Daily Archives: December 7, 2021

Devin Nunes, the California congressman and close ally of Donald Trump, will be retiring from the US House of Representatives next year to join Trumps new social media venture.

The Republican congressman, who represents a rural California district, announced his retirement from the House on Monday, writing in a letter to constituents that he was leaving his position to pursue a new opportunity to fight for the most important issues I believe in.

Shortly after, Trump Media & Technology Group announced Nunes would become the companys chief executive in January.

In a statement, Nunes said: The time has come to reopen the internet and allow for the free flow of ideas and expression without censorship.

Nunes, 48, has served as a congressman since 2003. He was a member of the intelligence committee during Donald Trumps first impeachment and emerged as one of Trumps staunchest defenders in the House.

Nunes has long been a critic of major social media companies. The congressman has repeatedly claimed without evidence that platforms have been trying to censor Republicans.

In 2019, he filed a lawsuit against Twitter over mocking tweets from two parody accounts, Devin Nunes Mom and Devin Nunes Cow. In the lawsuit, Nunes claimed he had endured an orchestrated defamation campaign, one that no human being should ever have to bear and suffer in their whole life. The suit also accused Twitter of censoring viewpoints with which it disagrees.

The parody accounts pretending to be the congressmans cow and his mother mocked him over revelations that his family had moved its farm to Iowa from California even as he used his agricultural roots as part of his campaign in central California.

Later, the Trump justice department subpoenaed Twitter for information related to a parody account that criticized Nunes, federal court records revealed even though a judge ruled that the representative could not sue the social media company for defamation.

Earlier on Monday, the blank-check company that aims to take Trump Media & Technology Group public acknowledged that two regulatory agencies are scrutinizing the $1.25bn deal.

Digital World Acquisition, which is often referred to by its trading symbol, DWAC, said it was cooperating with the preliminary, fact-finding inquiries by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.

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Republican Devin Nunes to quit Congress and head Trumps social media platform - The Guardian

In October, Eric Trump, son of the former president, spoke to a conference filled with anti-vaccine activists. Screenshot by NPR/Bitchute hide caption

In October, Eric Trump, son of the former president, spoke to a conference filled with anti-vaccine activists.

In October, a conference filled with anti-vaccine activists in Nashville, Tenn., received a high-profile political guest: former President Donald Trump's son Eric Trump.

While portions of the younger Trump's half-hour address were typical political platitudes, some of his biggest applause lines came when he attacked COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

"Do you want to get a vaccine or do you not? Do you want to be left alone or not?" said Trump to a roaring audience.

Still, Trump's emphasis was very different from those of many of the other speakers at the event, put on by longtime anti-vaccine activists Ty and Charlene Bollinger.

The day before Trump's speech, a homeopathic doctor named Edward Group stood on the same stage and suggested to the audience they should drink their urine as an alternative to getting vaccinated against COVID-19. Another speaker, Carrie Madej, said the vaccines contained microscopic technology designed to put "another kind of nervous system inside you." The true purpose of the vaccines, she claimed, was to turn humans into cyborgs.

It's the sort of fringe views that kept political figures away from this conference in the past. But as America heads into midterm elections next year, the political right and the anti-vaccine movement are drawing ever-closer together. It's an alliance that promises to give both sides more power, but the cost is potentially thousands of American lives.

To understand what's going on, it's important to understand where the parties are coming from. The anti-vaccine movement was not always especially political. Some of the movement's leaders, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of the late Democratic Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, have championed other liberal causes in the past.

"The truth is, I'm still a registered Democrat," says Del Bigtree, a well-known anti-vaccine activist. Even before COVID-19, he wrote and produced a documentary that falsely claimed childhood vaccines were linked to autism. But the message never caught on with the liberal audience he was targeting.

Anti-vaccine activist Del Bigtree says he's seen his audience grow on the political right. The Washington Post via Getty Images hide caption

Anti-vaccine activist Del Bigtree says he's seen his audience grow on the political right.

Instead, it seemed to tap into something on the political right. He still remembers the first time he noticed; it was after he was invited to speak at a conservative women's group in Texas.

"Clearly I was shocked as a lifelong liberal progressive that I was hugging and hanging out and having a great time with a bunch of extremely conservative mothers and grandmothers," says Bigtree.

Bigtree has been banned from social media platforms like YouTube for making false claims about the dangers of COVID-19 vaccines. But as the pandemic has dragged on, his conservative audience keeps growing. Often he speaks at conferences alongside people who claim the election was rigged and promoters of QAnon conspiracy theories.

"Unless there's going to be a white supremacist on the stage or I find out that there's something that I truly find distasteful, then I just see that stage as simply an audience that I want to hear this message," says Bigtree.

It's a numbers game. He wants to grow his movement, and he'll talk to anyone who will listen.

GOP political operative Roger Stone has become a key connector between the pro-Trump political movement and anti-vaccine activists. Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images hide caption

GOP political operative Roger Stone has become a key connector between the pro-Trump political movement and anti-vaccine activists.

On the other side of this alliance are far-right conservatives like Trump's former political adviser Roger Stone. Stone has been a Republican political operative since the 1970s, beginning with Richard Nixon's 1972 campaign. He's a longtime friend of Trump's and was convicted of lying to Congress about his knowledge of the 2016 Trump campaign's contacts with Russia. Trump pardoned Stone in December 2020.

Stone, who spoke at the conference, says he's quite open to some of the ideas presented there about vaccines. But he also sees the shot as a powerful wedge issue that Republicans can use to motivate conservative voters during next year's midterm elections. Citing public polls, Stone says that in particular, vaccine mandates are "highly likely" to be a campaign issue.

Vaccine mandates have many features that make them a good issue to motivate conservative voters. It invokes a fight about the government regulation and personal liberty. But add in the apocalyptic views of anti-vaccine activists and the political power of arguments against vaccine mandates gets punched up to a whole new level.

Some Republicans believe that vaccine mandates, such as this New York City requirement to enter museums and other public places, will be a potent political issue in 2022. Spencer Platt/Getty Images hide caption

Some Republicans believe that vaccine mandates, such as this New York City requirement to enter museums and other public places, will be a potent political issue in 2022.

For example, Bigtree falsely claims that the COVID-19 vaccines are killing people and represent an existential threat to humanity: "I believe that this vaccine approach, this vaccine itself, this brand-new technology, is so incredibly dangerous, that we are actually putting our species at risk."

It's the synergy between real politics and imagined dangers that is bringing the pro-Trump movement and anti-vaccine activists together.

But the result of this union increasingly appears to be an even higher death toll from COVID-19, in part because it's causing many people to resist getting the shot.

"We find a huge correlation between belief in misinformation and being unvaccinated," says Liz Hamel, who heads public opinion research with the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care think tank.

Between conservative media and GOP politicians, many Republican voters are being pummeled with bad science about vaccines almost daily. Kaiser's polling found that 94% of Republicans think one or more false statements about COVID-19 and vaccine safety might be true.

Over the past eight months, Hamel has watched as Republican vaccination rates have fallen further and further behind the rest of America. While Republicans tracked with other groups in terms of vaccination rates earlier this year, Kaiser's research shows that now, an unvaccinated person is three times as likely to lean Republican as they are to lean Democrat.

A new analysis by NPR suggests that Republicans are probably dying at a higher rate as a result. A nationwide comparison of 2020 presidential election results and COVID-19 death rates since vaccines became available for all adults, found that counties that voted heavily for Trump had nearly three times the COVID-19 mortality rate of those that went for Joe Biden. Those counties also had far lower vaccination rates.

The analysis only provides a geographic association, and the individual political affiliations of those taken by COVID-19 remains unknown. "It's a little crass to ask someone what their loved one's ideology was after they passed away," says Charles Gaba, an independent health care analyst who has been tracking partisanship trends during the pandemic. But the strength of the association, combined with polling information, strongly suggests that Republicans are being disproportionately affected.

When asked about Republicans' low vaccination rates, Stone was nonplussed. "Each person must make their own choice, God bless them." He went on to falsely claim that getting the vaccine actually enhances a person's chance of getting the disease. "So I guess I'd be more concerned if I were a Democrat," he says.

Other conservative politicians try to avoid the thorny issue by keeping the conversation on the issue of choice. "It's not about whether the vaccines work or not," says Mark Burns, a conservative pastor closely affiliated with Donald Trump. "What matters for me is that you are stripping citizens [of] the right to choose what's best for their own life."

Pastor Mark Burns spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Now a congressional candidate, he recently spoke at a major gathering of anti-vaccine activists. Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Pastor Mark Burns spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Now a congressional candidate, he recently spoke at a major gathering of anti-vaccine activists.

Burns, who is running for Congress in South Carolina, likened the choice about vaccination to smoking: "Cigarettes kill people every day, but yet you can go to the supermarket right now and buy it with no issue, that's their choice. If they want to go put cancer into their lungs, they have a right to do so." He felt his position would help him win the primary in the conservative district where he hopes to be elected.

But for many Republicans who are concerned about public health, the willingness to parlay a lifesaving vaccine into political capital is disturbing.

"They just care about winning," says Annette Meeks, a lifelong Republican who heads the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota conservative think tank. "It's the worst element in American politics today."

Meeks has seen the data on vaccines, and she's watched people she knows get sick. "To see people reject those vaccines based on pseudoscience or worse lies and to see lives lost is a tragedy beyond words," Meeks says.

In addition to the moral failings, Meeks says embracing the anti-vaccine movement carries huge political risks for the GOP. That's because elections in states like Minnesota are won and lost in the suburbs. And those suburban voters tend to be vaccinated.

"I believe that the long-term consequences for the Republican Party will be a lot of those independent suburban voters will look askance at us and say, 'What is this all about? I got vaccinated, my whole family got vaccinated, and we're just fine.' "

The risks for the Republican Party in lives and votes may be real, but the there is little downside for the other party in this alliance the anti-vaccine movement.

Del Bigtree says he's seeing more people at speaking engagements and getting millions of visitors to his website each week.

"We are growing in size, in numbers, in confidence and in finances," he says. And for now, his audience is clear: conservative America.

Paige Pfleger of WPLN contributed to this report.

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How anti-vaccine activists and the GOP are growing closer - NPR

(Damon Winter | The New York Times)A congressional staffer works late on Capitol Hill as lawmakers voted on a continuing resolution to fund the federal government, Thursday, Dec. 2, 2021. The current GOP attempts at extortion are both more naked and less rational than what happened during the Obama years, Paul Krugman writes.

By Paul Krugman | The New York Times

| Dec. 6, 2021, 8:00 p.m.

With everything else going on the likely imminent demise of Roe v. Wade, the revelation that Donald Trump knew he had tested positive for the coronavirus before he debated Joe Biden, and more I dont know how many readers are aware that the U.S. government came close to being shut down last weekend. A last-minute deal averted that crisis, but in any case another crisis will follow in a couple of weeks: The government is expected to hit its debt ceiling in the middle of this month, and failure to raise the ceiling would wreak havoc not just with governance but with Americas financial reputation.

The thing is, the federal government isnt having any problem raising money in fact, it can borrow at interest rates well below the inflation rate, so that the real cost of servicing additional federal debt is actually negative. Instead, this is all about politics. Both continuing government funding and raising the debt limit are subject to the filibuster, and many Republican senators wont support doing either unless Democrats meet their demands.

And what has Republicans so exercised that theyre willing to endanger both the functioning of our government and the nations financial stability? Whatever they may say, they arent taking a stand on principle or at least, not on any principle other than the proposition that even duly elected Democrats have no legitimate right to govern.

In some ways weve seen this movie before. Republicans led by Newt Gingrich partly shut down the government in 1995-96 in an attempt to extract concessions from President Bill Clinton. GOP legislators created a series of funding crises under President Barack Obama, again in a (partly successful) attempt to extract policy concessions. Creating budget crises whenever a Democrat sits in the White House has become standard Republican operating procedure.

Yet current GOP attempts at extortion are both more naked and less rational than what happened during the Obama years.

Under Obama, leading Republicans claimed that their fiscal brinkmanship was motivated by concerns about budget deficits. Some of us argued even at the time that self-proclaimed deficit hawks were phonies, that they didnt actually care about government debt a view validated by their silence when the Trump administration blew up the deficit and that they actually wanted to see the economy suffer on Obamas watch. But they maintained enough of a veneer of responsibility to fool many commentators.

This time, Republican obstructionists arent even pretending to care about red ink. Instead, theyre threatening to shut everything down unless the Biden administration abandons its efforts to fight the coronavirus with vaccine mandates.

Whats that about? As many observers have pointed out, claims that opposition to vaccine mandates (and similar opposition to mask mandates) is about maintaining personal freedom dont stand up to any kind of scrutiny. No reasonable definition of freedom includes the right to endanger other peoples health and lives because you dont feel like taking basic precautions.

Furthermore, actions by Republican-controlled state governments, for example in Florida and Texas, show a party that isnt so much pro-freedom as it is pro-COVID. How else can you explain attempts to prevent private businesses whose freedom to choose was supposed to be sacrosanct from requiring that their workers be vaccinated, or offers of special unemployment benefits for the unvaccinated?

In other words, the GOP doesnt look like a party trying to defend liberty; it looks like a party trying to block any effective response to a deadly disease. Why is it doing this?

To some extent it surely reflects a coldly cynical political calculation. Voters tend to blame whichever party holds the White House for anything bad that happens on its watch, which creates an incentive for a sufficiently ruthless party to engage in outright sabotage. Sure enough, Republicans who fought all efforts to contain the coronavirus are now attacking the Biden administration for failing to end the pandemic.

But trying to shut down the government to block vaccinations seems like overreach, even for hardened cynics. Its notable that Mitch McConnell, whom nobody could accuse of being a do-gooder, isnt part of the anti-vaccine caucus.

What seems to be happening instead goes beyond cold calculation. As Ive pointed out in the past, Republican politicians now act like apparatchiks in an authoritarian regime, competing to take ever more extreme positions as a way to demonstrate their loyalty to the cause and to The Leader. Catering to anti-vaccine hysteria, doing all they can to keep the pandemic going, has become something Republicans do to remain in good standing within the party.

The result is that one of Americas two major political parties isnt just refusing to help the nation deal with its problems; its actively working to make the country ungovernable.

And I hope the rest of us havent lost the ability to be properly horrified at this spectacle.

Paul Krugman | The New York Times(CREDIT: Fred R. Conrad)

Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, is a columnist for The New York Times.

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Paul Krugman: How saboteurs took over the Republican Party - Salt Lake Tribune

In October of 1860, The Atlantics first editor, James Russell Lowell, wrote of Abraham Lincoln that he had experience enough in public affairs to make him a statesman, and not enough to make him a politician. Lowell, in his endorsement, was mainly concerned not with Lincolns personal qualities but with the redemptive possibilities of his new party. The Republicans, Lowell wrote, know that true policy is gradual in its advances, that it is conditional and not absolute, that it must deal with facts and not with sentiments.

Check out the full table of contents and find your next story to read.

There is insufficient space in any one issue of this magazine to trace the Republican Partys decomposition from Lincolns day to ours. It is enough to say that its most recent, and most catastrophic, turntoward authoritarianism, nativism, and conspiracismthreatens the republic that it was founded to save.

From the October 1860 issue: James Russell Lowell endorses Abraham Lincoln for president

Stating plainly that one of Americas two major parties, the party putatively devoted to advancing the ideas and ideals of conservatism, has now fallen into autocratic disrepute is unnerving for a magazine committed to being, in the words of our founding manifesto, of no party or clique. Criticism of the Republican Party does not suggest an axiomatic endorsement of the Democratic Party, its leaders and policies. Substantive, even caustic, critiques can of course be made up and down the Democratic line. But avoiding partisan entanglement does not mean that we must turn away from the obvious. The leaders of the Republican Partythe soul-blighted Donald Trump and the satraps and lackeys who abet his nefarious behaviorare attempting to destroy the foundations of American democracy. This must be stated clearly, and repeatedly.

There will be no recovery from this crisis until the Republican Party recommits itself to democracy, says this magazines David Frum, who was one of the first writers to warn that America possessed no special immunities against demagoguery and authoritarianism.

In 2020, we asked another of our staff writers, Barton Gellman, to examine the ways in which Trumpism was weakening the norms and structures of American democracy. We published his cover story The Election That Could Break America before the election, and well before the insurrection of January 6. Something far out of the norm is likely to happen, Gellman wrote. Probably more than one thing. Expecting otherwise will dull our reflexes. It will lull us into spurious hope that Trump is tractable to forces that constrain normal incumbents.

As we know, the system held, but barely, America having been blessed, once again, by dumb luck. (The bravery of police officers on Capitol Hill, and the wisdom of a handful of state and local officials, also helped.) When President Joe Biden was safely inaugurated, two weeks after the attack on the Capitol, a belief took hold that Trump, and Trumpism, might very well go into eclipse.

But that belief was wrong. Which is why we asked Bart to examine, once again, the state of our democracy and the various attempts by Trump and other leading Republicans to claim power through voter suppression, subterfuge, and any other means necessary. His current cover story, January 6 Was Practice, suggests that we are closecloser than most of us ever thought possibleto losing not only our democracy, but whats left of our shared understanding of reality.

You will find in this issue other essays and reporting that illuminate the political, moral, and epistemological challenges we face today, including an investigation by Vann R. Newkirk II into Republican voter-suppression efforts, and an article by Kaitlyn Tiffany on a child-sex-trafficking panic intensified by the far rights descent into conspiratorial thinking. The crisis is in good measure a crisis of the Republican Party. A healthy democracy requires a strong conservative party and a strong liberal party arguing for their views publicly and vigorously. What we have instead today is a liberal party battling an authoritarian cult of personality. As David Brooks writes in his essay I Remember Conservatism: To be a conservative today, you have to oppose much of what the Republican Party has come to stand for.

The Atlantic, across its long history, has held true to the belief that the American experiment is a worthy one, which is why were devoting this issue, and so much of our journalism in the coming years, to its possible demise.

This article appears in the January/February 2022 print edition with the headline A Party, and Nation, in Crisis.

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Jeffrey Goldberg: The Republican Party, and America, Are in Crisis - The Atlantic

Its understandable if you thought the threat had gone. Donald Trump left office nearly a year ago, is no longer serving up daily outrages by tweet, and is reduced to appearing with Nigel Farage on GB News. But the menace he represented lingers, and not only because Trump remains the most likely Republican presidential nominee for 2024, a contest he could well win given the parlous approval ratings of the current incumbent.

Trumpism lives on in the legacy he left behind, its most visible incarnation perhaps the three ultra-conservative judges he selected for the supreme court, who this week began hearing a case on abortion one that many expect to result in the removal of American womens constitutionally protected right to end an unwanted pregnancy.

But Trumpism endures too in the party he remade in his own image. He has left behind a Republican party no longer committed to democracy. That sounds hyperbolic but, if anything, it understates the case. Republicans are breaking from the principle that precedes the idea of democracy and is even more fundamental: the belief that arguments between citizens should be resolved by peaceful means. Todays Republican party is normalising the notion of violence as a means of securing a political outcome.

Start with the case of Paul Gosar, the Republican member of Congress for Arizona. He retweeted an anime-style video that depicted him murdering his Democratic colleague, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as swinging a sword at Joe Biden. Appalling though that was, especially at a time when AOC and others face constant threats of violence, more telling was the response of Gosars party. When Democrats moved to censure him, only two Republicans voted with them. The 200-odd others gave Gosar their blessing.

Earlier, Republicans had had to make a similar decision. Before her election to Congress in 2020, Marjorie Taylor Greene had posted on Facebook a photograph of herself holding a gun next to an image of AOC and two other members of the so-called Squad, made up of left-leaning Democratic women of colour. Taylor Greene also all but called for the execution of the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi. Yet when Democrats voted to kick the Georgia Republican off the various congressional committees she sat on, only 11 members of her party voted with them. The rest stood with her.

Of course, the pattern was set with the Republican response to Trump himself, and his encouragement of the attempt to overturn a democratic election by force earlier this year. Republicans could have repudiated the storming of the Capitol on 6 January by joining their Democratic colleagues in voting to impeach the outgoing president for inciting an insurrection. But only 10 Republicans did so.

Since then, those 10 dissenters have been pilloried and ostracised by their fellow Republicans. Among the shunned is Liz Cheney, who was stripped of her House leadership role and expelled from the state Republican party in her native Wyoming. Shes an arch-conservative like her former vice-president father, but that didnt matter. Cheney believes in respecting elections and that was enough to put her beyond the pale.

These responses coddling the advocates of violence, punishing those who denounce it prove the truth of the declaration that Taylor Greene made this week: We are not the fringe. We are the base of the party.

Shes right. She and Gosar are in lockstep with a Republican party whose face can be seen in the death threats now routinely meted out not only to nationally famous politicians such as AOC, but to the officials and volunteers who serve in public health, local government or on school boards across the country.

Trumps downplaying of the dangers of the pandemic and his hostility to mask-wearing made those stances articles of faith among his most ardent supporters who now threaten murderous violence against those who cross them, their fury directed especially at schools that require their pupils to wear masks. In early October, the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, felt it necessary to send in the FBI to help protect school administrators, who were facing what the National School Boards Association calls a form of domestic terrorism.

To be clear, not every Republican in the House or Senate agrees with Gosar, Taylor Greene or the Republican candidate in Pennsylvania who promised to bring 20 strong men to a school board meeting because this is how you get stuff done but they are terrified of them, just as they are terrified of Trump and his supporters. They know that if they step out of line, they will soon face an internal, primary challenge for their own seat. So they say nothing.

The espousal of, or acquiescence in, political violence is the sharpest expression of Republicans steady march away from democracy, but it is not the only one. At the milder end is the unabashed gerrymandering under way in many of the states where Republicans are in control, redrawing boundaries to give themselves permanent and insurmountable majorities.

More troubling still are the hundreds of voter suppression measures advanced by Republican state legislatures, nakedly designed to make voting harder for groups that tend to vote Democratic, especially low-income Americans and those from ethnic minorities. Whether its demanding stricter proof of identity, reducing early or postal voting say, by allowing only one dropbox in each county, no matter how many people live there or how large it is the desired goal is the same: to shrink the franchise, hurting Democrats and helping Republicans.

The drive is, once again, fealty to Trump. Polls show that 68% of Republicans believe the former presidents big lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him and they are determined to make sure it wont happen again. To ensure there is no risk of Trump losing in 2024, Republicans are both making it harder for Democrats to vote and working to install reliable allies as election scrutineers: they want no repeat of 2020, when Republican officials allowed the votes to be counted fairly and declared Biden the winner.

What is fuelling this shift is not solely the cult of personality that still envelopes Donald Trump, though that devotion is a mighty force. Studies have long shown a potent authoritarian impulse on the American right drawn to the notion of a strong leader imposing order and guarding the nation against outsiders one greater than in comparable countries. As always with the US, race plays a central role. Enough white Americans fear a future in which they are no longer the dominant majority and are ready to do what it takes to stay in charge: to avert demography, theyll sacrifice democracy.

This represents a mortal threat to the American republic. But the US remains the worlds most powerful nation. As of now, only one of its two governing parties is committed to democracy and that poses a danger to us all.

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The Republican party is embracing violence in the name of Trump - The Guardian

MADISON, Wisc. A group formed to support former President Trumps agenda is working with Wisconsin Republicans on a ballot measure that would bypass the states Democratic governor to change how elections are run in the battleground state.

The effort represents a new escalation in the ongoing Republican campaign to alter voting laws in response to Trumps false claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. It comes as Wisconsin has become the epicenter of this years voting wars, with Republicans trying to dismantle the election system they themselves put in place several years ago and figure out how to do that with a Democratic governor still in office.

The backing for a possible route around Gov. Tony Evers was revealed during a private meeting on elections hosted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, which advocates conservative policies to state lawmakers in voting and other areas. Trumps former White House spokesman Hogan Gidley told attendees that his new organization, the Center for Election Integrity, was working with elected officials and business leaders in Wisconsin to figure out the best path around Evers, who has said he will block Republican-backed election measures.

We feel as though the governor cant do anything about it and it will become law, Gidley said in a recording of the session made by an attendee and obtained by the Associated Press.

The strategy is similar to one already underway in Michigan. State Republicans there already are gathering signatures to place a measure on the ballot that would tighten that states voting laws, an effort to get around Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmers veto of a similar bill that passed the Republican-controlled state legislature. But Gidleys statement is the first indication of a Trump-tied group engaged in a similar tactic in Wisconsin.

Reached for comment, Gidley initially said hed provide more details about his work in Wisconsin, but did not respond to further requests for comment.

Bill McCoshen, head of the policy board for a conservative group called Common Sense Wisconsin, said he met with Gidley in Milwaukee six weeks ago to discuss getting an elections proposal on the ballot.

I think they thought it was a good idea, McCoshen said. They havent made a commitment to us one way or the other.

McCoshens proposal would require elections to be run the same way across Wisconsin; early voting hours and days would have to be the same in every community, and some would have to change how they count absentee ballots. The measure is largely viewed as an attempt to force the states Democratic cities to restrict access.

The proposal would also bar private groups from making large donations to the states heavily Democratic cities.

Wisconsin Republicans have been angry about more than $10 million in election grants that went to more than 200 municipalities last year, the bulk of it going to the states five largest cities, which are all Democratic strongholds. The money came from $350 million in election donations from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that have triggered deep conservative suspicion.

Under the amendment, money like that would have to be shared by all municipalities in the state.

The changes require amending the state constitution, a process that takes at least two years because the Legislature has to pass it in two consecutive sessions. No amendment to do so has been introduced yet in the statehouse.

Following Trumps narrow loss of Wisconsin last year, the state has been roiled by a Republican attack on the bipartisan elections commission the Republican-controlled Legislature itself created six years ago.

Gidleys group is part of America First Policy Institute, an organization created during the Trump administration to promote the former president and his policies.

The three-hour session where Gidley spoke occurred Wednesday, during the conservative councils state and national policy summit in San Diego, California.

The session reflects how election issues have moved to the heart of the Republican agenda since Trump falsely blamed his 2020 loss on fraud. Repeated audits, investigations and lawsuits including by Trumps own Department of Justice turned up no significant fraud in the presidential election. But that has not stopped Republican state legislatures from pushing new laws that largely put new limits on voting.

During the session, participants heard from Cleta Mitchell, a prominent conservative attorney who advised the former president earlier this year as he pressured Georgia Republicans to declare him the winner of a state President Joe Biden won. Also addressing the group was Arizona Senate President Karen Fann, who approved a review of the election in that states largest county that chased a variety of conspiracy theories. It was unable to prove any fraud in Bidens victory there.

Gidley praised the Arizona review. Arizona has done a great job with their audits, he told the group.

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Group tied to Trump working with Republicans to change Wisconsin election system - pressherald.com

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Hello, and Happy Thursday,

Over the last few months, weve seen lawmakers in several states draw new, distorted political districts that entrench their political power for the next decade. Republicans are carving up Texas, North Carolina and Georgia to hold on to their majorities. Democrats have the power to draw maps in far fewer places, but theyve also shown a willingness to use it where they have it, in places like Illinois and Maryland.

But something uniquely disturbing is happening in Ohio.

Republicans control the legislature there and recently enacted new maps that would give them a supermajority in the state legislature and allow them to hold on to at least 12 of the states 15 congressional seats. Its an advantage that doesnt reflect how politically competitive Ohio is: Donald Trump won the state in 2020 with 53% of the vote.

Whats worse is that Ohio voters have specifically enacted reforms in recent years that were supposed to prevent this kind of manipulation. Republicans have completely ignored them. It underscores how challenging it is for reformers to wrest mapmaking power from politicians.

Its incredibly difficult to get folks to say, OK, were just gonna do this fairly after years and years and decades and decades of crafting districts that favor one political party, Catherine Turcer, the executive director of the Ohio chapter of Common Cause, a government watchdog group that backed the reforms, told me earlier this year. I did not envision this being as shady.

In 2015 and 2018, Ohio voters overwhelmingly approved two separate constitutional amendments that were meant to make mapmaking fairer. The 2015 amendment dealt with drawing state legislative districts and gave a seven-person panel, comprised of elected officials from both parties, power to draw districts. If the panel couldnt agree on new maps, they would only be in effect for four years, as opposed to the usual 10.

The 2018 amendment laid out a slightly different process for drawing congressional districts, but the overall idea was the same. Both reforms also said districts could not unfairly favor or disfavor a political party.

Something started to seem amiss earlier this fall when the panel got to work trying to create the new state legislative districts. The two top Republicans in the legislature wound up drawing the maps in secret, shutting their fellow GOP members out of the process. After reaching an impasse with Democrats, Republicans on the panel approved a plan that gives the GOP a majority in the state legislature for the next four years.

When it came time to draw congressional maps, things did not go much better. The panel barely even attempted to fulfill its mission, kicking mapmaking power back to the state legislature. Lawmakers there quickly enacted the congressional plan that benefits the GOP for the next four years.

The new map benefits the GOP by cracking Democratic-heavy Hamilton county, home of Cincinnati, into three different congressional districts, noted the Cook Political Report. It also transforms a district in northern Ohio, currently represented by Democrat Marcy Kaptur, the longest serving woman in Congress, from one Joe Biden carried by 19 points in 2020 to one Trump would have carried by 5 points.

The maps already face several lawsuits, and their fate will ultimately be decided by the Ohio supreme court. Republicans have a 4-3 advantage on the court, though one of the GOP justices is considered a swing vote. Well soon see if voter-approved reforms will be completely defanged.

Reader questions

Please continue to write to me each week with your questions about elections and voting at sam.levine@theguardian.com or DM me on Twitter at @srl and Ill try to answer as many as I can.

Few places better encapsulate the new Republican effort to undermine American elections than Wisconsin. Some Republicans there are calling for the removal of the non-partisan head of the states election commission.

Georgia saw a jump in the percentage of rejected mail-in ballot requests in one of the first elections after Republicans imposed new requirements. Many of those who had their ballot requests rejected didnt ultimately vote in person, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

The Justice Department on Tuesday filed a statement of interest in voting rights lawsuits in Arizona, Texas and Florida. All three filings significantly defend the power and scope of section two of the Voting Rights Act, one of the most powerful remaining provisions of the 1965 civil rights law.

Originally posted here:

A Republican power grab in Ohio might be the GOPs most brazen yet - The Guardian

Senator Josh Hawley is worried about men. In a recent speech at the National Conservatism Conference, he blamed the left for their mental health problems, joblessness, obsession with video games and hours spent watching pornography. The crisis of American men, he said, is a crisis for the American republic.

The liberal reaction was flippant. A CNN analysis mocked the speech, contrasting the decline of masculinity with real issues like the pandemic and inflation. The ReidOut Blog on MSNBCs website declared, Josh Hawleys crusade against video games and porn is hilariously empty. But the contempt and mockery his speech received was, at least in part, misplaced.

Mr. Hawley is not alone in sensing that masculinity is a popular cause; around the world, male politicians are tapping into social anxieties about its apparent decline, for their own ideological ends. The Chinese government, for instance, has declared a masculinity crisis, and it is responding by cracking down on gaming during school days and by investing in gym teachers and school sports.

There can be a homophobic and fascistic component to such calls: China has also barred sissy men from appearing on TV; in Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro has said that masks are for fairies; and Mr. Hawley, in his speech, fueled anti-transgender prejudice by alluding to a bogus war on womens sports. Nothing justifies this hateful nonsense. But Mr. Hawley, for all his winking bigotry, is tapping into something real a widespread, politically potent anxiety about young men that is already helping the right.

American politicians have long fanned popular flames of masculine panic to advance their own agendas, and Mr. Hawley is a scholar of this tradition. In 2008, two years after graduating from Yale Law School, he wrote a smart, compelling book about a historical figure who also worried about masculinity. In Theodore Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness, published by Yale University Press, Mr. Hawley described how Roosevelt sought to imbue men with the fortitude the country needed to drive big national projects like war and territorial expansion.

Foregrounding the iconic virility of the cowboy and the soldier, he set out to inspire civic virtue in a citizenry that, he believed, had lost traditional manly virtues when people moved from farms to cities. Conquest would allow American men to shed the temptations of the slothful life and become a more manful race. Mr. Hawley seeks to carry on this tradition.

He is right about some things. Deindustrialization has stripped many men of their ability to earn a decent wage, as well as of the pride they once took in contributing to prosperous communities. Boys are sometimes overdisciplined and overmedicated for not conforming to behavioral expectations in school. And while more women than men are diagnosed with anxiety or depression, men are more likely to commit suicide or die of drug overdoses.

None of these problems are caused by liberals. But liberalism hasnt offered a positive message for men lately. In the media, universities and other liberal institutions, it sometimes seems that every man is potentially guilty of something. As Mr. Hawley puts it, men are being told by liberals that theyre the problem. Our side the progressive side has struggled to articulate what a nontoxic masculinity might look like, or where boys might look for models of how to become men.

This has set up an existential crisis for the left, threatening its ability to win elections. For years, young men have been flocking to the far right, finding its messages and disgruntled virtual communities on YouTube and Reddit. In 2016, Donald Trump won the male vote by 11 percentage points. And with his attacks on pornography and video games, Mr. Hawley could appeal to mothers, too, who know that, in excess, these arent signs of healthy social adjustment.

Like Roosevelt, Mr. Hawley knows how to exploit the cultural anxieties of ordinary people to advance his brand of politics. But he hasnt offered solutions to this masculinity crisis because neither he nor his party has any.

Men and boys need good jobs, affordable access to team sports, an education system sensitive to their social and emotional development, public parks, mental health support, access to substance abuse treatment and paternity leave. All of this requires public funding, which is far more likely to come from the left than the right. To thrive, many men also need the freedom not to be men at all, but rather to become sissies, scrawny historians or even women, a cultural evolution Mr. Hawley and his conservative ilk adamantly oppose.

In his book, Mr. Hawley rightly condemned Roosevelts racism and commitment to violent conquest, but he also wanted to salvage from Roosevelts legacy a vision of the common good, an insistence that we can live nobler and more meaningful lives. In his speech, Mr. Hawley tapped into this legacy: To each man, I say: You can be a tremendous force for good. Your nation needs you. The world needs you.

I dont hate this message, taken alone, for our sons. Who would? But that vision of shared purpose and civic virtue wont come from Mr. Hawley any more than funding for more public baseball fields will. He, after all, has opposed just about every common public project recently proposed, from the bipartisan infrastructure bill to the Build Back Better Act to the Green New Deal.

Meanwhile, the left will need to find a better way to talk to men; half of the population is far too many people to abandon to the would-be strongmen of the far right.

Read this article:

Opinion | Josh Hawley and the Republican Obsession With Manliness - The New York Times

By March, Gov. Gavin Newsom knew he was in trouble.

His people had been tracking what, until then, was a mostly nascent campaign to recall the Democrat from office. Its the sort of thing generations of California governors have faced, and only one Gov. Gray Davis with real political consequences.

But, this year, the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything.

In 25 months, theres been six efforts to put a recall on the ballot, Newsom said in mid-March on ABCs The View. This one appears to have the requisite signatures, he acknowledged.

Indeed, by April, Secretary of State Shirley Weber declared that enough signatures had been verified more than 1,495,709 to force a recall election by the end of the year.

That campaign Newsom once dismissed as the purview of the far right alongside Trumpism, anti-vax conspiracy theories and a refusal to wear face masks? It had suddenly gained mainstream appeal.

All it took was the governor secretly violating his own public health orders on COVID-19, going out to dinner with friends and doing so at a Michelin-starred restaurant that most Californians navigating a pandemic-crunched economy could never afford.

I want to apologize to you because I need to preach and practice, not just preach and not practice, and Ive done my best to do that, Newsom said after being caught. Were all human. We all fall short sometimes.

COVID fatigue, he added, is exhausting.

Right.

By May, the recall circus was well underway. As was the case in 2003, when a deeply unpopular Davis was fighting for political life, dozens of unqualified clowns signed up to be candidates.

Among the most prominent: the millennial YouTuber Kevin Paffrath, the obnoxious Olympian-turned-reality-TV-star Caitlyn Jenner and the failed gubernatorial hopeful John Cox, who crisscrossed the state with a 1,000-pound, Kodiak bear named Tag.

Were gonna need big, beastly changes to be made in this state, Cox said during a campaign stop in Sacramento, while Tag snacked on cookies and chicken. Were going to have to be tough as a beast to go against the special interest groups.

The biggest entrance to the race came in July. Thats when Larry Elder, the loudmouth radio talk show host known for mentoring Trump sycophants and demonizing Black liberals to entertain white conservatives, decided he was going to save the state.

As the self-proclaimed Sage of South Central, Elder had name recognition and no experience. That, of course, set him up for a rapid rise to the top of the polls, above more traditional candidates such as former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer and Assembly member Kevin Kiley.

Elder vowed to do away with mask and vaccine mandates, put the brakes on police reform and, for all intents and purposes, ignore climate change and systemic racism. He also said some dumb stuff about homelessness, which no doubt prompted the egging he received while trying to tour a Venice encampment in a three-piece suit.

As President Biden said of Elder while stumping for Newsom in Long Beach, The leading Republican running for governor is the closest thing to a Trump clone that I have ever seen.

Despite all of this, by the final weeks of the race, Elder had an actual shot at being governor. Blame Californias nonsensical recall election process.

Lucky for Newsom, in this bluest of blue states, where the vast majority of the electorate is terrified of electing anyone at all connected to former President Trump, the governor managed to handily beat back the recall attempt.

As he said in his no-frills victory speech: Democracy is not a football. You dont throw it around.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder, joined by firefighters, speaks at a news conference on Sept. 9 in Glendale.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

As 2021 comes to a close, I find myself wondering what if anything California learned from this embarrassingly expensive exercise in ego-stroking political theater. And what if anything will come of it.

At the very least, we seem to have learned that the recall process needs an overhaul.

Californians are very frustrated that we just spent $276 million on this recall election that, from the looks of it, certified what voters said three years ago, Assembly member Marc Berman of Menlo Park said in September.

Hearings are already being held by the election committees of the Legislature.

But I suspect the impact of the recall election wont stop there. Rather, it will be felt most across the nation.

Consider that after Newsom trounced his would-be Republican ousters, political watchers speculated that his strategy of tying Republican candidates to Trump was one that would help Democrats in the midterm election.

Fast-forward a few weeks. Democrat Terry McAuliffe tried the Trump clone strategy while running for a second term as governor of Virginia and Republican Glenn Youngkin won anyway. Now those political watchers arent so sure anymore.

Just as important, Winsome Sears won the race for lieutenant governor, becoming the first Black woman elected to statewide office in Virginias history.

A conservative Republican, she previously led the national committee to boost Black voter turnout for Trump. She rails against critical race theory, insists that voters are being pitted against each other based on race and argues that Black people are coddled too much by government programs.

Sound familiar? Call it the Larry Elder strategy, pioneered right here in California. What better way for Republicans to avoid talking about their partys embrace of white supremacists than to promote Black conservatives?

Former NFL player Herschel Walker is trying the same trick in Georgia with a run for the U.S. Senate. Trump might try it too, as he weighs options for a running mate in 2024, Trumps pollster speculated to Politico.

The night Elder lost his bid to replace Newsom, he promised his mostly white, Republican supporters that hed be back.

We may have lost the battle, he said, pacing a stage in Costa Mesa, but we are going to win the war.

Not in California. But the rest of the country could be in trouble.

See the rest here:

Republicans sent in the clowns for California's recall circus - Los Angeles Times