable, and opens the door for abuse, harassment, and discrimination in the halls of Congress,” he wrote on Bluesky. For her part, McBride has recognized that Mace is out for attention and endeavored to not feed her trollery. “I’m not here to fight about bathrooms. I’m here to fight for Delawareans and to bring down costs facing families,” she said in a statement, “I will follow the rules as outlined by speaker Johnson, even if I disagree with them.” Mace, who is no stranger to spectacle, has made a habit of doing weird, attention-seeking gender cosplay on Capitol Hill. Last October, she wore a shirt bearing a large scarlet letter A after she joined the infamous Matt Gaetz in voting to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy in a sort of MAGA House mutiny. It was not immediately apparent what the famous Nathaniel Hawthorne character had to do with the speakership fiasco. (Just as confusingly, Mace seems to not be worried about Gaetz lurking around Capitol Hill’s washrooms.) Suffice it to say, her most recent hateful charade, made under the guise of “protecting women,” will likely only result in more women getting hurt.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188676/aoc-savages-nancy-mace-mcbride

2024-11-15 22:04:33

@nprofile…pyzj
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MAGA has a new conspiracy theory: Pennsylvania Democrats are trying to steal the Senate election because of how they’re counting provisional ballots.The Senate race is headed to a recount after an incredibly narrow margin of difference between the top two candidates. Last week, former Republican hedge fund manager Dave McCormick was announced the winner of Pennsylvania’s Senate race with 48.9 percent of the vote, at 99 percent reporting. His opponent, incumbent Democratic Senator Bob Casey, lost with 48.5 percent.The two sat at a difference of only 29,000 votes Wednesday, and statewide, officials have estimated that nearly 80,000 votes remained outstanding as of Thursday, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. Casey, who has not yet conceded his seat, has remained hopeful that buried in that remaining 2 percent of the states’ total ballots are enough votes to make up the difference. And Pennsylvania’s Republican secretary of state has already declared the initial results necessitate a recount.The battle for the remaining votes has ignited long-standing issues between Republicans and Democrats in the state over what ballots are able to be counted. Democrats are pushing to count a number of contested provisional ballots that are missing signatures and privacy envelopes, and election boards across the state are also pushing to count a number of undated ballots.Bucks County Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia cast a vote Thursday to count certain deficient provisional ballots that were missing one of two required signatures and had previously been barred by court order.“I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country,” said Marseglia.“People violate laws any time they want,” she continued. “So, for me, if I violate this law it’s because I want a court to pay attention. There’s nothing more important than counting votes.”Technocrat pest Elon Musk shared a video of Marseglia on X, claiming, “They are openly trying to count illegal ballots in Pennsylvania!”McCormick and his GOP allies went to court on Thursday to challenge the decisions of county commissioners in Philadelphia, Bucks, Montgomery, and Centre counties to include undated mail ballots in their tallies.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188507/fact-check-democrats-steal-pennsylvania-senate-election-votes

2024-11-15 22:04:33

@nprofile…pyzj
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Republicans don’t have much hope for ex-Representative Matt Gaetz’s odds of getting into the presidential Cabinet.The remarkably unpopular Florida politico was nominated by Donald Trump to become the country’s attorney general on Wednesday, a decision that would effectively hand the keys to the Justice Department to a man facing sex trafficking allegations. But before that happens, Gaetz has to be confirmed by the Senate—and that seems increasingly unlikely, according to members of the upper chamber. Assuming that all Democrats will vote against Trump’s nominees, the president-elect can only afford to lose three Republican votes to squeeze his candidates into the executive branch. But Gaetz faces immense opposition from inside the party, reported The Wall Street Journal, with far more than three votes planning to oppose the MAGA bro’s nomination. Estimates predict that those against Gaetz range from 12 Republican “no” votes to upward of 30.“It won’t even be close,” one source told the Journal. Few conservatives were willing to point out the underlying reasons behind Gaetz’s unlikely candidacy, but they appeared to understand the 42-year-old wouldn’t hold up during the grueling confirmation process.“It’s simply that Matt Gaetz has a very long, steep hill to get across the finish line,” North Dakota Senator Kevin Cramer told the Journal. “And it will require the spending of a lot of capital, and you just have to ask: if you could get him across the finish line, was it worth the cost?”Another unidentified source familiar with the conversations happening among Republicans over the process told the publication that “people are pissed.”Trump ally Senator Markwayne Mullin acknowledged that actually getting Gaetz—who up until this week was being investigated by the House Ethics Committee for alleged sexual misconduct with a minor—into the Cabinet would be “very difficult,” suggesting to the Journal that the vigorous vetting process might force Gaetz into a situation where he has to withdraw.“Every nominee will have to acquit themselves well during the confirmation process by answering difficult questions and having their actions scrutinized,” Senator Lindsey Graham, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, told the Journal. Meanwhile, the soon-to-be upper chamber majority appears unwilling to concede any of its power to the executive branch, pushing back on Trump’s demand that the body expedite the nomination process via recess appointments.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188505/republican-senators-doom-matt-gaetz

2024-11-15 22:04:32

@nprofile…6kn7
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Republicans don’t have much hope for ex-Representative Matt Gaetz’s odds of getting into the presidential Cabinet.The remarkably unpopular Florida politico was nominated by Donald Trump to become the country’s attorney general on Wednesday, a decision that would effectively hand the keys to the Justice Department to a man facing sex trafficking allegations. But before that happens, Gaetz has to be confirmed by the Senate—and that seems increasingly unlikely, according to members of the upper chamber. Assuming that all Democrats will vote against Trump’s nominees, the president-elect can only afford to lose three Republican votes to squeeze his candidates into the executive branch. But Gaetz faces immense opposition from inside the party, reported The Wall Street Journal, with far more than three votes planning to oppose the MAGA bro’s nomination. Estimates predict that those against Gaetz range from 12 Republican “no” votes to upward of 30.“It won’t even be close,” one source told the Journal. Few conservatives were willing to point out the underlying reasons behind Gaetz’s unlikely candidacy, but they appeared to understand the 42-year-old wouldn’t hold up during the grueling confirmation process.“It’s simply that Matt Gaetz has a very long, steep hill to get across the finish line,” North Dakota Senator Kevin Cramer told the Journal. “And it will require the spending of a lot of capital, and you just have to ask: if you could get him across the finish line, was it worth the cost?”Another unidentified source familiar with the conversations happening among Republicans over the process told the publication that “people are pissed.”Trump ally Senator Markwayne Mullin acknowledged that actually getting Gaetz—who up until this week was being investigated by the House Ethics Committee for alleged sexual misconduct with a minor—into the Cabinet would be “very difficult,” suggesting to the Journal that the vigorous vetting process might force Gaetz into a situation where he has to withdraw.“Every nominee will have to acquit themselves well during the confirmation process by answering difficult questions and having their actions scrutinized,” Senator Lindsey Graham, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, told the Journal. Meanwhile, the soon-to-be upper chamber majority appears unwilling to concede any of its power to the executive branch, pushing back on Trump’s demand that the body expedite the nomination process via recess appointments.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188505/republican-senators-doom-matt-gaetz

2024-11-15 20:58:49

@nprofile…pyzj
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U.S. Ambassador to Japan and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is floating the idea of running for chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Axios reports that Emanuel, who also served in Congress from 2003 to 2009 and worked in the Obama and Clinton administrations, is considering the move after the Democrats’ losses in the 2024 election. The party lost control of the Senate as well as the presidency—and Republicans maintained a narrow majority in the House—leaving open questions about its future direction. Democratic strategist David Axelrod, a friend of Emanuel’s, said on his podcast Hacks on Tap earlier this week that he would support the ambassador if he ran for the post.“If they said, ‘Well, what should we do? Who should lead the party?’ I would take Ambassador Rahm Emanuel, and I would bring him back from Japan and I would appoint him chairman of the Democratic National Committee,” Axelrod said. Since then, other Democrats have told Emanuel he should run, according to Axios. But Emanuel is likely to face opposition from progressives, especially due to his actions as mayor of Chicago. Emanuel’s handling of police violence as well as his record with the city’s public schools earned him a lot of criticism, and the Chicago Teachers Union is still mad at him. ...The Cover up and School Closings Guy? Hard no.https://t.co/U2Xan3dNqi— Chicago Teachers Union (@CTULocal1) November 15, 2024While serving as White House chief of staff under President Obama, Emanuel also clashed with then–DNC chair Howard Dean, who was arguably the most successful party chair in the 21st century with his “50 State Strategy.” Dean said in 2014 that he and Emanuel “obviously have a difference of opinion about how you get people elected.” This would seem to indicate that Emanuel would be taking a different approach than Dean at a time when Democrats need a plan to take back Congress as well as recover at the state level. Emanuel also has a reputation for angrily going on profanity-laden tirades, which won’t win him friends in a position where one has to be on good terms with Democrats across the country. The fact that Emanuel has been disconnected from local and state politics for years also seems unlikely to help. Democrats are currently expected to tap someone with expertise at the grassroots level and an understanding of how Democrats are winning elections now—two things Emanuel sorely lacks.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188500/unpopular-democrat-rahm-emanuel-wants-chair-dnc

2024-11-15 19:52:30

@nprofile…6kn7
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Donald Trump’s controversial picks for his upcoming Cabinet have rattled right past the American public and on to damaging Wall Street.In the wake of Trump’s decision to tap vaccine foe Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services, stocks linked to some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies—including Moderna, Pfizer, and Novavax—plummeted to some of their lowest points of the year.Novavax and BioNTech dropped by more than 7 percent, with “almost all of the losses coming after news broke of the selection,” reported Forbes. Moderna saw shares close at $39.77, knocking the stock to its lowest point this year. Pfizer, meanwhile, escaped the day with relatively minor losses, with stocks dropping by 2.6 percent to $26.02.The pharmaceutical industry hedged its bets in the last election cycle, donating considerable sums of money to both parties. But the historically conservative-leaning sector did, ultimately, give more to Republican candidates—with its affiliated PACs handing approximately $1.7 million more to Republicans across the 2024 election, amounting to $8.3 million in total to the conservative party, according to data collected by OpenSecrets.But that’s not the only impact that Trump’s policies are having on the stock market. Now that the initial rush surrounding Trump’s pro–big business agenda is quieting down, investors are waking up to the staggering costs of some of his plans. For the second day in a row, the S&P 500 dropped, with tech stocks at the forefront of the decline, according to Bloomberg.“[Trump’s plans] will come at the expense of potentially larger budget deficits, potentially larger debt and there is also the inflation dimension,” Charles-Henry Monchau, chief investment officer at Banque Syz & Co, told the business publication. “There’s been a realization that there is a price to pay for this.”Trump has floated several tariff ideas—including one impossibly high hike on imported goods of between 200 and 2,000 percent—that experts believe would drastically spike inflation. Businesses across the country have balked at his numbers, arguing that it will be Americans, not foreign countries, who pay the price. Readying themselves for a potential second Trump administration, companies whose business models rely on foreign suppliers, from the auto industry to some of the nation’s most popular clothing lines, are planning to introduce price hikes on their products.Trump has also proposed a more modest 20–60 plan, in which a potential second Trump administration would impose a 20 percent worldwide tariff alongside a 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods. But even that plan would prove devastating for the economy, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, which found that it would lower household incomes by an average of $3,000 in 2025.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188492/stock-market-tanks-trump-cabinet

2024-11-15 19:51:43

@nprofile…pyzj
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Donald Trump’s controversial picks for his upcoming Cabinet have rattled right past the American public and on to damaging Wall Street.In the wake of Trump’s decision to tap vaccine foe Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services, stocks linked to some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies—including Moderna, Pfizer, and Novavax—plummeted to some of their lowest points of the year.Novavax and BioNTech dropped by more than 7 percent, with “almost all of the losses coming after news broke of the selection,” reported Forbes. Moderna saw shares close at $39.77, knocking the stock to its lowest point this year. Pfizer, meanwhile, escaped the day with relatively minor losses, with stocks dropping by 2.6 percent to $26.02.The pharmaceutical industry hedged its bets in the last election cycle, donating considerable sums of money to both parties. But the historically conservative-leaning sector did, ultimately, give more to Republican candidates—with its affiliated PACs handing approximately $1.7 million more to Republicans across the 2024 election, amounting to $8.3 million in total to the conservative party, according to data collected by OpenSecrets.But that’s not the only impact that Trump’s policies are having on the stock market. Now that the initial rush surrounding Trump’s pro–big business agenda is quieting down, investors are waking up to the staggering costs of some of his plans. For the second day in a row, the S&P 500 dropped, with tech stocks at the forefront of the decline, according to Bloomberg.“[Trump’s plans] will come at the expense of potentially larger budget deficits, potentially larger debt and there is also the inflation dimension,” Charles-Henry Monchau, chief investment officer at Banque Syz & Co, told the business publication. “There’s been a realization that there is a price to pay for this.”Trump has floated several tariff ideas—including one impossibly high hike on imported goods of between 200 and 2,000 percent—that experts believe would drastically spike inflation. Businesses across the country have balked at his numbers, arguing that it will be Americans, not foreign countries, who pay the price. Readying themselves for a potential second Trump administration, companies whose business models rely on foreign suppliers, from the auto industry to some of the nation’s most popular clothing lines, are planning to introduce price hikes on their products.Trump has also proposed a more modest 20–60 plan, in which a potential second Trump administration would impose a 20 percent worldwide tariff alongside a 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods. But even that plan would prove devastating for the economy, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, which found that it would lower household incomes by an average of $3,000 in 2025.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188492/stock-market-tanks-trump-cabinet

2024-11-15 18:43:00

@nprofile…pyzj
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Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is drawing opposition from former Vice President Mike Pence over Kennedy’s remarks on abortion. In a statement, Pence said Kennedy “would be the most pro-abortion Republican appointed secretary of HHS in modern history.” “On behalf of tens of millions of pro-life Americans, I respectfully urge Senate Republicans to reject this nomination and give the American people a leader who will respect the sanctity of life as secretary of Health and Human Services,” Pence’s statement said. Trump’s choice of Kennedy has drawn alarm from health care professionals, who see his history of opposing vaccination as a threat to public health. Kennedy has also pledged to root out “corruption” in U.S. health agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration and National Institutes of Health, and has floated the idea of removing fluoride from the nation’s public water supply. Kennedy’s views on abortion, though, have drawn criticism not only from anti-abortion stalwarts like Pence but also from abortion rights supporters, who point to Kennedy’s comments earlier this year vaguely supporting limits on abortion “after a certain point.” Pence’s comments suggest there could be opposition to Kennedy from the former vice president’s fellow Christian conservatives in Congress. Pence, who served in the House from 2001 to 2013, had a falling out with Trump in 2021 after certifying the 2020 presidential election results despite Trump’s supporters attempting to violently storm the Capitol. The rioters at the time even set up a noose and gallows outside the building while chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” with Trump at the time reportedly thinking that Pence deserved the chants.  With Trump thinking so little of Pence, it remains to be seen whether the former vice president’s views on Kennedy will carry any weight on Capitol Hill. In the Senate, however, Republicans may see abortion as a more important issue than Trump’s opinion, which might doom Kennedy’s nomination. Kennedy also has other skeletons that could prevent his nomination to a Cabinet position: animal skeletons. 
https://newrepublic.com/post/188495/mike-pence-rfk-jr-abortion-oppose-secretary-health-human-services

2024-11-15 17:36:18

@nprofile…6kn7
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One of Matt Gaetz’s closest allies in Congress, Representative Jim Jordan, thinks the House Ethics Committee report about Donald Trump’s attorney general nominee should not be released. On Fox News Thursday night, Laura Ingraham asked Jordan, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, what would happen regarding the committee’s report on Gaetz that was scheduled to be released Friday. Jordan defended his former House colleague. “Well, it’s my understanding that it’s not supposed to go public. So if it’s not supposed to under the rules, it shouldn’t go public,” Jordan said. He spoke approvingly of Gaetz taking the attorney general position. “There are very few people who have the cross-examination skills he does, and I want someone in the Justice Department who’s not going to say moms and dads in school board meetings need to be investigated,” Jordan added. Ingraham: Do you have any sense about what will happen with that house ethics report..Jordan: Well, it's my understanding that is not supposed to go public. So, if it's not supposed to under the rules, it shouldn't go public. pic.twitter.com/qtSleTeUP7— Acyn (@Acyn) November 15, 2024Jordan’s defense of Gaetz suggests that Trump’s nominee still has allies on Capitol Hill, at least in the House of Representatives, and that they will try to defend him if details from the report or the report itself become public. The choice of Gaetz as the nation’s top law enforcement official has drawn backlash from Republican senators, even unpopular ones like Ted Cruz, which is not unexpected when one is under investigation for allegations of trafficking and having sex with a 17-year-old girl. Jordan, it should be noted, has been accused of ignoring accusations of widespread sex abuse while coaching wrestling at Ohio State University. Gaetz also has extremist Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene on his side, who hopes that Gaetz would prosecute vaccine “crimes against humanity.” But her opinion matters little in a Senate confirmation process, where Gaetz will have to win over a narrow Republican Senate majority. Trump may have to resort to recess appointments to get Gaetz confirmed.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188486/youll-never-guess-doesnt-want-gaetz-report-released

2024-11-15 15:22:00

@nprofile…pyzj
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Fox & Friends co-host Pete Hegseth, who was nominated by Donald Trump to be the next secretary of defense, was previously investigated for sexual assault, Vanity Fair first reported Thursday. Susie Wiles (who has been tapped to be Trump’s next chief of staff) was briefed on the allegations Wednesday night. Hegseth allegedly acted inappropriately with a woman in Monterey, California, in 2017, two sources told Vanity Fair.The allegations were serious enough that Wiles and Trump’s lawyers approached Hegseth about them Thursday, one transition source told Vanity Fair.Hegseth assured Wiles that the interaction had been consensual, and testimony that said otherwise was he-said, she-said, the transition source said. Before the meeting on Thursday, one high-level MAGA insider familiar with the allegation opined that Hegseth “wasn’t vetted.” A senior transition source denied that claim. “Hegseth was vetted, but this alleged incident didn’t come up,” they said. News of Hegseth’s alleged misconduct comes on the heels of Trump nominating Matt Gaetz, who has been the subject of investigations into alleged sexual misconduct and sex trafficking, as his next attorney general. Gaetz’s nomination was reportedly the result of one conversation on Trump’s plane Wednesday morning—the Florida Republican’s nomination was announced later that day. Hegseth’s lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, responded to the allegation against his client on Thursday. “This allegation was already investigated by the Monterey police department and they found no evidence for it,” he said, per Vanity Fair. Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung released a statement addressing the claims about Hegseth. “President Trump is nominating high-caliber and extremely qualified candidates to serve in his Administration. Mr. Hegseth has vigorously denied any and all accusations, and no charges were filed. We look forward to his confirmation as United States Secretary of Defense so he can get started on Day One to Make America Safe and Great Again.”Since being appointed, the 44-year-old television host has been criticized for his lack of high-level military experience, his blatant misogyny, extremist Islamophobic rhetoric, and his spate of tattoos with white nationalist connotations.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188475/trump-cabinet-sex-pests-pete-hegseth

2024-11-15 15:21:59

@nprofile…pyzj
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Historically, presidential cabinet picks are background checked by the FBI—but Donald Trump’s administration has instead opted to rely on private companies to examine his appointments, a decision that could allow him to practically shoe-in some of his most controversial candidates.Trump and his team are attempting to avoid a process that they believe is both excessively slow and intrusive, and which turns up dirt that could later be turned into political leverage by their opponents, according to sources that spoke with CNN.The FBI has conducted the president’s background checks since the President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration, providing critical security clearance to confirm that malicious foreign agents aren’t infiltrating the highest rungs of government.But the decision to move away from traditional security expectations has the dual effect of helping the incoming administration circumvent a particularly grueling process for a pool of candidates that are, by all means, dangerously bizarre and inexperienced.His choice for director of national intelligence, former Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard, regularly amplifies Russian propaganda and conspiracy theories. Her role would have her oversee 18 intelligence agencies, but critics—even in the House Intelligence Committee—have drawn attention to the danger of her nomination considering her particular affinity for foreign dictators like Syrian President Bashar-al Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin.Trump’s pick for attorney general, Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, has been the subject of several major controversies. Perhaps most notably, he was the subject of a House ethics investigation that accused him of sex trafficking a minor, and was also faced with a related investigation by the Justice Department. (The conveniently timed appointment—and Gaetz’s subsequent resignation—had the added benefit of killing the House investigation into Gaetz’s alleged misconduct with women and minors.) Gaetz has denied any wrongdoing.And Trump tapped Robert F. Kennedy Jr—a virulent vaccine conspiracy theorist with a wild history that included propping up dead bear cubs in New York City’s Central Park for fun—to run the Department of Health and Human Services. Last week, it was leaked that the administration did not believe Kennedy would pass the bar for a security clearance—but that could all change with Trump’s decision to veer away from the federal standard.National security experts in Washington believe that the decision to outsource the clearances is further evidence that Trump—who has a known history of benefiting from Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election—“doesn’t want harmony.”They “don’t want the FBI to coordinate a norm; they want to hammer the norm,” Dan Meyer, a national security attorney, told CNN.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188477/trump-skip-important-step-cabinet-vetting

2024-11-15 15:21:50

@nprofile…6kn7
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Fox & Friends co-host Pete Hegseth, who was nominated by Donald Trump to be the next secretary of defense, was previously investigated for sexual assault, Vanity Fair first reported Thursday. Susie Wiles (who has been tapped to be Trump’s next chief of staff) was briefed on the allegations Wednesday night. Hegseth allegedly acted inappropriately with a woman in Monterey, California, in 2017, two sources told Vanity Fair.The allegations were serious enough that Wiles and Trump’s lawyers approached Hegseth about them Thursday, one transition source told Vanity Fair.Hegseth assured Wiles that the interaction had been consensual, and testimony that said otherwise was he-said, she-said, the transition source said. Before the meeting on Thursday, one high-level MAGA insider familiar with the allegation opined that Hegseth “wasn’t vetted.” A senior transition source denied that claim. “Hegseth was vetted, but this alleged incident didn’t come up,” they said. News of Hegseth’s alleged misconduct comes on the heels of Trump nominating Matt Gaetz, who has been the subject of investigations into alleged sexual misconduct and sex trafficking, as his next attorney general. Gaetz’s nomination was reportedly the result of one conversation on Trump’s plane Wednesday morning—the Florida Republican’s nomination was announced later that day. Hegseth’s lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, responded to the allegation against his client on Thursday. “This allegation was already investigated by the Monterey police department and they found no evidence for it,” he said, per Vanity Fair. Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung released a statement addressing the claims about Hegseth. “President Trump is nominating high-caliber and extremely qualified candidates to serve in his Administration. Mr. Hegseth has vigorously denied any and all accusations, and no charges were filed. We look forward to his confirmation as United States Secretary of Defense so he can get started on Day One to Make America Safe and Great Again.”Since being appointed, the 44-year-old television host has been criticized for his lack of high-level military experience, his blatant misogyny, extremist Islamophobic rhetoric, and his spate of tattoos with white nationalist connotations.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188475/trump-cabinet-sex-pests-pete-hegseth

2024-11-15 14:16:59

@nprofile…pyzj
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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 15 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.We’re now in day two of the extraordinary GOP meltdown over Donald Trump’s pick of Matt Gaetz for attorney general. Numerous Republican senators are strongly opposing the move, including ones who are staunch Trump allies. One is even calling for the release of a House Ethics Committee report on Gaetz that examines drug use and sexual misconduct. Yet even as this is all happening, Trump just announced that he will nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the secretary of Health and Human Services.It’s really hard to say which of these two will be more of a disaster, but taken together, the message is very clear: We may be in some serious trouble. We’re chatting about all this with Nina Burleigh, author of a great new cover story for The New Republic called “Trump 2.0: Here Comes the Night,” which reports on how bad things are going to get. Thanks for coming on, Nina. Nina Burleigh: You’re welcome. Thanks for having me, Greg.Sargent: So, Gaetz first. Senators like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski are sharply criticizing the idea of Gates as attorney general. Others like Thom Tillis are saying he probably won’t get confirmed. John Cornyn is demanding the release of this House Ethics Committee report, which looked into whether Gates had sex with a minor, which he denies, among other things. Gaetz has resigned his House seat, apparently to avoid the release of that report, but it might leak. Bits of it are already coming out. Nina, what do you make of all this? How real is the opposition to Gaetz? Burleigh: Well, it’s all happening so fast. It’s hard to tell. Murkowski and Collins predictably would stand up, at least in the beginning. That’s not a surprise at all. I am a little bit surprised to see Texas Senator Cornyn asking for the Ethics report this afternoon. That’s a promising sign for sanity. Just in the last few days, with this wackadoodle clown car situation or whatever you want to call it, it’s pretty clear that shock and awe is the road that they’re going to travel. That was predicted to me, when I was working on this article that you referenced about what might happen, by the people who were predicting that—thought that—he would do shock and awe on day one, on the inauguration day when his hand came off the Bible. So what we’re seeing here is, Let’s just lay the groundwork right now. This isn’t going to be business as usual. Fuck you to the norms. The Senate, the Republican senators standing up ... Really, they’re the thin blue line for the public now.Sargent: Right. So speaking of a “fuck you,” which was I thought a good phrase to use, while this was all going on, Trump announced that RFK Jr. will be his pick as HHS secretary. Anti-science, anti-vax, conspiracy theorist. I want to point out that on that on October 30th, just before the election, Trump’s transition co-chair Howard Lutnick went on CNN and flatly said RFK will not be in charge of HHS. They lied. They lied about everything. The contempt for voters here is just incredible. You reported on how bad things are going to get. Did you anticipate them going through with this? Burleigh: I didn’t anticipate them going through right away with putting Bobby Kennedy into the HHS because he’s so far out in left field that it’s difficult to imagine a scenario where somebody like that actually is in charge of the public health, of millions of Americans. The anti-vaxxing aspect of RFK is of a piece with the MAGA response to Covid, which is, The government’s making us take these shots. But he’s been at it for a very long time, and he has these utterly baseless claims about what vaccines do and not just the Covid vaccine, but all the vaccines that keep babies from getting diseases that we can’t even pronounce anymore because we have basically eradicated them through the vaccine programs. He wants to toss that out. Toward the end of the campaign, when he started talking about the issue of this nineteenth, mid-twentieth-century paranoia about fluoridation—fluoride in the water—which is supposed to keep us from getting cavities, which apparently does protect our teeth. It’s one of those mid-twentieth-century Cold War era tinfoil hatty paranoid beliefs that you thought were ... Calling people pinkos and commies, which MAGAs are doing now, you thought that was like left behind in this other era. It’s the make America great again, which is, Let’s go back to 1950 and let’s really disinter the paranoias and the way that anti-government sentiment was expressed then, which is, Oh God, they’re putting this stuff in the water and like reinvigorating that kind of paranoia. And here now, he’s actually announcing that he’s going to make Bobby Kennedy the Secretary of Health and Human Services, which means that he can do things like tell the FDA to back off on things like raw milk or any warnings about quack medicine because he comes out of the fake wellness conspiracy world that, Let’s not take certain drugs are bad for you or the vaccines are bad for you. This is all going to become part of the policy of this country. We’re in a position right now where the farms out west are testing cows and humans for bird flu. Right now, today, there’s stories about how many people they’re now testing for bird flu. We’re on the verge of potentially another pandemic. So we’re headed into this position where it’s surreal. Sargent: HHS secretary is confirmable by the Senate. We’re actually seeing a little bit of backbone from Republican senators when it comes to Gaetz. RFK is at least as crazy and potentially destructive as Gaetz. Do you think that we’ll see Senate opposition among Republicans to him? At the very least, there’s going to have to be a confirmation hearing at which his views are really aired out. And I’ve got to think a lot of Republican senators don’t want that. I don’t know where they’re going to choose their battles and so forth, but clearly this is not something that’s good for the Republican Party, is it? Burleigh: They’re probably going to stand up against Gaetz because of the criminal behavior, criminal charges or criminal allegations against him. Bobby, the whole wackadoodleness of it just seems like something they wouldn’t want to have themselves tagged to. On the other hand, there is this sentiment out there, and it’s very strong in the Trump voters—not just MAGAs, but Trump voters—about the government telling people to take these jabs. Look, all of their districts ... a lot of those red districts were very anti-mask. They were very anti-Covid vaccine, even though they created the mRNA on lots of money that Trump gave the companies. Those people are opposed to having the vaccines. At some level, maybe that there would be less opposition, even though he seems like a nutball, than the Gaetz confirmation and the Tulsi Gabbard confirmation as well. Sargent: I still think that Republican senators are going to have a really tough time once the confirmation hearings actually start to expose in a very high-profile way the views of this nut. This is going to be a moment where we’re going to actually have a national discussion about whether he should oversee public health. That’s terrible for Republicans. Trump’s victory makes people think that they have magical powers and they can just win any debate no matter how crazy their positions. And I get that. I understand why people think that. But this is a tough one. People really care about their children’s health and public health. Republicans are going to have a tough time explaining this. Burleigh: I think they are too. Traditionally what the conservatives do, the Republicans, when they get in charge of the executive with the HHS is they put people in there who are anti-choice. They put the evangelicals in there because they use HHS to police morality really, to police the bodies, right? So that’s probably who the Project 2025 people would have wanted. They want somebody like that in there. Somebody who’s a known anti-choice fanatic. Bobby isn’t really that, but all bets are off. I honestly don’t know how much of the clown card they’re going to attach themselves to and want to be affiliated with, but we’ll have to wait and see.Sargent: It’s a really interesting point in a way that shows the MAGA takeover of the Republican Party. Whereas before they would use HHS to police morality, now they’re using it to police vaccines. There will be tons and tons of morality policing in keeping with the religious right going on under the Trump administration. And in some ways they’ll get worse. But here’s a very high profile example of them just putting in an anti-vax conspiracy theorist in a position that otherwise would have gone to a morality cop. Burleigh: We have to look at the Bobby nomination in the context of this larger project, the autocracy’s need for a population that is divorced from fact. What you see in Russia or places where people just don’t anymore believe in any expertise because they’ve been fooled and lied to so many times. That’s what part of this is: continuing to serve. It’s like a fog machine, right? A smoke machine so that people just can’t see anything. They can’t see their way out and they’re blinded. And the only way they can feel like they can get to safety is by having the golden autocrat hold their hand and lead them to the light. That’s what’s going on here. It’s really about the smoke machine. As Bannon ... Bannon’s flood the zone with shit. He’s flooding the zone with shit here and destroying the administrative state. Sargent: I want to point out to expand on what you said there that Gaetz is really about turning the Department of Justice into a weapon against Trump’s enemies. RFK is about destroying the administrative state from within in a certain respect. The justice system and public health system, those are real achievements and they’re already telegraphing that they want to destroy them both. Burleigh: Yeah. This is what MAGA has done and this is what they signed up for when they refused to impeach him the second time and let him flourish for four years within their communities instead of more than two of them standing up and saying, No, this is absolutely wrong. This guy’s a circus barker and he’s making fools out of us and he’s bringing a clown car into Washington. Are you really surprised that he’s bringing the clown car? He’s a circus barker. Sargent; Absolutely, and they actually had a real opening to get rid of Trump once and for all because he had just tried to overthrow the U.S. government with violence. He was on his way out of office anyway. That was the time to do it. They failed. They own every little last bit of this. Whether they get held accountable or not, I don’t know. Burleigh: Yeah. Who can say? The voters, they wanted a change. And I see that that’s what they’re getting here. There are a lot of the voters are just sitting there going, Yes, burn it down. They’re angry. They didn’t get any help from the Democrats for decades. The things that would have made a difference, national health care, minimum wage did not get carried out, carried through. The body politic was ripe for this, right? It’s been softened up and now they’re angry and they’re probably cheering this on. They’re cheering on and cheering on the mayhem and the chaos that he’s bringing there with the idea that if the government just evaporates or collapses, that everybody will have a better life. I don’t know how that’s going to happen. But it also is, Greg, as you know, you’ve been around long enough, the anti-government rhetoric that goes all the way back to Reagan, at least in my lifetime, maybe before, but the growing, the seething rage at government and at the federal government especially has been seeded for decades. And so now you’re seeing the flourishing of what was planted by gingers and everybody else between from Reagan on. Sargent: Yeah, I think that’s right. You got to wonder though, there’s a certain type of undecided and swing voter, at least undecided up to Election Day. Swing voters, maybe Latinos who just associate Trump with a good economy wrongly. But there it is. A lot of these voters, maybe they just see Trump as a disrupting figure, an anti-status quo figure. You can see from their perspective why they think that. In 2020, when Trump was in office, he got voted out because he was in office. And somehow, maybe partly because the law is rightly after Trump, he reconfigured himself yet again as an outsider despite being president one time and as a disruptor of the status quo, which obviously everybody dislikes. That sort of superficial understanding of what Trump represents is now looking like it’s going to be really disastrous. Don’t you think?Burleigh: Well, it depends on what, how you define a disaster. It may be that the seeds of his demise are being planted right here and right now with this stuff, with this overreach and that there is going to be that somebody. The Senate will say, Let’s get with the Democrats and get this guy out of here. You know what I mean? There may be such an uproar. Again, we haven’t talked about Tulsi Gabbard, but the intelligence community is going to go nuts. They’re going crazy over this. And the defense department with the Fox News slash war criminal cheerleader, Pete Hagseth—maybe they’re more comfortable with that kind of a person, but Gabbard and Bobby, they’re going to have a problem attaching themselves to people like that. There’s a possibility that the disaster is going to be a kind of boomerang and back on them. The problem is, of course, to me, anything that the Senate tries to do, they’re going to come up against his autocratic instinct to just do stuff without their input. Who knows what if it comes down to the Senate versus the president? What’s the Supreme Court six going to say, right? They want to give him kingly powers or they were ready to. So, yeah, it’s going to be a wild ride and we’re not even a weekend here. We’re not even at weekend. We’ve got months to go before the inauguration. I suspect that Harris’s warning that he’s unhinged and unstable is going to start to look more and more perceptive and important in retrospect. And I’m really hoping that sooner rather than later people start to really reconsider what they’ve done here. Voters can reconsider, but there’s nothing they can do about it. It’s now up to the Senate and the House, but I don’t think the House is going to do anything with it. It is really up to those men in the Senate and the Republican women who are obviously not going to be on his side.Sargent: Well, look, Nina, I guess we’re going to have to hope that those Republicans are really going to rise to the occasion. I’m pretty damn skeptical myself. Thanks for coming on Nina Burleigh. Burleigh: Anytime, Greg. Sargent: Folks, make sure to check out some great new content up at tnr.com: Matt Ford explaining how a federal court just upended decades of environmental regulation and Timothy Noah arguing that Trump should be jailed for one week. And listen to the latest episode of Words Matter on the DSR Network as Norm Ornstein and Kavita Patel take stock of our post-election situation and ask the question: Where do we go from here? We’ll see y’all next week.You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
https://newrepublic.com/article/188472/transcript-matt-gaetzs-meltdown-suddenly-gets-much-worse-trump

2024-11-15 13:09:42

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Last spring, Donald Trump presided over a meeting with the country’s top oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago resort. According to The Washington Post, Trump promised to fulfill a wish-list of policies sought by their industry—while explicitly soliciting $1 billion in campaign contributions from them. Trump made similar promises to other ultra-wealthy donors, vowing to keep their taxes low while urging them to cut large campaign checks.Now that Trump has won the presidency again, it’s worth revisiting these episodes as a guide to what might be coming. It’s often said that Trump campaigned expressly on a platform of authoritarian rule, but this also applies to corruption: He didn’t disguise his promises to govern in the direct interests of some of the wealthiest executives and investors in the country—and he won anyway. Trump and his allies will likely interpret this as a green light to engage in an extraordinary spree of unrestrained malfeasance.There are several reasons to fear this could amount to a level of oligarchic corruption that outdoes anything Trump did in his first term. In short, conditions are ripe for right-wing elites to try to loot the place from top to bottom.First, Senate Democrats, who just lost majority control, are now bracing to hit a wall in their inquiries into Trump’s apparent quid pro quo dealings. The Senate Budget Committee has been investigating the aforementioned $1 billion solicitation from Big Oil executives, aiming to establish precisely what Trump promised them—he reportedly offered to systematically roll back President Biden’s green energy policies and other regulations—seemingly in direct exchange for campaign money.With little fanfare, this investigation has been making progress: At least one major energy company confirmed that the gathering happened, and most of the other companies haven’t refuted the central allegation, according to a committee aide. Democrats have followed up with demands for company documents that might illuminate exactly what took place. But there is zero chance the incoming GOP majority will continue down this road, which means it will be much harder for Democrats to compel these companies to illuminate the true nature of their transaction with Trump.“Republican control of the Senate will unfortunately undermine congressional efforts to hold Trump and executives accountable for wreaking havoc on our planet and selling out American families and U.S. energy policy to the highest bidder,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, chair of the Budget Committee, told me in a statement. He added that this will hamper getting to the bottom of this “apparent quid pro quo.” Once these policy changes start in earnest, we’ll have no way to trace them back to it, let alone to shed congressional light on influence peddling in real time.Or take the ongoing Senate Finance Committee investigation into Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner’s international business dealings. That probe has established that Kusher took in over $100 million from Saudi and other foreign investors without returning any profits on those investments. This is raising questions for Democrats about whether the arrangement was a means for foreign entities to channel money to the family of the potential next president, raising obvious conflict-of-interest issues. (Kushner has provided an alternate explanation: that his firm moved slowly to invest the money he’d collected.)GOP control of the Senate could make it significantly harder to get to the bottom of these arrangements, a Democratic aide tells me, even as Trump takes control over the nation’s foreign policies, inviting still more influence-seeking. “The next four years are going to be a smash and grab under Trump,” Senator Ron Wyden, chair of the Finance Committee, told me in a statement. Wyden added that the “special interests who put Trump back in office expect a return on their investment,” which is “all the more reason not to let up on oversight.” But Republicans will now make this oversight a lot harder.Then there’s Trump’s decision to tap billionaire Elon Musk to head the grandiosely and misleadingly titled Department of Government Efficiency, a non-governmental body that will push substantial cuts in regulations, spending, and personnel. As The New York Times reports, Musk has grown infuriated with oversight on his SpaceX company, yet he will now be in a position to get Trump to consider regulatory rollbacks that benefit him, even as he enjoys lucrative federal contracts. That, plus government oversight on his other companies creates the potential for serious conflicts of interests.Trump has suggested Musk’s role will only be advisory. But even if that proves true, it’s ominous that Trump would so conspicuously hand Musk so much public influence over decisions that could heavily impact Musk’s own bottom line, especially with Trump so heavily indebted to Musk for transforming Twitter into a pro-Trump propaganda and MAGA disinformation machine. At minimum, Trump is basically declaring that his administration will be open for business to those who boost and assist him politically.“Trump is showing that he will reward people who help him by giving them tremendous influence over his administration,” Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told me. “This will encourage more people to direct their largesse Trump’s way. We expect government to look out for the public interest. Trump is open about the fact that government is meant to serve his supporters, business partners, and friends.”Other new openings for influence peddling will beckon. Bookbinder notes that during Trump’s first term, his publicly traded Truth Social platform did not exist. Now, Bookbinder points out, it provides an easy channel for wealthy people to curry favor with Trump by buying stock in it—even simpler than booking rooms at his hotels, which reaped millions for Trump’s businesses during his first term.“A publicly traded stock in a large company provides an easy way to drop a lot of money and quickly affect Trump’s net worth,” Bookbinder said. “Every president before him has divested financial interests so there wasn’t a clear way to influence them. Truth Social stock makes that even easier.”Meanwhile, Trump’s plan to purge the government of career civil servants and replace them with MAGA loyalists will create new avenues for sordid inside dealing. For instance, Biden initiatives like new federal protections for millions of workers from excessive heat—which are opposed by some business interests—are now in the rulemaking process and will be in the hands of the new administration. It’s easy to see MAGA appointees letting bogus information peddled by special interests undermine that regulation’s future. Career officials who remain—but whose protections against termination will be weaker under Trump—will be less likely to object when Trumpist appointees corrupt the rulemaking process more broadly.It is of course possible that Trump’s administration will display no trace of such seamy schemes. But that’s unlikely. When Trump first ran in 2016, he similarly celebrated his own corruption—declaring that not paying taxes “makes me smart”—but positioned himself as a traitor-to-his-class figure who would employ his personal familiarity with insider corruption to benefit ordinary Americans. Now he is openly promising to directly reward his elite allies with governing spoils, and not bothering to make a serious case that this will benefit the public.It is sometimes argued that Trump’s reelection was driven by revulsion at “elites.” However true that is, it’s not hard to see what’s coming next. If and when Trump’s initiatives spur widespread criticism—from canceling prosecutions of himself to unleashing hell on immigrants—certain pundits will intone that the criticism merely reflects his success in “taking on the elite class.” Meanwhile, Trump will be selling the government off for parts to his oligarchic right-wing elite cronies, and the jarring incongruity of it all won’t disturb these pundits in the slightest. After winning the presidency again despite making these corrupt deals right out in the open, why would Trump feel remotely constrained?
https://newrepublic.com/article/188467/trumps-musk-oligarchy-corruption

2024-11-15 13:09:42

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When a storm is named, it can take on an unearthly humanity of its own, become an object of hatred and dread like a person can. Like Hurricane Helene, who tore through the Blue Ridge Mountains of southern Appalachia in late September, after coming up from the Gulf of Mexico. She left particular devastation across western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, as 40 trillion gallons of rain fell in the course of a few nights. Behind her, the rivers came up, and the mountains came down.The flash flooding and landslides caused by Helene claimed 102 lives in North Carolina alone, and a total of more than 230 throughout a six-state region. Governor Roy Cooper’s administration estimated at one point that 126,000 homes may have been damaged. Because of the rugged geography, hundreds found themselves isolated by washouts and debris. Many were without power, clean water, and the internet for weeks. A month later, some were still without at least one of the three, and the city of Asheville is unlikely to see drinkable water until December.Western North Carolina was sometimes marketed as a “climate haven,” but Asheville has flooded before, though not for over a hundred years.Was it unprecedented? Not exactly. Western North Carolina was sometimes marketed as a “climate haven,” but Asheville has flooded before, though not for over a hundred years. Previous disasters throughout Appalachia, like the West Virginia floods of 2016 or the devastating eastern Kentucky floods of 2022, proved that mountains are susceptible to deadly flash flooding and landslides. The region is also infrastructurally precarious, with aging water lines and a vulnerable grid. And the communities are socially vulnerable as well: Hospitals have shuttered, economies are reliant on low-wage service work, income inequality and the cost of living are increasing. Inadequate zoning regulations and building standards have compounded environmental risks. Meanwhile, just 0.5 percent of single-family homes in western North Carolina have flood insurance, and the maximum award in housing assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency is only $42,500.Residents of the river towns of Marshall, Swannanoa, and many others are coming to grips with the scale of loss and digging themselves out of the muck at the same time. Though public officials and FEMA are present, there’s still a pervasive question: If not for neighbors, who would have mucked out the houses or cleaned the streets? Volunteer groups like Marshall-based Rural Organizing and Resilience, or ROAR, and tiny home company Nanostead have become information hubs, tool libraries, and volunteer dispatch centers. As uncertainties about the public health consequences of the cleanup have continued to swirl, and some involved have shown signs of respiratory and skin ailments, community members have done their best to keep one another safe and informed.
https://newrepublic.com/article/188415/hurricane-helene-photos-north-carolina-no-safe-haven

2024-11-15 13:09:42

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In the scramble to understand the numerous cultural currents that are constantly running through the United States, one of the most instructive ideas to emerge in recent years has come from political science professor Ryan Burge. His project, Graphs About Religion, provides interesting details on the growing number of Americans who identify as evangelical while rarely attending church—if they do so at all. In 2008, a mere 3 percent of self-identified evangelicals reported never attending religious services. By 2023, that number had grown to 10 percent, with an additional 17 percent saying that they seldom attended. This means that more than a quarter of America’s evangelical devout actually show little devotion, attending church once per year or less—a startling idea when we consider the outsize role that evangelicals have played in America’s postwar political life. It points to a wider trend that we’re seeing in elite (though they would reject that term) influencers who have lurched dramatically to the political right in recent years, under the guise of “cultural Christianity.”While not all cultural Christians identify as evangelical, they embrace a secular vision of Christian values—tradition, conventional families, and small government—all without the spiritual commitment or conviction. Cultural Christianity’s true believers tend to be drawn to the idea that the faith exists strictly as a rejection of liberal cultural hegemony; that whenever they turn on the television, a Taylor Swift or LeBron James is telling them how to vote or a transgender influencer like Dylan Mulvaney is advertising their all-American beer. Pop culture represents deeper political grievances, such as liberal gender and identity expression; the corporate drum of diversity, equity and inclusion; the intervening state of the pandemic; and overt multiculturalism.And while it might be tempting to view this movement as the domain of conservative old white guys, last week’s election highlighted that it is home to an increasingly potent coalition. Ironically, cultural Christianity’s St. Paul is Richard Dawkins, the British evolutionary biologist whose 2006 book, The God Delusion, was one of the canonical texts of the “new atheist” movement that took shape after 9/11. Only a year after his book denouncing all faith was released, Dawkins described himself as a “cultural Christian,” lamenting that there was an “increasing feeling” that festivals such as Christmas were being marginalized. “I’m not one of those who wants to purge our society of our Christian history,” he said. “If there’s any threat to these sorts of things, I think you will find it comes from rival religions and not from atheists.”Those skeptical about cultural Christianity might note that it bears the hallmarks of some of the more robust reactionary strains of secular politics without any of the Christ-like obligations—such as communal rituals, an emphasis on humility and forgiveness, and a dedication to serving others—that might conflict with the practitioner’s simultaneous adherence to a reactionary and antisocial brand of conservatism. In order to fill the void where religious faith might otherwise reside, cultural Christians are inculcated in a stew of sermons without questions about their own behaviors, beliefs shorn of moral foundations, and moralizing without scriptures. At its crudest interpretation, it could be argued that cultural Christianity is a home for those who don’t necessarily believe that Jesus sacrificed himself for our sins, but rather, that they are heirs to his victimhood. Persecution didn’t only happen to Jesus—it’s happening to me.It’s of little surprise, then, that the towering cultural—and financial—figure of the 2024 election, Elon Musk, came out as a cultural Christian in July. Musk, who used to be a liberal of sorts, took his first steps on the road to Damascus during the pandemic. It was the time when, in addition to publicly railing against lockdown orders, he was “tricked,” he claims, into signing papers for gender-affirming care for one of his children. Following the gender transition of the child, now an adult called Vivian, he told Canadian pop psychologist (and fellow cultural Christian) Jordan Peterson that he’s a “big believer in the principles of Christianity” and “a cultural Christian,” for his estranged daughter had been “killed by the woke mind virus.”Others in Musk’s milieu appear to be attracted to this nonpracticing version of  Christianity for its disciplining effect on wider society. Joe Rogan, host of America’s most popular podcast, said earlier this year in a conversation with NFL player Aaron Rodgers, “We need Jesus,” adding that now’s a good time for Him to come back, because “we’re kind of fucked.” There might be a point, he added, where society is “so unmanageable and so chaotic that something comes down and gives us a guideline.”On closer inspection, other prominent cultural Christians appear to be motivated more by Western cultural chauvinism than their own personal circumstances, a route similar to the one the new atheists followed out of the smoke plumes of the September 11 attacks. Bellicose British commentator and new atheist Douglas Murray, who has been outspoken about the righteousness of the destruction of Gaza, now describes himself as a “Christian atheist.” Last November, his friend Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Dutch American writer and fellow former new atheist, wrote an essay on her outright conversion to Christianity, citing reasons such as wokeness and Islam—while not once mentioning Jesus.Ali, along with many others in the cultural Christian movement, cite historian and popular podcaster Tom Holland’s 2019 book, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, as their Bible. Holland argues, with solid historical foundations, that the tenets of Western liberalism, from human rights to secularity, are deeply rooted in Christian thought and assumptions. (Following the election, Democratic Party consultant David Axelrod spoke to Holland’s thesis from another angle, arguing that the party has become “a metropolitan, college-educated party,” which approaches the working class in the “spirit of a missionary—that we’re here to help you become more like us.”)Holland is, however, more of a gospel-curious, reluctant agnostic than a chest-thumping, anti-woke culture warrior. The same cannot be said for the most antagonistic of those who have adopted his argument. In their kind-of coming to Jesus, Musk, Dawkins, and Ali have all rejected today’s liberal values, as they see them, and promotion of Western civilization—as they see it. Unspoken is the fact that 85 percent of the world’s Christians live in the developing world. That’s some distance from Richard Dawkins’s notion of “listening to the lovely bells of Winchester, one of our great mediaeval cathedrals,” which he claimed in a 2018 tweet was “much nicer than the aggressive-sounding ‘Allahu Akhbar.’” It’s not hard to imagine a Dawkins or Musk feeling as alien in an exuberant West African deliverance ministry as they would in a mosque.Yet while many of cultural Christianity’s public figures are tub-thumping Western supremacists, there’s a quietly growing number of Americans who describe themselves as non-Christian evangelicals. Using data from the Cooperative Election Study in 2022, Ryan Burge highlights a group of people—including 14 percent of Muslims and Catholics, 12 percent of Hindus, 9 percent of Buddhists, and 5 percent of Jews—who would also describe themselves as “born again” or evangelical Christians.Breaking it down further, he found that Republican Muslims self-identify as evangelical at a rate of 32 percent, compared to 11 percent of Democratic-leaning Muslims. Republican Jews identify the same way three times as much as Democratic Jews. Republican Buddhists and Hindus also identify as evangelical much more than their left-leaning co-religionists, while 19 percent of Republican “Nones” call themselves evangelical and only 9 percent of Democrats do the same.This trend is best encapsulated in the brief Republican presidential primary candidacy of Vivek Ramaswamy. Seeking to court Iowa’s powerful evangelical block, he closed his stump speeches with the hyper-online invocation that “God is real.” Finding common ground between Hindu faith and evangelical Christianity, he declared that faith is under attack by “new secular religions: wokeism, transgenderism, climatism, Covidism.” More persuasively, a 2021 essay for The American Conservative by authors of faith, “In Defence of Cultural Christianity,” argued that “liberal consumerism” is leading to “ever greater cultural absurdities” that do not sincerely reflect modern society.False nostalgia is a hell of a drug, but this taps into a wider dissatisfaction with economic life that is critiqued by paleoconservatives and fourth-wave feminists alike. Young families are being squeezed at every turn by cost-of-living pressures. Breaking glass ceilings has obvious appeal, but for a lot of women, that can mean placing 6-week-old babies in childcare. In some spheres, particularly a certain strain of the newly culturally Christian online right, it tends to be accompanied by a desire for an AI -image-generated ersatz past, where men sired large families and their wives happily stayed at home.Either way, the great American marketplace of faith, which for so long saw American Protestantism thrive free from the constraints of the state, is welcoming new customers, with their souls as an added extra. Spiritual converts usually arrive in the evangelical movement seeking personal salvation, but cultural Christians are flooding in thanks to a profound shift in a modern evangelical movement: Trump’s prophets, who are less interested in saving your soul than radically transforming society.Cultural Christians are joining spiritual Christians in feeling besieged by the liberal culture around them—from everyman Hollywood hero Robert De Niro yelling, “Fuck Trump” at a 2018 awards ceremony to evolving ideas about diversity and inclusion—a culture that is strongly backed by our corporate overlords. Suffering and sin become less important than finding a sense of order in a changing world and the ideas of a real and imagined past that underpin them.After all, if there’s one lesson from two millennia of Christianity, it’s that true believers have been called to reject the prevailing secular culture when it does not conform to their hearts. It instructs us, instead, to heed the lessons of the good book. For cultural Christians, which book that is is another question.
https://newrepublic.com/article/188337/cultural-christianity-taking-conservative-movement

2024-11-15 13:09:42

@nprofile…pyzj
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No position in President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet is as important as the attorney general. During his first term, Trump chafed against the post-Watergate tradition of independence for the Justice Department; he has promised to demolish it his second time around. The president-elect openly desired to use federal law enforcement to shield his friends from legal consequences and to target his political foes with vengeful punishments.On Wednesday night, Trump announced he’d chosen someone for the position who rather fittingly embodied both of these principles: former Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, who resigned from the House shortly after the decision became public. Even with a supine Republican majority in the Senate, it is hard to imagine that Gaetz will have an easy road to confirmation. His nomination instead suggests that Trump may actually attempt a constitutionally dubious maneuver to install Gaetz as the nation’s top lawyer and law enforcement official.The news stunned even the most inured public figures in Washington this week. Republican senators and representatives alike expressed shock, horror, and dismay at the selection. Gaetz is intensely unpopular on Capitol Hill for multiple reasons. But the ones that stand out are his leading role in the ouster of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy last year and the chaos that followed, his belligerent and childish interactions with other members, and the various scandals that have surrounded him in recent years.Mostly notably, the Justice Department and the House Ethics Committee have each investigated Gaetz for allegations of child sex trafficking, the statutory rape of a 17-year-old girl, and illegal drug use. (The former lawmaker has denied any wrongdoing.) Federal prosecutors declined to bring charges against him in 2023, reportedly because of concerns about witness credibility. The Ethics Committee was set to vote on the release of a report about the allegations on Friday, but its release is now questionable after Gaetz’s sudden (and convenient) resignation from the House on Wednesday night.Then there is the question of his qualifications. Gaetz graduated from law school at the College of William and Mary in 2007 and was admitted to the Florida state bar in 2008. But there is no evidence that he ever practiced law in any meaningful way. After working at a North Florida law firm for just over a year, he ran for a seat in the Florida House of Representatives in 2009 and served there until he was elected to Congress in 2016. This is not the résumé of your typical attorney general, to say the least.Of the 13 lawyers to serve as attorney general in Gaetz’s lifetime, all but one previously served as a state or federal prosecutor, as a state or federal judge, or as a high-ranking member of the Justice Department itself. The sole exception, Reagan appointee William French Stewart, spent more than 20 years in private practice at one of the nation’s top law firms. Gaetz, on the other hand, has no significant experience as a lawyer in any form. He would undoubtedly be the least qualified attorney general in the history of the republic.So why did Trump pick him? The obvious reason is loyalty. Gaetz spent his congressional career as a die-hard MAGA loyalist and as one of Trump’s closest allies. As attorney general, he would almost certainly transform the Justice Department into a vehicle for the president’s own whims and grievances, throwing aside its ethical obligations and lashing out at whichever political adversary frustrates Trump at any moment. Confirming Gaetz would be a dark day for the rule of law.The only thing standing in Trump’s and Gaetz’s way is the Senate. The Constitution allows the president to install top officials in the executive branch only with the “advice and consent” of the upper body. In practical terms, this means any presidential nominee must receive an up-or-down vote from senators before taking up their post. There is only one way around the Senate’s approval: When the Senate is in recess, the Constitution says that presidents “shall have power to fill up all vacancies that may happen” during that recess “by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session.”The recess-appointments clause is best understood as a product of the times in which the Constitution’s Framers lived. In the early republic, Congress did not sit continuously all year as it effectively does today. Senators and representatives journeyed to the capital for monthslong sessions, then returned home for monthslong breaks. Recess appointments allowed presidents to temporarily fill vacancies when the Senate could not speedily or readily gather, thus ensuring that the federal government could continue to function even when lawmakers were out of town.Presidents continued to make some recess appointments until the 2010s. Starting in 2007, Senate Democrats stopped regularly adjourning the chamber even when they left town and instead held pro forma sessions every three days to ensure that George W. Bush couldn’t make further recess appointments. No business was conducted during these sessions; a senator simply gaveled the chamber open and then immediately adjourned it. Senators from both parties largely continued that practice even when the White House and Senate were held by the same party.In January 2012, Barack Obama tried to bypass this hurdle by announcing recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau while the Senate was in a three-day pro forma session. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that those appointments were invalid two years later in NLRB v. Noel Canning. Justice Stephen Breyer, writing for five of the justices, left open the possibility that presidents could make appointments if a recess was 10 days or longer. Justice Antonin Scalia and the court’s other three conservatives at the time argued for a much stricter limit.Scalia scathingly criticized his colleagues in the majority for leaving the door open to future mischief by presidents and described the recess appointment power as an “anachronism” in general. “The need it was designed to fill no longer exists, and its only remaining use is the ignoble one of enabling the President to circumvent the Senate’s role in the appointment process,” he wrote in an opinion that concurred only with the outcome, not the reasoning used by his five colleagues to get there.Installing Gaetz through a traditional recess appointment would not make much sense on a practical level. Adjourning the Senate to create the opportunity for a recess appointment would still require a majority vote. If 50 senators (plus Vice President JD Vance, the tie-breaking vote) are already willing to vote for a recess, then Gaetz would already have the votes necessary to be confirmed the normal way. Recess appointees only serve on a temporary basis and are generally barred by federal law from earning a salary from their position until the Senate confirms them.But Trump reportedly has an even more dubious option in mind. The Constitution states that if the House and Senate cannot agree on a time to adjourn, the president “may adjourn them to such time as he shall think proper.” This is the only mechanism by which a president can force Congress out of session. This stands in sharp contrast to the British kings who previously ruled the Thirteen Colonies, who could dismiss Parliament at will. The Framers did not discuss this power any further in the Federalist Papers or other contemporary sources, except to draw that distinction.What would this look like in practical terms? Nobody knows, because not once in the nearly 250-year history of the American republic has a president forcibly adjourned Congress under this power. When two Heritage Foundation lawyers wrote about this option in 2020 in response to the Senate’s inaction on some of Trump’s nominees at the time, even they admitted that they had no idea what it would look like in practice or when a president could do it. Instead, they assumed that Trump would just do it and it would all be sorted out by the Supreme Court.It’s worth noting that their scenario imagined that then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi would be the one who refused to adjourn and Senate Republicans would be instigating the conflict. (At the time, Democrats held the House and Republicans held the Senate.) Proroguing Congress this time would likely only happen if Speaker Mike Johnson filed a motion of adjournment and the Senate didn’t act on it. In other words, the president and the House would be conspiring to deprive the Senate of its constitutional duty to confirm presidential nominees—a despotic and unprecedented move that would nullify the Constitution’s checks and balances.Whether the Supreme Court would validate such a move is an open question. During Trump’s presidency, the justices ruled against him in multiple high-profile cases, including on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients, a citizenship question on the census, and whether New York prosecutors could obtain his financial records. But this is also the same Supreme Court that gutted the Fourteenth Amendment’s disqualification clause so that Trump could run again and handed down a heretical ruling on “presidential immunity” to save him from prosecution earlier this year. After those decisions, one could hardly blame Trump for thinking the Supreme Court’s conservative justices would sign off on another step toward dictatorship.
https://newrepublic.com/article/188451/trump-break-congress-matt-gaetz

2024-11-15 13:09:42

@nprofile…pyzj
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It’s become something of a glum tradition in the Democratic Party. After an electoral beating, opinion makers and political elites—along with everyone with a social media account—offer their takes as to why Democrats blew it. For many, it is that the Democratic Party and President Joe Biden didn’t do more to help protect innocent lives in Gaza. For others, it is that Vice President Kamala Harris dared to campaign with Liz Cheney. Senator Bernie Sanders and many others point to the Democratic Party having moved away from its roots as the party of working and blue-collar folks.The one self-evident answer that no high-minded pundit wants to admit is that people simply bought what Donald Trump was selling. Specifically, that Trump manages to appeal to voters who believe the system sucks and respond to what he says, over and over again, he’s going to do about it: crush it, shove obstacles out of the way, and get immediate results. It’s obviously authoritarianism and a terrible way to actually run a country. But I sympathize with many of the people who pinned their hopes on a radical transformation of a status quo that’s left people behind, including many in traditional Democratic constituencies.Donald Trump tapped into something that everyone feels—that our current system of checks and balances and polite political norms doesn’t allow the country to move either nimbly or boldly enough, resulting in a consistent failure to deliver relief and results that people tangibly feel and desperately want.A survey of Americans in 2024 from the Partnership for Public Service showed that trust and confidence in government was at an all-time low. A whopping 63 percent of Americans said they do not trust the government—up from the mid-40s in 2022. There is not a single demographic where the majority believes the government can be trusted—not Democrats, not Republicans, not men, not women, not Latinos, not Black Americans. No one.Only 23 percent of Americans said they trust the government, far below the 35 percent who said that in 2022. Sixty-six percent say the government is incompetent. A full 68 percent of Americans say democracy is not working in the United States today, versus only 23 percent who say it is. Read that last part again. Nearly seven in 10 Americans say democracy is not working.In this environment, Donald Trump’s promise to “crush the system” is a winning message. The Democratic Party could have all put on hard hats, joined laborers in building infrastructure projects, flown out to Gaza to personally disarm Israeli munitions, and told Liz Cheney to take a hike, and it wouldn’t have made the difference for a straightforward reason. Democrats defended the system, and all its dreary norms, and hoary traditions—the very ones most Americans say are broken, can’t be trusted, and don’t work for them. Not only did it make Donald Trump an attractive candidate to many, but it also was likely a factor in the decision of millions of voters to just stay at home, stewing over their feelings that the choice was to keep the system that they feel is broken and not working at all for them or vote for a fascist.This is not to say that Democrats have to embrace authoritarianism; far from it. But no issue, no outreach to any constituency, and no return to the party of labor is going to matter until Democrats fully embrace the idea that Americans across the board see our government as a stale, stodgy, ineffective, and corrupt 250-year-old relic and believe that every promise you make to them will be broken. To these voters, Washington is where all the pretty promises are forced through a sausage grinder, only to come out the other side an unpalatable mess, if they come out at all.Here, Democrats might take a cue from one of their own: Elizabeth Warren. In 2020, the senator from Massachusetts had a boomlet in the Democratic primary with two simple messages:  “We need big, structural change,” and “I have a plan for that.” Senator Warren may have arrived on the scene too early to be broadly accepted. Maybe Democrats, understandably terrorized by the Trump administration and reeling from horrific pandemic losses, were of the mind to play it safe, to endorse normalcy as a cardinal virtue. Joe Biden was best positioned as this sort of nominee, and by Super Tuesday, voters were inclined to follow the Democratic Party’s post–South Carolina primary signaling and fall in line behind the former vice president. However, Donald Trump reportedly feared Warren as the nominee the most; more than Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, or anyone else.What Donald Trump understood, what Senator Warren got, and what Democrats should start to grasp now is that people don’t want to hear promises and don’t want politicians to just reach out to them. Voters and nonvoters alike want candidates to acknowledge their belief that the current system is horribly broken. Long before a candidate talks about their policy solutions, they just want some acknowledgment that voters are right to feel about the status quo in the way they do—and that they want their leaders to address the systemic issues that keep bold action from making it out of Washington alive.None of this forces anyone to embrace authoritarianism or ditch democracy. The good news is that in the same survey from the Partnership for Public Service, most Americans think civil service workers do a good job, and their interactions with the government have been positive. Almost unanimously, Americans believe that having a competent federal government is key to having a strong democracy. In the survey, 90 percent backed that notion.Democrats don’t have to abandon democracy or even checks and balances. But they do have to present a vision for a radical remaking of how our government works and how it legislates to meet the needs of people swiftly and boldly in the twenty-first century. And the story of how this change is wrought must be easy for people to understand, because Donald Trump’s message is two words: “Smash it.”The Democratic vision for big, structural change can range from ditching the filibuster (assuming Republicans don’t do it first) to national referenda for the purpose of introducing more direct democracy into government, to adding more judicial circuits and, thus, more seats to the high court—the better to break the stranglehold that corrupting influences have on the judiciary. It could include term limits for Congress and full public financing of elections for all federal offices so that politicians can’t be bought off. These reforms would move quickly with no filibuster and a more favorable Supreme Court.It may include a remaking of the Department of Labor to ensure unions have a permanent seat inside government to advocate and represent workers, and more independent watchdogs to report to the public on the activities of the FBI, CIA, Department of Homeland Security, and other agencies that engender so much distrust.Some of the above may be good ideas, and some may stink. But here, we get to the kinds of structural changes that might help voters trust our governing institutions again—a trust that must be cemented before anyone chats about specific policies.In the end, there was nothing Democrats could have done to win the 2024 election—not with any issue or any candidate—as long as they were put in the position of having to defend a status quo system that had fallen out of public favor, in the mistaken belief that the American people hold it dear to their hearts and would choose to keep it over Trump’s promise of smashing it all to pieces.If there are to be elections in the future that are free and fair (a prospect that is sadly now less than certain), then Democrats must start developing a bold, clear, easy-to-understand set of structural changes to how government is organized and how it works. They must meet most voters—and nonvoters—where they live. Before anything else, Democrats must tell voters: “We hear you. The system sucks. And here’s what we’re going to do about it.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/188333/democrats-break-status-quo-system

2024-11-15 13:08:29

@nprofile…6kn7
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In the scramble to understand the numerous cultural currents that are constantly running through the United States, one of the most instructive ideas to emerge in recent years has come from political science professor Ryan Burge. His project, Graphs About Religion, provides interesting details on the growing number of Americans who identify as evangelical while rarely attending church—if they do so at all. In 2008, a mere 3 percent of self-identified evangelicals reported never attending religious services. By 2023, that number had grown to 10 percent, with an additional 17 percent saying that they seldom attended. This means that more than a quarter of America’s evangelical devout actually show little devotion, attending church once per year or less—a startling idea when we consider the outsize role that evangelicals have played in America’s postwar political life. It points to a wider trend that we’re seeing in elite (though they would reject that term) influencers who have lurched dramatically to the political right in recent years, under the guise of “cultural Christianity.”While not all cultural Christians identify as evangelical, they embrace a secular vision of Christian values—tradition, conventional families, and small government—all without the spiritual commitment or conviction. Cultural Christianity’s true believers tend to be drawn to the idea that the faith exists strictly as a rejection of liberal cultural hegemony; that whenever they turn on the television, a Taylor Swift or LeBron James is telling them how to vote or a transgender influencer like Dylan Mulvaney is advertising their all-American beer. Pop culture represents deeper political grievances, such as liberal gender and identity expression; the corporate drum of diversity, equity and inclusion; the intervening state of the pandemic; and overt multiculturalism.And while it might be tempting to view this movement as the domain of conservative old white guys, last week’s election highlighted that it is home to an increasingly potent coalition. Ironically, cultural Christianity’s St. Paul is Richard Dawkins, the British evolutionary biologist whose 2006 book, The God Delusion, was one of the canonical texts of the “new atheist” movement that took shape after 9/11. Only a year after his book denouncing all faith was released, Dawkins described himself as a “cultural Christian,” lamenting that there was an “increasing feeling” that festivals such as Christmas were being marginalized. “I’m not one of those who wants to purge our society of our Christian history,” he said. “If there’s any threat to these sorts of things, I think you will find it comes from rival religions and not from atheists.”Those skeptical about cultural Christianity might note that it bears the hallmarks of some of the more robust reactionary strains of secular politics without any of the Christ-like obligations—such as communal rituals, an emphasis on humility and forgiveness, and a dedication to serving others—that might conflict with the practitioner’s simultaneous adherence to a reactionary and antisocial brand of conservatism. In order to fill the void where religious faith might otherwise reside, cultural Christians are inculcated in a stew of sermons without questions about their own behaviors, beliefs shorn of moral foundations, and moralizing without scriptures. At its crudest interpretation, it could be argued that cultural Christianity is a home for those who don’t necessarily believe that Jesus sacrificed himself for our sins, but rather, that they are heirs to his victimhood. Persecution didn’t only happen to Jesus—it’s happening to me.It’s of little surprise, then, that the towering cultural—and financial—figure of the 2024 election, Elon Musk, came out as a cultural Christian in July. Musk, who used to be a liberal of sorts, took his first steps on the road to Damascus during the pandemic. It was the time when, in addition to publicly railing against lockdown orders, he was “tricked,” he claims, into signing papers for gender-affirming care for one of his children. Following the gender transition of the child, now an adult called Vivian, he told Canadian pop psychologist (and fellow cultural Christian) Jordan Peterson that he’s a “big believer in the principles of Christianity” and “a cultural Christian,” for his estranged daughter had been “killed by the woke mind virus.”Others in Musk’s milieu appear to be attracted to this nonpracticing version of Christianity for its disciplining effect on wider society. Joe Rogan, host of America’s most popular podcast, said earlier this year in a conversation with NFL player Aaron Rodgers, “We need Jesus,” adding that now’s a good time for Him to come back, because “we’re kind of fucked.” There might be a point, he added, where society is “so unmanageable and so chaotic that something comes down and gives us a guideline.”On closer inspection, other prominent cultural Christians appear to be motivated more by Western cultural chauvinism than their own personal circumstances, a route similar to the one the new atheists followed out of the smoke plumes of the September 11 attacks. Bellicose British commentator and new atheist Douglas Murray, who has been outspoken about the righteousness of the destruction of Gaza, now describes himself as a “Christian atheist.” Last November, his friend Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Dutch American writer and fellow former new atheist, wrote an essay on her outright conversion to Christianity, citing reasons such as wokeness and Islam—while not once mentioning Jesus.Ali, along with many others in the cultural Christian movement, cite historian and popular podcaster Tom Holland’s 2019 book, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, as their Bible. Holland argues, with solid historical foundations, that the tenets of Western liberalism, from human rights to secularity, are deeply rooted in Christian thought and assumptions. (Following the election, Democratic Party consultant David Axelrod spoke to Holland’s thesis from another angle, arguing that the party has become “a metropolitan, college-educated party,” which approaches the working class in the “spirit of a missionary—that we’re here to help you become more like us.”)Holland is, however, more of a gospel-curious, reluctant agnostic than a chest-thumping, anti-woke culture warrior. The same cannot be said for the most antagonistic of those who have adopted his argument. In their kind-of coming to Jesus, Musk, Dawkins, and Ali have all rejected today’s liberal values, as they see them, and promotion of Western civilization—as they see it. Unspoken is the fact that 85 percent of the world’s Christians live in the developing world. That’s some distance from Richard Dawkins’s notion of “listening to the lovely bells of Winchester, one of our great mediaeval cathedrals,” which he claimed in a 2018 tweet was “much nicer than the aggressive-sounding ‘Allahu Akhbar.’” It’s not hard to imagine a Dawkins or Musk feeling as alien in an exuberant West African deliverance ministry as they would in a mosque.Yet while many of cultural Christianity’s public figures are tub-thumping Western supremacists, there’s a quietly growing number of Americans who describe themselves as non-Christian evangelicals. Using data from the Cooperative Election Study in 2022, Ryan Burge highlights a group of people—including 14 percent of Muslims and Catholics, 12 percent of Hindus, 9 percent of Buddhists, and 5 percent of Jews—who would also describe themselves as “born again” or evangelical Christians.Breaking it down further, he found that Republican Muslims self-identify as evangelical at a rate of 32 percent, compared to 11 percent of Democratic-leaning Muslims. Republican Jews identify the same way three times as much as Democratic Jews. Republican Buddhists and Hindus also identify as evangelical much more than their left-leaning co-religionists, while 19 percent of Republican “Nones” call themselves evangelical and only 9 percent of Democrats do the same.This trend is best encapsulated in the brief Republican presidential primary candidacy of Vivek Ramaswamy. Seeking to court Iowa’s powerful evangelical block, he closed his stump speeches with the hyper-online invocation that “God is real.” Finding common ground between Hindu faith and evangelical Christianity, he declared that faith is under attack by “new secular religions: wokeism, transgenderism, climatism, Covidism.” More persuasively, a 2021 essay for The American Conservative by authors of faith, “In Defence of Cultural Christianity,” argued that “liberal consumerism” is leading to “ever greater cultural absurdities” that do not sincerely reflect modern society.False nostalgia is a hell of a drug, but this taps into a wider dissatisfaction with economic life that is critiqued by paleoconservatives and fourth-wave feminists alike. Young families are being squeezed at every turn by cost-of-living pressures. Breaking glass ceilings has obvious appeal, but for a lot of women, that can mean placing 6-week-old babies in childcare. In some spheres, particularly a certain strain of the newly culturally Christian online right, it tends to be accompanied by a desire for an AI -image-generated ersatz past, where men sired large families and their wives happily stayed at home.Either way, the great American marketplace of faith, which for so long saw American Protestantism thrive free from the constraints of the state, is welcoming new customers, with their souls as an added extra. Spiritual converts usually arrive in the evangelical movement seeking personal salvation, but cultural Christians are flooding in thanks to a profound shift in a modern evangelical movement: Trump’s prophets, who are less interested in saving your soul than radically transforming society.Cultural Christians are joining spiritual Christians in feeling besieged by the liberal culture around them—from everyman Hollywood hero Robert De Niro yelling, “Fuck Trump” at a 2018 awards ceremony to evolving ideas about diversity and inclusion—a culture that is strongly backed by our corporate overlords. Suffering and sin become less important than finding a sense of order in a changing world and the ideas of a real and imagined past that underpin them.After all, if there’s one lesson from two millennia of Christianity, it’s that true believers have been called to reject the prevailing secular culture when it does not conform to their hearts. It instructs us, instead, to heed the lessons of the good book. For cultural Christians, which book that is is another question.
https://newrepublic.com/article/188337/cultural-christianity-taking-conservative-movement

2024-11-15 12:02:12

@nprofile…pyzj
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We’re now in Day Two of an extraordinary GOP meltdown over Donald Trump’s pick of Matt Gaetz for attorney general. Numerous Republican Senators are strongly opposing the move. But on Thursday, Trump’s appointments got even worse with his choice of anti-vax conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the secretary of Health and Human Services. It’s hard to say which of these will be more of a disaster. We talked to Nina Burleigh, author of a great new cover story for The New Republic called “Trump 2.0: Here Comes the Night,” about how deeply worrisome these developments truly are—and whether GOP senators will hold the line against them. The prognosis is not good. Listen to this episode here.
https://newrepublic.com/article/188462/trumps-ugly-new-rfk-stunner-points-dark-unsettling-times-ahead

2024-11-15 00:53:50

@nprofile…pyzj
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Elon Musk is apparently trying to broker some kind of agreement between the United States and Iran. The tech mogul and world’s richest man met with Iran’s Ambassador to the United Nations in New York on Monday, The New York Times reports, citing two anonymous Iranian officials. The meeting, held in a secret location, reportedly focused on how to diffuse tensions between the two countries and lasted for over an hour. The two officials said the meeting was “positive” and “good news,” according to the Times. Neither Donald Trump’s campaign nor Musk commented on the meeting. In the past week, Musk has been spending a lot of time with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate, and also traveled to Washington with him. This raises the question of whether Musk was meeting with Iranian officials on Trump’s orders. According to the Times, Musk requested the meeting and the ambassador picked the location. The president-elect included the tech CEO on a phone call last week with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy only hours after Trump won the election, so it wouldn’t be Musk’s first dip into Trump’s foreign policy communications. Musk has reportedly engaged in secret talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to a Wall Street Journal report last month, and Russia is allied with Iran. Trump also has a worrying relationship with Putin and Russia, which raises questions about whether Musk’s Monday meeting also has to do with Russia. The meeting could also signal a change in tone between Iran and the United States. Relations between the two countries have not been positive since Trump’s first term, when he infamously dissolved the nuclear deal with Iran negotiated by the Obama administration and approved the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in 2020. U.S. support for Israel’s brutal war against Gaza and Lebanon under the Biden administration has not helped matters either, especially since Iran backs the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, the stated target of Israeli bombing. Trump has been a staunch supporter of Israel’s war and attacked President Biden for insufficient support of the country, which considers Iran its top enemy. A Washington Post report Wednesday said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was seeking to give Trump an inauguration gift of a ceasefire with Lebanon. Maybe Trump hopes to make a grand show of “good deals” in the Middle East to start off his presidency. Or, as was the case in his first presidential term’s foreign policy efforts, his overtures may end up going nowhere.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188464/elon-musk-negotiating-iran-ambassador-united-nations-trump

2024-11-15 00:53:50

@nprofile…pyzj
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Even America’s most spineless senator doesn’t want Matt Gaetz to be attorney general.In a Thursday Newsmax appearance, Texas Republican Ted Cruz was asked for his thoughts on president-elect Trump’s potential nomination of the loathed and embattled MAGA Representative Matt Gaetz to serve as attorney general.The senator initially dodged the question, instead accusing Joe Biden of weaponizing the Justice Department and “infecting” it with partisan bias. He eventually addressed Gaetz, avoiding any advocacy of the nominee.“I will say that was a pick that was, I think, very surprising to the entirety of the Senate. And so we’ll assess the nominee on the merits, said Cruz. “But there is a process that will unfold that examines a particular nominee’s background, their experience and their suitability for a role.”Cruz was much warmer to the idea of his “dear friend” Senator Mike Lee as the attorney general pick, and reiterated the seriousness of the position. “I don’t know that there’s a more important position in this Trump administration than the attorney general,” said Cruz. “And so I think it’s critical to have someone there who will follow the law, who has integrity, who is a constitutionalist, and who has the courage to root out the incredible partisanship and weaponization that has infested this DOJ.”Gaetz grew unpopular within the Republican Party’s elected leadership after his destabilizing ouster of Speaker Kevin McCarthy. His attorney general nomination is currently jeopardized by a House Ethics Committee probe into allegations of trafficking and having sex with a 17-year-old girl at a drug-fueled party in 2017. Gaetz resigned from Congress in an effort to end the investigation, but it is expected to be leaked in the coming days.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188465/even-gops-hated-senator-problem-matt-gaetz

2024-11-15 00:51:45

@nprofile…6kn7
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Even America’s most spineless senator doesn’t want Matt Gaetz to be attorney general.In a Thursday Newsmax appearance, Texas Republican Ted Cruz was asked for his thoughts on president-elect Trump’s potential nomination of the loathed and embattled MAGA Representative Matt Gaetz to serve as attorney general.The senator initially dodged the question, instead accusing Joe Biden of weaponizing the Justice Department and “infecting” it with partisan bias. He eventually addressed Gaetz, avoiding any advocacy of the nominee.“I will say that was a pick that was, I think, very surprising to the entirety of the Senate. And so we’ll assess the nominee on the merits, said Cruz. “But there is a process that will unfold that examines a particular nominee’s background, their experience and their suitability for a role.”Cruz was much warmer to the idea of his “dear friend” Senator Mike Lee as the attorney general pick, and reiterated the seriousness of the position. “I don’t know that there’s a more important position in this Trump administration than the attorney general,” said Cruz. “And so I think it’s critical to have someone there who will follow the law, who has integrity, who is a constitutionalist, and who has the courage to root out the incredible partisanship and weaponization that has infested this DOJ.”Gaetz grew unpopular within the Republican Party’s elected leadership after his destabilizing ouster of Speaker Kevin McCarthy. His attorney general nomination is currently jeopardized by a House Ethics Committee probe into allegations of trafficking and having sex with a 17-year-old girl at a drug-fueled party in 2017. Gaetz resigned from Congress in an effort to end the investigation, but it is expected to be leaked in the coming days.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188465/even-gops-hated-senator-problem-matt-gaetz

2024-11-15 00:51:45

@nprofile…6kn7
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Elon Musk is apparently trying to broker some kind of agreement between the United States and Iran. The tech mogul and world’s richest man met with Iran’s Ambassador to the United Nations in New York on Monday, The New York Times reports, citing two anonymous Iranian officials. The meeting, held in a secret location, reportedly focused on how to diffuse tensions between the two countries and lasted for over an hour. The two officials said the meeting was “positive” and “good news,” according to the Times. Neither Donald Trump’s campaign nor Musk commented on the meeting. In the past week, Musk has been spending a lot of time with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate, and also traveled to Washington with him. This raises the question of whether Musk was meeting with Iranian officials on Trump’s orders. According to the Times, Musk requested the meeting and the ambassador picked the location. The president-elect included the tech CEO on a phone call last week with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy only hours after Trump won the election, so it wouldn’t be Musk’s first dip into Trump’s foreign policy communications. Musk has reportedly engaged in secret talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to a Wall Street Journal report last month, and Russia is allied with Iran. Trump also has a worrying relationship with Putin and Russia, which raises questions about whether Musk’s Monday meeting also has to do with Russia. The meeting could also signal a change in tone between Iran and the United States. Relations between the two countries have not been positive since Trump’s first term, when he infamously dissolved the nuclear deal with Iran negotiated by the Obama administration and approved the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in 2020. U.S. support for Israel’s brutal war against Gaza and Lebanon under the Biden administration has not helped matters either, especially since Iran backs the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, the stated target of Israeli bombing. Trump has been a staunch supporter of Israel’s war and attacked President Biden for insufficient support of the country, which considers Iran its top enemy. A Washington Post report Wednesday said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was seeking to give Trump an inauguration gift of a ceasefire with Lebanon. Maybe Trump hopes to make a grand show of “good deals” in the Middle East to start off his presidency. Or, as was the case in his first presidential term’s foreign policy efforts, his overtures may end up going nowhere.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188464/elon-musk-negotiating-iran-ambassador-united-nations-trump

2024-11-14 23:44:55

@nprofile…6kn7
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It looks like there is at least one person who is happy about Matt Gaetz’s nomination to be the next attorney general: Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who said she was hopeful Gaetz would prosecute vaccine “crimes against humanity,” whatever that means.The Georgia Republican, with a penchant for regurgitating extremist conspiracy theories, unleashed a diatribe of vaccine misinformation during a congressional meeting Thursday titled, “Preparing for the Next Pandemic: Lessons Learned and The Path Forward.”“I think one of the greatest lessons that has been learned here is that the government and its powerful agencies should never use the American people’s hard earned tax dollars to create viruses that can be unleashed on the world, like Covid-19 was,” Greene said. Greene claimed that Dr. Anthony Fauci “lied to the American people, abusing his power and position and role, a very powerful role paid for by the American tax people.” She suggested that the United States had been behind the deadly disease, just to sell Americans an even more horrific medicine. “People that perpetuated and continue to perpetuate these crimes need to be prosecuted, and that needs to be starting in the next administration, and I’m pretty sure our next attorney general will do that, and I look forward to seeing that happen,” she said. Greene, who bragged about being unvaccinated, also suggested that vaccines should be further “investigated,” and linked them to a supposed “rise in autism,” and neurological disorders—something which has also been suggested by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who Trump announced Thursday will be his nominee to become the sSecretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. “This has literally been a war on people’s health,” Greene said, misusing the word “literally” and describing life-saving vaccines as a “war.” “Preparing for the next pandemic is actually recognizing that the last pandemic resulted in crimes against humanity,” Greene continued. Will Gaetz be interested in prosecuting Fauci over his efforts to pull America out of a global pandemic? It’s unclear. Gaetz claimed In 2021 that the best way to prevent yourself from getting Covid-19 was… to get Covid-19. “The best vaccine we’ve found is mother nature’s vaccine,” Gaetz told the right-wing One America News Network.When CNN asked whether he had been vaccinated, Gaetz cut the interviewer off. “That’s very nosy of you,” he said.“I think we should be talking more about freeing Britney,” he added.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188461/marjorie-taylor-greene-mtg-vaccine-crimes-targets-ag-matt-gaetz

2024-11-14 21:32:30

@nprofile…pyzj
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Republican Senators Rand Paul and Thom Tillis got into a heated exchange Thursday over aid for hurricane victims in Virginia and North Carolina. Tillis asked for an aid bill to be passed by unanimous consent during a floor speech, but Paul had other ideas, pushing for an amendment that the relief be paid for with green energy funds and complaining about unrelated funds to Ukraine. In effect, Paul’s amendment would block the aid bill, which drew Tillis’s ire. The North Carolina senator then asked the Kentucky senator to yield his time for questions, setting off an argument. “Look, our state motto is esse quam videri,” Tillis, who represents North Carolina, said. “It says to ‘be’ rather than to ‘seem.’ This is a disingenuous offer to amend my bill.” Tillis suggested that Paul was grandstanding and perhaps planning to use his rant, which attacked the Green New Deal, in a fundraising email. “This bill, if it got amended, has no prayer,” Tillis said. “I came to the Senate to make a difference, not to make a point.” “I assume that Senator Paul knows how to count votes,” Tillis added. “He has to know that he doesn’t have the votes to get this bill done if it’s amended. To be rather than to seem. I’m focused on trying to get North Carolina back on track and not playing a game on the Senate floor.”Paul stuck to his guns, insisting that the funds weren’t available thanks to the “accumulation of $35 trillion worth of debt,” prompting a response from Tillis that Paul was “playing a game of being disingenuous.” The North Carolina senator noted that the House, which is controlled by Republicans, would find a way to pay for the aid relief and that Paul was “putting a poison pill” that would prevent the bill from passing in the Senate.Paul used debate over the bill to expound upon a favorite Republican punching bag, the Green New Deal, missing the irony that the environmental plan seeks to reduce the greenhouse emissions that are a major factor in increasingly severe hurricanes. Tillis has a point—people who have suffered because of Hurricane Helene care more about immediate relief than funding technicalities. It’s only been a week since Republicans had a successful election in which they won the presidency as well as Congress, and they are already having trouble passing a simple aid relief bill for hurricane victims that even had Democratic support. If this is how Congress is going to function when the GOP takes full control next year, we can expect more gridlock and hardly any bills being passed.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188434/republican-senators-thom-tillis-rand-paul-agree-hurricane-helene-relief

2024-11-14 21:32:30

@nprofile…pyzj
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Elon Musk is holding open auditions for employment at his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Applicants simply must be willing to work grueling hours for zero compensation. DOGE made the announcement Thursday from its official account on X, writing:We are very grateful to the thousands of Americans who have expressed interest in helping us at DOGE. We don’t need more part-time idea generators. We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting. If that’s you, DM this account with your CV. Elon & Vivek will review the top 1% of applicants.Musk then quote-tweeted a message regarding the “monumental amount of tedious super-high quality work” that would be required to run the department.   “Indeed, this will be tedious work, make lots of enemies & compensation is zero,” Musk wrote. “What a great deal!” The billionaire attached a laughing emoji at the end of the tweet. Musk is familiar with these kinds of absurd labor demands. He warned Twitter employees to either be “extremely hardcore” or leave when he bought the platform in 2022. He also told them they’d have to work “long hours at high intensity.” 80 percent of the staff left soon after.Musk was one of Donald Trump’s most prominent advocates (and donors) on the campaign trail, and he hasn’t left the president-elect’s side since his victory. In return Trump gifted Musk the Department of Governmental Efficiency—or DOGE, a stale reference to an ancient internet meme—along with Vivek Ramaswamy. How the department will operate, and what the jobs there will even look like, remains to be seen. 
https://newrepublic.com/post/188450/elon-musk-doge-unpaid

2024-11-14 21:30:40

@nprofile…6kn7
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Steve Bannon has a vision for the future, and it involves locking up MSNBC’s anchors and their producers for criticizing President-elect Donald Trump.“You better be worried. You better lawyer up. Some of you young producers, you better call mom and dad tonight. ‘Hey mom and dad, you know a good lawyer?’ Lawyer up. Lawyer up,” Bannon said on his show, War Room, Wednesday.The shocking threat came on the heels of news that Donald Trump had tapped Florida Representative Matt Gaetz to be his attorney general (a conveniently timed appointment that has the dual benefit of killing a House Ethics investigation into Gaetz’s alleged misconduct with women and minors.) That decision will effectively hand Gaetz the keys to the Justice Department during Trump’s second term—so long as the unsavvy but deferential political operative can ride the wave.“You try to destroy Trump. You try to imprison Trump. You try to break Trump,” Bannon continued. “He’s not breakable. You couldn’t destroy him. And now he is turned on you. And he’s put a firebrand in charge of main justice—Department of Justice. And you’re going to have to live with it.”The ex–Breitbart editor then went on to name names, calling out host Ari Melber and MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissmann, who was part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.“I’ve never complained about this,” Bannon said. “Never bitched and moaned about it. Just came with the territory. I understood they feared us. And why do they fear us? Because we were coming to take down the globalists and the deep state!”Bannon was himself, at one point, at the epicenter of Trump’s universe, serving as the forty-fifth president’s chief White House strategist before the former Apprentice host fired him in 2017 following a series of controversies in which Bannon openly contradicted Trump and began to encroach on the MAGA limelight.But despite his incredible fall from grace, Bannon has continued to posit his influence in the far-right sphere. In 2023, the political provocateur issued a similar threat, promising to slam MSNBC with “prosecutions and accountability.”“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Bannon said at the time.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188448/steve-bannon-trump-matt-gaetz-first-targets-media

2024-11-14 21:30:40

@nprofile…6kn7
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Elon Musk is holding open auditions for employment at his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Applicants simply must be willing to work grueling hours for zero compensation. DOGE made the announcement Thursday from its official account on X, writing:We are very grateful to the thousands of Americans who have expressed interest in helping us at DOGE. We don’t need more part-time idea generators. We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting. If that’s you, DM this account with your CV. Elon & Vivek will review the top 1% of applicants.Musk then quote-tweeted a message regarding the “monumental amount of tedious super-high quality work” that would be required to run the department. “Indeed, this will be tedious work, make lots of enemies & compensation is zero,” Musk wrote. “What a great deal!” The billionaire attached a laughing emoji at the end of the tweet. Musk is familiar with these kinds of absurd labor demands. He warned Twitter employees to either be “extremely hardcore” or leave when he bought the platform in 2022. He also told them they’d have to work “long hours at high intensity.” 80 percent of the staff left soon after.Musk was one of Donald Trump’s most prominent advocates (and donors) on the campaign trail, and he hasn’t left the president-elect’s side since his victory. In return Trump gifted Musk the Department of Governmental Efficiency—or DOGE, a stale reference to an ancient internet meme—along with Vivek Ramaswamy. How the department will operate, and what the jobs there will even look like, remains to be seen.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188450/elon-musk-doge-unpaid

2024-11-14 19:18:29

@nprofile…6kn7
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Florida Representative Matt Gaetz’s shocking attorney general nomination now has Dick Durbin demanding to see Ethics Committee receipts. The deeply divisive hardcore Trump loyalist was nominated for attorney general on Wednesday, leaving members of both parties aghast. Gaetz drew his colleagues’ ire after forcing out Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and has been accused of trafficking and having sex with a 17-year-old girl at a drug-fueled party in 2017. Gaetz’s friend Joel Greenberg has already confessed to having sex with the underage victim and claimed that Gaetz paid him to bring her. Gaetz’s ex-girlfriend has also told the court that he was indeed present at the party. Gaetz has repeatedly denied the allegations, which could potentially upend his nomination to the position of highest attorney in the land. The House Ethics Committee was investigating the Florida representative for these allegations, but that probe—which was slated to be released soon—closed as soon as Gaetz resigned from his House seat to prepare for the confirmation process.After Gaetz’s resignation, Senate Democrat and Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin called upon the House Ethics Committee to “preserve and share their report and all relevant documentation on Mr. Gaetz with the Senate Judiciary Committee. “We cannot allow this valuable information from a bipartisan investigation to be hidden from the American people,” the Democratic senator said. “Make no mistake: this information could be relevant to the question of Mr. Gaetz’s confirmation as the next Attorney General of the United States.”Conservatives would rather sweep the Ethics Committee investigation under the rug than allow Durbin to air out Gaetz’s very dirty laundry. Republican House Ethics Committee Chair Mike Guest explained to Punch Bowl’s Max Cohen that he didn’t have the jurisdiction to release the report. “What happens in ethics is confidential. We’re going to maintain that confidentiality,” he said. The other Republican senators on the committee—Lindsey Graham, Thom Tillis, and Josh Hawley—agree. CBS News’s Robert Costas reported that Republicans don’t have much energy for “pushing back” against the controversial nomination. “Trump runs the show,” Costas wrote on X. “If Gaetz can reassure them, they’re open to backing him.”But as Republicans move to hush Gaetz’s sex trafficking allegations, others note that this mess is likely far from over. “Mr. Gaetz’s likely nomination as attorney general is a perverse development in a truly dark series of events,” tweeted John Clune, the lawyer representing the underage victim. “We would support the House Ethics Committee immediately releasing their report. She was a high school student and there were witnesses.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/188426/matt-gaetz-high-school-girl-witnesses

2024-11-14 19:18:29

@nprofile…6kn7
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Donald Trump’s nomination of Matt Gaetz as attorney general is not just drawing backlash from Senate Republicans—even Fox News hosts aren’t fans. On Fox & Friends Thursday morning, Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade didn’t hold back their misgivings about Gaetz potentially ascending to the post, pointing out the House Ethics Committee investigation against him over sexual misconduct, drug use, and public corruption. “The report has been written, apparently, and Washington, D.C., leaks like a sieve. And you can bet, dollar to donuts, if he is … undergoes the confirmation hearing process as is standard, somebody is going to read verbatim from whatever it says,” Doocy said.Kilmeade pointed out that Gaetz was “solely responsible for blowing up the House last year,” referring to his leading role in ousting former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and said he had “no plan” to fix the situation before House Republicans coalesced around Representative Mike Johnson. Later, Kilmeade called out Gaetz for being part of the “clown car.” “I always thought when Susie Wiles took the job [of chief of staff], you heard, she says, ‘The one thing I would say is I don’t want to see any of the clown car,’” Kilmeade said. “I always thought Matt Gaetz was in the clown car, so I’m surprised he’d be part of the starting lineup.” Gaetz abruptly resigned from Congress Wednesday after being named by Trump to the attorney general post, only two days before the House Ethics Committee was set to vote on releasing its report about the investigation into Gaetz. While the move ends the investigation, it has raised more questions about what Gaetz is trying to hide. On Thursday, a “close friend” of Gaetz is petitioning a court to destroy records detailing a drug-fueled sex party that a trafficked 17-year-old and Gaetz allegedly attended in 2017. With Gaetz taking heat from Republicans and conservative media alike, it’s unclear if he’d be able to make it through the Cabinet confirmation process. The investigation into his alleged misdeeds must contain damning information for Gaetz to take a drastic step such as resigning, especially since the contents of the House committee’s report will likely come out before or during his confirmation hearings. In any case, it’s an inauspicious start for any Cabinet nominee, let alone one who is vying to be the nation’s top law enforcement officer.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188429/even-fox-news-doesnt-like-matt-gaetz-attorney-general-trump

2024-11-14 18:42:40

@nprofile…pyzj
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Alex Jones is having a full meltdown on the cusp of InfoWars’s extinction.The far-right conspiracy network was auctioned off to the satirical outlet The Onion, ending what was arguably Jones’s most successful endeavor while marking the beginning of his descent into irrelevancy.During a breathless rant on Steve Bannon’s War Room from the InfoWars studio, Jones called the news of The Onion’s acquisition “ridiculous,” referred to U.S. regulators as “Imperial Troops,” and insisted that the auction rules had been changed at the last minute by the “deep state.”“They are in the building, they told the office manager and they’re calling me right now, that they have ordered the IT providers to cut all the IT off to shut InfoWars off,” Jones said. “I could get on a live camera right now and go show you the U.S. trustee and the auctioneer.”“It’s confirmed now that they’re going to cut the power,” Jones said before busting into a grueling laugh. “We are literally sinking, tied up to the new boat, and we’re taking both ships right now, Steve Bannon, God bless you.”“They’re in the control room.… Imperial Troops are through the glass,” Jones said before standing up and walking off camera. “It is a distinct honor to be here in defiance of the tyrants.”Bannon then suggested that Jones and his crew should put a microphone in front of the regulators as they comb through Jones’s assets.At one point during the live broadcast, Jones attempted to project that he had made peace with the major loss, encouraging his viewers to tune into his new news site.“All you’re doing is shutting down the building and taking away AlexJones.com and the Infowars store,” he said. “We got funds coming in. We got high-powered lawyers. We’re moving forward. The tide has turned.” Infowars is being shut down now! pic.twitter.com/nb4loGvL12— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) November 14, 2024In the run-up to the auction, Jones had appeared to be under the impression that “good guys” on the right would buy the fringe network, though he did not reveal who they were. Several groups expressed interest in InfoWars assets, including a coalition of liberal and anti-disinformation watchdog groups, according to The Daily Beast, as well as some of Jones’s own supporters, like Donald Trump ally Roger Stone. The Onion’s monumental media scoop was made in partnership with the families of Sandy Hook victims, whom Jones owes at least $85 million to after he lost a $1.5 billion case for claiming that the massacre, which claimed the lives of 20 first graders and six adults, was a hoax.Ben Collins, The Onion’s CEO, playfully shared the news on social media, asking if anyone needed “millions of dollars worth of supplements?” As the news broke, The Onion—in true form—published an article by Bryce P. Tetraeder, the so-called CEO of Global Tetrahedron (The Onion’s “parent company”), in which the faux executive praised the conspiracy network as an “invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses.” “With a shrewd mix of delusional paranoia and dubious anti-aging nutrition hacks, they strive to make life both scarier and longer for everyone, a commendable goal,” the satirical piece read.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188430/alex-jones-meltdown-reaction-the-onion-buy-infowars

2024-11-14 18:42:40

@nprofile…pyzj
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Donald Trump’s nomination of Matt Gaetz as attorney general is not just drawing backlash from Senate Republicans—even Fox News hosts aren’t fans. On Fox & Friends Thursday morning, Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade didn’t hold back their misgivings about Gaetz potentially ascending to the post, pointing out the House Ethics Committee investigation against him over sexual misconduct, drug use, and public corruption. “The report has been written, apparently, and Washington, D.C., leaks like a sieve. And you can bet, dollar to donuts, if he is … undergoes the confirmation hearing process as is standard, somebody is going to read verbatim from whatever it says,” Doocy said.Kilmeade pointed out that Gaetz was “solely responsible for blowing up the House last year,” referring to his leading role in ousting former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and said he had “no plan” to fix the situation before House Republicans coalesced around Representative Mike Johnson. Later, Kilmeade called out Gaetz for being part of the “clown car.” “I always thought when Susie Wiles took the job [of chief of staff], you heard, she says, ‘The one thing I would say is I don’t want to see any of the clown car,’” Kilmeade said. “I always thought Matt Gaetz was in the clown car, so I’m surprised he’d be part of the starting lineup.” Gaetz abruptly resigned from Congress Wednesday after being named by Trump to the attorney general post, only two days before the House Ethics Committee was set to vote on releasing its report about the investigation into Gaetz. While the move ends the investigation, it has raised more questions about what Gaetz is trying to hide. On Thursday, a “close friend” of Gaetz is petitioning a court to destroy records detailing a drug-fueled sex party that a trafficked 17-year-old and Gaetz allegedly attended in 2017. With Gaetz taking heat from Republicans and conservative media alike, it’s unclear if he’d be able to make it through the Cabinet confirmation process. The investigation into his alleged misdeeds must contain damning information for Gaetz to take a drastic step such as resigning, especially since the contents of the House committee’s report will likely come out before or during his confirmation hearings. In any case, it’s an inauspicious start for any Cabinet nominee, let alone one who is vying to be the nation’s top law enforcement officer.   
https://newrepublic.com/post/188429/even-fox-news-doesnt-like-matt-gaetz-attorney-general-trump

2024-11-14 17:35:48

@nprofile…6kn7
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Matt Gaetz’s sex trafficking allegations aren’t going away—but Republicans and those close to the embattled Florida man are doing everything they can to bury them. Rolling Stone reports that a “close friend” of the Florida representative asked a court to destroy records that detail the drug-fueled sex party that a trafficked 17-year-old and Gaetz allegedly attended in 2017. Christopher Dorworth, a friend of Gaetz caught up in the probe, filed two motions to have these details “stricken from the judicial record,” and Gaetz has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.The 17-year-old victim in the case has said that Gaetz attended the 2017 party. Another friend of Gaetz’s, former Florida tax collector Joel Greenberg, has already admitted to having sex with the victim when she was 17, even writing a confession stating that Gaetz paid him to bring women in for sex and that (at least) one of them was under 18. Other court documents have also placed Gaetz at the party based on testimony from his ex-girlfriend, NOTUS reported. Greenberg pleaded guilty to six federal charges: sex trafficking of a child, production of a false identification document, aggravated identity theft, wire fraud, stalking, and conspiracy, in 2021. He is currently in prison.Dorworth’s request comes after Gaetz was tapped by Trump to lead the Department of Justice in his new administration. The potential attorney general has been a hard-core Trump loyalist who has drawn the ire of his fellow Republicans, who referred to him as a childish, “disgraceful,” and “vile” person after his ouster of Speaker Kevin McCarthy just over a year ago. Then-Representative Markwayne Mullin, now a senator, candidly told CNN last year that Gaetz bragged about having sex with young women to other members on the floor of the House of Representatives. “We had all seen videos … of the girls that he had slept with,” Mullin said. “He’d crush [erectile dysfunction] medicine and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night.” Mullin, now a Senator, has done a total 180 on this, saying on Wednesday that he “completely” trusts Trump’s decision to nominate Gaetz.It remains to be seen if these allegations will derail Gaetz’s confirmation process. But one of the judges on the case, Daniel Irick, thinks it should. “This is a case of public importance,” Irick said in August, according to NOTUS. “It is one that there may be media interest in, and it’s one that involves important issues.… I’m not seeing any confidentialities that would really overwhelm the First Amendment right for the public to see this case, especially when a plaintiff brings claims in relation to their marriage and spouses and the kind of intimate issues in this case which are laid out in extreme detail in the … complaint. I am unlikely to seal anything because it all seems relevant.”As attorney general, Gaetz will be fully empowered to carry out Trump’s—and his own—incindiary mandate, litigating culture wars and carrying out personal vendettas. Republican Senator Thom Tillis put it aptly: “I’m sure it’ll make for a popcorn-eating confirmation.”  
https://newrepublic.com/post/188421/matt-gaetz-really-wants-sex-trafficking-allegations-go-away

2024-11-14 17:04:10

@nprofile…6kn7
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Alex Jones’s conspiracy-laden media properties, including the website InfoWars, have been purchased at a bankruptcy auction by an unlikely entity: the satirical news outlet The Onion. The satirical magazine, which refers to itself as “America’s Finest News Source,” had the backing of the families of eight victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting, who successfully sued Jones for defamation in 2022. The Onion now owns all of InfoWars’ intellectual property, including its website, social media accounts, production equipment, as well as customer lists and inventory. “The Onion is proud to acquire Infowars, and we look forward to continuing its storied tradition of scaring the site’s users with lies until they fork over their cold, hard cash,” Onion CEO Ben Collins told CNN. “Or bitcoin. We will also accept bitcoin.” The Onion will close down InfoWars and reboot the website, NBC reports, citing a person close to the sale. In a video posted to X, Jones seemed to hold out hope that his media properties were not lost, claiming, “They’re supposed to have a court order.” Alex Jones announces this morning that The Onion has purchased InfoWars at public auction and the show is now being shut down. pic.twitter.com/VcYpJsDFWN— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) November 14, 2024In order to help The Onion’s bid, the Sandy Hook families “agreed to forgo a portion of their recovery to increase the overall value of The Onion’s bid, enabling its success,” they said in a statement. Jones and InfoWars repeatedly alleged various false details about the school shooting, claiming that it was a “false flag” operation staged with “crisis actors,” in which no children were actually killed. Jones’s lies led to his listeners and fans harassing the family members of the children and teachers who were killed.In true Onion fashion, the website posted a fake article announcing the news from a made-up CEO of their parent company Global Tetrahedron, Bryce P. Tetraeder, praising InfoWars as “an invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses.”“Make no mistake: This is a coup for our company and a well-deserved victory for multinational elites the world over,” the article said.  
https://newrepublic.com/post/188418/the-onion-just-bought-alex-jones-infowars

2024-11-14 17:04:09

@nprofile…6kn7
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Rudy Giuliani’s attorneys are walking off the job.The disgraced New York politico’s lead counsel, Kenneth Caruso, and attorney, David Labkowski, dropped him as a client on Wednesday, declaring in a motion in federal court that they had reached a “fundamental disagreement” with Giuliani.The legal duo argued that they were entitled to peel away from their client, citing a New York rule that grants attorneys the ability to withdraw when a client “insists upon taking action with which the lawyer has a fundamental disagreement,” when the client insists on “presenting a claim or defense that is not warranted under existing law and cannot be supported by good faith argument,” or when “the client fails to cooperate in the representation or otherwise renders the representation unreasonably difficult for the lawyer to carry out employment effectively.”Giuliani’s spokesperson, Ted Goodman, told The Independent that the Donald Trump ally had not been made aware of his legal representation’s recusal.“Surely Mr. Caruso would talk to the mayor, or at the very least inform him, of such a decision,” Goodman told the publication.Giuliani is still in court proceedings as he tries to worm his way out of paying up some $150 million in damages that he owes to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, a pair of 2020 Georgia poll workers that he repeatedly defamed while pushing Trump’s Georgia election conspiracy.Last week, the former gang-busting federal prosecutor tried out a new legal defense, arguing in a Manhattan courthouse that he couldn’t possibly hand over his assets to Freeman and Moss because he simply didn’t know where they were. Some of those assets include his Manhattan penthouse, a famously immovable object, as well as his Mercedes convertible, which he was seen driving in Florida on Election Day.In response, U.S. District Judge Lewis Liman said that the idea that neither Giuliani nor anyone else in the world has knowledge about the location of his assets was “farcical,” reported Reuters.Amazingly, the $148 million debt is just the tip of the iceberg for Giuliani’s legal woes. Over the past year, the former Trump attorney unsuccessfully filed for bankruptcy, lost his accountant over his insurmountable debts, begged Trump for help settling his seven-figure legal fees (he refused), had his WABC radio show canceled for spewing 2020 election lies, and miserably started his own coffee brand, “Rudy Coffee,” in an effort to funnel in some extra cash. He ultimately lost his bankruptcy case due to his outlandish spending habits, with the presiding New York judge branding the former city mayor a “recalcitrant debtor.”Giuliani is also under the gun for a lawsuit from his former legal representation, who accused him of failing to pay his bill and allegedly only dishing out $214,000 of nearly $1.6 million in legal expenses. Giuliani, meanwhile, claimed he was stiffed by his favorite client, Trump, to the tune of millions of dollars. But wait, there’s more: The MAGA henchman is also one of 19 co-defendants in the Georgia election interference case and was named in April in an Arizona indictment charging another slew of Republican officials and Trump allies for their alleged involvement in a scheme to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election results. In October, an Arizona judge torched a legal filing Giuliani made in the case, ruling that the ex–Trump aide had “not one scintilla” of evidence to question the legitimacy of a grand jury assigned to his lawsuit.But if the ex–Trump attorney can drag out his legal woes for long enough to obtain a pardon from Trump during the MAGA leader’s forthcoming second administration, he may not have to pay up at all.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188420/rudy-giuliani-lawyers-ditch-him-defamation-case

2024-11-14 15:55:29

@nprofile…pyzj
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Donald Trump is wasting no time making a punch line out of some of his key allies, including Elon Musk.During his first meeting with Republican lawmakers on the Hill as president-elect, Trump asserted his power over Musk, mocking the tech billionaire for sticking around for so long.“Elon won’t go home. I can’t get rid of him,” Trump said Wednesday. “Until I don’t like him.”The world’s richest man has reportedly spent “nearly every single day” of the last week at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, according to CNN. Musk has been spotted golfing with the president-elect, dining with him and his wife Melania, and has even been in the room while Trump phones world leaders, hopping on calls with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell argued that Trump’s comments about Musk were an assertion of his dominance, played before a room that has to play along.“Everyone laughed,” said O’Donnell. “They laughed that uncomfortable laugh. But they laugh when Donald Trump makes a joke about someone on his team, a joke that everyone knows is true, a joke that paints that person as pathetic, as Donald Trump’s personal sense of superiority demands that he do.”O’Donnell also purported that Musk’s new role in the government—co-leading a new agency, the Department of Government Efficiency, otherwise known as “DOGE”—is basically a joke in itself, with Musk’s responsibilities being tantamount to a “fake job” with little more power than that of a lobbyist on K Street.Musk will be the likely benefactor of his extended stay with the president-elect, whose opinion is famously swayed by whomever he last interacted with. But, according to tech journalist Kara Swisher, the relationship between the two self-imagined strongmen is destined to flame out.“They’re both narcissists, and there can be only one narcissist as head of the country, and that’s Donald Trump who just won the election,” Swisher said on Monday. “You know he owes things to Elon, but at some point, you know if he takes too much of the attention—think about Steve Bannon. You remember he was on the cover of that magazine, and how quickly he got out, even though he was critical to Trump’s first campaign and he was right in the middle of the White House, and then he wasn’t.”“Trump goes through people like tissues, essentially,” Swisher noted. “And even if it’s Musk, they’re going to clash at some point.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/188412/trump-humiliates-elon-musk-house-republicans

2024-11-14 12:34:46

@nprofile…6kn7
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Would Donald Trump have won reelection if not for the backing of the world’s richest man? We’ll never know. But that man, Elon Musk, gave Trump more than $130 million via his recently founded America PAC. Now, as Trump begins to staff his administration, Musk has more influence than anyone. It would be hard to argue that it wasn’t money well spent. Musk’s influence is already apparent. He has hardly left Trump’s side since Election Day. And on Tuesday evening, he was announced as the head of a new government “department”—the Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE,” a reference to a stale internet meme—with a broad, if also vague, remit to cut waste and transform the government. Musk spent the final month of the campaign appearing constantly with Trump at rallies, where he jumped around onstage, told crowds he was “Dark MAGA” and, later, “Dark Gothic MAGA,” somehow managed to mess up the “USA” chant, and gave away $1 million checks to people who signed a pro-Trump petition. On this last point, Musk may have violated federal campaign finance law; on the others, Musk was—at best—an awkward figure.“America is not just going to be great,” he announced at Trump’s now-infamous Madison Square Garden rally on October 27. “America is going to reach heights that it has never seen before. The future is gonna be amazing!”Even before formally endorsing Trump in July 2024, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO purchased Twitter—which he subsequently renamed X—with the express purpose of amplifying right-wing content. He began using his personal account, for which he has over 203 million followers, to share reactionary views about illegal immigration, the declining American birth rate, trans people, and “the woke mind virus,” often dozens of times a day. An April 2024 investigation by NBC News found that, under Musk’s leadership, there were at least 150 “Premium” accounts—i.e., users who were paying a nominal subscription fee to boost their account—making explicitly pro-Nazi posts, many of which racked up millions of views. And a Washington Post analysis in October revealed that Republican-aligned accounts on X were getting far more engagement than Democrat-aligned ones.Musk was rewarded for his service by spending election night with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, which he has reportedly barely left over the past week. Trump thanked Musk in his victory speech, calling him “a new star”—Musk has been a public figure for more than two decades and is undoubtedly one of the most famous people in the world—and a “super genius.” In the coming months and years, we’re sure to see even more of Musk, as Trump has promised him a possible Cabinet position: “secretary of cost-cutting,” which does not yet exist. Musk says he wants to slash the federal budget by a third and has welcomed as a necessity the economic depression such severe cuts would cause. As we prepare for a second Trump term, every sign suggests that Musk will act as a kind of shadow president, wielding vast power over the many areas of governance that Trump has no interest in. How did we get here?We have the dot-com bubble to thank for elevating Musk to this position of unprecedented power. In the mid-1990s, after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, Musk moved to Palo Alto and did what many young men were doing then: He became a serial entrepreneur in the brand-new internet sector. The World Wide Web opened to the public in 1991 with a single website. By 1992, there were 10 websites, and by 1994, there were 3,000. In 1995, when Musk burst onto the scene, it became evident that the internet wasn’t just a fun new invention. It could make people very, very rich very, very quickly.The dot-com bubble began on August 9, 1995, when browser company Netscape Communications had its initial public offering on Nasdaq. By the closing bell, the company was worth $58.25 a share and had a market value of $2.9 billion ($120.51 and $5.9 billion in 2024 dollars, respectively). Overnight, founders Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark became wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. Thus began an unprecedented speculative boom that would last until March 2000.In 1995, Musk co-founded the company Zip2, an internet city guide. As he tells the story, he was so broke that he slept on the couch at his office because he couldn’t afford an apartment, showered at the YMCA, and shared a single computer with his co-founders.“The website was up during the day and I was coding it at night, seven days a week, all the time,” Musk has said. “If you do the simple math, and say if somebody else is working 50 hours [a week] and you’re working 100, you’ll get twice [as much] done in the course of a year as the other company.”In March 1999, at the height of the dot-com bubble, computer company Compaq acquired Zip2 for $307 million in cash, for which Musk received $22 million. He used some of that money to found X.com, an online financial services company. (Yes, his fixation on that letter goes back more than two decades.) In 2000, X.com merged with software company Confinity, which was renamed PayPal in 2001. PayPal had a lucrative IPO in February 2002 and, in July of that year, was acquired by eBay. According to CNN, this deal netted Musk, PayPal’s largest shareholder, $165 million, although the figure may be higher.Throughout the 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s—long after the dot-com bubble burst in March 2000—Musk continued to leapfrog from tech company to tech company, consolidating his wealth. In 2012, he first made it to the Forbes billionaires list. By 2020, his net worth surpassed that of Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. While most early dot-com wealth was erased, the bubble also propelled a new class of mega-billionaires to power. If you survived the early-2000s crash, you benefited enormously—and got to live through a long era of low interest rates after the 2008 economic crash that likely made you even richer. In 2024, the dot-com bubble has been largely memory-holed, but Musk, perhaps its biggest beneficiary, remains.The dot-com bubble was a cultural event as much as an economic one. The press offered up glowing profiles of young start-up founders like Musk. It was this press coverage that helped create the trope of the start-up founder in the popular imagination: a young, ambitious, Bay Area nerd whose pure love of science and technology is justly rewarded with enormous wealth. The founder was surrounded by a utopian glow. He promised that the technology he was harnessing would do remarkable, transformative things (that it could also do horrible things was rarely mentioned). The way the media talked about the internet was giddy—giddy about the technology and, above all, giddy about the wealth it was creating. A 1999 CNN segment shows a young Elon Musk receiving a McLaren he ordered to celebrate the Zip2 acquisition. “Back in ’95, there weren’t very many people on the internet,” Musk says, summarizing how he went from showering at the Y to buying a $1 million limited-edition car. “And certainly nobody was making any money at all. Most people thought the internet was going to be a fad.”As the car is unloaded from a delivery truck, Musk, in his ill-fitting blazer, watches. He appears boyish, dumbstruck. “Wow,” he says to his then-girlfriend. “I can’t believe it’s actually here. Pretty wild, man.”There is a photo—widely circulated on social media—that shows Elon Musk and Peter Thiel in 2000. They each lean on one side of a boxy desktop computer, smiling sheepishly. Thiel wears a red and blue striped rugby shirt, and Musk wears a blue button-up. Musk, not yet 30, has a receding hairline and chipmunk cheeks. The two men look harmless, even cute. They do not look like they want to platform white nationalists, gut the federal government, or bring indentured servitude to Mars.The media lovefest extended long after the dot-com bubble burst—indeed, it outlasted many of the companies lauded by the press during that first online boom. Musk routinely made guest appearances on TV shows aimed at nerdy, vaguely liberal viewers. He had a cameo on The Simpsons in January 2015, on The Big Bang Theory in November 2015, and on the Big Bang Theory spin-off Young Sheldon in November 2017. As late as 2019, he appeared on Rick and Morty. Last fall, Walter Isaacson—hagiographic biographer of Steve Jobs, among others—released a largely laudatory biography of Musk that hailed him as a new titan of industry.This type of media coverage—both of Musk specifically and of Big Tech more generally—papered over the fact that Silicon Valley has, for decades, been a hotbed of right-wing ideology, eugenics, and antidemocratic sentiment. It’s no coincidence that Elon Musk is obsessed with IQ and human reproduction: Stanford University, located in the heart of Silicon Valley, was a hotbed of early eugenics research and activity in the early twentieth century, as Malcolm Harris described in his book Palo Alto.Recently, The New York Times reported that Musk has offered his semen to acquaintances in an effort to improve the national birth rate (a claim Musk has denied). Again, there is a real through line here. Starting in the late 1970s, optometrist Robert Graham started a sperm bank for Nobel laureates and people with high IQs, chock-full of emissions from Silicon Valley luminaries. Among them was Silicon Valley godfather William Shockley, who believed that Black people were less intelligent than white people.The conservative Hoover Institution was founded at Stanford in 1919 by alumnus Herbert Hoover, who is most famous for his presidential administration’s libertarian nonresponse to the Great Depression. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Hoover Institution has played a key role in staffing Republican presidential administrations and in incubating conservative policies that concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a tiny minority. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley has long been deeply entwined with the United States military.Today, some of Musk’s liberal fans have felt betrayed by what feels, to them, like a heel turn.“I thought you were rational, Elon,” wrote my own grandmother in a recent Facebook post denouncing him. It’s a common enough sentiment. Musk’s association with technology and his media-created public image as a kind of real-life Tony Stark—a brilliant, edgy inventor who was nevertheless focused on the public good—caused many to see him as an ally, or at least as someone interested in building a better world.My grandmother is a straight-ticket Democratic voter who had a successful career as a computer coder in Palo Alto and D.C. before retiring in the early 2000s. She was also, until just recently, an Elon Musk superfan, believing him (and Silicon Valley more generally) to be synonymous with the cause of science and technology, which, to her and many other liberals, are also synonymous with progressive values. My grandmother hates Trump and now struggles to make sense of the fact that her favorite public figure just helped her least favorite public figure get reelected.But “Dark MAGA Elon” isn’t a new identity. It’s not even a change of direction. Musk is simply revealing his true nature. And it’s not just him. Peter Thiel has long criticized democracy, funded right-wing causes, and even complained about women’s suffrage. And original dot-com poster boy Marc Andreessen, who now runs one of the most influential venture capital firms in the industry, released what is basically a techno-authoritarian-futurist manifesto in 2023. Then, this past summer, Andreessen announced he would endorse Trump. Twenty-five years after the dot-com bubble, the mask is finally off of Silicon Valley. What we’re seeing now from Elon and others is its true face.
https://newrepublic.com/article/188309/elon-musk-always-like-this-silicon-valley

2024-11-13 23:11:36

@nprofile…pyzj
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President-elect Donald Trump surprised Republican lawmakers on Wednesday when he chose Florida Representative Matt Gaetz to serve as his attorney general—including many of the senators needed to push through his confirmation. The antagonistic, deeply partisan MAGA cheerleader must now earn votes from the same Republicans who reviled him for forcing out Speaker Kevin McCarthy just over a year ago. And it’s not looking like he has a lot of support.Senator Jon Cornyn reportedly audibly snorted upon hearing news of Gaetz’s nomination. “I don’t know the man other than just his public persona,” he later told Washington Post correspondent Liz Goodwin. Senator Susan Collins said she was “shocked” by the news of his pick, and Senator Lisa Murkowski said “this one was not on my Bingo card.” But even Trump’s biggest supporters in the chamber were surprised. “Holy cow,” said Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, adding that he too did not see this one coming. Senator Joe Manchin said “no one could believe it” when the news broke on the Senate floor.Politico reporter Meridith Lee Hill said she saw a House Republican laughing so hard at the pick that he began crying. “Are you shitting me?” GOP Representative Mike Simpson said. When asked if Gaetz had the character to be attorney general, he plainly said “no.”Gaetz, one of the most outspoken MAGA representatives, has been described by his Republican colleagues in the past as a childish, “disgraceful,” and “vile” person. He is currently under a House ethics investigation for sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, after allegations that he had sex with a minor. Whether Trump loyalists or Liz Cheney-ites, Republicans throughout Congress were shocked at Trump’s nomination of Gaetz. Perhaps Republican Senator Thom Tillis put it best: “I’m sure it’ll make for a popcorn eating confirmation.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/188393/republicans-senators-react-trump-matt-gaetz-attorney-general

2024-11-13 22:04:55

@nprofile…6kn7
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Donald Trump nominated Republican-convert Tulsi Gabbard to be the next Director of National Intelligence on Wednesday. “As a former Candidate for the Democrat Presidential Nomination, she has broad support in both Parties—She is now a proud Republican! I know Tulsi will bring the fearless spirit that has defined her illustrious career to our Intelligence Community, championing our Constitutional Rights, and securing Peace Through Strength,” Trump said in a statement. After her failed presidential run in 2020, Gabbard left the Democratic Party (she seems to announce doing this at least once a week) and became something of a conservative celebrity, elevating transphobia, spreading Russian propaganda, and unsuccessfully endorsing Republicans. She recently went full MAGA, endorsing Trump and coaching him for his disastrous debate against Kamala Harris. Gabbard previously claimed she’d been placed on the TSA’s watchlist, and now she will oversee the U.S. intelligence community including the Central Intelligence Agency. While Gabbard paints herself as an anti-interventionist, she has acted primarily as an advocate for a slate of authoritarians. In 2019, she defended Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and voiced support for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.After Russia invaded Ukraine, Gabbard argued that it wasn’t worth U.S. intervention because Ukraine “isn’t actually a democracy,” and claimed there were U.S.-backed biolabs in the country—a Russian conspiracy that got her publicly criticized for acting like a foreign asset. This only added to her status as an outsider, pushing her deep into the MAGA throng. One member of Gabbard’s family has suggested that her troubling political journey could be related to her connection to the group Science of Identity Foundation, a cult that preaches homophobia, Islamophobia, and misogyny. If Gabbard is confirmed, her appointment could cause tension with another Trump nominee: Senator Marco Rubio, whom Trump has tapped for secretary of state. In July, Gabbard criticized Rubio as representing “the neocon warmongering establishment of Washington, D.C.” Gabbard explained that Rubio should not be in contention to be Trump’s running mate, and claimed Rubio was “diametrically opposed” to everything Trump stands for. It seems the president-elect disagreed. This story has been updated.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188390/donald-trump-tulsi-gabbard-national-intelligence

2024-11-13 22:04:55

@nprofile…6kn7
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Donald Trump plans to appoint Representative Matt Gaetz to the post of attorney general, the president-elect announced on Truth Social Wednesday, and the Florida congressman has already gleefully accepted the position.The news is a surprise, considering that Gaetz was not among the names discussed for the position, which included right-wing activist Mike Davis and Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee who quickly dismissed Trump’s classified documents case.Gaetz has been a staunch supporter of Trump, showing up to the president-elect’s New York hush-money trial in May and leaping to Trump’s defense in media appearances. But he also has a questionable reputation, having escaped federal charges over allegations of sexual misconduct with an underage girl.Gaetz was the target of a House Ethics Committee investigation over those allegations, and allegedly led the effort to oust former Representative Kevin McCarthy from the House speakership because he wished to block the ethics probe. While Gaetz has a law degree as well as an active law license, he does not appear to have any prosecutorial experience, which might be an obstacle in his confirmation process. This is a developing story.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188395/trump-cabinet-matt-gaetz-attorney-general

2024-11-13 19:49:15

@nprofile…pyzj
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Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville thinks that Democratic Senate wins in battleground states are suspicious. On Tuesday, Tuberville was on The Sean Spicer Show, a podcast hosted by Donald Trump’s former White House press secretary and communications director. Spicer asked Tuberville about how he’d fulfill his promise to be a “legislative sledgehammer for President Trump.”“One of the things I really want to do is straighten this dang voting up across our country,” Tuberville said. “We didn’t get killed down ballot, but let me tell you something: Donald Trump pulled out more people to vote for him” than Harris, the Alabama senator added. “And how in the world can some of these senators … receive more votes—the Democrats–than President Trump? It doesn’t add up to how this all went about.”Trump won the battleground states of Georgia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Arizona in the presidential election, but Democrats won the Senate races in the latter four states. Though he didn’t come out and declare fraud, Tuberville still hinted that something was off with those results. “We need to get this straight: voter ID,” he said. “You know, Kamala Harris won every state that was no voter ID. She did not win one that wasn’t voter ID. So think about that.” (This claim has already been disproven, as Harris did in fact win some states with voter ID laws and Trump won states without them.)  Tuberville’s claims seem to be sour grapes in an election where Republicans have taken the presidency as well as the Senate, and are close to retaining control of the House of Representatives. Like losing Republican Senate candidate Eric Hovde in Wisconsin, Tuberville doesn’t seem to understand split-ticket voting.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188385/tommy-tuberville-hints-election-fraud

2024-11-13 19:44:45

@nprofile…6kn7
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Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville thinks that Democratic Senate wins in battleground states are suspicious. On Tuesday, Tuberville was on The Sean Spicer Show, a podcast hosted by Donald Trump’s former White House press secretary and communications director. Spicer asked Tuberville about how he’d fulfill his promise to be a “legislative sledgehammer for President Trump.”“One of the things I really want to do is straighten this dang voting up across our country,” Tuberville said. “We didn’t get killed down ballot, but let me tell you something: Donald Trump pulled out more people to vote for him” than Harris, the Alabama senator added. “And how in the world can some of these senators … receive more votes—the Democrats–than President Trump? It doesn’t add up to how this all went about.”Trump won the battleground states of Georgia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Arizona in the presidential election, but Democrats won the Senate races in the latter four states. Though he didn’t come out and declare fraud, Tuberville still hinted that something was off with those results. “We need to get this straight: voter ID,” he said. “You know, Kamala Harris won every state that was no voter ID. She did not win one that wasn’t voter ID. So think about that.” (This claim has already been disproven, as Harris did in fact win some states with voter ID laws and Trump won states without them.)  Tuberville’s claims seem to be sour grapes in an election where Republicans have taken the presidency as well as the Senate, and are close to retaining control of the House of Representatives. Like losing Republican Senate candidate Eric Hovde in Wisconsin, Tuberville doesn’t seem to understand split-ticket voting.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188385/tommy-tuberville-hints-election-fraud

2024-11-13 18:42:24

@nprofile…6kn7
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Another judge has ruled against a January 6 defendant attempting to have his sentence delayed until Donald Trump is sworn in as president. On Wednesday, Judge Jia Cobb denied a motion to delay Antonio Lamotta’s sentence. The 2021 insurrection participant was sentenced in September to six months in prison, 24 months in supervised release, and $2,000 in restitution, after being found guilty of a felony and two misdemeanor offenses of disorderly conduct in a Capitol building. Citing the possibility of a presidential pardon from Trump after his election victory, Lamotta hoped Cobb would delay his sentence, but the judge said that wasn’t a valid reason, citing legal precedent. “[The] Defendant has pointed to no authority supporting his request to delay a valid sentence on the grounds that he may receive a presidential pardon in the future,” Cobb wrote in her ruling. Another D.C. federal judge, Amy Berman Jackson, also denied a January 6 participant’s case on Tuesday, ruling that, “The Court is not included to postpone the conclusion of this matter based on events that may or may not transpire with respect to some or all of the January 6 defendants as some unspecified date in the future.” Several January 6 defendants have attempted to delay their trials and sentencing, claiming that Trump will just pardon them anyway after he is sworn in on January 20 next year. Some have even cited Trump’s statements during his campaign in their legal motions. But, the D.C. Circuit Court judges in their cases seem unconvinced. On Monday, a Trump-appointed judge, Trevor McFadden, also denied a January 6 defendant’s request to have their trial extended. There have been over 1,500 federal criminal cases in the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection, with about 950 defendants pleading guilty and 200 being found guilty at trial. Several cases are still pending, and some may not begin proceedings between now and Trump’s inauguration. If Trump follows through on his promise to pardon some rioters, many of their cases may never see the inside of a courtroom.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188365/january-6-defendants-trump-defense-judge

2024-11-13 17:37:57

@nprofile…pyzj
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President-elect Donald Trump does not appear to be interested in assuaging any concerns about a total pursuit of power.Speaking before the House Republican conference on Wednesday, the 78-year-old, soon-to-be 47th president openly joked about running for a third term, telling the crowd that they could “figure something else out.”“I suspect I won’t be running again unless you say he’s so good we got to figure something else out,” Trump said while laughing, according to the Associated Press’s Farnoush Amiri.That would, of course, be a flagrant violation of the Constitution, which has stipulated since 1951—after President Franklin D. Roosevelt served a whopping four terms—that presidents cannot be elected for more than two terms. Previously, the two-term limit had been an unofficial precedent set by George Washington.“No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice,” states the 22nd Amendment. “And no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.”But it’s not the first time that Trump has hinted he’d be open to skirting the ironclad rule. At a National Rifle Association convention earlier this year, Trump likened his future running the country to Roosevelt’s tenure.“You know, FDR 16 years—almost 16 years—he was four terms. I don’t know, are we going to be considered three-term? Or two-term?” Trump said, allowing some people in the gun-loving crowd to cheer “three” in response, according to Politico.Trump also floated the idea on the campaign trail in 2020, before he lost to President Joe Biden, bizarrely claiming he was entitled to a “redo” of his first term due to an FBI counterintelligence investigation that had examined Russia’s efforts to thwart the 2016 election. (That investigation found that Trump interacted with individuals with direct ties to the Russian government, and that the foreign power had meddled in the U.S. election in an effort to aid Trump and hurt then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.)Luckily, the process of repealing or changing an amendment likely won’t change anytime soon, even with a Republican trifecta at the federal level, as it requires overwhelming public support. As outlined in Article V of the Constitution, any such change requires at least two-thirds of the Senate and the House to agree on the modification, with that change then requiring ratification by a minimum of three-quarters of states in the nation.A second approach to repealing the term-limiting amendment could be via a Constitutional Convention, though two-thirds of states would need to support the motion to have one at all, and any proposed changes to an amendment would still require ratification by three-fourths of the states.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188363/donald-trump-joke-power-forever

2024-11-13 17:29:55

@nprofile…6kn7
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Donald Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba said she would consider a possible appointment from the president-elect to be White House press secretary “very seriously.” Mediaite reported Tuesday that Habba was a top candidate for the position, citing four sources. On Fox News Tuesday night, Sean Hannity asked if there was any truth to the report and initially, she tried to deflect. “I’d leave it to the president and three people that are on my board of directors: That’s Luke, Chloe, and Parker, my children,” Habba said. “Everybody’ll know in time.” Hannity pressed further, asking if there were any “discussions about it,” and Habba again deflected, pivoting to Trump’s “amazing cabinet” and the work of his transition team. Hannity then directly asked what Habba would do if Trump asked her to serve in his administration. “I am very loyal to President Trump. I would think about it. Very seriously,” Habba replied. As one of Trump’s attorneys, Habba is known for making excuses for Trump’s behavior during his trials in the past year, as well as making very noticeable mistakes in court. One day during Trump’s E. Jean Carroll defamation trial, she was reprimanded 12 times by the judge in the case. If Trump chooses her as his press secretary, though, her obfuscation and willingness to explain away Trump’s rash actions would probably be an asset in the role. The job entails a lot of spin in presenting what the president wants to the American public and media, and painting Trump in a good light is where she excels. In addition, she would make history if Trump selects her as the first ever Arab-American, and first Iraqi-American press secretary.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188350/alina-habba-responds-trump-white-house-press-secretary

2024-11-13 17:29:55

@nprofile…6kn7
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Donald Trump voters are having a shocking bout of buyer’s remorse now that their candidate is slated for a second term.On Election Day and in the hours following, searches for “how to change my vote” spiked in states that the president-elect won, according to Google analytics. The searches first surged the morning of Election Day before declining the day afterward. Interest in the phrase was not short-lived, though, with numbers climbing again on Monday—just shy of a week out from the election—and continuing to grow throughout the week. The apparent change of heart comes after Trump allies had admitted Project 2025 was the plan all along, and after women and girls became the target of an overtly misogynistic, far-right campaign claiming ownership of their bodies.The search became so popular that it hit 100, according to Google Trends, which registers searched phrases on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 indicating the peak popularity for a term.Some of the states that Trump won by the biggest margins, such as Iowa, generated the highest number of state-by-state queries for the term. Those searches were concentrated around the Des Moines-Ames, Cedar Rapids-Waterlook-Iowa City, and Dubuque areas in the Hawkeye State, which already had a large portion of votes for Vice President Kamala Harris, according to Virginia news outlet WAVY. It is not clear, though, whether Trump or Harris supporters were hoping to change their vote.It should be common knowledge that citizens cannot change their vote once they’ve dropped it into the ballot box, but the data points to an alarming number of Americans who apparently have no awareness of the legitimacy and finite nature of their vote.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188357/donald-trump-search-term-change-vote

2024-11-13 17:29:55

@nprofile…6kn7
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Special counsel Jack Smith is throwing in the towel.The prosecutor who oversaw President-elect Donald Trump’s January 6 case and his Mar-a-Lago classified documents case is planning to finish his work and quit the office before Inauguration Day, The New York Times reported Wednesday.Trump had promised to fire Smith “within two seconds” of being sworn in as the country’s forty-seventh president. “We got immunity at the Supreme Court. It’s so easy. I would fire him within two seconds. He’ll be one of the first things addressed,” Trump told the Hugh Hewitt Show in October, adding his intentions to sue Smith.Smith worked for two years on outstandingly complex cases against the former president, but actually translating them into trials proved even more difficult. Trump’s legal team employed practically every tactic to slow-roll the cases until a general election that made the whole effort moot (Justice Department policy prevents a sitting president from being prosecuted for crimes).Before leaving the post, regulation requires that Smith file a report summarizing the investigation and his team’s decisions, though it’s unclear how quickly he will be able to do so. If he manages to finish it within President Joe Biden’s term, the document will likely become public, leaving a historic black mark on Trump’s legacy before his second administration begins. But if Smith fails to do so, the fate of such a document would remain unknown.Smith has become a favorite target of the MAGA party, which frames him as the figurehead behind Democratic efforts to destroy Trump.In October, Smith released an eye-opening report related to Trump’s January 6 case that included revelations about Trump’s behavior ahead of and on January 6. The report outlined what Smith described as Trump’s “private criminal conduct.”“At its core, the defendant’s scheme was a private one,” prosecutors wrote in the massive motion. “He extensively used private actors and his campaign infrastructure to attempt to overturn the election results and operated in a private capacity as a candidate for office.”But Smith’s efforts to make Trump face legal consequences were cut off at the legs in July, when the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 to expand a president’s immunity and redefine what constitutes an “official act,” effectively deciding that Trump could not be held accountable for some of his behavior with regard to attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188353/donald-trump-jack-smith-fire-quit

2024-11-13 16:27:57

@nprofile…pyzj
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Donald Trump voters are having a shocking bout of buyer’s remorse now that their candidate is slated for a second term.On Election Day and in the hours following, searches for “how to change my vote” spiked in states that the president-elect won, according to Google analytics. The searches first surged the morning of Election Day before declining the day afterward. Interest in the phrase was not short-lived, though, with numbers climbing again on Monday—just shy of a week out from the election—and continuing to grow throughout the week. The apparent change of heart comes after Trump allies had admitted Project 2025 was the plan all along, and after women and girls became the target of an overtly misogynistic, far-right campaign claiming ownership of their bodies.The search became so popular that it hit 100, according to Google Trends, which registers searched phrases on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 indicating the peak popularity for a term.Some of the states that Trump won by the biggest margins, such as Iowa, generated the highest number of state-by-state queries for the term. Those searches were concentrated around the Des Moines-Ames, Cedar Rapids-Waterlook-Iowa City, and Dubuque areas in the Hawkeye State, which already had a large portion of votes for Vice President Kamala Harris, according to Virginia news outlet WAVY. It is not clear, though, whether Trump or Harris supporters were hoping to change their vote.It should be common knowledge that citizens cannot change their vote once they’ve dropped it into the ballot box, but the data points to an alarming number of Americans who apparently have no awareness of the legitimacy and finite nature of their vote.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188357/donald-trump-search-term-change-vote

2024-11-13 15:21:16

@nprofile…pyzj
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Donald Trump has appointed Fox & Friends co-host Pete Hegseth as the Secretary of Defense—and he’s one of the worst choices yet.“Pete is tough, smart and a true believer in America First,” Trump said in a statement Tuesday night. “With Pete at the helm, America’s enemies are on notice—Our military will be Great Again, and America will Never Back Down.” While Hegseth is a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, he is significantly less experienced than a traditional pick to head the Department of Defense. Hegseth once called the very same Iraq war that Trump and JD Vance just spent weeks pretending to critique “an example of what we got right, when we got it right.” He will now run the Pentagon and command 1.3 million active duty troops. Or, maybe fewer: just last week, Hegseth said, “I’m straight up just saying, we should not have women in combat roles.”“It hasn’t made us more effective. Hasn’t made us more lethal. Has made fighting more complicated,” he explained. “Our institutions don’t have to incentivize that in places where traditionally—not traditionally, over history—men in those positions are more capable.”Hegseth doesn’t seem to want anyone but white men to be in the military. In his 2024 book The War on Warriors, Hegseth painted the military as anti-white and suffering from a “long-term infection of radical left wing social justice policies.” He wrote that “affirmative action posts have skyrocketed, with ‘firsts’ being the most important factor in filling new commanders. We will not stop until trans-lesbian Black females run everything!”Trump seemed to echo many of Hegseth’s complaints on the campaign trail, with his own ramblings about “woke” military leadership. Hegseth has repeatedly fear-mongered about the spread of Islam in the United States, both as a contributor to Fox News and in his 2020 book American Crusade.“Just like the Christian crusaders who pushed back the Muslim hordes in the twelfth century, American Crusaders will need to muster the same courage against Islamists today,” Hegseth wrote in his book. “Islamists—and even mainstream Muslims—use aggressive tactics to exploit American ‘tolerance’ as utter weakness in order to achieve accommodations that would never otherwise be tolerated,” he wrote. “I’m not talking about on the battlefield, I’m talking about in our classrooms, city councils, and social media.”Hegseth has also complained about Muslim birth rates in states such as Michigan, which has the largest Arab population in the country. He pushed fears about the “integration” of Muslims into American society and has lamented France’s changing “demography” in the wake of the Syrian refugee crisis, which he compared to an invasion. “Next to the communist Chinese and their global ambitions, Islamism is the most dangerous threat to freedom in the world. It cannot be negotiated with, coexisted with, or understood; it must be exposed, marginalized, and crushed,” he wrote in American Crusade. Unsurprisingly, Hegseth is a big supporter of “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer.Although he graduated from Princeton University, Hegseth has criticized elite universities. “I have a new rule, the more elite the university and advanced a graduate is, the dumber they are,” Hegseth said on an episode of Fox News’s The Five. “If you went to an Ivy League, prove that you have any common sense at all.”Hegseth has claimed that he sent his degree from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government back.Maybe he’s right. In 2019 Hegseth, laughed on air about not washing his hands for 10 years, saying, “Germs are not a real thing. I can’t see them, therefore, they are not real.”This story has been updated.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188349/donald-trump-defense-secretary-pete-hegseth-nightmare

2024-11-13 12:01:50

@nprofile…6kn7
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It was 3 a.m. on Nov. 6. The baby growing inside me kicked hard as yet another set of electoral college votes flashed red on the TV screen for Trump. I couldn’t help but wonder if the kicking was her own act of protest in the waning hours of the 2024 election. After all, this child is the progeny of two environmental activists who have spent decades fighting the climate emergency, particularly federal fossil fuel production. It’s difficult to describe how grim that work looks right now. But this is also the moment to radically reimagine and rebuild our political system into one more responsive to people’s needs. That’s the potential of the next four years. It’s the transformation we need to meet the climate catastrophes ahead, far more powerful than Trump himself.   Today’s reality is harsh: The U.S. is the world’s largest oil and gas producer and liquified natural gas exporter, and fossil fuels are the dominant cause of climate chaos. Both the Trump and Biden administrations reached record oil and gas production during their successive terms. The Biden administration had a complex relationship with the climate crisis, embracing both clean and dirty energy as part of an all-of-the-above approach that contradicts scientists’ recommendations to safeguard the planet. Biden passed historic clean energy investments with his signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. But that act also included additional oil and gas leasing on our public lands and waters. The administration then approved ConocoPhillips’ devastating Willow Project in Alaska, the nation’s largest oil drilling operation. In response to pressure from environmental justice communities and climate advocates, Biden also imposed a moratorium on new federal oil and gas leases in 2021 and paused approvals for new liquified natural gas terminals in 2024—bold moves that were eventually blocked by federal judges. Now we face the unfettered Trump 2.0 era, led by a man who shamelessly cheered “drill, baby, drill” and called climate change a “hoax” at his political rallies and appointed an ExxonMobil CEO to his first cabinet. All signs suggest this administration will focus on gutting environmental protections and padding the bloated pockets of fossil fuel corporations and their billionaire executives and shareholders.   For climate activists, Trump’s ascent means federal avenues to fight fossil fuels will be mostly blocked. Our three branches of government, designed to check one another and thwart abusive power, are now at risk of being monopolized by a climate-denying fascist.  Trump has vowed to ditch virtually all Biden administration regulations intended to cut carbon emissions and move away from fossil fuels. He will seek to slash positions of federal employees who have spent their careers trying to protect our air, water and wildlife. While the House of Representatives election results aren’t yet final, it’s clear that a Republican Senate will block any climate-fighting legislation. And the Supreme Court is severely compromised by its radical right wing. Trump has promised to replace Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas with younger judges who could secure a radical right majority at the highest court until my unborn daughter is in her 30s. Without material reform to expand the court, this doesn’t bode well for multiple generations of women, as well as the working class, communities of color, migrant families, transgender people and our imperiled ecosystems. As many in the environmental movement have said this past week, we will resist as we did the first time. Biden has committed to filling the nearly 50 open judicial vacancies before leaving office. This move, if he can accomplish it, will be a vital lifeline to ensuring integrity of the judiciary at district and appeals court levels. As a lawyer who was part of the record onslaught of lawsuits against Trump during his first term, I think it’s important to note that 90 percent of our lawsuits were successful. They acted as a crucial bulwark against Trump’s attacks on our climate, health and safety. But resistance alone, which maintains the status quo, is no longer enough. The election rebuked that notion and the world’s environmental chaos confirms it. Our current system has driven the planet to break 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming this year. The Paris Agreement set this threshold as a dangerous tipping point for the world’s poorest communities, who disproportionately bear the brunt of climate change’s horrific consequences while the wealthiest disproportionately pollute.  We need to only look at the last year to see that when climate chaos tested the country, the current system failed. The cataclysmic Hurricane Helene, record heat waves, and relentless wildfires stole lives, demolished homes, wiped out jobs, and left survivors in profound social, economic, and emotional instability.To survive and thrive during the next four years and beyond, we have to build our political system anew. We need to reimagine how our politics can be genuinely responsive to what people need—not under the hateful rhetoric of the Republicans or the willful ignorance of the Democrats.  Building a responsive political system starts on the ground, driving intersectional solutions to climate chaos that are both community-focused and deeply resourced. The climate movement has to fully break out of its silo and build real political power with youth, labor, working families, migrants, the LGBTQ+ community, and other rights-based groups to grow a broad-based movement that centers justice at every step. Climate activists within the movement have already made important inroads on this intersectional organizing—including last year when hundreds of thousands around the world marched in the first mass mobilization to end fossil fuels—and we have many miles to go.Faced with an intractable federal government, activists can also take their battle to the states, for example fighting the detonation of carbon bombs like the Permian Basin. My colleagues at the Center for Biological Diversity, together with Indigenous, frontline and youth groups, recently filed a landmark case challenging the state of New Mexico for failing to uphold its constitutional duty to control oil and gas pollution and protect the health of its residents. Responding to pressure from local groups, the state also has created health buffers aimed at preventing school children from being poisoned by the oil industry as they sit in their classes.The byzantine world of state public utility commissions is also ground zero for bucking the racist, fossil fuel-dependent electricity system and designing democratic and affordable energy systems that serve the public’s interest. These black-box commissions—long dominated by regulators captured by fossil utilities and drowned in technical jargon to confuse the public—are the frontline of deciding state energy policy.Mass organizing of communities harmed by predatory utility rates, shutoffs and fossil fuel pollution can force these commissions to respond to people, not monopoly utility providers that have stifled alternative distributed energy to protect their profits. State utility commissions can ramp up rooftop and community solar systems and other renewable energy sources that displace polluting fossil fuels, loosen the death grip of corporate utilities, and make electricity affordable, clean and democratic. This isn’t just a fight against the climate emergency—which can feel abstract to some people. It’s a fight against entrenched power that threatens people’s pocketbooks, their health and their livelihoods. While we are all trying to make sense of what happened and why, our next steps are clear. The status quo needs to change, and it’s up to us to organize a new, intersectional mass people’s movement that can create the momentum for and help design the systems that will get us there. It may be that my daughter’s strong kicks are her way of signaling that she’s rearing to go. Fighting for a safe climate means fighting on every front for a chance of something that looks like justice.
https://newrepublic.com/article/188328/trump-climate-activists-next-four-years

2024-11-12 23:47:30

@nprofile…6kn7
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Trump’s transition team has a “warrior board” executive order ready for the president-elect’s desk. An executive order draft is floating around MAGA world that would establish a Trump-appointed “warrior board” with the power to purge any three- or four-star generals as it sees fit. The board would send its dismissal recommendations to Trump and they would be acted upon within 30 days.The draft executive order, which was first reported on by The Wall Street Journal, makes it easy to quickly remove military officials “lacking in requisite leadership qualities” but leaves open the question of what those requisite qualities are. The executive order draws on General George C. Marshall’s 1940 creation of a “plucking board” led by retired general officers to “remove from line promotion any officer for reasons deemed good and sufficient.” But that plucking board was to uplift young officers with high potential, not to cull anyone not perfectly aligned with MAGA. It’s not yet clear if Trump will sign the executive order, but Trump has held vitriol toward certain military leaders for some time now. He has vowed to weaponize them against the “enemy within,” to fire anyone involved in the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and to create a task force to weed out “woke generals.”  “This looks like an administration getting ready to purge anyone who will not be a yes man,” former Army lawyer Eric Carpenter told The Wall Street Journal. “If you are looking to fire officers who might say no because of the law or their ethics, you set up a system with completely arbitrary standards, so you can fire anyone you want.”This draft may be ready to see President-elect Trump’s desk on day one.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188338/trump-executive-order-military-board-purge

2024-11-12 21:32:40

@nprofile…pyzj
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Donald Trump wants to save TikTok, after trying to get it banned during his first administration. Before leaving office in 2020, Trump attempted to ban TikTok through an executive order claiming the app was a threat to “the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.” Now he is expected to halt a ban put in motion by President Joe Biden. So what changed?Kellyanne Conway explained the president-elect’s newfound support for the insidiously addictive video-sharing app. “He appreciates the breadth and reach of TikTok, which he used masterfully along with podcasts and new media entrants to win,” Conway told The Washington Post.“There are many ways to hold China to account outside alienating 180 million U.S. users each month. Trump recognized early on that Democrats are the party of bans—gas-powered cars, menthol cigarettes, vapes, plastic straws, and TikTok—and to let them own that draconian, anti-personal choice space,” she said. Conway managed to describe the president promising to bring back his “travel ban” targeting people from predominantly Muslim countries, including refugees from Gaza, as being in opposition to the so-called “party of bans.”As Conway said, Trump was able to use TikTok to appeal to younger voters, which helped propel him to victory. Trump’s social media team garnered 3.2 billion TikTok views since the president-elect started using the app in June, according to the Post. In one of his first videos on the app he declared, “I’m gonna save TikTok.”But Trump’s affair with TikTok started before he ever used the app. After Trump stated his intent to ban the app, TikTok altered its algorithm and content moderation so that pro-Trump content would do better, according to The Information.Trump would go on to court Jeff Yass, a major Republican donor and one of the largest investors in TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance. Yass also reportedly donated to Accuracy in Media, which funded the doxxing of pro-Palestinian college students. The deadline by which ByteDance must divest from its U.S.-based TikTok operations is January 19, the day before Trump’s inauguration. The company has given no indication that it intends to comply, and challenged the ban as being unconstitutional.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188305/donald-trump-reverse-tiktok-ban

2024-11-12 21:30:39

@nprofile…6kn7
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Donald Trump wants to save TikTok, after trying to get it banned during his first administration. Before leaving office in 2020, Trump attempted to ban TikTok through an executive order claiming the app was a threat to “the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.” Now he is expected to halt a ban put in motion by President Joe Biden. So what changed?Kellyanne Conway explained the president-elect’s newfound support for the insidiously addictive video-sharing app. “He appreciates the breadth and reach of TikTok, which he used masterfully along with podcasts and new media entrants to win,” Conway told The Washington Post.“There are many ways to hold China to account outside alienating 180 million U.S. users each month. Trump recognized early on that Democrats are the party of bans—gas-powered cars, menthol cigarettes, vapes, plastic straws, and TikTok—and to let them own that draconian, anti-personal choice space,” she said. Conway managed to describe the president promising to bring back his “travel ban” targeting people from predominantly Muslim countries, including refugees from Gaza, as being in opposition to the so-called “party of bans.”As Conway said, Trump was able to use TikTok to appeal to younger voters, which helped propel him to victory. Trump’s social media team garnered 3.2 billion TikTok views since the president-elect started using the app in June, according to the Post. In one of his first videos on the app he declared, “I’m gonna save TikTok.”But Trump’s affair with TikTok started before he ever used the app. After Trump stated his intent to ban the app, TikTok altered its algorithm and content moderation so that pro-Trump content would do better, according to The Information.Trump would go on to court Jeff Yass, a major Republican donor and one of the largest investors in TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance. Yass also reportedly donated to Accuracy in Media, which funded the doxxing of pro-Palestinian college students. The deadline by which ByteDance must divest from its U.S.-based TikTok operations is January 19, the day before Trump’s inauguration. The company has given no indication that it intends to comply, and challenged the ban as being unconstitutional.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188305/donald-trump-reverse-tiktok-ban

2024-11-12 20:25:18

@nprofile…6kn7
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President Biden’s last appointment to the National Labor Relations Board has not yet been confirmed by the Senate, and Democrats only have a small window of time until Republicans take control of Congress. Two of the board’s five members are Republicans and two are Democrats, with its chairperson being chosen by the sitting president. In June, Biden nominated the current chair, Democrat Lauren McFerran, to a third term, and Joseph Ditelberg to fill a vacant Republican seat. But, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has not yet brought either nomination up for a vote. The NLRB protects the right to form a union and enforces labor law, and McFerran’s confirmation in particular would ensure a Democratic board until late 2026. This would allow for more pro-labor decisions and policies, and protect against right-wing attacks on unions and workers’ rights. But Schumer and Senate Democrats have to act quickly before January, when a new Republican Senate majority is sworn in. The NLRB is a frequent target of conservatives and powerful executives, who are seeking to cripple and even dissolve the labor body. In September, a judge appointed by Donald Trump granted a request in a legal case seeking to demolish the National Labor Relations Board. Tech CEO and close Trump ally Elon Musk is working with Amazon, Starbucks, and Trader Joe’s in another legal challenge seeking to destroy the agency on constitutional grounds. Unions have praised Biden’s record on labor, calling him the best president on workers’ rights since Franklin D. Roosevelt. But he was unable to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize, or PRO Act, and he was criticized for breaking a railroad strike in 2022. Filling this appointment may protect the gains he has made for working people at least in the short term while Democrats regroup for the 2026 midterm elections. But Schumer and the rest of the Democrats have to act soon, or it will be too late. 
https://newrepublic.com/post/188301/key-democratic-nominee-nlrb-awaits-vote-senate-schumer-trump

2024-11-12 20:25:18

@nprofile…6kn7
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Donald Trump has tapped former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee to serve as the next ambassador to Israel.“Mike has been a great public servant, Governor, and Leader in Faith for many years,” Trump said Tuesday in a statement. “He loves Israel, and the people of Israel, and likewise, the people of Israel love him. Mike will work tirelessly to bring about Peace in the Middle East!”Huckabee has been a vocal defender of Israel amid the escalating conflict. In June, he came out against a potential ceasefire deal between Israel and Palestine, arguing to NewsNation that Hamas should not be negotiated with and that the only solution for the war would be their complete surrender.Israel has killed more than 43,000 people in Gaza in the more than yearlong war, with an additional 102,000 people injured in the conflict, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. A report by the United Nations Human Rights Office, published last week, found that close to 70 percent of those killed were women and children, with five- to nine-year-old children comprising the majority of the dead. Roughly 80 percent of the victims were killed in residential buildings or similar housing. This is a developing story.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188312/donald-trump-mike-huckabee-israel-ambassador-gaza

2024-11-12 17:05:48

@nprofile…pyzj
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Donald Trump’s pick for his administration’s “border czar” suggested that immigrants should “self-deport” ahead of the president-elect’s massive deportation scheme.During an interview Monday with Tom Homan, Trump’s former director of Immigration Customs and Enforcement, Fox News’s Sean Hannity pitched the idea of a two- or three-month “grace period” for undocumented immigrants to self-deport.“If you don’t self-report-deport, then you will never be given an opportunity at citizenship and when you leave, you will never be invited back, you will never be able to apply to come into the country,” said Hannity. “Sound like a good idea or no?”“Criminals and gang members get no grace period,” Homan, the incoming border chief, said. “But, while we’re out prioritizing the public safety threats, and national security threats, if you want to self-deport, you should self-deport. Because, again, we know who you are, and we’re gonna come and find you.”“So, if you want to self-deport, that’s fine. But criminals and gang members, they get no favors from this administration. You came to this country illegally which is a crime. You committed crimes against United States citizens, some heinous crimes, you get no grace period, so we’re coming for you.”“But for those others, the non-criminals, you wanna self deport I’m all for it,” Homan said. “Because when they self-report they can put everything in order, their family business that they got, homes, or whatever. They can put all that in order and leave with their family all together. It makes perfect sense for the ones that are not criminals.”Homan: For the others, the non criminals, you want to self deport, I’m all for it. They can put everything in order..Hannity: How are the going to get home? pic.twitter.com/NedVHKIAUS— Acyn (@Acyn) November 12, 2024Homan’s rambling response leaves room for interpretation, resting on the administration’s definition of “non-criminal,” which would likely include both undocumented and legal immigrants.JD Vance has previously suggested that Trump would deport immigrants who are in the country under legal programs such as temporary protected status, or TPS. There were 863,880 foreign nationals in the United States under TPS as of August. Vance has also refused to rule out deporting immigrants with deferred action for childhood arrivals, or DACA, status.The details of Trump’s plan to execute the largest mass deportations in history are still unclear. Homan said Tuesday he expected support from the U.S. military and special operations.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188285/donald-trump-border-czar-plan-mass-deportations

2024-11-12 17:03:43

@nprofile…6kn7
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Senator Tom Cotton will be gaining a lot more power in the Senate thanks to Donald Trump’s Cabinet appointments.On Monday night, The New York Times reported that Trump will appoint Senator Marco Rubio as secretary of state, allowing Cotton to move up and become chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee as Republicans take control of the Senate.Cotton was initially reportedly in the running to be Trump’s vice president, but ultimately was passed over in favor of his Senate colleague JD Vance. If he does take over the Senate Intelligence Committee, he will bring his record of foreign policy hawkishness and support for violent solutions with him.Before his political career began, Cotton called for American journalists to be jailed for reporting on classified information, and in the Senate, he made a name for himself by constantly calling on the United States to attack Iran.In 2020, the Arkansas senator called for invoking the Insurrection Act and sending in federal troops to crush Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Later that year, he claimed that America’s Founding Fathers saw slavery as a “necessary evil upon which the union was built.” Recently, Cotton has made headlines for again calling for the military to be used against protesters, this time against opponents of Israel’s brutal massacres in Gaza and Lebanon, which he staunchly supports.As the Intelligence Committee chair, we can expect more sound bites like his racist badgering of TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew in January, where he repeatedly asked the Singaporean social media executive if he was a member of the Chinese Communist Party and ignored Chew’s protests about his actual place of birth.Cotton’s support of military force against Americans probably endears him to Trump, who has also called for military force against his domestic enemies. The Arkansas senator will also be pushing to use the full force of America’s intelligence apparatus against Americans he disagrees with. Cotton and Trump will very likely be working together to stamp out any dissent, especially if Congress grants the presidency unprecedented new powers.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188278/tom-cotton-power-senate-intel

2024-11-12 17:03:43

@nprofile…6kn7
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Donald Trump may have secured a second term in the White House, but his Russia problems are far from over—at least according to suspiciously phrased comments by some of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closest allies.Speaking with Russian state media on Monday, Russian presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev noted that while the U.S. election may be over, Trump is still beholden to “certain forces.”“To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations,” Patrushev told the business daily Kommersant in response to a question about whether the outcome of the presidential election would bode well for Russia. “As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.”That statement was elevated by Tass, the Russian news agency.In a curious follow-up about Trump’s susceptibility to being pressured and influenced, Patrushev made another eyebrow-raising comment: Rather than answer the question directly, the Putin aide made a point to bring up assassination attempts against the president-elect.“We know of two cases of attempts on his life during the election campaign,” Patrushev told Kommersant. “In general, throughout the history of the United States, attempts have been made on the lives of presidents and candidates regularly—more than 20 times. Four U.S. presidents have died at the hands of assassins while in office. Therefore, it is extremely important for U.S. intelligence agencies to prevent a repetition of such cases.”Trump’s history with Russia goes way back to the early days of his first campaign. In 2019, former FBI director and Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller noted that Russia had blackmail material on Trump during the 2016 presidential election.And that relationship appears to be ongoing. On Wednesday, veteran journalist Bob Woodward revealed that he had spoken about the unusual relationship between Trump and Putin several months ago with Trump’s former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats.“It’s so close, it seems like it might be blackmail,” Coats said, according to Woodward.Woodward also recounted a separate conversation he had with CIA Director Bill Burns, who reportedly emphasized that “Putin manipulates” and is “professionally trained” to do so. According to Woodward, Burns believed that Putin has “got a plan” to repeat what he did during the forty-fifth presidential administration by “playing Trump.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/188284/vladimir-putin-donald-trump-election-obligations

2024-11-12 15:57:48

@nprofile…pyzj
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House Republicans want to be in Trump’s cabinet so badly that they—and the president-elect—are willing to leave Speaker Mike Johnson vulnerable in the next Congress.Trump on Monday announced that New York Representative Elise Stefanik will serve as his U.N. ambassador and Florida Representative Mike Walz will serve as his national security adviser. With even more appointments on the way and a slim GOP majority, some Republicans have warned the president-elect’s transition team that  they cannot select any more Republican representatives for Trump’s cabinet. At least 12 other Republican House members have already been floated for cabinet positions. Five of them are from Florida alone. “I have 10 colleagues who think they’re going to the Cabinet,” an anonymous House GOP member told CNN. “If we’ve got a four-seat minority, you can let one or two go. But you’re not going to let three or four go.”“I think we have some really qualified people. But I wouldn’t want to drop us down to a one, two (seat) majority tactically,” said outgoing GOP Representative Kelly Armstrong. “We have a lot of talent … But you have to give Mike [Johnson] some room to operate.”Trump may also dip his fingers further into Senate Republicans’ majority, as he already did with his pick of Senator Marco Rubio for secretary of state.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188281/trump-screw-house-republicans-majority-congress

2024-11-12 14:48:58

@nprofile…pyzj
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Arizonans have elected Representative Ruben Gallego as the next senator of the Grand Canyon State, according to the Associated Press. Gallego clinched 50 percent of the votes, besting far-right darling and local TV news anchor Kari Lake by 2.2 percent with 95 percent of the state reporting.Bipartisan polls stretching back to July had placed Gallego squarely in the lead, sometimes with a double-digit jump on the former news anchor.“Gracias, Arizona!” Gallego wrote on X late Monday night.Gallego’s win will revert both of Arizona’s upper chamber seats back to the liberal party. After running as a Democrat in 2018, Senator Kyrsten Sinema—whom Gallego will replace—opted to become an independent, citing partisan extremism as her reasoning for the intra-office switch-up in an Arizona Republic op-ed. Earlier this year, Sinema announced she would not be seeking re-election, skirting a three-way race in the swing state.Gallego’s victory is a bright spot for Democrats, who have lost control of the Senate to Republicans. The GOP holds 53 seats in the chamber.Lake launched herself into the far-right stratosphere in 2022, when she made a national splash in Arizona’s gubernatorial race as a disciple of Donald Trump, carving her own candidacy out of mimicking the Republican presidential nominee’s bombastic and divisive rhetoric. Her narrow loss in that race to Democrat Katie Hobbs appeared to indicate that the MAGA tide had dried up in Arizona, but the state still voted for Trump this time around.In the final months of the race, Gallego and Lake’s match-up boiled down to a handful of issues plaguing voters in the state, including immigration, the border, the economy, and abortion access, all of which took center stage during a feisty debate between the two candidates in October.Over the course of 55 minutes, Gallego and Lake traded personal barbs while Lake positioned herself as a local radical. “Kari Lake is an unreformed fanatic. Ruben Gallego is an adult,” wrote Phil Boas for the Arizona Republic in the wake of the debate, noting that Gallego was the only candidate in the race who had grown from their radical campaign positions in 2022.After opening the debate by remarking that there are no Republicans or Democrats in war, Gallego—an Iraq war veteran—took aim at Lake’s track record, claiming that the local TV star had “failed the basic test of honesty.” In turn, Lake argued that Gallego, a former progressive, had “undergone an extreme makeover” in favor of his political ambitions.Lake also attacked Gallego for his prior comments on immigration in which he called Trump’s border wall “stupid” and “dumb.”In April, women in Arizona were rattled by a state Supreme Court decision to revive a 160-year-old anti-abortion law that offered no abortion exemptions, even in cases of rape or incest. That radical policy was quickly nipped by the state legislature, but not before Lake reversed course on her “100 percent pro-life” position, telling Arizona voters that she sympathized with women in need of abortions, and that she didn’t believe the ruling was in line with the state’s current politics. That same week, Lake backed Arizona Republicans’ bill to replace the 1864 ban with a law banning abortion after 15 weeks. The proposed bill also did not make exceptions for rape or incest.And, a week before Election Day, the Republican nominee copied one more Trumpian strategy: refusing to concede that she had lost her race in 2022. When pressed by CNN to answer a question that she has spent two years dodging, Lake claimed that she was unable to speak on the issue since she was still in litigation over the outcome, though she added that she intended to “make sure our elections are run properly” and that she wanted to “look forward” rather than backward.
https://newrepublic.com/post/187727/kari-lake-ruben-gallego-arizona-senate

2024-11-12 12:35:58

@nprofile…6kn7
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I know what you’re thinking. How can I, a 98-pound weakling, DEREGULATE my industry or win fat GOVERNMENT CONTRACTS? But after last week’s election, there’s NEVER been a better time to BRIBE THE PRESIDENT! As a candidate, Donald Trump said that, if elected, he would put his second term UP FOR SALE! Contribute to my campaign, he told oil and gas industry representatives, and REGULATORY RELIEF IS YOURS! But wait, you say. Aren’t there emoluments clauses in the Constitution that FORBID this? Isn’t BRIBERY of public officials AGAINST THE LAW? Not really, thanks to EXCITING NEW OPPORTUNITIES opened up by Supreme Court rulings and the Trump team’s own thrilling CULTURE OF IMPUNITY! The Pre-Election Presidential Transition Act requires major-party nominees for president to submit, before the election, a Memo of Understanding to the General Services Administration articulating an ethics policy to avoid conflicts of interest. Trump signed the MOU last time. He hasn’t submitted one this time, even though the deadline was October 1. Until he does, Trump is barred from carrying out certain transition functions. Probably he’ll sign eventually, but once he does the GSA will impose a $5,000 limit on private contributions to his transition and a disclosure requirement, neither of which is really the Trump way. Presumably Trump will tap many of the same donors who gave to him last time, including AT&T, General Electric, Microsoft, Exxon Mobil, and JPMorgan Chase. Meanwhile, no dollar limits inhibit contributions to Trump’s inaugural committee, which last time included $5 million from the late Sheldon Adelson. Adelson’s finances are now in the hands of his widow, Miriam, whom Trump will likely tap again.Am I saying any of these corporations or individuals extracted promises back in 2016 in exchange for their contributions? I am not. Back then they were deterred by fear of prosecution. But they have much less to fear now, because last June, in the latest of its rulings to render the federal bribery statute completely unenforceable, the Supreme Court ruled that a politician who gets paid off by the beneficiary of some past action is accepting a legal gratuity and not an illegal bribe. Less than one month after this decision (Snyder v. United States) came Trump v. United States, where the court ruled that a president couldn’t be prosecuted for any act performed as part of his official duties. The combined effect is that the highest court in the land is practically inviting you to bribe your president. You might risk offending it if you turn this fabulous offer down! The Supreme Court’s lassitude about bribery, however, bumps up against its lassitude about presidential immunity in an interesting way that I’ll discuss in a bit. As for the emoluments clauses (two of which apply to the president; a third is for members of Congress), the Supreme Court long ago made clear it had no intention of enforcing those. In 2020 the high court declined to hear an emoluments case (Blumenthal v. Trump) brought by members of Congress, thereby upholding a lower-court ruling that Congress lacked standing. In 2021 the court dispensed with two other emoluments cases (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) v. Donald J. Trump and the District of Columbia v. Trump), both filed way back in 2017, by delaying action until five days after Joe Biden was inaugurated president and then declaring the lawsuits moot. The high court resorted to this evasion because any ruling on the cases’ merits would have had to acknowledge that Trump, serially and flagrantly, violated the emoluments clauses both foreign (“no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust … shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State”) and domestic (“The President shall … not receive … any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them”). There’s a rich literature on the many and varied ways Trump made mincemeat of the emoluments clauses during his first term, including two reports by the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, one on foreign emoluments and one on domestic, and an update to the foreign emoluments report by CREW. According to CREW, Trump’s businesses received $13.6 million in payments from foreign governments during his presidency, including $5.7 million from China (mostly stays at Trump hotels), nearly $4 million from the United Kingdom (tax bailouts for two money-losing Trump golf resorts in Scotland), $1.1 million from Qatar (purchase of four units in Trump World Tower in New York City plus hotel stays at the now-defunct Trump International in Washington), and $885,000 from Saudi Arabia (which since 2001 has owned the 45thfloor of Trump World Tower; the Saudis also logged many stays at the Trump International). This tally excludes a reported $10 million campaign contribution that Trump’s 2016 campaign accepted from Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi. Such a contribution, if it was given, would be illegal. A Justice Department investigation of the alleged contribution was shut down by Trump Attorney General William Barr.On the domestic front, federal and state officials spent, over just an 11-month period, more than $163,000 on rooms at the Trump International, including eight people Trump appointed ambassador and three people Trump appointed to the federal bench. Meanwhile, the Secret Service paid $1.4 million to various Trump properties in the United States so that it might carry out its duties to protect the president and his family from physical harm, at rates as much as 4.5 times the federal per diem. In some instances the Secret Service paid more than Trump charged members of the Qatari royal family. The Secret Service isn’t trying to bribe Trump, of course, but because its stays were paid from the Treasury they violated the domestic emoluments clause, which is triggered by the expenditure of government money.Since Trump’s first term, opportunities to fill Trump’s pockets have proliferated. Truth Social is a money-losing social-media platform whose stock price is up 180 percent since late September. As I’ve noted before, Trump’s fans are much more interested in buying shares in his social-media platform than in using it, not because they can make money off it but because Trump can. Trump owns a $3.5 billion stake in the company even though he’s never invested in it and can sell that stake any time he wishes. Trump insists he isn’t selling, but more than half of Trump’s net worth of $5.9 billion is tied up in Truth Social, and he’s still burdened by hundreds of millions in debt. The presidency may be the only thing standing between Trump and personal bankruptcy. That reality makes Trump even more susceptible to payoffs of various kinds. “How much Truth Social stock do you own?” could easily become a routine question Trump poses to anybody seeking a political appointment or some other favor. If that’s established to be part of his “official duties,” no prosecutor can touch him. Maybe Trump’s new bestie Elon Musk will buy Truth Social and merge it with Twitter/X. The two platforms aren’t so different, and maybe Trump would agree to stop criticizing EVs in return.Trump also has a cryptocurrency business, World Liberty Financial (WLF). He doesn’t own it, and neither he nor any family member works for it or sits on its board of directors. As with Truth Social, Trump has not invested in the company. Yet Trump and his family are poised to receive as much as 75 percent of net revenues from the company. When you pay your bribe, don’t forget to make it in WLF tokens!The Trump International Hotel opened in Washington’s Old Post Office less than two months before the 2016 election, and with Trump’s victory it established the District of Columbia as a latter-day equivalent of Pottersville in It’s A Wonderful Life. Trump paid too much for his lease on this federal building in 2012, lost a fortune on it—and then sold it at a profit in 2022 under mysterious circumstances that I puzzled over two years ago. Some of the mystery cleared up after Forbes reported that Trump lent the new owner $28 million to take it off his hands. By last summer, though, the new owners—of what was now a Waldorf Astoria hotel—had defaulted, and in August the property quietly sold for $100 million at a foreclosure auction. Since then, Trump has licensed his name to three developments in Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, including a Trump Tower Dubai and an Intercontinental Hotel, sparing the governments of those countries the inconvenience of traveling to the United States to shovel petrodollars down Trump’s pants. The Saudis’ LIV Golf League has already hosted six tournaments at Trump properties and will doubtless now step up the pace.At the risk of spoiling the party, I must point out one potential bullkill.  Josh Chafetz, professor of law at Georgetown and author of a forthcoming Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities article about the Supreme Court and political corruption, noted recently to Adam Liptak of The New York Times that the high court’s definitions of what constitute “official acts” lack consitency. In McDonnell v. United States, a 2016 bribery case involving a corrupt wingnut Virginia governor, Chief Justice John Roberts defined an official act narrowly as “a formal exercise of government power,” and on those grounds he vacated the bribery conviction. But in July’s Trump v. the United States, Roberts defined an official act broadly as anything occurring “within the outer perimeter of … official responsibility,” and on those grounds he shielded Trump from prosecution. The only logic these two definitions shared was the chief justice’s motive not to prosecute corrupt Republican politicians.“They really do seem to go in different directions,” Chafetz told Liptak. “If something is official enough to get you immunity, it should be official enough to be the kind of thing you can’t accept money for doing.” You can shield presidents excessively from prosecution or you can shield bribe-takers excessively from prosecution, but can you really do both? Perhaps someday the Supreme Court will feel obliged to address this question.In the meantime, the Trump presidency is open for business, and it’s sure to remain so for the next four years. Pay your bribe today! You’ll be glad you did.
https://newrepublic.com/article/188271/trump-profit-presidency-emoluments-supreme-court

2024-11-12 11:28:13

@nprofile…6kn7
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During the campaign, Donald Trump openly advertised that as president, he’ll use the state to retaliate against his enemies in every way he can. Now The New York Times reports that some of his advisers are urging him to absolutely make good on that threat. And right on cue, Trump erupted on social media, calling for investigations into people supposedly spreading false rumors about his intention to sell shares of his Truth Social—a revealing indicator of the types of abuses of power that we can expect from a second Trump term. We talked to New Yorker staff writer Susan Glasser, author of a great new piece on what’s coming. She explains in alarming detail how Trump will be far more liberated—less constrained by the law, by the Republican Party, and by guardrails of any kind—than ever before. Listen to this episode here.
https://newrepublic.com/article/188252/trumps-angry-new-threats-truth-social-hint-darkly-whats-coming

2024-11-11 17:19:33

@nprofile…6kn7
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Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to Instagram to get a better understanding of perhaps the most confusing electoral coalition: the AOC/Trump voter. On Sunday night, the progressive congresswoman opened her story comments to her followers, asking: “People who support both Trump & me OR voted Trump/Dem, tell us why.”The seemingly endless responses touched on the war in Gaza, status quo dissatisfaction, and general vibes. But they all boiled down to one common denominator: class struggle.“It’s real simple … Trump and you care about the working class,” one comment said. “I feel like you are both outsiders compared to the rest of DC, and less ‘establishment,’” said another. “The responses you got make me want to barf,” said one more.Others mentioned the genocide in Gaza, the economy, or the general need for “change.”“Their responses give a window into their (primarily anti-establishment) views,” X user Leah McElrath tweeted. “Split-ticket voting is real, despite conspiracy theories to the contrary.”“Interesting & quite reassuring: seems there are a lot of people out there wanting radical change, but if only the right offers it, they’ll vote for them. But there’s an opportunity on the left too. Suspect that’s true in the UK as well,” another X user mused.This impromptu Q&A provided more evidence of a thirst for economic populism that the Democratic Party has yet to tap into.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188248/2024-election-voters-democrat-trump-aoc-split-ticket

2024-11-11 11:44:36

@nprofile…6kn7
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The Democratic Party is once again in the wilderness. Donald Trump won not only the presidential election but the popular vote. The scale of short-term and long-term harm that is about to be unleashed on our communities, our country, and our planet is genuinely difficult to comprehend. To work our way out of this hell, it should be clear that Democrats need to chart a new path. What does that path look like? There is one man in particular whose ideas need to be reckoned with: Bernie Sanders. Bernie has spent his entire career telling the same story about America, and it may just be the antidote to the one that Donald Trump successfully wielded in his return to power. And it’s not just his fans who are saying so. David Brooks, formerly one of Bernie Sanders’ most vehement centrist critics, admitted this week that “maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption—something that will make people like me uncomfortable.” Donald Trump won this election by winning the working class, massively improving his margins among voters without college degrees, young men, and Latinos. These are precisely the groups that Sanders managed to inspire and win in each of his campaigns. Trump dominated the online and new media ecosystem exemplified by Joe Rogan; in 2020, Bernie went on Rogan’s show and won him over. Trump ran on rage, performing solidarity with the many Americans who feel anger right now; Bernie, too, is extremely angry, and he’s never been afraid to show it.But this is perhaps the most vital thing to understand about Sanders’ approach. Human beings need stories. Stories, to be compelling—to anyone, but especially to people who are unhappyz—need villains. Trump has a story that features clear villains; like every fascist and rightwing authoritarian before him, he directs, channels, and amplifies voters’ anger towards groups that are easy to scapegoat, like immigrants and transgender people, as well as institutions that they feel have failed them, like the elites of both the Democratic and Republican parties. It’s simple, it’s visceral, and it works. Or at least, it works in a vacuum, when unhappy voters are not offered any other story about why their lives are harder, less secure, or more painful than they should be.There’s no doubt that Biden’s outlook on matters of labor and industrial policy was a massive improvement on the Obama years. But Biden’s term also saw the end of Covid-era expansions of the child tax credit, Medicaid, and unemployment insurance, the reappointment of an austerity-focused Federal Reserve chairman, and a failure to take decisive action as corporations raised the cost of groceries, rent, and other basic goods. Perhaps most importantly, as Biden faded from view as the consequences of his advanced age grew more prominent, he ceased to be an effective storyteller for his own ideas. Trump, for all of his own cognitive lapses, tirelessly kept at one thing: He made working-class people central to his message, not an afterthought. He successfully revived the idea that he could break the corrupt wheel of elite politics. And he outworked Harris in telling a story that made working people feel important. Bernie has, throughout his entire career, managed to tell similarly simple and visceral stories that give status and importance to the very voters Democrats are losing. He laid that story out quite clearly in the postelection analysis he released this week, writing that while “the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.” Like Trump, Bernie’s villains are clear. They’re the billionaires “doing phenomenally well” while “60 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck”; the tech executives making “a bad situation even worse”; the health insurers and Big Pharma companies forcing us to pay “the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs”; the war machine spending “billions funding the extremist Netanyahu government’s all out war against the Palestinian people”; and, of course, the “big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party.”That is a compelling alternative explanation for the frustrations working people are feeling. And when you have a compelling alternative explanation, you don’t need to accept your opponents’ narrative framework. Regardless of the years of Democratic elites weaponizing identity politics against Bernie because of his class-first approach, Bernie has never thrown immigrants and trans folks under the bus, as many Democrats have been eager to do this cycle. What Bernie does instead is center economic issues that have majoritarian support—because the best response to attacks on vulnerable groups is a counternarrative that redirects anger to the real villains, the oligarchs and corporate crooks that are actually making people’s lives worse.This election provided a great deal of evidence of the electoral benefits of Bernie’s style of economic populism in the kinds of districts and states that Democrats need to contest. Many of the candidates who outshone Harris were to some degree in this mold, including some that fell short but still made massive inroads, like Dan Osborn, the independent union leader and industrial mechanic running against Republican Senator Deb Fischer in Nebraska. Osborn outperformed Harris’s margin by a whopping 14 points, with a campaign that focused relentlessly on calling out concentrated corporate power, special interest money in politics, and D.C. corruption. And Sherrod Brown, a longtime populist crusader against free trade deals whose loss this week was heartbreaking, still outperformed Harris’s Ohio margin by eight points.There’s international evidence as well. Much has been made—and justifiably so—of the transnational anti-incumbent environment in the post-Covid era. But these comparisons always seem to conveniently leave out Mexico. Earlier this year, Mexico’s former president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a left-leaning populist known as AMLO who has frequently been called “Mexico’s Bernie Sanders,” left office with sky-high approval ratings after successfully handing the presidency to his chosen successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, a Jewish climate scientist who is now serving as Mexico’s first woman president after winning in a landslide. Mexico suffered under significant inflation just like the rest of the world. But there was no room for a right-wing demagogue to take advantage of rising prices, because that populist space was already filled.Naturally, AMLO isn’t perfect; neither is Sanders. But he points to a future where liberal politics doesn’t have to be weighed down by the baggage of socially elite condescension or the association with a broken status quo that Donald Trump was able to so effectively weaponize against the Harris campaign. In a Democratic Party strewn with disproven theories of how we can win—tack to the center, win over Dick Cheney Republicans, get billionaires like Mark Cuban on our side, align ourselves with the national security blob, etc.—a politics that combines anti-establishment mores and class-conscious economic populism can offer a compelling alternate vision of the world that can compete well against and perhaps ultimately defeat Trump’s antisocial, anti-inclusive, fascistic, authoritarian populism.Obviously, Sanders is not going to be the Democrats’ 2028 presidential nominee. If there’s one other lesson we hopefully will learn from this catastrophe, it’s that the Democratic Party needs to begin allowing a new generation of leaders to take the baton. But on every major strategic decision Democrats make over the next four years—like, for example, who replaces the cartoonishly inept and hackish Jaime Harrison as our next Democratic National Committee chair—a little Sanders-style disruption, that might make the elites in the Democratic party uncomfortable, should be the order of the day. When Senate Democrats elect their leadership in the new term, Bernie should have a key role in developing the new team. And as Democrats formulate their approach to the midterms—choosing which legislative battles to prioritize, which kinds of candidates to recruit, which electoral message to center—winning back the working class voters who’ve always been key to putting Democrats in the White House should be at the center of every decision.The battle for America’s—and humanity’s—future is not over. We’ve experienced a crushing defeat. But we’re not out of the fight. Republicans will overreach over the next few years with extremist policies and unpopular corruption. There will be openings for Democrats. But if we continue letting the same pocket-lining Democratic consultants keep us on our current trajectory—as a party shedding working-class support in exchange for higher-income and highly educated voters, in a country in which two-thirds of Americans do not have college degrees—we will never claw our way out of this hell. The numbers simply do not add up. Democrats have an opportunity now, and an obligation, to choose a different course. They’re fortunate enough to have a leader who’s been modeling it for decades.
https://newrepublic.com/article/188184/bernie-winning-back-working-class

2024-11-09 11:39:36

@nprofile…pyzj
https://images.newrepublic.com/4730b7eada35c7c9bbc9abec1a4dc4ab0bf37ae4.jpeg?w=1200&q=75&dpi=1&fm=pjpg&fit=crop&crop=faces&ar=3:2
There are 1,000 convoluted theories floating around on social media that purport to explain why Donald Trump won the presidential race. But some Democrats and people on Kamala Harris’s campaign have concluded that one very significant reason is a straightforward one: It proved disturbingly difficult to persuade undecided voters that Trump had been a bad president.Internal testing in all the battleground states over the course of many months yielded a result that unnerved the campaign, according to a senior Harris campaign operative who has seen the data. It was this: Undecided voters didn’t believe that some of the highest profile things that happened during Trump’s presidency—even if they saw these things negatively—were his fault.This was the case on two of the biggest issues in the campaign—the 2020 economic crash and demise of reproductive rights, the operative told me. The result: The good pre-Covid economy during the Trump years largely defined undecided voters’ impressions of him, and no message about his first term could persuade them to the contrary.To be clear, this assessment does not mean voters are to blame. Rather, one culprit here might be President Biden. Because he stayed in the race too long, undecided voters viewed the post-Covid status quo and the very real pain of inflation only through the prism of their dislike of Biden, which blotted out hopes of attuning them to arguments about Trump’s culpability in all of it, the operative said. Some Democrats believe that the leading pro-Harris Super PAC, Future Forward, failed to spend enough of its enormous budget on advertising early on that might have reminded voters of the horrors of the Trump presidency. That perhaps allowed him to slowly rehabilitate himself and edge up his favorable numbers while Democrats weren’t looking. “There was a calculation among Democrats after 2020 that Trump was disqualified and wouldn’t be back,” Democratic data analyst Tom Bonier told me. “That evolved into a calculation that he would be disqualified by his legal troubles and could end up in jail. Democrats undeniably failed to disqualify him. The result was that by the time the Harris campaign started, it was too late.”Trump did this in part by shrugging off specific national cataclysms that voters disliked and were undeniably a direct result of his presidency, and Harris campaign internal data illustrated how successfully he did this, the campaign operative notes.For instance, the campaign regularly tested messages—with undecided and only softly committed voters in the battleground states—about the country’s massive hemorrhaging of jobs during 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The disaster was made far worse than it had to be by Trump’s pathological refusal to take it seriously.But these swing voters did not hold Trump responsible for the job losses. “People gave him a total pass because of Covid,” the operative says. “There was frustration inside the campaign that voters turned the massive job losses into a non-issue,” added a second Democratic operative privy to internal data. The same thing happened with undecided voters’ views of Trump’s efforts as president to cut Social Security programs: Voters didn’t believe he had done that, making it harder to make the case that he’d do so again.And even on abortion, in all this testing, voters didn’t hold Trump responsible for appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, something Trump openly boasted about during the campaign. That’s because they didn’t believe Trump himself was sincerely anti-choice. “They didn’t find him personally responsible for the fall of Roe,” the first operative said, adding that these voters thought “he’s ambivalent” about abortion, perversely enough, because many didn’t think he had “core principles.” Perhaps partly as a result, a sizable subset of voters who supported robust abortion rights voted for Trump.The result of all this was that these voters associated Trump’s first term with the economy before Covid, which they understandably remembered as a time of lower prices, and nothing else. “We needed to make the case that Trump was a failed president,” the Harris operative told me. “But by the time we got to Biden getting out and Harris being the nominee, that cake was too baked.”None of this means there weren’t other big reasons for the outcome or other failures by Democrats. The loss was broad, as The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein explains: The whole electorate shifted toward Trump in all types of counties; Harris maintained Democratic strength in affluent, educated suburbs but slipped a bit even there relative to Biden; she didn’t put up good enough numbers with women; and Trump gained among Latinos and non-college educated whites. Much of this, as Brownstein notes, was driven by deep unhappiness with the status quo among these groups. While reproductive rights and the threat posed by Trump both weighed on voters’ choices, it wasn’t enough to offset that deep dissatisfaction.A lot of factors contributed to this, undoubtedly. Incumbent parties across the world have been falling like dominoes, in part due to the deep trauma many societies experienced in the aftermath of Covid, which was then exacerbated by inflation everywhere. As Zach Carter writes at Slate, Trump’s “raw anger” resonated with this dissatisfaction, even as Democrats failed to sufficiently harness voter emotions for their own ends.Indeed, one might add that Trump’s vicious attacks on democracy and his authoritarian threats might have simply coded him to some swing voters as an outsider and disrupter of the status quo once again—despite having been president once already—just as he came across in 2016. Only this time, this posture exploited a level of dissatisfaction with a more hated status quo than anything voters saw in Obama’s comparatively placid and successful second term.But surely a key part of this is that Trump was permitted to rehabilitate himself and his presidency relatively unchallenged, after running the economy into the ground and presiding over countless needless Covid deaths, then inciting a violent coup and facing an array of serious criminal charges. Trump and his media allies launched years of propaganda designed to erase 2020 from voters’ memories entirely while hammering Biden’s recovery as a catastrophe despite it actually proving a largely successful one, which Trump will now undoubtedly take credit for as president.All throughout, this effort from Trumpworld met little resistance from Democrats and woefully inadequate scrutiny by the news media. That the unpopular Biden remained in the race so long—keeping voters focused on him as the target of blame for inflation and the awful post-Covid hangover—may have further enabled Trump to shake off association with those national wounds, slowly rewrite the story of his presidency and burnish retrospective approval of it. “One of the peculiar things of this campaign cycle was the fact that Biden got the blame for Covid,” GOP strategist Mike Madrid, a critic of Trump, told me. “He had to deal with the residual mess of it: the economic crash, the inflationary pressures, the societal pressures. People don’t even remember that as a Trump phenomenon.”All this amounts to a truly shocking failure that deserves its own reckoning, one that Democrats must learn from and never allow to happen again.
https://newrepublic.com/article/188238/trump-won-voter-perception-2024

2024-11-09 11:38:31

@nprofile…6kn7
https://images.newrepublic.com/4730b7eada35c7c9bbc9abec1a4dc4ab0bf37ae4.jpeg?w=1200&q=75&dpi=1&fm=pjpg&fit=crop&crop=faces&ar=3:2
There are 1,000 convoluted theories floating around on social media that purport to explain why Donald Trump won the presidential race. But some Democrats and people on Kamala Harris’s campaign have concluded that one very significant reason is a straightforward one: It proved disturbingly difficult to persuade undecided voters that Trump had been a bad president.Internal testing in all the battleground states over the course of many months yielded a result that unnerved the campaign, according to a senior Harris campaign operative who has seen the data. It was this: Undecided voters didn’t believe that some of the highest profile things that happened during Trump’s presidency—even if they saw these things negatively—were his fault.This was the case on two of the biggest issues in the campaign—the 2020 economic crash and demise of reproductive rights, the operative told me. The result: The good pre-Covid economy during the Trump years largely defined undecided voters’ impressions of him, and no message about his first term could persuade them to the contrary.To be clear, this assessment does not mean voters are to blame. Rather, one culprit here might be President Biden. Because he stayed in the race too long, undecided voters viewed the post-Covid status quo and the very real pain of inflation only through the prism of their dislike of Biden, which blotted out hopes of attuning them to arguments about Trump’s culpability in all of it, the operative said. Some Democrats believe that the leading pro-Harris Super PAC, Future Forward, failed to spend enough of its enormous budget on advertising early on that might have reminded voters of the horrors of the Trump presidency. That perhaps allowed him to slowly rehabilitate himself and edge up his favorable numbers while Democrats weren’t looking. “There was a calculation among Democrats after 2020 that Trump was disqualified and wouldn’t be back,” Democratic data analyst Tom Bonier told me. “That evolved into a calculation that he would be disqualified by his legal troubles and could end up in jail. Democrats undeniably failed to disqualify him. The result was that by the time the Harris campaign started, it was too late.”Trump did this in part by shrugging off specific national cataclysms that voters disliked and were undeniably a direct result of his presidency, and Harris campaign internal data illustrated how successfully he did this, the campaign operative notes.For instance, the campaign regularly tested messages—with undecided and only softly committed voters in the battleground states—about the country’s massive hemorrhaging of jobs during 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The disaster was made far worse than it had to be by Trump’s pathological refusal to take it seriously.But these swing voters did not hold Trump responsible for the job losses. “People gave him a total pass because of Covid,” the operative says. “There was frustration inside the campaign that voters turned the massive job losses into a non-issue,” added a second Democratic operative privy to internal data. The same thing happened with undecided voters’ views of Trump’s efforts as president to cut Social Security programs: Voters didn’t believe he had done that, making it harder to make the case that he’d do so again.And even on abortion, in all this testing, voters didn’t hold Trump responsible for appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, something Trump openly boasted about during the campaign. That’s because they didn’t believe Trump himself was sincerely anti-choice. “They didn’t find him personally responsible for the fall of Roe,” the first operative said, adding that these voters thought “he’s ambivalent” about abortion, perversely enough, because many didn’t think he had “core principles.” Perhaps partly as a result, a sizable subset of voters who supported robust abortion rights voted for Trump.The result of all this was that these voters associated Trump’s first term with the economy before Covid, which they understandably remembered as a time of lower prices, and nothing else. “We needed to make the case that Trump was a failed president,” the Harris operative told me. “But by the time we got to Biden getting out and Harris being the nominee, that cake was too baked.”None of this means there weren’t other big reasons for the outcome or other failures by Democrats. The loss was broad, as The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein explains: The whole electorate shifted toward Trump in all types of counties; Harris maintained Democratic strength in affluent, educated suburbs but slipped a bit even there relative to Biden; she didn’t put up good enough numbers with women; and Trump gained among Latinos and non-college educated whites. Much of this, as Brownstein notes, was driven by deep unhappiness with the status quo among these groups. While reproductive rights and the threat posed by Trump both weighed on voters’ choices, it wasn’t enough to offset that deep dissatisfaction.A lot of factors contributed to this, undoubtedly. Incumbent parties across the world have been falling like dominoes, in part due to the deep trauma many societies experienced in the aftermath of Covid, which was then exacerbated by inflation everywhere. As Zach Carter writes at Slate, Trump’s “raw anger” resonated with this dissatisfaction, even as Democrats failed to sufficiently harness voter emotions for their own ends.Indeed, one might add that Trump’s vicious attacks on democracy and his authoritarian threats might have simply coded him to some swing voters as an outsider and disrupter of the status quo once again—despite having been president once already—just as he came across in 2016. Only this time, this posture exploited a level of dissatisfaction with a more hated status quo than anything voters saw in Obama’s comparatively placid and successful second term.But surely a key part of this is that Trump was permitted to rehabilitate himself and his presidency relatively unchallenged, after running the economy into the ground and presiding over countless needless Covid deaths, then inciting a violent coup and facing an array of serious criminal charges. Trump and his media allies launched years of propaganda designed to erase 2020 from voters’ memories entirely while hammering Biden’s recovery as a catastrophe despite it actually proving a largely successful one, which Trump will now undoubtedly take credit for as president.All throughout, this effort from Trumpworld met little resistance from Democrats and woefully inadequate scrutiny by the news media. That the unpopular Biden remained in the race so long—keeping voters focused on him as the target of blame for inflation and the awful post-Covid hangover—may have further enabled Trump to shake off association with those national wounds, slowly rewrite the story of his presidency and burnish retrospective approval of it. “One of the peculiar things of this campaign cycle was the fact that Biden got the blame for Covid,” GOP strategist Mike Madrid, a critic of Trump, told me. “He had to deal with the residual mess of it: the economic crash, the inflationary pressures, the societal pressures. People don’t even remember that as a Trump phenomenon.”All this amounts to a truly shocking failure that deserves its own reckoning, one that Democrats must learn from and never allow to happen again.
https://newrepublic.com/article/188238/trump-won-voter-perception-2024

2024-11-08 23:23:07

@nprofile…6kn7
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Montanans voted this week to send more Democrats to the state legislature, smashing a Republican supermajority in Big Sky Country.Democrats gained nine more seats in the state’s House of Representatives, and two more in the state Senate, even as Montanans voted for conservative lawmakers to represent them in Washington. It won’t be enough to break the Republican trifecta in Montana, but it will be enough to allow Democrats to block conservative bills and negotiate with Governor Greg Gianforte on issues that splinter the state’s conservatives, reported the Montana Free Press. Tuesday’s results, which were made possible in large part thanks to recently redrawn legislative maps, mean that Montana Democrats will hold 41 of 100 House seats as well as 18 out of 50 Senate seats in the 2025 Legislature. State Representative Zooey Zephyr celebrated her re-election, writing in a statement that the win marked “historic gains” for Democrats in the traditionally red state.“Despite a national election cycle that saw a 2-3 point shift towards Republicans, Montanans voted to send an additional nine Democrats to the state House of Representatives,” Zephyr wrote. “This is the largest gain for Democrats in over 30 years and represents a clear repudiation of the Republican’s extreme and undemocratic policies.”Zephyr, the first and only openly transgender individual to be elected to Montana’s legislature, was censured and barred from the state House floor by the conservative caucus in 2023 for declaring that Republicans had “blood” on their hands for advancing an anti-trans bill.“By shattering the Republican supermajority, Montanans have taken steps towards restoring accountability and genuine representation in our state government, and have shown that when Democrats are unwavering in our values, we are rewarded at the ballot box,” Zephyr added in her statement Friday.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188235/democrats-historic-win-montana-legislature

2024-11-08 23:23:07

@nprofile…6kn7
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Now that Kamala Harris lost an election by larger numbers than polls indicated, some liberals are questioning the election results and alleging fraud. While nearly every Democrat and liberal was shocked by the election results coming on Tuesday and Wednesday, on social media, some people went overboard and sounded like upset Trump supporters in 2020. Mueller, She Wrote emerged as one of the more prominent liberal X (formerly Twitter) accounts critical of Trump during his first term, and initially expressed doubt over the results. Other users on X saw potential nefarious activity in the vote count. At one point, the hashtag #DoNotConcedeKamala trended on X. One person who wanted Harris to contest the results referenced previous Democratic losses. Many of these conspiracies are still continuing days later. Much of the objection appears to have to do with what Harris supporters perceived as less voter turnout, although this is somewhat unfounded, as turnout was up in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania that were the deciding factors in both 2020 and 2024. In all, 12 states exceeded previous records of turnout. The next four years may go by very slowly if Harris supporters spend it contesting election results like many right-wingers did after Trump’s loss in 2020. Many of the right’s objections culminated in half-baked schemes and even vote tampering. And then there’s the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection, where Trump’s MAGA diehards stormed the Capitol and attempted to halt the certification of the 2020 election. Ultimately, that effort failed, resulting in more than 1,500 criminal charges and the deaths of some of the rioters. Hopefully, liberals and Harris supporters will come to their senses before any similar attempt. Besides, it will probably end up looking like this.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188233/trump-win-liberal-election-fraud-conspiracies

2024-11-08 21:07:16

@nprofile…6kn7
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Kamala Harris raised more than $1 billion for her presidential campaign … which ultimately failed. In the afterglow of stunning defeat, some Democrats are now asking how she could have possibly spent anywhere near that much money and still lost her shot at the White House.The Harris campaign finished out the race with at least $20 million in debt, two sources familiar told Politico’s Christopher Cadelago, who wrote on X Wednesday night that of the $1 billion Harris had raised, only $118 million remained in cash as of October 16.With the realization that all of that spending ultimately accomplished very little and cost the party control of the White House and Senate (and maybe even the House), Democrats are now beginning to point fingers.“We spent money in stupid ways because we had a really bad strategy,” a former consultant to the DNC told Puck’s Tara Palmeri. He cited money sent to fund Representative Colin Allred’s failed challenge against Texas Senator Ted Cruz, as well as money directed to help in Iowa, a state Democrats never, ever win. “Instead of owning any mistakes, or being transparent about the voter data and strategies that were so obviously wrong, they shut off their Twitter account and are patting each other on the back,” the former consultant said. “We dug out of a deep hole but not enough.”Inside Harris’s crumbled campaign, some feel that they were misled about her chances, and led to believe it would be a margin-of-error race. In reality, Trump blew apart Harris’s play for the blue wall states and beat her by more than four million votes.“People are depressed and frustrated about the overconfident leadership of the campaign,” one staffer told Axios.One Biden staffer put it more simply: “How did you spend $1 billion and not win? What the fuck?”Harris’s campaign budget was closely guarded by campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon, so it’s unclear exactly how funds were allocated. An official for the DNC said that the majority of campaign spending was toward major events, paid media, and Harris’s supposedly expansive ground game—one that ultimately didn’t drum up that many votes at all.  What’s clear is that Harris ran a very expensive campaign, one that dwarfed Donald Trump’s efforts. The campaign spent an average of $7.5 million a day in August, in comparison to the $2.7 million that Trump spent. In September, the Harris campaign spent $152 million on advertising, more than double the $63 million that Trump shelled out.Unfortunately for Harris, dollars didn’t seem to translate into votes. And even after Harris lost, her campaign is still sending out slates of fundraising requests.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188216/kamala-harris-campaign-billion-fundraising

2024-10-28 14:35:01

Trump Team Desperately Tries to Erase Wildly Racist Puerto Rico “Joke”
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Donald Trump’s campaign is desperately trying to backtrack after a comedian at Trump’s New York rally at Madison Square Garden Sunday made a very racist joke about Puerto Rico. Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” at the rally, immediately drawing backlash from across the political spectrum, even including Republicans like Senator Rick Scott and Representative Maria Elvira Salazar.On Sunday night, the Trump campaign immediately went into damage control mode, with spokesperson Danielle Alvarez telling CNN, “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.” Then, Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt went on Fox & Friends early Monday morning before sunrise, and initially tried to spin the rally as “amazing” and diverse. “The energy last night was palpable in the room, the spirit. It was happiness and joy. And it was such a diverse group of people in that stadium packed to the house. There wasn’t an empty seat. You had black Americans, Latino Americans, Jewish Americans, men, women of all ages coming in support of President Trump and unafraid to show it,” Leavitt said. Steve Doocy then addressed the elephant in the room. “You know, this morning, the mainstream media has picked up on the comic’s comments, which were offensive, have been denounced by the campaign and everybody else. What went on with that?” Doocy asked Leavitt. Leavitt tried in vain to distance the campaign from Hinchcliffe’s language. “Look, it was a comedian who made a joke in poor taste,” she replied. “Obviously, that joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or our campaign. And I think it is sad that the media will pick up on one joke that was made by a comedian rather than the truths that were shared by the phenomenal list of speakers that we had.”But, none of the following speakers at the rally Sunday, including Trump himself, condemned or tried to distance the Trump campaign from Hinchcliffe. The comedian himself doubled down, accusing his critics, including Walz, of “having no sense of humor.” It also was a reminder of Trump’s poor record regarding Puerto Rico, and how he mishandled the aftereffects of Hurricane Maria’s devastation of the island in 2017. Trump’s rally was full of disturbing parallels to a 1939 rally in Madison Square Garden supporting the Nazi Party, and the racism was just the icing on the cake. Americans who oppose such racism, including the many Puerto Ricans living in battleground states, should keep that in mind when they head to the polls.
https://newrepublic.com/post/187592/trump-team-erase-racist-puerto-rico-joke

2024-10-28 14:35:01

Fox News (Yes, Really!) Exposes Joe Rogan’s Shady Pro-Trump Move
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Even Fox News has raised its eyebrows at podcasting behemoth Joe Rogan’s decision not to interview Vice President Kamala Harris despite penning in a three-hour slot for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.During a Sunday discussion on the network between Fox News host Howard Kurtz and pundit Caroline Downey, the MediaBuzz anchor claimed that it was Rogan who had stiffed the Harris campaign. Downey argued that the lopsided interview opportunity proved a “net benefit” to Trump’s campaign, since “every TV hit that Kamala Harris does, she comes off more bitter, more angry, and more jaded, whereas Trump comes off as a normal guy.”“So, you know, Kamala Harris claims she’s trying to cater to the younger generation, but she’s sticking to legacy media interviews for the most part, and she refused to go on Rogan,” Downey said.But Kurtz was quick to push back on Downey’s behind-the-scenes speculation.“Well, no, I don’t think that’s true. I think she wanted to go on Joe Rogan, and I don’t think Rogan wanted her,” Kurtz said. “I think it would have been a good thing if she’d gone.”“So, even though Rogan, I believe, has refused to have Trump on in the past, he seemed largely sympathetic to the former president, and you heard him dismiss the media as a bunch of left-wing Democrats,” the host added.In recent weeks, Trump has dodged mainstream news appearances, including going so far as to break election tradition by refusing to sit for a 60 Minutes interview in September, which he reportedly backed out of last-minute over fears that the rigorous show would fact-check him.Instead, Trump has relegated his TV appearances to friendlier, more sycophantic networks, including Fox News, whose anchor Maria Bartiromo did not interrupt or correct Trump when he claimed that the real Election Day threat is the “enemy from within” while suggesting that the military should forcibly involve itself in handling the election results.But a chat with Rogan—who hosts one of the biggest podcasts in the country for Republican and independent men—has the potential to significantly sway undecided voters for either candidate.
https://newrepublic.com/post/187601/fox-news-joe-rogan-donald-trump-interview

2024-10-25 20:55:01

Trump Issues First Call to Arms Over Election Fraud Conspiracies
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Donald Trump and his allies have suggested for months that the 2024 election will be “stolen,” much like they did in the 2020 cycle, prepping unfounded claims ahead of time that the election will be undermined by “noncitizen” voters, overseas ballot programs, and mail-in voting.But on Friday, Trump officially called it, writing a “cease and desist” on Truth Social that effectively announced the Republican presidential nominee already believes that the November election is rigged—mere days into early voting.“CEASE & DESIST: I, together with many Attorneys and Legal Scholars, am watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely because I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election,” Trump posted. “It was a Disgrace to our Nation!” Trump fleetingly acknowledged in September that he did, factually, lose the 2020 election. But his insistence on Friday that he would definitely win the 2024 race came with a threat: that anyone working for the other side of the aisle—from attorneys to election officials and donors—will face consequences when he does.“Therefore, the 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again,” Trump wrote. “We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T! Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”Trump’s allies have concretely worked to skew election results in battleground states. In Georgia, a pro-Trump state election board issued prohibitive regulations that would have made it significantly more difficult for the state to find people willing to volunteer for the increasingly arduous job. Trump praised the MAGA members of Georgia’s board days before the August move, describing Dr. Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares, and Janelle King as “pit bulls fighting for victory.”Those regulations included mandating that poll workers hand-count ballots after they were electronically filed, and granting local election officials the authority to refuse to certify the results. Both of those rules were thrown out by a judge earlier this month.Meanwhile, some of the most powerful conservatives in the federal legislature, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, have refused to state on the record that they will unequivocally accept the 2024 presidential election results. In an interview with NBC News’s Meet the Press earlier this month, Johnson wavered on whether he would do his job to certify the results regardless of who won, insisting that he would only do so “if the election is free and fair and legal.” “I think Donald J. Trump is your next president, and that can’t happen soon enough,” Johnson said at the time.
https://newrepublic.com/post/187578/donald-trump-first-call-election-fraud-conspiracies

2024-10-24 20:25:01

Damning Report Exposes How Little Time Josh Hawley Spends in Missouri
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Missouri Senator Josh Hawley is treating his home state of Missouri like a flyover state, according to a new report that shows just how rarely the hawkish Republican lawmaker returns there. Records of Hawley’s taxpayer funded travels reviewed by St. Louis Magazine revealed that the Missouri Republican has traveled between Washington, D.C., and the Show-Me State only 33 times between March 2019 and January 2024—an average of six times per year. Many of Hawley’s trips were short: eight of them involved Hawley hightailing out of Missouri after less than 48 hours. More than half the time, Hawley was traveling home around the holidays, which tended to be longer stays. Hawley’s longest trip home was between April 1, 2020, and May 1, 2020, around the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.While taxpayer funded trips provide an incomplete picture of Hawley’s travel, it is a relevant data point when considering his travel plans. It’s common for senators to expense travel between Washington and their home state, according to Democratic strategist Jacob Long, who spoke with St. Louis Magazine.Lucas Kunce, a Democrat running to unseat Hawley, responded to the report Thursday in a post on X. Kunce wrote that Hawley “isn’t running for reelection to keep serving us—he’s running to keep up his luxury lifestyle on the coast.”Hawley has previously attacked “coastal elites” and “liberal elites” as part of his political campaigns.The senator and his family previously purchased a house in Virginia, which is now valued at $1.7 million. He previously listed his sister’s residence in Ozark, Missouri, as his voting address, but now has two properties associated with his name in Christian County, less than a mile apart, according to the Kansas City Star. The one he technically owns was only bought in 2023. October has been a rough month for the self-described Christian nationalist. Earlier this month, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s editorial board endorsed Kunce, calling Hawley the “worst sitting senator in America right now,” and criticized him for pumping his fist in support of the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol. Hawley also came under fire over his use of a private jet to campaign around Missouri, which was first reported by the Missouri Independent. Hawley had previously attacked his 2018 opponent, Democrat Claire McCaskill, for using a private jet, but apparently spent more than $132,000 on chartered flights between mid-December and June.“Missouri’s flyover country for this guy,” said Kunce at the time, pointing out that he had been campaigning in a minivan with his wife and 16-month-old son.
https://newrepublic.com/post/187513/josh-hawley-damning-report-little-time-missouri

2024-10-24 14:25:01

Old Man Trump Is So Desperate for a War, He’s Inventing Them Now
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Donald Trump made up a fictional war with France Wednesday, and then claimed to have stopped it.During a speech in Duluth, Georgia, Trump—who previously touted himself a “wartime president” but now lies about how peaceful and safe his time in office was—was bragging about his record when he falsely claimed he really had prevented an international conflict. “You have no idea what I did in the White House. I stopped wars … with France!” Trump said. “France, you know the France story? They were gonna charge us, think of this, 25 percent to all Ameri—I have to protect American companies, whether we like ‘em or not. Some of ‘em I didn’t even like. You know Google is treating us much better, did you notice that? What happened to Google? They’re treating us much better.”“They say McDonalds was one of the most viewed things that they’ve ever had,” Trump cheered. Trump: "You have no idea what I did in the White House. I stopped wars with France."His brain then flits to Google and McDonald's. All of this in about 30 seconds. pic.twitter.com/yxgYlycUCM— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 24, 2024While there was obviously no threat of war with France, it’s possible that Trump was referring to a trade skirmish with France from his time in office. Paris passed a digital services tax on large tech companies including Google, Facebook, and Amazon in 2019. In response, Trump threatened to place tariffs of up to 100 percent on French goods such as champagne and luxury bags. Undeterred, France ordered the tech companies to pay up in 2020. After Joe Biden entered the White House in 2021, he suspended Trump’s plan for retaliatory tariffs against France. So the “war” Trump stopped wasn’t a war, it was a trade fight. And he didn’t even stop it. If anything, he escalated it. But this might explain his incoherent weave from France, to Google, to back to his favorite subject, himself.
https://newrepublic.com/post/187489/donald-trump-invent-war-france

2024-10-24 10:05:03

Searching for the Elusive Man Who Inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin
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One evening in December 1850, an escaped slave named John Andrew Jackson arrived at a handsome, white clapboard house in Brunswick, Maine, cold and desperate for somewhere to stay. He was fleeing north to Canada, striving to evade the slave-catchers who had just been empowered by a new law, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, to capture runaways even in free states like Maine. Upon arriving at the Brunswick house, Jackson encountered its mistress, a young housewife (and burgeoning writer) named Harriet Beecher Stowe. She considered whether to grant him refuge. Her husband was hundreds of miles from home. Before the Fugitive Slave Act had passed, Stowe later reflected in a letter, she might have “tried to send him somewhere else.” But these were desperate times. She allowed Jackson to sleep under her roof, giving him a bed in “our waste room.” Jackson, a gifted raconteur, entertained her children with stories and songs. Jackson stayed with Stowe for just a single night, but—writes the historian Susanna Ashton—it was “an encounter that, quite possibly, changed the world.” As Ashton argues in her intriguing new book, A Plausible Man: The True Story of the Escaped Slave Who Inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe drew on this fleeting interaction when, just seven weeks later, she began to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The novel, which tells the story of a long-suffering enslaved man, sold at least 300,000 copies in its first year and helped to inflame the passions of a nation hurtling toward war.Yet if Stowe’s protagonist was so forbearing that his name has become an epithet, Jackson is a far more compelling figure. An epic, thousand-mile escape from slavery to freedom was only the first act in a life that spanned the pulpit, the jailhouse, and a daring attempt to buy his former owners’ land. Jackson told his own life story in an 1862 memoir that serves as one of Ashton’s main sources. She came upon the memoir while “hunting down rare or out-of-print slave narratives” and was so entranced by Jackson’s “big personality” that she decided to dig further. The resulting book, though billed as biography or literary history, is more properly read as somewhere between a detective story and a caper. In searching for John Andrew Jackson, Ashton has depicted with nuance and restraint a life story that complicates the kind of mawkish or tidy assumptions about enslaved people contained in many works, perhaps most famously Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Her main character’s elusiveness is the story’s most remarkable feature.“I was born in South Carolina,” begins John Andrew Jackson’s memoir, published a decade after Uncle Tom’s Cabin. His parents, Betty and the unusually named Doctor Clavern, were slaves on the Sumter County plantation of Robert English. John Andrew came into the world in 1825, one of the more than 50 slaves owned by English, most of whom were forced to pick short-staple cotton beneath a burning sun. For reasons still obscure, he was apparently also known to his enslavers as “Jackson.”English was a striver, a locally powerful but widely disliked property owner; his wife, Elizabeth, and four daughters were memorably abusive, apparently delighting in whipping their slaves. According to Jackson’s memoir, the youngest English daughter, Martha, once ordered Jackson’s sister to be whipped 100 times for refusing to stop praying; the sister died as a result of the beating. Jackson himself was forced to endure “many whippings,” he would write.Sometime before 1840, Jackson began a relationship with another enslaved woman, Louisa, with whom he soon had a daughter, Jinny. English was irate, as Louisa belonged to a neighboring enslaver, meaning Jinny and any other children Jackson and Louisa would have would be the property of Louisa’s owner. English beat Jackson every time he visited Louisa—“at least every week,” Jackson later wrote. “I shall carry these scars to my grave.” To make matters worse, Louisa’s owner soon moved to Georgia, sundering Jackson’s family.Jackson apparently sought solace in prayer—and in resistance. In 1846, he somehow acquired a pony and rode it to a religious meeting without permission, an act of defiance so unforgettably bold that Irving Lowery, an enslaved man who lived nearby, wrote about it more than 50 years later in his own memoir. Elizabeth English ordered her overseer to give Jackson a hundred lashes—“a terrifying punishment … not far off from being a death sentence,” Ashton wrote—but he managed to flee into the nearby trees. Realizing he was “stuck in the swampy woods without recourse, supplies, or a feasible plan for sustainable escape,” Jackson returned the next day, but soon thereafter, on Christmas Day, he retrieved his pony and escaped for good. Desperate to recapture their lost property, the English family ran an advertisement offering a reward for his apprehension. Noting his cleverness, the advertisement warned white readers that Jackson “speaks plausibly.”Armed with little more than his plausible tongue, Jackson managed to charm a procession of acquaintances into helping him escape nearly 900 miles to Massachusetts. He quickly set about trying to raise enough money to purchase Louisa and Jinny’s freedom, making valuable contacts with nearby abolitionist activists. Soon, he was traveling around Massachusetts, telling his story and soliciting donations. It was the beginning of a life of storytelling, reinvention, and tireless fundraising.Not long thereafter, in 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, forcing Jackson to flee once again. It was on his trip north that he spent a single night at the home of Harriet Beecher Stowe. From her waste room (essentially a storage closet), Jackson moved on to other towns in Maine, apparently passing the freezing winter of 1850–51 in Portland. Once again, his skill at connecting with nearby activists ensured his safety—and ultimately his passage into Canada.Ashton recounts the remainder of Jackson’s life with aplomb, ably covering his years of lecturing in Canada and then in England, his itinerant preaching, his acquisition of literacy, his decision to write a memoir, The Experience of a Slave in South Carolina, and his remarriage, to Julia Watson, a runaway slave from North Carolina. The details of Watson’s life are few, but it is evident she accompanied her husband to England and sometimes lectured onstage alongside him, making her “possibly the first African American woman to speak in the British Isles about her enslaved experiences.” Throughout the 1860s, Jackson attracted fans and donations yet consistently alienated allies, including financial benefactors. He had “spent his life carefully constructing a persona of resilient bravado,” Ashton writes carefully; he “wasn’t a man to back down.” Shortly after the end of the Civil War, Jackson and Watson returned to the United States, where he found work with the Freedmen’s Bureau. He set about trying to buy up his former owners’ land and turn it into a community for freed slaves—or for his own family. It was just one among many utopian visions for the postwar South, and—like most of these visions—it faded amid fierce white supremacist resistance.Jackson continued to lecture and fundraise but repeatedly encountered legal jeopardy; in North Carolina, authorities brought charges of financial swindling against him (Ashton calls them “trumped-up”) and he was sentenced to five years of hard labor. The aging man served little of it, briefly escaping from prison and then managing to secure a swift release after journalistic allies turned his conviction into an international scandal.In reconstructing a life that included so many wild twists and turns, Ashton has accomplished a remarkable feat of historical excavation.Toward the end of his life, Jackson did attain small plots of South Carolina soil, including property that had “almost certainly” been owned by “English family relatives.” But his dreams for this land amounted to little. It was “not unlikely” Ashton writes, again with tact, that he was “pilfering or profiting from goods that had been donated.… He had always been a bit of a hustler, a survivor.”In reconstructing a life that included so many wild twists and turns, drawing on sources drenched alternately in their recordkeepers’ racism and the protagonist’s self-mythologization, Ashton has accomplished something remarkable, a feat of historical excavation. She unearths myriad newspaper articles, court records, and letters, though she also reflects on “what can and cannot be recorded.” The result of her digging is a nuanced depiction of Jackson, a man possessed of almost unfathomable resilience and also chutzpah, a combination that led to both iconoclasm and apparently fraud. Understandably, her sources do not allow Ashton to paint her other characters as convincingly, occasionally resulting in a flattening sentimentality. Jackson’s mother, Betty, “must have been someone special. Someone fearless”; his wife, Julia Watson, “must have been remarkable.” Must they? Ashton is on firmer ground in refusing to make such demands of Jackson.The most newsworthy of Ashton’s conclusions are her claims about Jackson’s influence on Harriet Beecher Stowe. For it is these claims—featured centrally on A Plausible Man’s book jacket and in its marketing material—that go beyond the biographical, instead seeking to reframe one of the most famous works of American literature. While Ashton insists that the more “significant story” inspired by Jackson was “his own,” no doubt many readers will arrive at this book trying to learn more about the origins of another.From nearly the first moment it appeared in print, Uncle Tom’s Cabin inspired readers to try to discover Stowe’s inspirations. Within a year, Stowe had published The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an assemblage of the press reports, slave narratives, and other sources from which she claimed to have either drawn or found subsequent “confirmation.
https://newrepublic.com/article/184492/searching-elusive-man-inspired-uncle-toms-cabin

2024-10-24 10:05:02

Anti-Abortion Activists Want to Have It Both Ways
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Since Roe was overturned, abortion rates have gone up in most states with abortion bans, The New York Times reported Wednesday. Perhaps this might alarm anti-abortion activists, like Kristan Hawkins, president of the anti-choice group Students for Life America, prominent among those who helped end Roe, and who the Times interviewed for their story. For Hawkins, the fault lies with states doing exactly what the Dobbs decision allowed them to do: make their own abortion laws. “A serious breakdown in the law takes place when one state attempts to interfere with another state’s efforts to protect their citizens,” Hawkins told Times.This is, obviously, spin. But what’s striking is how Hawkins’s spin contradicts the prominent narrative of conservatives, including Trump and JD Vance, who claim that Dobbs merely “returned abortion to the states.” Claiming that Dobbs simply empowered the states to decide is how Republicans attempt to have it both ways: acknowledge the popularity of legal abortion yet still please the anti-abortion activists they need on their side.Hawkins, though, maintains that having fifty competing legal regimes governing abortion would be total chaos. And the implied solution to all this disorder is simple: a national ban on abortion.Hawkins is not some undergraduate with edgy, “heterodox” opinions, the kind who pops up in the page Times with some frequency. Around the time she actually was a student, according to her own biography, she was working for the Republican National Committee and was an appointee in the George W. Bush administration. Students for Life may sound like a smallish group who hand out literature on campus—some chapters do—but conservative dark money maestro Leonard Leo sits on their board. They are in the same network of Leo-backed groups, such as the Heritage Foundation and Alliance Defending Freedom, who lobby Congress together and file amici briefs in the same Supreme Court cases, including the case meant to take mifepristone, which can be used for abortions, off the market. Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts spoke at Students for Life’s annual summit in January. “We meet today amid a pro-abortion media narrative of smug triumphalism,” Roberts told the student attendees. Heritage also had a Project 2025 promotional booth. The Project 2025 anti-abortion agenda shares much with Students for Life’s.Even when they win, the anti-abortion movement poses as the victims. No one should be surprised that Hawkins, who seeks an end to abortion altogether, is not concerned with “states’ rights,” as it were. A national ban is already part of the Republican Party platform adopted at this year’s convention, even though Trump and Vance may pretend it is not. I don’t mean the platform’s single use of the word “abortion,” which appears in its opposition to “Late Term Abortion.” Rather, the gesture toward a possible national abortion ban is buried in what might read like the most banal reiteration of promises to uphold the Constitution: “We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied Life or Liberty without Due Process, and that the States are, therefore, free to pass Laws protecting those Rights.” This is a thinly veiled reference to a dubious anti-abortion legal strategy: that a fertilized egg is a legal person with constitutional rights—rights that, inevitably, outweigh the rights of the pregnant person.That’s an incredibly extreme move, one that shreds the intentions of the 14th Amendment, one of three Reconstruction-era amendments that recognized recently emancipated Black people in the United States as citizens, and the cornerstone of countless civil rights decisions by the Supreme Court into the 20th century—including Roe. Hawkins is extreme, even by anti-abortion movement standards. She wants to outlaw birth control pills and IUDs, claiming they “put women at risk and they kill children.” As part of this effort, she and Students for Life routinely push health misinformation, casting contraception as a form of abortion, or insisting that an abortion to save the life of the mother is not an abortion, but an act of “maternal-fetal separation.” She must know, as she can see the same polls everyone else does, that such positions are deeply, deeply unpopular. That may be why some of the more extreme measures she is pushing, such as giving fertilized eggs rights as legal persons, tend to come a bit cloaked or buried in jargon.Hawkins was not wrong when she tried to paint the post-Roe world as one in which states’ laws are interfering with one another, with pregnant people caught between conflicts in the laws where they live and the laws where they travel to obtain an abortion. But she is not being honest. She helped unleash this chaos. And now she wants to benefit from it.
https://newrepublic.com/article/187476/students-for-life-abortion-states

2024-10-24 10:05:01

Europe’s Electric Vehicle Woes Are a Lesson for EVs Everywhere
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Electric cars got top billing at this year’s Paris Auto Show. At the world’s largest such showcase, a central exhibition hall featured an “electric factory” display designed, in the colors of the French flag, to mimic the spine-like assembly lines that churn out electric cars and internal combustion engines. Along the exteriors of those lines were a series of questions answered inside of them, where clumps of teens on school trips and car enthusiasts stood by read to hear the answers: are electric vehicles produced in France? What new professions are created by electric vehicle production? Just outside the exhibition grounds, autoworkers that spend their days in real-world auto factories had a question of their own: Why are so many of them losing their jobs? A few hundred trade unionists from France, Italy, the United States and elsewhere gathered in the rain to rail against Stellantis chief Carlos Tavares, the embattled CEO whose global auto group is fending off accusations of mismanagement from workers and investors alike. Late last month, Stellantis issued a profit warning amid lower than expected sales “across most regions.” The company has temporarily suspended production of its fully electric Fiat 500e, citing low sales as it temporarily lays off workers in Italy; Stellantis plans to start producing a hybrid version of the car in 2025 or 2026. Similarly, in the United States, the company has blamed “market conditions” to backtrack on a pledge—enshrined in its contract with the UAW—to re-open and expand an idled plant in Belvidere, Illinois to include a $3.2 billion battery plan. Stellantis recently announced, too, that it will expand production of its best-selling, gas-powered Dodge RAM pick-ups in Mexico. Starting on October 12, they began laying off approximately 1,100 workers from their Warren Truck Assembly Plant in Michigan after ending production of the RAM 1500 Classic pickup there.On October 18, Stellantis workers in Italy carried out a 24-hour nationwide strike, culminating in a rally that brought an estimated 20,000 people out to Rome’s Piazza del Popolo. UAW members recently authorized their own strike against Stellantis, and are in tense negotiations with the company over unrealized investment commitments. The company has filed 9 federal lawsuits against the UAW and 2 dozen locals disputing the union’s contract violation claims and right to strike over them, arguing the pledge was always “contingent upon plant performance, changes in market conditions and consumer demand.”Amid all this, Tavares has tried to paint himself as a stalwart defender of electrification, ready to weather the winds of change even if that proves difficult in the near-term. Speaking to the Financial Times at the Paris Auto Show, he warned that slowing the transition to electric vehicles would be “a big trap,” and blamed governments for failing to provide adequate incentives to make the switch. Unions on either side of the Atlantic, however, argue that they’re paying the price for Stellantis’s longtime, short-term focus on maximizing profits and executive pay. “Stellantis has underinvested in this,” i.e. the electric transition, says Maurizio Oreggia, international coordinator for the Italian metalworkers’ union FIOM. He agrees that the Italian government and European Union aren’t doing enough to offer public support for electrification; bolstering those is among FIOM’s top demands. But he also sees Stellantis’s own choices as a key reason why the automaker is falling behind. “This transition is necessary given climate change, if you look at the situation of the planet. But we’ve known we have to do this for many years,” he adds. Instead of reinvesting profits into research and development, improving working conditions or electrification, “they have distributed profits to shareholders, never to the workers.” Earlier this month, Stellantis announced that it had bought $1.1 billion worth of stock back from shareholders since August. Tavares received a 56 percent pay bump last year. Defending his lavish compensation package in April, Tavares said it was simply part of the contract between himself and the company, “just as there are contracts for soccer players and for Formula 1 drivers.”The situation facing autoworkers is especially acute in Italy, where anger at Stellantis is pitched. Stellantis was created in 2021 through the merger of the French auto group Peugeot and Fiat Chrysler Automotives. Fiat has long been Italy’s only mass-market automaker, responsible for the bulk of the roughly 1.5 million cars made there as recently as the early 2000s. This year, Italy is expected to produce fewer than 500,000 cars, half as much as it made in 2018 and 250,000 less than it made last year. That decline has been especially hard-felt in the northern city of Turin, the longtime home of “Mamma Fiat” that has seen four car plants close since 1982.“The trend is downward in all European countries, but in Italy it’s been particularly strong. Various governments never allowed a foreign player to enter the Italian domestic market for car production,” says economist Simone Gasperin. In addition to heavily subsidizing auto plant construction, Italy historically used state-owned enterprises to support its car industry. That included efforts to build out the country’s highway system and offer cheaper gasoline prices via Eni. Through Alfa Romeo, Gasperine explains that the Italian government “was able to inject a dose of competition, which made Fiat more sensitive to things like investing to remain competitive. It was a way to reduce their monopolistic power.” Fiat acquired Alfa Romeo in 1986 amid a wave of privatizations. Since then, successive governments have generally relied on consumer-side subsidies to bolster its auto sector. And whereas the Inflation Reduction Act’s consumer-side EV incentives require that cars and their components be made in the U.S. or its trade partners in order to qualify, EU law generally prohibits these kinds of domestic content requirements.Even the comparatively generous state support for automakers to go electric in the United States can’t make up for their decades spent doubling down on internal combustion engines. Companies have reliably resisted regulatory efforts—like more stringent fuel efficiency standards—that might have spurred innovation. “Stellantis was one of the slowest, if not the slowest, to begin their transition to the next generation of vehicles,” says UAW Region 4 Director Brandon Campbell, who joined the demonstration in Paris and the strike rally in Rome; he first came to the union when he started working at the Belvidere plant in 1994. “They’re paying the price for that, but that is driven by their poor management and their poor decisions.” (For the sake of disclosure, my partner works for the UAW.)The EU has moved to end the sale of internal combustion engine-powered vehicles by 2035, a decisions now facing fierce pushback powerful parties within the bloc. While such a policy certainly spurs demand for EVs, it’s not at all clear that European companies will be making them. “Europe has already a much more developed EV market than the U.S., but is not prepared to produce most of the EVs that will be sold here,” Gasperin tells me. As Chinese companies roll out affordable EVs at home and abroad, Stellantis and other European automakers have felt pressured to lower prices in order to compete with foreign competition and convince consumers to buy the still relatively limited range of electric models they’re producing. Larger and more expensive cars make for bigger margins, though. In the U.S., where there’s no looming phase-out deadline for gas-powered cars, automakers including Stellantis have seemed content to double down on mostly gas-powered best-sellers like the RAM and Ford F-Series—however limited the demand for those hulking, pricey trucks and SUVs might be elsewhere.“Manufacturers’ only strategy is to preserve their margins,” Sophie Binet, secretary-general of France’s powerful General Confederation of Labour (CGT), told those gathered outside the Paris Auto Show last week. “Given our salaries, no worker can afford a car that costs 40, 50, 60 or 100,000 euros.” As the factories making those cars close, and companies move production abroad, she quipped that “the CGT project is simple: a small economical electric vehicle entirely manufactured in France, which could be sold for around 15,000 euros.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/187470/stellantis-strike-electric-vehicles

2024-10-23 17:25:01

Trump Brings Back Notorious 2020 Lawyer in Sign of Trouble to Come
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Less than two weeks from the election, Donald Trump is speaking to one of the lawyers who helped him contest the 2020 election results. The New York Times reports that Trump has been in touch with Kurt Olsen, who spoke to Trump several times over the phone on January 6, 2021 while a violent mob attacked the Capitol building in an attempt to overturn the election results for Trump. Olsen later faced court sanctions in 2022 for making baseless claims about voting machines in Arizona.Olsen has reportedly told Trump this time around that the former president should take legal action to make sure voting machine data from Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia is preserved, according to the Times. Trump reportedly encouraged this line of action.Trump and Olsen first met in late 2020, as the then-president was talking to anyone offering to help him stay in power. Olsen later joined the Texas attorney general’s doomed appeal to the Supreme Court to stop Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin from certifying Joe Biden’s victory over Trump. When that failed, he drafted a civil complaint based on the lawsuit, and tried to bring it in person to the acting U.S. attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen. Justice Department officials found the complaint flawed, and said it didn’t seem viable. In 2022, Olsen represented Kari Lake in her failed attempt to overturn her loss in the Arizona race for governor. In July, Olsen was hit with an ethics complaint from the States United Democracy Center and Lawyers Defending American Democracy, who asked the Maryland Attorney Grievance Commission and the District of Columbia’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel to investigate Olsen’s election denial activities.“Kurt Olsen has abused his law license to spread lies about our elections in the courtroom time and time again, and his pattern of unethical conduct shows he’s not going to stop,” said Gillian Feiner, Senior Counsel at the States United Democracy Center, at the time.The fact that Trump is seeking out someone the Times describes as a “fringe figure” suggests that he is worried enough about the coming election to attempt the same dangerous schemes as he did in 2020. None of Olsen’s schemes worked then, but Trump still has the ability to whip up confusion and incite an angry mob. Plus, he now has his supporters in important election posts across the country. The former president still hasn’t faced any consequences for his actions four years ago. What is he willing to try this time?
https://newrepublic.com/post/187450/trump-2020-lawyer-overturn-election

2024-10-22 20:15:01

Trump’s “Secretary of Retribution” Reveals Plan to Steal a Swing State
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Donald Trump’s cronies are already making plans to overturn North Carolina’s election results if a majority of the state’s voters choose Kamala Harris for president. Ivan Raiklin, a supporter of the former president who calls himself Trump’s future “secretary of retribution,” has prepared a plan to deliver North Carolina’s 16 electoral votes to Trump, regardless of how the votes go. Ralkin, an attorney and military veteran, has close ties to people in Trump’s inner circle, including Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser who was pardoned by the former president. Raiklin told his plan to an audience at the Christian nationalist ReAwaken America Tour over the weekend in Selma, North Carolina, after being introduced by Flynn, according to Rolling Stone. Raiklin claimed that Hurricane Helene’s devastation may hurt Republican turnout in the state and give Democrats the edge on November 5, so he asked the crowd to pressure the state’s Republican leadership to ignore a favorable Democratic result. Specifically, the leaders he mentioned were North Carolina state House Speaker Tim Moore and embattled Lt. Governor Mark Robinson, who presides over the state Senate. Raiklin’s plan involves the state legislature reacting quickly in January 2025 before the election results are certified by Congress, but only if Trump loses. “If it’s legit, we don’t have to worry, right?” Raiklin told the partisan audience. “But who thinks it’s going to be legit? You think they’re just going to give it to you? No, there’s going to be a fight!” Raiklin told the crowd to “apply the necessary motivation” to the state’s Republicans, who control both houses of the legislature, by telling the senators and representatives that “they have the political obligation to remedy an illegitimate election.” In Raiklin’s mind, this process, which he said is “the only way … we can address” the “calamity in western North Carolina” in a “legal, moral, ethical manner under our Constitution,” would be livestreamed on Rumble and Elon Musk’s X, adding that he hoped the “radical left media” would “start to cry.”Raiklin’s plan is far-fetched, but not far off from the many fake elector schemes attempted after Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. While each one of those was thwarted, Raiklin’s cryptic language could incite MAGA-aligned protesters into attempting to force the state’s legislature to overturn a possible Democratic victory, which could turn into a mini-January 6. It all depends on whether Raiklin’s half-baked plan garners any support, or if he’s exposed as a blustering troll.
https://newrepublic.com/post/187411/trump-secretary-retribution-plan-steal-swing-state-north-carolina-election

2024-10-22 15:45:01

Elon Musk’s Massive Plan to Help Trump Is Hilariously Crumbling
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Reports of glitchy-door knocking canvassing by Elon Musk’s super PAC just got way more real, spelling serious trouble for Donald Trump, who has almost entirely outsourced his door-to-door efforts in battleground states to the billionaire technocrat.It was previously reported that the app used by Trump and Musk’s canvassers was plagued by design problems and glitches, making it difficult to determine whether employees in swing states were actually doing their jobs. Now, it seems that some employees are exploiting the app’s faulty location functions.A video made by one Nevada-based canvasser with a vendor working with Musk’s America PAC demonstrated for users just how easy it is to fake door-knocks. The video shows users how a GPS-spoofing app can make it appear as if the user went to the homes of Trump voters. In reality, they didn’t need to go anywhere, and could simply falsify survey responses. The video, which was obtained by The Guardian, has been shared with hundreds of canvassers, but it’s unclear how widespread the spoofing practice actually is. America PAC and several of its vendors including Blitz, the vendor operating in Nevada and Arizona, released a joint statement. “Every door that is marked leaves unique fingerprints, and the fingerprints of a door marked with a spoofing app leave these fingerprints in neon colors. We have tech-enabled auditing and fraud prevention tools to identify and dismiss the bad apples, the Pac doesn’t pay a dime, and the door gets knocked by the next canvasser,” the statement said. Blitz, the vendor operating in Arizona and Nevada uses a “Quickbooks Workforce” app to monitor the location of its canvassers, two people familiar told The Guardian, but even that can be manipulated by simply turning off location services.This poses a particular problem in battleground states such as Nevada and Arizona. Leaked data from America PAC, also obtained by The Guardian, showed that roughly 24 percent of door-knocks in Arizona and 25 percent of door-knocks in Nevada last week were flagged as “unusual,” an internal metric that indicates faked door-knocks. Trump’s allies have been begging him to ditch Musk, and his malfunctioning canvassing efforts, as conservative activists and leaders report that they’ve seen little of the efforts Musk has apparently poured $75 million into over the last few months.
https://newrepublic.com/post/187389/donald-trump-elon-musk-plan-ground-game

2024-10-22 14:40:01

Trump Reveals Why He Wants America to Return to 1798 in Ominous Speech
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When Donald Trump says “Make America Great Again,” he has a specific ideal year in mind: 1798, when slavery was legal and when America carried out mass deportations based on little pretext. Speaking to a crowd in Greenville, North Carolina, Trump on Monday vowed to “rescue every town across America that has been invaded and conquered” by jailing and deporting immigrants by utilizing an arcane 200-year old law. “I will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 18– no, of 1798,” said Trump, first mixing up his dates. “Think of that, 1798. That’s when we had real politicians that said, ‘We are not gonna play games.’ “We have to go back to 1798.” Trump: We have to go back to 1798 pic.twitter.com/o3RWSRLHJk— Acyn (@Acyn) October 21, 2024Believe it or not, this is not the first time he has made such a ridiculous claim. Over the past month, Trump has regularly suggested sending America back more than two centuries in order to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Speaking on October 11 in Aurora, Colorado, he suggested he’d bring back the law to “target and dismantle every migrant criminal network operating on American soil.” He also spread misinformation about “migrant crime” in the area and nationwide, and called his plan to target suspected gang members “Operation Aurora.”The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 is one part of four laws put in place by President John Adams as part of the “Alien and Sedition Acts” meant to protect against French invasion. These laws allowed the government to increase citizenship requirements, crackdown on disloyalty, and deport noncitizens en masse. The law was meant to protect the United States only during “a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government,” or if a foreign nation had threatened war. Notably, it was used by President Franklin Roosevelt to detain thousands of people of Japanese descent, including U.S. citizens, in internment camps during World War II.It’s unclear under exactly what pretext Trump would use the law. Would he make the case that MS-13 or the Tren de Aragua gang is a foreign nation? Or would he settle for the GOP’s language of declaring war on Mexico? As Katherine Yon Ebright, counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, told Axios, “the rhetorical framing of migration as an invasion is not only something that turns up the temperature in the political landscape, but it’s also something that is meant to conflate legal and rhetorical concepts.” Even if he has no real plan to use a 200-year-old law in an authoritarian crackdown, as we’ve seen in Springfield, Ohio, this type of language can result in vigilante violence against everyday people.
https://newrepublic.com/post/187380/trump-america-return-1798-immigrants

2024-10-22 09:00:15

Trump Makes Asinine Speaker Choice for Rally in Key Swing State
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If Donald Trump wanted to distance himself from Project 2025, he sure isn’t doing a great job.Joining Trump for his bus tour across Pennsylvania this week is Monica Crowley, his former assistant secretary of the treasury for public affairs. But perhaps more importantly, Crowley is also a signed contributor to the Project 2025 Mandate For Leadership, which Trump has been desperately trying to disavow as the election nears.A footnote reads in Project 2025, Crowley is not simply a passive signatory. “All contributors to this chapter are listed at the front of this volume, but Monica Crowley [and others] deserve special mention,” the document reads.Crowley will join Trump as he stumps at nearly dozens stops across the state. This comes after Crowley took on a role helping JD Vance prepare for his vice presidential debate last month, serving as a mock moderator for the senator during practice sessions. Throughout the campaign, Trump has denied his many connections to the Project 2025 manifesto and its signatories. Earlier in October, Trump ranted about “Lyin’ Kamal [sic] Harris” and her mission to “make a thing called Project 2025 the central theme of her campaign, advertising and all.” Trump claims he has “nothing to do with it, NEVER READ IT, NEVER SAW IT,” but evidence says otherwise.
https://newrepublic.com/post/187370/trump-speaker-choice-rally-swing-state

2024-10-22 09:00:14

“Black Nazi” Who? Trump Feigns Ignorance of GOP Candidate in N.C.
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Donald Trump is no longer simply trying to distance himself from North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson. Now, the former president is outright pretending he doesn’t know anything about the scandal-plagued gubernatorial candidate.At a campaign stop in the Tar Heel state on Monday, Politico asked Trump whether he would still urge his supporters to vote for Robinson. “I’m not familiar with the race right now. I haven’t looked, I haven’t seen it,” Trump said.Within the span of eight months, Trump has gone from endorsing Robinson, calling him “Martin Luther King on steroids,” to dodging questions about him.Last month, a bombshell CNN report alleged that Robinson had left inflammatory and lewd comments on a pornography website’s message board, including calling himself a “Black Nazi.” Trump has neglected to withdraw his endorsement of Robinson, or really address the scandal at all.Still, as Trump has sought to drum up votes in North Carolina, Robinson has been notably absent and hasn’t appeared with the Republican presidential nominee since August.
https://newrepublic.com/post/187372/trump-feigns-ignorance-mark-robinson-gop-north-carolina

2024-10-22 09:00:12

MAGA’s New Outrageous Tim Walz Conspiracy Tied to Russian Disinfo Plot
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Earlier this month, Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz was plagued by MAGA rumors that he had sexually groomed a former student of his. Now, it appears that unfounded gossip was funded by a familiar source of misinformation: Russia.Last week, an anonymous account on X, “DocNetyoutube,” claimed that he had spoken with a former student of Walz’s who had been abused by him during Walz’s tenure as a high school teacher and football coach. That same account had a history of elevating other conspiracies, and conveniently, was deactivated shortly after the accusations gained ground. It was unclear whether the account had been offlined by the account owner or if X had removed it.Experts believe that the Russia-aligned network called Storm-1516 was behind the account, reported Wired. Storm-1516’s content relies heavily on faked primary sources, fooling American viewers into believing that fabricated documents, audio, and video support their baseless conspiracies. NBC News estimated that the prolific group—whose false narratives have lured politicians at the highest levels of government, including Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance—is responsible for at least 50 conspiracies in the last year alone.A video circulated by another account on X elevated a deep fake of a man identifying himself as the former student, Matthew Metro. But the real Metro—who was tracked down by The Washington Post on Monday—dispelled the outlandish smear, telling the paper that he was dismayed to find out that a group had used his identity to fuel a vicious and false attack on Walz. Metro told the Post that he had attended one of the schools that Walz taught at, but had never met him.Last month, another pro-Trump misinformation superspreader was ousted as a beneficiary of Russian state-controlled media. Tenet Media, which funded the work of popular far-right personalities, including podcaster Tim Pool and Lauren Southern, folded under the pressure of a Justice Department investigation that found the company had been backed to the tune of millions of dollars from Russian state-controlled media.Weeks later, another burgeoning MAGA outlet, Intelligencer—which has no apparent connection with New York Magazine’s Intelligencer—was caught with ties to Russia. Some of Trump’s closest allies were tied to the outlet, including former Trump policy aide George Papadopoulos and his wife Simona Mangiant. Nearly half of the company’s board members are former aides, surrogates, or fake electors for Trump’s previous campaigns.The site’s financial backing did not indicate that it had received funds directly from the Kremlin. Instead, Intelligencer began as a subsidiary of a right-wing radio station in Australia that covers a host of conservative U.S. issues, including climate change denial and Covid-19 conspiracies, until George Eliason, an American journalist with experience in Ukraine, took over the website. In recent months, Intelligencer’s conspiracy-laden articles were shared by the likes of Alex Jones and former Trump aide Roger Stone.
https://newrepublic.com/post/187376/maga-tim-walz-conspiracy-russian-disinformation

2024-10-18 17:05:01

Trump Bemoans Harvey Weinstein’s Prosecution in Bonkers Interview
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Donald Trump expressed surprise at Harvey Weinstein’s legal trouble in an interview on The Dan Bongino Show Friday morning.“I was so amazed that Harvey Weinstein got schlongged. He got hit as hard as you can get hit. Because he was sort of the king of the woke, right? And yet he got it. And I figured that maybe he wouldn’t get hit so hard,” Trump told Bongino. Trump seemed to be insinuating some sort of left-wing or liberal conspiracy behind who faces criminal charges in referring to Weinstein, a convicted serial sex offender and longtime Democratic donor. “So when they do get hit, they get hit. But that’s the only one I can think of. Normally they protect everybody. What they did with [Eric Adams] is very suspect,” Trump added, referring to the recently indicted New York City mayor, a Democrat. Donald Trump just now:"I was so amazed that Harvey Weinstein got schlongged, he got hit as hard as you can get hit. Because he was sort of king of the woke, right? And yet he got hit."What? pic.twitter.com/GNb5m0dOcf— Ammar Moussa (@ammarmufasa) October 18, 2024There’s a lot to unpack from Trump’s comments, as his claim that liberals tend to protect their own from prosecution also isn’t true, considering the cases of Democrats Senator Bob Menendez and Representative Henry Cuellar this year as well as others in recent decades. Trump also brought up Weinstein unprompted, and said “I don’t know him well.” This raises the question of whether the former president is lying and did know Weinsten, which then raises further questions about whether Trump knew about Weinstein’s reputation as a serial abuser. It wouldn’t be too much of a surprise, considering Trump’s own record with sexual abuse.It’s a reminder of Trump’s relationship with another infamous sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein. The former president has praised Epstein as a “good salesman” and was named in the documents released following a lawsuit against the billionaire from one of his victims.
https://newrepublic.com/post/187321/trump-bemoans-harvey-weinsteins-prosecution-bonkers-interview

2024-10-17 22:15:01

DeSantis Lawyer Sounds Alarm About Administration’s Authoritarian Turn
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Last week, a lawyer who worked for the Florida Department of Health resigned, and a letter obtained Thursday by the Miami Herald indicates that he didn’t like the state agency’s decision to prosecute television stations for airing political ads.John Wilson, the head attorney for the department, wrote in the letter that “A man is nothing without his conscience.”“It has become clear in recent days that I cannot join you on the road that lies before the agency,” Wilson wrote. Earlier this month, the department sent cease-and-desist letters to TV stations who aired political ads supporting Amendment 4, a ballot initiative which if approved by Florida voters on Election Day, would increase access to abortion. The letters threatened to criminally prosecute the stations that didn’t take the ads down. Wilson, along with Florida’s Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, the head of the department, are facing a federal lawsuit over the letters. The plaintiff is the group behind Amendment 4, Floridians Protecting Freedom, who allege that the threats violate the Constitution’s First Amendment rights to freedom of speech.In his letter, Wilson stated that he had worked for the state for 14 years, and as the department’s general counsel since 2022, and said that circumstances convinced him that he couldn’t work there anymore.“I wish that were not the case, but I take great comfort in knowing that the lawyers I leave behind will rise to the occasion and provide you the zealous representation you deserve,” wrote Wilson, but the letter didn’t go into more detail, according to the Herald. The ads feature a woman named Caroline who said that she received a terminal brain cancer diagnosis when she was two months pregnant and would have lost her baby, as well as her own life, if she didn’t receive an abortion.“The doctors knew that if I did not end my pregnancy, I would lose my baby, I would lose my life, and my daughter would lose her mom,” Caroline said in the ad. “Florida has now banned abortion even in cases like mine. Amendment Four is gonna protect women like me.”Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has spared no effort to fight against the ballot initiative even as his state was hit by Hurricanes Helene and Milton, spreading misinformation on his X account along with his legal threats. Last month, the state even sent police officers to the homes of people who signed a petition supporting the ballot initiative. At the time, DeSantis defended the zealous police action and even invoked the Republican bogeyman of voter fraud. It would appear that he’s very worried about the state’s abortion ban being negated at the ballot box.
https://newrepublic.com/post/187293/desantis-lawyer-sounds-alarm-administrations-authoritarian-turn

2024-10-17 17:45:01

Harris’s Harsh Takedown of Fox’s Bret Baier Exposes MAGA’s Biggest Lie
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Judging by the video that Kamala Harris’s campaign is circulating, her aides are pleased with one particular exchange during her interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier. In it, Harris dressed down Baier for playing video of Donald Trump that sanitized away his threat to unleash the military on “the enemy within.”Many observers immediately surmised that this moment—which showed Harris digging in hard against Baier—could wreck Trump’s most cherished spin about Harris. As Andrew Egger noted at The Bulwark, Harris punctured the “right-wing caricature” of her as “an insipid airhead with no ability to think on her feet.”But this is a seminal moment for another reason as well. It starkly revealed the degree to which Fox News—and by extension Trump’s other right-wing media propagandists—has constructed an informational universe around Trump that, at the most fundamental level, is comprehensively fictional. MAGA’s biggest deception of all may be its portrayal of Trump as enjoying public support that is not just authentically, broadly, deeply majoritarian, but also is only constrained from realizing its full explosive potential by interference from corrupt institutions like the media and the Deep State. The reality is the opposite: Without the massive propaganda support system he benefits from—and the gravitational pull it exerts on mainstream news outlets—Trump, who has never enjoyed majority support in this country, probably could not long politically survive.Harris’s confrontation with Baier illustrates the point. After Harris pointed out that Trump has threatened to target an “enemy within,” Baier said that Fox News had asked Trump to address those comments at its town hall on Wednesday. Baier then played Trump’s response at that town hall, but he left out the footage of Trump recommitting to targeting the “enemy within,” only airing Trump’s insistence that he is the one treated as the enemy. Watch the Harris’ campaign video of the moment:Fox News selectively edited out the clip of Trump they played during their Harris interview, omitting the part where he called Americans who don’t support him “the enemy within,” “dangerous,” “sick,” and “evil” pic.twitter.com/Rk7Bsr8qA9— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 17, 2024That makes Trump look uniformly like the victim of corrupt political prosecutions—prosecutions that are actually in keeping with the rule of law—while omitting Trump’s explicit doubling down on his threat. Harris called out the omission. “With all due respect, that clip was not what he has been saying about ‘the enemy within,’” Harris noted. “You didn’t show that.”Baier protested, but Harris kept it up, essentially accusing him of concealing what he knows to be true about Trump. “You and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people,” Harris said. She added:He has talked about going after people that are engaged in peaceful protest. He has talked about locking people up because they disagree with him. This is a democracy. And in a democracy, the president of the United States, in the United States of America, should be willing to be able to handle criticism without saying he’d lock people up for doing it. And this is what is at stake.What Harris revealed here is that, at the most basic level of all, Trump is campaigning on an explicit vow to treat the opposition and its voters as sub-American. He has threatened persecution of the “vermin” opposition, vowed to use federal disaster relief money to extort blue states into doing his bidding, floated sending the military into Democratic-run cities, and, now, made it all even more explicit with his latest “enemy within” rants. Trump is essentially running on an open promise to serially violate his oath of office to carry out a kind of scorched earth campaign against blue America. Baier knows all this is toxic among swing voters. And so the picture of Trump he presented was one in which the only victim of persecution is Trump himself.What’s more, in a little-noticed move, Baier also inflated Trump’s public support. Baier asked Harris: “Why is he beating you in a lot of swing states?” But that’s false: It’s largely tied in all of them, with Harris retaining an almost imperceptible edge in enough states to win the Electoral College. Baier also repeatedly said “half” or “50 percent” of the country backs Trump. But again, Trump has never enjoyed majority support at any point.MAGA is a minoritarian movement that derives energy from treating itself as “the people” and the non-MAGA majority as rooted in political aspirations and beliefs that are in some sense illegitimate. Yet Baier erased Trump’s lack of majority support, and downplayed his explicit campaigning on a vow to violate his oath of office toward the more populous rest of America that doesn’t support him. As Matt Gertz of Media Matters has shown, Fox often downplays and sugar-coats Trump’s most explicitly anti-democratic threats and actions. Baier carried out that project at an exceptionally high- profile moment.Something similar happened with Baier’s widely discussed questions on immigration. It’s true that Harris had trouble answering them—no one would deny that the Biden administration has struggled to manage the immigration system—but this is partly because here again, Baier constructed a largely imaginary world. The basic premise of his questions was that under Trump, all migrants were either detained all the way through their removals or forced to wait in Mexico; that none were released here; that crimes committed by migrants occurred only during the Biden years and are directly traceable to lax border policies.But as the American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick has demonstrated, none of this is true. During the period that Trump’s Remain in Mexico program was in effect, only a small minority of apprehended migrants were forced to wait there. And according to Reichlin-Melnick’s calculations, tens of thousands of migrants were released into the interior while Remain in Mexico was in place, which debunks the Fox News host’s suggestion that it created some sort of enforcement panacea.In fact, as the Cato Institute’s David Bier has shown, hundreds of thousands of migrants were released all throughout the Trump presidency. That’s fewer than under Biden—in part simply because more have migrated during his presidency for all sorts of complex geopolitical reasons—but far from the migrant-release-free utopia Baier presented.Why did Trump release so many migrants? Because Congress under-resources the executive for processing and detaining them, and because the law requires some releases. In Baier’s fictional portrayal of the situation, if migrants are released, it can only be a function of the executive’s permissiveness. But every administration has done this—including Trump’s. How many migrants released by Trump then committed crimes? We don’t know—in part because Democrats don’t highlight such crimes to demonize immigrants the way Republicans do. In the universe Baier constructed, none of these complications exist.Harris deserves credit for calling out Baier’s MAGA clean-up efforts. But all this raises a bigger question: How much public support would Trump have right now if Fox and other right-wing outlets had not been pumping out sanitizing propaganda about him and his presidency for the last 10 years?
https://newrepublic.com/article/187269/harriss-harsh-takedown-foxs-bret-baier-exposes-magas-biggest-lie