<Republican Representative Matt Rosendale of Montana expressed concern about drag performers controlling missiles at an Air Force base in his state.

Rosendale was speaking against funding gender reassignment surgeries for military personnel during a U.S. House session on Thursday. A rule was passed during the session for the Fiscal Year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which would allow lawmakers to start looking into 80 amendments to the military spending bill. Those amendments are related to hot-button issues such as abortion and diversity policies in the Pentagon and aid to Ukraine, according to ABC News.

"We have drag shows taking place at Malmstrom Air Force Base. There are 150 ICBM missiles that are being controlled by that Air Force Base and by these individuals. I do not want someone who doesn't know if they are a man or a woman with their hand on a missile button," Rosendale said on Thursday.

The Republican expressed his opposition towards "anything that doesn't contribute to making our fighting force the most effective" and said that he will not ask Montana residents or the United States to allocate funding towards transgender care.

"Anything that doesn't make our military the most effective fighting force in the world is a distraction. That's why I introduced an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act to prevent taxpayers from having to fund gender reassignment surgeries for military personnel," he tweeted on Thursday.

His remarks come at a time when trans rights are being heavily targeted on different occasions that ranged from boycotting Bud Light for using trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney to promote its products to passing anti-trans laws and introducing 490 anti-LGBTQ proposals in state legislatures across the U.S.

Newsweek reached out by email to the National Center for Transgender Equality for comment, but meanwhile, he was met online with differing opinions than his own.

"Your press release suggests this would include the family members of service members who are covered under Tricare.

"You know what doesn't make our military effective? Service members worrying about their families getting the medical care they need when they need it," tweeted Garrett Lenderman.

"you have voted AGAINST help for the military," tweeted @NoDynynTruth. "Montana doesn't have a representative. Montana has a PROPAGANDIST".

To attract new recruits, the Department of Defense (DOD) launched initiatives that involved carrying out drag performances. For example, the U.S. Navy launched a pilot program that ran for a few months in which it used a drag queen as a "digital ambassador" to reach out to young people who might be interested in joining the Navy. The move outraged Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

The U.S. Navy said in March that it was facing a "challenging recruiting environment" and that it didn't meet its recruitment targets in fiscal year 2022 for reserve personnel and active duty officers, according to the Navy Times.

Yeoman 2nd Class Joshua Kelley, who goes by the drag name Harpy Daniels and identifies as non-binary, announced on Instagram last November that they had been invited to become a "digital ambassador" for the Navy as per the program, and has performed in drag for sailors.

"I will NOT vote to fund ANY Trans programs of ANY kind especially of medical nature in our NDAA [National Defense Authorization Act]. ZERO. Our military has only one purpose, the defense of our country. Our military needs to train men for war, not turn men into fake women," Greene tweeted on at the time. The NDAA includes a series of federal laws that specify the DOD's annual budget.>

<House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Thursday night was allowing far-right officials to "load up the defense bill with culture war amendments" to get their support for the bill, but the extreme changes are dead-on-arrival in the Senate, according to Rep. Jeff Jackson.

Jackson, a Democrat, said votes on abortion, pride flags, and library books dominated the late-night session.

"I’m on the House floor right now (11pm) and basically what’s happening is the Speaker is letting the far-right load up the defense bill with culture war amendments in return for their support of the bill. So we’re voting on abortion, Pride flags, CRT, DEI, library books, etc.," he wrote.

"The Speaker wanted to keep these amendments out but the far-right caucus threatened to sink the whole defense bill, so he relented and now the floodgates are open," Jackson added.

He further noted that the changes won't be a part of the final bill.

"BTW folks, all of these amendments are dead-on-arrival in the Senate. This is all just to polarize the vote and get folks riled up. In other words, it’s for show," Jackson said Thursday.

There was one surprise in the votes, according to Jackson.

"BUT in a bit of a surprise the amendment to keep the Confederate names for military bases - and to halt the renaming process currently under way - fails. 41 GOP voted no and that sunk it," the congressman said.>

<A recent Mississippi law that allows the state to appoint judges and prosecutors in Hinds county, including the majority-Black capital of Jackson, constituted a “crude scheme that singles out and discriminates against Black residents”, the justice department said on Wednesday.

The agency announced its intent to intervene in a lawsuit filed by the NAACP against the state, arguing that the law, signed by the Republican governor, Tate Reeves, in April, took voting authority away from Black residents in Jackson and Hinds county, which are both Democrat-run and majority-Black.

“This thinly veiled state takeover is intended to strip power, voice and resources away from Hinds county’s predominantly-Black electorate, singling out the majority-Black Hinds county for adverse treatment imposed on no other voters in the state of Mississippi,” Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general of the justice department’s civil rights division, said in a statement.

The 32-page federal complaint argues that the state created a “two-tiered system of justice” by crafting a new court system in the part of Jackson called the Capitol Complex Improvement District and doubled the area’s size through incorporating Jackson’s predominantly white neighborhoods in a majority-Black city.

That means state capitol police and state appointed judges and prosecutors would oversee the city’s predominantly white areas and insulate “residents within its boundaries from judges accountable to the Black voters of Jackson and Hinds county”, the complaint notes.

Republicans in the majority-white Mississippi legislature who supported the bill’s passage argued that the law, which included an expansion of capitol police, was aimed at curtailing crime and improving public safety. Federal prosecutors questioned why the state could not address crime rates by “creating new elected offices, rather than singling out Hinds county residents by imposing a surfeit of largely unaccountable state-appointed officials”.

Unlike the NAACP case, which also challenges the law’s expansion of state capitol police as engaging in “separate and unequal policing”, the justice department’s intervention focuses on the state’s appointment of judges and prosecutors within the newly created court system.

“When our state leaders fail those they are supposed to serve, it is only right that the federal government steps in to ensure that justice is delivered,” the NAACP president, Derrick Johnson, who lives in Jackson, said in a statement.

The federal complaint also argued that the state’s appointment powers meant that Jackson voters would be unable to hold new officials accountable because the state would appoint them, unusual in a state where most judges are elected.

The state law also came after the Mississippi legislature “shortchanged” the Hinds county criminal justice system for decades by failing to “provide the county with the resources, funding and personnel that it needs”. That made it difficult for local police, prosecutors and judges to combat crime.

The Mississippi supreme court recently heard arguments in a separate case challenging the law. In June, a federal judge temporarily blocked the law from going into effect. The same judge will now determine whether the federal government can join the case.>

<Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) suggested on the House floor that because the phrase “humanitarian aid for women and children in Afghanistan” is not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, such aid is unconstitutional.

On Thursday, the House debated an amendment introduced by Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) to the National Defense Authorization Act. The measure would strip funding for aid to Afghanistan. Perry argued the money could end up being spent by the ruling Taliban for nefarious purposes instead.

In response, Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-CA) rose to speak against the amendment.

“This amendment ties the administration’s hands in how it can best support the people of Afghanistan living under Taliban rule,” she said. “It prohibits the use of any funds authorized via this bill to be used – even tangentially – to aid in our support of the millions of Afghan women and girls suffering under Taliban rule or to those Afghans living in poverty and in need of humanitarian relief.”

Kamlager-Dove said the Biden administration already takes measures to ensure aid does not end up going to the Taliban.

“This amendment would make that humanitarian aid illegal and people would die,” she concluded before Luna rose to rebut her speech.

“Chairman, I couldn’t help but pull out my pocket Constitution and I couldn’t seem to find anywhere in here where it says we need to fund programs for humanitarian aid for women and children in Afghanistan,” Luna said. “So, with that, I just wanted to point that out.”

“Mr. Speaker,” Kamlager-Dove responded as someone could be heard snickering in the chamber. “The text is not in the Constitution. It’s in the bill.”

Kamlager-Dove had a long day on the floor. Earlier on Thursday afternoon, she declared, “I request an Advil” after listening to a speech by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).>

Did Perry send Luna on a suicide mission?

<A wise frog once asked, why are there so many songs about rainbows?

He might also ask what's the point of firing a teacher for using one of those songs but since the answer is "because it advocates for acceptance," he would probably go back to the swamp and never take Manhattan again.

The school board of Waukesha, Wis. voted unanimously (unanimously!), 9-0, to terminate elementary school teacher Melissa Tempel for trying to get her students to sing the Dolly Parton and Miley Cyrus duet, "Rainbowland."

In March, Heyer Elementary School banned Tempel's first graders from singing the song at a concert, with parents in the district defending the choice because it "encourages LGBTQ acceptance and references rainbows."

Some of the song's controversial lyrics: "Living in a Rainbowland / The skies are blue and things are grand / Wouldn't it be nice to live in paradise / Where we're free to be exactly who we are."

Yeah, who would want to teach kids that.

Tempel tweeted her disappointment in the banning of the song, which then went viral and effectively nailed the casket shut on her career at Heyer. Lawyers for the school board accused Tempel of violating board policy by tweeting her feelings before speaking to her supervisors.

Tempel's lawyer argued that she was simply exercising her right to free speech, but that right only works half the time so Tempel was fired. And those Heyer kids will grow up to hate rainbows and/or gay people.

Meanwhile, Dolly Parton has donated 200 million books to kids up to the age of five through her Imagination Library, probably doing more for childhood literacy than name-any-politician.

And even if Dolly, The Great Uniter, is now divisive, we're all in big trouble.>

<Florida Republicans have hit dozens of voter registration groups with thousands of dollars of fines, the latest salvo in an alarming crackdown on voting in the state led by Governor Ron DeSantis.

At least 26 groups have cumulatively racked up more than $100,000 in fines since September of last year, according to a list that was provided by Florida officials to the Guardian. The groups include both for-profit and nonprofit organizations as well as political parties, including the statewide Republican and Democratic parties of Florida.

The fines, which range from $50 to tens of thousands of dollars, were levied by the state’s office of election crimes and security, a first-of-its-kind agency created at the behest of DeSantis in 2022 to investigate voter fraud. Voter fraud is extremely rare, and the office has already come under scrutiny for bringing criminal charges against people who appeared to be confused about their voting eligibility.

Election watchdogs worry the new policies could have a chilling effect on engaging voters. There has already been a drop in voter registrations this year compared with 2019 – the last full year leading into a presidential election, according to Daniel Smith, a political science professor at the University of Florida. Through 1 June of this year, 2,430 new registrations had come from third-party voter registration organizations, he said. That’s on pace to be a sharp decrease from the 63,212 new voter registrations third-party groups submitted by the end of 2019.

A crackdown on third-party voter registration groups is also likely to disproportionately affect Floridians of color, who are about five times more likely to register with third-party groups than white voters are.

“The message is clear, [third-party voter registration organizations] are an endangered species in Florida. And it affects this population disparately,” said Smith, who has been retained by the plaintiffs challenging the voter registration restrictions in federal court.

“When you start to ratchet down the ability for groups and their first amendment rights to petition … government by getting people registered to vote, you are going to affect that overall population of registered voters.”

A ‘gross misapplication’ of the law

In mid-May, the nonprofit Hispanic Federation received a letter from the office of election crimes and security notifying it that it was being fined $7,500. Fifteen of the applications it collected were submitted to the wrong county – Polk county, in central Florida, when the voters lived elsewhere. Those 15 applications represented a tiny sliver of the more than 16,500 voter registration applications the group collected in 2022 but still resulted in a fine.

Through a public records request, the Guardian reviewed several of the applications the Hispanic Federation submitted that were flagged for fines. In nearly all of them, the voter incorrectly wrote on their own applications that they lived in Polk county. In many cases, the address they listed was just over the county line in Osceola county.

One voter lived just 300ft from the county line, which cut through his neighborhood. Another lived just 660ft from the county line. At least ten voters lived within three miles of the county boundary, according to a Guardian analysis.

The Hispanic Federation agreed to pay the fine, but wrote a letter to the state saying it “strongly disagreed” with the penalty and called it a “gross misapplication” of the law.

“Despite our good faith efforts, professionalism, and due diligence, we cannot eliminate some applications from being processed with errors as we have not been given access to an official mechanism to verify the information of each applicant – which is, in any case, not our role,” the group wrote in June.

“There is no claim that we intentionally misrepresented, nor is there a claim that we diverted, such registrations from the correct county or that we held on to the registrations beyond the required period in which they were to be delivered.”

The Florida department of state, which oversees the office of election crimes and security, did not return a request for comment....>

<....Frederick Vélez III Burgos, the Hispanic Federation’s national director of civic engagement, said in an interview that until the recent change in the law, the group wouldn’t have been fined. In 2021, the GOP-controlled legislature tweaked state law to require groups to turn in voter registration forms to the county where the prospective voter lived (they previously could turn them in anywhere). The lawmakers imposed steep fines for noncompliance – $500 for each form that was turned in at the wrong place.

The change came after election officials complained that voter registration groups were bombarding them with applications for people outside their counties. Though the election officials could register voters regardless of where they lived, it created extra work around elections. “What would happen is [the groups] would kind of bomb different counties with a whole bunch of them. So the workload wasn’t fairly distributed,” said Lori Edwards, who serves as the supervisor of elections in Polk county.

While that could cause a headache for election officials, Edwards said, “it is not among the worst offenses that third-party voter registration organizations can do.” Far worse, she said, is when groups wait too long to turn in voter registration applications until after the registration deadline, thus disfranchising the voters.

In 2022, the state legislature raised the maximum amount a group could be fined from $1,000 to $50,000. Earlier this year, it raised the cap again, to $250,000, and shortened the amount of time groups have to turn in the forms after they are filled out from 14 days to 10. Each late application carries a $50 fine. Republicans also banned noncitizens from collecting applications and barred voter registration groups from collecting contact information from people who they register, making it harder to follow up with them later (a federal judge blocked both of these provisions this month).

Two groups have accounted for more than $70,000 of the fines. Hard Knocks Strategies LLC – a for-profit election canvassing organization – has been fined $47,600 since last year for turning in forms late and to the wrong county. And Poder Latinx was fined $26,000 for turning in 52 voter registration applications to the wrong county.

“We’re a small voter registration organization with a long history of playing by all the rules. We had to pay the penalties in Florida to avoid even costlier litigation, but paid them without admission of wrongdoing,” Hard Knocks Strategies said in a statement.

“Are voter registration organizations on the right being targeted as aggressively and frequently in Florida as those seeking to register voters of color and other underrepresented communities? Given Governor DeSantis’ track record, that question may be rhetorical.”

‘I would be allowing the system to win’

After getting fined, activists in Florida say they’re determined not to let the penalties deter them from continuing to sign up voters.

Rosemary McCoy, who runs a small nonprofit called Harriet Tubman Freedom Fighters, was fined $600 for turning in a dozen applications late. She said her group does quality control on the applications it collects, reviewing the forms to make sure that they are complete and don’t have errors. If there’s a problem it can take a while to track down the applicant.

McCoy said she plans to pay the fine, but it’s money that would have otherwise gone to provide stipends or a gas subsidy for volunteers.

“That’s a hefty fine,” she said. “The purpose of these fines is to stop us, stop us from registering people … Someone has to get out there and register people and that’s what we do.”

Regina Jackson, a Jacksonville pastor, received a notice in May that she was being fined $50 for turning in a voter registration form late. And while she wasn’t fined for it, the letter also said that the application didn’t have a mark noting the group that had collected it and the date printed in triplicate. Jackson said she had inquired about the specific form before she turned it in with the election office and had been advised it was acceptable.

Jackson considered stopping registering voters altogether after receiving the letter, but had since reconsidered.

“I was like, ‘You know what – I’m not doing this any more,’ she said in May, just after she got the letter. “Then I thought, ‘I would not only be hurting my community but I would be allowing the system to win.’”>

<DK Metcalf is one of the top wide receivers in the NFL, certainly a master of his craft. Metcalf did stir up some questioning when naming his top wide receivers in NFL history, omitting Jerry Rice from the No. 1 spot.

These rankings are subjective and Metcalf's opinion, but here was the Seattle Seahawks wide receiver's top five players at that position (on the "All Things Covered" podcast).

Metcalf's top five NFL WRs of all time:

Antonio Brown
Randy Moss
Terrell Owens
Jerry Rice
Julio Jones

Putting Rice at No. 4 is certainly a choice, given what Rice has accomplished in his excellent NFL career. Rice is first in NFL history in receptions (1,549), receiving yards (22,895) and receiving touchdowns (197). He led the NFL in receptions twice, receiving yards six times and receiving touchdowns six times -- winning the receiving triple crown in 1990. He owns 24 NFL records, including the most all-purpose yards in NFL history (23,546) and total touchdowns (208).

Rice is in the conversation of greatest NFL players ever, along with Tom Brady and Jim Brown. Again, this is Metcalf's opinion and he's entitled to such. When Rice played his last NFL game in 2004 (at the age of 42), Metcalf was seven years old. Entirely possible Metcalf just doesn't remember Rice scoring a touchdown in the Super Bowl at the age of 40 -- and he certainly couldn't remember his prime years in San Francisco since he wasn't born yet.

Metcalf certainly has established himself in the conversation for being one of the best receivers in the game. Coming off the second 1,000-yard season of his career, Metcalf finished with a career-high 90 catches for 1,048 yards and six touchdowns. Over the last four seasons, Metcalf is 16th in the NFL in receptions (306), 14th in yards (4,218), and tied for sixth in touchdowns (35).

Some may not agree with Metcalf's ranking, but he's entitled to one.>

Um, ya.

<Former President Donald Trump is demanding that the court indefinitely delay his Espionage Act trial to give him breathing room to campaign — which earned a strong rebuke filing from special counsel Jack Smith, pointing out that this violates federal law. Even so, some experts are concerned Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee with a history of controversial interventions in this very case on Trump's behalf, could be sympathetic to his request.

But if she does actually grant an indefinite delay, said Florida state attorney Dave Aronberg on MSNBC Friday, it would be swiftly reversed on appeal.

"Let's talk about this trial," said anchor Katie Phang, herself an attorney. "You and I have tried a lot of cases through our careers. We know what it's like with a pending trial date. Trial dates get set so you can walk back from that. Let's say it's set in December, deadlines get set to make it to trial in December. What is your call as to what you think the Judge will do. She originally set an August case. The DOJ is assking [sic] to continue to December. How realistic do you think it is that she said that's another four-plus months and I agree with the DOJ?"

"I think this is Judge Cannon 2.0," said Aronberg. "She ruled every time for Donald Trump, and had to get repudiated by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals." As a result of that, Aronberg predicted, "I think she's been chastened."

"I do not think she's going to give Trump's request," said Aronberg. "I think the DOJ's request for December is a bit expedited, but I think that the judge is more likely to postpone it bit by bit...., essentially could be death by a thousand paper cuts, where it could be delayed little by little, but to give what Trump says, postpone it indefinitely, I think that's ridiculous and that would get her reversed."

"In the Department of Justice's reply in support of its continuance, it actually cites the Eleventh Circuit activity that happened," said Phang. "Trump's side says there's all these issues of law that need to be adjudicated, and the DOJ says the novel issues have been dealt with by the Eleventh Circuit already. Do you think they — that the judge will have an out provided to her to be able to give time to Donald Trump's side to process all those classified documents?"

"I do think it's going to be tough to try this case before the election, because of all the classified documents," said Aronberg. "You have to get clearances. The tie always goes to the defendant. They'll always give more time to the defendant based on the Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial. They shouldn't give an indefinite postponement. I still think it's possible before the election, just not all that likely — I mean Trump's strategy all along is to delay delay delay, so his — what was that comment you mentioned earlier? It's just ridiculous where he's trying to say, look, although my arguments are against the law, they're novel. I want, as a prosecutor, to go against the law and say, no, no, I'm not going against sitting law, this is novel. No. Wrong is wrong and Trump is trying to delay things.">

<Politicians typically enter office with a variety of interests, goals and focuses.

A wave of progressive Democrats were elected in 2018 with the stated goal of bringing universal healthcare to the US. Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised to lead the country out of the Great Depression with the New Deal. Donald Trump wanted to build a wall, “drain the swamp”, and force people to say “Merry Christmas”.

Tommy Tuberville, the Republican senator from Alabama, has taken a different tack.

In a series of interviews and statements in recent months, he has invested his political capital in an attempt to defend white nationalism, and white nationalists, in what one anti-racist group called a “deeply disturbing” crusade – one that only appeared to come to an end this week, after condemnation from his Republican colleagues.

Tuberville’s dalliance with white nationalism – understood by most in the US and elsewhere as a racist ideology – began in May, when he used a local radio interview to criticize the government’s efforts to “get out the white extremists, the white nationalists” from the military.

Asked in that interview if white nationalists should be allowed in the military, Tuberville, an avid supporter of Trump, said, “Well, they call them that. I call them Americans,” before going into a rambling aside about the January 6 insurrection.

“Right after that, we, our military and Secretary Austin, put out an order to stand down and all military across the country, saying we’re going to run out the white nationalists, people that don’t believe how we believe,” Tuberville continued. “And that’s not how we do it in this country.”

Invited to clarify his remarks a couple of days later, Tuberville did anything but. He said the military “cannot have racists”, but, when asked if white nationalists should serve in the military, said:

“You think a white nationalist is a Nazi? I don’t look at it like that,” the senator said.

“I look at a white nationalist as a Trump Republican. That’s what we’re called all the time. A Maga person.”

As Tuberville’s comments gained more attention, few have seemed to agree with his sanitized definition.

“White nationalism is undoubtedly, nakedly racist,” Dr Cassie Miller, lead senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told the Guardian.

“To suggest anything otherwise would seem to be an attempt to make white nationalism an acceptable political position. That a senator would try to carry water for a violent, racist political movement is deeply disturbing.”

Tuberville, 68, was elected to the Senate in 2020, after spending most of his career as a college football coach. (His website still refers to Tuberville as “coach”, and his official Senate portrait shows him tossing a football in the air.)

If a defense of white nationalism seems a strange hill for a new senator to die on, his other main interest also fits in with a far-right cause: abortion. Tuberville, who sits on the Senate armed services committee, has single-handedly held up hundreds of military appointments as part of his opposition to abortion being provided in the armed forces.

His continued opposition has left the Marine Corps without a confirmed leader for the first time in 150 years, and on Thursday Joe Biden accused Tuberville of “jeopardising US security”.

While the Marine Corps was wondering who was going to be in charge, Tuberville instead kept plugging away about white nationalism at the beginning of the week, in an interview with CNN....>

<....After Tuberville suggested that a white nationalist was “just a cover word for the Democrats now where they can use it to try to make people mad across the country”, The CNN host Kaitlan Collins stated that the definition of a white nationalist is someone “who believes that the white race is superior to other races”.

“Well, that’s some people’s opinion,” Tuberville said.

“My opinion of a white nationalist – if somebody wants to call them a white nationalist – to me, it is an American,” Tuberville reiterated. “Now, if that white nationalist is a racist, I’m totally against anything that they want to do. Because I am 110% against racism.”

Rolling Stone seemed to capture the saga best. “Tommy Tuberville Is Either Extremely Dumb or Extremely Racist,” read the magazine’s headline (the article clarified that Tuberville could also be both), and even members of Tuberville’s own party condemned him on Tuesday.

Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate minority leader called white nationalism “unacceptable”, while John Thune, the Republican Senate whip, said: “I mean, I would just say that there is no place for white nationalism in our party, and I think that is kind of full stop.”

On the Senate floor, Chuck Schumer, the Democratic majority leader, was more robust.

“For the senator from Alabama to obscure the racist nature of white nationalism is indeed very, very dangerous,” Schumer said. “His words have power and carry weight with the fringe of his constituency, just the fringe, but if that fringe listens to him excuse and defend white nationalism, he is fanning the flames of bigotry and intolerance.”

Tuberville’s website lists six different office locations, in Washington and across Alabama.

No one answered the phone at any of the offices on Tuesday morning, as it seemed Tuberville was in the middle of a period of reflection: that afternoon the senator seemed to back away from white nationalism.

Asked by CBS, on Capitol Hill, to define a white nationalist, Tuberville said: “A white nationalist is somebody that thinks that they should be the only ones in this country.”

The CBS reporter followed up: “Racist, all the time?”

“Right, right: racist, that’s what I’m saying,” Tuberville said.

All it had taken was two months, a series of botched interviews, a slew of negative headlines and a rollicking from his party leaders, for Tuberville to get on board with the most of the rest of the US.>

<The House of Representatives passed the defense spending bill Friday with a vote of 219 to 210, mostly along party lines, but some members couldn’t get past the social policy issues added to the bill by hardliner Republicans.

Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY) told CNN’s Manu Raju that he was set to vote “yes” before abortion and transgender care access amendments caused him to change his mind.

“I am a proud combat veteran — this is an insult to all who serve, particularly women in uniform. Nearly 20% of our active military force risk their life [sic] right now,” Ryan said.

According to Raju, most Democrats like Ryan had initially decided to vote for the bill, but some “ultimately decided not to because of some significant changes that were made during the social policy issues that were added to this bill through the amendment process.”

Raju ran down a list of the issues some members said they couldn’t support:

One…would nix the Pentagon’s policy providing reimbursements for abortion services for military service members or their family to go out of state where the procedure is banned. Also, other issues such as targeting transgender rights, namely transgender health care for veterans — that would be eliminated as part of this bill. Also, it would eliminate diversity and equity training programs as part of the Pentagon, and also no longer allow…Defense Department schools to have so-called ‘gender ideology books.’ Those were all pushed by members of the far Right — that cost Democratic support.

According to CBS News, The $886 billion bill is a “must pass” because it sets Defense Department policy.

“While the package typically earns wide bipartisan support and has passed Congress each year for more than six decades, this year’s proposal became ensnared in politically-charged policy debates dividing Republicans and Democrats,” CBS reported.

The bill now heads to the U.S. Senate, where Raju said a partisan fight is sure to ensue.

“The Senate has its own bill that does not have the social policy issues in it; this is going to be a big fight between the Senate and the House in the months ahead,” Raju said. “And, this is such a significant bill, one that passes year after year, setting military policy. Can they reconcile the two chambers, can they get the White House to sign it into law?”>

<According to Google’s news search, the media has run more than 10,000 stories this year about Phillip Schofield, the British television presenter who resigned over an affair with a younger colleague. Google also records a global total of five news stories about a scientific paper published last week, showing that the chances of simultaneous crop losses in the world’s major growing regions, caused by climate breakdown, appear to have been dangerously underestimated. In mediaworld, a place that should never be confused with the real world, celebrity gossip is thousands of times more important than existential risk.

The new paper explores the impacts on crop production when meanders in the jet stream (Rossby waves) become stuck. Stuck patterns cause extreme weather. To put it crudely, if you live in the northern hemisphere and a kink in the jet stream (the band of strong winds a few miles above the Earth’s surface at mid-latitudes) is stuck to the south of you, your weather is likely to be cold and wet. If it’s stuck to the north of you, you’re likely to suffer escalating heat and drought.

In both cases, the stuck weather, exacerbated by global heating, affects crops. With certain meander patterns, several of the northern hemisphere’s major growing regions – such as western North America, Europe, India and east Asia – could be exposed to extreme weather at the same time, hammering their harvests. We rely for our subsistence on global smoothing: if there’s a bad harvest in one region, it’s likely to be counteracted by good harvests elsewhere. Even small crop losses occurring simultaneously present what the paper calls “systemic risk”.

Already, regional climate shocks have helped cause a disastrous reversal in the trend of global chronic hunger. For many years, the number of hungry people fell. But in 2015 the trend turned and has been curving upwards since. This is not because of a lack of food. The most likely explanation is that the global food system has lost its resilience. When complex systems lose resilience, instead of damping the shocks that hit them, they tend to amplify them. The shocks amplified across the system so far have landed most heavily on poor nations that depend on imports, causing local price spikes even when global food prices were low.

If this happens when harvests are affected in just one country or one region, we can only imagine the results if extreme weather simultaneously hits several major growing regions.

Other papers have been published with similar themes, showing, for example, the impacts of the rising frequency of “flash droughts” and concurrent heatwaves in grain-producing regions, and how global heating hits food security. All have been largely or entirely ignored by the media....>

<....We face an epochal, unthinkable prospect: of perhaps the two greatest existential threats – environmental breakdown and food system failure – converging, as one triggers the other.

There are plenty of signs, some of which I’ve tried to explain in the Guardian and, with a sense of rising urgency, in a presentation to parliament, suggesting that the global food system may not be far from its tipping point, for structural reasons similar to those that tanked the financial sector in 2008. As a system approaches a critical threshold, it’s impossible to say which external shock could push it over. Once a system has become fragile, and its resilience is not restored, it’s not a matter of if and how, but when.

So why isn’t this all over the front pages? Why, when governments know we’re facing existential risk, do they fail to act? Why is the Biden administration allowing enough oil and gas drilling to bust the US carbon budget five times over? Why is the UK government scrapping the £11.6bn international climate fund it promised? Why has Labour postponed its £28bn green prosperity fund, while Keir Starmer is reported to have remarked last week “I hate tree huggers” (a pejorative term for environmental campaigners)? Why are the Sun, the Mail, the Telegraph and the Express competing to attack every green solution that might help to prevent climate chaos? Why does everything else seem more important?

The underlying problem isn’t hard to grasp: governments have failed to break what the economist Thomas Piketty calls the patrimonial spiral of wealth accumulation. As a result, the rich have become ever richer, a process that seems to be accelerating. In 2021, for example, the ultra-rich captured almost two-thirds of all the world’s new wealth. Their share of national income in the UK has almost doubled since 1980, while in the US it’s higher than it was in 1820.

The richer a fraction of society becomes, the greater its political power, and the more extreme the demands it makes. The problem is summarised in one sentence in the resignation letter of the UK environment minister Zac Goldsmith: instead of attending a crucial environment summit, Rishi Sunak went to Rupert Murdoch’s summer party. We cannot work together to solve our common problems when great power is in the hands of so few.

What the ultra-rich want is to sustain and extend the economic system that put them where they are. The more they have to lose, the more creative their strategies become. As well as the traditional approach of buying media outlets and pouring money into the political parties that favour them, they devise new ways of protecting their interests.

Corporations and oligarchs with massive fortunes can hire as many junktanks (so-called thinktanks), troll farms, marketing gurus, psychologists and micro-targeters as they need to devise justifications and to demonise, demoralise, abuse and threaten people trying to sustain a habitable planet. The junktanks devise new laws to stifle protest, implemented by politicians funded by the same plutocratic class.

It could scarcely be more screwed up. The effort to protect Earth systems and the human systems that depend on them is led by people working at the margins with tiny resources, while the richest and most powerful use every means at their disposal to stop them. Can you imagine, in decades to come, trying to explain this to your children?

Looking back on previous human calamities, all of which will be dwarfed by this, you find yourself repeatedly asking “why didn’t they … ?” The answer is power: the power of a few to countermand the interests of humanity. The struggle to avert systemic failure is the struggle between democracy and plutocracy. It always has been, but the stakes are now higher than ever.>

<Several days after Business Insider admitted they had published inaccurate numbers of state residents that moved to Florida during the COVID-19 pandemic, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin cited them and used them in an attack piece about Gov. Ron DeSantis’, R-Fla., leadership of the state.

Rubin published the column Friday in which she claimed, "DeSantis likes to brag that more people are moving to Florida than ever. Not so fast. ‘An estimated 674,740 people reported that their permanent address changed from Florida to another state in 2021.’" Those numbers are wrong and the Post, in a correction on Saturday, admitting the column "mischaracterized" the stats.

She originally added, "’That’s more than any other state, including New York or California, the two states that have received the most attention for outbound migration during the pandemic,’ according to the American Community Survey released in June tracking state-by-state migration."

Business Insider published the figure earlier in the week, claiming that 674,740 residents left the state, overtaking 433,402 residents leaving California and 287,249 residents moving from New York.

Though the outlet corrected it Tuesday, after critics, including Team DeSantis’ Christina Pushaw, pointed out, consulted the data the report was based on and blasted the paper.

Pushaw tweeted, "That figure -- 674,740 -- is people who moved TO Florida, not OUT OF Florida. Retraction needed."

Confirming critics’ analysis, Business Insider wrote a new piece correcting the figure, which was headlined, "We got it wrong: More people moved out of New York and California in 2021."

In it, reporter Kelsey Neubauer – who wrote the original erroneous piece – stated, "Out-of-staters flocked to Florida in 2021, with some 674,740 people moving there," amending the claim.

It added, "About 469,577 residents left the state, for a net population gain of 205,163," and affirmed, "The state became a big draw for Americans who decided to move during the pandemic."

Despite Business Insider admitting its original claim was contrary to the actual numbers, Rubin published the debunked fact in her piece three days later.

On Saturday afternoon, the Post offered a correction to Rubin's column, admitting to "mischaracterizing" the numbers: "A previous version of this article mischaracterized Floridians' state-to-state migration in 2021. According to the Census Bureau, more people moved into Florida than any other state that year. This version has been corrected."

Since Rubin published the piece, multiple Twitter users blasted her and the Washington Post outlet for not catching the error.

The National Review’s Charles Cooke shared screenshots of Rubin’s error and the new article from Business Insider on Twitter. He wrote, "In which Jennifer Rubin writes a piece in the Washington Post on Friday that is based around the massive mistake that Business Insider made—and then corrected—on Tuesday. ‘Does she have editors?’ was just emphatically answered."

Cooke added, "It really is jarring to see. When I’ve written for the Post and the Times, I’ve been fact-checked until I bled. If I wrote that there are 50 states, I was asked for a citation. That’s fine—good, even. But, as is evident if you read those papers, it only happens in one direction."

Outkick.com writer Ian Miller tweeted, "Jennifer Rubin and the Washington Post lied about the amount of people who moved to Florida because they didn’t want it to be true since it makes Ron DeSantis look good — and they still haven’t corrected their very obvious mistake. Amazing to see how desperate they are."

RedState.com senior editor Joe Cunningham commented, "Hell, CNN fact-checked the hell out of an op-ed I wrote. But Jennifer Rubin gets all the free passes."

Fox News Digital reached out to the Washington Post for comment on the error.>

<CNN anchor Chris Wallace took RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel to task for a resolution referring to the January 6 riot as “legitimate political discourse.

On this week’s episodes of Wallace’s Max/CNN series Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace, Wallace interviewed McDaniel, as well as Hollywood superstar Goldie Hawn.

In an interview full of stunning exchanges, Wallace spent a solid three minutes holding McDaniel’s feet to the fire for her organization’s resolution censuring Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, and calling the attack on the Capitol “legitimate political discourse.

Eight different times, Wallace turned back McDaniel’s insistence that the resolution did not say what he characterized it as saying:

CHRIS WALLACE: No, no, it’s both of them. Right. The RNC voted to censure Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, both members of the January 6 committee, for their role in persecution of ordinary citizens engage in legitimate political discourse. Here is what your uncle Mitt Romney, had to say about that. This suggests that a violent attack on the seat of democracy is legitimate political discourse is is so far from accurate as to shock and awe and make people wonder what we are thinking. 17 months after the RNC that you were the head of passed that resolution, do you still think that January 6 was legitimate political discourse?

RONNA MCDANIEL: So I love the spin on this because we said this immediately. Of course, violence is never legitimate political discourse. And that was not what was said in that resolution. It was not intended. I made it clear and it’s dishonest. It is absolutely dishonest for the media to anyway said that the RNC was saying that violence is legitimate political.

CHRIS WALLACE: Well, first of.

RONNA MCDANIEL: All, that’s not what was said and it wasn’t.

CHRIS WALLACE: Also, your own uncle, Senator Mitt Romney. So that is not.

RONNA MCDANIEL: What was said.

CHRIS WALLACE: Well, I must tell you, Ronna, I specifically read the resolution again today. But and and what the it’s about the January 6th investigation and it’s persecution. Well, it wasn’t in the resolution.

RONNA MCDANIEL: Because you don’t have to say that violence isn’t legitimate political discourse. We didn’t think we had to say that. Use violence and.

CHRIS WALLACE: The January 6 committee and you are censuring them for persecuting ordinary citizens who have for legitimate political.

RONNA MCDANIEL: Discussions or showed up peacefully. That’s legitimate. You’re able to peacefully protest.

CHRIS WALLACE: That is what you said that you don’t say that.

RONNA MCDANIEL: Violence never is legitimate. And why.

CHRIS WALLACE: Didn’t you? You know what?

RONNA MCDANIEL: I’m saying it right now and I did condemn it. Go read my statements.

CHRIS WALLACE: I’m talking about the resolution that the RNC. Let me.

RONNA MCDANIEL: Say that. Do you have my statements from January 6?

CHRIS WALLACE: I have the resolution.

RONNA MCDANIEL: You have my statements from January 6? No, because I did condemn the violence. But if you’re going to.

CHRIS WALLACE: You do it in.

RONNA MCDANIEL: The right way to condemn it in the resolution when I already condemned it the day of, twice via tweets.

CHRIS WALLACE: Because the resolution is the resolution. It’s more than that statement said. This is the official position of the Republican Party and.

RONNA MCDANIEL: Said that violence is not political, legitimate political discourse. I said it with that resolution. I’ve said it after. I don’t think I should have to say that. But of course, violence is never legitimate political discourse.>

Y'all launched a typical passive-aggressive manoeuvre, it got pulled down, which, by your lights, makes you the victim.

<....It's not just me getting punished here; it's you the reader who isn't given an opportunity to understand what happened from a poster who knows what happened....>

'Waaaaah! I got slapped down after an unprovoked attack!! Waaaaah!'

<....I really don't know why I bother to contribute good information when my freedom of speech is so routinely violated and my paid account is harassed and restricted by the technicians who favor trash-posting trolls that pay no attention to chess and the angry political cyber bully who hates on people as a way of life....>

<Michigan's Republican Party has less than six figures in its coffers 16 months ahead of the November 2024 presidential election.

The Detroit News obtained a recording of a closed-door meeting of the state GOP committee on July 8 that one participant described as a "Festivus-style airing of grievances" that included a physical altercation as party officials revealed their bank accounts had only $93,000.

“What I will confirm right now is that we have $93,231.90 in our accounts," said Dan Bonamie, the state committee's budget chairman. "We have not taken loans out. We are working on the debt.”

Former state GOP officials described the financial picture as troubling and unusual based on past fundraising totals and expenses to fund the party's operations.

“That could sound like a lot to the casual observer, but that means they’re functionally bankrupt," said former state GOP executive director Jeff Timmer, who said $93,000 would not have covered rent, payroll and utilities for even a month when he was there from 2005 to 2009.

Tom Leonard, a former Michigan House speaker who was the state GOP's budget chair in 2009 and 2010, said a successful state party needed to raise about $30 million and $40 million each election cycle and have between $4 million and $6 million cash on hand to pay for staffers, voter outreach and other operations.

"At this point, any Republican that's going to be on the ballot in 2024 better be looking for resources and organization outside of the Michigan Republican Party," Leonard said.

Party chairwoman Kristina Karamo called the "in-house" meeting because she "saw the chaos that was brewing amongst the party," according to the recording, but party members feuded amongst themselves and couldn't even agree who was running the meeting.

"Who’s running the meeting?" said Macomb County Republican Party chairman Mark Forton.

“It’s not you, Forton. Sit down," responded a second person.

A physical assault broke out at one point when GOP activist James Chapman, of Wayne County, allegedly kicked Clare County GOP chairman Mark DeYoung in the groin when he wasn't allowed into the closed meeting.

"Somebody was just assaulted," Karamo said on the recording. "That is unbelievable."

GOP members then prayed after the attack, which Karamo later blamed on outside agitators.

"We are literally being incited to fight each other," Karamo said.>

Go to it, Kristina! Yer the essence of awesome!!

<United States Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) on Sunday ripped into House of Representatives Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Kentucky) for continuing to pursue testimony from supposed Hunter Biden informant Gal Luft, whom the Justice Department indicted on July 10th on eight federal felonies.

The crimes of which Luft is accused carry a combined maximum sentence of one hundred years.

Speaking with MSNBC host Jen Psaki, Raskin lamented the collapse of the GOP's credibility and attributed its descent into chaos to its fusion with unscrupulous individuals.

"What questions, what information are you seeking about James Comer's involvement with Luft and what do you really wanna know?" Psaki asked.

"Well, look, Gal Luft was supposed to be the star witness in arraigning Joe Biden on the old Giuliani charges of a fake Ukrainian bribery scandal," Raskin replied. "And it turns out that Luft was missing as Chairman Comer kept saying. The reason he was missing is because he's a fugitive from justice. He's on the run around the world away from the US government, and this was going to be the star witness against Joe Biden. And what I'm afraid has happened, Jen, is that the Trump party has created such a topsy-turvy world that we're getting real low-life characters like George Santos, like Donald Trump, like Gal Luft who say, I think I'm gonna be able to launder all of my crimes and wrap myself in the production [sic] of the Republican Party."

Psaki observed that "they see targets of people they could go after to help them," to which Raskin exclaimed, "That's right!"

Psaki questioned Raskin, "And so how concerned are you that James Comer, the chairman of the committee, was knowingly, unknowingly working with — co-opted by a foreign agent?"

Raskin explained that he is "concerned that the House Oversight Committee — which has a very proud history with, you know, Congressman Waxman as Chair, the great Elijah Cummings of Maryland as chair — is suddenly being compromised in a really serious way. Our legitimacy is being eroded by the tactics adopted by Chairman Comer. They essentially have said, we will validate anybody who will say anything about the Bidens. And of course, they haven't laid a glove on President Biden. There are real issues that are confronting our people, and they're off on this wild goose chase related to Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, and their main witnesses are people who are fleeing justice in America.">

<The speech by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) at the Talking Points Action conference left some progressives scratching their heads after her attacks on President Joe Biden appeared to be more like compliments.

Ranting at the far-right crowd, Greene attacked programs like Social Security, Medicare, and other infamous programs started by the late Democratic presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson.

She began by warning Joe Biden is trying to "finish what FDR started" by trying to address problems related to "education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, transportation, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and welfare."

It was revealed this week that "Bidenomics," the new attack phrase from the GOP, has done more to help red states with higher incomes than blue states,The New Republic cited.

"How will Dark Brandon ever recover from this?" mocked "Did Nothing Wrong" podcaster Jay McKenzie.

Issuing a "'warning' that Joe Biden is going to create things like Medicare and Medicaid — both wildly popular programs — seems like an odd way to attack him, but have at it," said historian Kevin M. Kruse said, citing Kaiser Family Foundation data showing the popularity of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.

Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) knocked her too for saying Democrats and Biden want to "finish what FDR started."

"Yes," he agreed. "Guilty as charged."

"Did not have “Marjorie Taylor Greene doing campaign ads for Biden” on my election bingo card but here we are," influencer Shauna W. mocked.>

<Reps. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., and Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., are suing liberal advocacy groups and two California cities that they allege violated their First Amendment rights through a coordinated cancellation of their rallies.

The two lawmakers had scheduled America First rallies in Anaheim and Riverside in 2021, but both venues canceled the events after they faced pressure from activists and local government officials. The lawsuit, which was filed Thursday, alleges their First Amendment rights were violated after the cities coerced the private venues to cancel the rallies, including a threat to revoke one venue's permit.

Gaetz and Taylor Greene filed the lawsuit along with their funding committees. They're seeking an injunction that would ban cities from "coercing private venues from entering into facilities use contracts with Plaintiffs for future political rallies." They also requested damages for emotional distress.

Ten advocacy groups are named in the lawsuit, which details how they allegedly pressured the cities to get the rallies canceled.

The scheduled rally in California was initially at Pacific Hills Banquet & Event Center, whose owner said he canceled after learning Gaetz and Taylor Greene would be speaking. It was then moved to Riverside Convention Center, which canceled due to an issue with the certificate of insurance, according to the lawsuit.

A third venue was chosen called Grand Theater, which also canceled after facing pressure from local leaders. The lawsuit alleges a city code enforcement officer told the venue that their conditional use permit would be "in jeopardy if they did not cancel the event."

Mike Lyster, the chief communications officer for Anaheim, told Fox News Digital the city has not formally received the complaint but is aware of it and will review it.

Riverside did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The rally was later hosted outside the Riverside City Hall.>

<A panel of 5th Circuit judges granted the Biden administration’s request for an administrative stay of a widely panned lower court decision that blocked wide swaths of the government from flagging misinformation to the companies that operate social media sites.

The stay will last “until further orders of the court.” The panel also expedited oral arguments, and punted the decision on whether to grant a stay pending appeal to the merits panel that will hear them.

The lower court judge, Donald Trump appointee Judge Terry Doughty, had ruled that government officials flagging potentially dangerous social media posts — largely about COVID-19 vaccine conspiracy theories — was a violation of the First Amendment.

He denied the government’s stay requests — saying that the injury to those being “censored” was far greater than the government’s — and the Justice Department immediately took its case to the 5th circuit.

Using unusually harsh language, the DOJ wrote that Doughty’s ruling “reflects numerous legal errors” and that its scope is an “abuse of discretion.” It also asked that, at the very least, the relief be constrained to the named parties in the suit so as to not affect the “vast universe of government actions lacking any connection to plaintiffs.”

Doughty, a consistently anti-Biden administration judge, had referred to the administration’s attempt to restrict COVID-19 misinformation as “Orwellian” and “dystopian” in his original ruling. He rehashed some of those examples of government “censorship” in his denial of the stay request.

His ruling is the latest example of right-wing judges taking advantage of nationwide relief to set government policy.>

<If you’ll remember the last time we discussed Incel Chieftain Ron DeSantis the story was that even though his polling numbers had faltered and campaign discourse had settled into describing his deep personal weirdness he was still sitting on a mountain of money. Well, maybe not. Now DeSantis has been forced to fire staff amid a spending crunch. A campaign insider tells Politico the number was “fewer than 10 staffers.” NBC says it was a dozen. The first reports tried to suggest this was part of a strategy shift as opposed to spending woes. But in those terms the new strategy seems to be to not run out of money before the end of the summer.

In fairness, the idea that GOP oligarchs had hosed Ron down with an obscene amount of cash was largely based on the Ron-backing SuperPACs, which still do have quite a lot of money. But this reminds us of a key dynamic of campaign financing even in the Citizens United era. Your allied SuperPACs and dark money entities can be part of your campaign commercial air war. They can help with organizing voters and get out the vote efforts to a lesser but still real extent. But the campaign still has to run its actual campaign through the old regulated system. That’s your own staff, your own events, your own paid media. That’s where DeSantis’s operation is apparently buckling.

Meanwhile this report from NBCNews highlights an additional problem. More than 2/3rds of the money DeSantis raised between mid-May and the end of June came from donors who’ve maxed out their giving; even some of that money can only be spent in the general election (which, let’s be honest, won’t ever happen for Ron).

As we noted a few days ago, the “small donor” label can be misleading inasmuch as people imagine its [sic] a true mass base of support reaching down through the class spectrum. It’s really dominated by upper middle class and affluent givers tossing in tens or a hundred dollars at a time online. But the key is that a candidate can keep drawing money from those givers. That kind of giving, which really got underway about twenty years ago and now plays a dominant role in Democratic campaigns, opened up a whole new kind of political campaigning in which candidates could essentially live on the land. DeSantis seems to be focused on an older and somewhat more transactional style of funding focused on richer but still non-oligarch givers who can max out with a single check. Those contributions are great and all campaigns in both parties try to get them. But it’s one and done. You can’t go back to those people again.

What it all amounts to is a campaign which is dying but at the highest levels, with enough juice to keep any other candidate from climbing out of single digits yet mortally wounded all the same.>

<Right-wing rhetoric of late is reverberating with echoes of the First Red Scare. Former President Donald Trump recently promised a conservative Christian audience that, if elected president again, he would keep foreign "communists, Marxists, and socialists out of America" by ordering his government to deny them entry.

Honoring this early campaign promise would not require a new policy, it would just enforce an extant one. The authority to turn away leftist immigrants, as Trump noted, is already enshrined in a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which deemed members or affiliates of "the Communist or any other totalitarian party ... inadmissible."

The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services policy manual traced the statute back to an immigration law passed in 1918 to address the "external threats of anarchism and communism" amid the First Red Scare. The law was a symptom of the feverish anti-communist hysteria of the time, appeased with an iron fist by the federal government in what historian Kenyon Zimmer called "an unparalleled period of political repression in the United States."

Trump's intention to dust off a fossil of that period is troublingly regressive and authoritarian. But his proposal for addressing domestic radicalism is even more so.

"My question is," Trump went on, "what are we going to do with the ones that are already here, that grew up here? I think we have to pass a new law for them." The implied solution, to deport U.S. residents who espouse purportedly un-American politics, was clear. (The audience certainly caught on, supplying approving shouts of, "Get rid of them!")

Such aspirations harken back to the Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920, which marked the apogee of First Red Scare repression.

Spearheaded by the eponymous former U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, the Palmer Raids saw the U.S. Justice Department violently round up thousands of anarchists, socialists, and communists, and expel foreign-born dissidents among them. In the end, this exercise of arbitrary administrative authority saw several hundred deported, marking a clear blot on the country's civil liberties record. A vast majority of subjects of the mass deportations were cast off merely for holding certain political ideas.

As one contemporary critic of Palmer put it, the attorney general used "exile to counteract evil-thinking." Or, to borrow terminology George Orwell would coin 30 years later, deportees were punished for the offense of thoughtcrime. While Trump may insist his plans are intended to stave off "totalitarian" incomers, his (and any) aspirations to replicate Palmer's methods ultimately bear true hallmarks of totalitarianism.

And Trump is far from the right's sole First Red Scare revivalist. Republican Senator Rick Scott recently warned that leftists "are not welcome" in Florida, reiterating a May "travel advisory" that the Sunshine State "is openly hostile toward Socialists, Communists, and those that enable them."

Such attempts to vilify radicals should disquiet even moderates on the political left, if not only on civil libertarian grounds, then because Republicans have proven time and time again that you need not be a communist to be labeled one.

In Scott's travel advisory, for instance, "socialist" denotes proponents of socialism, sure, but also those "who work in the Biden Administration" and "supporters of big government." Trump has historically adhered to a similarly loose definition of "communist," which encompasses the 2020 Democratic Party platform, Vice President Kamala Harris, private censorship by Twitter and Facebook, et cetera.

Despite sensationalist red baiting being a predominantly right-wing phenomenon, centrist Democrats too often fall in lockstep.

In February,109 House Democrats voted to pass a vapid GOP-sponsored motion condemning the "horrors of socialism." Critics at the time dismissed the resolution as a reactionary ploy—rife with junk history and selective amnesia—to falsely conflate increasingly popular democratic socialism with Stalinism. Despite these transparent ulterior motives, Democrats unquestioningly took the bait.

Considering that there appears to be no shortage of would-be A. Mitchell Palmers in our midst, endeavors to rehash First Red Scare tactics require strong, united opposition going forward.

The onus is on true anti-authoritarians to dismiss them for what they are: efforts to recycle dreck better left rotting in the dustbin of history.>