<An advocacy is pressing the University of Minnesota's Office of Undergraduate Studies after the taxpayer-funded university program opened its paid undergraduate internship program application to only non-white applicants.

The Equal Protection Project of the Legal Insurrection Foundation is calling for the University of Minnesota (UMN) to change its application process and open its summer internship programs to all students regardless of skin color.

"The U. Minnesota segregated summer program is inexcusable, and it's shocking that a major university would so openly make educational opportunities open only to students of a certain skin color," Bill Jacobson, president of the Equal Protection Project (EPP), told Fox News Digital. "EqualProtect.org calls on the university immediately to open-up the summer program to students of all races, ethnicities, and skin colors."

"There is no good form of racial discrimination. Depriving white students of educational opportunities does not promote racial or any other form of justice," Jacobson continued. "U. Minnesota's conduct is inexcusable."

According to the UMN's Office of Undergraduate Studies' website, the Multicultural Summer Research Opportunities Program (MSROP) is, "an intensive 10-week summer program in which undergraduate students of color work full-time with a faculty mentor on a research project."

Students who are selected to participate in the program will receive a $6,000 stipend for personal and research expenses, the program website says. However, to be eligible for the program, applicants must be a person of color.

In its application, the program states that the purpose of the program is "to prepare students of color and Native Americans for graduate school." The application process requests for inquiring students to fill out demographic information.

On Friday, May 19, the EPP sent an official federal civil rights complaint to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights ("OCR") exposing the university's discrimination and demanding for UMN’s discriminatory practices to be discontinued immediately and take all necessary enforcement action.

"We urge the U.S. Department of Education to fully investigate how pervasive segregationist practices are at U. Minnesota. Federal funding should not be used to promote educational opportunities restricted by skin color," Jacobson told Fox News Digital. "Federal funding for U. Minnesota needs to be reevaluated."

The EPP shared that the UMN's internship program violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

"We all thought racial segregation in education as government policy ended with Brown v. Bd. of Education, but unfortunately it has been reborn under the umbrella of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion," Jacobson said. "Whatever you call it, it's immoral and illegal, and U. Minnesota needs to stop treating students differently based on skin color."

"At EqualProtect.org we believe that the remedy for racism can never be more racism, it's equal treatment of all persons without regard to race," Jacobson continued. "Unfortunately, U. Minnesota appears to think that pitting students against each other based on race by making educational opportunities available based on skin color is the answer, but that just compounds the problems."

University of Minnesota and the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment.>

This once, I agree with <gazafan>: pathetic.

<We have a winner.

The most hateful, anti-American quote of the year is here (and it’s only May). It came in response to the question: “Do you believe the military should enlist white nationalists?”

Here’s the awful answer: “Well, they call them that. I call them Americans.”

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) gave that dismissive view of white nationalists as simply Americans in an interview with a home-state radio station, WBHM.

When later asked to explain that poisonous description of his fellow Americans, Tuberville offered this justification: “I look at a white nationalist as a Trump Republican. That’s what we’re called all the time, a MAGA person.”

Is he defending Trump Republicans by proudly labeling them all racists?

Tuberville represents a Republican Party that nationwide is 85 percent white, according to Gallup polling.

Former President Trump, the party’s leading voice, is considered a racist by 52 percent of Americans, including 43 percent of white Americans, according to a 2020 Yahoo News/YouGov poll.

Trump called a Black Lives Matter sign a “symbol of hate.” Some of his supporters carried a Confederate flag during a violent attack on the Capitol.

In 2019, Fox News polling asked, “Does Trump respect racial minorities?” Fifty-two percent of white Americans said “No.”

More disturbing racial attitudes among Republicans continued to emerge last year. Sixty-One percent of Trump voters told Yahoo they agree with the racially loaded “Replacement Theory” that there is an effort to “replace native-born Americans with immigrants and people of color who share their political views.”

It keeps coming. Trump’s biggest challenger in the upcoming Republican presidential primaries, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, signed a bill last week to end all state or federal spending on racial diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) training at the state’s colleges and universities.

Tuberville has also railed against DEI and “woke capitalism.” These complaints are a staple of white grievance on rightwing media shows and in speeches by Republican members of Congress.

Tuberville’s anger at the rise in America’s racial diversity recently led him to claim, incorrectly, that the first Black secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, had “put out an order to stand down [on] all military across the country, saying we are going to run out the white nationalists, people who don’t believe how we believe.”

The truth is that, after the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol by a mob that included several people who had served in the military, Austin wrote a memo asking for military leaders to pick a day for their units to discuss extremism.

Tuberville sees that as evidence of Democrats “attacking the military,” by trying to rid it of “white extremists,” who fail to “believe in our agenda, as [President] Joe Biden’s agenda.”

As WBHM noted in a clarification attached to a transcript of the Tuberville interview, the military’s concern with white nationalists was also evident when Trump was in office....>

<....In October 2020, before Biden took office, the Pentagon sent a report to Congress that “detailed the military’s efforts to keep extremists, particularly fascists, out of the military.”

Tuberville’s race-baiting is part of a larger political strategy for getting attention in a disproportionately white party as America becomes increasingly racially diverse.

Tuberville also has something to say about women in the military. He is blocking military promotions under Secretary Austin to protest reimbursement of military personnel for travel and leave to get abortions, a practice that Tuberville opposes.

Other abortion opponents, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), oppose Tuberville’s refusal to move ahead with the military promotions.

The combination of Tuberville’s attacks on racial diversity and abortion are evidence of his incredible sense of white male privilege being larger than his concern for the unity and readiness of the U.S. military.

He speaks as a white man, 30 percent of the U.S. population, but 62 percent of state and federal officeholders, according to a 2021 report from the Reflective Democracy Campaign.

In 2020 exit polls, Trump won 61 percent of the white male vote compared to Biden’s 38 percent.

Since Richard Nixon used the “Southern Strategy” to win the presidency in 1972, the modern Republican Party has routinely trafficked in racist rhetoric to win elections. Conservative stalwart Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) won his 1990 Senate reelection campaign with the infamous “Black hands” ad implying that his Black opponent, Harvey Gantt, would take jobs from white people and give them to undeserving Blacks.

Four years ago, then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) stripped Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) of his committee assignments because King had told a New York Times reporter that he did not see a problem with terms like “white supremacist” and “white nationalist.”

McCarthy said King’s indifference to such racism was “beneath the dignity of the party of Lincoln and the United States of America.”

McCarthy did the right thing. He acted in line with famed conservative thinker William F. Buckley, who shunned antisemitic conspiracists and racists.

Where is the Republican willing to take on Tuberville?>

<Florida-born and raised former Rep. David Jolly (R-Fla.) is thinking about leaving the Sunshine State because of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R) authoritarian policies.

Jolly, who quit the GOP in 2018, on Sunday said DeSantis’ attacks on migrants, the LGBTQ community and African Americans had left him feeling “unwelcome simply for my embrace of diversity of thought and as an ally” of those groups, even though he’s a “white, evangelical, straight male.”

“Why would I want to raise my kids in an environment in which they’re shamed for embracing diversity of thought and diverse cultures?” Jolly asked on MSNBC.

“I want my children to be exposed to as much diversity as possible and at home my wife and I can orient our family around the value set that’s right for us and prepare our kids to make decisions that are ultimately right for them as adults,” he continued. “That’s not permissible in the state of Florida. You’re shamed for it, you’re unwelcome.”

“So yes, look, we consider every day whether to raise our kids in Florida. And I think it’s representative of thousands upon thousands of Floridians here in the Sunshine State,” Jolly added.

Jolly’s comments echoed those he made to Time magazine, in which he lamented the shift in vibe that Florida has undergone underneath DeSantis’ governorship.

“It’s in the air, it’s everywhere, it’s amazing,” he said of the proliferation of so-called culture wars in the state. “It’s between neighbors, it’s when you go to restaurants, when you go to schools. You’re on one side or the other, and people know it.”

Last year, Jolly warned that DeSantis would as president be “far more dangerous” than Trump.

“He’s more savvy. He’s more coy. And he doesn’t have the pitfalls that Donald Trump does,” Jolly said of DeSantis at the time, adding: “He’s really kneecapping democracy right now for people of Florida, and he will successfully do it on the national stage should he get to the White House.”

DeSantis is imminently expected to join Trump in the 2024 race for the White House.>

<Michael Steele, a former chair of the Republican National Committee, on Saturday mocked Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-Ohio) Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, suggesting the purported probe of bias against conservatives was actually a self-own for the Donald Trump-loving Ohio Republican.

Asked by MSNBC’s Charles Blow if Jordan’s performance in the subcommittee’s recent hearings had helped Democrats prove that it’s in fact Republicans who have weaponized the government, Steele replied:

“Any time Jordan opens his mouth he proves that point. The reality is there’s no substance to any of this. This is just the dog and pony show. It’s like the worst you can come up with in the world where you can just make stuff up.”

“So, you’re trying to connect dots that do not exist,” Steele continued. “You’re grasping about little lines of this and a little line over here about something else, and none of it ever comes together.”

Steele then pointed to former President Donald Trump’s actual weaponization of the justice system during his time in office.

“Didn’t this all occur during Trump’s term in office? It was his Justice Department and FBI. It just kind of proves the point,” he said. “So, are you mad at Trump? Jordan, Jim, are you mad at Trump? Are you mad at Mr. Barr? Who you mad at? What are you trying, where was the weaponization against Trump’s own people by Trump? Because that’s basically what we are looking at here.”>

From the NY Times:

<E. Jean Carroll, who this month won $5 million in damages from former President Donald J. Trump, is now seeking a "very substantial" additional amount in response to his insults on a CNN program just a day after she won her sexual abuse and defamation case.

Ms. Carroll’s filing Monday in Manhattan federal court seeks to intensify the financial pain for Mr. Trump. The jury in her civil case found him liable on May 9 for sexual abuse and defamation. It ordered him to pay Ms. Carroll, a former advice columnist and fixture in Manhattan’s media circles, $2 million for the sexual abuse and $3 million for the defamation.

Monday’s filing came in a separate defamation lawsuit that Ms. Carroll had filed in 2019 against Mr. Trump, 76, which is before the same judge who presided in the civil trial but had been sidetracked by appeals. The older case stemmed from comments Mr. Trump made that year, shortly after she said that he had raped her in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. That lawsuit is still pending.

On May 10, Mr. Trump, who is seeking to regain the presidency, went on CNN and echoed his earlier denials about the episode, calling her account "fake" and a "made-up story." Despite a photograph showing them together, he claimed again that he had never met Ms. Carroll, 79, called her a “wack job” and said the recent civil trial was "a rigged deal."

The court filing on Monday argues Mr. Trump’s defamatory statements following the verdict "show the depth of his malice toward Carroll, since it is hard to imagine defamatory conduct that could possibly be more motivated by hatred, ill will or spite."

"This conduct supports a very substantial punitive damages award in Carroll’s favor both to punish Trump, to deter him from engaging in further defamation, and to deter others from doing the same," the filing says.

Mr. Trump continues to fight the jury’s decision. After the verdict, his lawyer Joseph Tacopina filed a notice of appeal.

Ms. Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta A. Kaplan, said in a brief interview Monday that Mr. Trump’s statements on CNN, "literally the day after the verdict," made it all the more important for Ms. Carroll to pursue the pending defamation lawsuit.

<The first time Gina Bisignano ran afoul of the law in Washington, D.C., she was recorded standing on a ledge in front of a broken window on the U.S. Capitol Building’s West Terrace, adorned in a Louis Vuitton sweater and Chanel boots. “We the people are not going to take it anymore. You are not going to take away our Trumpy Bear!” the Beverly Hills cosmetologist bellowed through a bullhorn on Jan. 6.

“Everybody, we need gas masks. We need weapons. We need strong, angry patriots to help our boys, they don’t want to leave. We need protection,” she yelled, her mascara running from tear gas.

Two years and multiple criminal charges later, Bisignano returned to Washington on March 1 of this year — and promptly ran afoul of the law again. Bisignano’s return journey to D.C. involved a deal she struck with prosecutors in which she pleaded guilty to four misdemeanors and two felonies and agreed to cooperate with investigators and the Department of Justice in return for special considerations at sentencing.

Nominally in D.C. to testify against a former associate, Bisignano took a detour to a vigil held near the jail where several dozen alleged insurrectionists were awaiting their trials. There, she shared details of her testimony in an ongoing trial, spoke with a convicted Jan. 6 felon, and admitted to hanging out with other Jan. 6 participants.

All of these were violations of the terms of her pre-trial release, and all of them — again — were caught on camera. But despite her Jan. 6 actions and her pre-trial agreement violations, Bisignano is not in jail. Instead, she’s on a particularly lenient version of house arrest as she awaits trial after withdrawing her guilty plea for felony obstruction of an official proceeding. She has already pleaded guilty to six counts, including felony civil disorder, and awaits sentencing after her felony trial concludes.

The supposed unjust treatment and persecution of Jan. 6 participants has become core to the prevailing conservative counter-narrative around the violent riot, an account that characterizes the participants as “political prisoners.” But contrary to the claims of heavy-handed political persecution, cases like Bisignano show how, in some instances, the legal system has afforded Jan. 6 defendants a far more judicious process than standard federal criminal defendants. And indeed, many experts believe the insurrectionists have been given far softer treatment than one might expect for attempting to storm the Capitol to block the certification of a presidential election.

“As a general trend, the January 6 people, especially given the violent nature of their protest, got off quite lightly in terms of the charges they face [and] the average sentence they face when they plead guilty and/or are found guilty,” says Wadie Said, a former federal public defender who studies national security prosecutions at the University of South Carolina School of Law. “That doesn’t mean that the result is always in their favor or that they don’t get punished, but just that their claims are certainly heard more, and their position certainly seems to be understood a little bit more.”

Early indications suggest that insurrectionists are, in fact, getting off easy. Data examined by Slate on the first anniversary of the insurrection found that Jan. 6 defendants were receiving significantly lighter sentences than what prosecutors have asked for. They also, at least as of the one-year mark, enjoyed a far higher rate of pretrial release — 70 percent — than other federal defendants, only 32 percent of whom were granted pretrial release.

Even outside of the immediate political context, other demographic factors may play a role in the disparate treatment, says Georgetown Law Professor Vida Johnson. Federal criminal defendants are disproportionately young, male people of color, and largely face charges related to drug and immigration violations — crimes that are highly racialized in their own right — whereas 93 percent of charged Jan. 6 participants are white, according to the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to comment, citing the ongoing matter. In response to a request for comment, Bisignano’s lawyer Charles Peruto tells Rolling Stone, “Any comment I give would just add to the over exposure this defendant has received. Therefore, I feel it’s best to do all of my talking in court.”....>

<....For obvious reasons, Bisignano received almost immediate and arguably disproportionate attention following the Capitol breach. In an interview with The Beverly Hills Courier following the riot, she said that she was initially unaware of plans to breach the Capitol. “I didn’t know we were storming the Capitol,” she recalled thinking. “I should have dressed different.”

This sartorial claim of innocence did not seem to persuade investigators, and Bisignano was soon arrested and charged with six misdemeanors and two felonies.

Among the first wave of insurrectionists charged for their actions, Bisignano faced both a public and a legal system at the zenith of its outrage and concern over the assault. With the indictment of more central actors like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers more than a year away, Bisignano does appear to have had the book thrown at her at first. A magistrate judge imposing a $170,000 bail on her and even after making bail, a federal judge ordered her back in custody, where she spent the next month.

But Bisignano’s fortunes improved as Jan. 6 went from a source of shame among the right to a cause célèbre.

The legal tides turned for her in August 2021 when she reached a deal with prosecutors, pleading guilty to six of the counts, including two felonies, and agreeing to cooperate with the Department of Justice and investigators. In court before Judge Carl J. Nichols, Bisignano expressed contrition for her actions on the day. At that point, she was looking at between 41 to 51 months in federal prison, with hopes of receiving a lighter sentence for her help.

But the relationship between Bisignano and prosecutors quickly deteriorated, with audio leaking in February 2022 of a conversation she had with supporters in which she spoke out against her plea deal and backtracked on her apology to Judge Nichols. Her attorney soon filed to undo her guilty plea on the felony count of obstructing an official proceeding.

Yet even with questions surrounding Bisignano’s cooperation, in a May 4 hearing concerning her pretrial violations and plea deal, Judge Nichols allowed Bisignano to back out of the guilty plea for felony obstruction of an official proceeding. Bisignano’s usefulness as a witness had also come into question, with the judge presiding over a separate case in which she provided testimony describing Bisignano as a “hot mess” and one of the worst witnesses she had ever seen take the stand.

Said characterizes the ruling as “unusual,” explaining that defendants face a high burden to reverse a guilty plea.

Ironically, the apparent latitude afforded to Bisignano by her judge has now placed her in more legal jeopardy, with a guilty verdict potentially delivering a higher sentence than she would have received as part of her deal with prosecutors.

Nichols’ ruling on her guilty plea came alongside a hearing on Bisignano’s many pretrial violations stemming from what prosecutors termed the “January 6 Block Party.”....>

<....Bisignano had long taken a liberal interpretation of her pretrial release agreement, which explicitly forbids “communications with anyone who was at the event on January 6, 2021,” speaking about the case with anyone aside from her “attorney, [the] government, and people that are directly associated with your case,” and maintaining a presence on social media. Furthermore, the terms exhort her to “avoid all contact, directly or indirectly, with any person who is or may be a victim or witness in the investigation or prosecution.”

Her visit to Washington wasn’t even the first time Bisignano had rallied on behalf of Jan. 6 participants.

A year to the day after the insurrection, on Jan. 6, 2022, Bisignano — her face partially covered by a pink Louis Vuitton scarf — appeared at a Beverly Hills rally held in honor of Ashli Babbitt, who was fatally shot by police while attempting to get closer to lawmakers. At least one other Jan. 6 participant was present at the rally. Bisignano also went to a May 2022 rally organized by a convicted Jan. 6 participant, Brandon Straka, and was caught on camera speaking with Siaka Massaquoi, an actor who entered the Capitol on Jan. 6.

It’s unclear whether prosecutors are aware of these incidents. While prosecutors cite two documents in reference to other violations, they remain restricted to the public.

But Bisignano did not have the same luck when she went to the March block party in Washington this year.

Broadcast nightly via livestream, the festive vigil featured live music, barbecue, and pie — and even once received a call from Donald Trump, who inveighed that Jan. 6 prisoners “are being treated very, very unfairly” — an increasingly common refrain among conservative politicians and their base.

Capitalizing on the growing clout of the insurrectionists, a MAGA rapper joined the vigil on March 1 to film a music video with Micki Witthoeft, the mother of Ashli Babbitt, who was shot by Capitol police while attempting to enter the Speaker’s Lobby. (“They left blood on the Capitol steps, yeah, they set us up / Patriots fightin’ for freedom, yeah we ain’t lettin’ up / I’m a god fearing soldier, I keep my weapons up / Can’t put no needle in my arm ‘cause I’m a pure blood.”)

Bisignano herself makes a couple of appearances in the music video. On the livestream of the event, she speaks to the crowd and tearfully proclaims Ashli Babbitt “a fallen hero,” rails against the “one world agenda,” and offers a rambling summary of the testimony she had proffered in court earlier that day. Later in the night, she talks on speakerphone with Shane Jenkins, a Jan. 6 rioter convicted of smashing a window with a tomahawk and throwing objects like a desk drawer at Capitol Police.

All of this, it goes without saying, violated her pretrial release agreement — a fact Bisignano herself is caught acknowledging on camera. “I’m on pretrial, I’m not supposed to be here,” she tells another attendee, skewer of meat in hand.

“My family’s angry at me because I hang out with January 6 people and I’m on pretrial,” she adds, apparently admitting to more pretrial violations.

“All the other January 6 people do, too,” the attendee responds sympathetically.

Ultimately, Bisignano paid a price for attending the rally, though not a particularly steep one: Judge Nichols reinstated Bisignano’s house arrest, limiting her to her Beverly Hills condominium except for work, church, and doctor’s appointments.>

<For retail investors he is one of the most astute financiers.

They watch each of his messages on social networks in hopes of obtaining keys to investments.

Michael Burry in 15 years has become one of the most listened-to financiers on Wall Street. The 2008 financial crisis made him a legend and an example to follow in defiance of standard practices in finance.

The 2015 film "The Big Short" describes how the hedge-fund manager, who had no particular expertise in finance and real estate, came to understand that the sector had become a sandcastle. Financiers and bankers had created exotic mortgage products issued to financially fragile households and borrowers with poor credit.

Burry decided to bet that the subprime-mortgage market would collapse -- hence the name "Big Short." (Short sales on securities are bets on price declines.)

History proved him right and the move made Burry something of a Wall Street oracle. He embraced this role, judging by his Twitter handle, which is Cassandra B.C. For traders and risk-takers, he is a kind of party spoiler.

It is therefore quite logical that in March eyes turned to him when the current crisis of banking confidence started with a bank run on Silicon Valley Bank (SIVB) - Get Free Report.

The Santa Clara, Calif., bank played a central role in the economy and startups. It had to close due to a bank run caused by its announcement that it would raise $2.25 billion to cover a net loss of $1.8 billion related to the sale of bonds and other securities in its portfolio.

Burry Makes Huge Gamble on First Republic Bank

Since then, fears have spread throughout the banking sector, with investors fearing contagion. SVB failed on March 10, followed two days later by Signature Bank in New York (SBNY) - Get Free Report.

After warning that another major bank was going to collapse, Burry changed his mind. The founder of Scion Asset Management said that the current crisis did not present any real danger and could be resolved very quickly.

"This crisis could resolve very quickly," the famous investor posted on Twitter on Mar. 14. "I am not seeing true danger here."

Consistent with his bullish statements on the banking sector, Burry bet on the banks, anticipating their stock market rebound after the panic subsides....>

<....He held 850,000 shares of New York Community Bank worth $7.68 million as of Mar. 31, and 184,900 shares of Huntington Bancshares, valued at $2.07 million, according to regulatory filings.

He also acquired 250,000 PacWest shares, valued at $2.4 million and 125,000 shares of Western Alliance Bancorp, valued at $4.44 million as of Mar. 31. Finally, he bought 125,000 Wells Fargo shares, valued at $4.67 million and 75,000 Capital One shares, worth $7.2 million.

Most striking, however, is that the iconic investor bet on First Republic Bank. He bought 150,000 shares of the San Francisco-based bank, valued at $2.1 million as of March 31. The problem is that First Republic Bank was seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. at the end of April and was sold to JPMorgan Chase on May 1. This transaction wiped out FRC shareholders.

Whether Burry still held shares in First Republic Bank when the bank was sold off to JPMorgan Chase is unclear. Perhaps he had sold his shares before May 1. But if he kept them in line with his mid-March optimism on the banks, he got a very bad deal.

The other question this transaction raises is what Burry saw in First Republic Bank to persuade him to gamble on a bank rebound when most investors had opted for caution.

Why First Republic Bank Failed

At the time of its failure, which was the second largest bank failure in U.S. history after Washington Mutual in 2008, First Republic Bank had seen its stock plummet more than 90% since SVB collapsed.

First Republic stock went from $121.89 on Dec.30, 2022 to $3.51 on April 28, 2023, the last trading session before the company was sold to JPMorgan.

First Republic Bank, which was founded in 1985 by Jim Herbert, has been a victim of its business model, which consisted of collecting large deposits from rich clients and paying little or no interest on them.

The bank, in turn, offered low-interest mortgages to those very some customers along with personalized service. The strategy worked for a very long time.

The firm had more than $200 billion in assets at the end of 2022, compared to $88 billion in assets at the end of 2017, which made it the U.S.'s 14th-largest lender.

But when the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates to fight stubborn inflation, this business model showed its limits. Customers began to panic and rushed to withdraw their funds.

What also fueled the panic is that the FDIC guarantees deposits up to a maximum $250,000. All individuals with more than $250,000 in their accounts would lose anything above the FDIC threshold if the bank defaulted.

First Republic Bank came up with a turnaround plan but the 41% drop in deposits in the first quarter ended up scaring investors away and signaling the end of the California bank as an independent entity.>

<Conventional wisdom says you should never pick a fight you can't afford to lose — but looking at the ongoing feud between Disney and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida looks like it's on shaky ground.

After more than a year of escalation, Disney's latest move was to scrap a $1 billion dollar development in Florida. The corporate campus could have brought more than 2,000 well-paying jobs to the Sunshine State, but reports said Disney's current relationship with Florida was one of several reasons the project was abandoned.

The news renewed questions over the wisdom of picking a fight with one of Florida's largest employers, and whether or not the state and the governor, or the company, have more to lose.

"I think DeSantis has more to lose, as this incident made apparent, depending on whether, as a fairly skilled politician, he can somehow put a good face on this," Richard Foglesong, a leading expert on Walt Disney World's history and politics, told Insider last week. Foglesong authored the 2003 book "Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando."

DeSantis has already faced political blowback for the Disney spat, including accusations from fellow Republicans that the 2024 hopeful isn't friendly to business and has lost his state jobs. Pending how the ongoing fight plays out, Florida could lose a lot more due to how much it benefits economically from Disney.

Disney is an economic powerhouse in Florida

A 2019 study by Oxford Economics found Orlando tourism generated $75.2 billion for central Florida in 2018. While that number includes other attractions, Disney dominates the area's tourism with four theme parks and two water parks.

The study also found Orlando tourism accounted for nearly half a million jobs and brought in $5.8 billion in state and local tax revenue that goes towards public safety, infrastructure, schools, and more.

Disney alone says it employs 75,000 people in Florida, making it the state's second-largest private employer behind the Publix grocery store chain, according to the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity.

And Disney Cruise Line ships leave from three different ports in Florida.

Theme parks are just part of Disney's business

Disney pulls in more revenue from its media and entertainment segment, which made $55 billion in revenue in the 2022 fiscal year. Disney parks, experiences, and products, in comparison, pulled in $28.7 billion, or around 33% of the company's total revenue....>

<....And although Disney's Florida resort is its most popular location, bringing in a whopping 58 million people annually between its four parks, the company has many other locations, including internationally, that draw tens of millions of people each year.

Disneyland in Anaheim drew around 28.5 million visitors between its two parks in 2019. Disneyland Paris attracted around 9.7 million people in the same year, while Shanghai Disneyland (which Disney owns 43% of) brought in 11.2 million. Tokyo Disneyland and Tokyo DisneySea — which are owned by the Oriental Land Company with intellectual property licensed from Disney — had nearly 32.7 million visitors between them in 2019. Hong Kong Disneyland (which Disney owns 48% of) brought in 6.5 million visitors in the 2019 fiscal year.

Disney also has the Disney Cruise Line, which is set to expand to Southeast Asia in 2025.

All to say, Disney has options on where to invest or expand, which could have major consequences for Florida.

If Disney focuses its investment elsewhere, other tourist attractions in Florida could suffer

As Foglesong previously told Insider, Disney is stuck in central Florida. There's simply too much brick-and-mortar investment for the theme park and resort to be moved elsewhere.

Although Disney can't leave the state, Foglesong said "they can lower their replenishment investment in the Disney World theme park."

He noted that an overwhelming number — about 70% — of Disney World guests are repeat visitors. That's a credit to Disney but also provides added pressure to keep investing in the Florida resort or risk losing customers, which in turn could hurt Orlando's economy and cause a lose-lose situation for both the state and the company — unless Disney can make up the money elsewhere.

"The challenging question is how many times will guests come back to see the same rides and attractions?" Foglesong said, adding that Disney draws back repeat visitors in part because it is constantly expanding. "One could credibly argue that the buoyancy of the Orlando economy depends upon Disney's investment, or reinvestment, in new rides and attractions because absent that, people won't come back."

As the state's largest tourist attraction, Disney provides a major boon to other tourism and tourism-adjacent businesses, as well as the entire economy of central Florida. Choosing not to reinvest in its Florida resort could hurt not only Disney's own annual visitation numbers but those of neighboring theme parks and businesses as well.

"The people who come may be attracted by Disney, but they don't spend seven days there," Foglesong said, adding the average Disney visitor might spend four days at Disney parks, two at Universal Studios, and one at Sea World, for example.

Right now it seems that — apart from the $1 billion corporate campus — Disney continues to invest in Florida.

Josh D'Amaro, Disney's parks chief, said Monday the company still plans to spend $17 billion in Florida over the next decade and that the fight with DeSantis has not hurt Disney's business, according to Deadline.

However, if DeSantis's campaign against Disney ultimately results in less investment in Florida, it won't just be the House of the Mouse that loses visitors.

"They won't just not come back to Disney World," Foglesong added. "They won't come back to Sea World, they won't come back to Universal Studios, they won't come back to the mom-and-pop roadside tourists attractions.">

<Picture it, if you will, it's January 21, 2025 and Donald Trump has just been inaugurated for his second term after the Biden interregnum. Yes, it would be a horrific time, not unlike those first horrible weeks in 2017 when over half the country struggled to grasp how it was possible that an ignorant, bombastic, game show host had eked out a win through an electoral college fluke. But those feelings of despair are where the similarities will end. The next Trump administration will be ready to hit the ground running with their leader's Retribution Agenda and it won't be because Trump is any more effective at presidential leadership. It will be because right-wing institutions will have spent their four years in the wilderness preparing for their chance to enact a radical overhaul of the federal government unlike anything we've ever seen in this country.

Even some members of the GOP establishment are getting nervous:

There was always talk of this among the original Trumpers, even though the president himself didn't have a clue what they were talking about. Recall former adviser Steve Bannon bellowing about the "deconstruction of the administrative state" and former Attorney General Bill Barr's assertions of unchecked executive power for example. As it happened, Trump was so far in over his head and ran such a chaotic, scandal-filled administration that they were unable to institute many systematic changes to test their theories but they came away with the knowledge that given another chance with a corrupt demagogue they could make changes to the system that could help them stay in power indefinitely.

Republicans have come to believe that the entire federal government is filled with woke liberals.

There has been a cascade of stories discussing the poor roll out of Trump's campaign and how he's still stuck in the repetitive groove of his grievances over the 2016 campaign and his loss in 2020. His appearance on CNN's generous kick-off campaign rally for him a couple of weeks ago reinforced that idea, as he repeated all his punch lines and the audience cheered and clapped ecstatically. It certainly left the impression that if Trump were to win the election next year we would be in for a repeat of his first term: turmoil, scandal and ineptitude in which the most terrifying consequence is that a crisis hits or someone makes a catastrophic error. Last time, you'll recall, we got hit with the first deadly global pandemic in a hundred years and Trump publicly told America to take unproven snake oil cures and instructed scientists to look into having people ingest disinfectants since they kill the virus on surfaces.

Many people died and many more families were decimated but I fear that too many Americans may think that a rerun of the The Trump Show won't be a catastrophe since most of us survived his tenure. But it won't be a rerun. Since the day Trump left the White House for his exile at Mar-a-Lago, well-funded right-wing organizations have been planning the return to power with a fully developed agenda and plan to enact it. All they have to do is put the Sharpie in Trump's hand to sign what they put in front of him after which he can run out to the cameras and whine and complain about whomever is his target that day as his minions turn the executive branch into a full functioning partisan operation....>

<....Last summer, Axios' Jonathan Swan wrote a long report on what they've been planning:

The impact could go well beyond typical conservative targets such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Internal Revenue Service. Trump allies are working on plans that would potentially strip layers at the Justice Department — including the FBI, and reaching into national security, intelligence, the State Department and the Pentagon, sources close to the former president say...The heart of the plan is derived from an executive order known as "Schedule F," developed and refined in secret over most of the second half of Trump's term and launched 13 days before the 2020 election.

Schedule F is an executive order which would reassign potentially tens of thousands of federal employees they determine to have policy influence so they would lose their civil service protections. Republicans have come to believe that the entire federal government is filled with woke liberals intent on depriving them of their natural right to rule without restraint.

How we let fascism creep in

The plan is being produced by a number of Republican groups and coordinated by some names with which you are no doubt familiar, like former Justice Department (DOJ) lawyer Jeffrey Clark, former Devin Nunes and Pentagon staffer Kash Patel, and former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows all of whom are caught up in Trump's legal messes as well. They plan to salt every department with GOP toadies from the military to the DOJ to the Department of Education to the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. And conservative organizations like the Heritage Foundation are drawing up lists of candidates. (That same right-wing institution similarly staffed the provisional government in Iraq with young neocons to disastrous results.)

The beauty of this plan is that it doesn't actually matter if Trump wins again. They can use it just as easily for another Republican. But it would be especially well-suited for Trump's principal rival Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Time Magazine's Molly Ball reported on DeSantis' desire to use every bit of executive power to achieve his goals:

"One of my first orders of business after getting elected was to have my transition team amass an exhaustive list of all the constitutional, statutory, and customary powers of the governor," he writes in The Courage to Be Free. "I wanted to be sure that I was using every lever available to advance our priorities." Aides from the time have corroborated this account, describing a thick binder of information that DeSantis proceeded to devour.

There's no need to reiterate all the ways in which he uses every lever and coerces the legislature to enact the most extreme agenda of any state in America and now promises to take it national. Should he win he will run with the Schedule F plan and probably come up with a few of his own. This is what defines him as a political leader.

In fact, from the sound of all the Republicans on the trail extolling the alleged "bombshell" that's actually a dud of the Durham Report as if it's some huge indictment of the "deep state" that has to be completely dismantled, it's obvious that this is going to be a Republican Party project, not a Trump project at all. They are all organizing themselves around blatant lies about elections, democracy, law and justice, health, foreign policy and national security and their partisan institutions are plotting to use those lies to remake the federal government.

It's an ambitious plan but with the courts on their side and a congressional majority, it's eminently doable. It's imperative that the American people do not let them attain power again as long as this is their agenda or there may be no going back.>

<How did the internet become so puritanical? On social media, outspoken anti-sex advocates increasingly cry “gross” at everything from R-rated rom-coms to fictional characters and queer people having sex to consenting adults with slight age gaps to dating short people. They see oversexualization in just about everything. They often accuse the things they dislike of being coded fronts for pedophilia, and the people who enjoy those things of being sexual predators. These social media users frequently form enclaves that turn as nightmarish and troubling as the things they’re ostensibly trying to police.

This dovetails with what we’re being told right now about Gen Z and sex: They’re having less casual sex, they hate dating, they’re more reserved about relationships in general. It’s easy to pigeonhole online anti-sex police as being teens and young adults, a.k.a. “puriteens.” Because so much of this comes down to carnal horror, you might assume that everyone who’s horrified is a teen who just hasn’t arrived at a mature view of sex and other adult activity. Such anti-sex zeal increasingly forces sex-positive communities back into the internet’s underground. It also aids and abets the larger cultural shift toward regressive attitudes and censorship of sexual minorities and sex-positive content.

Yet overwhelmingly, the common thread among this new generation of “antis” — a broad label for people who are opposed to sexual content in media — isn’t that they are minors who are scared of sex. It’s that none of them distinguish between fictional harm and real-world harm. That is, regardless of their ages, they believe fiction not only can have a real-world impact, but that it always has a real-world impact.

To understand how we got here, we have to look at the wellspring from which much of the internet’s creative impulses flow: online fandom, where superusers gather to celebrate, write fanfiction, and create fan art about the media and characters they love. On Tumblr and Twitter, where so much fandom discourse happens, this conversation about sexual content in media has spawned an entire movement called “anti-fandom.” In the wake of the 2018 passage of the internet child protection bill FOSTA-SESTA in the US, fandom’s proudly sex-positive culture has increasingly become sanitized, homogenized, and erased — which has allowed the puritanical voices of these “anti-fans” to take their place.

This trend would be bad news in any online community, but it’s been especially heady and unwieldy in fandom, an entire culture built around feeling things strongly, not rationally. The result is one of the unlikeliest fronts of the culture war: an internet community, once the bastion of delightful deviance and subversion, being completely overtaken by a new form of purity culture often spearheaded by people who would otherwise describe themselves as politically liberal.

Though this may sound like a niche fandom issue, this modern puritanism has spread far into the wider culture, intersecting with both a broader media illiteracy and a moral panic that crosses the political spectrum.

It’s making it more and more impossible to have a healthy discourse about sex at all.

The weaponization of social justice and the rise of the “anti-fandom”

Above all else, fans are passionate. Fandom is where the internet houses some of its most engaged communities — where fans flock to celebrate their favorite stories, create fan works, carry on intense discussions, and argue over which fictional or celebrity relationships they’re shipping.....>

<....During the first half of the 2010s, that passion meant that fans were effectively cultural superspreaders, proselytizing their favorites, from Marvel to K-pop to Netflix, far and wide. Their cultural influence, especially through the Tumblr-to-BuzzFeed pipeline, was outsize. You may not have been on Tumblr then, but its fandom-infused language and culture likely heavily influenced your internet experience just the same.

This trend would be bad for any online community, but fandom is an entire culture built around feeling things strongly, not rationally

Part of what Tumblr effortlessly exported, along with its fannish sensibility, was its users’ awareness of social justice concepts and language. The Tumblr culture of the early 2010s rapidly shifted an entire generation of social media users toward the left. That shift started not on Tumblr, but on LiveJournal, thanks to a widespread, year-long conversation about racism in geek culture in 2009 that became known as RaceFail. In 2010, LiveJournal became frequently nonfunctional due to intermittent hacker attacks, which sent thousands of displaced fans to Tumblr. With them, they brought all of their recent conversations about race and social justice. The result was an unexpected culture clash between the fandom teens of still-new Tumblr and the fandom adults of LiveJournal. Many Tumblr users, regardless of age and academic experience, got crash courses in progressive ideology and everything from socialism to structuralism — but that education wasn’t always easy or welcome.

“I was on Tumblr as the migration was happening,” journalist Allegra Rosenberg told me. “I distinctly remember the shift in tenor of doing fandom on Tumblr in late 2010, early 2011 as the LiveJournal adults came over, bringing with them the language of feminism, the language of social justice, intersectionality.”

“I remember feeling almost scared or offended,” Rosenberg said, “because I was like, you guys are trying to make this serious. We’re just making memes. I was just a kid and I felt kind of threatened by what I perceived to be this atmosphere of seriousness, because I don’t think I really understood what had been going on over there.”

The language of social justice may have been revelatory to many fans, but it also became fodder for zealotry and demagoguery. It frequently became a double-edged sword, weaponized by and against the people using it. Members of the alt-right started using the phrase “social justice warrior” to mockingly describe zealous Tumblr users who performed what they saw as shallow, overly aggressive, or inauthentic versions of progressive politics.

Tumblr teens also learned to weaponize this language, often through performativity that became a core part of 2010s fandom culture. This coincided with the rise of “call-out culture.” Blogs such as Your Fave Is Problematic typified what some dubbed Tumblr’s “accountability culture” by simply listing things various beloved celebrities, usually popular within geek culture, had done that were bad or troubling.

Call-out culture predated and existed independently from cancel culture. Its goal was always to raise awareness, not prompt mass harassment or boycotts, but one easily begets the other. Fans of the era adopted an eagerness to label absolutely everything even slightly complicated as “problematic,” and that easily translated into harassment of others who still enjoyed those now-tainted stories and creators.

Once fans had been given the tools of social media harassment and the moral motivation of social justice, they waged war on each other — often for things that only nominally had to do with social justice and were instead about things like fandom shipping and character biases. These fights often obscured or further marginalized actual fans of color and queer fans, all in the name of fighting on their behalf.

Soon, this tendency converged with “antis” in fandom: people who were identified primarily not through their love of a thing but for their hatred of it. Over the back half of the 2010s, the notion of what an “anti” was began to shift away from, say, K-pop stans hating on a specific K-pop star, toward broad opposition to various fandom ideologies and practices. This usually comes down to two things: sexualized content and shipping. Especially shipping.....>

<....How ship wars led to a war on shipping, which led to a war on all fictional sex

Few things in fandom are more polarizing than who a character falls in love with or ends up with or who you want them to end up with instead. More has been won and lost in the name of ship wars — fans fighting over which ship is the best — than time could detail. Specifically, in the Voltron fandom in 2016, hatred for a single ship on the animated TV show reportedly led to the creation of an entirely new concept in fandom: the idea of being “anti-ship” and “pro-ship.” The stated goal of this fight was to call out and oppose alleged pedophiles in fandom. But the actual goal was to wage war against one specific pairing by demonizing as a pedophile anyone who shipped it. (The characters in question, Shiro and Keith, were approximately 25 and 18, respectively, in the show’s first season.)

Fans devoted to this “problematic” ship gradually got shorthanded as “pro-ship,” which then became a generalized label for all shippers. In other words, if you shipped characters in fandom — which is arguably the dominant reason most people are in fandom — then you were suddenly on notice as being harmful.

“It’s just cartoons at the end of the day”

To be blunt, this is bonkers. The act of wanting two characters to fall madly in love, and celebrating when they do, is a natural response to fiction. If you were, say, a person who read or watched The Hunger Games and rooted for Peeta and Katniss, this group might brand you as problematic for shipping two teenagers.

Yet shipping is also often explicitly sexual, which makes it prone to distortion by people who want a moral excuse to oppose shipping. Just as with the original Voltron fandom ship war that presaged much of this discourse, people who are “anti-ship” often start out by seeking to attack specific ships based on their personal bias. Rather than acknowledging that bias, however, they instead frame fictional depictions of sex as harmful. This allows them to paint not only the ship they hate, but all ships, and shipping itself, as harmful.

It may sound hard to comprehend that anyone could take this rhetoric seriously, but the deeply emotional and accusatory nature of calling someone a pedophile makes it wildly effective. (Multiple sources I talked to for this article told me of unexpectedly vicious personal encounters with purity culture; everything from online accusations to a real-life friend group considering ostracization over suspicions the source was “pro-ship.”)

Sam Aburime, an artist and independent fan scholar who has dedicated years to tracking anti-fandom examples, argues that the movement is part of the changing generational nature of fandom. Older Gen Z and younger millennials who learned the language of social justice on Tumblr are now teaching younger generations how to wield those concepts for ill. “I think they grew up with faux activism as it was starting online,” Aburime told me, “where it was like, ‘if you like this, or if you don’t do this, you’re a bad person,’ when it’s just cartoons at the end of the day.”

FOSTA-SESTA made this conversation so much worse

It’s not a coincidence that anti-fandom discourse, which has single-handedly reframed decades of sex positivity in fandom, has also coincided with a broader crackdown on sex positivity across the internet.

Originally, Tumblr culture’s nuanced language around politics and accountability coexisted alongside a rampant, thriving, sexually explicit counterculture. Fans and non-fans, many of whom were queer, sex educators, and/or sex workers, enjoyed a healthy relationship to sexual expression during this era. While Tumblr became notorious for hosting porn, the reality was that the permissiveness of Tumblr’s adult content policies made it a safe space for many marginalized communities.

That all changed with the passage of the child protection bill FOSTA-SESTA in 2018. FOSTA heralded a sweeping crackdown on online adult content; as part of the fallout, huge swaths of the sex-positive internet were wiped out in the name of protecting children. Among those decimated communities were sex workers and sex educators on Tumblr, as well as the legions of users, many of whom were queer and genderqueer, who sought self-expression and explored their identities through sexualized content. Overnight, via its infamous ban on porn, Tumblr went from being a notably horny platform to a site full of regressive, paranoid, wary fans who were obsessed with spotting pedophilia and illicit sexual materials everywhere and anywhere — even if the things they deemed immoral and illicit were nowhere close to illegal....>

<....FOSTA seems to have weakened the natural resistance of fandom and internet culture at large to the US’s broader puritanical, anti-sex culture. The purity movement formally began in the ’90s within evangelical culture as a way of normalizing an abstinence-only approach to sex, especially among teens. In the modern era, the language of this movement has converged with that of trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), who enact a regressive approach to sex and gender expression.

“If you go into certain radfem forums, you’ll see language mirrored one-to-one,” Aburime told me, describing the way TERF rhetoric overlaps with and sometimes infiltrates fandom spaces. “It’s almost like a game — slipping some ideology secretly” into a fannish experience. “It’s misinformation under the guise of activism.” Like the US’s larger current moral panic over drag shows, LGBTQ people, and “groomers,” fandom’s culture has regressed toward sexual repression, attacks on sexual minorities, and censorship of art made by marginalized people. The shifts happening in fandom and across the internet help exacerbate this larger cultural shift.

“There’s no meaningful difference to me between a right winger who calls me a pedo because I’m trans and an antishipper that calls me a pedo because I read Homestuck,” said Farrah, a 33-year-old fan from North Carolina whose full name has been withheld at their request, referring to the famously weird webcomic. “They’re both putting me and people like me in a dangerous position.”

“It’s misinformation under the guise of activism”

“It’s hard to say where fandom starts and where everything else begins,” Rosenberg told me. She identifies the root of the shift as a core of “emotion and disgust” in response to various types of sexualized content, but while this response to sexual deviance has always existed, the internet allows fans to express their disgust in new ways, and the rise of anti-fandom allows fans to pathologize all kinds of things — from garden-variety kink to age gaps and sexualized cartoons.

Another major factor in the intensification of all this is Twitter, specifically the mass migration of many fandom cultures to Twitter over the last decade. “When these cultures moved to Twitter and were exposed to literally everybody and everything,” Rosenberg said, “the stakes were higher, in being on the so-called winning team.” Twitter also allowed fans to codify and systematize harassment through the use of platform-specific tools like hashtags and mass-brigading by bots, as we saw with the Depp-Heard trial last year. As Musk-era Twitter’s abuse team has dwindled, multiple sources told me they have been using the platform less, retreating into siloed spaces like private Discord servers and locked mailing lists or Facebook groups. Yet those siloed spaces do little to solve the problems; instead, they typically reinforce and entrench all the niche ideas that led to fandom extremism to begin with.

One positive development is that Tumblr recently brought back, in a limited capacity, the ability to create NSFW content on the site. While this won’t restore the zany porn-for-all days of yesteryear, it might encourage the return of sex-positive communities to drown out the noisy, harassing fringe of haters.

Farrah, who left Twitter due to the harassment there, told me they’re still on Tumblr, and hopeful things are changing.

“I think more people are starting to realize the extremity in the culture and politics around them,” they said, “and that awareness makes them better equipped to recognize the same extremism in fandom. I’ve seen more robust calls for a return to, ‘don’t like don’t read,’ and, ‘your kink is not my kink and that’s okay,’ in the last year or two than I had in a very long time.”

The downside is that the wider crackdown on sexual expression, especially in the United States, is only getting worse. That bodes ill for the internet and all its citizens, especially since media literacy as a whole is also on the decline. As purity culture spreads, the idea of depicting fictional harm as equivalent to real-world harm grows and spreads along with it.

Then again, if anyone can creatively respond to a culture of increasingly absurd attacks on ingenuity and imagination, it’s an army of passionate deviants who’ve historically been vanguards of the weird, the queer, and the subversive. They’re sexual rebels and literary freedom fighters.

If fans can’t kick that nonsense to the curb, who can?>

<In response to a wave of "extreme" legislation proposed by Republicans in the state, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper declared a "state of emergency" for its education system on Monday.

Cooper pointed out six bills now moving through the North Carolina legislature, two related to private school vouchers and four that would give politicians and parents more control over what material is allowed in school curriculums.

"Public education powers our workforce, builds our businesses, and boosts our communities. Unfortunately, our public schools are under assault," Cooper said. "The current General Assembly is considering extreme legislation that would cripple our public education system."

Conservatives across the country have pushed to remove books and other materials that they disagree with from schools over the past year. And in some states, like Wisconsin and Idaho, lawmakers have introduced laws that would strip teachers and librarians of their protections against penalties for distributing "harmful" material to minors.

In Florida, the state legislature passed the so-called "Don't Say Gay" bill, which prohibits the discussion of LGBTQ topics in classrooms. It also passed a law that forces teachers to pay union dues through mail-in checks.

Cooper, a Democrat, declared the state of emergency during a press conference on Monday, asking North Carolinians to contact their state legislator to complain about the recently introduced bills.

One of the proposed laws would create a "standard course advisory commission" that would recommend curriculum standards for the state's schools, and a second bill that would prohibit schools from "promoting certain concepts."

Among them is the concept that "one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex." And another one is that "an individual solely by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex."

Another proposed law would amend the state constitution to allow State Board of Education members to be elected. Vacant seats would be filled by a governor's appointment but would need to be approved by the legislature under the proposed law.

In a news release, Cooper said that these new laws would force the State Board of Education into partisan elections and take its authority away.

"Let education experts make curriculum decisions on what students learn," Cooper said.

Cooper also said that creating a voucher system to send kids to private schools without income limits would effectively allow millionaires to send their kids to private schools for free.

"Stop private school vouchers with no income limits," Cooper said. "It will rob public schools of needed funding and sanctions discrimination. Instead, use public money for public schools.">

<Texas lawmakers revealed Tuesday a monthslong corruption investigation into Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, going public with the probe shortly after Paxton accused the GOP House speaker of being drunk on the job.

Hours after Paxton's claim, House Speaker Dade Phelan announced the House General Investigating Committee has been looking into “alleged illegal conduct” by Paxton, who is already under FBI investigation over accusations of corruption by former staff. Phelan brushed off Paxton's allegation as a desperate attempt "to save face."

Both jolted the Texas Capitol near the frantic end of a legislative session that has again laid bare the raw divisions between Republicans who control every level of power in the state goverment [sic].

At stake for Paxton in the final days of the session is whether lawmakers will approve using $3.3 million in taxpayer dollars to settle a lawsuit brought by the attorney general's accusers. Paxton, who also separately remains indicted on securities fraud charges from 2015, has denied wrongdoing.

Phelan has previously expressed reservations about using state dollars to allow Paxton to settle the lawsuit. On Tuesday, after Paxton accused Phelan of being intoxicated while presiding over the Texas House and called on him to resign, Phelan revealed that a House General Investigating Committee has been looking into the settlement and accusation of bribery and abuse of office from Paxton's former top deputies.

The committee was scheduled to meet Wednesday. The full scope of its investigation is not clear but members sent a letter to Paxton ordering his office to preserve documents and communications surrounding the settlement.

Since April, the committee has issued at least 12 subpoenas for testimony and information to people and entities as part of its probe of Paxton’s office, according to meeting minutes that note the parties were left anonymous to “prevent reprisal and retaliation.”

This month, a committee lawyer began asking people questions about the allegations made in the whistleblower lawsuit by four of Paxton’s former staffers, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details of the investigation that had not been made public.

The group that sued was among eight of Paxton’s staff members who reported him to the FBI in 2020 on accusations of breaking the law to help one of his campaign contributors. The donor, Austin real estate developer Nate Paul, employed a woman with whom Paxton acknowledged having had an extramarital affair. In February, the federal criminal investigation of Paxton was taken over by the U.S. Justice Department’s Washington-based Public Integrity Section.

Each of Paxton's accusers later quit or was fired. In the years since, his agency has come unmoored by disarray behind the scenes, with seasoned lawyers quitting over practices they say aim to slant legal work, reward loyalists and drum out dissent. But until now GOP lawmakers had shown little appetite for looking into a member of their party who's kept up a steady stream of constrictive legal challenges to the Democratic Biden administration.

Tuesday's dust-up between two of Texas' top Republicans came as the House was in the middle of a marathon day of trying to pass bills before a key midnight deadline. The legislative session ends on Memorial Day.

Paxton, a former state lawmaker, tweeted that Phelan had been presiding over the Texas House “in a state of apparent debilitating intoxication.” He cited no specific evidence, but the tweet came days after conservative critics of Phelan circulated video on social media that appeared to show the speaker slurring his words while presiding over the Texas House on Friday night.

Phelan's statement did not address the video or the accusations that he was intoxicated. No House members have called for Phelan to step down.

Earlier this month, the same legislative investigative committee recommended the expulsion of GOP Texas state Rep. Bryan Slaton for inappropriate sexual conduct with a 19-year-old intern. Slaton resigned before a planned vote to kick him out.>

<Amanda Gorman is speaking out after access to her inaugural poem "The Hill We Climb" was restricted at a K-8 school in Florida.

The 24-year-old poet, who read her poem at President Joe Biden's inauguration in 2021 to wide acclaim, took to social media Tuesday to share that she is "gutted" about the Bob Graham Education Center restricting the availability of her poem to the middle school section of its media center after "one parent's complaint." Officials at the school did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

"I wrote The Hill We Climb so that all young people could see themselves in a historical moment. I've received countless letters and videos from children inspired by The Hill We Climb to write their own poems," Gorman wrote. "Robbing children of the chance to find their voices in literature is a violation of their right to free thought and free speech."

The Florida Freedom to Read Project, an organization dedicated to protecting "every student’s right to access information and ideas" per its website, shared the complaint filed against Gorman's poem as well as four other titles on the organization's Twitter account May 19. The complaint against Gorman's poem describes it as "not educational" and having indirect "hate messages." It also accuses the poem of seeking to "cause confusion and indoctrinate students." The complaints were filed by a parent of two students at the school.

The Florida Freedom to Read Project also shared a document containing a school materials review committee's recommendations for the titles in question. The committee determined that four of the titles, including Gorman's poem, are better suited for middle schoolers and should be available in the the middle school section of the media center. These include "The ABCs of Black History" by Rio Cortez, "Cuban Kids" by George Ancona and "Love to Langston" by Tony Medina.

One book, "Countries in the News Cuba" by Kieran Walsh, was deemed "balanced and age appropriate in its wording and presentation" and should remain available in the information section of the media center, the committee said.

The committee said Gorman's poem "has educational value because of its historical significance" and that "the vocabulary used in the poem was determined to be of value for middle school students."

The restrictions comes [sic] amidst a dramatic uptick in book banning efforts over the past few years. The American Library Association keeps track of challenges and bans across the country, and in 2022 recorded more than 1,200 challenges of more than 2,500 different books, nearly double the then-record total from 2021 and by far the most since the ALA began keeping data 20 years ago.

The actual numbers are likely much higher: Some challenges are never reported by libraries, and books preemptively pulled by librarians out of fear for their jobs are not included.

A recent analysis by PEN America found that many challenged books focus on communities of color, the history of racism in America and LGBTQ characters. In fact, one in three books restricted by school districts in the past year featured LGBTQ themes or characters. >

<Shaking up elections in Texas' largest county, the GOP-controlled Legislature on Tuesday approved abolishing a position in Harris County that oversees more than 2 million voters around Houston months before the city chooses a new mayor.

At the same time, Republicans advanced a separate plan that would also have a singular impact on Harris County, a growing Democratic stronghold: allowing the state to take greater control over elections there if it is determined there is a “pattern of problems.”

The push by the state's GOP majority resurfaced tensions over voting in the Texas Capitol, two years after Democratic lawmakers walked out for 93 days in protest of new voting restrictions that also targeted Harris County.

At the center of proposed changes this time is last year's elections in Harris County, where local officials have acknowledged problems that included paper ballot shortages and delayed poll openings. Republican candidates have challenged losses in races across the county. There has been no evidence that the issues affected the outcomes.

The elections were run by Harris County's elections administrator, a position created by the county in 2020. The bill headed to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott would return elections oversight in the county to the tax assessor and county clerk, which are both elected offices currently held by Democrats.

"It’s not working in Harris County after multiple attempts,” Republican state Rep. Briscoe Cain said of the county having an elections administrator.

The change would take effect Sept. 1. For more than an hour in the Texas House, Democrats raised concerns that would not give Harris County enough time to change oversight before November's mayoral election and accused Republicans of singling out the county because it was shifting away from them.

“Your party loses elections, and you guys lose your mind,” Democratic state Rep. Jarvis Johnson said.

The election bills approved in the House would not apply to any of Texas' 253 other counties. The Senate must still give final approval this week to the other measure that could allow the Secretary of State to intervene in Houston elections after investigating complaints.

In Georgia two years ago, Republican state lawmakers included a provision that could ultimately allow the state to take over a county’s elections. It was promptly used to target Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, with a bipartisan review panel appointed in August 2021 to evaluate the county’s election processes.

Another bill advanced Tuesday puts Texas on a path to leave a nationwide program that has a demonstrated record of combating voter fraud but has become a target of suspicion among GOP activists and former President Donald Trump.

Texas for years has been part of the Electronic Registration Information Center, more commonly known as ERIC, a bipartisan effort among states to ensure accurate voting lists. Texas lawmakers are moving to instead replace ERIC with another system, which has yet to be identified or proven to work.>

<On Friday night, Fox News' Laura Ingraham did something nearly unheard of on the propaganda-masquerading-as-news network: She admitted that a story Fox had been hyping was wrong.

For a week, Fox News and other right-wing outlets had been heavily hyping claims that "homeless veterans" were being forced out of a hotel in upstate New York to make room for Central American refugees. Due to diligent reporting from local reporters at the Mid Hudson News, however, the story quickly unraveled. The hotel denied the claims and had receipts to refute the right-wing narrative. By the end of the week, the Mid Hudson News had a group of homeless men ready to talk about how Sharon Toney-Finch, the source of this tale and the head of a veteran advocacy group, had recruited them to pretend they were the displaced veterans. The whole thing was a hoax.

"Turns out the group behind the claim made it up," Ingraham said, in a rare moment of honesty. However, she swiftly returned to the comfier space of mendacity, saying, "We have no clue as to why anyone would do such a thing."

This, of course, is total nonsense. Ingraham knows exactly why someone would fake such a story: Because it works. Whether Toney-Finch's goals were money, fame, or politics, she appears to have correctly surmised that a surefire way to get wall-to-wall coverage in right-wing media is to roll out some B.S. story that validates the bigoted beliefs of their audience. Indeed, history shows that hoaxes and fake stories like this don't just routinely take off in right-wing media, but often gain enough momentum to launch into the mainstream media, giving the lies more traction and validation across the political spectrum. That's what happened with "Clinton's emails," a nothingburger story that nonetheless got lodged into voters' imaginations because mainstream journalists kept asking then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to explain herself, without ever telling audiences there was nothing to explain.

The pattern plays out the same way again and again: Right-wing operatives claim to have a "whistleblower" or "undercover footage" or some other evidence of a "scandal." The right-wing media cover it breathlessly, and the mainstream media, afraid of being left behind, soon amplify the false story. Eventually, the lies get debunked, but only after the story has lodged into the public imagination. Typically, the debunkings are much quieter, as well, which means most Americans who heard the original hoax never hear the truth.

Eventually, the lies get debunked, but only after the story has lodged into the public imagination.

It's a strategy that was used to sell the Iraq War, by hyping false claims that Saddam Hussein was concealing weapons of mass destruction. "Benghazi". "Planned Parenthood sells fetal parts." Claims that the now-destroyed anti-poverty organization ACORN was covering up for sex traffickers. Same story over and over: Right wing hoaxes, fueled by mainstream coverage, spread rapidly. Even the Satanic panic of the 80s fits the mold. Stories of Satanic ritual abuse were first floated by deceptive conservative sources, only to flow into the mainstream press that didn't look too closely at people's false claims. The truth eventually comes out with these kinds of stories, but it's usually too late to stop the damage.

Fox News texts reveal the truth: The Big Lie was a con — that the viewers were in on However, there are some intriguing signs that the mainstream media is finally starting to learn skepticism, instead of simply rushing forward to give airtime to shadily sourced right-wing fairy tales. A few years ago, for instance, there was a good chance that CNN and NPR and the New York Times would have been right up there with Fox, publishing stories about these "homeless vets" allegations, only to issue much-quieter debunking stories days later. This time, however, mainstream outlets were careful not to take the bait, only covering the story once it was clear it wasn't true, and centering their coverage around the hoax itself, not the allegations....>

<....What's changed? Plenty.

For one thing, here has been increasing pressure on mainstream outlets to not do another "Clinton's emails." Due to Donald Trump's profligate lying, there's also a lot more public discussion about the nature of disinformation, making it all the more embarrassing for media outlets that succumb to the siren call to amplify it. But what has really made an impact is the defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News, which resulted in a $787 million settlement earlier this spring.

Who knows how permanent the lesson will be, but for now, there's little doubt that the settlement and the public court filings before it have destroyed Fox's longstanding but undeserved reputation as a "news" organization. Prior to the lawsuit, there was a general-but-false view that, while Fox is conservative, they aren't deliberate peddlers of disinformation. So when a story was published on Fox, it created not just permission for other outlets to treat it as credible, but pressure on them to cover it, lest they be accused of "bias" against conservatives.

Dominion's lawyers released a bunch of insider text messages and communications from Fox leadership, however, that proved beyond all doubt that the network knowingly spreads lies. Not only did the documents demonstrate Fox hosts and executives openly discussing how to amplify and validate Trump's election lies, there was even talk of punishing employees who dared tell the truth about who won the 2020 election. It made it impossible for the rest of the press to keep up the pretense that information on Fox is trustworthy.

Ironically, it was that very pretense that made it so easy for Fox to pump false stories into the mainstream media. That's likely why Ingraham felt the need to admit the "homeless veterans" story was a hoax. If Fox is ever going to regain its power to push misleading or even fake stories into the news again, they'll need to start convincing mainstream journalists they're a "real" news outlet. Offering a correction on-air, no matter how insincere, helps prop up the illusion that Fox is anything but the dishonest propaganda outlet it actually is.

Fox News has lost control of its viewers

Will it work? On one hand, there's still a strong desire in the mainstream media to prove they're not "biased" by giving Fox News and Republicans the benefit of the doubt. On the other hand, there's other signs that the Beltway press has generally become better at debunking Republican lies before giving them airtime.

For instance, both Rep. James Comer, R-Ky. and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, have been trying for over a year to use their House committee chairs to spread disinformation. They use all the usual propaganda techniques, such as false claims to have "whistleblowers" or reliance on untrustworthy sources. But rather than credulously quoting Republican claims without contextualizing them, the press has been doing a much better job of focusing coverage on the lack of credibility — or the lack of existence — of these supposed "witnesses". Jordan in particular seems frustrated that it's a lot harder that it used to be to get the press to parrot his lies uncritically.

Unfortunately, disinformation has a lot more channels to go through than it used to. Obviously, social media is the biggest purveyor of GOP lies, helping outright nonsense spread faster than even Fox News could dream of. Plus, there's a number of alternative media bad actors, like Joe Rogan, who are only happy to do the "tell the big lie, and then quietly admit it wasn't true" game on topics like whether schools offer litter boxes to kids who "identify as cats."

Still, it cannot be understated how important it is to have mainstream media validating right wing nonsense. It's why Trump was so eager to go on CNN to tell lies, even though Fox News has a much larger audience. The veneer of Beltway acceptance goes a long way towards reassuring people who want to buy into conspiracy theories that they aren't "crazy" or "fringe." There was a time when a preposterous story like the "homeless vets displaced by migrants" hoax could have exploded across mainstream media before anyone bothered to check if it was true. That the press turned its nose up to this right wing bait is a hopeful sign of progress.>