<Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., vowed Monday he would do everything within his power to "undo" the bipartisan debt ceiling bill and the "disaster" he said it would be for America's defense.

"I will use all powers available to me in the Senate to have amendment votes to undo this catastrophe for defense," Graham wrote on Twitter. "I support raising the debt limit for 90 days to give us a chance to correct this disaster for defense."

"Have total disgust for political leaders’ decision to make it remotely possible to gut our national security apparatus at a time of great peril. Take this absurd idea off the table," he added.

Earlier in the afternoon, he repeated criticism he leveled against the defense spending aspects of the deal on Sunday, calling it "welcome news to China," and suggested it ran counter to Democrats' and Republicans' "screaming about the rise and growing threat of China."

"How far the Party of Ronald Reagan has fallen. The Biden defense budget has been ridiculed by Republicans for over a year," he wrote on Twitter. "As to the share of GDP spent on defense, the Biden budget matches and eventually dips below the lowest level in modern history. Nothing in this bill provides weapons or technology to help Ukraine defeat Putin and make the world more stable."

"To Biden, McConnell, and McCarthy, what are we going to do about our own national defense as well as our support of Ukraine? We need to know," he added.

During an appearance on "Fox News Sunday," Graham warned House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., against slashing the defense budget in order to reach a deal on the debt ceiling. His comments came prior to the release of the full details of the deal.

"Number one, I respect Kevin McCarthy. I want to raise the debt ceiling. It would be irresponsible not to do it. I want to control spending. I’d like to have a smaller IRS. I’d like to claw back the unused COVID money. I know you can’t get the perfect – but what I will not do is adopt the Biden defense budget and call it a success," Graham said.

"Kevin said that the defense is fully funded. If we adopt the Biden defense budget, it increases defense spending below inflation – 3.2% increase in defense is below inflation," he added.

Biden and McCarthy reached an agreement on the debt ceiling late Sunday, averting a potentially catastrophic U.S. default just days ahead of a June 5 deadline. They released the House version of the bill later in the evening.

The deal includes a 3% rise in defense spending next year, less than the current annual inflation rate of more than 4%. It would also keep nondefense spending roughly flat in the 2024 fiscal year and increase it by 1% the following year, as well as provide for a 2-year debt-limit increase.

The House Rules Committee will meet at 3 p.m. on Tuesday to prepare the debt ceiling bill for a debate on the floor Wednesday.>

<Rep. Chip Roy accused House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Monday of cutting a deal that could complicate negotiators’ efforts to pass a bill to raise the US debt ceiling this week.

But McCarthy’s allies quickly refuted the Texas Republican, underscoring the tension ahead of a key meeting of the House Rules Committee on Tuesday – and putting new pressure on a conservative holdout, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who has yet to take a position on the plan.

Roy contended that McCarthy cut a hand-shake deal in January that all nine Republicans on the powerful panel must agree to move any legislation forward, otherwise bills could not be considered by the full House for majority approval. That would essentially doom the debt ceiling bill since Roy – who sits on the panel – and another conservative committee member are trying to stop the bill from advancing.

“A reminder that during Speaker negotiations to build the coalition, that it was explicit both that nothing would pass Rules Committee without AT LEAST 7 GOP votes - AND that the Committee would not allow reporting out rules without unanimous Republican votes,” Roy tweeted.

Senior GOP sources acknowledged that there was an agreement for seven Republican committee members to agree to move forward in order to advance a bill to the floor, but they flatly dispute that there was a deal for all nine to sign off for legislation to advance.

“I have not heard that before. If those conversations took place, the rest of the conference was unaware of them,” said Rep. Dusty Johnson of South Dakota. “And frankly, I doubt them.”

The dispute is significant because Roy sits on the committee – which is divided between nine Republicans and four Democrats – as does GOP Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina. Both men have emerged as leading foes of the bipartisan debt limit bill to avoid a June 5 default, arguing it does little to rein in government spending.

A third conservative who sits on the panel – Massie – has been mum about how he plans to handle the rule vote in committee. McCarthy agreed to name all three men to the panel as part of the promises he made during his hard-fought speaker’s victory – all to give more power to conservatives on committees, including on Rules, which is typically stacked with the speaker’s closest allies.

If Massie were to join Roy and Norman and vote against the rule at Tuesday’s meeting, he could effectively stall the measure in committee.

But in January, Massie told CNN he was reluctant to vote against rules to stop bills in their tracks.

“I would be reluctant to try to use the rules committee to achieve a legislative outcome, particularly if it doesn’t represent a large majority of our caucus,” Massie said at the time. “So I don’t ever intend to use my position on there to like, hold somebody hostage – or hold legislation hostage.”

Democrats on the committee may also vote for the rule, sources told CNN, and that would ensure it has the votes to advance to the floor. But if Massie were to oppose the rule, only six Republicans would be in favor of it, complicating McCarthy’s efforts to bring the plan to the floor since he previously agreed to only take up bills with the backing of seven committee Republicans.

Massie’s office declined to comment on how he may vote on Tuesday, and neither Roy nor the speaker’s office responded to requests for comments on the Texan’s assertion.

But Republicans close to McCarthy refuted the notion that bills could only advance with unanimous GOP support in the committee.

“I’m a rules guy,” Johnson said. “And when I checked, there wasn’t a rule that something has to come out of Rules Committee unanimously. Now Chip is a rules guy too. So I think he’s going to understand that, that this is a majoritarian institution, and that ultimately, we’re going to serve Americans the best way that the majority of us know how – that’s going to be to pass this bill.”

Other McCarthy allies agreed.

“I don’t know what Speaker McCarthy agreed to, but that has not been something that any of us were familiar with,” Rep. Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma said. “I think that comment was that it had to be unanimous to come out of the Rules Committee to go to the floor is the tweet that I read. And I think that is inaccurate, at best, but I don’t know because I wasn’t in the room. I don’t know how you would have something like that functionally work.”>

<As criticism builds in Republican ranks over the debt ceiling deal struck by Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden, some hardline conservatives have begun floating the idea of toppling the speaker.

On a House Freedom Caucus call Monday night, Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., floated using the motion to vacate, a rule that would allow any member of Congress to force a vote to remove the speaker, two sources familiar with the call told NBC News. Buck, speaking toward the end of the call, referred to it as the “elephant in the room,” one source said.

After House Freedom Caucus Chairman Scott Perry, R-Pa., suggested it might be too early for such a drastic threat, Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., proposed using the threat to force McCarthy to allow members to amend the bill on the House floor, under an "open rule" that could stall the bill's passage. Perry responded that they would discuss the issue more when members return to Washington after the long weekend.

One lawmaker on the call who confirmed that Buck suggested using the motion to vacate said of the Biden-McCarthy deal, "Some people feel this is a complete miss," adding, “I’d say there are five or more who would be sympathetic to Buck’s position.”

Another lawmaker who was on the call, but did not hear Buck's suggestion, said bluntly, “The unity we had is gone.”

While right-wing members have blasted the deal publicly, calling it "insanity," a “turd-sandwich" and criticizing the scale of the cuts, lawmakers had held back from threatening to oust McCarthy over the agreement.

Over the weekend, many lawmakers dismissed using the motion to vacate when asked whether they would threaten McCarthy’s speakership over the debt bill, even as growing numbers say they intend to vote against it.

But, as one former Republican White House official told NBC News over the weekend after the deal was announced: “McCarthy is now on a clock.”

A spokesperson for Buck declined to comment on the congressman’s comments but said the Republican is looking to yield a solution to the debt ceiling “that doesn’t give Democrats a blank check.”

“We don’t comment on internal HFC discussions,” Buck spokesperson Joe Jackson said. “Congressman Buck is focused on finding a debt ceiling solution that doesn’t give Democrats a blank check to add trillions of dollars to the debt in the next two years.”

Spokespeople for Perry and Gosar did not respond to requests for comment.>

<Tech workers are concerned the industry might be reaching the end of a very lucrative era.

Last month, a poll on the anonymous-job site Blind garnered thousands of votes as users debated whether the tech industry could be doing away with $500,000 salaries.

In the post, a user who worked for Oracle said that between 2019 and 2022, program managers were making $500,000 in total compensation, while the "average" software development engineer was making $350,000 and recruiters were taking home $200,000.

"Are those days over?" the user asked. "Will there be a rebalance to salaries back to 2015 levels where only directors with 100+ reports were clearing 500k."

Over 14,400 users weighed in on the poll — with 51.7% of voters agreeing that the industry had reached the end of an era.

Blind allows its users to post anonymously, but it requires them to verify their status via their employee email address. Insider did not independently verify the employment of the users cited in this story.

"Tech is still extraordinarily lucrative," one user who works at Amazon wrote in a post that generated 150 likes. "The salaries are here to stay, but ridiculous overpaying is over. I doubt we'll see Meta/Google/Doordash etc. throw 500k at someone who's making 200k currently."

Another user from Twitter said they received "multiple offers" over $1.1 million in total compensation.

"With all these layoffs people start accepting lower pay and the trend will continue unless there is huge demand for tech," one user from the AI company Tractable wrote. "I think supply for devs is really high and so demand might go down. If you can get good (not great) talent for cheap, managers might adjust with that."

The Oracle employee was not the only one to question whether tech salaries are on a downward spiral.

"Do you think salaries like 250k- 500k, etc are sustainable in tech. Or we are hitting a bubble that soon will burst?" an employee of the cloud-computing company VMware wrote in a separate post that generated over 900 comments.

Big Tech employees have long earned more than their counterparts at other firms.

The median take-home pay for a program manager in the US is $98,578, while a program manager at a major tech firm like Google may earn closer to $220,000 a year, per GlassDoor.

GlassDoor estimates the median annual earnings of software development engineers and tech recruiters are $130,887 and $75,489, respectively. Big tech companies are known to pay much more, with Glassdoor putting the total-compensation range for software development engineers at Meta from $187,000 to $283,000, and for the company's recruiters from $104,000 to $171,000.

Tech recruiters told Insider earlier this year that some companies were using layoffs to cut the salaries of new hires. Major tech companies — including Meta, Microsoft, and Google — have laid off thousands of staff in recent months.

Additional concerns are being raised over the growing abilities of artificial intelligence, with dozens of tech workers taking to Blind to question whether their jobs would be replaced.

"Face it, golden age is over," a Microsoft engineer wrote. "Software engineering is a dying profession. And since GPT is already great at writing its own prompts, you're up the creek without a paddle.">

Maybe <fredthepissant> can report this post.

Hahahahaha!!!!

<Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis presents himself as a conservative culture warrior with a strong legislative track record, but a new analysis finds his reputation for competence nothing but "a Disney-esque fairy tale."

The Florida governor likes to boast about legislative wins in the Republican-dominated statehouse, but Washington Monthly columnist Bill Scher argued that putting points on the board with that vast majority isn't quite the same thing as achieving positive results for his state.

"Mere enactment is not competence," Scher wrote. "The more pertinent question is whether DeSantis has shown the foresight to use those majorities to craft good legislation that helps his state prosper. Or did he use them to pass legislation that looks good to Republican presidential primary voters but will backfire on Florida voters?"

The most glaring example is the governor's vengeful feud with Disney, the state's largest employer, over the company's objection to the DeSantis law prohibiting classroom discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation.

"The 44-year-old governor was so proud of his retribution that 'The Magic Kingdom of Woke Corporatism' is a chapter in his bestselling campaign book," Scher wrote. "But DeSantis was sloppy. In February, Disney signed a contract with the outgoing local government to preserve its powers, and a hapless DeSantis didn’t realize he’d been had for weeks. The new board, all gubernatorial appointees, nullified the contract in April."

Disney sued the state and canceled a planned $1 billion office complex, which would have brought 2,000 jobs to Florida, and Scher said that's just one example of DeSantis choosing short-term political gain over long-term prosperity.

"If Mickey Mouse can give DeSantis the runaround," Scher wrote, "Republicans may ask, how will he do against Xi Jinping?">

<Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) on Tuesday came out against the deal that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) struck with President Joe Biden to raise the debt ceiling.

Writing on Twitter, Mace argued that the deal showed "Republicans got outsmarted by a President who can’t find his pants," despite the fact that McCarthy crowed over the weekend that the deal has nothing positive in it for Democrats.

Mace in particular argued that the deal worked out between Biden and McCarthy "normalized" the high spending adopted by the government starting under former President Donald Trump to handle the novel coronavirus crisis that has killed more than a million American citizens.

"Govt grew massively over the past 3 years," she wrote. "This growth was supposed to be emergency funding only during COVID. During this time, govt grew 40% or by $2 trillion from 2019 to 2023. We went from spending just over $4T to spending just over $6T."

Both right-wing Republicans and progressive Democrats have criticized the debt ceiling compromise, and at the moment it's not clear whether McCarthy has the votes to pass it in the House of Representatives.

While conservatives have criticized the deal for not doing enough to cut spending, progressives have slammed the bill for its added work requirements for people who receive food stamps under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).>

<An April 17 Instagram post (direct link, archived link) shows a video of a plane flying through a cloudy sky and leaving behind condensation trails.

“The shadow of the aerosol trail being dispersed by the Geoengineering SAI aircraft/drone that is seen cast on the artificial synthetic reflective greenhouse above it, is due to the albedo effect,” reads part of the post's caption. "What this means is that, a synthetic cover over a region is created."

The post goes on to claim that this synthetic cover, not human activity, is causing global warming.

The post garnered more than 2,000 likes in one month.

Our rating: False

Scientists say the post is inaccurate on several levels. The existence of the albedo effect does not prove a "synthetic cover" has been placed around the Earth, according to experts. The post also references solar geoengineering, but researchers say those technologies are still being developed, and no large-scale experiments or operations have been conducted. Scientists have discovered ample evidence that climate change is driven by human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels.

Post mischaracterizes albedo effect

The post refers to the concept of albedo, which is a measure of the amount of light that a surface reflects. The more reflective a surface is, the higher the surface’s albedo.

But the post fundamentally misrepresents how the Earth’s albedo relates to global warming, according to David Fahey, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Chemical Sciences Laboratory.

“Albedo is a real effect. Every planet has albedo,” Fahey said. “It has a role in global warming because the albedo of the planet determines how much sunlight is reflected back to space."

Ice and snow are extremely reflective. As the Earth warms and sea ice melt increases, the Earth’s albedo decreases and less sunlight is reflected back out into space – warming the planet even more in a phenomenon called ice-albedo feedback.

The fact that the Earth has an albedo doesn’t prove that global warming is artificially engineered, or that a “synthetic cover” has been placed over parts of the atmosphere, Fahey said.

Furthermore, the post's assertion that solar ultraviolet and infrared light are trapped by an "artificial synthetic reflective" cover "cannot be explained using well-known physical and radiative processes that control how the spectrum of solar radiation interacts with air, aerosol, clouds and Earth's surface," Fahey said.

The albedo effect is also not what causes airplane condensation trails to form as the post posits, according to Joshua Horton, the former research director for geoengineering at the Harvard Kennedy School.

“Contrails are caused by ice crystals forming when water vapor in aircraft engine exhaust freezes at high altitude,” he told USA TODAY in an email.

Fahey agreed, saying that while albedo does not create condensation trails, condensation trails – like other clouds – alter the Earth’s albedo by reflecting sunlight.

Fact check: False claim geoengineering is behind climate change

The post also mentions geoengineering, a term that refers to a number of emerging climate intervention technologies that could manipulate the atmosphere to mitigate the effects of climate change.

The aim of solar geoengineering, one of the two broad categories of climate intervention technology being researched, is to modify the amount of solar radiation absorbed and released by the Earth’s atmosphere.

"The idea is that dispersing aerosols – tiny particles – at high altitude would reflect a small fraction of incoming sunlight back to space and cool the planet, offsetting some global warming," Horton previously told USA TODAY....>

<....But the technology is still being developed and studied, according to Horton and Alan Robock, a climate science professor at Rutgers University. Both scientists explained that much of the technology necessary to make it work does not yet exist, and neither was aware of any significant experiments or operations using geoengineering technology.

Furthermore, the aim of the technology is to increase the Earth’s albedo and the amount of sunlight being reflected away from the Earth to cool the planet and offset global warming – not to increase global warming as the post claims – Horton said.

Global warming driven by greenhouse gas emissions

The Instagram post claims that global warming is “temporary” and that “the effects of a ‘climate crisis’ are intentionally being facilitated” using geoengineering technologies.

However, Fahey previously told USA TODAY that climate change is not the product of geoengineering technologies.

“The variables that we associate with climate change like global temperatures have been changing for decades,” Fahey said. “If one really thought there was a cause and effect there, one would have to say that geoengineering was going on for decades. The reasoning and logic isn't there.”

Fact check: Geoengineering technology not yet in use, despite posts to the contrary

Scientists have ample and “unequivocal” evidence that modern climate change is driven by greenhouse gases emitted from human activities, particularly the burning of fossil fuels, according to NASA.

Greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane trap heat in the atmosphere, resulting in rising global surface temperatures. As a result, the average global temperature has increased by nearly 2 degrees since 1880.

USA TODAY reached out to the Instagram user who shared the post for comment but did not receive an immediate response.>

<House Speaker Kevin McCarthy helped secure a debt limit deal – now he has to secure its passage in the House, with little room for error and a looming threat to his speakership.

In a win for McCarthy, the bill cleared a key hurdle Tuesday evening when the powerful House Rules Committee voted seven to six to advance the debt ceiling bill to the floor. The bill will come to floor Wednesday for debate and a final passage vote before it goes to the Senate.

The Rules Committee vote had been highly anticipated due to the fact that some of the loudest conservative critics of the bill are members of the panel.

The timeframe to get the bill passed through both chambers of Congress and signed into law is extremely tight. Lawmakers are racing the clock to avert a catastrophic default ahead of June 5, the day the Treasury Department has said it will no longer be able to pay all of the nation’s obligations in full and on time.

In another positive sign for the bill’s prospects in the House, a wide range of members on both sides of the aisle – many of them moderates – appear poised to coalesce behind the deal to avert default. Republicans believe they are pushing toward 150 Republican votes or more, two sources told CNN.

That’s more than a majority of the Republican conference, which McCarthy has been promising for days he could get on the bill.

Key hurdle to clear

To win the speakership, McCarthy agreed to name three conservative hardliners – – GOP Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina – to the Rules committee, a major concession since usually the panel is stacked with close allies of the leadership.

Roy and Norman have both emerged as leading critics of the bipartisan debt limit bill.

In the lead up to the rule vote, pressure grew on Massie as it was unclear how he would vote. If he did not support the rule, the debt limit bill may have been unable to advance to the House floor.

But when the committee met to consider the bill, Massie said he anticipated he would support the rule.

“I want to see the rule (first) – it’s not printed yet, it’s not been read, but I anticipate voting for this rule,” Massie said.

In January, Massie told CNN he was reluctant to vote against rules to stop bills in their tracks.

“I would be reluctant to try to use the Rules Committee to achieve a legislative outcome, particularly if it doesn’t represent a large majority of our caucus,” Massie said at the time. “So I don’t ever intend to use my position on there to like, hold somebody hostage – or hold legislation hostage.”

Another key concession McCarthy made to win the speakership that looms over the effort to push the debt limit deal: Any member of the House can move to force a vote to topple the speaker known as a motion to vacate.

Roy made the strongest threat yet to McCarthy’s gavel during an interview with Glenn Beck, saying that if the deal can’t be killed in rules or on the floor: “Then we’re going to have to then regroup and figure out the whole leadership arrangement again.”

The comments were confirmed to CNN though his spokesperson.

Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio said Tuesday that he’s not worried about McCarthy’s speakership. “I think he is doing a good job,” he said.

Rep. Patrick McHenry said Tuesday he was not worried about McCarthy losing his speakership and defended the deal he helped cut.

“With a narrow majority in the House, we have the most conservative outcome we possibly could,” McHenry said.

“I’m proud of the package. I wanted more. I absolutely wanted more, (but) what we have here is better than what was about to come.”

Asked if the speaker’s job is now in jeopardy, McHenry said, “no.”>

<With overwhelming bipartisan support, the House voted Wednesday to pass the debt ceiling legislation negotiated by Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden, sending it to the Senate with days to spare before a potentially disastrous default.

The vote was 314 to 117 with 149 Republicans joining 165 Democrats.

The bill would extend the debt limit for two years alongside a two-year budget agreement if signed into law. It is the culmination of months of political warfare and weeks of frenzied negotiations between the two parties that finally broke a lengthy stalemate over the issue.

The McCarthy-Biden deal overcame heavy criticism from GOP hard-liners, who argued that its spending cuts and conservative provisions are too weak. It also faced opposition from Democrats, who criticized the added work requirements and non-defense spending cuts negotiated by the two men.

“You are getting so many wins for the American people in this bill,” McCarthy said, hailing it as a measure that “moves us in the right direction” fiscally. He said his message to fellow Republicans on Wednesday was: “You’re not spending more money. There’s no new government programs. There’s no tax increases. There’s nothing in the bill that you really should be negative about.”

Biden praised passage.

"This budget agreement is a bipartisan compromise," Biden said in a statement. "Neither side got everything it wanted. That’s the responsibility of governing."

The bill now goes to the Democratic-led Senate, where it needs 60 votes before it can get to Biden’s desk. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., have both endorsed it and called for speedy passage.

The White House has urged passage of the bill as the U.S. nears Monday's deadline to act or risk an economically catastrophic default on the nation's debt. The deal contains modest spending cuts and suspends the borrowing limit to Jan. 1, 2025 — with Treasury then able to use extraordinary measures to pay the bills.

House Republican leaders always expected to lose some votes, mostly from hard-right members who say the deal isn't aggressive enough at delivering spending cuts. That meant some Democrats were needed to get it over the finish line.

“House Democrats are going to make sure that the country does not default — period, full stop,” said Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y. “We will continue to be responsible stewards of our economy. And we will not let middle-class Americans, working families, those who aspire to be part of the middle class, seniors, veterans, the poor, the sick and the afflicted, be hurt by a dangerous GOP manufactured default.”

The legislation would cap spending for the next two years. It includes conservative measures that would claw back about $28 billion in unspent Covid relief funds, eliminate $1.4 billion in IRS funding and shift roughly $20 billion of the $80 billion the IRS got through the Inflation Reduction Act to non-defense funding....>

<....The bill would also restart federal student loan payments after a lengthy pause that began at the start of the pandemic. And it would add work requirements for people up to 55 years old to get benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (the current threshold is 50 years old), with carve-outs for veterans and homeless people.

The Biden-McCarthy doesn't make changes to Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid.

An analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that if the bill's spending caps and targets are followed, it would reduce federal discretionary spending by $1.3 trillion over the next 10 years. Only the first two years of spending levels are binding under the legislation, however.

The SNAP reforms would actually net out a spending increase of $2.1 billion, CBO found. The new work rules would save $6.5 billion, but the new exclusions for homeless people and veterans would add 78,000 new people to SNAP benefit rolls and cost $8.6 billion.

Hard-right members tore into the measure.

Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., said the conservative policy provisions were actually "fictionalized suggestions of change" that are insignificant. "In effect what they’ve done" is a "clean" debt limit extension with no substantive policy additions, he argued, portraying it as a surrender to Biden's demands.

"And so there's nothing there," said Bishop. "If you're going to do tacitly a clean debt ceiling, make it short."

Senators who oppose it, like Mike Lee, R-Utah, have procedural tools they could use to try and slow it down past Monday's deadline. Schumer has encouraged members to act quickly to avoid default.

"Senators should be prepared to move on this bill quickly once it is the Senate's turn to act. I cannot stress enough that we have no margin — no margin — for error," Schumer said Wednesday, warning that "any needless delay, any last-minute brinkmanship" could mean that "the federal government will default for the first time ever."

McConnell quickly praised House passage of the bill on Twitter and added: “Now, it’s the Senate’s turn to pass this agreement without delay.”>

<“In some more traditional relationships (but not all) the man disciplines the woman either physically (like spanking) or with things like writing lines and standing in the corner,” one woman advises another on the Red Pill Women forum, an online community of rightwing, anti-feminist women.

Welcome to the weird and frightening world of trad wives, where women spurn modern, egalitarian values to dedicate their lives to the service of their husbands. My research into this far-right subculture began during the writing of my book on the far right and reproductive rights. I was curious to learn how the movement, determined to reduce women to reproductive vessels to aid white male supremacy, recruited women to its cause. The answer was a toxic combination of anti-feminism, white supremacy, normalised abuse and a desire to return to an imagined past.

Trad wives can be traced back to the Red Pill Women forum that was set up in 2013. According to research from Julia Ebner in 2020, 30,000 women identified as Red Pill Women or trad wives. As with most far-right trends, most of them appear to be in the US, but due to the networked nature of the modern far right, trends that start stateside don’t remain there. Interviews I conducted revealed that the British far right encourages its women to be trad, with women attending nationalist conferences such as the annual Patriotic Alternative conference, and making a name for themselves on the far-right infosphere.

The subculture shares aesthetics and values across the Atlantic. Long, floral dresses are the norm, idealising a mythic past of feminine modesty. Women should be covered up, as their bodies are just for their husbands. A woman’s role is to stay at home, serving her spouse domestically and sexually, while her partner goes to work to support her. Men should “discipline” women.

Unsurprisingly, they are anti-feminist, with the far right recruiting women to the trad lifestyle by claiming feminism has failed to make them happy. While not a trad wife herself, “alt-right” influencer Lauren Southern shot to fame by claiming feminism taught women “to work 9–5 and drink wine every night until their ovaries dry up”.

And, of course, they’re white. One meme I encountered on Telegram during my research summed up a good trad wife as being “knowledgable [sic] about her European roots” and who “loves her family, race and culture”. Leading the tribe is far-right influencer Ayla Stewart, who shot to social media fame when her notorious “white baby challenge” went viral after she declared: “As a mother of six, I challenge families to have as many white babies as I have contributed.”

The motive behind the white baby challenge, and much of trad wife culture, is a fear of the so-called “great replacement” – a baseless conspiracy theory that believes white people are being “replaced” by migrant people from the global south, while feminists repress the white birthrate via abortion rights. To defeat this so-called “white genocide”, as one Stewart fan expressed it, far-right women need to “Make White Babies Great Again!” On far-right Telegram channels, I found posters following her lead. One far-right woman posted she planned to have six babies, as that was above the “optimum replacement rate”.

What Stewart and her acolytes’ examples show is how the trad lifestyle is fixed to two essential components of fascist ideology that govern the modern far right: white supremacy and patriarchy. What’s concerning is how these aims are becoming more and more influential as the global far right pushes to overturn laws protecting women from gender-based violence and reproductive rights, and their ideas gain traction among mainstream rightwing political parties.

During his time in the White House, Donald Trump weakened protections for victims of sexual harassment and domestic abuse, while Spain’s far-right Vox party is vocal about its desire to overturn laws protecting women from gender-based violence.

The reversal of Roe v Wade met the far-right demands that women be removed from the public sphere into the domestic, and be pinned to reproduction. Poland’s far-right government tightened its already draconian abortion ban. Far-right leaders in Hungary and Italy continue to contest the right to abortion, and in Slovakia the far-right L’SNS party has repeatedly tried to bring in a ban. At the recent National Conservatism conference in the UK, Conservative MPs joined writers and activists who combined anti-migrant speeches with those urging women to have more babies.

<Over the past few months, we’ve watched as major corporations such as Disney, Anheuser-Busch, and Target have hopped on the LGBT train and alienated their traditional client bases as a result. Regardless of the often swift and brutal backlash they know will follow, others, including North Face, Nike, and Kohl’s, are always waiting in the wings to become the next sacrificial lamb.

It turns out there’s a reason for this counterintuitive behavior that goes far beyond virtue signaling: Companies are trying to raise their Corporate Equality Index. The more woke issues a company supports, the higher their score.

A CEI is essentially a “woke” credit score that is determined by the Human Rights Campaign, a 501(c)(4) organization that describes itself as “the largest LGBTQ political lobbying organization within the United States.” No one will be surprised to hear that George Soros’s Open Society Foundations is HRC’s largest donor. Other donors include the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the labor unions for the National Education Association and the United Food and Commercial Workers, according to Influence Watch.

Influence Watch reports HRC’s public charity arm, the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, plays an influential role in Democratic Party politics by pressuring companies to comply with its social agenda.

A company’s CEI is derived from its performance in five areas:

Workforce Protections (5 points possible).

Inclusive Benefits (50 points possible).

Supporting an Inclusive Culture (25 points possible).

Corporate Social Responsibility (20 points possible).

Responsible Citizenship (-25).

Yes, you read that right. “A large-scale official or public anti-LGBTQ blemish” on a company’s record will result in the loss of 25 points. HRC explains that “scores on this criterion are based on information that has come to HRC’s attention.”

For example, Fox News, which for three years had scored 100%, lost its perfect rating in April 2022 after several hosts defended Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R-FL) Parental Rights in Education Act, better known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill....>

<....HRCF’s 2022 report shows that 842 corporations achieved CEIs of 100%, which earned them the apparently coveted distinction of being one of the “Best Places to Work for LGBTQ+ Equality.”

An explainer about the index published by the New York Post last month notes that CEI is “a lesser-known part of the burgeoning ESG [environmental, social, and corporate governance] ‘ethical investing’ movement increasingly pushed by the country’s top three investment firms,” BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street Bank. “ESG funds invest in companies that oppose fossil fuels, push for unionization, and stress racial and gender equity over merit in hiring and board selection.”

The New York Post reports that “HRC sends representatives to corporations every year telling them what kind of stuff they have to make visible at the company. They give them a list of demands and if they don’t follow through there’s a threat that you won’t keep your CEI score.”

James Lindsay, editor of the website New Discourses, told the New York Post, “HRC administers the CEI ranking ‘like an extortion racket, like the Mafia.’”

Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, a candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, said, “The big fund managers like BlackRock all embrace this ESG orthodoxy in how they apply pressure to top corporate management teams and boards and they determine, in many cases, executive compensation and bonuses and who gets re-elected or re-appointed to boards. They can make it very difficult for you if you don’t abide by their agendas.”

In a 2018 letter to CEOs from BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, whom Fortune magazine has dubbed the “face of ESG,” he emphasizes a “new model of governance” in harmony with ESG values.

Fink wrote, “Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose. To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society. … [I]f a company doesn’t engage with the community and have a sense of purpose, it will ultimately lose the license to operate from key stakeholders.”

Fink is mistaken. Society is not demanding that companies serve a social purpose. Rather, ESG is being forced upon society by the global elites who wield it as a weapon and a control mechanism they can use to consolidate power over the masses.

The mission of the activist group Our Money, Our Values is to educate the public about the threats posed by ESG. OMOV quotes Derek Kreifels, the co-founder and CEO of State Financial Officers Foundation, on its front page: “ESG is a highly subjective political score infiltrating all walks of life, forcing progressive policies on everyday Americans, resulting in higher prices at the pump and at the store.”

Asked for a comment by the New York Post, Kreifels said, “The problem with measures like CEI, and its big brother ESG, is that it introduces an incentive structure outside of the bounds of business, often in ways contradictory to fiduciary duty.”

It certainly is. Corporations exist to maximize shareholder value, not to serve social purposes. The interests of shareholders of Anheuser-Busch, Disney, Target, and other companies whose executives have prioritized ESG over profits, and common sense, are clearly not being served.

If shareholders were smart, they’d take legal action to eradicate this attack on shareholder rights and American values. And even those of us who don’t have a financial stake in corporate American must understand that the culture wars are strangling us and turning the United States into a country we no longer recognize. We stop focusing on them at our peril.>

<Just like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, it turns out that the Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator franchise was a blueprint, not a work of science fiction. When Skynet, a network of computers created by the military contractor Cyberdyne Systems, gained self-awareness, panicky humans tried to deactivate it. The newly formed artificial intelligence (AI) identified “all humans as a threat”, “decided our fate in a microsecond: extermination” and launched a nuclear attack on every major city.

Four decades on, fiction risks becoming fact. In the most chilling warning since the Szilárd petition of 1945 and the establishment by Albert Einstein of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, many of the world’s greatest AI experts are convinced it could destroy humanity, that the technology poses an existential threat to our survival as a species.

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” pleads a letter signed by Sam Altman of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind and many others. Other founding godfathers of AI have quit their jobs and expressed regret at their life’s work. Their terror is palpable, as is the sense that this time we have gone too far, that our institutions cannot cope, that AI will be hijacked to build weapons of mass destruction or to rule over us.

They could all be wrong, and there are huge benefits to AI as well as costs, but why isn’t this the number one priority of every politician in the world? How can anybody believe that some silly pact, or a puerile EU regulation, might be the answer? We face a profound philosophical and practical choice: what is the meaning of life and intelligence? How do we make sure humanity remains in charge of machines? How do we trade off productivity growth against the risk of annihilation? This is surely the most complex question we have ever faced, and yet our shockingly unserious society cannot face up to it.

The global elites have again got their priorities wrong. They have focused obsessively on climate change, turning a real but surmountable problem into an anti-Western religion, but are bizarrely nonchalant about much greater threats. I’m not downplaying the large disruption and cost of climate change, but it won’t come anywhere close to terminating life on Earth, unlike a nuclear war, biowarfare or out-of-control AI. Our rush to net zero, by reducing growth, is in fact limiting our ability to wage an AI war with a Chinese state that continues to belch out carbon dioxide.

The most immediate risk to humanity’s survival is nuclear war. Russia may yet launch tactical nukes on Ukraine; China may invade Taiwan; or a terror attack could push India and Pakistan into total conflict. Yet the most pressing danger comes from nuclear proliferation, a slow-burn crisis that contradicts woke narratives and is thus overlooked. North Korea remains a major threat, but Iran is the real danger: it keeps enriching uranium and wants to annihilate Israel. Where is the anti-proliferation Greta Thunberg?

The other great danger is biowarfare. It is insane that we still tolerate gain of function research, which enhances viruses genetically: at some point, a super-potent virus may be released accidentally or intentionally, killing billions and destroying civilisation. Where is the outrage, the parade of concerned activists?

Out-of-control AI could prey on a growing pathology at the heart of Western society: our vulnerability to social contagion. Instead of creating an army of resilient, independent, hyper-educated rational individualists with all of human learning at our fingertips, smartphones have reduced us to an uber-emotional, animalistic, dopamine-addled mob. There is plenty of information, but little knowledge. Instead of being able to think for ourselves, we are slaves to fashion, not only when it comes to dressing but also opinions, consumption and financial decisions. Radicalised by social media, elite opinion-formers embrace absurd views at breakneck speed. Politicians, businesses and celebrities take their cue from a revolutionary vanguard that subverts public sentiment....>

<....Our society no longer understands the purpose of free speech, as described by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty. Instead of engaging in Socratic argumentation to get to the truth, we use words to virtue-signal and to camouflage base emotions. Our elites claim to be universalist humanists, but are in fact born-again tribalists who spend their time pitting in-groups (those who repeat the favoured platitude of the moment) against the out-groups (anyone who disagrees).

We no longer know how to think critically. Subjectivity and nihilism rule supreme: the deranged, post-modernist woke cargo cult claims that there no longer is truth, just our truths. Ideas are at best positional goods, fashion statements and markers of social hierarchy, and at worst tools of oppression. Words are devoid of any essential meaning: expressing “righthink” signals high status (even if the opinion is nonsense, such as the claim that China had nothing to do with Covid) and “wrongthink” (such as support for Brexit) implies low-status.

Alex Tabarrok of George Mason University argues that our society is not merely increasingly capricious but also prone to a new madness of crowds. Technology, by increasing transparency and reducing transaction costs, has “intensified the madness of the masses and expanded their reach. From finance to politics and culture, no domain remains untouched.” Bank runs are more frequent, with deposits moved from online accounts as soon as rumours begin to circulate. Fake news, boycotts, fury, demonstrations, health panics and calls for crackdowns become the norm. There are no error-correcting mechanisms.

Such a world – governed by the opposite principles to those developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Antifragile – is vulnerable to manipulation, and hence to weaponised AI. Imagine a deepfake video watched 20 million times in a couple of hours that warns of an imminent terror attack, or “proves” a politician was a fraud hours before an election: the impact would be catastrophic.

“Can we survive technology?” – so asked John von Neumann, the 20th century’s greatest mind, in 1955. Could the answer really be in the negative?>

No vote by <bimboebert>; maybe she is a mite concerned about her prospects next term.

<An extensive new report from NBC News details the ways that Republican canvassing operations in states such as Nevada are riddled with problems that include canvassers "cheating" by lying about the number of local homes they've visited.

One particularly prominent example cited in the story involves a Republican canvasser who claimed to have knocked doors all around a Southern Las Vegas neighborhood, even though they actually spent the day lounging in the Caesar's Palace casino.

According to data reviewed by local GOP officials, this was not an isolated incident.

"A half-dozen Republican-aligned field operators working on various races in Nevada, Georgia and Oregon said they encountered suspicious or fraudulent data — such as entries filed from homes that weren’t visited or falsified surveys — in 2022," the report notes.

The GOP narrowly lost races in Georgia and Nevada last year that wound up costing it control of the United States Senate.

“That’s why we’re losing elections,” one GOP operative tells NBC News. “Nobody wants to admit it."

However, other sources cautioned NBC that many of the people blaming the canvassing operation as the prime culprit for the party's disappointing performances were simply trying to draw attention away from other issues.

“I don’t think everything was done perfectly, obviously," one source told the publication. “But at the same time, there are a lot of people that have their own agenda or some other agenda for outside groups or whatever the case may be.”>

<The first rule of business and marketing is that if you make it easy for folks to buy your product or engage with you, more people will do so. If you don’t want people to buy or use your product or service, on the other hand, just make them jump through hoops to complete the transaction and many won’t bother.

Republicans know this and have been applying it to voting for the better part of 50 years; recently they’ve turned it into a science.

Polling before the 2020 election in Texas, for example, showed that Joe Biden may [sic] beat Trump just as he did in so many other swing states across the country. From Trump failing there, the Republican elders in the state knew, it would be a short jump to flipping the entire state Blue, as happened with Michigan and Wisconsin.

Harris County — basically, solid-Blue Houston — laid out a plan to send out forms to all its 2.5 million registered voters to qualify for mail-in ballots (it was during the pandemic and before vaccines were available, after all).

Making it easier to vote, even during a pandemic, was definitely a bridge too far for the GOP: it sent (now impeached) Attorney General Ken Paxton into action.

Paxton immediately filed a lawsuit to stop the largest Democratic county in all of Texas from making voting convenient.

The state had spent years, after all, driving up the number of hours voters in Democratic parts of the state had to wait in line to cast a ballot and they weren’t about to let voting become painless.

A 2020 study by Northern Illinois University ranked Texas dead last in the nation in ease of voting, with the GOP having put into place a whole series of roadblocks designed to make it hard to register or even to vote during elections.

Paxton explained to Steve Bannon how well his lawsuit worked, bragging about forcing millions of Houstonians to take their lives in their hands if they really wanted to vote:

“If we’d lost Harris County—Trump won by 620,000 votes in Texas. Harris County mail-in ballots that they wanted to send out were 2.5 million,” Paxton told Steve Bannon in June, 2021 adding, “and we were able to stop every one of them.”

Texas’ 38 electoral votes were crucial to Trump even getting close to beating Biden, and if heavily Democratic Harris County/Houston had been able to easily vote in large numbers — it was even less safe to vote during a pandemic in a high-population-density city like Houston than in rural Texas — Republicans would be toast.

So he essentially denied them an opportunity to vote without exposing themselves to a deadly disease that ultimately killed over 1 million Americans.

“If you want to vote in Houston,” Paxton essentially said, “you’re going to have to expose yourself to Covid.”

As Paxton pointed out to Bannon:

“Had we not done that, we would have been in the very same situation — we would’ve been on Election Day, I was watching on election night and I knew, when I saw what was happening in these other states [that did expand mail-in voting for the pandemic], that that would’ve been Texas. We would’ve been in the same boat. We would’ve been one of those battleground states that they were counting votes in Harris County for three days and Donald Trump would’ve lost the election.”

This kind of massive and morally reprehensible voter suppression is pretty much limited to Republican-controlled states. It’s their latest strategy for holding power.

In contrast to Texas (60.4% voter turnout), I live in the easiest state in the union to vote: Oregon (75.5% voter turnout)....>

<....For over a quarter-century, voting in Oregon has been conducted entirely by mail. There are polling places in a few government buildings for disabled people, but otherwise everybody gets their ballot in the mail six weeks or so before the election and can send them back in an enclosed, postage-paid envelope right up to and including on election day.

From Minnesota (79.9% turnout) to Maryland (71.1% turnout), Democratic-controlled states that make it easy to vote and don’t throw up obstructions to voting by mail generally have the highest turnout.

Colorado, Oregon, Washington state, Hawaii, and Utah conduct their elections entirely by mail. By contrast, Oklahoma (54.9% turnout), Arkansas (56% turnout), West Virginia (57.5% turnout) and Tennessee (59.8% turnout) all throw up obstacles to registering to vote and voting by mail, and thus have low voter turnout.

In the week or three after our ballot arrives in the mail, Louise and I find the time to sit down at the dining room table with a laptop and look up all the obscure races that used to confound us when we had to vote in person and couldn’t bring anything into the booth with us.

Voting for judges, ballot measures, city and county races, etc. that once involved wild guesses are now thoughtful and specific: democracy in Oregon is strengthened by every voter having this same ability.

And throughout those two-plus decades that Oregonians have voted entirely by mail, there hasn’t been a single credible claim of consequential, election-altering voter fraud. It’s a phrase that only makes the local newspapers when Republicans in some other state are using it to justify blocking people from registering or voting.

Using Donald Trump’s “stolen election” lies as the basis for their actions, legislators in every Republican-controlled state in the nation have made it harder to vote over the past few years. States under Democratic control, on the other hand, have uniformly made it more convenient to vote.

With the exception of voting-obsessed first-in-the-nation New Hampshire, all of the top-10 voter turnout states are controlled by Democrats.

This is no way to run a democracy: the right to vote should not be a partisan issue.>

<An anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist has been found guilty of plotting to destroy 5G masts after subscribing to an ideology that they were linked to the Covid-19 vaccine.

Christine Grayson discussed “getting rid” of the mobile phone masts with expanding foam and angle grinders during regular discussions online, a court heard.

The 59-year-old was found guilty of conspiracy to commit criminal damage by a jury at Leeds Crown Court.

Her co-defendant Darren Reynolds, 60, was cleared of the same charge but convicted of eight terrorist offences.

Jurors found him guilty of encouraging terrorism with online comments including calling for MPs to be killed.

Reynolds was also convicted of disseminating a terrorist publication by sharing a link to the neo-Nazi White Alexandria’s Library.

He was found guilty of six offences of possessing material likely to be useful to a person committing an act of terrorism, including a manual on how to build a .50 Browning calibre single shot rifle, and a document called How To Become An Assassin.

Opening the case to jurors in April, prosecutor Tom Storey said the defendants knew each other through the social media platform Telegram, which both were regular users of between 2020 and 2022.

They subscribed to an antiauthoritarian ideology which involved conspiracy theories, jurors heard.

Reynolds discussed armed uprisings and advocated violence towards people he called “traitors”, also “going further” and posting extreme right-wing, antisemitic and racist views, Mr Storey said.

When police searched their addresses they found a crossbow and a number of crossbow bolts at Grayson’s home, while at Reynolds’ they discovered two replica assault rifles.

The police also found copies of documents about how to use assault rifles or manufacture explosive devices on some of Reynolds’ electronic devices.

The court heard both defendants were strongly opposed to the rollout of the 5G network, and regarded 5G masts as pieces of “enemy infrastructure”.

Grayson said she needed a “sabotage team” to “get rid of these 5G bloody near me” in a Telegram exchange on August 7 2021.

Jurors were told Reynolds openly discussed the use of violence against people he labelled “traitors”, particularly Members of Parliament.

On June 29 2021 he posted: “Storm parliament and the Lords, drag them ALL outside and hang them ALL on the spot for treason, sedition insurgency, attempted genocide and crimes against the peoples of Great Britain,” the court heard.

Reynolds described murdered MP Sir David Amess as a “traitor” and reacted with approval to another user’s view that Thomas Mair had “rightly executed the murdered MP Jo Cox because of her alleged treason”.

The court heard that in one police interview, Reynolds asked officers: “Do I look like a terrorist to you?”

He then said that terrorists were “usually Arabs, or Irish from the 70s”.

Grayson, of Boothwood Road, York, was convicted of one offence of conspiracy to commit criminal damage and cleared of one charge of encouraging terrorism.

Reynolds, of Newbould Crescent, Sheffield, was found guilty of one count of encouraging terrorism, one of disseminating a terrorist publication and six of possessing material likely to be useful to a person committing an act of terrorism.

He was cleared of conspiracy to commit criminal damage and two counts of disseminating a terrorist publication.

Judge Guy Kearl KC remanded both into custody to be sentenced at the same court on June 5.>

<After five months of largely amicable relations between Kevin McCarthy and a House Freedom Caucus that extracted significant concessions to make him House speaker, we got the clash we knew was coming sooner or later.

The Freedom Caucus emerges from that clash looking bruised, hapless and apparently without the leverage it thought it had over McCarthy.

The House on Wednesday night overwhelmingly passed a debt ceiling deal forged by McCarthy (R-Calif.) and President Biden, 314-117. Surprisingly, not only did more than three-fourths of Democrats vote for it, but so too did more than two-thirds of Republicans. The latter did so despite members of the Freedom Caucus arguing that the bill was a complete nonstarter and aiming to keep support below a majority of the GOP.

Republicans were able to force Biden to the negotiating table in recent weeks. But the deal itself contained only modest wins for the right; they included two years of spending caps, permitting reform, work requirements for food stamps, and clawing back unspent covid money and IRS funding.

This one was, in many ways, teed up for the Freedom Caucus to flex its newfound muscle. The subject was the economy and spending cuts, which is in its wheelhouse. The deal was piecemeal, the kind of insufficient compromise that is anathema to the purity-obsessed right. And the leverage was right there, with a potentially catastrophic default right around the corner.

Nobody in Washington is more adept at projecting a willingness to blow things up than the Freedom Caucus, and it could point to an explosion just around the corner. It even had the leader of the GOP, Donald Trump, advocating for allowing a debt default if the party didn’t get “massive cuts.”

In the end, though, the messaging was all over the place and lacked commitment. And the levers the Freedom Caucus secured back in January proved wholly insufficient.

Perhaps the caucus’s best tool was in its long-standing, implied threat to McCarthy’s speakership. But it notably sought to denounce the deal without going too hard after the speaker who had forged it.

At a news conference Tuesday — notably attended by only about one-fourth of the caucus — members mostly talked around McCarthy’s role while saying the agreement he had reached was completely unacceptable. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) even credited McCarthy for doing “the best that he could do to some extent with this deal.”

A few members have floated trying to remove McCarthy as speaker if he followed through, but only one really committed to it, and most kept the idea at arm’s length or suggested that it would be something to consider only after passage. (This despite the utility of the threat seeming to be as a deterrent.) It became abundantly clear that the caucus didn’t want to or didn’t feel it would be productive to come after McCarthy too hard.

The McCarthy issue aside, some members asserted that this was ripping the party apart — in ways that seem rather silly after the vote Wednesday. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) said, “The Republican conference right now has been torn asunder.” Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) said that when the details of the deal were emerging, it would “collapse” the GOP majority....>

<....At more than one point, its members suggested that McCarthy was violating previously unknown agreements with them.

One was Rep. Any [sic] Biggs (R-Ariz.), who claimed that it was agreed that such bills wouldn’t be allowed to pass with more Democratic votes than Republican ones. This doesn’t appear to have been a thing; rather, the usual agreement is that a bill must get votes from a majority of the majority party, which this one did with ease.

Another was Roy, who claimed that McCarthy had agreed to require the GOP votes on the powerful Rules Committee on which Roy serves to be unanimous. It’s true that we don’t know exactly what McCarthy gave away to become speaker, and deliberately so. But this agreement was apparently news to other Republicans — including fellow committee member Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) — and Roy soon backed off pressing that case.

Relatedly, Massie provided one of the most significant moments in all of this — in a way that appeared to undercut the Freedom Caucus’s goals moving forward.

One of the most significant concessions McCarthy gave away was putting three non-loyalists on the Rules Committee, which is usually stocked with the speaker’s allies. That meant Massie would serve as the potentially decisive fulcrum between the McCarthy loyalists and two Freedom Caucus members on the committee, which serves as a crucial stop for major pieces of legislation.

With the committee taking up the debt ceiling deal Tuesday, though, Massie not only voted to advance it, but he reasserted that he wouldn’t vote to halt bills there just because he opposed them on the substance. Massie isn’t a Freedom Caucus member, but he is aligned with it on plenty, and this suggests that won’t be a venue for gumming up the works.

With its opposition petering out and in an effort to save face, the Freedom Caucus has embraced a version of Biggs’s talking point. Repeatedly since Wednesday night, it has noted that the debt ceiling deal got more Democratic votes than Republicans ones. It has done so not in the service of arguing that McCarthy broke his promise, but to argue that this was a bad deal, period. If 78 percent of Democrats voted for it and 68 percent of Republicans voted for it, how could it possibly have been a good deal for Republicans?

Nevermind that those numbers aren’t really that far apart, or that eight of its own Freedom Caucus members voted for the bill. Far from convincing most of the party to vote against it, it couldn’t even get close to unanimity itself. And to the extent that this is the argument that’s left, that says a lot.

None of which means the Freedom Caucus is suddenly a nonentity in House GOP politics or that it won’t be a thorn in McCarthy’s side. The realities of the slim House majority and the concessions McCarthy made to become speaker mean you must cater to every corner of the party. And perhaps on this one, non-Freedom Caucus members simply didn’t feel enough of a pull from the GOP base to hold out for more.

But what the debt ceiling debate showed is that when the rest of the party decides it doesn’t need to toe the Freedom Caucus’s line, the caucus doesn’t really wield that much power — and doesn’t seem to know how to use the power it does have.

Which, beyond the legislative win, is about the best outcome McCarthy could have hoped for five months after the Freedom Caucus gave him fits during his ascent to the speakership.>

<Early on Wednesday morning, police officers from the Atlanta Police Department and the Georgia Bureau of Investigations raided the Teardown House, a hub for a constellation of organizing activity in East Atlanta. At least a dozen officers in riot gear, wielding assault rifles, arrested three organizers from the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, a non-profit that supports people who are arrested for protest or activism. The Solidarity Fund pays bail, provides jail support, and refers people who have been arrested to available lawyers. In other words, the Solidarity Fund connects people who are still presumed innocent to things that they are legally entitled to: the ability to have others pay their bail and a lawyer to represent them in court.

As a collective of people who post bail for strangers, the Atlanta Solidarity Fund is one of nearly a hundred organized bail funds around the country. These community bail funds share a sense that the state should not be subjecting people to the violence of jail simply because they cannot pay their bail. More essentially, bail funds understand that one powerful way to push back against the injustice of pretrial detention is to join together in the act of paying bail for strangers.

In the case of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, much of their focus in the past year has been on providing this collective support to activists in their local movement to Stop “Cop City,” shorthand for the Atlanta Police Foundation’s plan to raze 85 acres of the Weelaunee Forest and, in its place, build a $90 million police training complex that includes a small model city in which to practice police tactics. The Cop City project would, in turn, be funded by at least $30 million in Atlanta’s public funds, and possibly as much as $51 million in public money. For more than two years, the Stop Cop City movement has pushed back against this proposal, through protest actions and tactics ranging from occupation of the forest to mass testimony at city council hearings on the proposal. In return, local and state police have continuously surveilled and criminalized these activities, beginning with the arrests of protesters in September 2021. The movement lost its first member to state violence when, in January 2023, Georgia State Patrol killed a twenty-six-year-old nonbinary movement activist, known as Tortuguita, who was shot at least 57 times by patrol officers while they sat cross-legged in the forest. According to the police, Tortuguita fired first and hit a state trooper, but the available evidence—including the autopsy report, body camera footage, and a lack of gunpowder residue on Tortuguita’s body—point to the state trooper being hit by a fellow officer and Tortuguita’s hands being up in the air when they were gunned down in cold blood....>