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- Fox News’s Harris Faulkner pulling out her best theater chops to make an objectively uncontroversial story sound like a scandal
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Well, Donald Trump is doing his old song and dance again, and as expected, most members of his party are nowhere to be found to condemn him.
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Last Tuesday, the disgraced former president had dinner with antisemite-to-the-stars, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, as well as avowed white nationalist Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago. It’s worth noting that “white nationalist” isn’t a casual label Nick Fuentes has acquired through his America First podcast (gag) where he regularly promotes racism, antisemitism, and a whole slew of conspiracy theories, it’s one the Justice Department officially applied to him. Trump said in a statement that the dinner was supposed to be just him and Ye, but Fuentes was brought as a guest. Regardless, reports say Trump was “very taken” with the 24-year-old neo-Nazi and at one point apparently turned to Ye and said of Fuentes, “I really like this guy. He gets me.” Fuentes first gained notoriety in 2017 at the deadly Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville. We’re not surprised the two have so much in common.
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High-ranking members of his party have of course been conspicuously silent. Spokespeople for over 20 high-ranking House and Senate Republicans (including party leaders and caucus chairs of task forces focused on Judaism or fighting antisemitism and sponsors of legislation to combat antisemitic hate crimes!!) declined to respond when asked to comment on Trump’s dinner with America’s two foremost antisemites. Profiles in courage!!! Only a handful of Republican lawmakers have chosen to speak out against the former president, made up mostly of familiar faces who have been unafraid of criticizing him in the past, such as Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT). Thus far, no comment from GOP Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell or House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. Interesting!
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The silence echoing through the halls of Congress on the GOP side of the aisle is, while not surprising, compelling considering the post-midterms narrative of Republicans trying to “distance themselves from Trump” following the shellacking his hand-picked candidates took. It’s clear that regardless of any nominal effort to keep the former president at arm’s length, he still looms large over the party, and those within it are still afraid of angering him and his supporters. One of the more cartoonishly-silly characters in the extended Trump Universe, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, announced today that he will run against Ronna McDaniel to chair the Republican National Convention. Lindell is a close Trump ally, a grifter, and virulent election denier.
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Speaking of the Big Lie, if there were any doubts that it has become the governing ideology of the modern Republican Party, those are quickly vanishing.
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U-Line CEO and founder and GOP megadonor Dick Uihlein has funneled tens of millions of dollars into campaigns of election deniers, but now, he’s officially teaming up with one. Arizona GOP vice chair and former Trump official Gina Swoboda was hired last year as executive director of the Uihlein-backed dark money nonprofit Restoration Action Inc. Swoboda currently serves as an “election integrity” coordinator for GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who lost her election to Democrat Katie Hobbs. Restoration Action Inc.’s 2021 IRS filings not only divulged the hiring of Swoboda but also the organization’s huge influx of cash and spike in spending. From 2020-2021, the organization doubled its income and gave almost $10 million to conservative causes, most of them “election integrity” (Big Lie/voter suppression) projects, an almost tenfold increase from the year before.
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We haven’t heard the last out of Arizona. Republican officials in rural Cochise County, AZ, still have yet to certify the 2022 state election, despite no evidence of error in the count or the functionality of the ballot counting machines. State election officials are now poised to sue the county for missing the certification deadline in order to force them to do so, and if they don’t comply by December 5, the county’s votes will be excluded. Should the Republican-held county shoot themselves in the foot and choose to have their votes thrown out, that could threaten to flip the victor in two close races from a Republican to a Democrat. I love when conspiracy theorists are backed into a lose-lose situation!
Much has been written and said about the need for a “healthy Republican Party” for the greater good of a functioning democracy. That’s a nice thought, but it also romanticizes past iterations of the party, which are more similar to today’s than many people would like to admit. The fact that many “establishment” Republican lawmakers continually refuse to condemn Trump’s most unconscionable words and deeds, and enabled him every step of the way throughout his presidency, underscores that.
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Mother Country Radicals is back with a special crossover episode! Zayd sits down with his mom, Bernardine Dohrn, along with Jamie and Karen Zelermyer of Wonder Media Network’s I Was Never There to look back at the process of making a show so deeply rooted in personal family history. Jamie and Zayd interview their mothers to learn how they felt reliving their radical pasts and what it was like to make a podcast with their children. And in a time that feels so politically similar to the turbulent decades Karen and Bernardine lived through - how do they find hope?
Listen to this bonus episode and binge Mother Country Radicals now, wherever you get your podcasts.
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A lawsuit filed today claims that the United States government has discriminated against “countless” Black military veterans for decades, rejecting service-related disability claims disproportionately compared to White applicants, and blocking access to housing and education benefits that helped fuel the rise of America’s (White) middle class after World War II. The filing was brought by Yale Law School’s Veterans Legal Services Clinic on behalf of Vietnam War veteran Conley Monk, Jr., whose applications for health-care, homeloans, and education assistance were “repeatedly” denied by the Department of Veterans Affairs. The case could help determine whether the federal government can be held liable for entrenched prejudices that systematically disadvantaged Black Americans who served in the military and their families. VA press secretary Terrence Hayes did not address the lawsuit but said in a statement that the agency is working to combat “institutional racism.” The original GI bill of 1944 discriminated against Black Americans and greatly limited their social mobility and opportunity to build generational wealth after World War II.
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A new analysis from the Washington Post shows that high-profile Republican members of Congress and right-wing personalities gained hundreds of thousands of twitter followers in the first weeks of Elon Musk’s reign as CEO while their Democratic counterparts experienced equal and opposite losses. Weird! Can’t imagine why! Totally unrelated, I’m sure, Musk said on Saturday that he would support Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) if he ran for president in 2024. Since Musk has instituted new changes at Twitter and fired about half the staff, the site has seen an explosion in fake accounts, and many accounts which had been previously banned for hate speech or inciting violence or some combination of the two (Kanye West, Trump, et al.) have been reinstated. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has gained 330,000 new twitter followers in the past month (a 28 percent increase), while Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) have each lost over 100,000.
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