Month: July 2021

The hits just keep on coming:

It only took a few days for Scott Atlas to alarm top US health officials after he became a White House COVID-19 adviser in mid-August of last year.

Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx had already been sidelined and were struggling to combat falsehood after falsehood spread by former president Donald Trump. Yet the pair quickly realized that Atlas — a senior fellow at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution who routinely downplayed the pandemic on Fox News — was about to make their fight against the virus even harder, according to emails obtained through a public records request and shared with BuzzFeed News.

“I am more convinced than ever the dangers of Dr. Atlas’ views on the pandemic,” Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator at the time, wrote to Fauci and other top health officials in an Aug. 21, 2020, email — 11 days after Trump had announced that Atlas, a neuroradiologist, would be his newest adviser. She accused Atlas of “providing information not based on data or knowledge of pandemics — nor pandemic responses on the ground but by personal opinion formed by cherry picking data from nonpeer reviewed COVID publications.”

“This is dangerous and a true threat to a comprehensive and critical response to this pandemic,” she added. “Dr Atlas views appeal to a subsection of American citizens and if allowed to gain traction will reverse months of incredibly hard won gains.”

“I agree and share your concerns,” Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease scientist, responded on a thread that included former FDA head Stephen Hahn and former CDC chief Robert Redfield. He added, “He is a very clever guy and knows the literature (in his own way). It is in the interpretation of the literature that we differ.”

The emails — obtained by Charles Seife, a New York University journalism professor — show how alarmed Fauci and Birx were about Atlas, who became one of Trump’s most influential advisers and one of the loudest sources of COVID-19 misinformation in the US.

He infamously advocated for a controversial approach to the deadly virus: letting it spread unchecked among non-elderly people in the absence of a vaccine so that the population at large could develop immunity. Infectious disease experts at the time argued that this strategy would be incredibly dangerous, inevitably leading to large numbers of unnecessary hospitalizations and deaths. But the idea held sway with the president: Weeks after Atlas started on the job, Trump proclaimed on TV that the virus would “go away” once people developed “a herd mentality.”

Fauci and Birx, meanwhile, were almost entirely shut out of the Oval Office, according to their correspondence at the time. “I don’t see the President so I don’t have a counter balance opportunity to this Atlas Dogma,” Birx wrote. “Tony and I did not brief the President nor speak to the President between 22 April and the end of July beyond one vaccine briefing in July.”

Now they want to put Fauci in jail.

I guess they both could have spoken out. But They probably should have. But what good would it have done/ Trump always did what he wanted, irrespective of public opinion. He liked Atlas because Atlas told him he could stop testing (keep the numbers down), let people die in huge number and it would all be better in the long run because he would win re-election, which was all that mattered. Nothing was going to change that.

Sometimes I read one of these Trump in the final days stories and it just hits me in the gut. These pandemic stories do that every time. They killed people. On purpose. For Trump’s sickening, evil narcissism. And he’s out there still pushing his January 6th, Big Lie revolution and may very well get back in the White House in three years if they manage to degrade our election processes enough to make it possible.

This Daily Beast piece takes a look at the Weisselberg case from an interesting angle. How much did ex-daughter-in-law Jennifer have to do with the indictment?

While the Manhattan District Attorney’s office undertook a years-long, high-stakes battle to obtain Donald Trump’s tax records—twice returning to the Supreme Court—some of the most damning evidence was quietly in the possession of someone who was more than willing to turn it over: the ex-daughter-in-law of a top Trump Organization executive.

Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s longtime chief financial officer, has always been key to unlocking the finances of the Trump family business. For years, prosecutors have been looking for documents that would show what exiled insiders like Trump’s ex-consigliere Michael Cohen have claimed: that the Trump Organization was fudging numbers and dodging taxes.

What investigators didn’t know was that the proof was in the hands of Jennifer Weisselberg, the woman once married to Barry Weisselberg, the son of Allen Weisselberg. And it wasn’t until November 2020 that city and state investigators connected with her to acquire the evidence.

The Daily Beast has obtained some of the records that, according to Ms. Weisselberg and her lawyer, have proved pivotal to last week’s indictment of the Trump Organization CFO.Corporate Perks

The top finance executive at the Trump Organization was indicted for dodging taxes by receiving pay in unaccounted corporate perks. Among them: redirecting his salary to cover tuition payments for his grandkids.

As prosecutors would discover, Barry Weisselberg explained it all in sworn testimony he made during a deposition in his divorce case in August 2018.

Grandpa Weisselberg paid more than $50,000 a year for each of the two kids to attend a top-rated private academy, the Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School. He’d been doing it for at least six years, Barry Weisselberg told his wife’s lawyer, Clifford Petroske.

New York investigators would later ask Jennifer Weisselberg about that financial arrangement, according to two people in the room. They said prosecutors’ eyes widened when she explained that Trump himself would sign a check that she would hand deliver to the school.

That detail made its way into page seven of last week’s indictment: “as part of the scheme to defraud, Trump Corporation personnel, including Weisselberg, arranged for tuition expenses for Weisselberg’s family members to be paid by personal checks drawn on the account of and signed by Donald J. Trump.”

In the indictment, the office of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. noted that tuition payments “constituted employee compensation and taxable income to Allen Weisselberg,” but it claims he hadn’t reported that additional $359,058 in his taxes over the years.Luxury Living On A Budget

The indictment also mentions “a family member” of the CFO who took part in “the scheme to defraud” the government by getting a company apartment—again, without reporting it on personal income taxes.

This, too, stemmed from the Barry-Jennifer divorce case. Investigators found that the CFO’s son, a fellow Trump Organization employee in charge of its Wollman ice skating rink at Central Park, was keeping his official salary artificially low. In his divorce case, Barry Weisselberg testified that he didn’t even get a monetary raise in years, and according to investigators, he received the extra compensation in the form of fringe benefits.

The documents lay it out. Barry and Jennifer Weisselberg’s joint 2010 tax return lists his combined “wages, salaries, and tips” at $132,811. In New York, that’s enough for a couple to live in a comfortable one-bedroom apartment in Queens with a view of the city.

But in actuality, the Weisselbergs were staying at the ritzy 100 Central Park South, premium real estate at a coveted spot in the heart of Manhattan. The cost of living at the Trump-owned building is several times higher than what Weisselberg could afford on that salary, where monthly rent nowadays ranges from $5,300 to $20,000.

The answer? Donald Trump picked up the tab for more than six years.

“It was a corporate apartment, so we didn’t have rent,” Barry Weisselberg said in his deposition.

His wife’s lawyer kept pressing with questions to reveal the value of this luxurious corporate perk.

“What would the rent have been if that apartment would have been rented to a third party?” Petroske asked.

“I have no idea,” Barry Weisselberg replied.

When asked whether he’d reported the apartment perk on his taxes from 2005 to 2011, he said he didn’t “recall.”

This is the same arrangement that the longtime Trump ice rink manager had for his next place: a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan’s expensive Upper East Side, on the same block as the Trump Plaza building.

In his divorce deposition, Barry Weisselberg described this other spot as “a corporate apartment” and said he simply didn’t know who was paying the rent, if it were being paid at all.

In the indictment, prosecutors said that second apartment also “constituted income” that should have been taxes, but that the Trump Organization “intentionally failed to do so.”

Barry Weisselberg was not charged in last week’s indictment, but the investigation is ongoing and the government could still target him. It’s a looming threat that could be understood as a strategy: applying additional pressure on the CFO, so that he cooperates with law enforcement to spare his son from the probe.All The Way To The Top

The Manhattan District Attorney and New York Attorney General, which have struck a rare partnership to prosecute this together, have hinted that there’s more to come. Questions asked of witnesses, who spoke to The Daily Beast on condition of anonymity, show that investigators are interested in other executives as well.

And as the current case centers on questions about untaxed “fringe benefits,” the DA and AG will have to prove who tweaked salaries—and whether they knew about tax rules.

Once again, Jennifer Weisselberg’s divorce case shows the path.

Barry Weisselberg’s testified that his pay—which remained flat for “numerous years” while the corporate perks added up—was decided by his own father, Allen Weisselberg, and Trump’s Chief Operating Officer, Matthew Calamari.

Trump’s bodyguard-turned-COO was not named in the indictment, nor has he been charged with a crime. But investigators are probing Calamari’s activity, according to two people familiar with the investigation.

Prosecutors also have reason to examine Trump’s involvement more closely as well. In his divorce testimony, Barry Weisselberg made clear that his pay was once determined by the head honcho himself.

“Personally Donald Trump would make that decision?” his wife’s lawyer asked.

“Yes,” Barry Weisselberg responded.

Trump only stopped personally overseeing the skating rink manager’s pay when Trump became president of the United States, Barry Weisselberg claimed. If true, that would rope in Trump, who called himself “king of the tax code” for years and is now trying to walk that back and play dumb.

As I have pointed out a number of times, Trump bragged about the fact that he always signed every check because he wanted to know where the money was going. And he continued signing checks after he became president.

There’s more at the link. But I hesitate to get very excited about any of this. Trump has shown himself to be teflon and it sure doesn’t seem as if this is a big enough case to bring him down. It might spell the end of his business but clearly, he’s moved on. Politics — revolution —is his business now. And he’s found ways to make a ton of money doing it.

I think everyone had better get ready for more of this. And in places where they are allowed to open carry, it could get very ugly:

A far-right congressional candidate in Orange County, California called on his supporters to “Confront Katie Porter” in an Instagram post that featured the walk-up music of a pro wrestler. 

And on Sunday, candidate Nick Taurus did just that, leading a crew of supporters loudly heckling the Democratic California congresswoman at the start of an outdoor town hall event at a park in Irvine. The confrontation then escalated into a brief scuffle, the details of which remain unclear.

The fighting was over within a few minutes. Karie Davies, a spokesperson for the Irvine Police Department, told TPM “this is an active investigation.” 

“What I can tell you is there were opposing views and it got heated,” Davies said. “One party pushed the other and it escalated to punches being thrown. One person was arrested for assault and battery and was released from the scene with a citation.”

The arrestee was a Porter supporter, Davies said.

“According to the report, someone on the opposition was pushed by a supporter and that caused pushing back and forth,” she added. “Ultimately an opposer was punched in the face by a supporter, suffering a bloody nose. Our officers were there for the event and were able to get control pretty quickly. The supporter was arrested for assault and battery and was released from the scene with a citation.”

A reporter from the Los Angeles Times who was present at the rally, Seema Mehta, reported afterward that she could not tell who threw the first punch, but that “it wasn’t a bench-clearing brawl.” Limited video from part of the scuffle showed some pushing and shoving before police broke things up. 

“A few [Porter supporters] confronted protesters, resulting in punches being thrown and men falling to the ground,” the Times reported. “Porter rushed to the scuffle, wrapping her arms around an elderly woman near the scrum.” 

Though Taurus later denied that he intended for his protest to get violent, Porter said in a statement that he had created “unsafe conditions.” 

“It is disappointing that a small but vocal group of attendees, who advertised a ‘confrontation rally,’ created unsafe conditions at a planned family-friendly event,” Porter said. “While I absolutely respect their right to disagree, their disturbance disrespected all the families who attended and were ready to engage in a thoughtful, civil, and safe way.” 

In an Instagram post calling his supporters to the event — featuring the walk-up music of Kurt Angle, the former WWE star — Taurus wrote, “Please join the Taurus Campaign this Sunday (07/11/21) at 2:30PM to demand AMERICA BE PUT FIRST and send Carpetbagger Katie back to the Iowa farm she came from!”

But that wasn’t all — in comments under the post, he tagged several accounts connected to Nick Fuentes, the far-right influencer who, among other things, has said of the Jim Crow South: “It was better for them, it’s better for us.”

Taurus hasn’t hidden his own extreme views, posting pictures with Fuents and calling on his website for a 25-year immigration moratorium, a “nationwide ban” on critical race theory (which he calls “anti-White Racism”) and “LGBT ideology” in schools and private businesses, the “release and pardon of all 1/6 Patriots,” and federal charges against Black Lives Matter and anti-fascist groups. 

One of the Instagram accounts Taurus tagged in his call for supporters to show up at the Katie Porter event, AFU.Arizona, once referred to Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey as a “traitor to our religion” above a picture of Ducey at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Last month, the same account reposted a tweet from Fuentes calling for “pro-White solidarity.” 

“No longer will AMERICANS bow to the billionaires, anti-White extremists and the GAY mafia,” Taurus said when announcing his candidacy in June.

In a video posted to Instagram after the event, Taurus blamed Porter’s supporters for introducing violence — but he also acknowledged, “we started, basically, heckling and hassling her” after learning the congresswoman might not answer questions he and his supporters had submitted ahead of time. (Porter’s statement noted, “At our town halls, we take steps, such as putting all questions into a bingo ball spinner, so that we hear all voices, not just the loudest ones.”)

“We have to make these people squirm, we have to make them feel uncomfortable,” Taurus added later in the video. 

Notably, Taurus implied in the video that the local Republican Party had been involved in the stunt.

“We were instructed to do this — or not instructed, I guess I took the impetus myself to go form this event — but the OC GOP, or someone in a local GOP chapter, went out and sent an invitation for us to go and ask questions and kind of go out and press her a bit regarding everything she’s doing in the 45th district,” Taurus said. 

He said separately, “We decided to go down after being prompted by the local GOP and to kind of make our voices heard.”

Of course they were prompted by the GOP.

Every revolutionary movement needs a martyr and it appears that the MAGA revolution has finally found one for itself.

Ashli Babbit, the Jan. 6th insurrectionist who was shot by a security guard as she climbed through a broken window just a few feet away from members of Congress, is Donald Trump’s Horst Wessel, the German brownshirt who was murdered in 1930 and turned into a martyr by the Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels. Trump himself is making the case for Babbit, having mentioned her in every appearance he’s made in the last week.

At his recent Florida rally, Trump wondered: “Who shot Ashli Babbit? We all saw the hand… Now they don’t want to give the name.” At his press conference on Wednesday in which he announced his laughable “class action” lawsuit against the Big Tech companies, he went a little bit farther saying, “there were no guns in the Capitol except for the gun that shot Ashli Babbitt. And nobody knows who that man were…the person that shot Ashli Babbitt right through the head, just boom. There was no reason for that.” Then this past weekend he went all the way, describing the insurrection as a love fest and Babbit as an innocent victim in an interview with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo:

Bartiromo took the ball and ran with it, saying that Babbitt climbed out of a broken window (as if she was trying to escape the vicious gunman) after which both she and Trump speculated that the officer who shot Babbitt was part of a Democratic official’s security detail, casually mentioning Chuck Schumer in the process. The implication was obvious: the Democrats shot Ashli Babbitt for no good reason. The fact that we have all seen the footage of the shooting is irrelevant: We can believe them or we can believe our lying eyes.

Over the weekend, Trump appeared at his second CPAC conference in five months — this time in Texas. (Salon’s Zachary Petrizzo delivered these dispatches from the event.) Trump gave his usual speech, to a notably more excited crowd than the last one in February in Florida. He’s barely able to keep from announcing to his adoring fans that he’s running again and they are all clamoring for him to do it. And it’s clear that he will be running to avenge his bogus claims that he actually won the election. The Big Lie will never die.

It all sounds bizarre but when you talk about this stuff in the context of CPAC, it is really not all that crazy. Sure the violent insurrection gives their standard reckless rhetoric a feeling of urgency that wasn’t there before, but if you look back you can see that’s been there for decades.

Back in 1973 when the American Conservative Union (founded in 1964) first started holding these get-togethers, the GOP was in terrible disarray in the wake of Watergate and far-right organizers saw an opportunity to reshape the party in their conservative image. They invited Ronald Reagan to give the first keynote and the “New Right” never looked back.

CPAC has always been used as a way to take the temperature of the party activists and in that way, it’s very instructive. The straw poll that’s taken every year (or now, every few months, apparently) has not always been predictive of the party’s nominee, but it shows what ideas and issues most excite the base. It’s almost certain that the feedback loop between this group and the right-wing media guides the party as much as party officials and pollsters do. For the first quarter-century, the conference was an ideological gathering designed to promote the conservative movement agenda of anti-communism, small government, strong military, Christian Right values, low taxes, etc. But with the rise of the right-wing media — first talk radio, then Fox News — by the turn of the century, it became much more of a right-wing celebrity spectacle that sought to shock the political media, which loved to cover it since it was always held in DC. (This is the first year they’ve ever held the event outside of DC.) In fact, for the past 20 years, CPAC was basically the same circus that Trump took on the road for his beloved rallies. During the Bush years, politicians showed up and there were panel discussions of issues but the stars of the show were people like Ann Coulter, who pretty much made her name at these events. And they said things which, looking back, make January 6th seem inevitable.

At the 2002 meeting, Coulter said, “we need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too, otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors.” A few years later she made news again with another notorious speech:

On Democrats: “Someday they will find a way to abort all future Boy Scouts.”

College professors: “sissified, pussified.” Harvard: “the Soviet Union.” John Kerry: the other “dominant woman in Democratic politics.”

Her post-9/11 motto: “Rag head talks tough, rag head faces consequences.” For good measure, she threw in a joke about having Muslims burn down the Supreme Court — with the liberal justices inside.

Then came questions. A young woman asked Coulter to describe the most difficult ethical decision she ever made. “There was one time I had a shot at Bill Clinton,” Coulter said.

She meant that literally. Meanwhile, down in the bowels of the hotel hosting CPAC, they sold merchandise with adorable sayings such as “Happiness is Hillary Clinton’s face on a milk carton” and “Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some Assembly Required.” At the next year’s event, Coulter said, “I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘fa**ot,'” and when she was rebuked for saying it, she called it “speech totalitarianism.”

There is nothing new under the right-wing sun.

In recent years, some of the acts were scrapped. Coulter was not invited in 2015, and in 2017 the right-wing provocateur Milo Yianopoulos was canceled when it was revealed that he had made positive statements about pedophilia. They were no longer needed anyway. The show was by then dominated by Donald Trump who had made his first big political splash there in 2013 spreading the “birther” lie, which the attendees ate up with a spoon. And while Coulter climbed her way back to CPAC this weekend, participating on an obscure panel going on about immigration and making grotesque racist statements, as usual, her act doesn’t shock anymore and nobody cares. Who needs Coulter anyway when you have Trump?

Salon

“When past presidents faced similar threats from growing corporate power, they took bold action,” the Biden White House says in its Friday fact sheet (that I’m just now getting to). The goal of Biden’s Executive Order is “to reduce the trend of corporate consolidation, increase competition, and deliver concrete benefits to America’s consumers, workers, farmers, and small businesses.”

But some things he can order. For others, he has the bully pulpit, appointees in place, and little else. Let’s keep score, shall we?

Biden in a “whole-of-government effort” plans to take 72 actions in varying degrees of boldness. Let’s skip the overview and get right to the details:

*That’s because of the limits on Biden’s executive authorities.

In the view of Christian dominionists, they own this country. Jesus himself gave it to them to rule, and they are, more than ever, bent on making that a reality (Washington Post):

It is a world in which demons are real, miracles are real, and the ultimate mission is not just transforming individual lives but also turning civilization itself into their version of God’s Kingdom: one with two genders, no abortion, a free-market economy, Bible-based education, church-based social programs and laws such as the ones curtailing LGBTQ rights now moving through statehouses around the country.

Smashing antiquities comes later.

The Post sketch of the growing nondenominational movement describes loud, highly produced services (requiring ear plugs) at a Fort Worth, Texas church named Mercy Culture. Donald Trump adviser Paula White comes from such a place. Predictions of a “heavenly strike” and “a Christian populist uprising” from the movement led some to believe they’d been led by God to assault the Capitol on Jan. 6th.

The Daily Beast described the court appearance of one such believer:

Pauline Bauer, a Pennsylvania pizzeria owner, is accused of multiple counts of violent entry, disruptive conduct, and obstruction of Congress after she allegedly broke into the Capitol on Jan. 6. Prosecutors allege that Bauer tried organizing buses to transport people to D.C. for a rally that preceded the riot, and that while in the Capitol rotunda she told police that she wanted to kill House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

But in what experts describe as an inadvisable legal strategy, Bauer has demanded to represent herself in court, appeared to threaten a court clerk with prison time, and declared herself a “self-governed individual” with special legal privileges.

“I am here by special divine appearance, a living soul,” she told a judge. She wants to represent herself.

She don’t need no stinking constitution. She has a Bible and she knows how to use it.

Is Bauer a dominionist or just another sovereign citizen? Who knows?

We’ve covered Dominionism here at Hullabaloo so many times that I’ve lost count (search for dominionist or Dominionism in the side bar). But for those who need it, the Post provides a very brief referesher:

Even as mainline Protestant and evangelical denominations continue an overall decline in numbers in a changing America, nondenominational congregations have surged from being virtually nonexistent in the 1980s to accounting for roughly 1 in 10 Americans in 2020, according to long-term academic surveys of religious affiliation. Church leaders tend to attribute the growth to the power of an uncompromised Christianity. Experts seeking a more historical understanding point to a relatively recent development called the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR.

A California-based theologian coined the phrase in the 1990s to describe what he said he had seen as a missionary in Latin America — vast church growth, miracles, and modern-day prophets and apostles endowed with special powers to fight demonic forces. He and others promoted new church models using sociological principles to attract members. They also began advancing a set of beliefs called dominionism, which holds that God commands Christians to assert authority over the “seven mountains” of life — family, religion, education, economy, arts, media and government — after which time Jesus Christ will return and God will reign for eternity.

And make His Own the overseers, naturally. All fueled by the prosperity gospel.

Someone must have a Venn diagram of how Christian reconstructionism, dominionism, and Christian nationalism intersect, but I can’t find one just now. Bill Berkowitz mentions another NAR faction that has abandoned the politics of the right and moved to the Pacific Northwest to await societal collapse and the emergence of a new Christian order they will build. Underlying it all is the belief that Christians should rule, and all others shall bow to Jesus (and to them).

Christianity Today describes Christian nationalism thusly:

Christian nationalism is the belief that the American nation is defined by Christianity, and that the government should take active steps to keep it that way. Popularly, Christian nationalists assert that America is and must remain a “Christian nation”—not merely as an observation about American history, but as a prescriptive program for what America must continue to be in the future. Scholars like Samuel Huntington have made a similar argument: that America is defined by its “Anglo-Protestant” past and that we will lose our identity and our freedom if we do not preserve our cultural inheritance.

Christian nationalists do not reject the First Amendment and do not advocate for theocracy, but they do believe that Christianity should enjoy a privileged position in the public square. The term “Christian nationalism,” is relatively new, and its advocates generally do not use it of themselves, but it accurately describes American nationalists who believe American identity is inextricable from Christianity.

As for not advocating a theocracy, Christianity Today might have to explain that part to the theocrats themselves.

They expect not to govern but to rule … in God’s name. That last is about the only thing differentiating them from leading Republicans.

Trump appeared on Maria Bartiromo’s show this morning and basically called for the police officer who shot Ashli Babbit to be prosecuted — or lynched. He seems to be hinting that the Democrats put him up to shooting Babbit for political gain.

Also he pretty much confirms that he’s running:

Remember that brief moment in time when Fox News was reluctant to push big lies about the 2020 election for fear of being sued? That’s long gone

“The Supreme Court did not have the courage to take it up, and they should be ashamed of themselves” — Trump is still lamenting that the Supreme Court didn’t step in to throw the election for him

“There was such love at that rally … the love in the air, I’ve never seen anything like it” — Trump has completely rewritten the history of the deadly January 6 insurrection he instigated

Trump describes Ashli Babbitt, who was part of a mob that was trying to lynch the VP, as an “innocent, wonderful, incredible woman”

Trump on who shot Ashli Babbitt: “I’ve heard also that it was the head of security for a certain high official. A Democrat. It’s gonna come out.”

Maria Bartiromo strongly hints that someone associated with Chuck Schumer shot Ashli Babbitt. Completely irresponsible stuff.

Trump basically confirms he’ll be running for POTUS in 2024 and says he thinks CNN and MSNBC will endorse him because their ratings are down

OLD: The 1/6 commission should investigate antifa

NEW: The 1/6 commission should investigate lies about the 2020 election being rigged

BARTIROMO: They continue to call this an armed insurrection, and yet no guns were seized

TRUMP: Right

(Weapons seized included stun guns, pepper spray, baseball bats, flagpoles wielded as clubs, pipe bombs were planted … )

Originally tweeted by Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) on July 11, 2021.

Dr. Anthony Fauci said the crowd’s positive reaction to the dangerous anti-vaccine message emanating from the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas this weekend was “horrifying” and “frightening.”

On Sunday, CNN’s Jake Tapper showed Biden’s chief medical adviser a video clip from CPAC where the crowd loudly cheered while a conservative author boasted about the government having trouble reaching a higher percentile of U.S. citizens vaccinated.

“They were hoping, the government was hoping that they could sort of sucker 90 percent of the population into getting vaccinated. And it isn’t happening,” the panelist said to cheers. Currently, only 48 percent of Americans are fully vaccinated.

When asked for his reaction the nation’s top infectious disease expert responded with horror.

“It’s horrifying,” Fauci said. “I mean, they are cheering about someone saying that it’s a good thing for people not to try and save their lives. I mean, if you just unpack that for a second, Jake, it’s almost frightening to say, ‘Hey, guess what, we don’t want you to do something to save your life.’ Yay! Everybody starts screaming and clapping. I just don’t get that. I mean, and I don’t think that anybody who’s thinking clearly can get that. What is that all about? I don’t understand that, Jake.”

They are also calling for Fauci to be put in jail — chanting “lock him up” every time his name is mentioned. It’s sick.

But it’s not new. They are a death cult. And they have been for a long time:

This piece about suburban Republicans who turned on Trump but are still likely to vote for GOP Representatives leaves out some important dynamics in our current political environment:

Pursuing a bipartisan infrastructure deal and trumpeting a revived economy and progress against the pandemic, President Biden is trying to persuade the nation that Democrats are the party that gets things done. His message is aimed at holding on to a set of voters in next year’s midterms who could determine the fate of his agenda: suburbanites who abandoned former President Donald Trump in droves.

More than any other group, those independent-minded voters put Mr. Biden in the White House. Whether they remain in the Democratic coalition is the most urgent question facing the party as it tries to keep its razor-thin advantage in the House and the Senate next year.

Mr. Biden made his pitch again on Friday when he signed an executive order intended to protect consumers from the anti-competitive practices of large businesses.

But Republicans are also going to war for suburban votes. The party is painting the six-month-old Biden administration as a failure, one that has lost control of the Southwestern border, is presiding over soaring crime rates and rising prices and is on the wrong side of a culture clash over how schools teach the history of racism in America.

Whoever wins this messaging battle will have the power to determine the outcome of the rest of Mr. Biden’s term, setting the stage for either two more years of Democrats driving their policies forward or a new period of gridlock in a divided Washington.

Both parties are targeting voters like Jay Jackson, a retired career Air Force officer who is now a reservist in the Omaha suburbs. Mr. Jackson had lawn signs last year for Republicans running for Congress, but also for Mr. Biden. He thought that Mr. Trump had failed to empathize with military duty and regularly lied to Americans, and did not deserve re-election.

“I’m a classic RINO,” Mr. Jackson said with a laugh, accepting the right’s favorite insult for voters like him: Republicans in Name Only.

In a guest column in The Omaha World-Herald, Mr. Jackson, a 39-year-old lawyer, explained his view: “We Republicans need to turn away from Trump and back to our values and the principles of patriotism and conservatism.”

Mr. Biden won 54 percent of voters from the country’s suburbs last year, a significant improvement over Hillary Clinton in 2016, and enough to overcome Mr. Trump’s expansion of his own margins in rural and urban areas, according to new data from the Pew Research Center. Suburbanites made up 55 percent of the Biden coalition, compared with 48 percent of Clinton voters.

The authoritative Pew study, which echoed other recent surveys, also showed that Mr. Biden failed to increase his share of the Democratic base from 2016, including among young people and voters of color. It found, however, that his support surged among independents, veterans and married men — voters like Mr. Jackson.

But even as Mr. Jackson crossed party lines for Mr. Biden, he supported Representative Don Bacon, a Republican who won re-election in Nebraska’s Second District, which Mr. Biden himself carried. Mr. Jackson said that he was pleased so far with the Biden administration — especially its “putting the accelerator to the floor on Covid” — but that he would very likely vote again for Mr. Bacon.

It shows that in 2022, Democrats will need to count on more than the revolt of suburbia against Mr. Trump’s norm-smashing presidency to motivate their voters.

I wouldn’t count on actual registered Republicans to vote for Democrats. A few of them may have hated Trump enough to split their tickets but if they are still sticking with the party aftr all the bootlicking, they haven’t really changed. It’s the Independents who are up for grabs. Here’s what the article says about them:

Jeff Slobotski, a suburban father of five who changed his registration from Republican to independent, said the Bacon seat was “absolutely winnable” for Democrats in 2022. A Trump supporter in 2016, Mr. Slobotski voted for Mr. Biden last year.

Mr. Slobotski, 43, is an executive for a company that brings tech start-ups and arts groups to an emerging neighborhood in the city. He spoke over lunch last week at a downtown Omaha restaurant, the Kitchen Table. The restaurant windows displayed posters for Black Lives Matter and for a young state senator, Tony Vargas, who has been mentioned as a possible Democratic nominee to take on Mr. Bacon.

Although Mr. Slobotski voted for Mr. Bacon, he said he would support Mr. Vargas if he ran for the seat. “He’s just a young visionary, somebody with leadership ability, more of a pragmatist,” he said of Mr. Vargas, a former Omaha school board member. The Democrats’ 2020 nominee, Kara Eastman, was considered by many to be too progressive for the district.

Later that day, at a restaurant in Papillion, a group of three other 2020 ticket-splitting voters sipped iced coffees as they assessed Washington under unified Democratic control.

They all want the Democrats to preserve the filibuster — basically because they don’t understand the modern GOP. Someone should educate them. *sigh*

It’s interesting but it assumes this election is going to be a reversion to a pre-Trump world. It is not. Trump is going to be involved heavily in this campaign and every Republican candidate is going to have to kiss the ring or be shunned by the powerful Trump-drunk grassroots. As long as he’s in the picture, all of this remains up in the air. I wouldn’t make any bets either way.

Trump on the Wuhan Lab leak theory:

“Then it was finally revealed that this was most likely the truth, that it came from the lab. And it was a small little story. But when I said it, it was like a weapon went off, a major weapon.

“I won’t use the word ‘weapon,’ because I never use the word ‘nuclear.’ But we have to be careful with our leadership, because if we don’t have the proper leadership, we’re in a very perilous state.

“So we don’t use the word ‘nuclear.’ I never used it, OK? I never used it. I never said it. That’s called disinformation.”

Trump has frequently veered off-script at his rallies, peppering his political speeches with rants about bugbears including weak showers, lightbulbs, and hairspray.

It was unclear what Trump was referring to on Wednesday or why he was insisting that he did not use the word “nuclear.”

However, in 2019 Trump denied reports that he had asked national security officials to consider using nuclear bombs to tackle hurricanes.

And to think the right wing media has the nerve to say that Joe Biden is incoherent. But that’s just par for the course. They have projected the entire Resistance critique of Trump on to Biden and because their brainwashed followers live in their bubble they have no idea.