MyPillow, the bedding company led by the pro-Trump CEO Mike Lindell, on Monday filed a $1.6 billion lawsuit against Dominion Voting Systems, which is currently suing Lindell and his business for defamation.

“This is a free-speech case. This is a First Amendment case,” Lindell said on a livestreamed broadcast announcing the lawsuit.

The election-technology firm Dominion sued MyPillow and Lindell in February, accusing them of spreading the false claim that the company rigged the 2020 election for President Joe Biden by manipulating votes. Former President Donald Trump’s campaign and his allies lost dozens of lawsuits in their sweeping effort to overturn key states’ election results and flip the outcome of the race.

Dominion is seeking more than $1.3 billion in punitive and compensatory damages, saying the “viral disinformation campaign” spread by Lindell and others has “irreparably damaged” the company’s reputation. Dominion has filed similar lawsuits against Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, attorney Sidney Powell and Fox News.

Reports say Stephen Broderick is a former Travis County Sheriff's Office detective, but while Interim Austin Police Chief Joe Chacon said Broderick might have a background in law enforcement, he would not confirm.

The Stephen Broderick who is former law enforcement was accused of sexually assaulting a child in June of 2020. Broderick was 40 years old at the time of his arrest.

Stephen Broderick was identified as the gunman in the Austin shooting Sunday, April 18, 2021. The Travis County Sheriff's Law Enforcement Association shared this photo on their Facebook page in February 2019.
The arrest affidavit said the assault happened at a home in Elgin. The victim made an outcry to her mother, who took the child for an examination and doctors confirmed the abuse.

Broderick was was arrested on June 6 by the U.S. Marshals Service and charged with sexual assault of a child. He was placed on administrative leave without pay.

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/04/18/stephen-broderick-austin-shooting-suspect-arboretum/7278131002/

A media suddenly bereft of the eye-popping right-wing extremism once peddled daily by the 45th president has found its methadone: a seemingly endless stream of QAnon-centric documentaries, books and essays.

There’s Vice’s “The Search for Q” series; CNN’s “Inside the QAnon Conspiracy”; Daily Beast reporter Will Sommer’s announcement of his forthcoming book based on the topic; and the buzziest of them all: “Q: Into the Storm,” HBO’s six-episode documentary miniseries produced by Adam McKay, the Oscar-winning auteur of ripped-from-the-headlines cinema.

It’s been three months since the nearly four-year-old conspiracy theory reached its violent climax, with QAnon believers joining forces with militia members, white nationalists, and just generally crazed Trump supporters to storm the Capitol in an attempt to flip the election for their preferred candidate. In the aftermath, cable networks and publishers are doubling down on Americans’ potential interest in how such a sprawling, byzantine online community could so thoroughly distort both personal lives and national politics. Central to QAnon’s mystique is the lingering mystery about the identity of the “Q” himself — the anonymous web forum poster whose cryptic missives about “deep state” pedophilia opposed by a heroic Trump galvanized a complete subcultural ecosystem of fear, apocalyptic interpretation, and dogged amateur sleuthing from supporters and critics alike.

Critics accuse QAnon’s chroniclers in the media of failing to learn Trump-era lessons about the role mainstream media plays in amplifying disinformation and extremist content. And more than any behind-the-scenes revelation about the conspiracy itself, “Into the Storm” is most striking in what it reveals about how the beliefs and language of the paranoiac far right have spread like wildfire through our culture and politics — and the role the media has, or hasn’t, played in that phenomenon. (As if illustrating this point, documentarian Cullen Hoback uses once-esoteric terms like “red-pilled” and “Q-drops” as casually as if they were policy lingo and he were a surrogate trying to sell the Biden infrastructure package on the Sunday shows.)

After years of watching their standing erode in energy-producing states, Democrats under President Joe Biden have accepted the challenge that’s vexed them for a decade: convincing fossil fuel workers that they will still be okay even if their current jobs evaporate as the nation embraces a climate change-friendly economy.

Democrats have a term for their vision — “Just Transition” — and hope it might succeed in the same places where previous attempts to focus on economic transition have failed. In 2016, Hillary Clinton tried to tout a transition economy in West Virginia, only to produce the most toxic sound bite of her ill-fated campaign, when she appeared to gloat at the notion of Democratic policies taking away coal miners’ jobs.

But even as Biden’s infrastructure bill touches on many policies that energy states say they will need to withstand job losses — including retooling defunct factories — they have yet to show much progress in winning the hearts and minds of people in places it would directly affect. Even some key allies acknowledge that Democrats haven’t yet landed on a coherent, persuasive message.

“They’ve got a long way to go to convince people that what could happen will actually be positive for them,” said Phil Smith, spokesperson for the United Mine Workers of America, a labor group for coal miners. “Because right now, they don’t believe that.”

Matthew McConaughey commands more support to be Texas’ next governor than incumbent Greg Abbott, according to a poll released Sunday by The Dallas Morning News and the University of Texas at Tyler.

However, the film actor and political newcomer could hit potholes in either major party’s primary if he enters next year’s governor’s race, the poll found.

For months, McConaughey has teased political pundits and TV talk show hosts with musings that he might enter politics in his home state.

If he were to take the plunge and run for governor, the poll found, 45% of Texas registered voters would vote for McConaughey, 33% would vote for Abbott and 22% would vote for someone else.

The Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol in January created a trove of self-incriminating evidence, thoroughly documenting their actions and words in videos and social media posts. Now some of the camera-toting people in the crowd are claiming they were only there to record history as journalists, not to join a deadly insurrection.

It’s unlikely that any of the self-proclaimed journalists can mount a viable defense on the First Amendment’s free speech grounds, experts say. They face long odds if video captured them acting more like rioters than impartial observers. But as the internet has broadened and blurred the definition of a journalist, some appear intent on trying.

At least eight defendants charged in the Jan. 6 riot have identified themselves as a journalist or a documentary filmmaker, including three people arrested this month, according to an Associated Press review of court records in nearly 400 federal cases.

...snip...

One defendant, Shawn Witzemann, told authorities he was inside the Capitol during the riot as part of his work in livestreaming video at protests and has since argued that he was there as a journalist. That explanation did not sway the FBI. The plumber from Farmington, New Mexico, is charged with joining in demonstrating in the Capitol while Congress was certifying Joe Biden’s electoral victory over Donald Trump.

Three people died and two were hospitalized with serious injuries after a gunman entered bar in Kenosha County, Wisconsin, the police department said in a statement on Sunday. Police responded to the shooting at around 12:42 a.m. and the suspect has not been found.

The big picture: The midnight shooting is the latest in a string of deadly mass shootings to hit the U.S. since March, fueling a debate in Washington about how to regulate the weapons.

What they're saying: Police described the suspect as "a black male over six feet tall wearing a light-colored hooded sweatshirt" and say the shooting appeared to be an isolated incident. Victims' names and ages are still being determined.

"We do not believe there is a threat to the community at this time," the department said in a statement.
The shooting occurred inside the tavern, Sgt. David Wright, a spokesperson for the Kenosha County Sheriff's Department, told CNN.

Months after the inauguration of President Biden, One America News Network, a right-wing cable news channel available in some 35 million households, has continued to broadcast segments questioning the validity of the 2020 presidential election.

“There’s still serious doubts about who’s actually president,” the OAN correspondent Pearson Sharp said in a March 28 report.

That segment was one in a spate of similar reports from a channel that has become a kind of Trump TV for the post-Trump age, an outlet whose reporting has aligned with the former president’s grievances at a time when he is barred from major social media platforms.

Some of OAN’s coverage has not had the full support of the staff. In interviews with 18 current and former OAN newsroom employees, 16 said the channel had broadcast reports that they considered misleading, inaccurate or untrue.