Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Dan Pfeiffer (subscription) explains why MAGA’s usual childishness is actually quite savvy in this case:

One of the Super Pacs allied with Donald Trump released a video on Friday morning that took the Internet by storm. The ad uses the potentially apocryphal story of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis eating chocolate pudding with his fingers to attack his past support for cutting Social Security and Medicare.

Most Trump World shenanigans are stupid, bordering on self-destructive. That is not the case with this ad, which ran on CNN and Fox News on Friday morning. On the day after DeSantis signed a dangerous six-week abortion ban, it seems trite to care about the manner in which he consumes packaged desserts. While impulse control is a valuable attribute in a Commander-in-Chief who can unilaterally launch nuclear warheads, no one should really care that DeSantis was unwilling to wait for a spoon. Frankly, his pudding impatience may be the most relatable thing about the otherwise painfully awkward, malfunctioning Westworld robot authoritarian.

But bear with me; there is ample precedent to suggest the pudding thing could hurt DeSantis’s yet-to-launch presidential campaign. I don’t want to overstate the case. This is a long campaign and one ad or one anecdote won’t dramatically alter the trajectory. This ad isn’t even that great. Still, the pudding anecdote and how the Trump folks are weaponizing it is a case study of how presidential politics works in our broken media ecosystem.

People Don’t Vote for Weirdos

Thanks to all the coverage his cruel stunts have received, Ron DeSantis has remarkably high name ID for someone who has not even served as Governor for five years. But I theorize most Republican voters couldn’t pick him out of a lineup. All they know about DeSantis is that he is a mini-Trump and pisses off all the right people (Liberals). In other words, support for or interest in DeSantis is a mile wide and an inch deep.

DeSantis’s decision to delay launching his campaign left a vacuum that Trump intends to fill. Trump, who has an instinctual sense for the jugular, is trying to introduce DeSantis to the voters before the Florida Governor can do it himself. And the picture Trump wants to paint is of DeSantis as an establishment-friendly, awkward weirdo. Trump has an instinct for the jugular and knows Americans don’t like to vote for weirdos.

Once again, I doubt anyone cares how DeSantis consumes his pudding, but the anecdote in the ad is part of a larger project to make him seem totally unrelateable. Presidential elections are inherently different from any other contest. Because the U.S. President is both head of state and head of government, they are omnipresent in American life. In picking a candidate, voters sign up to have that person in their lives for at least four years. Relatability and likeability play a role in some voters’ choices. This is known as the “beer question:” with which candidate would you rather have a beer? I wish that weren’t the case, but it is.

In the 2012 campaign, Mitt Romney had his own “pudding problem.” The Boston Globe reported that Romney had once gone on a long car ride with his dog Seamus strapped to the roof of his car. Needless to say, when voters learned about this anecdote, they were more than a little concerned about Romney’s judgment and empathy. Mostly, they just thought it was really, really weird. The story was fodder for comedians, the late night shows, and Internet jokes and memes. In the Obama campaign, we wanted as many voters to learn about Romney strapping the dog to the roof. At one point, we even engineered a photo op of President Obama taking his dog for a ride INSIDE the car, just so we could jokingly tell people about Romney’s dog.

Was this the most important issue? No. Was it a little juvenile? Definitely. Did it help us win? Maybe. It was one more data point in the larger argument that proved effective. People thought Mitt Romney was out-of-touch and could not understand their lives and concerns.

Hijacking the Freak Show

In 2006, Politico founder John Harris and disgraced Newsmax personality Mark Halperin wrote a book called The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008 that purported to lay out a roadmap for how someone could win the upcoming 2008 election. Drawing on interviews with Bill Clinton, Karl Rove and others, Harris and Halperin speculated on how that election would play out. One problem: the words “Barack Obama” do not appear once in the book.

Oops.

As you can imagine, much of that book aged like milk in the hot sun but there was one useful component. The authors coined the phrase “The Freak Show” to describe the new Internet-first media environment embodied by Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh, and an array of newly powerful bloggers. A candidate’s ability to navigate “The Freak Show” without losing control of their public narrative was a necessary component for winning a presidential campaign. “The Freak Show” has only gotten exponentially freakier in the ensuing 17 years. The Internet, cable, and Twitter feast on weird personal foibles like a leading presidential contender eating pudding with his fingers. That’s the sort of content that leads to clicks and views. That’s the stuff that goes viral. And in our disaggregated media ecosystem, virality is often the only way to get a piece of content in front of a viewer.

However, going viral for the sake of virality is a bad strategy. Finding a way to piggyback a piece of persuadable information onto viral content is Holy Grail. Trump has hammered DeSantis for weeks over his past support for cutting Social Security and Medicare. There is little evidence in the polling that his attacks are reaching voters. Yet another ad about Social Security cuts would get scant attention. An ad about pudding and Social Security? That is destined to get the kind of clicks and coverage campaigns dream about. The more viral an ad goes, the more cost-effective it is.

The Pudding Ad is reminiscent of an ad George W. Bush’s campaign ran in 2004. In that campaign, John Kerry decided to go windsurfing — which was seen by some (for reasons that made no sense) as an elite and effete activity befitting of the Boston Brahmin caricature of the Senator. The Bush campaign tried to weaponize that imagery in a now somewhat infamous ad that used the footage.

Like the Trump ad, the Bush Campaign saw something funny and weird that would generate media and Internet attention and paired it with a persuasive message backed by their research.

Of course, this campaign will not be decided by an ad or one very amusing anecdote, but the entire situation is a window into what works in our very bizarre media environment.

I think this is right as depressing as that is. But I will never in a million years understand how anyone could not see that orange monster for the flaming freak that he is. The hair alone should have launched a thousand ads like this. He was relentlessly exposed as the monumental narcissist he is. I mean: “I am a very stable genius!” He suggested that people might be able to ingest disinfectant to cure COVID. He loves Kim Jong Uhn. Kim Jong Uhn!!!! And he made up out of whole cloth that he won an election he lost by 7 million votes and incited his followers to storm the US Capitol.

And it meant nothing to half the country.

I would love to know what Pfeiffer thinks accounts for the fact that the greatest weirdo the political world has ever produced managed to convince conservatives that a man who wears more makeup and hairspray than Ru Paul is their avatar. How did that happen???

It’s just a legal license to kill

The NY Times had this on the shooting of Ralph Yarl in Kansas City:

Chief Graves said that the teenager was expected to give a formal statement to investigators when his injuries allow. She also said that there was a “potential” self-defense or “stand your ground” element that investigators were examining.

But the following day, Mayor Lucas said that Missouri’s Stand Your Ground law, which was adopted in 2016, should not apply in this case.

“If Stand Your Ground really lets somebody just shoot somebody that rings a doorbell,” he said, “that put the life of every postal worker, every campaigner, every Amazon delivery person at risk in this country.”

I’m sure the man believes he was standing his ground because he “felt threatened” when a Black teenager rang his doorbell.

Then there’s the man in New York who shot at a car that accidentally turned into the wrong driveway and killed a young woman as the car was turning around. I’m sure he believes he was “standing his ground” too.

Every person’s life is at risk in this country because of this proliferation of guns and laws that allow people to shoot others with impunity. All they have to do is say they were afraid for people like Texas Governor Greg Abbott to claim they had a right to shoot them. These laws are becoming the norm all over the country.

We used to have a “duty to retreat” if at all possible. You weren’t allowed to shott people simply because you were afraid if you could have gotten away. And you couldn’t just kill people you thought might want to steal property. Today, people are being told they have a god-given right to kill anyone they want and claim they felt threatened. That killer in Texas actually wrote that on Facebook. And some of them are doing it.

This is gun culture. It’s an atrocity.

Trump’s suit against Michael Cohen is characteristically stupid

From David Corn:

Last week, when Donald Trump filed a $500 million civil lawsuit in federal court against his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, legal experts scoffed and guffawed. Trump’s suit accused Cohen of breaching confidentiality and “spreading falsehoods” about the former president—that is, ratting out Trump. The timing of the filing was suspicious, given that it came shortly after Trump was indicted in the porn-star-hush-money case for which Cohen is a key witness. It seemed an act of revenge on Trump’s part. The Florida attorney Trump retained for this effort, Alejandro Brito, is a specialist in franchise disputes (not half-billion-dollar high-stakes cases), and the complaint was written in a bombastic and amateurish manner often associated with many of Trump’s legal efforts.

The lawsuit raised the boomerang-ish prospect of Cohen winning the opportunity to submit Trump to the discovery process and obtaining documents and testimony from the former failed casino operator. Beyond this misstep, Trump committed another strategic blunder with the complaint: He inadvertently bolstered the accusation that he was involved in the $130,000 payoff to Stormy Daniels at the time Cohen made the payment to keep the adult film star from publicly alleging before the 2016 election that she had an extramarital affair with Trump.

[…]

To keep Trump out of the initial plot to silence Daniels, his lawyers and mouthpieces have mounted a fierce campaign to discredit Cohen (though there are other witnesses who can testify whether Trump was involved from the get-go). They have pronounced Cohen a liar whose account cannot be trusted. Indeed, Cohen did plead guilty to lying to Congress, making false statements to a bank, and tax evasion. Trump’s complaint against Cohen refers to him as a “serial liar” and a “totally unreliable” person who has “great difficulty telling the truth.”

But here’s where Trump’s legal team made an unforced error. In its effort to portray Cohen as deceitful, the complaint cites the sentencing memorandum submitted by the office of the US attorney for the Southern District of New York in Cohen’s criminal case. Seeking a tough sentence for Cohen, the prosecutors contended that Cohen had exhibited “a pattern of deception that permeated his professional life” and that his crimes involved “deception, and each were motivated by personal greed and ambition.” Those quotes are highlighted in Trump’s complaint, which also cites a public statement SDNY issued that slammed Cohen “as a lawyer who, rather than setting an example of respect for the law, instead chose to break the law, repeatedly over many years, and in a variety of ways.”

Looking to depict Cohen as a dishonest no-goodnik, Brito presents the SDNY’s sentencing memo as an important and credible source. Yet on page 11 of that 40-page document is a sentence that is highly problematic for Trump: “In particular, and as Cohen himself has now admitted, with respect to both payments, he acted in coordination and at the direction of Individual 1.”

Individual 1 is Trump, and the payments refer to the funds slipped to Stormy Daniels and money paid to a former Playboy model named Karen McDougal by the National Enquirer to smother her story of an affair with Trump. With this sentence, the feds declared that Trump was an instigator and co-conspirator in the illegal Stormy Daniels hush-money caper. (By the way, as I explained here, Trump’s Justice Department and then–Attorney General Bill Barr impeded further investigation of the Daniels case after Cohen pleaded guilty—a move that certainly was beneficial to Trump.)Brito is citing a memo that declared that Trump conspired with Cohen to commit a crime at the heart of Bragg’s case. This is not good lawyering. 

Brito doesn’t mention this incriminating sentence in the complaint against Cohen. But by referencing this document as a reliable source of information, he is lending credence to a document that undermines his client’s position in the ongoing criminal case. He is citing a memo that plainly stated that Trump conspired with Cohen to commit a crime at the heart of Bragg’s case. This is not good lawyering. 

In similar fashion, the complaint against Cohen also cites a separate sentencing memo submitted by special counsel Robert Mueller that noted Cohen had made “deliberate and premeditated” false statements to Congress. But Brito’s complaint also leaves out key elements of this document. The memo stated that Cohen lied to Congress to protect Individual 1—yes, Trump—and to downplay Trump’s clandestine attempt during the 2016 race to land a huge deal for a tower in Moscow that could have netted him hundreds of millions of dollars. Mueller’s memo also said that Cohen, who cooperated with his investigation, provided information that was “credible and consistent with other evidence.” It reported that “Cohen has taken responsibility for his wrongdoing” and told the judge this should be “a significant mitigating factor” in sentencing. That is, Cohen deserved a break for being a credible witness.

By basing part of Trump’s lawsuit against Cohen on these two memos, Brito clumsily endorsed investigations that concluded that Trump was in on the Stormy Daniels skullduggery, that when Cohen lied to Congress he did so to protect Trump’s covert business dealings with Russia, and that Cohen was a reliable source of information for Mueller. None of that is helpful for Trump’s defense in the hush-money case. This filing is yet the latest sign that when it comes to recruiting legal firepower, Trump still has trouble finding the very best people. 

I saw Cohen on MSNBC yesterday and he claims that he has a couple of high powered lawyers coming to help his case. He didn’t name them and maybe he was being hyperbolic. But they have to be better than the guy Trump hired. Cohen representing himself would be better than the guy Trump hired.

Trump says he will outlaw homelessness and arrest everyone who refuses to comply. He will then give them the option to get out of jail to be relocated to new tent cities elsewhere where he will take care of their needs. pic.twitter.com/P5z5ckG8b6

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 18, 2023

Offered as a public service. This man is the likely GOP nominee for president and it will be close. Dear God. He wants to build concentration camps. Maybe they can build munitions for the war effort against Mexico.

But you knew that

Rep. Jeff Jackson (D-NC) will be lucky to survive the coming next round of gerrymandered congressional maps from the NC GOP. But he has shown himself adept at using social media since long before he got to Congress.

Watch. He’s slick.

@jeffjacksonnc Rep. Jeff Jackson (NC): Fake anger #fyp #politics #nc #charlotte #raleigh #asheville #durham #greensboro ♬ original sound – Jeff Jackson

Maybe too slick. Perhaps another of those pretty boys we’ve seen use his military service to position himself for public office. But watch that space.

♫ Then they let their hair hang down

Remember when after Obama’s election, pundits insisted we were living in a “post-racial” society?

“America’s struggle is to become not post-racial, but post-racist,” Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote years later. On the far right, “post-racial” was a prime, MAD magazine example of “What They Say and What it Really Means.” What some white people really meant was it was time for Black people to STFU about their treatment in white, by-God America.

It was wishful thinking. At best. ‘Cause when they get behind closed doors, Charlie Rich might have sung, they still let their hair hang down.

In Oklahoma, for example (The Oklahoman):

In southeast Oklahoma, the sheriff of McCurtain County, one of his investigators and a county commissioner are accused by a newspaper of discussing killing a local reporter and lamenting that modern justice no longer includes hanging Black people. 

The explosive accusations were published this week in the McCurtain Gazette-News.

According to the newspaper, Sheriff Kevin Clardy, investigator Alicia Manning and District 2 Commissioner Mark Jennings were part of an impromptu discussion after the March 6 meeting of the county Board of Commissioners. 

Bruce Willingham, the Gazette’s publisher, had left a voice-activated recorder in the meeting room. He suspected that officials meant to conduct official business after the meeting ended in violation of the state’s Open Meeting Act.

The Oklahoman states that it “could not identify who the speakers were in the recordings.”

“I talked on two different occasions to our attorneys to make sure I wasn’t doing anything illegal,” Willingham told NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth. Willingham’s son, Chris, is a reporter for the Gazette.

Willingham had that day filed a defamation lawsuit against the sheriff’s department. Manning, the investigator, spoke of what might or should happen to Willingham. The recording transcript is a doozy (The Oklahoman again):

“Yeah, I ain’t worried about what he’s gonna do to me. I’m worried about what I might do to him. My papaw would have whipped his ass, would have wiped him and used him for toilet paper … if my daddy hadn’t been run over by a vehicle, he would have been down there.”

Jennings replied that his 86-year-old father, in response to an opinion published in the newspaper, once “started to go down there and just kill him,” according to the Gazette.

“I know where two big, deep holes are here if you ever need them,” Jennings allegedly said. 

Clardy, the sheriff, allegedly said he had the equipment. 

“I’ve got an excavator,” Clardy is accused of saying during the discussion.

“Well, these are already pre-dug,” Jennings allegedly said. 

Jennings allegedly talked about knowing hitmen in Louisiana who could “cut no (expletive) mercy.”

A brief discussion about assaulting local judges followed, according to the Gazette. 

Jennings, the commissioner, then discussed how many people might run for sheriff, according to the newspaper story. 

“They don’t have a goddamn clue what they’re getting into,” he said. “Not this day and age. I’m going to tell you something — if it was back in the day, when Alan Marston would take a damned Black guy and whoop their (expletive) and throw them in the cell, I’d run for (expletive) sheriff.”

Clardy responded by saying, “Yeah, it’s not like that no more,” the newspaper reported.

Jennings then said Black people have more rights than others, according to the Gazette.

“Take them down to Mud Creek and hang them up with damned rope,” he said. “But you can’t do that anymore. They’ve got more rights than we’ve got.”

Yup, it’s a violation of white rights and privileges when they can’t just go and lynch a Black man like in the Good Old Days.

Protests erupted on Monday outside the McCurtain County sheriff’s department.

NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth:

Gov. Kevin Stitt said Sunday he was seeking the resignations of McCurtain County Sheriff Kevin Clardy and three other county officials: sheriff’s Capt. Alicia Manning, District 2 Commissioner Mark Jennings and Jail Administrator Larry Hendrix.

“I am both appalled and disheartened to hear of the horrid comments made by officials in McCurtain County,” Stitt said in a statement. “There is simply no place for such hateful rhetoric in the state of Oklahoma, especially by those that serve to represent the community through their respective office.”

Want to get them really pissed off? Accuse them in public of being racist!

You’d think that in Donald Trump’s America, more people would let their hair hang down about it.

One of the right’s top hitmen seems to be one…

The following is probably way too much information for some of you but I can’t resist. Ali Alexander and Milo Yiannopoulos are alt-right icons. Alexander is one of the big organizers of the Stop the Steal insurrection and Yiannopoulos has been hanging around Roger Stone for years and was most recently working with Marjorie Taylor Greene. These are people with access to the highest reaches of the GOP, including the Dear Leader. Oh, and they’re all affiliated with the Nazi Nick Fuentes and Kanye West.

This is just … amazing:

A key figure in the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” campaign has apologized after being accused of asking teenage boys for sexual pictures.

Ali Alexander has become one of the most ubiquitous figures in the MAGA movement. Trump himself reportedly requested that Alexander speak at his rally before the riot, with his appearance only quashed by a last-minute intervention from Trump’s aides. But this week, Alexander stands at the center of a scandal that raises questions about how powerful men in the far-right treat their younger acolytes.

“This is so gay,” Alexander said in a statement issued Friday night that addressed the allegations in broad terms.

Alexander, who has described himself as bisexual in the past, added that he was “battling with same-sex attraction.”

The budding online scandal has also roiled the pro-Trump and white supremacist “America First” movement, just months after it reached new levels of notoriety after its leader, Nick Fuentes, dined with Donald Trump and rapper Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago. Now Fuentes is facing backlash from his own supporters over whether he ignored warnings that Alexander, his friend and ally, was allegedly soliciting nude pictures from young men within Fuentes’s movement.

On Friday night, Alexander—who was questioned by the House Jan. 6 Committee about his role organizing a canceled rally dubbed the “Wild Protest” outside the Capitol, which drew crowds to the building right before the riot began—issued a statement Friday offering a general apology.

“I apologize for any inappropriate messages sent over the years,” Alexander wrote, adding later, “When I’ve flirted or others have flirted with me, I’ve flexed my credentials or dropped corny pick up lines. Other times, I’ve been careless and should’ve qualified those coming up to me’s (sic) identities during flirtatious banter at the start.”

Alexander didn’t respond to requests for comment from The Daily Beast. In his statement, he claimed he had also been targeted by false accusations and edited screenshots of his messages, but declined opportunities to point out which accusers or screenshots aren’t legitimate.

“That is to be determined by the boy who plays his cards the most correct.”

Rumors about Alexander’s alleged sexual behavior towards younger men have circulated in conservative online circles since at least 2015. But they reached a new level late last month after Milo Yiannopoulos —the controversial British provocateur and one-time Alexander ally—turned on Alexander after Alexander and Fuentes pushed him out of a potentially lucrative position in West’s nascent presidential campaign.

Yiannopoulos started releasing video interviews and other evidence meant to prove that Alexander sexually propositioned both adult men in their 20s and at least two teenagers. Yiannopoulos, whose own career as a far-right pundit imploded in 2017 after remarks he had made downplaying the seriousness of pedophilia surfaced, claims he has more damaging videos to release about Alexander and Fuentes.

Yiannopoulos claims he’s releasing the video against Alexander because Alexander dropped Yiannopoulos’ name to entice young men. One screenshot purports to show Alexander dangling the prospect of a meeting with Yiannopoulos to a teenage boy.

“The reason I’m doing this is because he used my name,” Yiannopoulos told The Daily Beast.

‘Who Will Be My Arm Candy’

In 2017, Aidan Duncan—a 15-year-old boy in Colorado interested in right-wing politics—sent Alexander nude pictures after the MAGA activist asked him for them, according to an account Duncan gave in a March 2023 podcast appearance.

While Duncan was a high-school sophomore just starting out in politics, Alexander was a 32-year-old with a decade of political work for the Republican Party behind him. And now he was willing to share the connections he had gained through that work with Duncan, as long as the teenager met certain preconditions, including secrecy.

“You’ll have [me] sharing my entire network with you,” Alexander told Duncan, according to Snapchat screenshots reviewed by The Daily Beast.

Originally from Dallas, Alexander pleaded guilty to felony property theft in 2007 and felony credit card abuse in 2008. But despite his criminal background, Alexander—who was then using his legal name, Ali Akbar—managed to rise in the GOP during the online conservative backlash to the Obama administration. Leveraging his position writing for blogs with names like “Hip Hop Republican,” Alexander received funding from billionaire conservative mega-donor Robert Mercer, organized a national club for bloggers that later faced questions about how Alexander spent the money he raised, and hosted an annual party at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

By 2017, Alexander had become an ardent Trump supporter with a passion for social-media trash talk. He became a protege of MAGA figures like Roger Stone and InfoWars chief Alex Jones, and ran with a group of other young MAGA internet provocateurs, including anti-Muslim activist Laura Loomer and blundering smear artist Jacob Wohl.

But in his messages to Duncan, according to the screenshots, there was one name Alexander dangled as a perk for the teenager if he kept up contact with Alexander: Milo Yiannopoulos. In a Sept. 4, 2017 exchange about an upcoming trip Alexander was planning, Alexander purportedly told Duncan he would introduce the teenager to Yiannopoulos and speculated about whether the boy would be Alexander’s “arm candy” and suggested the boy would have to be “entertaining.”

“Rolling with me?” Alexander wrote, according to the message. “Mostly. I’ll have an Entourage. Depends. Ha. I mean, depends—if it’s me babysitting you during the day, then no. I don’t have kids. If it’s something more entertaining, then maybe. All depends on what we’re up to. No matter what, I’ll let you meet Milo. There’s probably five ppl I’ll introduce to him. But who will be my arm candy—the one with me always in VIP and in/out? Well that is to be determined by the boy who plays his cards the most correct.”

“Arm candy > baby sitting,” Alexander added, according to the screenshot.

“Boundaries are cool. Allowed to say no. However, the less you deprive me of, the less I deprive you of. ”

Other screenshots show Duncan sending Alexander a picture, which was redacted in the version of the screenshot reviewed by The Daily Beast. Alexander responded with the “face with heart eyes” emoji and asking the teenager which app Alexander should use to send him money.

An undated series of screenshots purport to show Alexander laying out rules for his contact with the teenager, many of them stressing secrecy and a sort of quid pro quo relationship between sexual availability and career opportunities.

“Everything is secret and private,” one rule read. “We’re family.”

Another said that Duncan was “allowed to say no,” but that Alexander might “deprive” him of something unspecified in return.

“Boundaries are cool,” the message reads. “Allowed to say no. However, the less you deprive me of, the less I deprive you of. I’m a big sharing person unless it’s not even.”

Finally, according to the messages, Alexander asked Duncan to “be mindful of each other’s reputation.”

In an appearance last month on a podcast hosted by white supremacist Richard Spencer, Duncan claimed that Alexander wanted him to fly to Texas and “be his intern,” assuring the teenager that the boy could just lie to his parents and say that he was going to a swim meet.

But Alexander had grown frustrated by May 2019, claiming that the still-underage Duncan wouldn’t send him “good jack off material,” according to the screenshots.

“You don’t even send me videos anymore,” Alexander wrote, according to the message. “No good jack off material. Don’t even wanna be my side piece.”

A day later, according to the screenshots, he asked Duncan to come to Texas for a week for an “internship.”

Duncan, now 21, has since become a relatively high-profile member of Fuentes’s racist “America First” movement, going by the name “Smiley.” On Spencer’s podcast, Duncan said he believed Fuentes knew about the rumors about Alexander’s alleged solicitation of nude photos.

“I think Nick is 100 percent aware,” Duncan said on the podcast.

Last Thursday, Duncan posted a statement on Twitter about his communications with Alexander.

“When I was 15 I was naive and desperate,” Duncan wrote. “I thought I had no choice but to cooperate with inappropriate and humiliating requests if I wanted to make it in politics. I figured that was just the nature of the game.”

‘Show Me Your …’

Alexander started messaging 17-year-old Lance Johnston in the summer of 2019, according to Johnston. The floppy-haired teen was a rising star on conservative TikTok communities, amassing more than 140,000 followers under the screenname “Lancevideos.”

Johnston and Alexander started exchanging messages about politics. Johnston claims that a friend warned him early into their communications that Alexander has a history of asking for sexually explicit pictures.

“My friend at the time had told me that he had heard some weird rumors about him,” Johnston told The Daily Beast. “At first I was kind of like ‘I don’t know.’ I was 17, I had just gotten into politics.”

Alexander moved “oddly quickly” towards discussing sex with the teenager, according to Johnston. In July 2019, in what Johnston claims was the night of the White House “Social Media Summit” where Trump feted Alexander and other conservatives as victims of online censorship, the 34-year-old Alexander used the eggplant emoji to ask the teenager for a picture of his penis, according to a screenshot.

“Show me ur [eggplant emoji] ” Alexander wrote, according to the messages.

“What’s that?” Johnston said.

“Omg dick,” Alexander wrote back, according to the picture.

Johnston says he refused and quickly blocked Alexander. Johnston took a screenshot of the exchange, but he was fearful of raising the issue more broadly on the far-right.

“I thought in my mind that he would try his best to try to discredit me and ruin me politically and influentially with my time in politics,” Johnston said.

Still, a friend of Johnston’s publicized the screenshot, which began circulating in conservative circles. Alexander took to a video livestreaming app to defend himself.

“You can have any conversation you want with someone who’s 17,” Alexander said.

The eggplant-emoji screenshot gained new circulation in far-right circles in 2022, as Alexander and Fuentes achieved prominence as members of West’s entourage. That’s when, Johnston claims, Fuentes asked him to say in a text message to Alexander that the screenshot had been doctored and apologize. Presumably, that text message could then itself be screenshotted and used to discredit Johnston.

“Nick personally asked me to apologize to Ali for supposedly faking the messages,” Johnston said.

But Johnston insists the eggplant screenshot is legitimate. In exchange for disowning the eggplant exchange, according to Johnston, Fuentes and Alexander offered to get him a job in politics.

“Basically they wanted me to lie, apologize to Ali, and then they said they would try to get me a job,” Johnston said.

Fuentes denied Johnston’s claims about him in an email to The Daily Beast.

“I never offered Lance Johnston a job nor did I urge him to disavow that screenshot,” Fuentes wrote.

In a post on the social media app Telegram, Fuentes claimed Johnston was using the screenshot to “extort” Alexander into giving him a job on West’s campaign.

Four years later, Johnston thinks Alexander used his prominence in the MAGA movement for “very creepy” ends.

“No person like Ali should be even near politics,” he said.

‘The Real Victim In This Entire Saga Is Me’

Alexander, who has described his ethnicity as half-Black and half-Arab and says he’s bisexual, might seem like an unusual ally for the avowedly racist and homophobic “America First” movement led by Fuentes.

But Fuentes, a 24-year-old who marched at the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville with a long history of racist, antisemitic, and sexist remarks, has appeared frequently with Alexander at events like a “Stop the Steal” rally in Georgia in 2020.

The pair would later become arguably the most prominent far-right figures in West’s short-lived, virulently antisemitic presidential campaign after Yiannopoulos’s ouster.

In text messages reviewed by The Daily Beast, Yiannopoulos warned Fuentes in broad terms about his ally’s reputation.

“Alexander wants to come to your events to have sex with underage boys,” Yiannopoulos wrote in a January 2022 text to Fuentes. “Snap out of it. “

As the allegations mounted against Alexander over the weekend, Fuentes said he “disavowed” Alexander’s actions and called them “gross,” but accused Yiannopoulos of sitting on the claims until he could use them to get revenge on his rivals from the West campaign. In a Telegram post, Fuentes also blamed Duncan and Johnston for “flirting” with Alexander to advance their careers.

“[Duncan] and Lance were willing to go along flirting with Ali (to varying degrees) without any protest because they thought it would advance their political careers,” Fuentes wrote. “If you are flirting with adult gay men because you think it’s going to land you a job, you know full well what you’re doing and it’s gross. Sorry but even at 15, I would have never sent nudes to an adult gay man. There’s something wrong there.”

“You don’t even send me videos anymore… Don’t even wanna be my side piece.”

Fuentes added that “the real victim in this entire saga is me.” In a self-pitying post, he referred to himself as an “incel”—internet slang for “involuntarily celibate.”

“Sounds like everybody involved got what they wanted,” Fuentes wrote. “Except me, the incel, who is now somehow being blamed for things I had nothing to do with.”

This isn’t the first time Fuentes’s racist group has been dogged by accusations of inappropriate sexual behavior regarding children. In August, Fuentes associate Alejandro Richard Velasquez Gomez was arrested and charged with possessing child pornography. Velasquez, who went by “LatinoZoomer” online and has been photographed with Fuentes, also faces charges over allegedly threatening a conference held by a rival conservative group.

The accusations against Alexander and his apology have already alienated several far-right figures. Anthime Gionet, the far-right provocateur known as “Baked Alaska” who was recently released from a prison term for his role in the Capitol riot, posted a statement Sunday saying he would not “working with Ali in any capacity moving forward.”

“So Ali admitted to sending inappropriate messages and flirting with young boys?” pro-Trump rapper Bryson Gray tweeted. “Disgusting.”

Despite his Friday night apology, Alexander struck a more defiant tone hours later in a bizarre, late-night Telegram audio livestream from what appeared to be a karaoke bar. As an amateur performance of Billy Joel’s “You May Be Right” played in the background, Alexander told an acquaintance that his life had become a “reality show” revolving around one question: “Implode or not implode.”

Asked by someone on the stream whether he wanted to perform karaoke, Alexander demurred.

“I’m in the middle of a scandal,” Alexander said at one point. “I can’t do karaoke. I’m in the middle of a scandal that I’m going to survive.”

My goodness. Wait until Ron DeSantis finds out about this.

There are many reasons for the state to battle with a corporation but being a snotty bitch because the corporation objected to something the Governor said isn’t one of them:

Gov. Ron DeSantis vowed Monday that the Florida Legislature will soon reassert control over Disney World’s Reedy Creek Improvement District, promising to void development agreements and even floating the idea of building a state prison near the world-famous attraction.

Legislation also will be filed to take away Disney’s self-inspection of rides and monorails and allow the state to examine a ride if someone is seriously injured on it, DeSantis said at a news conference at Reedy Creek’s administrative building.

He then mused about potentially selling off the district’s utilities and developing district land that Disney doesn’t own.

“People are like, ‘Well, … what should we do with this land?” said a smiling DeSantis. “… Maybe create a state park, maybe try to do more amusement parks? Someone even said, ‘Maybe you need another state prison?’ Who knows? I just think that the possibilities are endless.”

Some of this stuff wouldn’t be unreasonable coming from a state entity that was acting in good faith. But this is just about punishing the states biggest employer for failing to give DeSantis the bootlicking he requires.

Are people in Florida really ok with this? I guess Ron figures Disney can’t exactly pick up stakes and leave the state so he can do whatever he wants but this seems excessive even for him. He’s just being an ass at this point.

We need this Fox Dominion trial for the sake of democracy

Michael Tomasky makes the case:

Here’s an instructive and telling little exercise for you, one that I engaged in myself this past Sunday morning.

Head over to Google and search for “NBC defamation lawsuits by former employees.” And then, do the same with CBS, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. You’ll find a few interesting incidents. A Native American employee sued NBC over discrimination at the 30 Rock workplace. The CBS affiliate in Dallas settled an age discrimination case brought by an on-air reporter.

After you’ve done that, go Google “Fox News defamation lawsuits by former employees”—and watch your computer explode. There’s the record $1 million fine Fox paid in 2021 over various #MeToo allegations from female employees. There’s the staggering $20 million Fox agreed to pay to Gretchen Carlson in 2016. There’s the far bigger $90 million settlement reached the next year concerning allegations of sexual misconduct surrounding Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly. There was the $15 million paid to a former female host who alleged pay discrimination. And these are just suits filed by Fox’s own employees; they don’t include other such settlements like the $100 million Fox paid out in the British phone-hacking scandal—the details of which, if one bothers to recall them, add up to an unbelievable breach for a “news organization” to have committed. (The short version goes something like this: News of the World hired “investigators” to hack the phones of celebrities, politicians, families of soldiers killed in war, and the family of a missing 13-year-old girl who was later found dead; they got caught, and the media feeding frenzy consumed the United Kingdom.)

I’m sure I could go on if I spent a full day looking. This is just the bounty plundered from 15 minutes of research. But I hope this all proves a point: All news organizations fight lawsuits from people irked by how they’re covered. Often these are nuisance suits trying to buy silence, like Donald’s Trump $475 million suit against CNN filed last October. Sometimes, sure—news organizations make errors. But there’s only one “news organization” in America that has serially settled lawsuits with its own employees—usually women—over allegations that are sometimes sickening (one former Fox employee said Roger Ailes blackmailed her into being his “sex slave” for two decades).

Fox has also settled an unusual number of suits with the people and organizations it has covered—and that brings us to the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit, opening Tuesday (the judge delayed it by a day) in a courtroom in Delaware. If there’s any justice in this world, this suit will prove in court once and for all what has been apparent for years: Fox is not a news organization in any normal sense of the word at all; it’s an ideological shakedown operation that knowingly peddles lies to advance a deeply reactionary, anti-democracy agenda with the goal of turning the United States into an Orbánesque illiberal pseudo-democracy, if not an outright Putinesque authoritarian state.

Does that sound a bit strong? It’s not. Think about what the Fox anchors and executives were doing, as we’ve learned from the pretrial documents that have been made public so far. Privately, they were acknowledging that Trump lost and Joe Biden won and that Trump was lying about the election. Publicly, as Rupert Murdoch admitted in a deposition, Fox hosts were going on the air and endorsing the lies.

In other words, Fox News was directly and strategically attacking democracy—a democratic outcome that its anchors and executives knew to be legitimate—for the sake of ratings and money. If Fox had had its way, Trump would have succeeded in overturning the election, and our democracy would be gone.

CEO Suzanne Scott didn’t just passively go along. She aggressively inserted herself into the news operation to insist that what little actual news gathering other people at Fox were doing must not continue. The infamous December 2, 2020, email from Scott to EVP Meade Cooper carried the subject heading “Fox News’ Eric Shawn Fact-Checks Trump’s ‘Dump’ Claims” and reads: “This has to stop now. I’m going to address this with you and Jay and Lowell tomorrow. This is bad business and there clearly is a lack of understanding what is happening on these shows. The audience is furious and we are just feeding them material. Bad for business.”

That’s not just a smoking gun. That gun is still sizzling, two and a half years later. Before Scott’s email, Shawn had done two segments on his weekend show debunking various Trump claims—he said claims of a rigged ballot were “false and unsubstantiated,” and he asserted that Trump’s claims about massive vote dumping to help Biden were also untrue.

What Shawn was saying was true. He was doing journalism; delivering news. And that, not Maria Bartiromo’s propaganda, is what Scott ordered stopped. In addition to that, we know that in the aftermath of the election and Biden’s victory, Fox didn’t fire any of the anchors spreading poison and lies. It fired the two guys who ran the Decision Desk, which was the first to call Biden as the winner in Arizona, which was the crucial call that propelled him to victory. Fox fired the two people trying to do news. The people doing propaganda, it kept and protected, and most of them are still on the air.

Why Rupert Murdoch didn’t settle this suit like all the others boggles the mind. Because this chain of events will find him, possibly this week, in a place he’s spent decades trying to avoid—a courtroom, on a witness stand, under oath, answering hostile questions from smart lawyers. But he made his choice. He has a lot of fancy lawyers himself, and rich people find many sleazy ways to wriggle out of blame and responsibility. So I make no predictions here. But based on what we know publicly, it shouldn’t be too hard for a smart litigator to paint Murdoch into a grim corner where he has to end up admitting that his news organization knowingly aired lies for the sake of ratings.

And if these 12 Delawareans find Fox News culpable? That’s not the end. It’s a beginning. Because from that moment, we will be able to say, with a certainty we can’t quite claim now, that Fox News lies.

Sadly, it appears they are in serious settlement discussions today so who knows? But in a perfect world what Tomasky said would be the result of a trial verdict against Fox:

That certainty should set in motion its own series of events. For example: What will our country’s real news organizations do in response to such a verdict? NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, and others should band together and say: We do not consider Fox News to be like us. It is not a news organization in the accepted sense of the term. Memo to the White House, Congress, or any media credential-granting institution: If you give Fox News media credentials for your event, none of us will cover it.

In addition, cable and satellite providers have to stop paying Fox News the carrying fees that are really Fox’s bread and butter, far more than ad revenue. Are you aware that you, reader, if you are a cable or satellite subscriber, pay Fox News about $20 a month? If the jury finds against Fox, pressure must mount for that to end as well.

A verdict against Fox rips down the veil. Nobody will have to pretend anymore. And we should make the demand of our real news organizations that they too stop pretending. Rupert’s Reign of Terror can be ended.

It’s hard to imagine but we can dream…

Some things never change

Kevin McCarthy went to Wall Street to unveil his debt ceiling plan: stick it to the poor. How perfect:

On Monday, the speaker delivered remarks at the New York Stock Exchange on the pressing issue facing Congress: raising the debt ceiling and ensuring the US can avoid a catastrophic default that could happen as soon as July.

After months of stalemate, and Biden remaining adamant that he will not use the debt ceiling as bargaining chip, McCarthy confirmed that the House will vote on a bill “in the coming weeks” that would raise the debt ceiling through next year while keeping federal spending at the 2022 level over the next decade. 

Part of that deal would include strengthened work requirements on welfare programs, like the food stamps program called SNAP.

“Our proposal will also restore work requirements that ensure able-bodied adults without dependents earn a paycheck and learn new skills that will grow our economy and help the supply chain,” McCarthy said. “Right now, there are more job openings than people who are looking for jobs. You know why? It’s in part because the Biden administration weakened work requirements.”

“Incentives matter,” he continued. “And the incentives today are out of whack. It’s time to get Americans back to work.”

SNAP recipients are already seeing fewer benefits in the face of inflation, after lawmakers opted to wind down a pandemic-era program that bolstered how much Americans could receive in food stamps. On average, recipients saw their benefits drop by $82 a month, and older adults — like those on fixed incomes — saw their monthly food allowances depleted by $258.

Politico reports that even some of McCarthy’s Republicans are queasy about this:

Cutting spending on federal food assistance programs is a perennial Republican target, and House conservatives are eager to make it part of any agreement to raise the debt ceiling, which the country must do later this year to avoid a default crisis. But Senate Democrats have said such measures are dead on arrival in the upper chamber, and with the help of key Senate Republicans, they have killed off a series of similar House GOP efforts over the years — including a 2018 push involving McCarthy and his current top debt limit lieutenant Rep. Garret Graves (La.). The early response from Senate Republicans this time around does not bode well for a different outcome in 2023.

While praising the intent behind the House GOP efforts to expand work requirements for SNAP, which used to be known as food stamps, top Republican senators have sought to temper expectations about the proposal’s prospects in the upper chamber.

“I’m sure it won’t be easy,” said John Thune (S.D.), the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, noting his party will get a second bite at the apple later this year during the farm bill reauthorization process.

A GOP Senate aide, who was granted anonymity to discuss private conversations, was less diplomatic: “I mean, Godspeed. Get what you can. We’re going to live in reality over here.”

Senate Republicans have been voicing similar skepticism since House Republicans began privately pitching new proposals to rein in SNAP last year, after they won back the chamber in November.

Asked about the prospects for such measures in the next Congress, Sen. John Boozman (Ark.) the top Republican on the Agriculture Committee, which oversees SNAP, said in an interview a week after the 2022 midterms that the effort “would be difficult to pass in the Senate with 60 votes,” a nod to the threshold needed to overcome a Senate filibuster.

And, given the GOP’s unexpectedly slim majority in the House, there’s no guarantee such controversial proposals could even get out of the lower chamber, Boozman pointed out. “You look at the margin in the House,” he said, “It might be difficult to pass it in the House.”

McCarthy and his team are now confronting that reality as they try to hold together their own caucus vis-a-vis the debt ceiling negotiations with the White House. McCarthy, Graves and other top House Republicans have briefed most of the caucus on their plans in a series of calls that stretched into the weekend. So far, leaders have avoided key defections by staying away from too much detail — for example, they have yet to outline a specific plan to close the so-called “loopholes” in the existing SNAP work requirements, which Republicans complain primarily blue states are using to waive some work requirements. Taking a tough line would please the most conservative GOP members, but alienate Republicans from swing districts, and vice versa.

Already, the talk of shrinking SNAP, which currently serves 41 million low-income Americans, is raising pressure on many Republicans that represent districts President Joe Biden won in 2020. Several of those members have raised internal concerns, especially about proposals from their colleagues that would add work requirements for some low-income parents who have children under 18 living at home, according to two other people involved in those conversations, who asked for anonymity to discuss internal caucus matters. A handful of GOP freshmen from New York, one of the states that consistently asks the federal government to waive some work requirements for SNAP recipients, are in an especially tricky spot. Constituents have begun pressing them to oppose efforts that would further restrict SNAP and other key assistance following the loss of key pandemic-era aid — which Biden administration officials argue helped keep the country from falling into a deeper hunger crisis in the wake of Covid-19.

At a farm bill listening session in Rep. Marc Molinaro’s (R-N.Y.) upstate district last Friday, local farmers, food bank operators and anti-hunger advocates urged lawmakers to defend and even expand current SNAP programs.

One state administrator called for “easing burdensome and complicated work and reporting requirements” to provide better access to the program, as the administration’s pandemic-era pause on certain SNAP work requirements is set to end in July. A food bank operator warned of a looming “hunger cliff” in the country as families continue to reel from the fallout of Covid-19. She urged members of Congress “not make decisions on the back of the most vulnerable people.”

Eric Ooms, vice president of the New York branch of the American Farm Bureau Federation, the nation’s leading agricultural lobby, told the lawmakers who attended the listening session not to think of SNAP as a “city thing,” noting that the program is a key lifeline to low-income Americans in rural areas where food insecurity “is higher than it’s ever been.”

Molinaro, who says his family relied on food stamps during his childhood, has indicated general support for some SNAP reforms, saying he understands the “inefficiencies” of the program through his experience as a former county executive charged with overseeing it. But he has declined to say if he would support the proposals to expand work requirements that his colleagues have been pushing for months.

In his closing remarks on Friday, Molinaro sounded a note of support for SNAP but indicated only the most needy should get aid — an argument Republicans have used in their campaign to reduce the size of the program.

“Yes, those that struggle the hardest need to know that they have the support, not only of SNAP, but of other wrap-around services,” he said.

Derrick Van Orden, a Trump-aligned Republican who represents a swing district in Wisconsin, spoke during the listening session of his family’s struggle with poverty and reliance on food stamps when he was a child. While he acknowledges some flaws in the current system, he said, “I’m a member of Congress because of these programs.”

“There’s a lot of people who have not gone to bed hungry at night, and I have. And there’s no place for that in America,” Van Orden said.

I would guess there are plenty of people on SNAP in McCarthy’s home district in Bakersfield. It’s not exactly a wealthy California enclave. But he doesn’t care about those poor people. They don’t vote for him anyway.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy addresses the debt limit cliff at the New York Stock Exchange:

“The longer President Biden waits to be sensible to find an agreement, the more likely it becomes that this administration will bumble into the first default in our nation’s history.” pic.twitter.com/pgdmpMTuc4

— The Recount (@therecount) April 17, 2023