June 7, 2024

Setting the Record Straight on the NY Election Interference Case Against Donald Trump

https://meidasnews.com/news/setting-the-record-straight-on-the-ny-election-interference-case-against-donald-trump

This past April, I wrote an article for Meidas making the case for why the NY election case is the most important of all the indictments against Donald Trump. After a masterful presentation by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, 12 jurors unanimously voted to convict Trump of 34 felonies. In order to do so, they had to unanimously find that Trump engaged in election interference in the 2016 presidential election.

It was a grueling six-week trial, where nearly two dozen witnesses testified under oath, were subjected to blistering cross examination and vitriolic public scrutiny. By almost all accounts, Judge Juan Merchan was fair, even-handed, and preserved the integrity of the process. The prosecutors methodically and painstakingly introduced documents, records, recordings, photos, texts, emails, transcripts, social media posts and book excerpts to corroborate witness testimony.

Since the resounding jury verdict, however, there have been multiple critics of the case, the prosecution, the trial, the judge, and the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg. As someone who spent nearly her entire career at the Manhattan D.A.’s Office (I have never worked for Bragg), I feel compelled to respond.

Skeptics have criticized this case from the beginning, saying it is less serious than Trump’s other three indictments. It has been called a zombie case, politically motivated, a Biden conspiracy, and 2024 election interference. A recent article in New York Magazine called it “an ill-conceived unjustified mess.” These arguments are incorrect.

*snip*

June 5, 2024

Barbara McQuade: Debunking 12 Myths About Trump's Conviction

https://time.com/6985532/trump-conviction-myths-debunked-essay/


Depending on your perspective, the conviction of Donald Trump on 34 counts in a Manhattan courtroom was either a refreshing affirmation of the rule of law or a miscarriage of justice in a politically motivated prosecution. A jury returned a verdict finding that Trump had caused the falsification of checks, invoices, and ledgers to conceal the payment of $130,000 to adult film actress Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 presidential election, with intent to conceal the violation of campaign finance and tax laws.

We are all entitled to our own views of the case, of course, but opinion should also be based on facts. Certain myths are creeping into the conversation and distorting the truth about Trump’s conviction. And it’s worth examining some of these myths in order to dispel them.

Myth: No one knows what Trump was charged with.

Response: Trump was charged in a 15-page indictment, handed up by a grand jury, with 34 counts of violating New York Penal Law 175-10 in the first degree, which is a felony. A violation in the first degree occurs when a person falsifies business records with an intent to defraud that includes an intent to commit, aid, or conceal another crime. In addition to the indictment, the Manhattan District Attorney filed a 13-page statement of facts detailing the allegations.

*snip*

June 4, 2024

The Year in Hate & Extremism 2023 (Southern Poverty Law Center)

https://www.splcenter.org/resources/year-hate-extremism-2023

In 2023, the SPLC documented 1,430 hate and antigovernment extremist groups that comprise the organizational infrastructure upholding white supremacy in the U.S. The years since the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection have been a time for the hard right to prepare. In 2023, those opposing inclusive democracy worked to legitimize insurrection, paint hate as virtuous and transform false conspiracy theories into truth – all in preparation for one of the most significant elections in U.S. history. The report chronicles trends in hard-right activity, not simply as a reality check, but as a tool to act alongside those working to prevent radicalization and counter white supremacy, disinformation and false conspiracies in 2024.

FORTIFYING OUR DEMOCRACY AGAINST THE FAR-RIGHT AGENDA
https://www.splcenter.org/year-hate-extremism-2023/fortifying-democracy-against-far-right

A YEAR OF PREPARATION UNDER THE SPECTER OF CONSPIRACY
https://www.splcenter.org/year-hate-extremism-2023/conspiracy-preparation

THE WHITE POWER MOVEMENT HITS THE STREETS
https://www.splcenter.org/year-hate-extremism-2023/white-power-movement

THE NEW DOMINIONISM TRIES TO RULE
https://www.splcenter.org/year-hate-extremism-2023/new-dominionism-tries-rule

CONSPIRATORIAL RHETORIC OF MIGRANT ‘INVASION’ REACHES HIGH LEVELS IN 2023
https://www.splcenter.org/year-hate-extremism-2023/conspiratorial-rhetoric

HOW MALE SUPREMACY PROVIDED THE FOUNDATION FOR HATE IN 2023
https://www.splcenter.org/year-hate-extremism-2023/male-supremacy-dangers

PREVENTABLE HARMS: CONSIDERING GENDER WHILE BUILDING RESILIENCE AGAINST EXTREMISM
https://www.splcenter.org/year-hate-extremism-2023/preventable-harms

COUNTERING HATE & EXTREMISM THROUGH POLICY & DATA
https://www.splcenter.org/year-hate-extremism-2023/countering-hate-extremism-policy-data

FOCUSING ON PREVENTION: SPLC-PERIL STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP INTERVIEW
https://www.splcenter.org/year-hate-extremism-2023/focusing-prevention

A YEAR OF IMPACT
https://www.splcenter.org/year-hate-extremism-2023/data-lab-combats-digital-extremism

THE STRUGGLE FOR INCLUSIVE EDUCATION
https://www.splcenter.org/year-hate-extremism-2023/struggle-inclusive-education

FIGHTING ILLITERACY, PRESERVING DEMOCRACY
https://www.splcenter.org/year-hate-extremism-2023/power-drag-story-hour

NEW RECRUITS
https://www.splcenter.org/year-hate-extremism-2023/new-recruits

CONTINUED INSURRECTION FALLOUT FORCES MILITIAS TO ADAPT
https://www.splcenter.org/year-hate-extremism-2023/militias-adapt

STATE OF HATE IN THE DEEP SOUTH
https://www.splcenter.org/year-hate-extremism-2023/hate-southern-states

June 4, 2024

How Q Became Everything

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/06/how-q-became-everything-big-feature-wayfair-balenciaga/


You can track QAnon’s arc, like most things in America, through its relationship with corporate brands. Although the conspiracy movement emerged out of fringe imageboards in 2017, its first viral successes came on Facebook and YouTube, where its lore envisioning Donald Trump fighting an elite cabal of liberal pedophiles was honed and refined. When Covid came in 2020, QAnon ballooned under lockdowns, putting it in the mainstream, but leaving it short of actually being mainstream.

Call it the Wayfair era. In July 2020, followers of QAnon began spreading a particular pedophilic panic: the absurd notion that the online furniture retailer was selling children for sexual abuse via armoire orders. Non-Q masses took the bait: “Mentions of Wayfair and ‘trafficking’ have exploded on Facebook and Instagram over the past week,” the Associated Press wrote at the time, noting that related TikTok hashtags “together amassed nearly 4.5 million views.” A national human trafficking hotline issued a press release warning that a flood of calls about the conspiracy had distracted them from genuine work.

While it was widely peddled, it was also widely derided. Surely, something so absurd could not keep going. And looking back on the uproar from two years later, Wayfair seemed like the death of Q. By late 2020, major Q adherents had been purged from the platforms. Its influencers and weird hoaxes almost never broke into broader consciousness, except to be debunked. Its galvanizing messiah, Trump, was on his way out of the White House. Q was no longer inspiring people to murder mob bosses, kidnap their own children, or show up heavily armed at the Hoover Dam.

But far from being the end, Wayfair was a sign of what the movement was turning into—one confirmed in late November 2022, when the Balenciaga panic happened. The genesis point was a TikTok video posted by Brittany Venti, a right-wing provocateur and influencer with a history of aggravating culture war fights. While displaying pictures from a Balenciaga ad campaign showing small children with purses made to look like teddy bears wearing bondage straps, she complained that a “worldwide, internationally known brand” was “advertising their purses by having a child hold kink fetish gear.”

*snip*

May 25, 2024

Jessica Valenti: How Conservatives are Rebranding Pro-Life

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/conservatives-rebranding-pro-life-abortion-1235018370/

No paywall link
https://archive.li/dqfEL

AMERICANS DON’T WANT abortion to be banned. In fact, they barely want it legislated at all: A 2024 poll found that 81 percent of voters don’t want abortion issues to be regulated by the government. Instead, they want the decision to be between a patient and their doctor.

That overwhelming support for legal abortion leaves Republicans with a major problem: How do you defend and push a policy that no one wants? In the nearly two years since Roe v. Wade was overturned, the GOP has faced an unprecedented backlash. They’re losing election after election — from the 2022 midterms to state Supreme Court races — and abortion rights win every time they are on the ballot. Republicans are even considering doing away with the term “pro-life” because Americans view it as too extreme. The horror stories regularly coming out of states with abortion bans certainly don’t help.

In response, anti-abortion lawmakers and groups have recently launched a new two-pronged attack. They’re changing the way they publicly talk about abortion, using specific terms and phrases to make Americans believe that they’re softening on the issue; at the same time, they’re systematically chipping away at democracy so that voters won’t have a say in the matter, just in case their talking points don’t work.

I’ve been tracking these tactics in my newsletter, “Abortion, Every Day,” since Roe was overturned, finding that the GOP’s deception runs deeper than most people realize.

*snip*

May 11, 2024

The US Army is getting new 'Iron Fist' technology - thanks to Ukraine war aid

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/05/09/us-army-ukraine-war-aid-iron-fist-aps-m2-bradley-armour/

One thing many critics of US aid to Ukraine don’t seem to understand is that most of the money actually gets spent in the United States, very often on improved equipment for our own armed forces. For example, some Ukraine aid is being spent getting the latest Iron Fist “active defence” equipment into the US Army’s own armoured vehicle fleets much faster than it would otherwise arrive.

This is happening because the United States typically supports Ukraine by donating older weapons from existing US stocks, and then using the authorized “Ukraine aid” funds to re-equip US troops with newer weapons to replace those older weapons they just gave away.

Quite literally, the roughly $140 billion the United States is spending on Ukraine through the war’s first three years is actually funding a major modernization drive for the US military.

The US Army’s fleet of M-2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles is a great example of this counterintuitive dynamic. In exchange for giving away old M-2s to Ukraine, the United States is getting new M-2s hot off BAE Systems’ production line in York, Pennsylvania.

*snip*

May 1, 2024

True North Issues New Research Report Detailing Who Is Targeting State Courts to Limit Freedoms

https://truenorthresearch.org/2024/04/report-who-is-targeting-state-courts-to-limit-our-freedoms/

In 2024, America will witness some of the most expensive state judicial elections in history, with attack ads largely fueled by men with vast fortunes trying to make their personal agendas into binding law. True North is issuing a new research report shining a light on those men–Leonard Leo, Dick Uihlein, Charles Koch, and Jeff Yass–and right-wing groups targeting state courts and other levers of power to change the rules and limit our freedoms. This new report also documents how Leo used the Federalist Society to target state supreme courts and the judicial selection process in order to advance his agenda, and more.

Read the full report at the link or here.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24602706-true-north-conquering-the-courts-report

April 30, 2024

The Federalist Society coup, in 16 charts.

https://www.weekendreading.net/p/breaking-the-law-trump-is-the-means

Going into last week’s oral arguments on Trump’s immunity appeal, it was widely believed that as a practical matter the appeals court decision would hold – that Trump did not have immunity for attempting to overturn the results of the election he lost and for inciting a deadly mob to prevent the Electoral College votes from being counted. At that point, it seemed clear that the only motive for SCOTUS to hear Trump’s appeal in the first place was to delay his trial. Indeed, there was no apparent justification for the Supreme Court hearing this appeal other than postponing the trial. After all, Justice Roberts has famously said:

If it is not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case, then it is necessary not to decide more.

Instead, as they have so many times before, the six Federalist Society justices1 opened the door to much darker possibilities. Astonishingly, they were more concerned with erring by setting a precedent that could open the door to frivolous partisan prosecutions by the Justice Department against a future president than they were about erring by setting a precedent that would close the door to accountability for the last president who actually attempted a coup. (Incredibly, the implication, an echo of MAGA paranoia, is that the Justice Department, the criminal justice system, and the jury system are less legitimate than the actions of the unnamed president.)

The Federalist Society Project

Right now there is a real risk that the raw offensiveness of the proceedings – the shock of hearing certain justices entertain the idea of allowing presidential lawlessness – will continue to distract us from the most lethal danger we face. That danger is the completion of the Federalist Society project: to replace America’s liberal democratic constitutional order with an illiberal, revanchist one that does not protect civil rights or constrain the worst excesses of capital, and that allows the Court to make policy without democratic accountability.

It’s a mistake to discuss Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas as individual jurists rather than as politicians who were effectively “appointed” to the Court by the Federalist Society. Whatever your (justifiable) problems with any of those individuals, if they had not been confirmed, there were dozens more lined up on the Federalist bench who would not be doing anything substantially different. (To be clear, I am not saying that the justices have been bought off; I’m reasonably confident they believe in what they are doing. I am saying that they wouldn't be Supreme Court justices if they hadn’t been able to convince the MAGA/corporate judicial gatekeepers of their commitment to the cause.)

*snip*

April 30, 2024

Every Awful Thing Trump Has Promised to Do in a Second Term

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-second-term-plans-wildest-proposals-1234947327/

No paywall link
https://archive.li/53DPv

Donald Trump reportedly did not expect to win the presidency in 2016, which isn’t surprising considering how ill-prepared he and his team were to take control of the country. He appointed established conservatives to key positions before learning some had personal principles that extended beyond indulging the president’s ego. Trump wreaked havoc on the United States for four years, but the damage might have been even greater if he wasn’t battling career public servants who tried to check his impulses, or if he wasn’t such a political neophyte.

Trump will not be the dog that caught the car heading into his second term. He’ll be ready and waiting to take the wheel and hit the gas. The former president has now had nearly a decade to burnish his understanding of how Washington, D.C., works, and to assemble a political machine laser-focused on exploiting a federal government full of loopholes to give him the power to enact an authoritarian agenda that could spell disaster for the economy, the environment, human rights, and democracy.

Trump’s romp through the primaries has confirmed that he is in total control of the race and barring something unforeseen will be squaring off with Joe Biden in an election to determine the fate of the nation.

Here’s what’s at stake:

He will indict Biden and his other political enemies

Trump has made abundantly clear that he will use a potential second term in office to take revenge on his enemies. He’s planning to do so by helming the Justice Department with a loyal attorney general willing to appoint a slew of special prosecutors to go after everyone he feels has wronged him. These plans have been in the works since 2021, as Rolling Stone reported in August, and focus not just on Biden, whom Trump believes is the primary force behind his myriad legal woes, but also on Special Counsel Jack Smith, Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and plenty of others. “There are almost too many targets to keep track of,” one Trump adviser familiar with the discussions says.

*snip*

April 17, 2024

Secret Russian foreign policy document urges action to weaken the U.S.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/04/17/russia-foreign-policy-us-weaken/

No paywall link
https://archive.li/Jmvrx

Russia’s Foreign Ministry has been drawing up plans to try to weaken its Western adversaries, including the United States, and leverage the Ukraine war to forge a global order free from what it sees as American dominance, according to a secret Foreign Ministry document.

In a classified addendum to Russia’s official — and public — “Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation,” the ministry calls for an “offensive information campaign” and other measures spanning “the military-political, economic and trade and informational psychological spheres” against a “coalition of unfriendly countries” led by the United States.

“We need to continue adjusting our approach to relations with unfriendly states,” states the 2023 document, which was provided to The Washington Post by a European intelligence service. “It’s important to create a mechanism for finding the vulnerable points of their external and internal policies with the aim of developing practical steps to weaken Russia’s opponents.”

The document for the first time provides official confirmation and codification of what many in the Moscow elite say has become a hybrid war against the West. Russia is seeking to subvert Western support for Ukraine and disrupt the domestic politics of the United States and European countries, through propaganda campaigns supporting isolationist and extremist policies, according to Kremlin documents previously reported on by The Post. It is also seeking to refashion geopolitics, drawing closer to China, Iran and North Korea in an attempt to shift the current balance of power.

*snip*