James.galbraith

Inside the Arizona’s representative’s restless, highly online, and seriously combative plan to transform the Democratic Party.

Part of The power and potential of Latino voters, from The Highlight, Vox’s home for ambitious stories that explain our world.

PHOENIX, Arizona — Rep. Ruben Gallego picked up a steak knife, twisted his left wrist, and began stabbing the air in front of him. He’d been ranting about why he hates Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing, and, an hour into dinner, he was clearly getting flustered. “Politics is dark and hard. It’s not a bunch of people trying to do their best. It’s who can shank each other in a smarter way,” he said.

It was the Monday night before primary day in Arizona, and we were at an overheated Sonoran-style Mexican restaurant in South Phoenix with Gallego’s wife and a couple of staffers. One of them reminded Gallego we were in public, and he put down the knife. After some laughter cleared the air (“first of all, this isn’t even hard enough to stab you”), he continued. “Too many young Democrats grew up watching West Wing thinking that’s what politics is.”

To Gallego, the 42-year-old Congress member from Arizona’s Seventh District and potential 2024 Senate candidate, politics should be treated like more of an existential fight. Republicans, inspired by Donald Trump, definitely are. The next day, a slate of election-denying Trump loyalists would sweep the primaries for Arizona’s statewide elected offices; a second GOP member of Congress who voted to impeach Trump would lose his race in Michigan; and a third was on track to lose in Washington state.

Gallego has plenty of reasons to say that. Going to (and getting temporarily kicked out of) Harvard as a poor Latino kid from the South Side of Chicago wasn’t easy, but it led him to enlist with the Marine Corps a year before 9/11, and then to Iraq, where he fought as part of the infantry unit that suffered the worst casualties of the war. Around the turn of the decade, he demonstrated for immigrant and Latino rights in the heat of Jan Brewer and Joe Arpaio’s ruby-red Arizona. A decade later, after efforts to overturn his state’s electoral votes culminated in the January 6 Capitol attack, he told me he was prepared to stab his way out of the floor of the House of Representatives with a pen if it came to it.

Now in 2022, Ruben Gallego has a vision for reshaping the Democratic Party — and it starts with a fight. Too many liberals, he says, have lost the plot on their party’s identity, ceded ground and airwaves to a radicalizing Republican Party, and failed to convince working-class voters — especially the Latino voters Democrats lost in 2020 and 2021 — that Democrats stand for something. He wants his party to own their victories and take the culture war to Republicans — reclaiming support from voters of color, building a new Democratic coalition, and rebranding progressivism.

All that requires a firm stance that Democrats will champion working- and middle-class kitchen table issues while reining in Republican extremism, choosing pragmatic solutions over progressive purity tests, and getting out to talk directly to voters. Democrats, he says, should be challenging Republican talking points and calling out their kookier ideas with the anger and ridicule they deserve — and the style of outrage politics and attention economy Trump perfected against them. This vision is more confrontational and direct than the approach many top Democrats, including President Joe Biden, have generally favored — though Biden himself seemed more willing to punch back at Republicans late this summer.

There’s also the question of Arizona’s US Senate election — not this one, but the next one — and the possibility that he challenges his onetime boss, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, in a little over a year. His political career in Arizona suggests some of what he’s thinking on all these fronts — and even the spot he chose for dinner that night offered me some clues. Wielding trigger fingers turned Twitter fingers, Gallego wants more Democrats to go to battle.

Long before telling me he’d probably use a fork to stab me instead of a dull steak knife (pointier, sturdier), Gallego and I had been talking about the history of the desert community surrounding us. The taco spot, Cocina Madrigal, is nestled among rundown tire shops, dusty houses, and stark warehouses, in a predominantly Mexican American neighborhood just across the Salt River from central Phoenix, the heart of the state’s Seventh Congressional District.

“This area has kind of been the dividing line between the old Latino barrio and the Black — what used to be called — ghetto. They were all kind of pushed out here because this was the only place they were allowed to buy property,” he said. “You can actually see, if you drive around, you still don’t have sidewalks in many places. It’s very hard to undo that.”

When I joined Gallego the next day as he was getting out the vote, we took circuitous routes to pass as many gas stations as we could. He’d commit the prices to memory — and point out the higher cost south of the city center and across the river in the more racially diverse and economically stretched part of the city. “The Circle K here and the Circle K there — they’re buying from the same provider. Why, besides price gouging, is it different?” he asked me. “One dollar for a mile of difference.” And that difference was being felt hardest by his neighbors, the city’s poorest.

Though he’s not an Arizona native, Gallego has spent most of his political career in Maricopa County, first as an organizer, then a political strategist, and eventually a candidate for Congress. He’s been representing the heart of the county for seven years now — and has seen both his district and the state become microcosms for many of the political trends, economic stresses, and demographic changes unfolding around the country.

Maricopa County, America’s fastest-growing county last year, is home to more than 60 percent of the state’s population; it’s produced many of the country’s conservative Republican hardliners; and it voted for the Republican presidential candidate for over 70 years. But things started to change as out-of-staters moved into an urbanizing district, the county’s Latino population grew, and the children of immigrants who grew up with an antagonistic Republican Party began to vote. In 2016, Hillary Clinton came within 3 points of winning Maricopa; Sinema won the county with the help of those Latino voters in 2018; and Biden became the first Democratic presidential nominee to flip it since the 1940s.

As in many other states, Latinos are on the rise here, making up about a third of Arizona’s population and growing 20 percent over the last decade. Gallego’s seat, which will become the state’s Third Congressional District after redistricting, is safely Democratic, working-class, and majority Latino (a bit more than 60 percent of the population is). Housing affordability and cost of living are top of mind for residents here; access to higher education is paramount but no guarantee of success (the college graduation rate is just 15 percent, below the state’s average and far below the national average of 39 percent).

And as our bodies overheated while talking to voters and local candidates outside a polling place in South Mountain, the impact of climate change, especially through urban heat islands, was obvious. To Gallego, these shouldn’t just be campaign issues; they’re existential threats for Arizonans that require urgent, practical solutions, and require him to talk about them with the gravity they pose to people’s lives.

I heard about those three issues — and fear about the Republican Party’s radicalization against democracy — over and over again from voters and residents there. While the Seventh District is overwhelmingly Democratic, the state’s political composition is split roughly in three, between registered Republicans, independents, and Democrats. A moderate political pitch has tended to provide statewide Democratic candidates the best path to victory; it’s part of the reason two Democrats represent the state in the US Senate now. But with inflation still soaring and dissatisfaction with the status quo high, Arizona Democrats face ultra-competitive general elections. Gallego has a theory for how to beat those odds. Some of it comes from personal experience.

Two things are obvious when meeting Gallego: He talks — a lot — and he constantly needs to be doing something. On Capitol Hill, that meant I was often scrambling to keep up with his pace of conversation and his literal pace; as we talked between votes and committee meetings the week before primary day, he led me on a brisk but aimless 30-minute loop from the Capitol crypt up through the Rotunda, past Statuary Hall, and to the doors of the House chamber. We repeated that path at least three times.

In Phoenix a week later, his mother told me he’d always been restless, constantly getting into arguments with family and classmates, seemingly for the fun of it. His teachers would tell her that he was easily bored by class and needed extra stimulation, but the family was stretched thin for money; she’d save coupons from a local store to buy Gallego history books and war stories. He told me he calmed that restlessness in high school through learning trivia from free editions of an encyclopedia he got his hands on. “Unfortunately they stopped at ‘N,’ so I’m pretty knowledgeable from ‘A’ to ‘N.’ After that…”

Gallego was born in Chicago to a Colombian mother and a Mexican father, though his father was largely out of the picture after early childhood. Gallego describes his father as the black sheep of his side of the family; he left his family’s farm in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua to work in construction in the Chicago area and eventually met Gallego’s mom, Elisa, at a local dance. Gallego was the second of their four children and the only son. When Gallego was 2 years old, his father brought his family back to Mexico to help his grandmother take care of their farm. They stayed there for a few years before returning to Chicago, where Gallego started second grade; he’d return to Chihuahua for the next few summers to cultivate watermelon, beans, and corn.

His parents’ marriage and his father’s construction business eventually sputtered out (Gallego writes in a memoir that his dad ended up getting busted in the drug trade), and his mother and siblings moved into a cramped apartment south of Chicago, where he slept on the floor. There he conjured up plans for a better life and worked whatever odd jobs he needed to get there. He did stints as a line cook, janitor, and cashier, and worked shifts in construction and meatpacking — classic first-generation immigrant stuff, and experiences that now inform a lot of his thinking on the role of government in creating social safety nets: giving working-class people a shot to make their fortunes. He made it to Harvard in 1998, and basically flunked out three years later.

That Harvard-enforced pause in schooling led him to act on an instinct he’d long had: serving in the Armed Forces. Military service is an appealing path for many Latino and Hispanic youth, and, as was the case for Gallego, the Marine Corps has a particular luster (Hispanic and Latino people historically make up a greater share of the Corps than other service branches — in part because of aggressive recruiting and better pay options than civilian minimum wage jobs). Back in high school, he had dreamed of working for the CIA or State Department, though he had no real idea what that meant. He found his way to a Marine Corps recruitment center, and convinced the recruiter to consider letting him enlist as an infantryman in the Marine Reserves instead of going the officer route. He got an offer a few days later, and he agreed to enlist as a mortarman. It was 2000.

He’d spend the next months finishing basic training in South Carolina, returning to Harvard, and reporting for drills every month in New Hampshire. After 9/11, he knew he’d see action. But it wasn’t until January 2003 that his unit was activated and sent after training to Okinawa, Japan. The task was safe, nothing like the eight-month activation he would spend in Iraq a few years later.

By that point, he’d graduated from Harvard and moved to New Mexico, the home state of his then-girlfriend and future wife, Kate Widland. (The two would divorce in 2017. Kate Gallego is now the mayor of Phoenix.) He found a job as a field organizer in Santa Fe for a union group backing John Kerry’s presidential campaign — going door-to-door to register people to vote. Widland ended up moving to Arizona, while he stayed in New Mexico and was reassigned to a new unit — Company D of the Fourth Reconnaissance Battalion, which would eventually supplement another unit, the Third Battalion, 25th Marines.

Gallego recounts his war memories with biting humor, detached regret, and, at times, resignation. When his unit was eventually deployed to Iraq in 2005, it saw action in some of the war’s most dangerous territory but endured two months unscathed. “Lucky Lima,” the company was called — until one day that luck flipped. Their platoon sergeant was killed in an ambush. A few days later, Gallego’s best friend, Lance Cpl. Jonathan Grant, was among those killed in an IED attack. Then in August, Gallego’s unit suffered the worst single day of Marine casualties since the 1980s: 14 Marines died in a botched operation, including 10 from Lima. When the time came to return to the States, the battalion had a record: the most losses of any American unit fighting in the Iraq War, 46 Marines and two Navy corpsmen, including 23 from Lima.

Gallego has since written a memoir recounting the stories of the soldiers he fought alongside, both living and dead, and talks plainly about how his war memories drive his political thinking and action. On the campaign trail, in interviews, and on Capitol Hill, he talks openly about the post-traumatic stress he wrestled with after Iraq (disclosing PTSD carries a stigma), and has proposed various pieces of legislation to reform the VA’s bureaucracy and help veterans. This summer, he attacked Republicans who held up passage of the PACT Act, a proposal to provide better health care to veterans exposed to toxic burn pits, in television interviews and on social media.

Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc./Getty Images

On Capitol Hill with me, on his way to a House Armed Services Committee meeting, he stopped by a memorial on a wall inside the Rayburn House Office Building. There, he pointed out, among the alphabetically ordered rows of fallen soldiers’ names, was his friend Grant’s name in white block letters. Grant was from New Mexico; his fiancee and two young children were there when he died. Gallego often says in interviews that Grant is the reason he survived — he took the IED that Gallego should have taken.

Back stateside, once he mourned Grant and his fellow fallen Marines, Gallego realized New Mexico had nothing but “the ghosts of plans that should have been.” So he joined Widland in Phoenix, found a job in marketing for a local consultant, got married, and tried to readjust.

Gallego and I first met when I was reporting out a story about the history of the term Latinx. Every four to six months, it seems, this one word swallows up a day of takes on political Twitter — bringing out the radical centrists, contrarians, and disingenuous conservatives to wage rhetorical battle against white progressives, academics, and left-leaning activists.

Gallego stepped into this language war the afternoon after Election Day 2020, when Florida had quickly been called for Trump, Texas hadn’t flipped after all, and vote counts were close in Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada. After celebrating record Latino turnout in his state, he turned to a reply from a concerned liberal: “how do we as a party improve our work with the LatinX community…? Its so frustrating to see so many republican LatinX voters.”

His response launched a thousand hot takes: “First start by not using the term Latinx. Second we have to be in front of them year round not just election years. That is what we did in AZ,” Gallego said. He was talking about the work he and other young Latino activists did in Arizona when Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio went full anti-immigrant, Gov. Jan Brewer signed SB 1070 — the “show your papers” law that trained law enforcement’s eye on anyone Hispanic-looking — and Latinos had scant representation in the state’s political infrastructure.

In retrospect, Gallego doesn’t regret weighing in on this debate. When I asked him about it a year later, he told me he’d received mostly positive feedback from other Latino people (both politicos and normies) who felt similarly frustrated with the usage of and fascination with the word.

“For this name to be kind of imposed upon the community, what a lot of Latinos felt was [that it was] inappropriate, especially because we felt it was coming mostly from white progressives,” he told me. He formally banned his staff from using the word, and earlier this year went on Bill Maher’s show to explain his rationale.

But Gallego’s first tweet contained two suggestions: Stop using “Latinx” and invest early and heavily with Latino voters. Many of his Hill colleagues and their campaign shops have followed the first recommendation. Many Democrats have a lot of work to do on the second.

The 2020 election results continue to spook Democrats, especially after disappointing results in Virginia and New Jersey last year supercharged the idea that this midterm year would be especially bad for them, and that Latinos, even in more Democratic states, were slipping away. The last presidential election saw Trump and congressional Republicans doing much better than expected, pulling in votes from minority and immigrant communities in red and blue states, and Biden underperforming previous Democratic nominees just about everywhere.

Arizona was different. Record turnout among Latino voters contributed to Biden’s eventual win — and many progressive Latino activists claimed victory for the result of their years of organizing and educating the state’s growing Latino electorate.

Gallego says he wasn’t surprised by the national trend. “We had for way too long taken advantage of the Latino vote and didn’t actually communicate for many years. And the older a Latino population gets, the more Republican they get. In the areas where we didn’t have success, we didn’t bring in new voters to counterbalance these older voters. That’s why you saw, in Arizona, very little slippage, because we had young voters coming in. In Texas, and Miami, you had a lot of older Democratic voters that were starting to vote more Republican — that’s going to happen. But the way you offset that is, you have a very invigorated movement or actually bring in new blood.”

That’s why he says his party needs to start putting class and economic issues first — wrangling inflation, increasing the minimum wage, ensuring access to affordable health care, and helping working families. Those talking points are all part of a pitch that gets at the nuances of Latino voters: a racialized demographic group that is beginning to behave more like the average white voter, depending on geography and level of education.

In his mind, a pragmatic, populist progressivism is the party’s future. Yes, invoke Trump and the future of democracy, but remind voters that while Republicans are litigating the last election, Democrats are trying to make their lives easier and more affordable. Those kitchen-table issues might be more likely to resonate with an American, and Latino, electorate that is growing less liberal and more moderate.

“We have to actually start delivering as a Democratic Party,” he told me in his DC office in late July, while the mood on the Hill before the summer congressional recess was grim. “When some of these moderate or conservative Democrats don’t want to rock the boat, it actually makes it harder for us because we can’t go and talk to the Latino carpenter, who for years, we’ve been promising we’re gonna get minimum wage increases, better health care, we’re gonna help you not be poor, and then we don’t do shit for years. And especially when we just hit the trifecta [controlling both houses of Congress and the presidency] — they’re eventually gonna start looking for other options, other people.”

“Do something” crystallizes his view of politics: show voters that Democrats are willing to fight for something, or lose voters’ trust. “People aren’t excited for Democrats because they never know what they’re going to get,” he told me. “We get into power and we’re afraid to use that power. We get into this vicious cycle where we sometimes only win because the other people are that bad, when we need to show that by us winning, this is what you get: you get a middle-class lifestyle. You get to live the American dream.”

And then there’s a messaging problem: Not many Democrats are eager to cast themselves as firebrands, to set the tone of conversations or take back the power in debates, or even to cuss a little (Gallego does, a lot). A recent Arizona controversy that spun into a national story shows his thinking: A few weeks after the state’s primary, when the ultra-right-wing former TV news host Kari Lake won the GOP gubernatorial nomination, Gallego picked up on a Twitter thread from a local Axios reporter. Lake had endorsed a homophobic, antisemitic extremist candidate in an Oklahoma state Senate primary race. He reshared the tweet with some commentary: “Only reason @KariLake supports an antisemite or a homophobe for office is because she is both.”

He was goading Lake into a Twitter fight but was essentially nationalizing a local story. Lake engaged, tossing out a dig at his friendship with California Rep. Eric Swalwell with a screenshot from an Instagram account belonging to Gallego’s wife, Sydney. Gallego spent the afternoon hammering Lake with more tweets (“Hi Kari so the candidate you endorsed said ‘Jews will go to hell’ do you agree with that statement?”). A few days — and bad news stories and Gallego tweets — later, Lake rescinded the endorsement. But the damage had been done, and Gallego had shown the political value of his brand of fighting.

His party’s reaction after the leak of the Supreme Court’s intent to overturn Roe v. Wade was a perfect case-in-point of party leaders not doing something and not reacting with the visceral emotion the occasion warranted: disjointed responses from individual elected officials, bureaucratic paralysis in Washington, and an uneven national message besides “vote for Democrats.”

He’s working on getting more of his colleagues to understand that — and that blind ideological purity isn’t helpful when responding to the needs of a nuanced group of voters. That’s where his whole deal with the term Latinx comes from: a frustration with (often) white progressives and left-leaning activists who want Democrats to sound like college students and vote like ideologues.

“He is someone who is very concerned that we don’t understand — that we need to stay in touch with Latino voters and what they care about,” Swalwell, one of Gallego’s closest friends on the Hill, told me. “He tries to be an ambassador to his non-Latino colleagues about how to understand what Latinos care about: issues of the family, whether that’s church, or whether it’s community, whether it’s having a job, supporting yourself, feeling safe — and he just reminds us that it’s not just immigration. It’s not just calling them Latinx.”

As the leader of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’s political arm, BOLD PAC, Gallego has outsize influence on crafting Latino-specific messaging and the party’s larger pitch to the average American voter. When I asked him what that pitch would be the first time we chatted on the Hill, Democrats looked like they were heading into peak campaign season with a lackluster record in power: Sen. Joe Manchin hadn’t yet announced his deal with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to revive parts of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda in the new Inflation Reduction Act; the July inflation report showing some price relief was still weeks away; and the pivotal victory of abortion rights activists in Kansas hadn’t yet happened.

Gallego said the pitch to voters would be “a kind of protect initiative. We want to protect the country from Republicans, from their radicalism, from them trying to destroy democracy, from them trying to take control of your body.”

Things changed quickly in a week — and so did Gallego’s tone.

There wasn’t a ton of formal Latino political power — or a pipeline of potential candidates — when Gallego was organizing in the 2010s. That much has changed. He hasn’t faced a tough election since his first primary bid back in 2014 in Arizona’s most Democratic district, but he has helped build up the state party’s infrastructure and outreach efforts, state party chair Raquel Terán told me.

Ross D. Franklin/AP

“The infrastructure is completely different from 2010 [when President Barack Obama faced punishing midterm elections and Democrats lost two House seats in Arizona]. So that’s why we’re ready to meet this moment for Latinos running for office at all levels.” Terán said that last bit with a wink.

Gallego still campaigns avidly — we joined two other Democratic candidates on primary day — even though he was running uncontested. He learned the value of retail politicking from his very first jobs in politics, including one as a campaign manager for the effort to defeat the anti-same-sex marriage Proposition 107. It was that campaign that showed him the power of old-school, face-to-face politics and coalition-building — and that’s where his path crossed with the campaign’s chair: Kyrsten Sinema.

Voters on primary day noticed that Gallego didn’t have to be there — and they were quick to invoke Sinema as a foil when I asked them about their Congress member: “He’s been listening to us, he’s been getting out to hear our needs, and he’s been very responsive to our concerns,” one told me. “She is not allowing Biden’s agenda to go forward and she’s just holding up everything,” another said. “Right now we really need him in the Senate.”

That Gallego wants to challenge Sinema seems like an open secret. He rails against her regularly: on Twitter, on TV, with voters, and with me. In Phoenix, he often sounded more like a Senate candidate than a Congress member turning out the vote in an uncontested safe blue district. He told me that’s part of the point; he has nothing to lose, but his party and the communities he’s visiting have a lot to gain by simply hearing from a member of Congress. Sinema, meanwhile, was in DC, keeping Democrats on edge as to her final vote on the Inflation Reduction Act.

Still, Gallego has been coy about 2024. An effort to draft him into a primary race has serious financial and political backing, and parallel efforts to primary Sinema, including from one of the state’s most influential activist groups, Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA), have centered on Gallego as a potential challenger from the left, Alejandra Gomez, LUCHA’s co-chair, told me. “We’re prepared to run a no campaign on Sinema, we’re prepared to do what we have to do to ensure that she does not make it. We don’t know who’s going to throw in for that race, but we know we’re gonna be there to make sure that she doesn’t get reelected,” she said.

Gallego was more halting in his memoir: “For now, I’m happy being a congressman.” But as Democrats abandoned efforts to pass voting rights legislation, dropped a proposed $15 minimum wage in the American Rescue Plan, and flailed for months to advance Biden’s economic and climate agenda, all in part because of Sinema, he began to soften. “I never say no to the future,” he told Roll Call in November 2021. “The decision is going to be made by Arizonans,” he told Politico in April this year. ”What we’re looking at right now may be different than what we’re looking at next year.”

But his future hangs from the tip of his tongue. In fundraising efforts this summer, Gallego has been teasing a primary. Polling earlier this year showed Gallego ahead in that matchup, but his biggest obstacle is Sinema’s fundraising prowess. Though not up for reelection this year, she raised $1.6 million in the first three months of 2022, according to Axios. And mounting a primary challenge during a presidential election year in a state at the center of the political universe would be an even more expensive endeavor.

He’d face pressure from social justice activists on the left: He’s no AOC or Squad-like progressive, and some left-leaning activists in the state, like those from LUCHA, wish he were even more progressive. “He is in a very safe Democratic district, and represents his constituents well. Are there moments from any candidate, including him, that we would like to see them step out in front of immigration issues, in front of fighting for jobs, voting rights? Absolutely. But light-years, he is more of a champion than Sinema,” LUCHA’s Gomez told me.

Sinema’s camp, meanwhile, rarely comments on Gallego’s broadsides, including his complaints that she is too close to hedge fund managers and the pharmaceutical industry. Responding to accusations from him and others that she rarely visits the state and is not easily accessible to constituents or media, her office pointed out to me that she speaks frequently to local, if not national, media. They also provided a list of in-state meetings and events, and explanations of her policy positions.

More recently, when the Arizona Republic reported on the start of Gallego and Sinema’s antagonism during the 2006 same-sex marriage campaign, Gallego offered an interview. Sinema brushed it off through a spokesperson: “As a longstanding professional courtesy, Senator Sinema does not comment on now-Congressman Gallego’s dismissal from his brief entry-level, administrative role on the 2006 Arizona Together campaign.”

On primarying her, Gallego wouldn’t give me a yes or no answer, offering a variation of “it’s too early to say” and “Arizonans will decide.” He wants to shore up some statewide Democratic wins in Arizona — defeating the “insurrectionist trifecta” of gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, Senate candidate Blake Masters, and secretary of state nominee Mark Finchem, and contrasting Trump’s party with a new Democratic coalition focused on better-paying jobs, more affordable living, access to health care, and a better climate.

Driving, walking, and talking with Gallego on primary day reminded me of a conversation we had back in Washington, when I asked him what the national Democratic pitch to voters should be. Foreshadowing his West Wing rant, he told me about the precious egos who want to stare down fanatics with politics as usual. The pitch might as well be, “If you don’t vote for us, the crazies will take over.”

Had he thought about what it would be like to work in a chamber led by Kevin McCarthy and the House Freedom Caucus?

“No, in some regard because it’s hard for me to imagine someone that dumb being speaker of the House.”

Would he even want to be around Washington to see Republicans take over the House — and even the Senate?

“Oh, yeah. Because I’m a great fighter.”

Update, September 20, 10:40 am: This story has been updated to include a comment from Sen. Sinema’s office.

How 'lawyering by Fox News' is backfiring on Trump.

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The weird question is who bought it for them.

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Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin is expected to stump for Arizona governor candidate Kari Lake next month, escalating his midterm campaign efforts ahead of a prospective 2024 presidential bid.

Youngkin is embarking on the Arizona trip as part of a broader nationwide campaign tour to bolster Republican candidates for governor. In recent weeks, he has traveled to Nevada — an early state on the 2024 GOP nominating calendar — and to Michigan, where Republicans are looking to unseat Democratic incumbents. Youngkin is headed to Kansas later this week.

But Lake will be the highest-profile, most MAGA-aligned candidate Youngkin has campaigned for to date. She has embraced Trump’s false claim the 2020 election was stolen, railed against Covid vaccine mandates and turned the media into a punching bag. Polls have shown her in a tight race with Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, in a state that was narrowly won by President Joe Biden.

Youngkin is expected to hold political and fundraising events for Lake. As in other trips, he is likely to focus heavily on education policy — an issue he made a centerpiece of his upset 2021 win in Virginia’s race, where he made inroads with suburban voters who had turned against the Republican Party during former President Donald Trump’s administration.

In a statement, Youngkin praised Arizona’s termed-out chief executive, Doug Ducey, and said the state “deserves another Republican governor.”

While Lake has appealed aggressively to Trump’s conservative backers, she has begun to make inroads with more mainstream Republican figures in her state. Arizona GOP mega-donor Jim Click, an automobile dealer who for years has bankrolled top Republicans, played a key role in encouraging Youngkin to back Lake. In an interview, Click said he recently met with Lake in his office along with roughly a dozen other Arizona Republicans, and he said that the group came away thinking highly of her.

“We were very impressed,” said Click, who backed Lake’s opponent in the primary. He added: “I think she’s going to do very well, I think she’s going to help us down-ballot.”

Click, who was part of former President George W. Bush’s fundraising network, lavished praise on Youngkin and said he would be a “good candidate,” though he added that it was too early to say who he might get behind in 2024.

Youngkin has taken a series of steps to bolster his profile in recent months, launching a pair of PACs that can fund his political activities and appearing at conservative events held by the American Enterprise Institute and Susan B. Anthony List, a group that opposes abortion.

The Virginia governor has joined another Republican governor, Florida’s Ron DeSantis, in drawing speculation about the 2024 presidential race while on the midterm campaign trail. DeSantis is also embarking on a nationwide blitz, including traveling to Arizona last month to campaign for Lake.

WASHINGTON— A gold judicial collar made of glass beads that belonged to the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has sold at auction for $176,775.

The piece was part of a collection of about 75 items of Ginsburg’s that were sold to benefit charity. In total, bidders paid nearly $517,000 for items in the online auction which ended Friday. Sunday marks the two-year anniversary of the liberal icon’s death at 87.

The judicial collar was the item with the highest purchase price, and its sale marks the first time any of the late justice’s signature neckwear has been available for purchase. Her family donated some of the justices’ most well-known collars to the Smithsonian.

In addition to the collar, other items that were auctioned included: a gavel that sold for $20,400, a pair of Ginsburg’s opera glasses that sold for $10,837.50 and a shawl that sold for $12,750. A pair of her black lace gloves sold for $16,575 while a cream pair sold for $12,750.

The auction was conducted by Bonhams, which also conducted an online auction of her books in that brought in $2.3 million. In April, some 150 items — including art Ginsburg displayed in her home and office — raised more than $800,000 for Washington National Opera, one of the late justice’s passions.

Proceeds from the latest sale will fund an endowment in Ginsburg’s honor benefitting SOS Children’s Villages, a organization that supports vulnerable children around the world. Ginsburg’s daughter-in-law, Patrice Michaels, is on the organization’s advisory board.

The Fifth Circuit wants to put Texas Republicans in charge of social media platforms.

An especially right-wing panel of the already conservative United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit handed down an astonishing opinion on Friday, effectively holding that the state of Texas may seize control of content moderation at major social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

The mere fact that this opinion exists is not surprising. When Texas initially passed the law at hand, which imposes strong restrictions on major social media companies’ power to moderate content and ban users deemed to be offensive or worse, the same panel of judges raced to defend it.

Trade organizations representing the major social media companies sued to block the law from taking effect, and a federal trial court agreed with them. In May, the Fifth Circuit handed down a brief, unexplained order in NetChoice v. Paxton, which reinstated the Texas law — until the Supreme Court blocked that decision a few weeks later, effectively suspending the law once again.

Now, the Fifth Circuit is attempting to permanently reinstate the law. Its latest opinion, which explains why the court sided with Texas’s law, is exceedingly difficult to square with longstanding First Amendment law. Indeed, it turns that law on its head, holding that the government may force private companies — or, at least, large private social media companies — to publish content that the companies do not wish to host.

The Texas law is potentially an existential threat to the social media industry. Its supposed anti-censorship provisions are so strict that it would likely prevent the major social media platforms from removing content touting Nazism or white supremacy, or even from blocking social media users who engage in campaigns of harassment against other users. Additionally, the law imposes disclosure and procedural requirements on the major platforms that may literally be impossible to comply with.

Given the Supreme Court’s previous intervention in this case, there is a good chance that the law will be suspended again in fairly short order. But the law — and the back-and-forth over it — raise interesting questions about just how much power social media companies should have over public discourse.

How the Texas law works

Under existing First Amendment law, individuals and private businesses have a right to speak their own minds, and also a right not to speak when they do not wish to, or when they disagree with a particular viewpoint. As the Supreme Court explained in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (2006), “this Court’s leading First Amendment precedents have established the principle that freedom of speech prohibits the government from telling people what they must say.”

This freedom allows companies to choose which viewpoints of its users it publishes, too. (More on this later.)

Nevertheless, the Texas law prohibits a social media platform “that functionally has more than 50 million active users in the United States in a calendar month” from banning a user — or even from regulating or restricting a user’s content, or altering the algorithms that surface content to other users — because of that user’s “viewpoint.” The Texas law permits individual social media users who believe that a platform has violated the law to sue in order to force compliance. It also permits suits by the state’s attorney general.

Technically, the law’s restrictions only apply to Texas residents, businesses that operate in Texas, or to a social media user who “shares or receives content on a social media platform in this state.” As a practical matter, however, social media platforms are likely to struggle to identify which users view social media content within Texas, and which businesses have Texas operations. So they could be forced to apply Texas’s rules to every user in order to avoid being sued for unwittingly targeting someone who the Texas law applies to.

Texas Republicans have been quite open about the fact that they intend the law to address what Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) described as a “dangerous movement by social media companies to silence conservative viewpoints and ideas.” But, while some individual conservatives have been banned from some platforms, including former President Donald Trump, the evidence that social media companies are engaged in any kind of systemic discrimination against conservative viewpoints is quite thin.

And, in any event, the law applies broadly to nearly all forms of viewpoint discrimination, regardless of whether the speech at issue is political.

Suppose, for example, that someone, angry that a woman he met online refused his advances, decides to bombard that woman with harassment, much of it calling her “ugly.” If Twitter bans this user for calling the woman “ugly,” Texas’s law most likely would also require Twitter to ban anyone who calls the woman “beautiful” — because the law prohibits discrimination on the basis of viewpoint.

Similarly, if a literal Nazi launched a YouTube account that posts videos calling for the systematic extermination of all Jews, Texas’s law would prevent YouTube from banning this user or removing the Nazi videos, unless it also took the same action against users who express the opposite viewpoint — that is, the view that Jewish people should not be exterminated.

Additionally, the law would require the major social media platforms to publish a “biannual transparency report” disclosing every single “action” they took against a particular piece of content. It would also require them to set up a process where decisions to remove content can be appealed — and these appeals must be resolved within 14 days.

But, as Facebook explained in a court filing, it alone “makes decisions about ‘billions of pieces of content’ and ‘[a]ll such decisions are unique and context-specific ... and involve some measure of judgment.’” It is far from clear whether Facebook, or any of the other major platforms, have the physical capacity to comply with the law’s disclosure and appeals requirements.

The Texas law, in other words, could potentially turn every major social media site into a cesspool of racial slurs, misogyny, and targeted harassment that the platforms would be powerless to control — and that’s assuming that the platforms are even capable of complying with the law.

The First Amendment forbids this law

In order to understand why this law violates the Constitution, it’s helpful to understand three well-established principles of First Amendment law.

The first principle is that, under what is known as the “state action doctrine,” the First Amendment generally only prohibits the government, and not private actors, from taking actions that restrict speech. This doctrine respects the gross power deferential between the government and literally any other actor.

If Facebook doesn’t like what you have to say, it can kick you off Facebook. But if the government doesn’t like what you say (and if there are no constitutional safeguards against government overreach), it can send armed police officers to haul you off to prison forever.

The second principle is that corporations may assert free speech protections just as surely as individuals can. This proposition became controversial, especially among left-leaning critics of the Supreme Court, after the Court held in Citizens United v. FEC (2010) that corporations have a First Amendment right to spend lavishly to influence elections. But the proposition that corporations have First Amendment rights long predates Citizens United, and is one of the foundations of press freedoms in the United States.

In New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), for example, the Court ruled that Jim Crow state officials could not use malicious libel suits to punish a media corporation that published an advertisement with a pro-civil rights viewpoint. If corporations could not assert First Amendment claims, then the New York Times Company would have lost this case.

The third principle of First Amendment law is that the Constitution protects both against government censorship and against government actions that force people to speak when they would rather remain silent. The seminal case is West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), which held that the government could not require schoolchildren to salute the flag or say the Pledge of Allegiance.

Subsequent decisions establish that the prohibition on forced speech prevents the government from telling media companies what they must publish. In Miami Herald v. Tornillo (1974), for example, the Court held that a newspaper’s “choice of material to go into a newspaper” is subject only to the paper’s “editorial control and judgment,” and that “it has yet to be demonstrated how governmental regulation of this crucial process can be exercised consistent with First Amendment guarantees of a free press.”

Then, in Reno v. ACLU (1997), the Court held that the same First Amendment regime that applies to physical media also applies to the internet. Reno acknowledged that the internet is distinct from other forms of communication because “the Internet can hardly be considered a ‘scarce’ expressive commodity” — that is, unlike a newspaper, there is no physical limit on how much content can be published on a website. But the Court ultimately concluded that “our cases provide no basis for qualifying the level of First Amendment scrutiny that should be applied to this medium.”

To all of this, Judge Andy Oldham, the Trump appointee and former law clerk to Justice Samuel Alito who authored the Fifth Circuit’s opinion in NetChoice, argues that the First Amendment doesn’t apply to Texas’s law because the law “does not chill speech,” and instead “chills censorship” by preventing social media companies from limiting who is allowed to post on their platforms or what they can say.

But that decision is hard to square with Miami Herald and similar cases, which establish that media companies may refuse to publish content that they do not wish to publish. Texas could not, for example, force Vox Media to publish a guest column entitled “Greg Abbott is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.” So why can it effectively force YouTube to publish content from Nazis?

Oldham’s primary response to Miami Herald is that social media platforms are “nothing like the newspaper in Miami Herald” because, he claims, “the Platforms exercise virtually no editorial control or judgment.” But this is false.

It is true that social media companies are unlike newspapers in that they typically let users post whatever they want, and then pull down content that violates their rules after the fact. But Oldham’s claim that the platforms exercise “virtually no editorial control” is not credible. As Judge Robert Pitman, the trial judge who heard NetChoice, explained in his opinion striking down the Texas law:

[I]n three months in 2021, Facebook removed 8.8 million pieces of “bullying and harassment content,” 9.8 million pieces of “organized hate content,” and 25.2 million pieces of “hate speech content.” During the last three months of 2020, YouTube removed just over 2 million channels and over 9 million videos because they violated its policies. While some of those removals are subject to an existing appeals process, many removals are not. For example, in a three-month period in 2021, YouTube removed 1.16 billion comments.

So, while social media companies permit more individuals to publish on their platforms than a traditional newspaper, they still exercise a fair amount of editorial control. And the First Amendment, as interpreted by decisions like Miami Herald and Reno, permits Facebook to decide that it will not publish bullying or “organized hate content.”

It also permits Facebook, as a private company, to decide not to publish Republicans’ content, if that’s the company’s decision.

Censorship by social media companies raises difficult questions, but the solution cannot be to turn over content moderation to Texas Republicans

Having explained why Oldham’s opinion is at odds with the First Amendment, I want to acknowledge the difficult questions presented by a world where private companies get to decide who gets to participate in such potent forums. Mark Zuckerberg may not have the power to have his critics arrested, but the amount of control that he wields over political conversations throughout the globe is alarming — and it’s not like Facebook has always used its power responsibly.

But the solution suggested by Oldham’s opinion is that one set of state legislators in Texas should get to decide the rules around what content must be published on social media platforms. That’s infinitely worse than the current regime. Among other things, if Texas’s GOP-controlled legislature has the power to decide what content shows up on social media, it has an obvious interest in using that power to benefit Republicans and to hurt Democrats.

The inherent dilemma inherent in all cases of speech regulation is that, once the government is given the power to regulate speech, that power will ultimately rest with government officials with their own political agendas. If you do not like living in a world where Zuckerberg wields outsized control over public debates, imagine living in one where the ultimate power to decide what content is published online rests with Greg Abbott. Or with Andy Oldham. Or with Samuel Alito.

Oldham’s opinion, moreover, necessarily permits a single state — the state of Texas — to decide the free speech regime that applies to every major social media company. That’s despite that people in the other 49 states, not to mention people in other countries, have no say over who wields power in Texas.

And what happens if another state — perhaps a blue state with very different views about what sort of content should be published online — enacts a law that contradicts Texas’s statute? What is Twitter or Facebook supposed to do if states enact conflicting laws and it is literally impossible to comply with both of them?

Current case law — cases like Barnette, Miami Herald, and Reno — respect these realities. They understand that, whatever the costs of giving media companies an outsized ability to shape political debates and culture, the cost of giving this power to government is so much worse.

It is likely that even the current Supreme Court, with its Republican-appointed supermajority, will respect existing law. After all, the Court already voted to block the Texas law last May, albeit in a 5-4 decision.

For now, though, the law is technically in effect, endangering the entire world’s ability to openly debate ideas online.

Google is launching a pilot program to keep emails from political campaigns from going to users' spam folders this week, the company told Axios. From the report: Google asked the Federal Election Commission in June if a program that would let campaigns emails bypass spam filters, instead giving users the option to move them to spam first, would be legal under campaign finance laws. Despite hundreds of negative comments submitted to the FEC arguing against it, the FEC approved the program in August. Eligible committees, abiding by security requirements and best practices as outlined by Google, can now register to participate. Google has come under fire that its algorithms unfairly target conservative content across its services, and that its Gmail service filters more Republican fundraising and campaign emails to spam. This is partly based on a study from North Carolina State University, though its authors say it has been misconstrued. "We expect to begin the pilot with a small number of campaigns from both parties and will test whether these changes improve the user experience, and provide more certainty for senders during this election period," Jose Castaneda, a Google spokesperson, told Axios. "We will continue to listen and respond to feedback as the pilot progresses." He added: "During the pilot, users will be in control through a more prominent unsubscribe button."

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ArsTechnica reports: The head of Kiwi Farms said the site experienced a breach that allowed hackers to access his administrator account and possibly the accounts of all other users. On the site, creator Joshua Moon wrote: "The forum was hacked. You should assume the following. Assume your password for the Kiwi Farms has been stolen. Assume your email has been leaked. Assume any IP you've used on your Kiwi Farms account in the last month has been leaked." Moon said that the unknown individual or individuals behind the hack gained access to his admin account by using a technique known as session hijacking, in which an attacker obtains the authentication cookies a site sets after an account holder enters valid credentials and successfully completes any two-factor authentication requirements. The session hijacking was made possible after uploading malicious content to XenForo, a site Kiwi Farms uses to power its user forums.

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The U.S. Supreme Court is back for the October term in just two weeks, ready to wreak more havoc on the nation. While the highest court’s ending of constitutional abortion rights overshadowed much of its actions last session, there was a parade of cases that rolled back rights and eviscerated the institution’s legitimacy. In addition to ending the right to an abortion, it curtailed the federal government’s ability to tackle climate change, obliterated the separation of church and state while attacking public education, and took away important measures that states have instituted to prevent gun violence.

That barely scratches the surface of what the court did to curtail our rights, freedoms, and safety in the last term. Here are at least a dozen other decisions that the court handed down, both in their regular process and from the emergency shadow docket, that demonstrate just how radical and illegitimate the Trump-packed institution has become.

(Take Back the Court has tracked and compiled the atrocities from this term, and you can read more on many of these cases there.)

Eroding our rights in the legal system

The Supreme Court took on five cases that limit the ability of Americans to defend themselves in a court of law.

1. In Shinn v. Ramirez, the court ruled 6-3 that federal judges cannot hear new evidence from death row inmates, arguing that their state-appointed lawyers did not provide constitutionally adequate defense, eviscerating the Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel. The Sixth Amendment guarantees everyone the right to an effective, competent attorney, even if they can’t pay.

In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor stated that the “perverse” decision “hamstrings the federal courts’ authority to safeguard [the Sixth Amendment] right” and that the “Court’s decision will leave many people who were convicted in violation of the Sixth Amendment to face incarceration or even execution without any meaningful chance to vindicate their right to counsel.” Across the term, the court chipped away at incarcerated people’s rights, and made it more difficult for them to bring writs of habeas corpus, which are one of the most powerful means of challenging wrongful convictions and sentences.

2. In another 6-3 ruling, the court chipped away at our Miranda rights—the rights given to people in the United States upon arrest since the 1966 ruling Miranda v. Arizona, requiring that law enforcement inform suspects of their right to remain silent, to have legal representation, and against self-incrimination. In Vega v. Tekoh, the court ruled 6-3 along partisan lines that Americans cannot sue officers who fail to inform them of their right to remain silent and right to an attorney during an arrest. By removing consequences for violating someone’s Miranda rights, the court almost certainly made it more likely that law enforcement will infringe upon people’s rights and put their legal status and safety at risk.

3. The Supreme Court’s assault on the Constitution included going after Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. In Egbert v. Boule, the court held—again 6-3 along partisan lines—that border patrol officers who violate the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure cannot be sued. That gives these officers more power to search the homes of anyone within 100 miles of a border without fear of consequence.

That ruling does not just affect immigrants. It’s everyone who lives within the border zone—nearly two out of three Americans. The ruling doesn’t take away your Fourth Amendment rights under the Constitution. It just makes it easier for border patrol, and potentially other federal law enforcement agents, to get away with violating them.

4. The Trump-packed court majority denied every stay of execution application that came before it last session, eliminating rights for vulnerable people facing execution. The Supreme Court denied the emergency stay of execution petitions and overruled two stays of execution ordered by lower courts, allowing all 13 people who applied for relief to be put to death.

Four of the people awaiting execution had intellectual disabilities. Four were challenging Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocols—a state which has a cruel history of botched executions—but the court refused to halt their executions. Ultimately, one of the people executed in Oklahoma, John Grant, asphyxiated on his own vomit during the lethal injection. A lower court had stayed Grant’s execution, but the Supreme Court reversed that order and pushed the execution forward; he was killed just hours later.

5. The court used its shadow docket to shield police who use excessive force from accountability. In Rivas-Villegas v. Cortesluna and City of Tahlequah, OK v. Bond, the Court reversed two lower court decisions denying qualified immunity for officers involved in two excessive force cases. One of the cases involved a fatal shooting. Qualified immunity shields police officers from accountability for their actions in excessive force claims, allowing them to essentially torture at will. Doing so almost certainly makes it more likely that officers will use excessive force. This is from the shadow docket, so no justices’ fingerprints are on the decision.

Eroding our voting rights

6. In three voting rights cases, the Supreme Court instituted racially gerrymandered maps in three separate states. In a trifecta of voting rights cases—Merrill v. Milligan, Wisconsin Legislature v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, and Ardoin v. Robinson—the court continued its assault on the Voting Rights Act through three shadow docket decisions that undermine Black voting power.

In February, the court allowed Alabama to reinstate a racist voting map after a lower court held the map was unlawful. Several weeks later, the court threw out a Wisconsin Supreme Court redistricting ruling that adopted a map adding a majority-Black seat to the state legislature. And in the last week of the term, the court intervened to revive Louisiana’s racially gerrymandered congressional map, which had been blocked by a lower court.

Targeting non-citizens

7. The court made it extremely difficult for immigrants to get help when the government violates their rights. In Garland v. Gonzalez, the court’s conservative supermajority ruled 6-3 on partisan lines that noncitizens cannot receive class-wide injunctive relief when the government violates the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). As a result, when the government violates the rights of a whole class of noncitizens, courts are unable to require immigration officers to provide relief like bond hearings to all affected people; instead, each individual noncitizen must separately request and be given a bond hearing.

On the same day, June 13, the court issued an 8-1 decision in Johnson v. Arteaga-Martinez, holding that noncitizens are not entitled to specialized bond hearings after being detained more than six months. Together, these two cases leave many vulnerable noncitizens without recourse to defend their rights and could leave people in detention indefinitely.

8. The court also harmed resident immigrants, leaving thousands without recourse to challenge unfair Board of Immigration Appeals decisions. In Patel v. Garland, the court ruled that federal courts cannot review decisions made by immigration judges and the Board of Immigration Appeals—leaving some of the most vulnerable among us without recourse to challenge unfair decisions. Pankajkumar Patel, who has lived and worked in the U.S. for more than 30 years and raised a family here, was denied permanent residence status because of a mistake on his driver’s license application years ago. The Supreme Court shut down his ability to fight that decision, and he and his wife face deportation proceedings without recourse.

Harming vulnerable communities and Tribes

9. The court denied U.S. citizens living in Puerto Rico their right to access certain Social Security benefits in U.S. v. Vaello-Madero. Jose Luis Vaello Madero was a recipient of SSI benefits while living in New York, and then moved to Puerto Rico in 2013. He continued to receive benefits, but when the government discovered he had moved, they ended his benefits and sought to claw back $28,000 from him. He sued, arguing that the exclusion of Puerto Rico residents—U.S. citizens—violates the Equal Protection guarantee of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. The court held that the U.S. government can deny SSI benefits to disabled U.S. citizens living in Puerto Rico—residents who are overwhelmingly Latino and people of color. More than 300,000 people were impacted by this ruling.

In her dissent, Justice Sotomayor noted that the decision is especially devastating because Puerto Rico has no congressional representation, and therefore has no other means to correct the “punishing disparities suffered by citizen residents of Puerto Rico under Congress’ unequal treatment.”

10. The court issued a devastating blow to tribal sovereignty in Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, upending decades of precedent and basic principles of federal Indian law to strip power away from tribes in criminal justice matters on native lands. National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) President Fawn Sharp called the ruling “an attack on tribal sovereignty and the hard-fought progress of our ancestors to exercise our inherent sovereignty over our own territories.”

“It was only a few months ago that Congress loudly supported tribal sovereignty and tribal criminal jurisdiction with the passage of the Violence Against Women’s Act, reaffirming the right of Tribal Nations to protect their own people and communities, but make no mistake, today, the Supreme Court has dealt a massive blow to tribal sovereignty and Congress must, again, respond.”

11. The court made it harder for victims of illegal FBI surveillance on Muslim communities to vindicate their rights. In FBI v .Fazaga, the court held that the FBI can hide its discriminatory surveillance of Muslim Americans under “state secrets,” barring the plaintiffs’ religious discrimination claims. Those claims were based on evidence that the government illegally spied on those attending mosques in violation of their constitutional religious liberties and federal law, illegally videotaping their homes and recording conversations in several California mosques.

Upending environmental protections

12. In addition to the more widely reported West Virginia v. EPA, which attacked the Clean Air Act, the court also went after the Clean Water Act and the health and safety of communities, this time from the shadow docket. In Louisiana v. American Rivers, the Court issued a radical environmental decision that revived a Trump-era policy, upending decades of precedent and settled law giving states and tribes authority to protect their waters.

The ruling severely limits the authority of states and tribes to restrict environmentally risky projects, such as pipelines and coal export facilities. The Supreme Court—again—gave no reasoning for shredding 50 years of precedent, issuing only a one-paragraph opinion siding with polluting industries over the tribes and communities whose safety is on the line.

These 12 decisions demonstrate why the legitimacy of the court is in question. It’s not “simply because people disagree with an opinion,” as Chief Justice John Roberts whined earlier this month. It’s because the radical, extreme majority has been dismantling core tenets of the Constitution and settled law, undermining the will of the majority of Americans, throwing out decades—even centuries—of precedent, and demonstrating that it is an existential threat to the rule of law.

The court’s next term, starting in just two weeks, will feature cases that threaten LGBTQ rights, environmental safety, election integrity, affirmative action, and more. That includes Moore v. Harper, an effort by Republican legislators in North Carolina to declare themselves the sole arbiters of federal elections, putting them above the state’s constitution and the state’s courts. The  specious and radical theory they’re arguing—the “independent state legislature” theory—is based on an early 19th-century document that “is a well-known fake.” In other words: fraud. 

The Supreme Court has lost legitimacy, and there isn’t much time to correct it. Congress and President Biden must expand the court today to ensure our safety, liberties, and futures.

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Just one day after the Ethereum Merge, where the cryptocoin successfully switched from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS), profitability of GPU mining has completely collapsed. Tom's Hardware reports: That means the best graphics cards should finally be back where they belonged, in your gaming PC, just as god intended. That's a quick drop, considering yesterday there were still a few cryptocurrencies that were technically profitable. Looking at WhatToMine, and using the standard $0.10 per kWh, the best-case results are with the GeForce RTX 3090 and Radeon RX 6800 and 6800 XT. Those are technically showing slightly positive results, to the tune of around $0.06 per day after power costs. However, that doesn't factor in the cost of the PC power, or the wear and tear on your graphics card. Even at a slightly positive net result, it would still take over 20 years to break even on the cost of an RX 6800. We say that tongue-in-cheek, because if there's one thing we know for certain, it's that no one can predict what the cryptocurrency market will look like even one year out, never mind 20 years in the future. It's a volatile market, and there are definitely lots of groups and individuals hoping to figure out a way to Make GPU Mining Profitable Again (MGMPA hats inbound...) Of the 21 current generation graphics cards from the AMD RX 6000-series and the Nvidia RTX 30-series, only five are theoretically profitable right now, and those are all just barely in the black. This is using data from NiceHash and WhatToMine, so perhaps there are ways to tune other GPUs to get into the net positive, but the bottom line is that no one should be using GPUs for mining right now, and certainly not buying more GPUs for mining purposes. [You can see a full list of the current profitability of the current generation graphics cards here.]

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By Brad Reed A newly unearthed document reveals just how much effort the far-right Proud Boys gang puts into preparing for potentially violent encounters. The Guardian reports that the document shows “meticulous planning” for Proud Boys actions, as “it resembles the annual minutes of a society of tax accountants” more than a manifesto written for political extremists. According to the publication, the document was given by a member of the Proud Boys to extremism reporter Andy Campbell, who used it as part of research for his new book titled, “We Are Proud Boys: How a Right-Wing Street Gang Ush…

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The makers of the secure telnet client PuTTY also sell a service monitoring company security services — and this July Mandiant Managed Defense "identified a novel spear phish methodology," according to a post on the company's blog: [The threat cluster] established communication with the victim over WhatsApp and lured them to download a malicious ISO package regarding a fake job offering that led to the deployment of the AIRDRY.V2 backdoor through a trojanized instance of the PuTTY utility.... This activity was identified by our Mandiant Intelligence: Staging Directories mission, which searches for anomalous files written to directories commonly used by threat actors.... The amazon_assessment.iso archive held two files: an executable and a text file. The text file named Readme.txt had connection details for use with the second file: PuTTY.exe.... [T]he PuTTY.exe binary in the malicious archive does not have a digital signature. The size of the PuTTY binary downloaded by the victim is also substantially larger than the legitimate version. Upon closer inspection, it has a large, high entropy .data section in comparison to the officially distributed version. Sections like these are typically indicative of packed or encrypted data. The suspicious nature of the PuTTY.exe embedded in the ISO file prompted Managed Defense to perform a deeper investigation on the host and the file itself. The execution of the malicious PuTTY binary resulted in the deployment of a backdoor to the host. "The executable embedded in each ISO file is a fully functional PuTTY application compiled using publicly available PuTTY version 0.77 source code," the blog post points out. Ars Technica notes that Mandiant's researchers believe it's being pushed by groups with ties to North Korea: The executable file installed the latest version of Airdry, a backdoor the US government has attributed to the North Korean government. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has a description here. Japan's community emergency response team has this description of the backdoor, which is also tracked as BLINDINGCAN.

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Lord of the Rings and The Little Mermaid are just the latest targets of racist fans.

Two new adaptations of The Lord of the Rings and The Little Mermaid are prompting deep outrage and indignation among fans who are arguing that the projects’ increased diversity has weakened their faithfulness to the original story.

Detractors of Amazon’s new Lord of the Rings series, which debuted this month, claim that casting Black and Asian actors undermines the show’s faithfulness to Tolkien’s world. Meanwhile, some ostensible fans of Disney’s animated Little Mermaid are rejecting the new live-action version for swapping out the titular mermaid’s famous blue eyes and red hair for the features of Black actress Halle Bailey.

The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power first drew widespread anger from fans because it casts Black and Asian actors as characters across the spectrum of fictional Middle Earth races. Fans’ chief complaint was that the decision to include nonwhite characters had ruined the authenticity of Tolkien’s world, because he had never described his elves, hobbits, men, and dwarves as anything other than white. Then last week, Disney released the first trailer for The Little Mermaid, featuring Bailey singing “Part of Your World.” Thousands of YouTube users brigaded, leaving more than 2 million dislikes and countless derogatory comments on the trailer, and creating memes ridiculing the film for casting Bailey and mocking all of its supporters.

To anyone who’s paid any attention to geek culture over the past decade or so, these arguments probably feel endless and exhausting. After all, this is the same cycle of backlash that plays out when any beloved story gets rebooted (or, in the case of Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, adapted to film for the first time) and makes any changes, big or small. The anger intensifies to a new level when they’re big changes that shake the foundations of a story that was originally framed within a white, male worldview. Let’s face it: Most of the stories that have been passed down to us throughout the centuries have been created for us by white men.

From a progressive standpoint, stories all could use a good shake-up by varying their points of view through casting, and pop culture is full of narratives ripe for retelling. Taking the detractors at face value, however, you have a pantheon of geeks who just want to see their beloved tales left alone. These fans now face repeated battles as they watch one franchise after another fall into the clutches of progressive directors and writers who insist on — gasp — casting women in the lead roles, or — gasp — casting actors of color in roles long reserved for white people.

The negative attention on The Little Mermaid and The Lord of the Rings has fueled a groundswell of support from other fans who view such anger as founded in racism. Complicating all of these arguments are angry right-wing politicians and influencers like Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, who are using both franchises as an example of Hollywood and liberal “wokeness” run amok.

On the historical accuracy of diverse hobbits and mermaids

On their face, the arguments over Rings of Power and The Little Mermaid are superficially absurd. The “historical inaccuracy” argument falls apart any way you look at it.

For starters, as many fans have noted, hobbits and mermaids aren’t real, so it shouldn’t matter what race they are. For another thing, even though Tolkien’s setting for Middle Earth is based on Europe, people of color lived throughout medieval Europe, so a diverse Middle Earth is historically accurate.

As for Hans Christian Andersen’s short story “The Little Mermaid,” it was originally a sublimated allegory for a closeted queer man, and its original setting was “far out in the ocean.” Seeking historical accuracy from this type of fairy tale seems like grasping at best; but to further put to rest the argument that such characters have to be white, consider that the first Disney version made Ariel’s home a fictional amalgam of Greek and Mediterranean mythology somewhere in the middle of the North Atlantic sea. So the idea of strictly Caucasian mermaids from this vicinity is a stretch.

Again, all of this is the stuff of fantasy, so really, who cares whether they’re played by white or Black actors?

As it turns out, the answer is lots and lots of people.

A key cry among these kinds of fans is that such productions are insisting on what they’ve dubbed “forced diversity.” Detractors claim that the goal isn’t really to meaningfully inject realistic representation into the universe, but rather to advance a “woke ideological agenda.” This argument has been particularly loud among right-wing politicians and conservative influencers.

The ideal for such fans would be something they tend to describe as “organic diversity” — something that would arise naturally from the canonical descriptions of characters. For instance, one Tolkien scholar complained to CNN that since Tolkien described elves as “fair-faced,” anything too tawny would ruin the authenticity of the show.

“This is not something organic that’s coming out of Middle Earth,” Tolkien expert Louis Markos told CNN. “This is really an agenda that is being imposed upon it.”

Framing the mere existence of nonwhite characters in media as an inherently political stance is itself an ideological agenda. Moreover, it contradicts the long legacy of fantasy adaptations deviating from canonical descriptions of characters, and fans usually not minding — as long as the casting still reinforces a white, male-centric worldview.

This brings us to the larger issue at play. This isn’t just about hobbits and “fair-faced” elves and redheaded mermaids, but about the existence of real people in our nonfictional world.

Welcome to the culture war, for the 8 millionth time

The endless culture war over increasingly diverse media has famously targeted everything from games to Ghostbusters, and now it has arrived to a fantasy universe near you. See the latest Star Wars series, or Captain Marvel, or Black Panther, or Black Adam, or Star Wars again — or pretty much every familiar franchise being adapted or remade these days with women and/or Black protagonists.

Usually, the audience that resists change will decry every reason except racism and misogyny for their hatred of these changes. For example, they might argue that casting actors of color is a cheap aesthetic change that does nothing to deepen the worldview of a story. Or, if the casting does result in a shift in worldview, they might argue that said worldview isn’t faithful to the original creator’s vision. (This usually makes it clear they never understood the creator’s original vision at all, because these narratives nearly always have deeply humanist and optimistic themes that align far more closely with a progressive worldview than with a traditionalist worldview — especially a racist one.)

Amazon Studios / IMDB

Diverse casting can come with pitfalls and sometimes can be a shortcut to appearing progressive without actually being progressive. (See: Bridgerton and Hamilton.) Studios such as Disney are often more invested in rebooting their existing IP rather than taking chances on new and exciting stories from minority creators. Fans argue that this emphasis on simply redoing an old story with a casting facelift has led to a repetitive, tedious emphasis on pointless reboots and tired retreads rather than something truly meaningfully different and expansive.

However, these arguments often drown out the voices of fans of color who are overjoyed when they see themselves reflected in the legacy media they love — like the parents who celebrated the new Little Mermaid trailer by sharing photos and videos of their Black daughters reacting ecstatically.

What’s more, when high-powered studios like Disney do take such chances on new original work, the resulting wonderful work often also draws tremendous amounts of inflamed backlash. Pixar’s sleeper hit Turning Red became a surprise culture war target because of its culturally unique place and subject, as well as its characters.

This all suggests that the arguments for less diversity are just as shallow and political, just as racist and sexist, as they sound. Journalist and period drama expert Amanda-Rae Prescott learned this lesson well when she began tracking the fandom for the cult PBS series Sanditon. The series, an adaptation of Jane Austen’s unfinished novel, features one character of color — hardly the racially diverse cast of much more high-profile period dramas such as Bridgerton and The Gilded Age. As Prescott observed, despite many fans wanting more characters of color to also have more screentime, the majority of the show’s white fandom was committed to “maintaining Sanditon as the anti-Bridgerton” — in other words, to preserving its mainly white cast.

Prescott next saw a similar form of racist gatekeeping around the recent Netflix adaptation of Austen’s Persuasion, with white Austen fans masking racism behind other critiques of the movie as well as ostensibly lighthearted memes making fun of the film in oblique ways.

Both types of racist objections have attached to these new adaptations. The Little Mermaid trailer comments are currently wall-to-wall with haters making fun of people who like the trailer, using a variant of a copy/paste meme to mock the idea of liking the movie at all. The meme, like so many politically motivated memes, masks the real racist agenda behind it.

The repetitive nature of all these forms of discourse, Prescott points out, is part of the system.

“The same people who were angry about a Black Queen and a South Asian Viscountess on Bridgerton are the same people who are now angry about BIPOC elves, witches, and mermaids,” Prescott told me in an email. “You can copy and paste racist comments about diverse period dramas onto the racist comments about these fantasy franchises. There are people in period drama fandom who watch these series because they don’t want to see Black or POC characters, and it’s the same trend in speculative fiction.”

Prescott said she believes a driving theme of these campaigns is obfuscation — the use of some other argument to mask the real one. With historical dramas, it’s the argument for “historical accuracy.” With fantasy and science fiction adaptations, it’s the argument for preserving whatever version of the franchise you grew up with. “Racists weaponize childhood nostalgia to oppose diverse casting in these sci-fi/fantasy series because they cannot rely on whitewashed history to oppose diverse casting,” Prescott wrote.

Here, again, though, these arguments prove facile and flimsy. After all, generations of Disney fans who grew up with the beloved 1997 version of Cinderella, a.k.a. “the Brandy Cinderella,” didn’t subsequently have meltdowns over later adaptations that cast Cinderella as white. Instead, last year’s Cinderella saw Billy Porter’s genderless fairy godmother facing — sigh — transphobic backlash, because if there’s one thing fairies are famous for, it’s their rigid gender binary.

In other words, the backlash only ever works in one direction, and it only ever has one ultimate aim: erasing and threatening difference and deviance.

Prescott doesn’t have much hope that it will stop anytime soon.

“I believe racists are going to attack ANY series that they believe should have been 100% white,” Prescott wrote. “Racists are going to get mad at the next superhero or horror show that racebends a character, and they’ll be outraged over whatever the next Bridgerton is. Their goal is to stop all efforts to diversify Hollywood.”

Intellia Therapeutics reported encouraging early-stage study results for its Crispr gene-editing treatments, the latest sign that the pathbreaking technology could result in commercially available drugs in the coming years. The Wall Street Journal reports: Intellia said Friday that one of its treatments, code-named NTLA-2002, significantly reduced levels of a protein that causes periodic attacks of swelling in six patients with a rare genetic disease called hereditary angioedema, or HAE. In a separate study building on previously released trial data, Intellia's treatment NTLA-2001 reduced a disease-causing protein by more than 90% in 12 people with transthyretin-mediated amyloidosis cardiomyopathy, or ATTR-CM, a genetic disease that can lead to heart failure. Despite the positive results, questions remain about whether therapies based on Crispr will work safely and effectively, analysts said. Intellia's latest studies involved a small number of patients, and were disclosed in news releases and haven't been published in a peer-reviewed journal. The NTLA-2002 study results were presented at the Bradykinin Symposium in Berlin, a medical meeting focused on angioedema. The data came from small, so-called Phase 1 studies conducted in New Zealand and the U.K. that didn't include control groups. Results from such early studies can be unreliable predictors of a drug's safety and effectiveness once the compound is tested in larger numbers of patients. The findings, nevertheless, add to preliminary but promising evidence of the potential for drugs based on the gene-editing technology. Last year, Intellia said that NTLA-2001 reduced the disease-causing protein involved in ATTR patients.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

LastPass says the attacker behind the August security breach had internal access to the company's systems for four days until they were detected and evicted. BleepingComputer reports: In an update to the security incident notification published last month, Lastpass' CEO Karim Toubba also said that the company's investigation (carried out in partnership with cybersecurity firm Mandiant) found no evidence the threat actor accessed customer data or encrypted password vaults. "Although the threat actor was able to access the Development environment, our system design and controls prevented the threat actor from accessing any customer data or encrypted password vaults," Toubba said. While method through which the attacker was able to compromise a Lastpass developer's endpoint to access the Development environment, the investigation found that the threat actor was able to impersonate the developer after he "had successfully authenticated using multi-factor authentication." After analyzing source code and production builds, the company has also not found evidence that the attacker tried to inject malicious code. This is likely because only the Build Release team can push code from Development into Production, and even then, Toubba said the process involves code review, testing, and validation stages. Additionally, he added that the LastPass Development environment is "physically separated from, and has no direct connectivity to" Lastpass' Production environment. The company says it has since "deployed enhanced security controls including additional endpoint security controls and monitoring," as well as additional threat intelligence capabilities and enhanced detection and prevention technologies in both Development and Production environments.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mehmet Oz has a new set of problems. No, it’s not the crudités he was supposed to get his wife. No, it’s not his many homes. No, it’s not the fact that he’s a clear carpetbagger who has lived and voted in New Jersey up until 2021. Wait, it is the New Jersey thing! It has been well covered that Republican candidates love to pretend to be from a place they have not lived in. Ask Herschel Walker down in Georgia. The reason Mehmet Oz has to worry about this well-tread criticism of his out-of-touch elitism is that his fellow MAGA superstar Doug Mastriano ain’t from around these here parts, either.

The New Jersey Globe reports that Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano was registered to vote in his hometown of New Jersey for 28 years. Mastriano, a candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania, stopped being registered to vote in New Jersey in July 2021. In Doug Mastriano’s defense, it wasn’t until his retirement from the U.S. Army in 2017 that Doug decided he wanted to try and participate in the overthrow of our government. Up until that time, it seems Mastriano’s entire voting career from 1982 on was in the Garden State.

And while Mastriano was running for Congress in 2018, it wasn’t until after his mother died in 2021 that the state was informed Doug had left the Garden State permanently.

RELATED STORY: New video seems to contradict Republican’s statements about participation in Capitol riots

It seems like Doug Mastriano came out of the army ready to continue a legacy from New Jersey. New Jersey is where his mother, Janice, was once trounced from her position on the East Windsor Regional Board of Education for being an old-timey homophobe, comparing homosexuality to pedophilia. That was back in 2000, when she reportedly told the Trenton Times, ”I wouldn’t want a known homosexual camping with my boys, because you know most of them are pedophiles, too.”

Around the same time, as the Washington Post reported in May, Mastriano’s 2001 master’s thesis paper was uncovered. In it, he warned that the United States was vulnerable to a left-wing “Hitlerian Putsch.” 

In it, Mastriano adopts the point of view of a colonel who is living in 2018—some 17 years in the future—and has taken refuge in an “isolated cavern” in the George Washington National Forest. The military’s collapse, in his telling, allowed a left-wing leader obsessed with “political correctness” and backed militarily by the United Nations and the European Union to rise to power in a struggle that led to the deaths of millions of Americans.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that after Mastriano’s victory in the GOP gubernatorial primary, Mastriano’s victory speech didn’t touch on a single thing that voters of his newly adopted state have said they were interested in hearing policy about. Instead, he said this:

“Like the media and the left did over all the years and said follow the science, we’re going to exactly do that and follow the science, so that means only biological females can play on biologically female teams.”

No matter where he’s from, or who he’s representing, one thing about Doug Mastriano is always true: He doesn’t care about his constituents or their needs. He cares about punching down and using his power to further hurt the most vulnerable among us. 

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It might seem that, having already repeatedly shocked the legal community by defying all precedent, procedure, facts, and law, Judge Aileen Cannon might decide to tread a bit more carefully in her latest ruling. Except that’s what someone who doesn’t know Cannon might think, because what she did is what she always does: bent over beyond backwards to give Donald Trump whatever he wants.

The last series of exchanges from Cannon, the government, and Trump’s legal team had both sides turning in a list of candidates as potential special masters. (One guess as to Cannon’s ruling on that point.) She went straight to Trump’s list to select retired U.S. District Judge Raymond Dearie. However, Dearie was the only choice on Trump’s list that the Department of Justice agreed to, so that could be seen as at least moderately reasonable. Next up, just how long will Dearie have to take a look at the documents? The Justice Department, naturally, wanted this over quickly. But Cannon decided to give Dearie until Nov. 30, meaning that there’s no danger that the documents will be available to the Department of Justice before the election. But even that isn’t the really appalling part of this latest Cannon missive.

That’s because in this ruling Cannon orders the Department of Justice to hand back all the documents, including those which are classified; denies the Department of Justice request to take action to protect national security; and hands herself the ability to decide whether or not any documents are actually classified.

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Dearie has experience on the FISA court, which should give him some experience in dealing with national security issues and classified information. On the other hand, one of the things that Dearie did on the FISA court was sit on the court that signed off on the warrants for Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. How Dearie feels about that, given the six-year effort to discredit that warrant, isn’t known. But it certainly would seem to create a potential for conflict. And the fact that Trump’s team put Dearie on their list after all the time Trump has spent railing against the FISA court would seem to suggest that they have some insight into Dearie’s feelings on this point.

But still … the government approved Dearie. Dearie has experience and a long judicial record that seems solid enough. No one regards the Reagan-appointed former judge as another Cannon. 

Oh, and in case Dearie comes back with a decision that doesn’t fall in line with the results Trump wants, Cannon made sure to underline the fact that she can always pick someone else writing, “The Court reserves the right to remove the Special Master.”

But even that’s still within the bounds of normality once you get past the idea that there should never have been a special master appointed in this case. It’s what comes next where things really start to unravel the threads of rationality.

Naturally, in special master cases, the special master gets to examine the documents. That’s the point. However, even in cases where the question involves prosecutors being in possession of documents possibly protected by attorney client privilege, judges order that a copy of those documents be sent to the special master for evaluation.

Cannon didn’t do that. While she did order that the government provide a copy of all the material to Trump’s attorneys, and did order that the FBI privilege team send a copy of their work to both Dearie and Trump’s team, when it comes to the actual documents, Cannon leaves absolutely no option but taking them all, the originals, and depositing them on Dearie’s front porch. 

At a minimum, the Government shall make available to the Special Master the Seized Materials, the search warrant executed in this matter, and the redacted public versions of the underlying application materials for the search warrant.

There’s nothing in this order to suggest that the government even gets to hold on to a copy of the documents … unlike Trump’s team. One other thing that got left out of Cannon’s order: any concern at all about the Department of Justice’s statements around obstruction or threats to national security. Cannon just blew right past that without discussion.

But wait. It gets worse.

It gets worse because on Thursday Cannon also responded to the Justice Department’s request for a stay to allow them to continue using the documents in criminal investigations. That request pointed out that there were genuine national security concerns in sitting on these documents. For example, if the documents were shown to someone, that could put human assets, technical assets, and decisions made based on the intelligence in these documents at extreme risk. The criminal case is intrinsically bound up with the intelligence and security case, and can’t really be separated.

Cannon’s response? I don’t believe you.

For the reasons discussed below, the Government’s Motion is DENIED … the Motion effectively asks the Court to accept the following compound premises, neither of which the Court is prepared to adopt hastily without further review by a Special Master. The first premise underlying the Motion is that all of the approximately 100 documents isolated by the Government (and “papers physically attached to them”) are classified government records, and that Plaintiff therefore could not possibly have a possessory interest in any of them. The second is that Plaintiff has no plausible claim of privilege as to any of these documents.

In this ruling, Cannon is making two absolutely extraordinary claims: First, she accuses the government of lying about whether or not the documents are classified. Then she argues that Trump may have “a plausible claim of privilege.” In other words, Cannon is arguing for Trump’s “I declassified them” position even though Trump’s legal team never made this claim in any submission to the court. This, more even than her ruling to appoint a special master in the first place, is a flat out breakdown of the entire process.

There’s also the fact that in doing this, Cannon is placing herself in a position to adjudicate whether or not the documents are classified without reference to any other authority. She’s opened the door to the point where she could simply decide that the classified documents belong to Trump, no matter what anyone says.

All of this is extraordinarily dangerous, both to national security and to the usual form of legal proceeding where courts recognize the government as the authority in determining issues such as classification and security risk. There have been reasons to doubt the government’s position in the past, but in those cases judges have citied those reasons. Cannon has simply gone down the rabbit hole, and she’s taking the law with her.

There seems little doubt that, no matter the outcome of appeals, Trump is going to get what he wanted: a hefty delay, one that should please Republicans by sidelining any criminal investigation involving these materials until well after the election. But all of this has to be appealed anyway, because … good lord. This is bad law.

When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis lured migrants onto a plane in Texas with promises that they would find jobs and work papers in Boston, then dropped them in Martha’s Vineyard, he was echoing an earlier history that shows exactly who he is. Massachusetts state Sen. Julian Cyr immediately identified the similarities to the “reverse freedom rides” of the early 1960s, when segregationist politicians in Arkansas and other southern states bused Black families north to make a political point. That ugly history is very much at play as Republican politicians today bus and fly migrants to Illinois, New York, Washington, D.C., and now Martha’s Vineyard.

“For many years, certain politicians, educators, and certain religious leaders have used the white people of the South as a whipping boy, to put it mildly, to further their own ends and their political campaigns,” Amis Guthridge, one of the architects of the reverse freedom rides, is quoted in an in-depth 2019 piece by Gabrielle Emanuel at GBH News. “We’re going to find out if people like Ted Kennedy … and the Kennedys, all of them, really do have an interest in the Negro people, really do have a love for the Negro.”

Hundreds of Black people, mostly from Arkansas and Louisiana, were misled or, in some cases, coerced onto buses north, ending up in states from California to New Hampshire. But the largest number, nearly 100, were sent to Hyannis, Massachusetts. Because when Amis Guthridge said, “We’re going to find out if people like Ted Kennedy … and the Kennedys, all of them, really do have an interest in the Negro people, really do have a love for the Negro,” he was intending to send people literally to the Kennedys’ doorstep, or anyway to the bus stop closest to where the Kennedys spent their summers, telling them they would meet President John Kennedy when they arrived.

Now, we’ve got Ron DeSantis lying to migrants and sending them to where former President Barack Obama vacations in the summer. It’s eerie how the racists of today are replaying a largely forgotten campaign of the racists of the past.

RELATED STORY: Ron DeSantis grabbed migrants from Texas and dumped them on Martha's Vineyard

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Compare that quote from Guthridge decades ago with this one from DeSantis on Thursday: “Every community in America should be sharing in the burdens. It shouldn’t all fall on a handful of red states,” he told reporters. Other states “don’t like it as much when you get just a small, small, small amount compared to what these folks have dealt with in Texas and in other states.”

The racists of the 1960s had reporters waiting to meet Black southerners at the bus stop in Hyannis. The racists of the 2020s are taking advantage of technology: DeSantis sent a videographer on the plane to Martha’s Vineyard.

The racists of the 1960s threatened to take people off welfare rolls and promised that housing and jobs would be waiting for them. DeSantis had people told they would get work papers and jobs, and had the charter plane pilot tell them mid-flight that they were not going to Boston as promised.

Watching Texas Gov. Greg Abbott turn this project into major far-right street cred, DeSantis was so desperate to get the headlines from treating vulnerable migrants as political pawns that he used Florida taxpayer money to get migrants out of Texas. After the Martha’s Vineyard flight on Wednesday, Abbott had buses drop migrants off in front of the vice president’s residence in Washington, D.C., on Thursday.

Rep. Joaquin Castro, who represents San Antonio, where the migrants started their day before being flown to Martha’s Vineyard, tweeted, “The Department of Justice needs to investigate Governor DeSantis for using fraud and deception to lure people out of state only to abandon them without fulfilling his false promises. Same for Greg Abbott. They’re engaging in human trafficking.”

DeSantis and Abbott are also probably grasping at a way to get attention that distracts from abortion, since it’s become clear that punitive abortion policies are not an electoral boost for Republicans overall right now—as much as it might help in a Republican primary. But, as is the case with virtually every Republican policy these days, the cruelty is the point. Lying to people with nothing and dropping them on an island with scarce and expensive housing and no access to the promised resources is simply cruel. It’s the kind of thing you do if you enjoy other people’s suffering. As DeSantis and Abbott clearly do.

“They reported to me that these people got off the plane, men, women, and children from Venezuela, as they told me,” Rep. Bill Keating told CNN. “And they had a map or instructions in their hand where they would get housing and jobs. And it was a vacant parking lot, the destination.” It’s a juvenile prank mindset taken to a life-shattering, heavily resourced level.

Lisa Belcastro, head of the single homeless shelter on Martha’s Vineyard, echoed Keating’s point that these people were looking for jobs. “None of them wanted to come to Martha’s Vineyard. They’ve never heard of Martha’s Vineyard. This was a political move,” she said. “Not one person has asked for a handout; they have asked to work.”

“Exploiting vulnerable people for political stunts is repulsive and cruel. Massachusetts is fully capable of handling asylum seekers, and I'll keep working with local, state, and federal partners to ensure we have the necessary resources to care for people with dignity,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren tweeted.

According to state Rep. Dylan Fernandes, the state attorney general’s office is helping local officials find immigration attorneys for the migrants.

Donald Trump and his MAGA allies came close to overthrowing our democracy on January 6, and they will try again if they win in 2022. The best thing you can do is to help get out the Democratic vote for the midterms, and we need everyone to do what they can. Click here to find all the volunteer opportunities available.

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Yanking defeat from the jaws of political victory, Senate Democrats let Sen. Susan Collins of Maine screw up their key culture war messaging yet again. The vote on marriage equality is going to be postponed until after the election because, well, there’s no good reason. So Republicans can prove how bigoted they are after Nov. 8?

Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, apparently and for no discernible reason based on history, was convinced that Collins would be a true bipartisan and get Republicans lined up behind the basic idea that two adults should be able to get married and enjoy the benefits of that union regardless of their race or sexual orientation. Making Republicans say yes or no to that before November’s election was important for voters to see.

What Sen. Elizabeth Warren says:

Having that vote in the immediate aftermath of Sen. Lindsey Graham’s abortion ban neutron bomb was going to be even smarter! Republicans have been thrown into total disarray over abortion, and this vote would have intensified that. It would have given them the opportunity to show voters just how deep their bigotry runs. Or not.

There’s absolutely no guarantee this delay does anything to ensure the bill passes. Nothing. What it does is let Republicans off the hook. It’s simply political malpractice.

RELATED STORY: Collins’ delay game on marriage equality got her desired result: No vote before the election

Abortion rights, gun safety, and the our planet are all at stake in this election. We must persuade Democratic voters to turn out in November. Click here to volunteer with Vote Forward and write personalized letters to targeted voters on your own schedule from the comfort of your own home, without ever having to talk to anyone.

Republican Gov. Jim Justice of West Virginia is about to sign a law that will ban nearly all abortions in the state of West Virginia. As reported by Abigail Tracy, writing for Vanity Fair:

While the bill outlaws abortions in nearly all circumstances, it does include narrow exceptions in instances of rape, incest, and medical emergencies. It also stipulates that for adults, abortions are legal up to eight weeks of pregnancy—but only in instances of rape or incest reported to law enforcement. Minors who are victims of rape or incest can obtain abortions before 14 weeks, provided that a crime was reported to law enforcement or that the victim was treated at a hospital in West Virginia.

As Tracy reports, coupled with the passage of that law, the state’s Republican-dominated legislature adopted a formal resolution justifying its passage. The language of that resolution is redolent with dystopian overtones elevating the status of “motherhood” to near mystical status, and (with tone-deaf irony) subordinating the state’s interest to its sacred preservation.

Some of the language from the resolution in support of the bill confirms its theocratic overtones:

Further Resolved, That the maintenance of a peaceful and prosperous society depends upon the subordination of power and interest to the well-being of mothers, as their bearing and rearing of children determines the existence and quality of our common life together with infinitely greater efficacy than any federal or state policy; and, be it        

Further Resolved, That we are cognizant that, as an institution, motherhood is prior to the state, and, as such, the state must work to serve mothers and their interests, as the health of any state can be determined, in the main, by their health and happiness. [...] 

Further Resolved, That motherhood does not impose obligations only upon women, nor only upon fathers, but upon all of society, as when a woman becomes a mother she becomes the rightful recipient of society’s care and solicitude; and, be it            

Further Resolved, That she has a right to this care and solicitude, which empowers her in her ability to care for her children, and at the least, this right demands that the state protect her from powerful interests that would pressure her, through threats or promises, to reject her elevated position and return her to the ranks of “normal” citizens. …

Context is important. It should be remembered that this high-minded language is being used not to encourage “motherhood,” but to justify preventing any escape from it. The “care and solicitude” it espouses is being employed in the service of men to deny women or other pregnant people the right to control their own reproductive choices. This is not the language of empowerment, but of oppression.

As Tracy notes, the passage of this law is not an end for forced birthers, but a beginning:

Furthermore, the resolution suggests that this is just the first strike by the Republican-led legislature against reproductive rights in the state. “The criminalization of abortion must be only the beginning of West Virginia’s post-Roe initiatives,” it says.

As reported by Lisa Lerer and Elizabeth Dias, writing for The New York Times, the national ban on abortion introduced on Tuesday by Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham is seen merely as a first step.

A 15-week ban would be “the beginning,” said Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America and Students for Life Action, last week as she arrived at the Senate building. Ms. Hawkins said that she has been talking with congressional staff about introducing a federal ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy but called it a “work in progress.”

“Everyone here is focused on November,” she said. “We have our plans for January in place, but we’ve got to get to that point first.”

These people want Gilead, folks. They're not going to stop until they get it. Unless we stop them first.

Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado was speaking at the Truth & Liberty Conference in Woodland Park a few days ago. It’s a conference of Christian nationalists who want their version of Christianity to rule the United States. During her remarks, she decided to quote some scary New Testament passages (probably because all that “love thy neighbor” stuff doesn’t bring in the kind of fundraising dollars that “fire and brimstone” stuff does). She threw around some misapplied scripture full of combative language, like, “God is on our side. The blood has been applied. We are going straight into victory. You are all more than conquerors through God, through Christ who strengthens you every step of the way.”

A highlight of this frightening ludicrosity was when Boebert read from Romans 1:28-32, “Since they didn’t bother to acknowledge God, God quit bothering them and let them run loose. And then all hell broke loose: rampant evil, grabbing and grasping, vicious backstabbing. They made life hell on earth with their envy, wanton killing, bickering, and cheating.”

But when Boebert hit the word “wanton,” she pronounced it as “wonton.” She abruptly says to her audience, “I don’t know what a wonton [sic] killing is. I’m gonna have to look that one up. But it sounds interesting. And I don’t think I want to be a part of it.”

This is me trying to blink moisture into my eyes. The fact that Boebert doesn’t know how to pronounce the word “wanton,” and the fact that she doesn’t know what the word means, is not the issue here. The issue here is that she pretends to be religious and to promote a true end-times evangelical philosophy of the world and the politics that come with it. She does this with almost (or completely) no intellectual curiosity and, worse, without examining (or even reading) what she is willing to say to achieve whatever her ends may be. She is excited to read a fiery excerpt from Paul’s letter to the Romans—but doesn’t even think to figure out what the words mean beforehand.

The responses to Boebert were wonderful.

Before we get into the fun responses to Boebert’s blunder, here’s some fun Bible history for you! The translation Boebert seems to be using is The Message, by retired Presbyterian pastor and author Eugene Peterson. Peterson’s The Message began as small excerpts released in 1993, with a full translation going into publication in 2002. Peterson’s is considered to be on the far end of the “dynamic equivalence” translation range. To (potentially over-)simplify: Translations are approached using what scholars call the “dynamic and formal equivalence spectrum.” The formal end is a one-to-one literal translation of words, etc., while the dynamic end is the idea of readability being the most important function. Of course, the balance between these two poles is what translations are critiqued on.

Petersen’s version uses more “contemporary language” in order to get across the points of the Bible and has been very popularly received. It is one of the translations of the Bible that evangelicals like, and Peterson has shown himself to be a charismatic on-screen personality. Popular group U2’s frontman Bono is a big fan of The Message, and even did a series of short programs on the Bible with Peterson that you can watch. In 2017, possibly because he was hanging out too much with the more liberal Bono, Peterson gave a controversial interview with the Religious News Service where he said he wasn’t particularly opposed to same-sex marriage. He also said this during that interview:

I wouldn’t have said this 20 years ago, but now I know a lot of people who are gay and lesbian and they seem to have as good a spiritual life as I do. I think that kind of debate about lesbians and gays might be over. People who disapprove of it, they’ll probably just go to another church. So we’re in a transition and I think it’s a transition for the best, for the good. I don’t think it’s something that you can parade, but it’s not a right or wrong thing as far as I’m concerned.

What is somewhat ironic here is that, while Evangelicals have used the lines that directly precede the ones Boebert mangles in the video below as “proof” that God hates the LGBTQ+ community, The Message’s translation does not overtly attack the LGBTQ community the way previous versions do.

The following day, Petersen took back the statement that he wouldn’t have a problem marrying same-sex couples if he were still a pastor. That Evangelical money is green like everyone else’s, amiright? Anywho, that’s a little background on the passage Ms. Boebert mangled in her attempt at casting liberals as “mean-spirited, venomous, fork-tongued God-bashers.” You have to admit, it is a fun translation!

It’s a lot to take in. 

Here’s a celebrity!

Here’s a fun one.

Something more simple, but to the point.

Here’s what passes for a deep cut these days where time has become a flat circle.

A fact check?

Some fun.

And finally.

Rep. Lauren Boebert is a terrible person. There are innumerable ways in which this is true. The fact that she is lacking in intelligence is only one excuse for her terrible behavior toward others.

Texas’s ban on abortions after six weeks has been in effect for about a year now, since the U.S. Supreme Court decided, from the shadow docket, to let it happen. Since then, the Court has overturned federal abortion protections, and Texas’s near-total ban has been enacted. Now it appears that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s administration is actively covering up any deaths that have occurred because of the forced birth laws.

The House Chronicle reports that the state’s health officials missed a  deadline to report the first major update of pregnancy-related deaths in the state in almost a decade. The report was supposed to have been issued on Sept. 1, but now has been delayed indefinitely. By “indefinitely,” Texas officials seem to mean “until after the election of 2022 and maybe the one in 2024.”

State lawmakers are working with nine-year-old data on maternal death, and now likely will be until the 2025 biennial legislative session because the state says it probably won’t be able to release the updated information until after next year’s session. Whether the Department of State Health Services (DSHS) is truly just sitting on the data, or the agency really doesn’t have enough staff and enough funding to have finished the review on time, as DSHS commissioner Dr. John Hellerstedt told the state’s Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee, the result is the same. The data isn’t available and won’t be for months, possibly longer.

RELATED: Texas provides a chilling glimpse into our post-Roe future

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“There are a lot of us that want to know whether or not pregnancy in Texas is a death sentence,” Democratic state Rep. Ann Johnson said of the delay. “If we’ve got a higher rate of maternal mortality, we sure want to figure it out. You can’t figure it out if somebody’s sitting on the numbers, and that’s my worry.”

Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa was less measured in response. “Let there be no doubt that Greg Abbott, Dan Patrick, Ken Paxton, and their Republican cronies are withholding this crucial data from Texans because it shows what we have cried out for decades: that restricting abortion care has horrific and fatal consequences for women.”

“By withholding this data from the Texas public who deserve to see it, Texas Republicans are hoping that we won’t be able to see the devastating impacts of their brutal, draconian, extreme abortion ban that has no exceptions for incest or rape,” Hinojosa continued. “We told you—these abortion bans will kill women.”

The state doesn’t have, or won’t release, the data, but researchers at University Hospital and Parkland Hospital—the safety net hospital for Dallas County—have made their findings public. Their sample size was small, because the time window was less than a year, and the patient cohort relatively small. But the finding was clear: the 6-week ban created an almost doubled risk for serious health complications because their doctors delayed care until they were about to die.

They looked at 28 patients with dangerous pregnancies less than 23 weeks along hospitalized from the time the 6-week ban was adopted in September through mid-May. The answers they got from that study—about 43% of patients had serious complications, including hemorrhage or infections, and 32% had to either be put in intensive care, receive a surgical abortion, or have repeated hospitalization.

The delayed treatment as a result of the law meant 57% of the patients had serious health complications. That’s double the number in states where patients are able to get abortions without being on death’s door. This is in an already vulnerable community of patients.

“Because of the intense politicization of these issues nationally, some have questioned, ‘What does the threat of death have to be?’ and ‘How imminent must it be?’” the study reads. “As large academic medical centers prepare to navigate the potential for loss of access to services, more questions are raised than answers.”

There won’t be answers forthcoming from the state, and hospitals and providers will be put in the position of tracking and publicizing the information, exposing the deaths that the Republican leadership in the state is trying to cover up.

Abortion rights, gun safety, and the our planet are all at stake in this election. We must persuade Democratic voters to turn out in November. Click here to volunteer with Vote Forward and write personalized letters to targeted voters on your own schedule from the comfort of your own home, without ever having to talk to anyone.

On May 13, 2019, then-Attorney General Bill Barr let it be known that at Donald Trump’s “request,” he was conducting an investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation. To conduct this investigation, Barr appointed his very own special prosecutor, U.S. Attorney John Durham. For the next three-and-a-half years, Republicans made confident predictions that “Bull” Durham was going to be the man to finally “lock ‘er up.” Surely Durham, unleashed with no deadline, budgetary limit, or constraint on where he looked, would prove conclusively that every conspiracy theory pushed by Trump was true.

But after more than three years and more than $40 million spent, Durham managed to produce just a single charge: accusing Democratic-linked attorney Michael Sussmann of lying to the FBI for not revealing secondhand connections to Hillary Clinton’s campaign when talking to them about Donald Trump’s Russia dealings. In May, a jury found Sussman not guilty of the ridiculous charge.

Now The New York Times reports that the grand jury seated in connection with Durham’s investigation has been allowed to expire. Several members of Durham’s team have already left, and those who remain are now working to complete “a final report.” A report that shows they found absolutely nothing.

Durham had a solid background as a man who would twist any law to assist the Republican cause, such as when he decided there was absolutely nothing wrong with the kidnapping and torture the Bush administration practiced before and during the invasion of Iraq. The U.S. attorney signed on to help to create a false narrative about the Russia investigation, rewriting the order of events and insisting that there was no cause to involve the Department of Justice or the FBI. He even accompanied Barr overseas as they tried to talk U.S. allies into lying about intelligence sources.

In the runup to the 2020 election, Republicans regularly played on the idea that Durham was going to provide them with an “October surprise” by reversing the Russia narrative, absolving Trump of the crimes he committed in his first impeachment, and just generally stomping on Democratic faces. That lust for a coming bombshell grew even greater when Durham let it be known that his investigation had “evolved into a criminal investigation” and that a grand jury had been seated. Surely all those “lock ‘er up” chants were about to be fulfilled.

But before that bombshell could arrive, Durham’s lead investigator left the team, there were indications that Durham’s investigation was coming up dry, and sad news that his report “was unlikely to be ready in time for the election.”

There would be no report. Not in time for the election. Not in the next two years.

In fact, by September 2020 Durham seemed to have already lost the thread of what he was supposed to be investigating and was instead taking a deep look at the Clinton Foundation, apparently checking into Q-anon conspiracy theories about “deep state” connections. He found absolutely nothing. By that point, his investigation had already been underway for 16 months, a time period in which Robert Mueller’s investigation issued 31 indictments, accepted five guilty pleas, filed 190 charges, and successfully prosecuted four cases resulting in prison sentences. 

Even though Durham had nothing to show for nearly two years of searching, Barr, supposedly oh-so-upset over Trump’s lies about the election, gave Trump a parting gift before he left the White House: He changed Durham’s status to that of special counsel, expanding his reach still further, and gave him forever to dig up anything he could. 

For MAGA Americans, the Durham investigation was an answer to prayer. They had a prosecutor who could go anywhere, subpoena anyone, and investigate anything in order to find all those pizza tunnels and lizard men hiding at the bottom of the deep state. It all made for a super tasty bit of revenge fantasy. Just as their Q-notes insisted that Trump was always about to return from Mar-a-Lago and reveal that he had really been in charge all along, John Durham was always about to come smashing through the doors at Democratic Party HQ with a fist full of arrest warrants.

After all, the memes were unstoppable!

Now it seems there finally is going to be a Durham report. And like everything else Durham is done, it’s going to be a pointless exercise in finger-pointing unsupported by evidence and good for nothing but boosting his chances of being a “legal commentator” on Fox News.

Durham’s investigation is coming to an end without ever laying a single charge against Hillary Clinton or anyone with more than a passing connection to her campaign. It’s coming to an end without finding anything like a conspiracy to use the FBI against Trump. It’s coming to an end … and that’s about the only good thing that can be said about it.

This is exactly the conclusion that everyone should have expected on day one. John Durham was hired as a professional witch hunter, and there simply are no witches to find. Everything about the FBI’s investigation into Trump was already well known. There were no secrets. No conspiracy.

That didn’t stop Durham from making that claim in court when prosecuting Sussman. The verdict shows exactly what the jury thought of his unsupported statements.

A month before Barr revealed that Durham’s report wasn’t yet baked, the Senate Intelligence Committee, then led by Republican Sen. Richard Burr, issued its own final report on the Trump campaign’s connection with Russia. That report found more than 100 contacts between Trump’s team and Russian agents. It found that Trump’s campaign directly collaborated with Russia on multiple occasions and in various ways to alter the outcome of a U.S. election. It found that multiple members of Trump’s campaign lied to investigators about these connections. It found that the coordination of Trump’s campaign and the Russian government “represented a grave counterintelligence threat.”

Those are the facts of what happened. Durham was never going to find anything that made this any less true. What Durham needs to report is all the conspiracy theories he investigated and found to be false.

But don’t worry. Just because Durham’s investigation is ending without a single conviction to stand on, that doesn’t mean right-wing media is going to stop claiming he found something huge. They’re certainly not stopping today. In fact, the Durham investigation is likely to go on endlessly in the MAGA mind. If Donald Trump can be secret president, running the country from Mar-a-Lago while Biden wonders why his red button does nothing, then surely John Durham can keep on investigating forever. No grand jury? Who needs one. Durham will be always about to come through Democratic doors, laser grenade and electro-whip of justice in hand.

He’ll always be just one rabbit hole away,

The last sad cry for help ...

What’s the first thing any self-respecting, savvy Democrat should do when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is having a bad week?

Make. It. Worse.

McConnell has lost control of his conference. South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham threw the Republican Senate into disarray with his national abortion ban. Meanwhile, Sen. Rick Scott, the guy who is in charge of electing more Republicans to the Senate, refuses to shut up about his plan to end Social Security and Medicare.

All of which makes it a really great time to press the Democrats’ advantage, make McConnell’s life hell, and put Republicans on the record. On abortion. On marriage equality. On birth control. Hell, on Social Security and Medicare, too. 

Every $1 you give to increase the Democrats’ majority in the Senate makes McConnell cry. Well, okay, not really. But you can still help make his job a lot harder. That’s a good thing.

Listen to this guy. He gets it.

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Graham wants a vote on his national abortion ban and McConnell very much does not, curtly telling reporters Tuesday: “I think most of the members of my conference prefer that this be dealt with at the state level.”

Let’s prove it! Have the vote, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

Meanwhile, the most vulnerable Republican incumbent, Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson, is in personal disarray over the issue of marriage equality, flipping and flopping over whether he would vote for a bill that provides federal, statutory protection to same-sex and interracial marriage. He’s even made spurious accusations against his fellow Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, the Democrat spearheading the bill, saying she “leaked” texts between the two of them on his issue. Johnson is in a frenzy over this bill, not knowing what to do.

Make him vote on it! Now!

Right now, Republican Susan Collins is hard at work with her pretend negotiations to get 10 Republicans on board with that bill. It’s the job McConnell gives her every time: Get involved in bipartisan negotiations, string Democrats along for months, and make sure agreement is never reached.

Don’t let her get away with it again. Make Republicans vote.

Make them vote on the issues that are defining this election. Put them on the record. Make. Them. Vote.

Abortion rights, gun safety, and the our planet are all at stake in this election. We must persuade Democratic voters to turn out in November. Click here to volunteer with Vote Forward and write personalized letters to targeted voters on your own schedule from the comfort of your own home, without ever having to talk to anyone.

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