Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

Republicans are straight up vowing they will take power permanently in state after state and they are telling you exactly how they will do it.

Ohio is essentially lost at this point, as Republicans there simply refuse to obey the state's Supreme Court under any circumstance.

The Republican members of the Ohio Redistricting Commission are asserting that the Ohio Supreme Court does not have the authority to hold them in contempt of court while their Democratic counterparts on the commission argue otherwise.

The Ohio redistricting commissioners filed their motions in court after petitioners – who are objecting to the latest round of state legislative district maps – asked the court to order members to explain why they should not be held in contempt.

On May 6, the commission resubmitted a plan for Ohio House and Ohio Senate district maps that had already been rejected by the Ohio Supreme Court as unconstitutional in March.

Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, said in his court filing that he cannot be held in contempt when he is acting “in accordance with his solemn duty to ensure orderly and trustworthy elections and to protect the voting rights of Ohioans.”

LaRose said, through attorneys in his court filing, that he laid out for the commission the “logistical realities” of holding a primary for state legislative races in 2022. During commission meetings, LaRose explained his reasoning for why the commission had to choose what’s become known as Map 3, a plan adopted by the commission in February. LaRose said that was the only plan that gave local elections officials a chance to hold a primary on August 2 given certain deadlines they would have to meet.

“Petitioners cannot ignore realities and the established deadlines (that Secretary LaRose does not have the authority to change) that they acknowledged in the Gonidakis Case and take contrary positions calling for contempt in this action,” wrote attorneys representing LaRose in the filing. The “Gonidakis Case” refers to a federal court case where judges have given Ohio until May 28 to adopt a constitutional plan or the federal court will implement the unconstitutional Map 3.

Rep. Jeff LaRe (R-Violet Twp.) and Sen. Rob McColley (R-Napoleon) filed together to echo LaRose’s response and added, “the resubmittal of the plan adopted by the Commission on February 24, 2022 (the “Third Plan”) was not an act of defiance, but an act of necessity under the electoral emergency facing the Secretary of State and Ohio voters.”

The Republican commissioners all made the argument – even Auditor Keith Faber who voted against the maps – that the Ohio Supreme Court does not have the authority to hold the commission in contempt because it is a different branch of government and would result in a separation of powers violation.

 

The Ohio GOP has run out the clock on the redistricting process, and now the federal courts will allow Republicans to simply use whichever unconstitutional map they want to, as I said they would do last year.

In Colorado, Republicans are vowing to disenfranchise 99.99% of Democratic voters in urban counties.

Coloradans have elected just one Republican governor in the last 50 years. A current GOP candidate for governor has an idea that could change that: stop counting each vote equally.

Former Parker Mayor Greg Lopez, who holds the top line on the 2022 Republican primary ballot, says Colorado should create an electoral college system for electing candidates to statewide office.

The plan, which would be the first of its kind on the state level, would give far more voting power to Coloradans in rural, conservative counties and dilute the voting power of Coloradans in more populous urban and suburban areas. Even as turnout numbers vary over time, the sheer number of rural conservative counties would create a built-in advantage for Republicans.

Lopez outlined his proposal at a May 15 campaign stop in Silverton. An audio recording of the event made by a political tracker was provided to 9NEWS.

“One of the things that I’m going to do, and I’ve already put this plan together, is, as governor, I’m going to introduce a conversation about doing away with the popular vote for statewide elected officials and doing an electoral college vote for statewide elected officials,” Lopez said.

Lopez said his electoral college plan would weight counties’ votes based on their voter turnout percentage to encourage turnout.

“I’ve already got the plan in place,” Lopez said. “The most that any county can get is 11 electoral college votes. The least that a county can get is three.”

 

More than 80% of Colorado voters live in just 11 of the state's 64 counties, meaning that the other 15% or so would actually decide the races in this complete scam of an election layout. If turnout is even across the state, the state's least populous county, San Juan (pop. 646) would have the same "electoral college votes" as Denver County or El Paso County (both pop. 700,000+). It's a laughable scam that would ensure Republican victories permanently.

And in Pennsylvania, GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, January 6th terrorism suspect, is outright saying that Democrats will have their election wins annulled in the state in 2024.

 

As governor, Mastriano would have the opportunity not just to speak, but to act. The Trump-endorsed 58-year-old, who won the Republican nomination for governor on Tuesday, would gain significant influence over the administration of the battleground state’s elections should he prevail in November, worrying experts already fearful of a democratic breakdown around the 2024 presidential contest.

Those concerns are made especially acute in Pennsylvania by the fact that the governor has the unusual authority to directly appoint the secretary of state, who serves as chief elections officer and must sign off on results. If he or she refuses, chaos could follow.

“The biggest risk is a secretary of state just saying, ‘I’m not going to certify the election, despite what the court says and despite what the evidence shows, because I’m concerned about suspicions,’” said Clifford Levine, a Democratic election lawyer in Pennsylvania. “You would start to have a breakdown in the legal system and the whole process.”

Mastriano’s backers appear well aware of the stakes. A video posted to Telegram by election denial activist Ivan Raiklin from Mastriano’s victory party on Tuesday showed the candidate smiling as Raiklin congratulated him on his win and added, with a thumb’s up, “20 electoral votes as well,” a reference to the state’s clout in the electoral college.

“Oh yeahhhh,” Mastriano responded.

Mastriano did not respond to a voice mail or an email sent to a campaign account for media.

But Mastriano told Stephen K. Bannon, a former adviser to Trump who now hosts a podcast popular on the right, that he had already selected the person he would appoint as secretary of state if elected.

“As far as cleaning up the election, I mean, I’m in a good position as governor,” he said in the April 23 appearance on Bannon’s “War Room” podcast. “I have a voting-reform-minded individual who’s been traveling the nation and knows voting reform extremely well. That individual has agreed to be my secretary of state.”

He added that he planned to decertify voting machines in several Pennsylvania counties, a power given under state law to the secretary of state. “It’s going to be a top issue for me,” he said.

 

Mastriano would simply decertify election results from Philly and Pittsburgh completely, and Republicans will win every race from now on.

 

Who will stop people like this? 

I'm hoping it's you folks in November.

Last Call For A Smart Formula

President Biden has invoked the Defense Production Act to get baby formula manufacturers everything they need to immediately ramp up production in response to the national shortage of formula.

The announcement means the federal government will prioritize key ingredients for formula production and compel suppliers to provide the needed resources to formula manufacturers.

In addition to invoking the 1950 law, which allows the government to direct manufacturing production for national defense, Biden also launched a program that will use U.S. military aircraft to import formula from abroad.

The move comes after a bipartisan group of lawmakers called on Biden to invoke the Defense Production Act to bolster formula production amid the worsening shortage and as parents scramble to secure formula.

The Food and Drug Administration in February began warning consumers against purchasing certain baby formula as it investigated a string of bacterial infections in four infants tied to an Abbott Nutrition facility in Sturgis, Michigan.

Abbott Nutrition, which has denied any wrongdoing, said Monday it had agreed to terms set by the FDA to resume operations at the company’s Michigan plant, but the shortage has frenzied parents.

Biden on Wednesday also initiated a program that will use U.S. military aircraft to import formula from abroad. The program, called "Operation Fly Formula," directs the Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Agriculture to use Defense Department commercial aircraft to fly in approved formula from other countries.

 

Lawmakers: Hey Joe, do the thing

 

Biden: OK

 

Really is that simple sometimes.  

 

Oh, the reasons there's a shortage are 1) Abbott Nutrition made a crapton of pandemic profit and used those billions in stock buybacks to boost their stock prices and executive bonuses rather than repairing machinery in their Michigan factory that was allowing bacteria to infect formula production lines, 2) pandemic supply chain meltdowns and 3) Donald Trump's trade policies protected Abbott's oligopoly on baby formula.

The argument here is when America's manufacturing is concentrated among a few brands, that indispensable product always becomes an oligopoly as government raises barriers to entry to keep newer, "less trustworthy" companies out. That certainly describes what happened with baby formula.

Now parents are paying the price, quite literally.

The Road To Gilead, Con't

Homeland Security is making it very clear that they are expecting violence over the end of Roe and that last week's near light-speed vote to extend protections to SCOTUS justices and their families was an unfortunately necessary call.

In the wake of the Supreme Court's majority draft opinion leak, the U.S. Supreme Court Police reported a "significant increase in violent threats," including a series of social media posts directed at certain sitting justices as well as the Supreme Court building. The Department of Homeland Security said it has registered an uptick in threats against "reproductive healthcare personnel and facilities."

The threats were outlined in an intelligence bulletin the DHS issued to state and local law enforcement agencies nationwide. The memo, titled "Potential for Threats to Public Safety in Response to Abortion Debate" and dated May 13, was published by DHS' Office of Intelligence and Analysis.

The DHS said federal law enforcement agencies have opened investigations into several of the online threats.

The National Capital Region Threat Intelligence Consortium — the Washington, D.C., regional intelligence hub charged with tracking domestic terrorism threats — has referred at least 25 violent online posts to partner agencies for further investigation. According to the bulletin, some of the social media threats discussed "burning down or storming the U.S. Supreme Court and murdering Justices and their clerks, members of Congress, and lawful demonstrators."

The bulletin warned of an emerging "threat to government, religious, and reproductive healthcare personnel and facilities and ideological opponents" and marks the first intelligence bulletin explicitly issued to state and local law enforcement regarding abortion-related extremism in the wake of the opinion draft leak.

"The volume of violent threats targeting Supreme Court Justices, members of Congress, other public officials, clergy, healthcare officials and providers, and others associated with the abortion debate are likely to persist and may increase leading up to and following the issuing of the Court's official ruling," the bulletin added.

The Supreme Court is expected to issue its final ruling on the Mississippi abortion case next month.

Since July 2021, at least four incidents of violence occurred between "ideological opponents" at abortion-related protests in Oregon and California, where demonstrators deployed "smoke grenades, paintball guns, batons, chemical irritants, and bats, according to press reporting," the memo reads.

Historically, a Justice Department task force has registered at least 10 murders committed by pro-abortion violent extremists, as well as dozens of bombings and arsons, all targeting abortion providers and facilities. However, the Supreme Court leak could lead to threats from both pro and anti-abortion supporters.

The DHS' Office of Intelligence and Analysis said in its bulletin that "grievances related to restricting abortion access could fuel violence by pro-choice abortion-related violent extremists and other [domestic violent extremists.]"

 

Protecting SCOTUS is, frankly, vital.

 

The problem I have is equating and conflating the pro-choice side here to the side that kills abortion providers in their church pews. 

They are not the same, folks. One is much, much more likely to commit actual violence, and it's not the side that wants folks to have bodily autonomy over their own uteri.

God I hate this timeline, I really do. If there were still somehow doubts that the draft decision on Roe was leaked by conservatives (and quite possibly by Ginni Thomas herself) this report should put it to rest.

The (Burned) Bridges Of Madison Cawthorn, Con't

Being a screaming racist, a junior Neo-Nazi youth director, and a horrible boss were all fine wit Republican voters in NC-11. What cost Rep. Madison Cawthorn his primary and his career last night however was spilling the beans on Capitol Hill GOP coke orgies.

 

In 2020, Madison Cawthorn became the youngest Republican elected to Congress in American history. In 2022, he became the youngest Republican to lose reelection to Congress in American history.

A spokesperson for Cawthorn said he conceded the Republican race for his North Carolina congressional seat Tuesday night. The 26-year-old Cawthorn lost after a series of self-imposed scandals, controversies, and gaffes. He was repeatedly pulled over for speeding while driving without a license, twice took a firearm through airport security, faced allegations of sexual misconduct and insider trading, and baselessly accused colleagues of participating in cocaine-fueled orgies, and then there was the weird video of him humping another man.

It didn’t help that Cawthorn had an inflated view of his own political stock. He released his own personal policy program for House Republicans, an unusual step for any individual member let alone a freshman backbencher. And he angered his home state’s Republicans by announcing a bid in a newly drawn district meant for the state House Speaker only to see the gerrymander thrown out in court and forcing him to return, chastened, to run in the district he currently represents.

Cawthorn’s maneuver especially angered Senator Thom Tillis, who had been attacked by Cawthorn. Tillis endorsed State Senator Chuck Edwards, who defeated Cawthorn on Tuesday, and actively campaigned against him. A Tillis-tied super-PAC ran ads explicitly attacking Cawthorn as “a liar.” When asked by a reporter Tuesday whether Cawthorn deserved a second chance, the Republican senator jibed, “I believe everybody deserves second chances. That’s why I voted for a lot of the criminal justice reform bills.”

Republican discontent stretched beyond traditional figures such as Tillis. “No one from the Freedom Caucus guys to people in MAGA world are happy with how he conducted himself,” said one ally of Donald Trump. There is a sense he had behaved even worse than controversial figures such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, who, for all inflammatory rhetoric, was not viewed as “super-conceited and cocky.” Another plugged-in Republican strategist put it more bluntly: “The guy is just a total fuckup and shows the limits of patience and tolerance that the MAGA movement has for complete and utter idiots. It’s breaking laws and recklessness in personal behavior.”

The result was Cawthorn did not get the full and effusive emailed statement of endorsement on the eve of the election that Trump has given to scores of other Republicans. Instead, Trump simply posted a statement on his flailing new social-media platform, Truth Social, where he described Cawthorn as making “some foolish mistakes” but insisted the freshman Republican deserved “a second chance.”

Even such tepid praise marked a major fall from glory for Cawthorn, who took office just four months after his 25th birthday and was an immediate Republican star. On the strength of his youth — and what turned out to be a fabricated backstory about the obstacles he had to overcome after being paralyzed in a car accident at the age of 19 — he had not only won an open Republican primary without Trump’s endorsement but had then gone on to be a featured speaker at the 2020 Republican convention.

 

Sadly, Cawthorn will remain in the House as a lame duck for the next seven months, so there's still a lot of damage he can do to both parties before the inevitable FOX, Newsmax, or OANN job next year. I'd love to say that we'll never hear from this clown again, but he's going to be around for decades. The best outcome would be him naming names on the way out, but we won't be that lucky.

No, by all accounts, this little carbuncle is going to be around long after I'm gone, he's only 26. He's has a half-century long career of riding the Right-Wing Gravy Train ahead of him.

Unless he burns that final bridge too.

Last Call For Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

The Washington Post is reporting that former Trump Assistant Secretary of State Robert Destro met with two election theft "activists" on January 6th itself, with the purpose of the meeting to coordinate spreading disinformation about the 2020 election and justifying the January 6th terrorist attack with that disinformation.

 

On Jan. 6, 2021, around the time that thousands of Donald Trump’s supporters swarmed the U.S. Capitol, a top Trump appointee at the U.S. State Department met with two activists who had been key to spreading the false narrative that the presidential election had been stolen.

The meeting came as Trump’s allies were pressing theories that election machines had been hacked by foreign powers and were angling for Trump to employ the vast powers of the national security establishment to seize voting machines or even rerun the election.

Robert A. Destro, a law professor at Catholic University of America then serving as an assistant secretary of state, confirmed to The Washington Post he met with the two men — Colorado podcaster Joe Oltmann and Michigan lawyer Matthew DePerno — in the midst of the tumultuous day.

The two men have previously claimed to have huddled on Jan. 6 with State Department leaders, who Oltmann has said were sympathetic to the claims that a “coup” was underway to steal the presidency from Trump. They have not identified with whom they met. Destro’s acknowledgment is the first independent confirmation that they successfully gained the high-level audience. It is unclear whether the meeting led to any action.

Oltmann and DePerno played important behind-the-scenes roles in crafting the baseless allegations that the election was stolen from Trump, a review of emails and public statements from Trump allies shows. The State Department meeting provides new evidence of the success that activists spreading false claims about the election had in gaining access to top administration officials. Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows was in close contact with activists pushing false fraud narratives, as were high-level officials at the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security.

Little is known about the origins of the session at the State Department. The department is responsible for international diplomacy, and former officials said meetings that revolve around domestic elections would be highly unusual.

In response to questions from The Post, Destro confirmed in an email that he met with Oltmann and DePerno, now the Republican nominee for attorney general in Michigan. But Destro declined to answer other questions, including what was discussed that day, whether other officials took part and whether anyone took action as a result.

“I met with hundreds of American citizens and foreign nationals during my time at State, all of whom had foreign-focused issues to discuss,” wrote Destro, who served as the assistant secretary of state for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor from September 2019 to the end of Trump’s term. “I won’t talk about any of the details of those meetings, either.”

Before joining the State Department, Destro was a law professor who specialized in religious liberty and had served as an adviser to religious organizations. He has appeared on a podcast hosted by Tony Perkins, president of the socially conservative Family Research Council.

Oltmann and DePerno did not respond to questions about the meeting.

 

Everywhere you look, you find more January 6th co-conspirators.

 

And let's not forget about the terrorist attacks outside of that day. 

Years beforelaw enforcement seized the contents of Ian Rogers’s safe, he earned a reputation as a talented mechanic and successful Napa Valley business owner. Rogers catered to an elite clientele of Jaguar, Land Rover and Rolls-Royce owners inside a garage off Napa’s main drag, a street spotted with boutiques and high-end bed and breakfasts.

The 47-year-old from Sonoma County, who appeared to have a passion for guns, according to Facebook posts where he dissed prominent Democrats, was also a loving husband and father who paid his bills on time, according to his family and friends.

In the fall of 2020, in the weeks after Joe Biden was declared the next president of the United States, Rogers sent an ominous text to someone he trusted, according to court records.

“Ok bro we need to hit the enemy in the mouth,” he messaged.

“Yeah so we punch Soros,” Rogers’s former employee and gym buddy, Jarrod Copeland, texted back, referring to billionaire investor George Soros.

Copeland, a Kentucky native, had been a mechanic at Rogers’s shop nearly a decade earlier.

“I think right now we attack democrats. They’re offices etc. Molotov cocktails and gasoline,” Rogers continued.

Copeland replied, “We need more people bro. Gonna be hard.”

The day after Thanksgiving, the chatter kindled a plan. Text messages contained in court records show the two men agreed to burn down the headquarters of the California Democratic Party in Sacramento, a building diagonal to the California Highway Patrol office tasked with protecting state lawmakers and daily visitors to the Capitol. Also nearby: a youth center, a gym and a popular bookstore.

Rogers: sent link to the address of the California Democratic Party office…
Copeland: Right next to CHP
Copeland: gotta be cautious
Rogers: Only takes 3 minutes
Rogers: Take a brick break a window pour gas in and light

The two men texted that they hoped hitting that particular target would send a message and ignite a movement. They viewed themselves as action-film heroes, referencing “The Expendables,” a popular movie franchise.

Rogers: Scare the whole country
Rogers: Can you imagine cnn covering this haha !
Rogers: I’ll leave a envelope with our demands and intentions
Rogers: Basically saying we declare war on the Democratic Party and all traitors to the republic.
Copeland: That’s some expendables stuff.
Rogers: We need to send a message
Copeland: Yep I agree
Rogers: Start a movement

On Jan. 8, 2021, the two acknowledged they might die carrying out their plan. Rogers asked Copeland if he was ready to leave his wife.

Rogers: What I’m talking about we probably will die unfortunately
Copeland: She was crying yesterday and said to me “please don’t leave me I don’t know what to do without you” she was rubbing my back while I was watching...
Copeland: She knows how i run and she knows I will put myself in harms way for what I believe in

It never came to that.

Rogers and Copeland were arrested in January and July of 2021, respectively, according to court records.

 

Reminder that the good guys have to get lucky 100% of the time, or people die.

 

It's A Gas, Gas, Gas Con't

Republicans want you to blame Biden and the Democrats for high gas prices at the pump, and specifically they want you to blame Biden and the Democrats for "not doing anything to help" when Republicans are the ones blocking legislation to do so.

Take a walk through U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers' tweets and you'll find complaint after complaint about the price of gas. Congresswoman McMorris Rodgers, Republican of Washington, is the ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee but opposes legislation to stop oil and gas companies from price gouging consumers.

Rep. McMorris Rodgers on Monday claimed that making it illegal for oil companies to price gouge is "socialism," something that's done in places like "Soviet Russia," not in America.

“The promise of America is free enterprise, not socialism, not government price controls,” she claimed, as she complained about the price of gas, which just hit a new record high.

The bill would not set price caps as some Republicans suggest, rather, it would empower the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate if oil and gas companies are price gouging consumers.

Republicans on the powerful House Rules Committee on Monday blocked the bill, H.R. 7688, the Consumer Fuel Price Gouging Prevention Act. from advancing. The GOP, thanks to McMorris Rodgers, is now calling the legislation the "Socialist Energy Price Fixing Act."

CNN's Manu Raju reports House Republican leadership Monday evening was urging its members to vote against the legislation if and when it comes to a vote on the full floor, which is still possible, although questionable.

But even if the bill passes the House, Senate Republicans will filibuster it, then all of them will run ads blaming the Democrats.

They'll get away with it too.

They always do.

Nobody's Business But The Turks, Con't

With Sweden and Finland (and even the Swiss) wanting to join NATO, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan knows that unanimous consent among all NATO members is needed to approve the move, and that means Erdogan can now extract all kinds of political concessions from his fellow NATO allies.

Ankara has repeatedly taken issue with Western governments like Sweden over their support for the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The dominant fighting force in the SDF, which has been the West's main partner in the fight against ISIS, is the Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG). Turkey regards the YPG as a terrorist organization, associating it with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) — a militant, separatist group that has waged a violent campaign against the Turkish government since the mid-1980s as part of an effort to establish an independent Kurdish state.

The YPG has denied having any explicit organizational links with the PKK, but Turkey effectively views them as one in the same. The US also views the PKK as a terror group, but it hasn't taken the same stance toward the YPG and has worked closely with the SDF in the campaign against ISIS. Turkey has also rebuked the US over its support for the SDF.

This complex backdrop helps explain why Erdogan on Friday said he did not view Finland and Sweden's NATO aspirations positively and accused them of harboring terrorist organizations.

Over the weekend, Turkey's top diplomat appeared to signal that there was room for negotiation on the issue, laying out Ankara's demands in this regard.

"There absolutely needs to be security guarantees here. They need to stop supporting terrorist organizations," Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told reporters in Berlin, per Reuters. The Turkish government has demanded that Finland and Sweden extradite suspected members of Kurdish militant groups like the PKK, while also calling for the two countries to lift restrictions on arms exports to Turkey that were imposed over military actions in Syria in 2019.

Meanwhile, Ibrahim Kalin, a spokesperson for Erdogan, on Saturday told Reuters that Turkey was "not closing the door" on Finland and Sweden's NATO bids. "But we are basically raising this issue as a matter of national security for Turkey," Kalin added.

Erdogan is running for re-election next year, and could be trying to score political points domestically by tying this issue to Turkey's issues with Kurdish militant groups.

"Erdogan decided to make this very public and announce Turkey's position, with a view also to obtain support domestically," Sinan Ulgen, a former Turkish diplomat, told the Wall Street Journal, adding, "This is how he operates. He always has an eye to domestic politics."

Stoltenberg, the NATO chief, on Sunday said he did not believe it was Turkey's intention to prevent Sweden and Finland from joining the alliance. "Turkey has made it clear: Their intention is not to block membership," Stoltenberg told reporters Sunday, the Washington Post reported. "Therefore, I am confident we'll be able to address the concerns that Turkey has expressed in a way that doesn't delay the accession process."

But Erdogan's comments on Monday threw more uncertainty into the process. Russian President Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, offered remarks on the latest moves that stood in stark contrast with Moscow's generally hardline stance and threats against NATO expansion.

"Russia has no problem with these states — none," Putin said to the leaders of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a Russia-led military alliance. "And so in this sense there is no immediate threat to Russia from an expansion of NATO to include these countries," he added, according to Reuters.

 

Expect the price tag to be pretty substantial, but Erdogan will get his realpolitik kickback here from Biden and company. Nobody wants to be the next Ukraine.

Last Call For Cruz Control, SCOTUS Edition

A nice change of pace for the Roberts Court is merely legalizing Sen. Ted Cruz's garden variety campaign finance bribery and embezzlement, instead of every ruling directly turning the country into a white supremacist fascist ethnostate.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has been at war with campaign finance laws for more than a dozen years, stretching at least as far back as its decision in Citizens United v. FEC (2010). On Monday, the Court’s six Republican appointees escalated this war.

The Court’s decision in FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate is a boon to wealthy candidates. It strikes down an anti-bribery law that limited the amount of money candidates could raise after an election in order to repay loans they made to their own campaign.

Federal law permits candidates to loan money to their campaigns. In 2001, however, Congress prohibited campaigns from repaying more than $250,000 of these loans using funds raised after the election. They can repay as much as they want from campaign donations received before the election (although a federal regulation required them to do so “within 20 days of the election”).

The idea is that, if already-elected officials can solicit donations to repay what is effectively their own personal debt, lobbyists and others seeking to influence lawmakers can put money directly into the elected official’s pocket — and campaign donations that personally enrich a lawmaker are particularly likely to lead to corrupt bargains. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) manufactured a case to try to overturn that $250,000 limit, and now, the Court has sided with him.

Indeed, now that this limit on loan repayments has been struck down, lawmakers with sufficiently creative accountants may be able to use such loans to give themselves a steady income stream from campaign donors.

According to the Los Angeles Times, for example, Rep. Grace Napolitano (D-CA) made a $150,000 loan to her campaign at 18 percent interest in 1998 — before the 2001 law was enacted. Though Napolitano did eventually reduce the interest rate on this loan to 10 percent, the high-interest loan allowed her to make a considerable profit from donors.

As of 2009, Napolitano reportedly raised $221,780 to repay that loan — $158,000 of which was classified as “interest.” Because the 6-3 decision in Ted Cruz neutralizes the 2001 law, lawmakers may now potentially use a similar scheme in order to funnel legal bribes into their personal bank accounts.

Other lawmakers might not be quite as brazen in seeking to line their own pockets. But they still may be inclined to reward donors who help them recoup the cost of personal loans. As Justice Elena Kagan writes in dissent, a candidate who receives money that goes directly into their own pocket is likely to be “more grateful than for ordinary campaign contributions (which do not increase his personal wealth).”

 

And yes, this is the rare instance where "both sides" is an apt case to make, as at least one Democrat, Grace Napolitano, saw no problem with making thousands this way. Napolitano is still in Congress, by the way.

Yes, Cruz was the one who went to SCOTUS to legalize bribery, but you'd be kidding yourself if you don't think both parties will take advantage of the new rules.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

There's zero doubt that the Buffalo market shooting on Saturday was a planned execution of Black people because the gunman admitted as such to police after his arrest.

The 18-year-old suspected of opening fire at a Buffalo supermarket Saturday told authorities he was targeting the Black community, according to an official familiar with the investigation.

The alleged gunman made disturbing statements describing his motive and state of mind following his arrest, the official said. The statements were clear and filled with hate toward the Black community. Investigators also uncovered other information from search warrants and other methods indicating the alleged shooter was "studying" previous hate attacks and shootings, the official said.

The revelation comes a day after a gunman killed 10 people and wounded three others at the Tops Friendly Markets store in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo. Eleven of the people who were shot were Black, officials said.

The suspect was identified as a rifle-toting 18-year-old from Conklin, New York, who allegedly wrote a White supremacist manifesto online, traveled about 200 miles to the store and livestreamed the attack, authorities said.

Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said Sunday the attack was a racist hate crime and will be prosecuted as such.

"The evidence that we have uncovered so far makes no mistake that this is an absolute racist hate crime. It will be prosecuted as a hate crime," he said. "This is someone who has hate in their heart, soul and mind."

Investigators believe the suspect acted on his own in the shooting, Gramaglia said. The suspect was in Buffalo a day before the shooting and did some reconnaissance at the Tops Friendly Markets store, the commissioner said.

The victims included a former Buffalo police lieutenant working as a security guard and the 86-year-old mother of Buffalo's retired fire commissioner, Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said. Two people remain hospitalized in stable condition, a spokesman for Erie County Medical Center said Saturday night.

 

The right is scrambling to try to escape their years of violent "Great Replacement" rhetoric, but this time ten people were executed because of it.  And they can't escape from it, because it's mainstream Republican bigotry and has been for decades, as Rolling Stone's Talia Lavin reminds us.

The demographics of the United States are changing, and the share of the population considered white is shrinking. This change is occurring faster than anticipated, thanks to the relative ages of white and nonwhite populations in the country — the nonwhite population trends significantly younger — and all national population growth is being driven by nonwhite groups, according to an analysis by Brookings. This confluence of death, birth, and immigration is in and of itself morally neutral, a matter of the natural ebb and flow of populations over time. But as the era of the white majority nears its end, a revanchist, racist right has treated the facts of demography as an occasion for a sweeping, violent moral panic.

Donald Trump’s ascendance was a key marker of the force of white racial panic; from the moment he launched his candidacy, his overt racism set the party’s agenda, and from the very first, his rhetoric directly provoked racist violence. Far from ebbing as Trump has ceased to be the party’s sole center, however, the tide of white animus has become even more central to a new crop of Congresspeople and candidates.

The Republican Party’s embrace of nativism has been more of a full-on dash than a slow slide, and it has been catalyzed by the vast constellation of right-wing media. Chief among these is the juggernaut that is Fox News. As a New York Times analysis revealed, the network’s flagship prime-time show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, has an obsession with replacement theory: In more than 400 shows the newspaper analyzed, Carlson evoked the idea of forced demographic change through immigration and other methods. Carlson is not alone: A Media Matters examination of Fox’s rhetoric throughout 2021 found that the network fulsomely embraced replacement theory, or, as it is more commonly known among extremists, “white genocide.” Such fears have become commonplace campaign talking points among Republican candidates: Ohio senatorial candidate J.D. Vance recently declared that Democrats are “bringing in a large number of new voters to replace those that are already here”; in Arizona, far-right state senator Wendy Rogers responded to an article about migrants with the ominous message, “We are being replaced and invaded.” Just hours after the mass shooting in Buffalo, Senate candidate Blake Masters posted a video appearance in which he declared that Democrats’ electoral strategy involves bringing in “millions” of immigrants to vote for them. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene rode extremism into Congress, long after sharing a video that declared that an “unholy alliance of leftists, capitalists, and Zionist supremacists has schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation, with the deliberate aim of breeding us out of existence in our own homelands.” This clamor — from politicians and pundits, candidates and conspiracy theorists — has become the radioactive center of the right’s policy.

Once you understand an obsession with racial composition and white fertility to be the driving engine of Republican politics, a number of seemingly disparate movements begin to fit together into an ugly whole. Some aspects are obvious: The anti-immigrant movement that has seen U.S. refugee admissions at historic lows and asylum seekers marooned in purgatorial camps in Mexico continues to dominate the right-wing airwaves. Historic levels of gerrymandering are ensuring that a diversifying populace remains beholden to the views of a white minority — alongside openly antidemocratic restrictions on voting and changes in election administration.

Other aspects are more veiled, but no less vitriolic. Years of fearmongering about transgender rights, and in particular their influence on youth, are linked to fears of waning fertility: anti-trans demagogues like Abigail Shrier describe trans bodies as “maimed and sterile,” and, as such, a chief motivation for the legion of anti-trans laws passed by state legislatures is the future fertility of trans children born female. The violent antifeminism of a far-right movement that sees women principally as vessels for breeding a new white generation expresses itself in a fixation on a return to “traditional” gender roles. And the culmination of generations of right-wing activism, which will secure the “domestic supply of infants,” as Justice Samuel Alito memorably put it, is poised to arrive in the form of the dissolution of Roe v. Wade. Payton Gendron, and those like him, are listening: like Brenton Tarrant, the mass shooter at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, Gendron opened his manifesto with a screed on the supposedly apocalyptic consequences of “sub-replacement fertility rates” among white women.

In his manifesto, Gendron claims to have acted alone, while in the same breath admitting, “I’ve had many influences from others.” The 180 pages of the document reveal the breadth of those influences: it is largely pastiche, with page upon page of racist and antisemitic memes compiled in repulsive collages; collections of scientific studies of I.Q. differentials between racist groups; screenshots and links to news articles that confirm his prejudices; and segments of other manifestos, including Tarrant’s, bloat a thin line of racist scrawl. He may have, as he claims, become radicalized by over-enthused browsing of the Internet’s sewers, principally 4chan. But his fixations mirror those of the right wing more broadly, from violent transphobia to a loathing of immigration to a preoccupation with the possibility of civil war.

When the rhetoric of an entire movement devolves into Manichaean demonization of their political foes; when demographic shifts are represented as apocalyptic; and when a party can appeal to nothing but the consolidation of white power, it is an inevitability that such rhetoric will leave bodies in its wake. The Republican Party caters chiefly now to those who claim that to be born the wrong color is an act of genocide, and act with appropriate fervor. There has never been a lone wolf when it comes to racist terror in the United States; it suffuses every aspect of our politics and policy, and in latter years the mass howl of fear at change comes from a jaw that drips with blood. As long as we fail to recognize the wellspring of racial animus that animates the right wing in this country, the corpses will continue to accrue.

The GOP has gotten so racist that even Republicans are saying so.  Well, Republican, singular, and that's Liz Cheney.

Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., on Monday accused House GOP leadership of enabling white supremacy and antisemitism, which she suggested has inspired people to act upon those threats, leading to dangerous consequences.

"The House GOP leadership has enabled white nationalism, white supremacy, and anti-semitism. History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse. @GOP leaders must renounce and reject these views and those who hold them," Cheney said in a tweet.

You'll excuse me for thinking that while Cheney is absolutely correct, I believe her motivations are extremely suspect, and that she's scoring points here while being just as racist.

For Cheney, Stefanik, and the GOP, everything is about producing more white babies and killing more non-white people in order to slow or reverse the browning of America.

Everything.

Never forget that.

The Poll-Asked Look, Con't

Yet another poll, this time from NBC News, finds the following three things: Americans overwhelmingly want to keep Roe v. Wade in place, President Biden's approval ratings are mediocre at best (and slipping down into Trump territory), and down-ticket Democrats are doing much better than earlier this year on the subject of the generic congressional ballot.

Support for abortion rights has reached a record high, and nearly two-thirds of Americans oppose the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, according to a new national NBC News poll conducted after the leak of a draft opinion that would strike down the constitutional right to abortion.

What’s more, the survey finds abortion climbing up the list of issues that Americans believe are the most important, and that Democratic interest in the upcoming midterms has increased since earlier this year.

But the poll also found that this Supreme Court draft opinion hasn’t substantially altered the overall political environment heading into November’s elections — with inflation and the economy remaining the public’s top issues, President Joe Biden’s job rating falling below 40 percent and a whopping 75 percent of Americans saying the country is headed in the wrong direction.

It’s the fourth straight NBC News poll with the wrong-track number higher than 70 percent, and the fifth time in the poll’s 34-year history when the wrong-track number hit 75 percent or higher.

The other times were in 2008 (during the Great Recession) and 2013 (during a government shutdown).

“It is a flashing red light when you see a number like this,” said Republican pollster Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies, who conducted this survey with Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates.

“Americans are telling us this is as bad as 2008,” McInturff added.

Yet given these numbers, Democrats are still tied with Republicans in the poll’s question of which party should control Congress.

“It is remarkable that preference for control of Congress is even overall, and that the gap in interest in the election has narrowed,” said Horwitt, the Democratic pollster. 

 

The better news is that the upcoming loss of abortion rights in two dozen states has finally motivated Democrats into closing the enthusiasm gap, rapidly.

Maybe more significantly, Democratic interest in the midterms has increased — from 50 percent of Democrats in March who indicated a high level of interest (either a “9” or “10” on a 10-point scale) to 61 percent now.

That’s compared to Republicans, who were at 67 percent high interest two months ago, versus 69 percent now.

“How [abortion] plays out in November is to be determined. but for now, it is injecting some much-needed enthusiasm into parts of the Democratic coalition,” said Horwitt, the Democratic pollster.

 

Americans are realizing that the GOP isn't the solution to our problems, and that they are in fact the cause of many of them.

Last Call For The Night The Lights Went Out In Texas, Con't

Texas's third-world power grid can't keep up with demand as summer heat approaches, and instead of dying from freezing cold and no electricity to run water pumps, you can now die in sweltering heat with no cooling.

The operator of Texas' power grid asked residents to conserve electricity Friday after six power plants went offline amid soaring temperatures.

Brad Jones, CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, said in a statement that the company had lost roughly 2,900 megawatts of electricity — or enough to power nearly 600,000 homes, the Texas Tribune reported.

Jones referenced the unseasonably hot weather, saying it was driving the demand for power across the state. Temperatures approaching 100 degrees were forecast from Austin to Dallas over the weekend and into next week.

Jones did not say why the plants went offline, and a spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment Friday evening.

The executive asked customers to set their thermostats to 78 degrees and avoid using large appliances in the afternoon and early evening.

The non-profit energy organization, which manages power for 90 percent of Texas' electrical grid, faced blistering criticism last year after blackouts left millions without power for days during subfreezing temperatures.

 

And yes, the state's power grid is still unfixed and completely vulnerable to total collapse to the next winter disaster, but the main issue of deregulation exists in the summer too.

The main Texas grid is an island, not connected to the country’s two major power grids. That is by design, the result of state leaders’ actions decades ago to avoid federal regulation and encourage free-market competition. Multiple state agencies, as well as a nonprofit organization, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, govern the grid’s operations, writing rules based on laws passed by state legislators.

The legislators responded to February’s disaster by passing measures to improve the power system’s preparedness for winter. They established weatherization mandates but left it to state regulators to implement them.

 

And they have done precisely none of that, meaning Texans will have to pay potentially thousands of dollars for power when the demand spikes over this summer.

Again.

The Road To Gilead, Con't

The road to Gilead goes through Oklahoma, as women are being turned away from abortion services and medication already, under what would have been a patently unconstitutional six-week limit of abortions signed into law by GOP Gov. Kevin Stitt, and just the threat of a SCOTUS decision obliterating Roe means there will be no challenge to it in the courts whatsoever.

Oklahoma’s six-week abortion ban, Senate Bill 1503, is only the second in the nation to go into effect. Texas, the first, has had its ban in place since 1 September. The impact of Oklahoma’s ban could be seismic in Texas and Oklahoma – last fall, Oklahoma emerged as the state that Texans seeking abortions were most likely to travel to for care. Some drove hundreds of miles, spending thousands of dollars to make the journey. Already, clinicians in Oklahoma are trying to devise strategies to help their patients get to clinics in neighboring Kansas. But there are limits to what they can do.

And even access at six weeks is not expected to last long. Last week’s draft leak has chilled abortion providers across the country, confirming what many had anticipated for months. Unless something dramatic shifts, the court will probably overturn Roe in a matter of weeks. When that happens, states will have the power to ban abortion entirely. And in both Oklahoma and Texas, that will happen. They are among the 13 states that have passed what are known as trigger laws – legislation crafted to ban abortion almost right away once Roe is struck down.

For many, the draft decision put a post-Roe reality into sharp clarity. But for clinicians in Oklahoma, like in Texas, the moment is already here. And few people are paying attention.

“There’s kind of this view of these states as disposable – that there aren’t valuable people that live here,” said Kailey Voellinger, who runs the Trust Women clinic in Oklahoma City. “It feels like we’re afterthoughts.”

Since the new six-week ban took effect, neither President Joe Biden nor his press office has put out a statement about Oklahoma’s new law, despite publicly condemning similar bans passed in Texas and Idaho, and criticizing other Oklahoma bans that have not yet taken effect. (Idaho’s six-week ban has been blocked by its state supreme court.) The Department of Justice – which sprang into action when Texas’s six-week ban took effect – has been similarly quiet.

And in the meantime, patients keep calling the state’s four clinics for appointments.

Trust Women and Tulsa Women’s Clinic are still providing the service. Those who are providing care are only seeing patients up to six weeks of pregnancy, but patients well beyond that are still calling to seek abortions. Many learn about the new six-week ban only on that initial phone call.

“There’s a lot of shock and disbelief from patients, reacting like, ‘What do you mean I’ve got to go out of state?’ ‘That’s crazy, I can’t afford to take off work, I can’t leave my kids that long, how am I supposed to do that?’” Gallegos said.

Patients are angry, Voellinger said. “I’ve had two staff people tell me they got off the phone with a patient who was like, ‘Well, what am I supposed to do? Kill myself?’

“People are exasperated and don’t know what to do,” she added.

In the clinics, the shift has been stark. Right up until the six-week ban took effect, appointments had been booked solid, the waiting rooms full of Texans and Oklahomans. Abortion appointments were booked two to three weeks out.

That has changed since last week. But in the days after the six-week ban took effect, the Tulsa Women’s Clinic performed abortions for eight patients, and then 10 the next day. That represented about half the people who came in for abortions, Gallegos said. The rest thought they were within six weeks of pregnancy, but learned at the clinic they were too far along. On the third day after the ban, 20 patients – two-thirds of the people who had booked an appointment – were able to get the abortions they had sought.

There are no more Texans coming for care. And the tight timeline of six weeks, Gallegos added, means that the patients who are coming for abortions have barely had time to think about their decisions. They’re being forced to rush, often without the luxury of even an extra day.

“It’s awful to have to tell the patients, ‘You can ultimately do what you need to do, but if you don’t do this today you don’t have the option any more,’” she said.

 

It's already too late for many women, and the ban on abortion will end up killing thousands of women in states like Oklahoma and here in Kentucky in the weeks and months ahead.

There's no doubt in my mind that the draft decision was leaked to give red states to go-ahead to ban abortion and paralyze the courts when it came to issuing stays for the unconstitutional bans. By July 4th, abortion will be gone for more than half of America's women. The pain and suffering is already real in several states.

It only gets worse from here.

Unless we vote in November in record numbers.

Sunday Long Read: One Million Reasons Why

The New York Times documents the loss of one million American lives to a preventable disease, and how we as a country got here in our Sunday Long Read.

 

THE MAGNITUDE OF THE country’s loss is nearly impossible to grasp.

More Americans have died of Covid-19 than in two decades of car crashes or on battlefields in all of the country’s wars combined.

Experts say deaths were all but inevitable from a new virus of such severity and transmissibility. Yet, one million dead is a stunning toll, even for a country the size of the United States, and the true number is almost certainly higher because of undercounting.

It is the result of many factors, including elected officials who played down the threat posed by the coronavirus and resisted safety measures; a decentralized, overburdened health care system that struggled with testing, tracing and treatment; and lower vaccination and booster rates than other rich countries, partly the result of widespread mistrust and resistance fanned by right-wing media and politicians.

The virus did not claim lives evenly, or randomly. The New York Times analyzed 25 months of data on deaths during the pandemic and found that some demographic groups, occupations and communities were far more vulnerable than others. A significant proportion of the nation’s oldest residents died, making up about three-quarters of the total deaths. And among younger adults across the nation, Black and Hispanic people died at much higher rates than white people.

Understanding the toll — who makes up the one million and how the country failed them — is essential as the pandemic continues. More than 300 people are still dying of Covid every day.

“We are a country with the best doctors in the world, we got a vaccine in an astoundingly short period of time, and yet we’ve had so many deaths,” said Mary T. Bassett, the health commissioner for New York State.

“It really should be a moment for us all to reflect on what sort of society we want to have,” she added.

 

The society that we apparently want to have is one where 100,000 deaths to COVID was heart-rending, and a million deaths are the price we pay to move on from lockdowns, mask regulations, and vaccine requirements.

 

It's a society that has deliberately undercounted the deaths by maybe 50, maybe 100%, and we do everything to pretend the pandemic is over.

 

It's a society that will tolerate the deaths of hundreds of thousands, millions more, and ignore the debilitation of millions, tens of millions due to Long COVID symptoms.

 

It's the most selfish, amoral society in human history, I would think.

 

That really does describe America in 2022, doesn't it?

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Police and FBI agents have a suspect in custody in Saturday's terrorist attack at a grocery store Saturday afternoon in Buffalo, New York.  An avowed, radicalized white supremacist terrorist shot and killed at least 10 people in a Tops, a Black neighborhood grocery store, in a heavily-armed execution-style rampage by an 18-year-old white male.

Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said the supermarket shooting suspect was wearing tactical gear and livestreaming as he entered the store.

"At approximately 2:30 today, an individual who the mayor stated is not from this area and is from hours away, drove to Buffalo and went to ... the Tops market. He exited his vehicle, he was very heavily armed. He had tactical gear. He had a tactical helmet on. He had a camera that he was livestreaming what he was doing,"

The suspect is an 18-year-old White male, he said.

He shot four people in the parking lot, Gramaglia said, three of whom died.

The suspect went inside the store, where a security guard and former Buffalo police officer engaged him.

"Because he had heavily armored plating on, the bullet had no round. The suspect engaged our retired officer and he was shot and deceased at the scene. He continued to work his way through the store," Gramaglia said.

He made his way back to the front of the store, where patrol officers were able to talk him into dropping his gun after he "put the gun to his own neck."

Police arrested the suspect and transported him to Buffalo Police Headquarters.

 

The FBI is treating this as a hate crime.

Stephen Belongia, the special agent in charge of the FBI's Buffalo Field Office, said the FBI is assisting in the investigation as well during a news conference.

Erie County Sheriff John Garcia called the shooting "pure evil" during the news conference.

"It was straight-up, racially motivated hate crime from somebody outside of our community, outside of the city of good neighbors as the mayor said, coming into our community and trying to inflict that evil upon us," Garcia said.

Out of the 13 victims, 11 are Black while two are White, according to Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia.

 

A heavily-armed white supremacist terrorist in tactical gear went to this store to kill Black people and did. And when he did it, he streamed it live on Twitch.

Officials said the gunman broadcast the attack live on Twitch, the live-streaming site owned by Amazon that is popular with gamers. Twitch said it had taken the channel offline. The channel’s page said only that it was “currently unavailable due to a violation of Twitch’s community guidelines or terms of service.” In a statement, a Twitch spokeswoman said the site “has a zero-tolerance policy against violence of any kind and works swiftly to respond to all incidents. The user has been indefinitely suspended from our service, and we are taking all appropriate action, including monitoring for any accounts rebroadcasting this content.”

And he had a racist, anti-Semitic manifesto ready to go after he did the deed. Repotedly, the manifesto is 100% "Great Replacement" theory bigotry, he specifically "chose" this Tops supermarket in order to kill as many Black people as he could, to stop them from "replacing" white Americans.

You know, Tucker Carlson's favorite subject.

The Fox News host has repeatedly fear-mongered about Democrats allegedly bringing in dark-skinned immigrants with the express purpose of “replacing” the American (read: white) electorate. On Wednesday night, he declared that the Biden administration is intentionally trying “to change the racial mix of the country” through immigration.

“In political terms, this policy is called ‘the great replacement,’ the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries,” Carlson exclaimed. “They brag about it all the time, but if you dare to say it's happening they will scream at you with maximum hysteria.”

The so-called “Great Replacement” theory is a white-supremacist belief in a conspiracy among liberals and wealthy elites to demographically and culturally replace the white population of majority-white countries with immigrants of non-European descent. In recent years, the theory has served as the inspiration for racist mass killings in El Paso, Pittsburgh and Christchurch, New Zealand.

Yet, despite its overtly racist and antisemitic roots, the conspiracy theory—thanks in large part to Carlson’s embrace of it—has become more acceptable and normalized within the Republican Party, with numerous GOP lawmakers and officials openly citing it.

On Thursday, in response to Carlson’s latest segment, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt renewed his calls for Fox News to dump its biggest star.

“It cannot be overstated enough,” Greenblatt said in a statement to The Daily Beast. “For Tucker Carlson, host of one of the most-watched news programs in the country, to use his platform as a megaphone to spread the toxic, antisemitic, and xenophobic ‘great replacement theory’ is a repugnant and dangerous abuse of his platform.”

Greenblatt added: “If it somehow wasn’t clear enough before to the executives at Fox News that Carlson was openly embracing white nationalist talking points, let last night’s episode be case and point. We reiterate our call to Fox News and Lachlan Murdoch: Tucker Carlson must go.”

 

That was April 2021 and again in September.

And guess what? The Great Replacement theory is accepted by half of Republican voters.  

 

Last December, the Associated Press and NORC conducted a large national poll examining conspiratorial ideas including this one. They found that nearly half of Republicans agree to at least some extent with the idea that there’s a deliberate intent to “replace” native-born Americans with immigrants.

The AP-NORC poll included several other questions related to the idea. They asked whether respondents were concerned about native-born Americans losing economic, political and cultural influence as the number of immigrants increased and whether they were concerned that the system under which elections are conducted discriminates against White Americans.

About 3 in 10 Americans overall agreed with the idea that intentional replacement was occurring or that native-born Americans were losing influence. About 1 in 5 agreed that the election system discriminated against Whites. In each case, though, Republicans were more likely than Democrats to express agreement or concern.

The pollsters also asked respondents what cable news channel they preferred. As might be expected, those who preferred Fox News were more likely than Americans overall or than those who preferred CNN or MSNBC to agree with the replacement theory idea. Three in 10 of those who prefer Fox News held the agree/concerned positions on the first two questions above. Among those who watched cable news closer to the right-wing fringe — One America News and Newsmax — the figure was 45 percent.

 

We know exactly where the terrorist in Saturday's attack was radicalized. I've been saying for years now that this was going to breed more deadly violence and today, it did.  It's racism openly supported and repeated by several sitting GOP members of Congress and 2022 candidates.

And today ,at least ten people died directly because of it.

Black Lives Still Matter.

Socially Awkward Laws

A shadow docket move late Wednesday means the 5th Circuit has sided with the Texas GOP allowing the state's anti-social media moderation law to take full effect while the law is being reviewed by the courts, meaning Texas citizens can now sue social media giants like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for any comment, content, or blocking moderation to the tune of billions.

A federal appeals court will let Texas enforce its new social media law — which targets Twitter, Facebook and other large platforms that Republicans accuse of censoring conservatives — even though the court has yet to rule on the law's constitutionality.

The one-sentence order by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, issued Wednesday evening, came with no explanation and was split 2-1, though the order did not indicate how the panel's three judges voted.

The law known as House Bill 20, approved largely along party lines by the Legislature last year, was blocked from taking effect in December by U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman of Austin.

Siding with two tech industry groups that challenged the law, Pitman said HB 20 was an unconstitutional violation of social media companies' free speech rights — interfering with the platforms' editorial discretion and their First Amendment right to moderate the third-party content they disseminate.

"HB 20 prohibits virtually all content moderation, the very tool that social media platforms employ to make their platforms safe, useful, and enjoyable for users," Pitman wrote.

Wednesday's order came only two days after the appeals court heard oral arguments in which Texas lawyers defended HB 20 as a legitimate effort to ban platforms from censoring certain viewpoints.

Texas argues that the large platforms are "common carrier" public forums, subjecting them to state regulation to ensure free and unobstructed access without fear of viewpoint discrimination.

Ken Paxton, the state's Republican attorney general, called the ruling a "big win against Big Tech."

"Texas's HB 20 is back in effect," Paxton wrote on Twitter. "The 5th Circuit made the right call here, and I look forward to continuing to defend the constitutionality of HB 20."

The Texas law lets users sue if they are blocked from posting on a large platform or if their posts are removed.

Tech industry groups argued that HB 20 would open social media platforms to countless lawsuits, upending their ability to enforce content moderation policies and protect users from abusive posts, scams or falsehoods.

Carl Szabo, vice president and general counsel of NetChoice, which challenged the Texas law, said the industry group plans to immediately appeal the order, which he called "an unusual and unfortunate move" because it was issued without explanation or addressing the law's merits.

 

The countless lawsuits and inability to protect users from abuse, disinformation, and harassment is the entire point, and as of right now, expect any efforts to moderate the worst, most racist, most misogynist, most antisemitic content on social media to end immediately.

And if this is upheld by SCOTUS, and there's no reason to think otherwise, expect the end of social media as we know it.

Trump's Truth Social and white supremacist hotbeds like Gab and Parler will be the only games in town very soon.