The right’s dictator references are nothing new After the Hamilton County, Indiana, chapter of the “extremist” Moms for Liberty placed a Hitler quote on the front page of its June newsletter, they received unwanted attention and blowback. The Hill: The quote, believed to be from a 1935 speech by Hitler, reads, “He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future.” The Nazi Party trained young people through school and summer camps to indoctrinate them into Nazi ideology. Paige Miller, chairwoman of the chapter, apologized in an updated version of the newsletter after initially giving an explanation that the quote “should put parents on alert.” “We condemn Adolf Hitler’s actions and his dark place in human history,” Miller said. “We should not have quoted him in our newsletter and express our deepest apology.” Maybe not so deep. Maybe not so sincere. I asked last week why the MAGA right keeps Hitler quotes so handy. “Moms” are not alone. Hitler resurfaced again over the weekend at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority Policy Conference” at the Washington Hilton.
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Well, that was quite a weekend wasn’t it? For a while there it looked as if Russian president Vladimir Putin might be overthrown by a monstrous mercenary warlord named Yevgeny Prigozhin. If that wasn’t strange enough, after taking over a couple of cities en route to Moscow, the plan was abruptly aborted and the warlord was quietly sent packing to Belarus while his mercenary troops were cordially invited to join the Russian army. Nobody knows why. Now it just remains to be seen if the Putin regime has been permanently damaged or whether it was just another surreal moment in the increasingly surreal era. Meanwhile, back in the equally surreal USA, the Republican presidential candidates all attended the annual conservative evangelical gathering, The Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference. By all accounts the crowd was very excited to see all the candidates make their pitch, but the keynote speech by former president Donald Trump was the star event by a mile.
Media Mzatters took a deep dive into this tragic relationship. It’s not pretty: Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has spent nearly two years promoting anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist and Democratic presidential primary candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on his War Room podcast in a mutually beneficial relationship that could have disastrous public health consequences for the country and the world. Both men have used their substantial platforms to spread incorrect information about vaccines and COVID-19, which could now reach an even wider audience given Kennedy’s longshot campaign. Bannon reportedly encouraged Kennedy to run against President Joe Biden in the Democratic Party primary, believing he could be “both a useful chaos agent in [the] 2024 race and a big name who could help stoke anti-vax sentiment around the country,” according to CBS’ Robert Costa. Other right-wing pundits have similarly exploited Kennedy’s run as an attempt to undermine Biden’s support among Democrats with the aim of weakening him in the general election.
Ah, the good ol’ days! Do you remember #SecondCivilWarLetters? When in 2018 Alex Jones announced a Second Civil War starting on the 4th of July? Twitter erupted in mockery with Ken Burns-ish “letters” from the front? Nikki Haley touched off a sort of reprise (though much less fun) on Saturday with one tweet It was blowback a go-go! Seriously? Medhi Hasan: It was so simple when she was growing up that, per her own memoir, she wasn’t allowed to be in a child beauty pageant because it was divided into Black kids and white kids and she was neither. The good ol’ days! That memory probably makes Nikki smile now. Roger Sollenberger: When Nikki was growing up, she sure had it simple — the president of the HBCU where her father was a professor was shot by cops in the Orangeburg massacre while protesting racial segregation Ted Lieu: Dear @NikkiHaley: I remember growing up, when folks called me Chink. Threw eggs at our house. Slashed our tires. Called the police on us because they thought Asians like us were stealing wild ducks for food. And no one in government looked like me or you. Jeff Sharlet: 1970s?
You’ll be shocked You know you want one. Now there’s a study to support why: Millions of Americans who had never owned a gun purchased a firearm during a two-and-a-half-year period that began in January 2019, before the pandemic, and continued through April 2021. Of the 7.5 million people who bought their first firearm during that period, 5.4 million had until then lived in homes without guns, researchers at Harvard and Northeastern University estimated. The new buyers were different from the white men who have historically made up a majority of gun owners. Half were women, and nearly half were people of color (20 percent were Black, and 20 percent were Hispanic). “The people who were always buying are still buying — they didn’t stop. But a whole other community of folks have come in,” said Michael Anestis, the executive director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center, who was not involved in the study. “The real question I wanted to answer was, What do people get out of having a gun?” said Nick Buttrick, a psychologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Nobody really knows… The internet is recommending this early analysis from Yaroslav Trofimov in the WSJ of the failed Russian coup over the weekend. I thought I would share some of it: One widely shared conclusion in Russia, however, was that none of the key players in the power struggle that began when Prigozhin seized the southern city of Rostov on Saturday morning has been strengthened by the ordeal that brought the country to the edge of civil war. Putin, who earlier in the day demanded his security forces crush what he described as a treasonous mutiny, ordered amnesties for Prigozhin and his men by the evening, after Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko negotiated a face-saving compromise. Prigozhin, who showed Wagner’s strength by marching two-thirds of the way toward Moscow with little opposition, ended up aborting the rebellion and accepting, at least for now, exile in Belarus. The Russian army and security forces, meanwhile, displayed little glory as their troops proved reluctant, if not outright afraid, to try stopping Wagner. Flying Russian flags, large Wagner columns on Sunday were driving south on the Moscow-Rostov highway.
From Amy Walters at The Cook Report: For a while now, political prognosticators and armchair campaign analysts have mused that the GOP presidential primary is almost a carbon copy of the 2016 contest. A crowded field of candidates, few of whom are willing to confront Donald Trump directly, will once again ensure that Trump will roll-up primary wins and ultimately capture the nomination in 2024. Yet it’s also true that things are very different from the 2016 cycle. First, Trump is a lot more popular among Republicans and Republican-leaning independent voters than he was in 2015-2016. A Marist poll taken in July 2015 found just 41% of Republicans had favorable opinions of Trump compared to 49% who viewed him unfavorably. By July 2016, most Republicans had warmed to the GOP nominee, but a considerable percentage still viewed him unfavorably: 65% favorable to 29% unfavorable. This month, the former president — who has been indicted in two cases, found liable in a battery and defamation lawsuit and faces more potential legal jeopardy stemming from his role in the Jan.
Again He breaks the law and his cult members have to pony up to pay his expenses: Facing multiple intensifying investigations, former President Donald J. Trump has quietly begun diverting more of the money he is raising away from his 2024 presidential campaign and into a political action committee that he has used to pay his personal legal fees. The change, which went unannounced except in the fine print of his online disclosures, raises fresh questions about how Mr. Trump is paying for his mounting legal bills — which could run into millions of dollars — as he prepares for at least two criminal trials, and whether his PAC, Save America, is facing a financial crunch. When Mr. Trump kicked off his 2024 campaign in November, for every dollar raised online, 99 cents went to his campaign, and a penny went to Save America. But internet archival records show that sometime in February or March, he adjusted that split. Now his campaign’s share has been reduced to 90 percent of donations, and 10 percent goes to Save America.
Things are better than we think. Ed Kilgore takes on the question of why Biden isn’t getting any credit for our improving circumstances. (It’s because people don’t feel it yet…) These days it often seems like we’re caught in a deluge of bad and worrying news on everything from artificial intelligence and UFOs to homelessness and smoke in the air. But you could argue that life has been getting better in the USA overall, as Washington Monthly’s Bill Scher did recently in examining some of the issues people, and especially Republicans, blame on President Joe Biden.
How very Soviet of them I’m so tired: HOUSE SPEAKER KEVIN McCarthy (R-Calif.) is backing two resolutions introduced by Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) looking to expunge Donald Trump’s two impeachments by the House of Representatives. Speaking to reporters while exiting the Capitol on Friday, McCarthy said that he felt it was “appropriate” to expunge the impeachments “because it never should have gone through.” Trump was impeached twice over the course of his presidency. First in 2019 over allegations that he tried to extort Ukrainian government officials into launching a public investigation into Joe Biden in order to cripple his run for president in 2020. Trump was impeached again in 2021 for “incitement of insurrection” in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.