Last Call For Tech Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself, Con't

Twitter shareholders when into revolt this weekend over the company not selling the whole enchilada of the social media platform to billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk for $43 billion so that he could take it private and turn the company into another of his very expensive toys and are now openly forcing the company to reconsider the offer.

Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) is coming under increasing pressure from its shareholders to negotiate with Elon Musk even though the world's richest person has called his $43 billion bid for the social media platform his best and final offer, people familiar with the matter said on Sunday.

While the views of Twitter shareholders vary over what a fair price for a deal would be, many reached out to the company after Musk outlined his acquisition financing plan on Thursday and urged it not to let the opportunity for a deal slip away, the sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity. read more

Twitter's board is expected to find that Musk's all-cash $54.20 per share offer for the company is too low by the time it reports quarterly earnings on Thursday. Nonetheless, some shareholders who agree with that stance still want Twitter to seek a better offer from Musk, whose net worth is pegged by Forbes at $270 billion, the sources told Reuters.

One option available to Twitter's board is to open its books to Musk to try to coax him to sweeten his bid. Another would be to solicit offers from other potential bidders. While it is not yet clear which path Twitter will take, it is increasingly likely that its board will attempt to solicit a better offer from Musk even as it rebuffs the current one, the sources said.

"I wouldn't be surprised to wake up next week and see Musk raise what he called his best and final offer to possibly $64.20 per share," one of the fund managers who is invested in Twitter said on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations with the company.

"He could also drop the whole thing entirely. Anything is possible," the fund manager said about Musk's offer.

Twitter shares closed at $48.93 on Friday, a significant discount to Musk's offer that reflects the uncertainty over his bid's fate.

 

Indeed, Musk is now coming in with that higher offer.

Twitter Inc. TWTR 3.93% is re-examining Elon Musk’s $43 billion takeover offer after the billionaire lined up financing for the bid, in a sign the social-media company could be more receptive to a deal.

Twitter had been expected to rebuff the offer, which Mr. Musk made earlier this month without saying how he would pay for it. But after he disclosed last week that he now has $46.5 billion in financing, Twitter is taking a fresh look at the offer and is more likely than before to seek to negotiate, people familiar with the matter said. The situation is fast-moving and it is still far from guaranteed Twitter will do so.

Twitter is still working on an all-important estimate of its own value, which would need to come in close to Mr. Musk’s offer, and it could also insist on sweeteners such as Mr. Musk agreeing to cover breakup protections should the deal fall apart, some of the people said.

The two sides are meeting Sunday to discuss Mr. Musk’s proposal, the people said.

Twitter is expected to weigh in on the bid when it reports first-quarter earnings Thursday, if not sooner, the people said. Twitter’s response won’t necessarily be black-and-white, and could leave the door open for inviting other bidders or negotiating with Mr. Musk on terms other than price. Mr. Musk reiterated to Twitter’s chairman Bret Taylor in recent days that he won’t budge from his offer of $54.20-a-share, the people said.

The potential turnabout on Twitter’s part comes after Mr. Musk met privately Friday with several shareholders of the company to extol the virtues of his proposal while repeating that the board has a “yes-or-no” decision to make, according to people familiar with the matter. He also pledged to solve the free-speech issues he sees as plaguing the platform and the country more broadly, whether his bid succeeds or not, they said.

 

We'll see where this goes, but odds are in Musk's favor. If he does pull this off, Twitter is going to be a very different place very quickly, and the changes are not going to be for the better.

The Big Lie, Con't

As of this weekend, the official platform of the Michigan Republican party is that the 2020 election was stolen, that Donald Trump is the rightful resident of the White House, and that their slate of statewide office candidates are committed to proving that.

Michigan Republicans picked two candidates — who deny the 2020 election results and have been endorsed by former President Trump — to serve as the state's next top elections officer and top law enforcement official.

Kristina Karamo, a community college professor who rose to prominence after claiming she saw election fraud in Detroit in the last presidential race, won the three-person race for secretary of state with about 67% of the vote at Saturday's GOP endorsement convention in Grand Rapids. On the November ballot, her opponent will be incumbent Democrat Jocelyn Benson.

Matt DePerno, an attorney who has pushed Trump's false claims of election fraud, won the party's endorsement for attorney general. In a runoff race, DePerno took 54% of the vote to defeat former state House speaker Tom Leonard, who was seen as the more establishment Republican candidate. DePerno is now running against incumbent Democrat Dana Nessel.

Michigan does not hold primary elections for a number of down-ballot races, including the secretary of state — who oversees elections — and attorney general. Instead, Republicans and Democrats endorse and nominate candidates for November's general election at party conventions.

At this weekend's GOP convention, the party voted resoundingly to support former President Trump's false claims about the 2020 election. About 2,000 delegates from across the state participated in the vote.

The convention was seen by many as the first major test of Trump's influence over the 2022 elections. Trump's former campaign attorney Rudy Giuliani attended the convention, as well as MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, who has become a leader in the election denial movement.

The former president came to Michigan earlier this month to stump with both Karamo and DePerno.

"This is not just about 2022," Trump said during his visit to the state in early April. "This is about making sure Michigan is not rigged and stolen again in 2024."

Karamo is the first of the many election-denying candidates running in secretary of state races across the U.S to move toward appearing on a state ballot in November. She has also said she doesn't believe evolution should be taught in schools.

Incumbent Democrat Benson faced a torrent of threats and harassment following the 2020 election that echoed Trump's lies about voting in Michigan. Ahead of Saturday's vote, Benson said that she worried about the state of democracy, should the state elect a secretary of state candidate like Karamo, who thinks the 2020 election was stolen.

"It's like putting arsonists in charge of a fire department. It's like putting a bank robber in charge of a bank and giving them the keys to the vault," Benson said. "This is a choice between whether or not we'll have a democracy moving forward."

Looking ahead to the general election, some Michigan political insiders question whether Karamo will be able to widen her support outside of Trump's base, considering the range of controversial views she has already voiced.

She appeared at a QAnon-adjacent rally last year, and she has said she believes the conspiracy theory that left-wing activists were behind the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

"Every ad from April 24 through November is going to say 'QAnon Karamo is too crazy for us,' " said state Rep. Beau LaFave, a Republican who ran for secretary of state against Karamo, before Saturday's vote.

 

It's amusing that anyone on Earth, let alone America, believes for a microsecond that embrace of the Big Lie, Q-ball conspiracy theories, and denial of evolution will somehow stop Republicans from voting for Karamo in Michigan, or stopping any of the Big Lie candidates in other states in November. They will vote for awful people in order to stop Democrats from winning.

 

And the awful people they elect in 2022 will make sure no Democrat whatsoever can win in 2024 in those states either.

Sunday Long Read: Small Change, Big Changes

In our Sunday Long Read this week, The Guardian's Tom Lamont explores the world of vending machines, the original "contactless" delivery method, in the age of tech dominance, drone delivery, internet metadata and the pandemic.

A minute before midnight on 21 July 2021, as passengers staggered sleepily through Manchester airport, I stood wringing my hands in the glow of a vending machine that was seven feet tall, conspicuously branded with the name of its owner – BRODERICK – and positioned like a clever trap between arrivals and the taxi rank. Standard agonies. Sweet or savoury? Liquid or something to munch? I opted for Doritos, keying in a three-digit code and touching my card to the reader so that the packet moved jerkily forwards, propelled by a churning plastic spiral and tipped into the well of the machine. My Doritos landed with a thwap, a sound that always brings relief to the vending enthusiast, because there hasn’t been a mechanical miscue. Judged by the clock, which now read 12am, it was the UK’s first vending-machine sale of the day.

Nine hours later, I was sitting in a spruce office in the Manchester suburb of Wythenshawe, drinking coffee with John “Johnny Brod” Broderick, the man who owned and operated that handsome airport machine. I’d had an idea to try to capture 24 hours in the life of vending machines. These weird, conspicuous objects! With their backs against the wall of everyday existence, they tempt out such a peculiar range of emotions, from relief to frustration, condescension to childish glee. For decades I’d been a steady and unquestioning patron. I figured that by spending some time in the closer company of the machines and their keepers, by immersing myself in their history, by looking to their future, I might get to the bottom of their enduring appeal. What made entrepreneurs from the Victorian age onwards want to hawk their goods in this way? What made generations of us buy? Johnny Brod seemed a good first person to ask.

Freckle-tanned, portly and quick to laugh, Broderick has a playful exterior that conceals the fiery heart of a vending fundamentalist. He is a man so invested in the roboticised transmission of snacks that, come Halloween, Johnny Brod has been known to park a machine full of sweets in his driveway, letting any costumed local kids issue their demand for treats via prodded forefinger. With his brother Peter and his father, John Sr, he runs the vending empire Broderick’s Ltd, its 2,800 machines occupying some of the most sought-after corridors and crannies of the UK. The Broderick family sugar and sustain office workers, factory workers, students, gym goers, shoppers and schoolchildren. They pep up breaktimes in a nuclear power station. If you’ve ever wolfed a postpartum Snickers in the maternity ward at Chesterfield or Leeds General, or turned thirsty while waiting to fly out of Stansted or Birmingham airports, then you’ve almost certainly shopped, at one mechanical remove, with Johnny Brod. He thanks you.

The coffee we drank that morning had trickled into cardboard cups from one of his own hot-beverage makers. Business had been hurt badly by Covid, he said. There had been one wretched day in the spring of 2020 when he awoke to find himself not the owner of the second-largest fleet of vending machines in the UK, but instead, of “timebombs. All these machines of ours in places we couldn’t access. All full of perishable food.” After enduring months of closed workplaces, abandoned airports and dead campuses, the Brodericks had lost millions on foregone Twirls and Mini Cheddars. Even so, Johnny Brod was bullish, insisting that the pandemic presented him with opportunities, too.

As he led me on a tour of his Wythenshawe headquarters, I told him about my early hours purchase from a Broderick machine at the airport. Talk about a smooth transaction, I said. No snagging! I imagined he would be pleased to hear this, but he twitched his head in frustration, as if at a grave breach of etiquette. Vending people hated it, he explained to me, this unexamined expectation of mechanical failure. Modern machines contained many failsafes against botched vends. Despite this, the one time that Johnny Brod could remember his beloved industry trending on Twitter, a cruel joke had done the rounds. “About change being inevitable. Except from a vending machine.”

Every one of his machines, he countered, was fitted with a contactless card reader. Since Covid, people didn’t want to touch anything they didn’t have to. Big change was sweeping through automated vending, and the first thing to go was small change. As cash sales tumbled in 2020 and 2021, and contactless sales climbed, the Brodericks had been the beneficiary of new and better information about their customers. Pre-Covid, not only did they have to go and fetch someone’s coppery quid, then count it – they didn’t even know whose quid it was. Now the tycoons of vending understood us better. Johnny Brod had released a smartphone app that tempted people with discounts in return for permission to track their vending habits.

He led us into a control room that had large screens mounted on the walls and employees arranged Nasa-style, facing screens on which stationary dots and travelling arrows identified thousands of vending machines and the technicians who roved between them. We watched a live ticking record of the day’s sales activity, north to Aberdeen, south to the Isle of Wight. A couple of quick clicks on a technician’s computer and we were marvelling at the snacking history of a loyal, I would say fanatical, Broderick customer in Manchester, someone who must have been sourcing two full meals a day from behind glass. While Johnny Brod made a note to slip this customer a thank-you tenner via the app, I asked his team if they’d be able to find the record of my midnight Doritos. A few keyboard taps and there it was.

The Doritos fell from their spiral at midnight, closely followed by a sachet of peanut M&Ms, a stubby Mars and a bottle of water. What happened next in the wider world of these machines? I contacted a number of Johnny Brod’s competitors, outfits of all sizes, and asked them to share with me similar sales data for that day in July. I enlisted volunteers to help me track vending activity around the globe. Everywhere mouths watered, spirals turned. A world of people bent double, their hands patting blindly inside retrieval wells, claiming juice boxes, cola bottles, cereal bars, gum, whatever they’d bought, whatever they craved.

 

Turns out being able to get anything you want from a vending machine at whatever time of day or night is something the world has in common. Insert a few minutes into the slot and enjoy the story.

Utahn Me Out

Having finally accepted that the Democratic party in Utah has been dead for years, apparently we're not even bothering with a Senate candidate and instead officially backing independent failed third-party presidential gadfly Evan McMullin to run against GOP Sen. Mike "Suddenly Sedition" Lee.

In an extraordinary move on Saturday, Utah Democrats voted to back independent candidate Evan McMullin over Democrat Kael Weston to challenge the winner of the Republican primary later this year.

At the Utah Democratic Convention at Cottonwood High School in Murray, McMullin received 782 of the delegate’s votes, nearly 57%, to Weston’s 594 votes, according to preliminary results.

It’s an unprecedented measure for Utah’s Democrats, who grappled between party loyalty or backing an outsider to increase the likelihood of defeating a Republican in November. The Democrats were motivated by the prospect of unseating Sen. Mike Lee, who is running for his third term this year, and won the support of Republican around 75% of delegates at his party’s convention.

Lee still needs to defeat challengers Ally Isom and Becky Edwards in his June primary to face McMullin in the general election.

“Democrats are putting country over party,” McMullin said after the vote. “This is our democracy and, yes, it can be messy at times as we saw today, but it’s sure a heck of a lot better than the alternative.”

Weston said he accepted the outcome of what delegates decided and that it sparked an important dialogue.

“Of course, you want to be the candidate that walks out with a unanimous degree of support, but I knew this was always going to be an important conversation to have and I think with a great team, and a lot of supporters who drove from all across the state, it was a real conversation,” Weston said. “Today was a crossroads and a certain path was taken. It’s a path that has not been taken before.”

 

If you're wondering how we got here, understand that Democrats in many red states have decided that it's time to do whatever it takes to stop sitting Republican seditionist traitors like Mike Lee. It's also a tacit admission that the Democratic party brand is so toxic in 40 out of 50 states or so (and on life support in the other 10) that the only coalition-building criteria is "not Republican but that's a huge chunk of real estate".

 

On the other hand a moribund Team Blue isn't exactly a recent development in Utah, a state that hasn't elected a Democrat to the Senate since before I was born.

 

If it takes Evan McMullin to unseat Mike Lee, great. In reality, I figure it means he might only lose by 15 points instead of 25, much like Democrats here in Kentucky.

Last Call For The Big Lie, Con't

Republicans don't want free and fair elections, they want elections where they control the election process and they always win, and anyone who doesn't go along with creating false election results is punished.

A local Republican Party leader in North Carolina threatened to get a county elections director fired or have her pay cut unless she helped him gain illegal access to voting equipment, the state elections board told Reuters.

The party official, William Keith Senter, sought evidence to support false conspiracy theories alleging the 2020 election was rigged against former U.S. President Donald Trump. The previously unreported incident is part of a national effort by Trump supporters to audit voting systems to bolster the baseless stolen-election claims.

Senter, chair of the Surry County Republican Party, told elections director Michella Huff that he would ensure she lost her job if she refused his demand to access the county's vote tabulators, the North Carolina State Board of Elections said in written responses to questions from Reuters. Senter was "aggressive, threatening, and hostile," in two meetings with Huff, the state elections board said, citing witness accounts.

Senter did not respond to requests for comment.

Huff, who refused Senter's demands, was disturbed by the incident of political intimidation. Such threats have become common nationwide since the 2020 election. Reuters has documented more than 900 threatening or hostile messages aimed at election officials in a series of investigative reports.

"It’s a shame, that it is being normalized," Huff told Reuters. "I didn’t expect to get it here in our county. We are just trying to do our job by the law."

Senter's demands are a potential violation of state law. In a legal memo responding to community calls for a "forensic audit" of voting machines, Mark Payne, an attorney retained by the Surry County Board of Elections, wrote this week that it was illegal to provide access to voting machines to unauthorized individuals. Anyone threatens or intimidates an election officer could also face felony charges, according to a state statute.

Senter and a prominent pro-Trump election conspiracist, Douglas Frank, met with Huff on March 28, claiming “there was a 'chip' in the voting machines that pinged a cellular phone tower on Nov. 3, 2020, and somehow influenced election results," the state election board said, calling the claim “fabricated disinformation.” Separately, in a public gathering that Huff did not attend, Senter threatened to have Huff's pay cut, according to Huff, who said a person at the meeting told her about the threat.

Two days before meeting with Huff, Frank gave a speech in Dobson, a town in the rural county of 72,000 people on the northern border with Virginia, where he spoke about "debunked conspiracy theories about the 2020 election," the board said. The day after the meeting, Frank, an Ohio math teacher, thanked his "patriot" hosts in a post to the messaging app Telegram about his trip to North Carolina and said he was "leaving behind a bonfire burning in good hands.”

Frank did not respond to requests for comment. 

 

Multiple state GOP parties are controlled by people who believe there was massive election fraud in their state, even in the states Trump won. The fact that red state Democrats exist is proof enough of widespread fraud, you see. And they'll do anything to "find" this fraud.

And if you think anyone in these state parties will be punished, you're fooling yourself. Meanwhile, ground beef is $5 a pound, so we're apparently going to hand the country right back to the people who believe democracies are a nuisance on the way to fascism.

As of this writing, redistricting remains incomplete in Florida, Missouri, and New Hampshire. However, for the sake of argument, let’s assume the following: 1. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) gets his way, and Republican state legislators approve his recently proposed map, where we’d rate 20 districts at least leaning Republican and 8 at least leaning Democratic; 2. Missouri eventually adopts a map that preserves 6 Republican-leaning seats and 2 Democratic-leaning ones; and 3. New Hampshire passes a map with 1 Democratic-leaning seat and 1 Toss-up.

If that happens, and no other state maps change due to legal action, here would be our topline ratings: 210 seats would be rated Safe, Likely, or Leans Republican, 198 would be rated Safe, Likely, or Leans Democratic, and 27 would be rated as Toss-ups.

Given the political environment, we’d expect Republicans to do quite well among the Toss-up races. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, they win 20 of the 27. That would result in a 230-205 Republican House, or a net gain of 17 from what Republicans won in 2020.

To be honest, that seems a little light in terms of Republican gains. If we had to guess, today, what Republicans would net in the House, we’d probably pick a number in the 20s. So that means our ratings are probably at least a little bit friendlier to Democrats than perhaps they should be. However, we do have several more seats rated Leans Democratic (15) compared to Leans Republican (8), which is one way of indicating how the playing field could grow. On the other hand, our ratings also reflect the possibility of a Democratic comeback in which they limit Republican advances.

Still, don’t be surprised to see more House updates from us later this year in which all or nearly all of the changes are in favor of Republicans. It’s just that kind of cycle, at least for the time being.

 

For the love of God, fight back or die.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Another court filing by the January 6th Committee has revealed more devastating evidence against sitting GOP members of Congress and their role in participating in the conspiracy to overthrow the American government.

Republican members of Congress were heavily involved in calls and meetings with former President Donald Trump and his top aides as they devised a strategy to overturn the election in December 2020, according to new evidence filed in federal court late Friday.

Deposition excerpts filed by the Jan 6. select committee — part of an effort to force former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to appear for an interview — suggest that some of Trump’s top allies in Congress were frequently present in meetings where a handful of strategies to prevent then-President-elect Joe Biden from taking office were discussed, including efforts to replace the leadership of the Justice Department with figures who would sow doubts about the legitimacy of the election.

Lawmakers who attended meetings, in person or by phone, included Reps. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and numerous members of the House Freedom Caucus, according to Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Meadows who provided key testimony about the conversations and meetings Meadows had in December 2020.

The new evidence underscores the expansive cast of elected Republicans who had ultimately enlisted themselves in Trump’s last-ditch effort to cling to power. Members traded theories about ways to push then-Vice President Mike Pence to single-handedly stop Biden’s election, they parried with the White House Counsel’s Office on the boundaries of the law regarding presidential electors and they met directly with Pence’s staff to encourage him to take direct action on Jan. 6, when Congress convened to count electoral votes.

“They felt that he had the authority to — pardon me if my phrasing isn’t correct on this, but — send votes back to the States or the electors back to the States,” Hutchinson recalled.

The disclosure came as part of a Friday evening court filing by the select panel asking a federal court to throw out Meadows’ lawsuit against the committee. In the filing, the select committee revealed that Meadows turned over 2,319 text messages during a brief period of cooperation but withheld more than 1,000, citing various privileges.

“[H]e was not acting as anything like a typical White House Chief of Staff advising the President on official matters of government policy,” House General Counsel Doug Letter wrote. “Mr. Meadows was playing a campaign role, attempting to facilitate a strategy that would have reversed the certified results of the 2020 election.”

The committee indicated that Meadows told Jordan in a text message that he supported efforts to convince Pence to send the election back to the states.

“I have pushed for this. Not sure it is going to happen,” Meadows texted Jordan early in the morning on Jan. 6.

Some of the GOP lawmakers were present in December meetings, Hutchinson recalled, when members of the White House Counsel’s Office raised significant legal doubts about a plan for pro-Trump activists to submit “alternate” electors in states won by Joe Biden.

Others attended a Dec. 21 meeting where Rudy Giuliani, then the president’s personal lawyer, and some associates advocated a plan for Pence to unilaterally refuse to count Biden’s electors and instead send the election back to various GOP-controlled state legislatures to replace Biden’s electors with Trump’s.

 

The conspiracy to defraud the United State and overthrow the government, sedition, is right there in the open, folks. We know it happened because it's still happening. These same people are trying to remove Biden and all Democrats from power. 

The question remains what we choose to do about it. Because if the answer is "nothing" then the days of MAGA bloodshed and violence will only get exponentially worse.

A man was arrested this week for threatening violence over the dictionary definition of “female,” the latest indication of where things are headed in this moment of homophobic and transphobic hate.

According to the Department of Justice, 34-year-old Californian Jeremy David Hanson sent threatening messages to Springfield, Massachusetts-based Merrimack-Webster through the dictionary’s online contact form.

“[Your] headquarters should be shot up and bombed,” Hanson wrote. ”It is sickening that you have caved to the cultural Marxist, anti-science tranny [sic] agenda and altered the definition of ‘female’ as part of the Left’s efforts to corrupt and degrade the English language and deny reality. You evil Marxists should all be killed. It would be poetic justice to have someone storm your offices and shoot up the place, leaving none of you commies alive.”

There’s good reason to take threats like Hanson’s seriously. Street violence against the LGBTQ community is increasing at a time when attempts to marginalize and dehumanize them at the legislative level are snowballing.

In Morrisville, Vermont earlier this month, a trans woman named Fern Feather was stabbed to death; the killing came after escalated anti-trans rhetoric from state GOP leaders (who have since blamed the killing on “defund the police”).

A Florida family beat the boyfriend of their youngest son nearly to death and blinded him—teachers in the state are banned from telling children about the very existence of gay and trans people. The state’s Health Department issued guidance recommending against people under the age of 18 transitioning, even socially; a bill in Missouri (one of a series of laws proposed around the country) would make giving gender-affirming treatment punishable by law.

What Republican want is power, and the ability to used armed force against those out of power to keep them there forever. We're getting closer to that breaking point every day.

A Border Line Jackass

Even Texas Republicans are starting to point the finger at GOP Gov. Greg Abbott, whose week-long pre-Easter truck inspection border stunt cost the state of Texas billions of dollars.

Gov. Greg Abbott increasing inspections of commercial trucks entering from Mexico in the hopes of staunching illegal smuggling activity resulted in zero migrants detentions or illegal drug seizures, despite allegedly costing the Lone Star State billions of dollars.

Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller stated in an email to supporters this week that the enhanced truck inspections cost Texas consumers and businesses an estimated $4.3 billion "despite not catching a single illegal alien or confiscating a single gram of illegal drugs."

"However, Governor Abbott successfully persuaded Mexico states to enhance security on their side of the border," Miller added. "Both of these things are true at the same time."

The Texas Tribune reports that over an eight-day period beginning on April 8, troopers conducted more than 1,400 truck inspections. Despite no drugs being discovered, troopers managed to take 850 trucks off the road for various equipment violations, including under-inflated tires, broken turn signals and oil leaks.

The inspections also created a backlog of 18-wheelers on both sides of the border, with some truckers reporting waiting more than 30 hours for a process that typically takes three hours, according to the Dallas Morning News. The delays resulted in $240 million in spoiled produce and empty shelves at local markets.

Miller's estimate roughly coincides with findings released by The Perryman Group, a Waco-based economic analysis firm, which estimates the delays cost the state $4.2 billion in gross domestic product and the U.S. nearly $9 billion in GDP.

Abbott ordered the enhanced truck inspections in response to President Joe Biden ending Title 42, a border policy that allowed federal agents to quickly deport migrants attempting to enter the country citing COVID-19 restrictions. Last week, the Republican leader called off the inspection initiative after signing agreements with leaders of four Mexican states that border Texas who said they would increase border security measures.

Despite the economic impacts of shutting down traffic at the border, Abbott isn't ruling out reinstating the policy. Asked about the impacts during a roundtable with law enforcement in San Antonio Thursday, Abbott responded, "Obviously there are concerns about the economy but there are even larger concerns about the unabated immigration that the Biden administration is promoting."

 

There's no doubt in my mind that Abbott will do this again.  He's learned that he can damage the economy, make national news, blame Biden for it, and suffer no consequences for doing so, and that he can basically do it at will. And considering the number of Democrats now openly running against Biden ending Title 42, he knows he can use it to put House and Senate Democrats on the spot this fall.

No, Abbott now knows he can do ten billion dollars in economic damage a week with a stroke of his pen. He'll use that ability again and again and again to hurt as many people as possible until the White House gives him whatever he wants.

Terrorism, you see.

America Goes Viral Yet Again, Con't

Last week after rising COVID Omicron variant cases triggered indoor mask mandate rules in Philadelphia, this week's figures have dropped low enough that the mask mandate has been lifted after just four days.

 

Just days after re-imposing the indoor mask mandate in Philadelphia, city officials confirmed Thursday night that they will end the requirement, citing improving numbers for COVID-19 hospitalizations and confirmed infections.

A city spokesperson said officials will release more details Friday morning.

“Due to decreasing hospitalizations and a leveling of case counts, the City will move to strongly recommending masks in indoor public spaces as opposed to a mask mandate. Given the latest data, the Board of Health voted tonight to rescind the mandate,” Kevin Lessard, spokesperson for Mayor Jim Kenney, said in an email Thursday night.

Earlier on Thursday, Kenney defended the controversial mandate that has made his city an outlier in the national COVID-19 response.

”I have committed through this whole dilemma, this whole pandemic, to follow the guidance of health professionals,” Kenney said Thursday in a video interview with the Washington Post, indicating, “and that’s what we’re doing here.”

Kenney expressed hope that slightly declining hospitalization rates could be a sign the requirement is already showing positive results.

The number of people with COVID in city hospitals dropped to 65 Thursday, the lowest figure reported in a week.

The recent peak of 82 was reached Sunday, the day before the mask mandate took effect.

The return of the Philadelphia mandate on Monday collided with a federal judge’s ruling that lifted the federal mask requirement on flights and mass transportation.

The conflicting rules led to confusion and frustration exacerbated when SEPTA said they would follow the judge’s order and end masking on trains, trolleys, and buses, as well as in stations and concourses. Philadelphia International Airport said masks would be required in terminals because of the city restriction, although coverings could be removed on planes, because airlines lifted their requirements.

On Wednesday, a group of Philadelphia business owners and residents filed a motion seeking an emergency injunction with Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court to immediately suspend the mandate, arguing that the restriction was causing them “irreparable harm.”

The federal government also filed a notice of appeal Wednesday for the ruling on masking on transportation.

 

Mayor Kenney's mandate would have certainly been enjoined given the federal mandate being lifted by a Trump judge this week, so he would have lost on both politics and legality.

The decision for America to just live with an extra 500,000 deaths per year due to COVID was made some time ago, and no government, local, state, or federal, will take responsibility for stopping it, because the American people won't put up with the inconvenience anymore.

I'd say we deserve it, except we're talking about thousands of dead per week.

A Strange Meadows Lark

Washington Post media reporter and fact check columnist Glenn Kessler lays out the case of voting fraud against former Trump WH Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

After Donald Trump lost the presidential election, falsely claiming election fraud, Meadows became senior partner at the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), which promotes “election integrity” efforts. The organization’s “citizen’s guide” urges activists to determine that the registrations of their neighbors are legal by checking on “whether voters have moved, or if the registrations are PO Boxes, commercial addresses or vacant lots” and then “obtaining evidence: photos of commercial buildings? Vacant lots?” and “securing affidavits from current residents that a registered voter has moved.”

Voter-list maintenance is one of the dividing lines in American politics. Republicans argue that if voter-registration records are not regularly purged and updated, election fraud can take place. Democrats push back that too many voter-list purges are conducted haphazardly, removing eligible voters who don’t learn they are no longer listed until they show up to vote.

Now it turns out that until last week, Meadows was simultaneously registered to vote in three different states — North Carolina, Virginia and South Carolina — according to state records obtained by The Fact Checker.

The overlap lasted about three weeks, and it might have continued if revelations about Meadows’s voting record had not attracted scrutiny in North Carolina. Meadows is still registered in Virginia and South Carolina.

This is the latest in a series of revelations about election-related behavior by Meadows that appear to contradict his and his party’s rhetoric on election integrity.

Meadows, in fact, was the keynote speaker at a CPI Election Integrity Summit in Atlanta on Feb. 19. “What you’re doing is investing in the future of our country and making sure only legal votes count,” Meadows told attendees. He said he had just gotten off the phone with Trump, who he said had told him: “We cannot give up on election integrity.”

About three weeks after that speech, the New Yorker reported that Meadows had registered to vote at a home where he did not reside. Meadows and his wife, Debra, had submitted voter registration forms that listed as their residential address a 14-by-62-foot mobile home in Macon County, N.C., with a rusted metal roof that sold for $105,000 in 2021, even though they did not actually own it or live there. He then voted in the 2020 election via absentee ballot.

North Carolina officials announced last month that, as a result, Mark Meadows is under investigation for potential voter fraud. On April 11, his voter registration was removed by Macon County officials, the North Carolina State Board of Elections said last week.

The state cited the fact that Meadows had voted in Virginia during the 2021 gubernatorial election that elected a Republican, Glenn Youngkin. Meadows and his wife had registered to vote in the state in September, his and her voter registration applications show, even though they were still registered in North Carolina.

About two weeks after publication of the New Yorker article, Meadows registered to vote in South Carolina, state election records show. In July 2021, Meadows had purchased a three-story waterfront home of more than 6,000 square feet in South Carolina for nearly $1.6 million. But until this year, he also owned a townhouse in Alexandria that he had purchased in 2017.

It is not unusual for some overlap in voter rolls as people move across state lines, and many people do not bother to terminate their voting registration when they move. In contrast to Meadows, however, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo canceled his voter registration in Kansas just a few months after selling his home in Wichita and moving to McLean when he became CIA director.

South Carolina and Virginia are members of the Electronic Registration Information Center, a nonprofit that provides member states with reports on voters. If Meadows had listed his Virginia voter registration while registering in South Carolina, the state would have notified Virginia. Angie Maniglia Turner, Alexandria’s general registrar and director of elections, said Thursday that there has been no change in the voter registration status in Virginia of either Mark or Debra Meadows.

Ben Williamson, a spokesman for Mark Meadows, declined to comment.

 

Republicans cheered when Crystal Mason, a Black woman in Texas, was sentenced to five years in prison for unknowingly trying to vote while ineligible, but a white Republican Trumper registers to vote in three states knowingly in order to game the system on purpose will at most face a small fine if anything.

They can do whatever they want to. The rest of us are subject to actual laws that they impose upon us in the name of "integrity".

Last Call For The Road To Gilead Starts In Kentucky, Con't

A US district court judge has issued an injunction against Kentucky's wholly unconstitutional omnibus abortion law that went into effect last week without any of the statewide support structure that the law requires, meaning it was legally impossible to perform the procedure in the state. That has been remedied...for now.

A federal judge has issued a temporary order blocking Kentucky's sweeping new abortion law that forced the state's only two providers to stop offering the procedure.

The law, House Bill 3, put Kentucky in the national spotlight for becoming the first state to eliminate access to all abortion services since the law took effect April 13.

In a ruling issued Thursday, U.S. District Judge Rebecca Grady Jennings granted a request from one of the state's two abortion providers for a temporary restraining order, finding that the law took effect immediately with no opportunity for clinics to comply with its many new rules.

"The plain language of HB 3 is clear that the entire law became effective and enforceable on April 13, 2022," Jennings' opinion said.

Jennings said her order is not a ruling on the constitutionality of HB 3; she will consider that argument at a hearing on whether to grant a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of HB 3 before her temporary order expires in 14 days.

Thursday's ruling was celebrated by Planned Parenthood and EMW Women's Surgical Center, the state's only abortion providers, though acknowledging it is only temporary.

"This is a win but it is only a first step," said Rebecca Gibron, CEO of Planned Parenthood's six-state group that includes Kentucky "We're prepared to fight for our patients' right to basic health in court and to continue doing everything in our power (to) ensure abortion access is permanently secured in Kentucky."

Heather Gatnarek, a lawyer who represents EMW, said the ruling clears the way for providers to resume abortion services.

"Abortion remains legal and is once again available in Kentucky," said Gatnarek, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky. "We will always fight to keep it that way here and across the country."

But Attorney General Daniel Cameron, a Republican who is defending HB 3 in federal court, said he "disappointed that the court chose to temporarily halt enforcement of the law."

"This law is constitutional and we look forward to continuing to defend it," Cameron said.

 

I expect that like the Texas abortion bounty law, Cameron and Kentucky Republicans will be able to quickly procure a de facto shadow docket stay from the injunction until the Mississippi abortion case currently before SCOTUS is decided later this spring, so enjoy the final weeks of legalized abortion in the Bluegrass State and about two dozen other states. 

 

As I've said multiple times, I expect Roe and Casey to be rendered moot or nuked completely by July 4th, meaning your rights to your uterus will be 100% determined by where you live, and states will then rush to criminalize miscarriages, contraception, and sodomy heading into the 2023 SCOTUS term.

 

And as I've said before, I have little to no hope that removing abortion in half the US will move the needle at all in terms of how women vote in November. A majority of white women will still vote for their GOP captors, hoping they will be spared when the inevitable comes.

 

They will find out way too late that this will not be the case.

 

Many of the rest of us will have already been dealt with.

The road to Gilead will be a difficult one, and not all of us are going to make the journey, I suspect.

Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

Jon Chait correctly names Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis as an autocrat, pointing to his retaliation against Disney as the blueprint for his inevitable presidential run in 2024.

Here is how the New York Times reported DeSantis’s latest maneuver: “In a move widely seen as retaliation, Gov. Ron DeSantis asked Florida lawmakers on Tuesday to consider the ‘termination’ of self-governing privileges that Disney World has held in the Orlando area for 55 years.”

A move widely seen as retaliation is quite a way to put it, given that DeSantis himself has advertised the measure as retaliation. DeSantis said he was “fighting back” against Disney. (“Fighting back” is a synonym for retaliation.) First he floated a completely different provision targeting Disney (a social-media carve-out he had designed himself) before turning to the current version.

To make his intentions even more obvious, he appeared on Fox News to confess. Brian Kilmeade presented his intentions plainly: “You basically said, ‘Hey Disney, I don’t like your stance against this bill, this parents rights bill, so maybe we’ll go into revisit your special status in Florida.’ Do you want to expand on that?”

DeSantis did not deny this. Instead he made a case on the merits for the retaliation, before saying, “Six months ago, it would have been unthinkable” that Republicans would have taken this step.

The response from the conservative media has been more instructive. One foundation of DeSantis’s governing style is that he has calculated he does not need mainstream media at all. He can rely on support from party-controlled media to obtain sufficient public approval to meet his goals, and his non-party-controlled media as a punching bag.

The conservative media has raised almost no objection to DeSantis’s thuggery. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, Washington Examiner, and Washington Times — all of which would be publishing front-page editorials calling protesters into the streets if a Democrat had tried something like this — have no commentary on it. Republican legal mind Hugh Hewitt approves.

National Review has two stories, one approving, one disapproving. The latter is the only dissent I have seen in the conservative media. It is exceedingly mild. Its author, Charles C.W. Cooke, notes his overall support for DeSantis and the anti-gay measure, but chides him for “an ugly and ill-conceived mistake” they are undertaking “inexplicably,” given that the anti-gay law already passed.

Cooke calls the move a “tantrum,” one serving no purpose at all. But of course there is a point to it. The point is to send a message to any other corporation that they will be punished by the state if they oppose DeSantis on anything.

National Review’s opposing column supporting DeSantis’s retaliation makes that explicit: “These corporations assume that it’s still 2010, and that our genteel Marquess of Queensberry norms will prevent conservatives from retaliating against their many political campaigns and rhetorical posturing against us.” It seems the principle that the government should not coerce private firms into supporting the regime was devised by Marquess of Queensberry, who was probably a communist. In any case, it doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that the only conservative who publicly opposes DeSantis’s move is also the only one who doesn’t seem to be (or wish to be) aware of why he is doing it.

The impetus for DeSantis’s presidential candidacy is the belief that Trump is a liability, and a desire for a replacement who can marshal the same coalition more effectively. What DeSantis is building in Florida is his blueprint for the country.

 

"Trump, but without the baggage" was always the goal, and DeSantis is well on his way. Should he become president in 2024 along with a GOP-controlled Congress, the entire American experiment will be scheduled for demolition. Greg Sargent:

So let’s run a thought experiment. What might it look like if a President DeSantis took this view of the administrative state and decided to wield his power this way?

Donald Moynihan, an expert on the administrative state at Georgetown, says you can envision various scenarios. Such a president, he said, might use regulatory agencies staffed with right-thinking political employees (which Vance explicitly wants) to harass or investigate companies perceived as “culturally disloyal.”

Another possibility, Moynihan said, might be to change the tax status of liberal-leaning foundations. Those are already another favorite target of right-wing populists.

Faced with a president “who’s fully willing to use the powers of the administrative state,” Moynihan told me, such foundations might refrain from advocating for various causes or fund certain types of research, “because it’s not worth the potential risks.”

What if such a president were backed in this project by congressional leadership? Josh Chafetz, a Georgetown law professor who studies Congress, says you could see legislation targeted at offending companies, and even if it didn’t survive the courts, it could still function in a punitive way.

Those companies would sink large sums of money into litigating against such measures, even as Congress relied on taxpayer-funded lawyers on their side, Chafetz told me, meaning “the onus of the expense would fall on the companies, which would have a chilling effect.”

So a lot is at stake in how DeSantis’s war with Disney turns out. To glimpse the future, just look at what DeSantis is saying and doing right now. And given all the accolades he’s getting from the right, does anyone doubt that this could get a whole lot worse?

 

American government would become nothing more than a tool to punish grievances, real or imagined. Pick a group of those people and take everything from them, while making it clear that refusal to join in the pogrom means you are next. Pretty soon everyone wants to be on the winning side, because it's the only game in town.

Autocracy 101.

We're well on our way.

 

Slum Lord Millionaire

People forget that before his election last year as Virginia Governor, the GOP's Glenn Youngkin worked for the Carlyle Group, a huge private equity firm. When he washed out of the firm as CEO in 2020 after a string of bad investments, he turned to politics.

Now Glenn is making good on those bad bets by changing the rules to advantage him and his rich buddies as governor, and his latest obvious grift is vetoing a bipartisan slumlord prosecution bill, making it easier to condemn tenements, evict tenants, and sell the land to...huge private equity firms. 

 

Housing advocates say legislation passed by the General Assembly on a bipartisan vote would have helped rein in the most negligent landlords. Now they’re questioning Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s veto of the bill from Del. Cia Price (D-Newport News), which received no critical testimony in committee and was backed by both the Virginia Poverty Law Center and the Virginia Apartment and Management Association.

“This is creating a safe space in Virginia for slumlords,” Price says. “I don't know what the governor was thinking but that's what the end result will be.”

Part of the problem now is that cities and counties don’t have great tools at their disposal to deal with absentee landlords, according to Christie Marra, director of housing advocacy at the VPLC. Their main mode of enforcement is citing landlords for code violations, which, if they don’t address, can result in fines as low as $50.

“Some slumlords find that it's a better business model to pay the fine than to actually put money into the repairs,” Marra says.

If the conditions continue to deteriorate, localities’ only real option is to condemn the building, a move which quickly displaces tenants in a tight housing market.

Price’s bill would give localities the ability to take legal action against landlords who don’t address serious violations in a reasonable time frame, including “a fire hazard or serious threat to the life, health, or safety of tenants or occupants.” Judges could order the landlord to make these repairs.

“And if the landlord doesn't make the repairs, that landlord can be held in civil contempt and sent to jail until he finds a way to make them,” Marra says.

In his veto, Youngkin said the legislation “contains unnecessary and duplicative provisions” and suggested tenants should also bear responsibility for conditions: “Landlords and tenants both have responsibilities to maintain safe, decent, and sanitary housing.” Marra said he appeared to misunderstand the bill since it was “not duplicative.”

Price called Youngkin’s claims “factually inaccurate” and said she was surprised by the veto. She said no one from the governor’s office reached out to her about the bill.

“I definitely am not quiet about things that I see going wrong, especially as it pertains to voting rights and civil rights,” said Price, who is a member of the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus. “To think that this might be personal is just beyond my comprehension because the people that actually lose out are residents of the commonwealth who the governor swore to protect.”

Eleven House Republicans and five Senate Republicans joined Democrats in voting for the bill. Price will need to recruit a handful more in order to have the two-thirds majority in each chamber needed to override Youngkin’s veto. She said she had little hope Republicans would override any of Youngkin’s 26 vetoes – all bills passed with bipartisan support that were sponsored by Democrats.

 

So yes, it's a combination of petty obnoxiousness and future grifting. But hey, Republican.

Last Call For Ron's Gone Wrong

Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis has declared war on Disney, as well as Orlando-area taxpayers. Oh, and Black voters.

 

The Republican-controlled Florida Senate quickly voted Wednesday to dissolve Disney World’s Reedy Creek Improvement District and for a congressional redistricting map that eliminates two Black districts and tilts the balance of the delegation more Republican.

Both measures were pushed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, which one Democrat called a “hijack” of the Legislature’s duties.

Lawmakers originally came to Tallahassee on Tuesday to take up a congressional map drawn by DeSantis’ office after he vetoed two maps approved by the Legislature during the regular session.

But less than an hour before the special session began, he expanded it to include a bill dissolving Reedy Creek, which independently governs the Orlando resort, and another bill retracting a special carveout that protected Disney from liability in the so-called Big Tech law from 2021.

Just a day later, the Senate voted 23-16 to dissolve Reedy Creek, with Sen. Jeff Brandes of Pinellas Park the only Republican to vote against Sen. Jennifer Bradley’s bill. The Senate voted 24-15 along party lines to approve Bradley’s bill retracting the Disney carveout, which was found unconstitutional by a federal judge.

Critics of the governor say the bills were meant to punish Disney, Florida’s largest single-site employer, for opposing the so-called “don’t say gay” law signed by DeSantis last month.

The bills were filed almost as soon as he called for the expanded session, raising questions about who wrote them and whether the sponsors were forced to carry them for the governor.

Democrats assailed their Republican colleagues for capitulating to DeSantis out of fear of facing primary opponents or having their projects vetoed from the budget rather than acting as the independently elected lawmakers they are supposed to be.

“I didn’t think we were going to acquiesce and let the governor hijack that process,” Sen. Shevrin Jones, a Black Democrat from Miami Gardens, said during the morning debate on the Senate version of the redistricting bill. “What we now see in the Senate we used to only see in the House. We used to be happy when bad bills came to the Senate because that’s where bad bills came to die.”

“If this is going to happen from now on, there is no need to show up,” Jones said.

[ OPINION: Vengeful DeSantis stampedes lawmakers to attack Disney ]

Jones, and other senators, Democrat and Republican, conceded that the redistricting map was going to wind up in court no matter what the outcome. Democrats were especially critical of an amendment added Tuesday that requires all lawsuits challenging the redistricting map to be filed in Leon Circuit Court, an attempt to sidestep the federal court in Tallahassee where most election cases have been challenged and found unconstitutional.

The map DeSantis introduced achieves his stated goal to eliminate the minority-majority District 5 that sprawls across North Florida from Jacksonville to Tallahassee and replaces it with a district that is only 12% Black. It also diminishes the Black voting population in District 10 in Orlando, moving a large number into the Republican-friendly District 11. The map reduces predominantly Black districts from four to two.

 

Tennessee did the same thing with Nashville's congressional district and got away with it.

 

Seriously, all Republicans, and Republican voters care about, is punishing the people who are not on their side, to the point of costing taxpayers millions, and disenfranchising as many Black voters as they can get away with.

 

It's all punishment of those people, all the time.  Anyone who doesn't toe the line is made to suffer by the power of the state. A government of white grievance retribution, for angry white folk, by angry white folk, and the rest of us are increasingly being targeted.

They want that nationally. They're likely to get it.

Going Out To Farm Country

The Democrats finally figured out what I've been saying for over a year now: in order to win rural voters, you have to stop falling for the culture war rope-a-dope and go directly to the Biden infrastructure bill programs that are designed specifically to help rural folks and help them directly with those programs.

The Biden administration is rolling out a new initiative to help rural communities, as Democrats work to halt an erosion of support for the party in rural America.

The new effort, led by the Agriculture Department, will deploy federal staffers next month to rural areas in five states. They'll will help communities there take advantages of federal resources, including funds from the infrastructure law and the covid relief package that President Biden signed early in his presidency.

Several of the places where staffers will be deployed are also expected to be battlegrounds in the midterm elections this fall, including Arizona and Georgia — where Sens. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) are facing tough reelection fights — and districts represented by Reps. Tom O’Halleran (D-Ariz.), Yvette Herrell (R-N.M.) and Sanford Bishop (D-Ga.).

The administration plans to expand the initiative this summer to Puerto Rico and five more states, including Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin, all of which are home to top-tier Senate races.

The White House says political considerations had nothing to do with deciding where to start the program, which the administration eventually hopes to expand to all 50 states.

“We overlaid counties of persistent poverty with the distressed community index and the CDC's social vulnerability index,” a senior administration official told reporters on Tuesday, referring to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “And those three indices created, in essence, a bullseye.”

The administration included “qualitative factors” and aimed for geographic diversity when choosing the second set of communities, the official added. 

 

Show the people what good you can provide for them and their communities. Whocoodanode?

Chloe Maxmin, a Democratic state senator in Maine who won in rural, Republican-leaning districts in 2018 and 2020, said she didn’t think her constituents especially care about bickering in Washington. Instead, they’re troubled by a sense that the Democratic Party doesn’t value them.

“Rural voters are not listened to,” said Maxmin, who wrote a forthcoming book with her campaign manager, Canyon Woodward, on wooing back rural voters. “They’re not heard. Their voices are not integrated into the Democratic Party. And so why should they listen to us?”

What advice does she have for Democrats trying to win in rural areas this fall?

Knock on as many doors as they can, she said.

“I can't even tell you how many times I've showed up at a house and just the simple fact that I drove down someone's dirt driveway, knocked on their door, left my cell phone number — it's just that basic act of showing up wins votes,” she said.

 

And yes, that does include programs to help Black farmers too.

The RIght-Wing Noise Machine, Con't

The problem with GOP disinformation on social media is that one, it's easy to spread, and two, the right-wing disinformation machine rewards those who do spread it willingly and directly. That's the case with Chaya Raichik of NYC, who discovered that retweeting viral political TikTok videos on Twitter made for the perfect format for "owning the libs" and especially her attacks on the LGBTQ+ community. Now, her two-year campaign has gotten her nearly two-thirds of a million followers, including several major influential cable TV and talk radio appearances.

 

Chaya Raichik had been working as a real estate salesperson in Brooklyn when, in early November 2020, she created the account that would eventually become Libs of TikTok.

Under her first handle @shaya69830552, she minimized covid, cast doubt on the election results and promoted a dubious story about a child sex trafficking ring. On Nov. 23, 2020, Raichik changed handles, this time going by @shaya_ray and identifying herself publicly as a real estate investor in Brooklyn. She began doubling down on election fraud conspiracies using QAnon-related language. Early that December, she joked about launching a clothing line titled “voter fraud is real.”

In January 2021, Raichik started talking about traveling to D.C. to support Trump on Jan. 6 at the Stop the Steal rally. When violence broke out at the Capitol that day, she tweeted a play-by-play account claiming to be on the ground. “They were rubber bullets from law enforcement. 1 hit right next to me,” she said. She posted videos from the crowd and spoke of tear gas being deployed nearby. After saying she left the riot, she used Twitter to downplay the event, claiming that it was peaceful compared to a “BLM protest.”

Later that month, Raichik cycled through two more Twitter names, this time focusing on state politicians. First under the handle @ChayaRaichik and the display name “Chaya Raichik,” and then under the new handle, @cuomomustgo, she railed against New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D), calling for him to resign. She promoted the efforts to recall California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). She also began posting about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), calling him “actually brilliant.”

By early last March, she pivoted to a parody account titled @houseplantpotus, pretending to tweet as if she was a houseplant living with President Biden. She revamped her avatar to look like a small shrub with Biden’s face on the leaves. At that point in time she also claimed to be proudly Orthodox Jewish, live in Brooklyn and work in real estate in her Twitter bio.

But the house plant parody never took off. On April 19, 2021, she pivoted her account once again, this time to Libs of TikTok.

Just four months after getting started, Libs of TikTok got its big break: Joe Rogan started promoting the account to the millions of listeners of his hit podcast. He mentioned it several times on the show in August, then again in late September. “Libs of TikTok is one of the greatest f---ing accounts of all time,” he said. With his seal of approval, Raichik’s following skyrocketed.

Libs of TikTok gained more prominence throughout the end of last year, cementing its spot in the right-wing media outrage cycle. Its attacks on the LGBTQ+ community also escalated. By January, Raichik’s page was leaning hard into “groomer” discourse, calling for any teacher who comes out as gay to their students to be “fired on the spot.”

Her anti-trans tweets went especially viral. She called on her followers to contact schools that were allowing “boys in the girls bathrooms” and pushed the false conspiracy theory that schools were installing litter boxes in bathrooms for children who identify as cats. She also purported that adults who teach children about LGBTQ+ identities are “abusive,” that being gender-nonconforming or an ally to the LGBTQ+ community is a “mental illness,” and referred to schools as “government run indoctrination camps” for the LGBTQ+ community.

“Libs of TikTok is shaping our entire political conversation about the rights of LGBTQ people to participate in society,” Drennen said. “It feels like they’re single-handedly taking us back a decade in terms of the public discourse around LGBTQ rights. It’s been like nothing we’ve ever really seen.”

 

A one-woman show, feeding the right-wing outrage beast with instant, viral red meat, day after day. No wonder then she's become a superstar in the red state echo chamber.

And there are thousands and thousands more like her. If you want to know how things got so dark, so quickly around here, it's people like Raichik.