Life as a fictional character Noah Lanard and David Corn find that fact-chaecking the freshman congressman from New York is more like editing a work of fiction: In September 2020, George Santos’ congressional campaign reported that Victoria and Jonathan Regor had each contributed $2,800—the maximum amount—to his first bid for a House seat. Their listed address was 45 New Mexico Street in Jackson Township, New Jersey. A search of various databases reveals no one in the United States named Victoria or Jonathan Regor. Moreover, there is nobody by any name living at 45 New Mexico Street in Jackson. That address doesn’t exist. There is a New Mexico Street in Jackson, but the numbers end in the 20s, according to Google Maps and a resident of the street. Santos’ 2020 campaign finance reports also list a donor named Stephen Berger as a $2,500 donor and said he was a retiree who lived on Brandt Road in Brawley, California.
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Can the Trump Organization recover from the loss of one of their top executives?Actually, does the Trump Organization still exist? He is one of the “stars” of Trump affiliated Rumble, the right wing YouTube alternative. I ask once again. How many right wing media entities are there anyway? How many do they need?
Here’s what’s happening and it isn’t just in Florida. Other red states are following DeSantis’s lead. Judd Legum’s Popular Information newsletter had the story: Teachers in Manatee County, Florida, are being told to make their classroom libraries — and any other “unvetted” book — inaccessible to students, or risk felony prosecution. The new policy is part of an effort to comply with new laws and regulations championed by Governor Ron DeSantis (R). It is based on the premise, promoted by right-wing advocacy groups, that teachers and librarians are using books to “groom” students or indoctrinate them with leftist ideologies. Kevin Chapman, the Chief of Staff for the Manatee County School District, told Popular Information that the policy was communicated to principals in a meeting last Wednesday. Individual schools are now in the process of informing teachers and other staff. Teachers in Manatee County lamented the news on social media.
I’m fairly sure most of you don’t watch Fox News or other right wing media. I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t have to . But I think it’s important to pass on at least some of what they’re doing so we know where Republican voters are getting some of this stuff. Here’s Tucker Carlson this week proposing that the US invade Canada: Tucker Carlson on Thursday called for the U.S. to invade Canada and remove Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The Fox News host claimed he meant it before saying he was talking himself “into a frenzy.” During Fox Nation’s “Tucker Carlson Today,” Carlson referenced the arrests last year of anti-vax truckers in Canada. The demonstrators paralyzed commerce and won over extremists with their traffic-tying protests of COVID-19 safety measures. At the time, Carlson said the country had become a dictatorship because the government took action. And now he suggested he’d like to do something about it. “I’m completely in favor of a Bay of Pigs operation to liberate that country,” Carlson said.
Jonathan Chait’s observation here is right on: There is an enduring pattern in American conservatism in which the right first develops a paranoid interpretation of the liberal Establishment, and then reverse engineers its own version of the monster it has imagined. Conservatives convinced themselves that the mainstream media and universities were mere propaganda organs, then created institutions like the Heritage Foundation and Fox News, warped reflections of their own overheated critique. The January 6 insurrection was, of course, in the mind of its participants, a “response” to the imagined vote-fraud conspiracy and its antifa/BLM shock troops. John Durham’s investigation is a classic episode in this tradition. The American right first convinced itself that Robert Mueller and the deep state, using the cover of dispassionate professionalism, had launched a partisan witch hunt to smear Donald Trump. In response, it created a right-wing mirror image, as fervently partisan and unhinged as they believed their enemies to be. I would say the “weaponization committee” is the Bizarro Worldversion of the January 6th Committee too.
Trump has gotten away with criminal and corrupt behavior his whole life, largely because the authorities just couldn’t ever be bothered with taking the risk of doing anything about it. That remains true today: Days before then-President Donald Trump left the White House, federal prosecutors in New York discussed whether to potentially charge Trump with campaign finance crimes once he was out of office, according to a new book from CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig. Prosecutors from the Southern District of New York developed significant evidence against Trump when they charged his former attorney Michael Cohen in 2018 over a hush money scheme paying two women claiming affairs with Trump, including adult film star Stormy Daniels, Honig writes. But prosecutors did not consider charging Trump at the time because of longstanding Justice Department guidance that a sitting president cannot be indicted. With Trump about to leave office in January 2021, however, Audrey Strauss, the acting US attorney, held multiple discussions with a small group of prosecutors to discuss its evidence against Trump.
Take a deep breath Anand Giridharadas suggests (not in so many words) that if we want to defeat nascent fascism the left needs to get over itself: We need to build a movement like we never have before: attractive, fun, substantive, visionary, tomorrow-oriented, rooted in people’s lives, open-armed, fiery, merciful. A movement that understands the emotion and psychology and anxiety that are at the heart of politics. The right gets this; the left largely doesn’t. We need a new movement that does. A movement that isn’t tedious and hairsplitting and gatekeeping and purist and more interested in petty internal beefing than outward expansion. We need a small-e evangelical movement more interested in finding converts than heretics. If you’ve read “The Persuaders,” the roots of this post are obvious. The left needs to focus more on building critical mass than on criticism. A movement with a tribal language and that finds a dark cloud in every silver lining isn’t inviting. A real movement doesn’t erect barriers to entry. A movement that has a sense of humor.
This is the new GOP establishment House Speaker Kevin McCarthy made good on his promise this week to exact revenge on Democrats for denying committee assignments to far-right extremists Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Paul Gosar, R-Az. He booted two California congressmen, Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, from the Select Committee on Intelligence. AS Speaker, McCarthy has the power to make this move unilaterally. But he is also proposing to kick Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar off the Foreign Relations Committee, which will require a vote of the full House. The cycle of revenge has officially begun. It should be noted that the removal of Greene and Gosar, both of whom have addressed white nationalist gatherings and publicly advocated for the deaths of Democratic officials, was decided by a bipartisan vote by the full House. But that was an earlier, more innocent time. A golden era when death threats against Democratic colleagues were considered bad form by at least a handful of Republicans. It was all the way back in 2021, a lifetime ago.
The best thing Biden ever did was to refuse to give Trump the customary ex-president security clearance: He said creating a new health care plan would be “so easy” too….
I’ve been writing and saying on various radio shows and podcasts over the past few months that even in his weakened state, at this point in the cycle (granted way too early to make any serious predictions) Trump is still the most likely nominee for the GOP nomination. There are reasons for this that have little to do with his popularity (which is still pretty strong in the base.) It’s a structural problem for the GOP which they refuse to deal with. This piece in the Daily Beast spells it out well: If you’re one of the millions of Americans who want desperately for the country to move on from Donald Trump and his toxic brand of politics, I’ve got some bad news—he’s the odds-on favorite to be the 2024 Republican nominee for president. I don’t make the rules here (and I’m not happy about it either), but the numbers don’t lie. In the latest poll from the polling firm Morning Consult, Trump is winning 49 percent of the GOP field, which gives him a 19 percentage point lead over his nearest rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.