Daniel Penny joins Kyle Rittenhouse Being homeless and in mental distress is now a crime. One or more Twitter users have declared Jordan Neely, the street performer choked to death on a New York subway, a criminal. The online defense fund for his subway choker, Daniel Penny, quickly exceeded $1.6 million over the weekend. Neely’s death was not explicitly political violence, but Neely may have been a casualty in the cultural civil war waged by the right. Even as MAGA celebrates Ashli Babbitt as a Jan. 6 martyr, the right is lining up to celebrate Penny as a cultural civil war hero like Kyle Rittenhouse. Brian Klaas writes at his substack about the right’s open embrace of political violence: In Texas, Governor Abbott previously said that he was “looking forward” to pardoning a man who murdered a Black Lives Matter protester. The murderer, Daniel Perry, was just sentenced to 25 years in prison. He had previously texted a friend that he “might have to kill” some people on his way to work.
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The DeSantis Trump Iowa race has begin. And it’s as absurd as you imagined. It was supposed to be the first time the two main rivals for the Republican nomination faced off on GOP territory at the same time and the media couldn’t have been more excited. Despite still being undeclared, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was making a foray into Iowa, the first Republican primary state, on the same day as former president Donald Trump. What was going to happen when these two manly pugilists finally entered the ring? Well, the big confrontation didn’t happen as planned. DeSantis threw on a crisp blue shirt with a button down collar and a pair of skinny jeans and hit the trail and Trump bowed out at the last minute. The New York Times declared that a big win for the Florida Governor describing DeSantis’ intrepid trek to the area where Trump had been scheduled to speak as a “clear rebuke” to the man who has been “tormenting him” — a brave move to ensure that he doesn’t suffer the same result as all the other Republicans Trump has destroyed: For the first time in months, Gov.
Words to the wise: I can’t help but feel like a chapter in the evolution of social media is drawing to a close. Now, surely some of this feeling is a product of my changing perspective. I got my first social media account when I was 19 years old and signed up for MySpace in college; I turn 41 later this month, and it’d be foolish to pretend that more than two decades of maturation hasn’t altered my relationship with social media. Still, there’s no denying that something has shifted. Between the haphazard-yet-thorough disassembly of Twitter at the hands of Elon Musk, the driftless and flailing “metaverse” obsessions of Facebook, and the can’t-put-my-finger-on-it-but-something’s-not-right-here vibe of Instagram these days, it’s hard not to feel like we’re at the end of an era. Social media will evolve and persist, but the monoculture days of everyone hanging out in the same few places are winding down. Like many, I feel a pang of loss for these spaces, spaces from which I’ve taken a lot in the past two decades. But I’m not here to throw a funeral. Instead, I view this as a sort of graduation.
Very impressive “oversight” in the GOP House Lololol: Rep. James Comer (R-KY) revealed on Sunday that Republicans had lost track of a top witness in the investigation of President Joe Biden and his family. During an interview on Fox News, host Maria Bartiromo asked Comer about evidence he had of Biden’s alleged corruption. “You have spoken with whistleblowers,” she noted. “You also spoke with an informant who gave you all of this information. Where is that informant today? Where are these whistleblowers?” “Well, unfortunately, we can’t track down the informant,” Comer replied. “We’re hopeful that the informant is still there. The whistleblower knows the informant. The whistleblower is very credible.” “Hold on a second, Congressman,” Bartiromo said.
The media spent the last couple of weeks relentlessly hyping the end of Title 42 as an apocalypse of epic proportions. Hordes of screaming migrants were supposedly gathered at the border prepared to invade the country on foot like a medieval army and there was nothing we could do about it. Well: Migrants crossing the border without documentation dropped on Friday, the first day after Title 42 was lifted, two U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials told NBC News. U.S. Customs and Border Protection stopped just over 6,200 undocumented migrants on Friday compared with roughly 11,000 on Tuesday and Wednesday, and 10,000 on Thursday, the officials said. These numbers include both migrants who cross illegally between ports of entry — more than 7,000 of them on Friday — and those who present themselves legally at ports of entry without proper entry documents. The Covid-era restrictions that allowed immigration officials to quickly turn away migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border expired at 11:59 p.m. ET on Thursday, ushering in tougher policies for asylum-seekers.
Everyone scratched their head when pro-choice liberal North Carolina Democrat abruptly switched parties and voted for a draconian abortion ban. Everyone wondered, was it money? Was it blackmail? What could make someone completely reverse course like this and betray every value she had previously held — and do it practically overnight. I’m still not sure I buy the following explanation but maybe this person is really as shallow as she appears: Imagine campaigning for a Democratic politician—a thankless, low-paying job, especially at the state level—because you believe in what they stand for. The candidate gives powerful speeches about abortion rights that make you proud. You’re in a purple state, where every single seat in the legislature is critical to protecting abortion access. So you join the fight, help them win, and continue working for them in the legislature. Then inexplicably, in the middle of their term, that politician does an about-face, switches parties, and votes in favor of an extreme abortion ban, delivering Republicans the one vote they needed to override a veto and actually shutter clinics in the state.
Trump’s takeover of GOP helped him to write the delegate rules. The number winner-take-all states has grown from seven to 17 I don’t think people have truly grasped what this means: Republicans seeking to keep Donald Trump from becoming their party’s nominee will have to overcome rules even more favorable to the former president than the ones that helped him clinch the 2016 nomination. In 2024, more states will award delegates through winner-take-all primaries — a system that helped Trump when opponents divided the vote, allowing him to be awarded all or most of the delegates with less than majority support. Is it possible that the field will be cleared of everyone but DeSantis (or one of the other candidates) and they will win a majority and Trump will be defeated. But it is highly unlikely. Trump dominates the GOP primary electorate and will probably win a majority in most states even if they manage to clear the field. And, as we know, it matters where you win. If he takes the biggest states with large numbers of delegates, he wins again.
NC’s Democratic governor rallies support behind a veto North Carolina rallied on Saturday to sustain Gov. Roy Cooper’s public veto of Republicans’ recently passed 12-week abortion ban. Politico: The Democrat decried the legislation, which he vetoed at a rally in downtown Raleigh, as a “complicated and confusing monster bill” that makes patients “navigate a wicked obstacle course just to get care.” “Standing in the way of progress right now is this Republican supermajority legislature that only took 48 hours to turn the clock back 50 years on women’s health,” Cooper said. “Let’s be clear: This bill has nothing to do with making women safer and everything to do with banning abortion.” With the GOP holding veto-proof margins in both legislative chambers, Democrats (if even they can maintain a unified front) will need the defection of at least one Republican in either chamber to sustain Cooper’s veto. The blowback on that member would be fierce.