Month: July 2023

Can he keep it together or are we in for another round of crazy?

I’m betting on crazy:

Speaker Kevin McCarthy is working furiously to prevent another House floor takeover by his hardest-right conservatives as the GOP prepares to tackle some of the year’s biggest bills.

With the House back for a final stretch before its August recess, McCarthy on Tuesday afternoon summoned a group of leaders from multiple corners of his conference to shape a strategy for staving off further right-wing revolts — which his team can’t afford this summer. Underscoring the urgency of their task, the group of GOP lawmakers met in the shadow of what could become a new right-flank rebellion over the rule for debating a must-pass Pentagon policy bill.

“The speaker has called these meetings so we can get things hopefully worked out before it blows up on the floor, so there’s no surprises,” said Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett, one of the 11 Republicans who held up the floor last month during an ongoing rift with leadership.

But Burchett said he remained “ticked off” about a few other things, namely party leaders’ recent treatment of his proposed amendments to that Pentagon policy bill.

And he wasn’t the only hard-right Republican who left less than satisfied after Tuesday’s meeting — which party leaders described to members as the first of several procedure-focused discussions.

“They’ve got the problem of figuring out how to put Humpty Dumpty back together. I’m perfectly willing to cooperate. But we’ve demonstrated we can get to yes, that’s not the problem,” said Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.), another of the 11 conservatives who defied leadership on the party’s own agenda in June.

“I think sitting around in rooms, frankly, and for people to repeat things … [is] probably not gonna get the job done,” Bishop added. “I think they got to figure out another path.”

According to two attendees at Tuesday’s meeting, McCarthy’s general message was more philosophical about the GOP’s need for unity, versus prescribing a specific course of action for upcoming bills. The California Republican did signal his preference on one thing: Coming to agreement on funding the government before the current shutdown deadline of Sept. 30.

Republican Study Chair Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.) summed up the message from leadership as: “Our goal is not to do a CR” — referring to a continuing resolution, the sort of stopgap spending bill that’s currently seen as inevitable across Capitol Hill.

But Republicans also acknowledged that they are quickly running out of time to avoid such an outcome — they would need to thread a veritable bucket of needles on spending decisions in just six weeks of session. The party is also trying to navigate growing demands from the right flank, many of whom attended Tuesday night’s confab.

In what could prove a bad omen, even McCarthy himself seemed to acknowledge Tuesday that his party’s goal of passing the Pentagon policy measure this week could slip.

“I never put it into this week,” he told reporters. “I was always very confident we’d get it done.”

The speaker and his leadership team have spent weeks working with GOP members and their Democratic counterparts to find a compromise bill that can clear the House with conservative votes — but also preserve the bipartisan support that the legislation has almost always enjoyed on the floor.

It’s not clear whether that compromise can materialize by Friday.

“I do worry about us. I worry about what we’re gonna do. Because we’re so fractured in so many different directions,” said Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.), who attended the meeting.

Republicans in disarray … imagine that.

I suspect they will end up shutting down the government. They can’t help themselves. We’ll see how that serves them in an election year.

“He was always telling me that we need to use the FBI and IRS to go after people,” Kelly told the Times last year, adding that “it was constant and obsessive and is just what he’s claiming is being done to him now.”

This lawsuit by Lisa Page and Peter Strzok is focusing attention once again on Trump’s abuse of power. Former Chief of Staff John Kelly testified that he wanted him to use the IRS to go after them, his political enemies. His abuses were extensive and a lot of it was right out in the open. I’m not talking about the rank corruption — running his business out of the White House, signing hush money checks in the oval office, accepting unlimited graft and access in the form of both foreign and domestic money at his hotels and resorts. Nobody seems to care about that at all. I’m talking about the abuse of his power as president.

Aaron Blake has a short, incomplete, list:

Trump also wanted the IRS to investigate former FBI director James B. Comey and former deputy director Andrew McCabe, along with Hillary Clinton, former secretary of state and Trump’s presidential challenger, and other perceived foes, Kelly said last year. Comey and McCabe were audited, the odds of which happening randomly is infinitesimal. (An inspector general report last year found no connection between Trump and the audits, but raised concerns that warranted further investigation.)

Trump publicly and repeatedly pushed for McCabe’s firing before McCabe was due to receive full retirement benefits, ultimately succeeding mere hours before that would have taken place.

Trump told his White House counsel that he wanted to order probes of Clinton and Comey, per the Times. (His press secretary in late 2017 also said prosecuting Comey was “something that certainly should be looked at” at the Justice Department.)

Trump said publicly in late 2020 that former president Barack Obama and former vice president Joe Biden should be indicted and indicated he had made such a case to his attorney general, William P. Barr.

He said in 2019 that it would be “appropriate” for him to ask for an investigation of Biden.

He withheld security assistance from Ukraine while seeking to have the country say it was opening an investigation involving Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, releasing the aid only when the situation became public. Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney effectively confirmed this was the arrangement before backing off those comments. Trump was impeached for this, and many Republicans acknowledged it was at least improper. A key figure — European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland — indicated it was probably illegal.

A Justice Department office was tasked with investigating former secretary of state John F. Kerry in 2018, two days after Trump tweeted about Kerry’s “possibly illegal” activities and the same day Trump said Kerry “should be prosecuted,” according to former U.S. attorney Geoffrey Berman’s book.

A Trump political appointee in 2018 asked Berman to prosecute a prominent Democratic lawyer, Gregory Craig, and to do so before the midterms, Berman also said. (When Berman declined, it was prosecuted in Washington, where the jury acquitted Craig of lying to the Justice Department.)

Berman recalled several other examples of political influence seeping into the Justice Department. “Throughout my tenure as U.S. attorney,” Berman wrote, “Trump’s Justice Department kept demanding that I use my office to aid them politically, and I kept declining — in ways just tactful enough to keep me from being fired.”

Trump repeatedly applied public pressure on the Justice Department to take it easy on his allies, prompting Barr to remark that Trump’s comments “make it impossible for me to do my job.”

This is a necessarily incomplete list. It doesn’t include, for example, Trump’s pardoning of political allies at a historic rate. This was his prerogative as president, but it certainly plays into the idea that Trump intended to wield the government for political benefit.

\

The sheer gall of these Republicans to spend all this time and money investigating Joe Biden and his alleged “weaponization” of the government against poor little Donnie Trump who never did anything wrong in his whole virtuous life is almost too much to bear. They just do their thing and the Democrats have to react and on and on it goes.

Yep, it’s the deep state

The guy was indicted under seal before the midterms. https://t.co/FuqGj94QAv

— Bradley P. Moss (@BradMossEsq) July 11, 2023

You knew the Republicans were going to say this. I’m surprised it took so long. But the fact that he was indicted before the GOP took over the House makes this absurd. And it makes the House Majority MAGAs look like gullible idiots once again.

*Sigh*. Philip Bump at the Washington Post. “Anyone offering criticism of President Biden instantly becomes credible on the right”:

The Justice Department on Monday announced that it had unsealed an indictment against Gal Luft, a director at a think tank in the Washington area. According to federal prosecutors, he is also someone who violated Iranian sanctions, trafficked weapons and aided the Chinese government without registering as a foreign agent.

The specific allegations included in the indictment were not known before Monday, but the fact that Luft had been indicted was. He was arrested in Cyprus in February, which Luft immediately suggested was a response to his having information incriminating President Biden and members of his family. Last week, the New York Post published excerpts of a recorded message from Luft, who skipped bail in April, in which Luft discussed specific elements of the indictment.

In fact, you may have heard about Luft before the announcement on Monday. His insistence that he was being targeted by the Biden administration was immediately embraced by conservative media and Republican legislators. When he skipped bail, House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) lamented to Fox News host Maria Bartiromo that he had gone “missing,” appearing to conflate Luft with an informant from whom Republicans had spun out a separate allegation against Biden, implying that something nefarious had befallen him.

This has been the pattern on the right for months. Anyone making any allegation against Biden and/or his family is accepted as inherently credible, however shaky the evidence or, as in the case of Luft, however obvious the conflict of interest. Not only are anti-Biden claims taken at face value, any skepticism about those allegations or, again as in the case of Luft, external indicators of unreliability are themselves folded into a voluminous conspiracy theory.

The timeline is important. It appears, both from comments by Luft in the video reported by the New York Post and in looking at court records, the indictment was handed down last fall. (Update: It occurred on Nov. 1, as Luft indicated in the video reported by the New York Post.) As mentioned, his initial arrest was in February. It is not clear why the indictment was unsealed now, but it is not the case that the charges are new. In other words, the understood order of events suggests not that he was charged because he made public allegations but, instead, that he made public allegations after he had been charged.

Yet Comer and at least one colleague on House Oversight insisted the indictment was necessarily political. “I don’t trust the DOJ or the FBI. They are trying to silence our witnesses,” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) said on Fox News, again to Maria Bartiromo, who has been energetically promoting the Republican allegations. “This is a way to do that.”

Again, he appears to have become a desired witness after his indictment. Speaking to Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Monday night, however, Comer made a similar argument as Mace had. “The timing is always coincidental, according to the Democrats and the Department of Justice,” Comer scoffed.

The implication for viewers, of course, is that it was not a coincidence at all, but it is not clear what the implied noncoincidence is. Nothing has obviously changed about the status of Luft and, if the committee planned to take his testimony previously despite his fugitive status, it still can. All that has changed is that we are hearing the government’s arguments against Luft from the government, instead of from Luft.

Luft claims he spoke with the FBI in 2019 about his interactions with the Bidens, specifically Joe Biden’s son Hunter and the president’s brother James. The discussion centered on the other Bidens’ work with CEFC China Energy, which The Washington Post detailed in March 2022. In the video obtained by the New York Post, he does not appear to make allegations about Joe Biden receiving any money from foreign interests, an unproven claim from Comer and other Republicans that remains unsubstantiated.

Last week, in response to the New York Post article, Comer appeared on Newsmax. Luft is “very credible,” he insisted at the time, “and the people on MSNBC who made fun of me when I said we had an informant that was missing, they should feel like fools right now. This is their worst nightmare, because, again, this is a credible witness that the FBI flew all the way to Brussels to interview and sent several agents to interview.”

Again, Comer asserted the credibility of Luft after it was known that Luft had been arrested and after the New York Post reported on elements of the charges that Luft had described. “We want to know why the FBI has never made public this interview” with Luft in 2019, Comer said. “Our sources in the FBI, the ones that Senator Grassley has worked closely with, say they did nothing. They never investigated any of this. They turned a complete blind eye.”

Hunter Biden agreed to a plea deal with the federal government last month for failing to report millions in dollars of income. In the video obtained by the New York Post, Luft compared his facing charges for failing to register as a foreign agent with what he alleges Hunter and James Biden did on behalf of foreign companies. Comer and Mace made the same argument in their Fox News interviews after his indictment. Incidentally, speaking to Fox News in late 2019, Luft suggested that Hunter Biden’s engagement with Chinese companies was par for the course.

The pattern here is not that government investigators are seeking to throw roadblocks in Comer’s path. Instead, it is that Comer and others on the right keep building paths into quicksand, and then have to pretend they are not sinking. You might recall the allegation raised two months ago that Joe and Hunter Biden had received a bribe from a Ukrainian executive.

That allegation stems from an interview the FBI conducted with an informant who spoke to the executive. The person believed to be that executive, however, previously denied to others that he had any contact with the Bidens. There is no other evidence of any bribe, including in the financial records obtained by House Oversight. Yet the idea that this bribe occurred is treated as a matter of fact by many on the right.

There is also the release of purported 2017 WhatsApp messages from Hunter Biden in which he suggests he is sitting with his father as he pressures Chinese partners. This, too, has been elevated as proven fact despite 1) there being no evidence Joe Biden was in the room but plenty of reason for Hunter Biden, indisputably adept at leveraging his last name, to suggest that he was and 2) the public presentations of the exchange including apparent summaries of the messages instead of documented transcripts. Again, though, this idea that Joe Biden was sitting there nodding along is now accepted as a verified fact.

Even though there is still no evidence that the now-president received a dime. “The president of the United States and his family has taken millions of dollars from a company that’s 100 percent wholly owned by the Chinese Communist Party,” Comer said on Newsmax during his conversation about Luft, though he has no evidence of that first, most damning allegation.

The Newsmax host did not challenge him on it. Instead, he disparaged members of the media skeptical about the allegations as “pitiful” and “desperate shills” who are helping Biden “cover up this very obvious atrocity.” When this is the standard of scrutiny your allies apply, it is little wonder that a fugitive accused of violating sanctions and aiding the Chinese government, but who is also willing to suggest that the Biden administration is out to get him, gets to be hailed as a bold truth teller.

They throw everything at the wall in hopes that something sticks. And the endless repetition is designed to wear down the opposition until they just give up.

That may have worked in the past before they all joined a cult that worships a sociopathic would-be fascist — Democrats in those days might vote for a Republican just to stop the noise. But Trump has changed that. It’s hand to hand combat now. And it’s exhausting.

That’s Trump talking about the country

President Trump x @UFC Unfiltered#UFC290 pic.twitter.com/4g76WlWYuv

— Steven Cheung (@TheStevenCheung) July 8, 2023

Excerpts from Trump’s softball interview with the Nevada Globe:

TNG: What do you think that they would be saying to you now as you’re going through another campaign and this legal persecution, if you will?

President Trump:

It is persecution. It is. I call it election interference, more than anything else.

These are terrible people, disgusting people.

My father would be angry at these people. My mother would be– she’d feel a little remorse for me, because, you know, it’s very unfair.

It’s a total…this witch hunt has been going on from the beginning–from the time I came down the escalator, and it has been proven to all be false.

Everything has been proven to be false.

If you look, every single thing that they’ve done, from Russia, Russia, Russia…it has all turned out to be a hoax.

That’s what Democrats are good at is just these hoaxes.

They’re not good at policy. They’re not good at, frankly, many things.

All Democrats do is disinformation and hoaxes.

But, I think that it has been an amazing period of time.

We had an amazing presidency.

We’re leading in the polls by a lot, tremendously. We’re way up above everybody, including Biden.

But with the Republicans–we are way up over, I call him Sanctimonious—because I got him elected. But, he’s doing poorly. I don’t think he’ll do well because he has got no personality and we’re doing great.

We’ll see what happens. I think we have a really very good chance of winning it and bringing the country back by making America great again.

We were energy independent. We had tax cuts, we had regulation cuts at a level that never seen before.

We had no wars. I didn’t start wars, but I finished wars. We beat Isis.

Everything we did worked out incredibly well, and we had to do it through the guise of these witch hunts all the time. Constantly,

Adam Schiff… Shifty Shiff…and all of these people that are sick. They’re psychos.

It was an amazing period of time, and I think the reason we’re doing well now is they see how badly it is and how bad it was.

There’s more spirit now.

I got more votes than any sitting president in history in 2020, and there’s more spirit now than there was in 2016 or in 2020. I think a lot of that is because of the fact that they see how bad, just how bad they’re doing.

They’re destroying our country.

Waaaaah!

TNG: So with the indictments, we actually saw your polling numbers go up. How do you explain that phenomenon?

President Trump:

Because people are very smart. The public is actually very smart and they’ve studied it, and they saw it’s a hoax.

It’s all a big hoax.

Biden has boxes all over. Nobody does anything about it.

I come under the Presidential Records Act which allows me… it’s perfect for explaining exactly what this is all about. It gives the full authority and power to the President.

Biden doesn’t come under that act because he wasn’t the president when he took all of these documents. But I was, and they don’t mention that. The fake news doesn’t cover it.  But the people understand it. You’ve heard me speak about it. The people understand it.

I come under the Presidential Records Act which isn’t criminal, nothing.

It’s not criminal and everything I did was absolutely fine. But, it’s a very important, very important distinction when you look…when you look at the fact that one person is targeted, and the other person gets away with murder.

Look at all the money that Biden has stolen from China.

He takes money.

He take bribes.

Call it whatever you want.

But, we have a compromised president.

They paid him millions and millions of dollars through Hunter.

And, Ukraine. Money comes in, and from other countries money comes in–it comes pouring in, and the fake news doesn’t want to even cover it.

I think the Republican congress is doing a great job. Jamie Comer is doing great. Jim Jordan is doing great.

But, the fake news doesn’t want to cover it. And, yet, this is the biggest story probably in the history of our country.

This is 100 times bigger than Watergate, but they don’t want to cover it, because they want to shield the Democrat.

And, I think it’s really showing how sick the press is. It’s sick, it’s corrupt. It’s as corrupt as anything I’ve ever seen. And it’s not only what they talk about, it’s what they don’t talk about.

They won’t talk about things, and that came out with the judge’s opinion the other day where he said you couldn’t talk through Facebook and Twitter and all of these different places because you’re giving them false information…the FBI, the DOJ, et cetera, the government, the Democrats.

So it’s big stuff. I mean, it’s big stuff.

It, at some point, it must explode. It must absolutely explode.

I wonder what he’s talking about? Hmmmmm?

The following is all lies. Of course:

TNG: In the decision, the judge referred to the government as the “Ministry of Truth” in reference to Orwell’s 1984, and with that, we now know that there was election interference via massive censorship during the 2020 election cycle. Now that the judge has rendered this decision, how do you think this is going to impact the 2024 election?

President Trump:

I think it impacts it greatly because people realize…look, you had True The Vote where they found hundreds of thousands of votes. They stuffed it, right? Catherine Englebrecht. She is a fantastic woman.

They stuffed the ballot boxes.

We have it on tape and people don’t want to talk about it.

You have so many other things, but now you have a judge who made a statement, it’s a very powerful statement. Brilliant judge, brilliant man, highly respected.

But even before that, you had the 51 intelligence officers saying that it was Russian disinformation, and they knew it wasn’t.

And, even before that you had Twitter, Facebook and you had FBI Twitter.

The FBI Twitter thing was unbelievable.

The FBI Facebook and the DOJ Facebook, all of these scandals, and the pollster said it made a 17 point difference. 17 points… and just with a quarter of a point…

Look, the election was rigged. It was a rigged election.

We have no borders in our country and we have rigged elections. You can’t have a country like that.

It’s one of the reasons I am running and I’m doing it, and I think it’s one of the reasons we’re doing so well.

People see what happened, but this, the judge’s decision, the recent judge’s decision, from two days ago, was amazing.

He goes on to say that he had the greatest government the world has ever seen with the country being the richest and most successful it’s ever been under his fantastic policies which only he can produce. Or something to that effect.

This brief litany of his massive achievements and complaints about Nevada being “disgraceful state” because he won it both times and they cheated him out of it and that was it. It’s truly all he wants to talk about. And from the sound of it, the right wing press is happy to indulge him.

It’s going to be a long 16 months listening to this extended whine. Don’t his people ever get tired of hearing it? Doesn’t it sound childish and … weak?

Next time he’ll get ‘er done:

Donald Trump wanted to “tap the phones” of White House aides who he suspected of leaking information, according to bombshell claims made by a former Trump administration official.

Miles Taylor, who served as the Department of Homeland Security’s chief of staff under Mr Trump, has claimed in his new book Blowback that the then-president floated the idea “to pursue leakers by tapping phones” at some point in 2018.

The idea was quickly shut down by then-White House Chief of Staff John Kelly who warned Mr Trump he would be breaking the law.

Mr Kelly “quickly nixed the suggestion, knowing it would be illegal,” Mr Taylor writes in the book excerpt, obtained by Axios.

I suspect that Chief of Staff Kash Patel won;t be quite so squeamish.

Delay, delay, delay

Mentor Roy Cohn taught Donald Trump well. Basic Rules for the Unscrupulous for defeating all enemies, according to one documentary: “Deflect and distract, never give in, never admit fault, lie and attack, lie and attack, publicity no matter what, win no matter what, all underpinned by a deep, prove-me-wrong belief in the power of chaos and fear.”

Delay, delay, delay is not in there explicitly. Perhaps it is a Trumpian riff on deflect and distract. But it is by now a familiar Trump tactic. Run out the clock or else bleed out an opponent’s funds for fighting. Hard to do the latter when the opponent is the federal government. So delay, it is.

Thus (Politico):

Donald Trump on Monday called for a lengthy delay before he goes to trial for allegedly hoarding military secrets at his Mar-a-Lago estate, contending that proceeding while he remains a candidate for president would make it virtually impossible to seat an impartial jury.

“Proceeding to trial during the pendency of a Presidential election cycle wherein opposing candidates are effectively (if not literally) directly adverse to one another in this action will create extraordinary challenges in the jury selection process and limit the Defendants’ ability to secure a fair and impartial adjudication,” attorneys for Trump and his personal aide and co-defendant, Walt Nauta, said in a court filing Monday night.

Standard operating procedure:

The tactic is in keeping with Trump’s typical legal strategy: to drag out matters he’s facing as long as possible while hoping the legal landscape changes. But this time, it’s an effort to stave off a criminal trial that could result in a lengthy prison sentence if he’s convicted — the first ever prosecution of a former president.

“Flexibility is the first principle of politics,” Richard Nixon once instructed a new staffer. It may not have been one of Cohn’s principles, but like many other conservatives, it’s one Trump lives by. When he was running against Hillary Clinton in 2016, Trump made her handling of classified information a key campaign issue. Special counsel Jack Smith cites Trump’s hectoring on the matter in his indictment.

Now that his document handling is a campaign issue, well…. “Lock her up!” is now “Wait till later!” says Marcy Wheeler about the Trump filing:

Note that Trump misrepresents what his filing attempts to do (and few journalists are calling him on it). The filing is titled, “Response in Opposition to the Government’s Motion for Continuance and Proposed Revised Scheduling Order” — that is, it claims to be responding only to the government’s pitch for a December trial. But the first paragraph admits that it is also asking Cannon to entirely withdraw her own orders setting trial in August.

The Defendants, President Donald J. Trump and Waltine Nauta, in the above captioned matter, respectfully request that this Court deny the Government’s proposed scheduling order, withdraw the current Order (ECF No. 28), and postpone initial consideration of any rescheduled trial date until after substantive motions have been presented and adjudicated. [my emphasis]

Wheeler notes in the filing, “There’s a funny progression where Trump first says his day job running for President doesn’t leave him time to be prosecuted for stealing documents the last time he was President, then admits that he has found time in his busy schedule for two other trials.”

There is an ancient ad for Borden dairy products that goes, “If it’s Borden, it’s got to be good.” In this case, if it’s Trump, it’s got to be bullshit.

But, given that he got elected the last time by promising he would be more careful with classified information than his opponent, the most remarkable paragraph in the filing is this one, where Trump says there is no exigency to scheduling this trial (as opposed to his hush money or corporate fraud trials) before the election.

While the Government appears to favor an expedited (and therefore cursory) approach to this case, it cannot point to any exigency or urgency requiring a rapid adjudication. There is no ongoing threat to national security interests nor any concern regarding continued criminal activity

I suspect the paragraph is designed to elicit a response to the question, “is there any concern regarding continued criminal activity?” That is, I think it is an attempt to probe for what more the government continues to investigate.

And yes, the government may well respond to this by answering, “funny you should mention ongoing threats to national security because we’re still looking for all the things that disappeared up at Bedminster.”

But the underlying premise is even more remarkable, given how Trump’s got elected the last time.

Trump ran in 2016 promising he would protect government secrets. Not like that dastardly Hillary Clinton, no. And now? His lawyers argue that the “guy accused of using the access to the nation’s secrets he got by getting elected President on false promises the last time, should get a shot at accessing those secrets again, without first letting a jury decide whether he had abused his position of power the last time.”

That is, without letting the voters find out if he did before they go to the polls and give him a chance to crime all over again. But that’s our crime First Family.

Inculcating hate

A friend from the reddest part of my county once described how GOP candidates there rally support. In every group of voters, find out what issue pisses them off, then wedge the hell out of it. As the late Howard Phillips put it, “We organize discontent.”

It’s just that on the right, wedge issues come and go (for those of a certain age) like fad products by Wham-O or their support for the U.S. Constitution. The issues are not the issue. Organizing discontent is.

Tess Owen at Vice News examines the controversy du jour in Los Angeles schools. Recognition of Pride Month that touched off parent protests:

This was grooming, said the protesters, many of whom were parents wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “Leave Our Kids Alone.” The June 2 protest quickly turned violent. Videos show parents and their right-wing supporters brawling with pro-LGBTQ counterprotesters, beating them, and kicking them. 

It was hardly an isolated incident in the LA-area. Fights also broke out at two more protests in June, both outside Glendale School Board meetings. Like the earlier protest at Saticoy Elementary, many in the crowd were from the Armenian community. Videos of those brawls were shared widely across right-wing media circles, as influencers praised “Brave Armenian Dads” for “standing up to “trantifa.”

In the last year, culture warriors and extremists, bolstered by mainstream GOP policy and rhetoric, have gone all in on false narratives that claim educators are “grooming” kids by teaching them about Pride and the LGBTQ community. Christian nationalists, neo-Nazis, Proud Boys, and other extremists have menaced school board meetings, called in bomb threats to Drag Queen Story Hours, and faced off with counter-protesters across the country—all with the goal of making the LGBTQ community and their allies feel less safe. 

I’m not sure how the fight began, was on my way out. Large scale fight, a few people hurt visibly on the pro-Pride side. pic.twitter.com/ACDjjlrlqP

— acatwithnews (@ACatWithNews) June 2, 2023

The more conservatives feel out of the mainstream, the more reactionary they become and the more tightly bound together by shared grievances.

Hate crimes targeting the trans community were higher in LA than any other major city last year, an increase of nearly 70% compared to 2021, according to data collected by Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. 

Local activists and journalists say the far-right is becoming increasingly emboldened in southern California, as thought-leaders of the movement reach and radicalize new recruits, including parents. 

“The parents were so violent,” said Kelly Stuart, a local photographer who’s been documenting the far-right around LA for the last few years, about the protest outside Saticoy Elementary. She followed and photographed some of the protesters that day as they marched around the perimeter of the school—out of sight from local law enforcement. 

“They told me, ‘there’s no cops here now, we could just smash your head in,’” recalled Stuart, who is 62.

“So that kind of viciousness … has always been present” in the movement, historian Rick Perlstein told Fresh Air in 2020.

So why this issue now?

Owen suggests that “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) simply did not have the staying power to keep the discontent on the edge of a boil. “It was a little too nebulous and theoretical for it to really take hold.” Owen writes. “Grooming” carries more octane.

“I think they’re getting more radical. They’re finding a sense of identity and purpose, being in a group, feeling right, unified. It’s almost like mob violence, when they’re all chanting together. It’s like they’re getting high off it,” said Stuart. “When I leave the rallies, I’m so exhausted from the energy. It’s not personal, it’s just the energy of the crowd is so full of hate.” 

Getting back to wedge issues:

“The combination of Trump and the pandemic created this elastic and familiarized network of villains and heroes in the culture wars. Not everyone who shows up to protests necessarily has the same depth of prejudice or embrace of violence,” said Brian Levin, who heads the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. “But it doesn’t matter because what these wedge issues do is enable people from different backgrounds but who have extreme emotions to work together.”

Local culture war drama may be especially pronounced in progressive strongholds, like California, said Levin, because hard-right activists know that the only way they can leverage any sort of power is within local politics. The types of angry scenes that have recently played out in Glendale are unlikely to play out in Florida, for example, because extremists and culture warriors know they have an ideological ally in Gov. Ron DeSantis. 

To every wedge issue there is a season. Maybe not like not wearing white after Labor Day —some are simply faddish and others, like fashions, come back around. Discontent is the thing. When one culture war issue loses steam, reactionaries will find another.

Right now grooming is all the rage. Literally. Except to understand it in context, “grooming” is in the eye of the beholder, observes Dave Neiwert, a chronicler of the alt-right, Neo-Nazis, and the like.

Same genre. pic.twitter.com/2MgsrV6UFs

— David Neiwert (@DavidNeiwert) July 11, 2023

In fact, Trump won every voter in the country both times he ran. It’s just the Deep State rigged it so it looked like he didn’t

Trump just gave an interview to The Nevada Globe. The interviewer notes Trump lost Nevada 2x in the general election, and asks how he is going to win this time.

Trump responds by saying he actually won both times "by a lot" and calls Nevada "disgraceful" state.

Great start! pic.twitter.com/wJ31hp1K4G

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) July 10, 2023

I hope they have that on tape. I think it could be useful in an ad, don’t you?

There’s something amiss in the whistleblowers’ tale

CNN reports:

US Attorney David Weiss, who is overseeing the Hunter Biden criminal probe, says in a letter obtained by CNN that he did not ask to be named as a special counsel and was never refused authority to bring charges anywhere in the country, refuting two key allegations from IRS whistleblowers.

Weiss’ comments, in a letter sent Monday to GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, go against claims from IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley and one of his deputies, who said they witnessed political interference in investigation of President Joe Biden’s son.

They testified to Congress that during an October 2022 meeting, Weiss said he had requested to be named as a special counsel but was denied by Justice Department leadership. But Weiss said in the new letter that he never requested special counsel status, but rather explored becoming a “special attorney” under a different statute.

“I have not requested Special Counsel designation,” Weiss wrote to Graham on Monday. “Rather, I had discussions with Departmental officials regarding potential appointment under 28 U.S.C. § 515, which would have allowed me to file charges in a district outside my own without the partnership of the local U.S. Attorney.”

Weiss said he got these assurances “months before the October 7, 2022, meeting referenced throughout the whistleblowers’ allegations.”

The prosecutor also wrote that he has “never been denied the authority to bring charges in any jurisdiction.” Shapley claimed that Weiss said in that same October 2022 meeting he wasn’t the deciding person on whether to indict Hunter Biden, because political appointees had blocked him from bringing charges in Los Angeles and Washington, DC.

Shapley and his deputy raised their concerns in congressional testimony that was made public last month by House Republicans. The Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland have denied that there was any political interference in the Hunter Biden criminal probe, which led to a plea deal where the president’s son will admit to two tax misdemeanors, resolve a felony gun charge and likely avoid jail time.

Lawyers for Shapley told CNN on Monday that the letter shows that “Weiss’ story continues to change.”

“As a practical matter, it makes no difference whether Weiss requested special counsel or special attorney authority. Under no circumstances should ‘the process’ have included the political appointees of the subject’s father, because Congress and the public had been assured it would not – but it did,” they said.

In the letter, Weiss also declined to comment on the internal FBI document from 2020 that contained uncorroborated allegations that Joe Biden and his son Hunter were involved in a foreign bribery scheme. Weiss said Graham’s questions about the matter “relate to an ongoing investigation.”

But Rod Rosenstein and Bill Barr were neck deep in the Trump investigations and that wasn’t a problem for these folks.

I don’t know what Shapley and his deputy’s deal is. Maybe they misunderstood what was said or maybe they’re just disgruntled Trumpies who believed they’d found a smoking gun and it was really just another dud. Weiss is a Trump appointee, not a Biden political appointee, so I don’t know what that attorney is talking about.

I simply do not believe that Garland or Weiss or the FBI went easy on Hunter Biden. They just aren’t the types to play that game.

If you want to get into the weeds on all this, Marcy Wheeler has been down the rabbit hole for the last couple of weeks. This thing is a mess.

Well, it looks as though they’ve another way to perform for the cult. It’s a meaningless waste of time but it does have the benefit of degrading our democracy even further. Hunter at DKos has the story:

Well, here we go again. House Republicans have been shrieking that they’re going to impeach a whole passel of top officials in the Joe Biden administration for supposed crimes that include investigating seditionist Donald Trump too much and investigating Hunter Biden too little, but every once in a while one of them remembers that Congress also has the power to simply zero out the salaries of any executive branch employees they don’t particularly like.

It’s akin to a bill of attainder targeting a particular executive official’s career. Frustrated congressional cornballs have been sporadically remembering the power for years now, especially whenever some government agency does something that they really super do not like but can’t muster the legislative votes to actually change.

Politico reports that House Republican cranks are again threatening to use this power, probably after someone in the Freedom Caucus sobered up long enough to remember it existed. The possible targets reportedly include Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and “some are hoping to use the procedure on investigators working for special counsel Jack Smith.”

That last part is another bit of nice, clean proof that at least “some” House Republicans are eager to use their positions as U.S. congresscreatures to interfere specifically with the ongoing investigations and criminal charges against the coup-attempting, document-stealing Donald Trump. As House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s bag of deplorables prepare to begin impeachment proceedings against Garland for not finding anything except petty crimes to indict Hunter Biden on, yet again disrupting one of Rudy Giuliani and Republicanism’s most grand pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine conspiracy theories, and enraging the petty fascists of the party beyond all hope of reason, there are at least some bozos in the caucus eager to target the Jack Smith investigation specifically.

It’s a simple enough strategy: Zero out the salaries of any Department of Justice or FBI official involved with prosecuting Trump for lying to federal officials about stolen national security documents, and you’ll neatly empty out the offices of anyone willing to pursue Trump’s crimes. It’s a gleefully corrupt act, all premised on the House Republican insistence that the government must arrest their enemies for committing crimes they can’t prove while letting powerful Republicans get away with crimes even if they’re caught in the act.

And this is why it’s perfectly reasonable to conclude that the Freedom Caucus and allies are not so much a political caucus as an organized crime ring. Not a well-organized crime ring, mind you, but organized enough.

Now that Politico has brought us this news, it’s time for the usual caveats. Guess what? House Republicans won’t actually be able to zero out salaries whether they “want” to or not, and that’s because the whole scheme has the same flaw that supposed impeachment of federal officials does. The Democratic-held Senate would have to agree, and the Senate has no interest in helping Jim Jordan’s crime spree along. A bill to do this would go nowhere.

It’s also an arcane enough move that one imagines it wouldn’t be worth all that much for House Republicans to try it for the sake of campaign trail bragging rights: “I tried to take away Merrick Garland’s paycheck but it didn’t work” isn’t the best bullet point for a campaign flier. House Republicans will instead probably keep moving forward with a Garland impeachment “investigation,” solely because it would be an opportunity for an extended, months-long spectacle. Jordan and other House Republicans are still clamoring for revenge against House Democrats who had the audacity to impeach Trump twice: once for attempting to extort the Ukrainian government for personal gain, and once for that whole “attempting to violently overthrow the United States government” thing.

Remember, too, that Jordan’s been demanding state and federal prosecutors turn over their case materials to him in the cases where Trump has already been indicted. House Republicans aren’t just interfering with the multiple criminal investigations of Trump, they’re doing it repeatedly, continually, and as an explicit strategy. And why wouldn’t they? They were willing to obstruct investigations of an attempted Republican coup, they’re hardly going to recoil at this sort of old-school corruption.

They are all completely corrupt and we have come to accept that that’s just the way it is.

We are in trouble, folks.