<....Applebaum: And it’s completely the wrong question. Completely wrong.

Pomerantsev: Exactly. It’s the wrong question. Because, you know, if you think about belief as, you know, a set of beliefs that you’ve thought about and you’ve worked out and you’ve decided that represents you—you know, these are your thoughts, what you stand for—I mean, that matters in a society where your opinion matters.

But here it’s the other way around. You say that which marks your belonging in order to feel some sort of psychological comfort. But tomorrow if the line changes, well, then you’ll believe that.

Kinzinger: You look at Nazi Germany, and you’re like, How could an entire population of Germans do what they did? And I understand it now, because if you’re living in an environment where there’s so much pressure, you can convince yourself of anything. I’m not comparing Republicans to Nazis, but I can see now how, when that pressure is so intense, you can convince yourself of anything simply to survive.

I have come to believe in my life that people, more than they fear death, they fear not belonging. I think there are more people that would step in front of a train to save a child than there are people that would be willing to leave their party and be an outlier.

Pomerantsev: For me, I find it somewhat petrifying because basically this means a political system where truth and facts and evidence—they aren’t a currency anymore. You can’t have a democratic debate about anything, really. What Adam Kinzinger is talking about here, it’s a very, very anxious moment. And I’m not quite sure how you go back from that moment.

Applebaum: And, of course, it’s also true that once you aren’t having a conversation about reality, you’re not talking about things that have actually happened, then you’re in a different kind of political conversation. Then all you have is anger and emotion and people expressing themselves in order to confirm their identities or to attack somebody else’s identity.

And then you’re not talking about health care or roads or how to build bridges, where the next investment should be or how high taxes are. Instead, you’re in a different kind of politics. And I do think that America crossed into that world.

Pomerantsev: There might be something else going on as well, because at some level, you know, people who are inhabiting this anti-fact, anti-truth identity—at some level, they must always know that that’s not quite them. You know, even if they’re now performing it very seriously, they’re still performing it.

Applebaum: And so you’re saying there’s a psychological cost to having a kind of double life?

Pomerantsev: And when they see someone like a Kinzinger calling them out, saying, Hold on. You weren’t like this before. This is not true, then that sort of just causes this sort of visceral anger.

Applebaum: Yeah, I think it’s anger because someone like Kinzinger is letting down the side. But also, he’s able to say things in a freer way, and there’s a kind of jealousy there as well. That’s also the moment when he was ostracized. And for Kinzinger, it finally happened when he made his decision to vote for the impeachment of President Trump.

CBS newscaster Anthony Mason: “Congressman Adam Kinzinger, one of the growing number of House Republicans to publicly say they will vote to impeach the president. He joins us now.”

Kinzinger: To me, I think by the time that impeachment vote came up, I was blown away that it was only 10 of us.

I mean, you know, when I broke with the GOP—yeah, I guess there’s any number of ways people react. Some were confused. Did you become a Democrat now? Are you a Democrat? Like you only have two options or something—like, you know, the idea of being somebody that actually could think for yourself was foreign to these folks.

And so when you make the decision to go against the party, to leave the party, first off, you realize who your friends are, and then you realize you don’t have near as many as you thought you did.

Applebaum: Can you remember any specific people who dropped you or who were nasty to you?

Kinzinger: Oh yeah. You know, the guy I fought with in Iraq sent me a text that said, I’m ashamed to have ever flown with you.

Applebaum: Wow.

Kinzinger: And there was nothing about our friendship or our time in Iraq together that was political. We fought the enemy. But all of a sudden, he’s ashamed to have fought in a war with me because—what? He disagrees with my political stand?>

<....Applebaum: What Kinzinger found when he was speaking freely was not only did his relationships with people around him change but his whole life became much more dangerous.

Kinzinger: We had people, you know, all in the name of Christ, for some reason—and I say this as a Christian. It’s embarrassing to me for people to say that they want the Lord to strike me and my family down. Why? Because I told you the truth? Because the Bible I looked at, the truth was what you’re supposed to be telling.

People wishing my son, who was six months old at the time, would die. I mean, these are the kinds of things that you just, like—you realize the rot in people’s lives. But I was less concerned about those making calls and leaving messages when they’re drunk on Fox News than I was about the people that wouldn’t bother calling. Because, to them, it would be some just battle to go and kill a congressman, right?

Pomerantsev: And, I mean, it’s kind of extraordinary in all the worst possible ways. A U.S. congressman in the United States of America who’s afraid that he’ll be murdered because he refused to go along with a set of utter lies about the 2020 election and the assault on the Capitol. And, you know, one has to feel for Kinzinger and kind of admire him. But he was experiencing these threats at a really high level.

And I can’t forget about the story we started with in Maricopa County in Arizona: Stephen Richer. In a sense, he was far more vulnerable there, and he and his team were having the full weight of the Republican law machine come down on them.

Applebaum: I asked Stephen Richer to talk to me about that.

Applebaum: How did this impact your day-to-day life? Did your commute to work change? Did you think differently about trips to the grocery store or anything like that?

Richer: We took certain precautions at our homes. We built a new security system. And security just got baked into the elections-administration puzzle so much more, such that all of our facilities are just very secure facilities now.

I would say the biggest impact it’s had is just where I go. I don’t put myself into some of the places where, quite frankly, I feel I need to be speaking because they need to be hearing some of this—places where I don’t know if it would be smart, and it certainly wouldn’t be fun.

Applebaum: Meaning places where there are Republicans?

Richer: Like the grassroots groups, you know, where it’s a gathering of 50-plus people who are, you know—they’re angry. They’re angry about life. They’re angry about the world. They’re certainly angry about the 2020 election. And certainly a lot of their anger has been directed towards people like me.

Applebaum: Not all this anger just stays in people’s heads. You have the attempted murder of Congressman Steve Scalise in 2017; the plot to kidnap Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, in 2020; a gunman outside the home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022. And also, in that same year, a man broke into Nancy Pelosi’s house intending to kidnap her and wound up smashing her husband’s head with a hammer instead.

Pomerantsev: And then, of course, this summer, a 20-year-old in Pennsylvania tried to kill Donald Trump at a rally. The bullet grazed his ear.

Applebaum: But all of these examples involve big names—congressmen, Supreme Court justices. In Arizona, we’re talking about local government workers. This is a county election office. And yet, Richer and his team in 2021 are being questioned and harassed and threatened and even investigated by the state’s attorney general, under pressure from the president of the United States. And this was really hard on Richer’s staff.

Richer: There’s a number of people for whom this was a job, and they found it on a county website, and they like the people that they’re working with. They like that it’s consistent. And it rattled quite a few people. Some of them would come to me, just alarmed: Am I going to be arrested? I didn’t do anything.

Pomerantsev: Anne, this is a really important moment, where it’s not just about conspiracists believing their own reality. They start to force it onto other people. People start feeling really awkward and guilty and start internalizing the guilt. I mean, a bit of your brain starts going, Well, did I do it? What if they’re right? What if two plus two equals five? What’s going on here?>

<....Applebaum: It’s unsettling, and people talk about it years later and don’t always recover. I mean, the moment when they were afraid of being arrested for some absurd political claim, the moment when they were forced to say something or do something they didn’t believe—these are moments when you suddenly feel a sharp break with what’s supposed to be normal and what life is supposed to be like.

Pomerantsev: Let’s be frank: People get accused of murders they haven’t committed. I mean, there’s all sorts of horrible things that happen, even in the most, you know, advanced democracies. So these things happen.

What’s happening here is a political attack on one of the institutions, the electoral commission, that is meant to guarantee the facts of our democracy. So it’s a sort of strategic attack on the infrastructure of reason that supports a functioning democracy.

Applebaum: Well, the infrastructure of reason is still standing in Maricopa County. The Kafkaesque investigation into Richer ended, and the attorney general in Arizona is an elected position. A Democrat now holds the job.

NBC 12News newscaster Mark Curtis: For almost a year, the state’s top prosecutor concealed his own investigators’ reports that would have showed Arizonans that there was no evidence of election fraud in 2020. Now that Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich has left office, his Democratic successor, Kris Mays, released the reports today.

NBC 12News newscaster Caribe Devine: Team 12’s Brahm Resnik is joining us in studio with more on these bombshell reports. Brahm?

NBC 12News reporter Brahm Resnik: Yeah, keep in mind that former—

Pomerantsev: This slew of prosecutions and personal attacks has a very direct consequence on democracy. It means that ordinary people just don’t want to be part of it. They don’t want to work in these jobs without which democracy doesn’t actually happen.

Applebaum: I asked Stephen Richer what he’s doing these days in order to recruit and rehire at the county clerk’s office.

Richer: I tell them: You get a front row seat to history. I tell them that 10, 20, 30 years—whatever it is—from now, this will be a chapter in American textbooks. And for whatever reason, of all the bars in all the towns in all the world, Maricopa County figures in prominently to this conversation, and our office figures in prominently.

Applebaum: I suppose that was a happy ending of a kind. Although, this summer, Richer lost a Republican primary. The investigations ended, but many Arizonans continue to believe that the 2020 election was stolen.

Pomerantsev: What happens if the courts are undermined and are willing to go along with that conspiracy? What if the psychological corruption becomes political corruption? What if the online mobs shouting about conspiracy theories and the people calling congressmen to threaten their children—what if those people get control of a congressional committee, a government department, or a courthouse?

Applebaum: It’s beginning to happen already.

Renée DiResta: That, for me, was a real Oh, wow moment, because I thought, Surely, we’re not that far gone. And then, yeah—and then I realized, Maybe we are, actually.

Applebaum: That’s next time on Autocracy in America.>

<The fall campaign has begun in earnest, and the presidential race is still tight, according to swing state polls conducted for The Hill between Aug. 23 and 28. The big question is: Why the race still so close?

In the short time Vice President Harris has been the designated Democratic nominee, she solidified her party’s base, raised a ton of dough and selected a popular running mate. Meanwhile, former President Trump bumbled and stumbled his way through the summer with incoherent campaign rhetoric, a divisive running mate and defections by prominent Republicans. Former Sen. Pat Toomey, from the swing state of Pennsylvania, and former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, the daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney, are the latest Republicans to express their intentions to not vote for their party’s nominee.

Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), have been crisscrossing battleground states while Trump has hunkered down in Mar-a-Lago.

You would like to think that Democratic energy and enthusiasm would have produced a big blue wave, but it isn’t so. The race is still close in the seven swing states on the front lines of the electoral combat zone. Either party can win simply by mobilizing its base. But neither can dominate without having broad support across voting blocs. The next president needs a large public mandate to advance her or his agenda. Neither candidate is likely to own one after Election Day.

The winner will have to deal with a closely divided Congress, which will make it difficult for Harris to deliver on her campaign promises.

The Democratic nominee wants higher taxes on bankers and billionaires to pay for tax cuts for hard working and financially strapped middle-income families. That proposal would be dead on arrival in a Congress where the GOP controls one or both houses.

The deep divisions in American politics prevent either party from gaining much of an advantage in politics or a mandate for policy.

The great racial and gender divides that afflict our democracy are well known. But one of the deepest fissures in the body politic is the difference between college-educated white voters and white voters who don’t have a four-year diploma.

In 2020, each of these two groups constituted about one-third of the electorate, but they made significantly different choices. The stark discrepancy between these two voting blocs illustrate the divisions in America that are as wide and deep as the Pacific Ocean.

Seven out of ten non-white voters supported Biden regardless of education level. A small majority of the college-educated white voters supported Biden. Two of every three white voters without a college degree went for Trump.

Progressives such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) hope to build a biracial populist majority to battle corporate domination of politics and policy and enact Medicare for All and a living wage.

The voting inclinations of white voters without college degrees presents a serious obstacle for progressive populists. In 2020, Americans in that category living in households where the total income was less than $50,000 a year, overwhelmingly supported Trump over Biden. It would be easy but inaccurate to describe these Trump supporters as “rednecks.” In fact, most of them live in cities and suburbs.

Low-income white voters would benefit greatly from a progressive populist agenda. So why do they vote against their own economic interests?

The answer is that these low-income white voters, who lack a college education, are social conservatives. A clear majority of these voters were opposed to abortion in all or most cases and a plurality of them disliked the Black Lives Matter movement in the last presidential election.

Trump goes out of his way to exploit the conservative social tendencies of these voters to keep them from backing Democrats. His racially-tinged rhetoric is especially potent in a contest against a Black opponent. It is the reason the contest is still close, despite all of Harris’s momentum.

The social and racial views of low-income white voters have undermined the movement for progressive economic populism throughout our history. For Harris to be a successful candidate and president, she must overcome social and racial divisions that stand in her way.

The way for her to proceed and succeed is to go big on populist economic proposals that will make it clear that Democrats alone share the hopes and dreams of low-income voters of all races.

Expect a close contest on Election Day. But don’t expect groundbreaking movement on progressive economic initiatives as long as low-income white voters vote their social prejudices instead of their economic interests.>

As <fredthemalignanttwat> makes yet unsubstantiated accusations, proving anew what a hypocrite and liar that he is. Must be is trying to catch up to his hero Hump; at worst he is trying to emulate him.

<Some House Republicans are already privately worrying about how a partial government shutdown would affect their electoral chances in November.

"If we shut down, we lose," one lawmaker told Fox News Digital.

Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., unveiled his plan to avoid a partial shutdown in a private call with House GOP lawmakers on Wednesday morning, four sources told Fox News Digital.

It involves a six-month extension of fiscal 2024's federal funding levels known as a "continuing resolution" (CR) – to buy House and Senate negotiators more time to hash out next year's spending priorities – and would be linked to a bill adding a proof of citizenship requirement to the voter registration process.

But with both Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and the White House publicly opposing the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, it's highly likely Johnson's plan would be dead on arrival if it passed the House.

"My problem isn't with the policy, which I support. My problem isn't with the messaging, which I think is strong. My problem is that I just don't think Chuck Schumer is going to agree to it," a second House Republican said of their concerns about the plan.

If the Senate and House don't agree on a way forward by Oct. 1, the country could be wracked by a partial government shutdown roughly a month before Election Day.

Past government shutdowns like those seen under the Obama and Trump administrations in 2013 and 2019, respectively, have traditionally seen Americans blame the GOP.

"In general, the voters seem to have a strong bias for blaming Republicans for shutdowns, which is understandable," the second Republican continued.

"We often have the more combative rhetoric leading up to a shutdown. We often are the ones who are most quick to claim that a shutdown isn't a real problem. And so I think we kind of telegraph to voters that we're OK with that. I think that makes it a little easier for the Democrats to try to stick us with [it]."

They added at the end of their explanation, "But it takes two to tango, and I don't think what we're asking for is too much."

Meanwhile, two sources familiar with the Tuesday House GOP call said questions were raised about what Johnson's next step would be if the Senate sent back a "clean" CR with no attachments, and concerns were aired about how a possible shutdown would affect vulnerable Republicans.

"The Republicans have the majority today because we won seats in California and [other blue states]. Those seem to be members who'd be most disadvantaged by a shutdown in the four weeks before an election," the second GOP lawmaker said.

Veteran GOP strategist Doug Heye said a possible shutdown could have less of an impact given it's a presidential election year, but he conceded "that's a real risk to take."

"Republicans usually get blamed for shutdowns, and that could play into Harris' ‘Trump-as-chaos’ argument," Heye said.

He added, however, "that's not a bet I'd make. Especially when the speaker has offered a path to avoid this."

Other Republicans dismissed fears of political blowback in the event of a government shutdown.

Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., who is not committed or opposed to Johnson's plan, told Fox News Digital this week, "The legacy media makes these shutdowns worse than they are. … Nobody loses their house, nobody loses a dime. They all get made whole."

A partial government shutdown would see some non-emergency federal services halted and potentially thousands of government employees furloughed.

Any federal payments paused during a shutdown are retroactively made to their recipients, however.

Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, one of the architects of the SAVE Act, would not say whether he'd want a shutdown if the Johnson plan failed to pass.

"I’m not going to play the shutdown game … the press wants to make it about a shutdown. Democrats want to make this about a shutdown," Roy said. "We’re offering to fund the government – all manners of sin, by the way, in that government…we’re willing to do that, but these guys need to make sure our elections are secure."

"If [Democrats] want to shut the government down, that’s on them.>

<A group of more than 60 active and retired law enforcement officials have endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris’s bid for the presidency, calling the former prosecutor and her running-mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, “the only candidates we trust to keep our communities safe.”

The list of top law enforcement executives giving their imprimatur to the Harriz-Walz campaign include elected sheriffs in Durham and Henderson, North Carolina, as well as active sheriffs and chiefs of police in Alabama, California, Maine, Colorado, Michigan, Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, Indiana, New York, and Illinois.

It also includes retired sheriffs and top police officials, including Charles Ramsey, the former chief of police in Washington, DC who later served as the Philadelphia police commissioner, and former Dane County, Wisconsin sheriff David Mahoney. Also appearing on the list are Harry Dunn and Aqulino Gonell, the former US Capitol Police officer and sergeant who emerged as fierce critics of Donald Trump in the wake of the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

“We trust Vice President Harris and Governor Walz to support law enforcement’s work to keep communities safe because they have been doing it their entire careers. Throughout her career, Vice President Harris has worked side-by-side with law enforcement to protect the public and hold offenders accountable,” they said in a letter announcing their endorsement.

The law enforcement officials go on to detail Harris’s record as a courtroom prosecutor and later as an elected district attorney and attorney general. During that time, she prosecuted child sex assault cases and went up against transnational criminal gangs while racking up increased conviction rates and bringing in large monetary judgments from big banks that managed the Golden State’s massive pension fund.

They also cite Walz’s gubernatorial record of investment in law enforcement needs as evidence of their commitment to public safety matters, and compared it favorably with Harris’s work as Vice President under President Biden.

“Their investment in our departments and colleagues is working: they have presided over the largest drop in murders over a one-year period in American history. And, as the leader of the first-ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, Vice President Harris has built on her career-long commitment to preventing gun violence. After helping to pass the most significant gun safety law in nearly 30 years, Vice President Harris has helped close the gun show loophole and prevent domestic abusers from buying guns—keeping more dangerous guns off our streets,” they said.

By contrast, the law enforcement experts said Trump, the first convicted felon to run for president as a major party nominee, “has shown he will undermine our departments and make our country more dangerous.”

“Trump has repeatedly shown he does not respect law enforcement or the rule of law. After his supporters injured police officers on January 6th, he promised to pardon them. When he was convicted of 34 felony counts, he attacked the system instead of taking responsibility. He has called for defunding federal law enforcement. He said he would terminate the Constitution, weaponize the Department of Justice, and rule as a ‘dictator.’ He creates disorder that puts law enforcement and all Americans at risk,” they added.

The long list of active and retired police and law enforcement officials adding their names to the roster of Harris-Walz supporters comes as Trump, who is facing sentencing for his conviction on 34 felony counts in his former home state of New York later this month, is set to announce that he has been endorsed by the nation’s largest police union....>

<....Law enforcement unions have generally been supportive of the ex-president, despite his criminal record and endorsement of violence against police officers during and after the January 6 riot.

Dunn, who retired from the Capitol Police to mount an unsuccessful campaign for a House seat in Maryland, said on a call for reporters on Thursday that Trump, who is set to address Fraternal Order of Police members on Friday, will “lie” to the police union members about his allyship with law enforcement.

“He’s going to tell my fellow officers that he’s their ally, he’s their friend, and he’s the candidate, the candidate of law and order — well, after what I experienced on January 6, I can assure you that he is not,” Dunn said. “He only backs the blue who are loyal to him.”

The former Capitol Police officer added that the ex-president “doesn’t care that he put my life and the lives of my fellow Capitol police officers in danger on January 6.”

“He doesn’t care that it was because he encouraged a mob of violent insurrectionists to march on the Capitol that five officers died because of that day, and now he’s running to pardon those very same insurrectionists … he doesn’t care about Capitol Police or any law enforcement. He only cares about getting power for himself,” Dunn said.

Another signatory on the endorsement letter, Durham County, North Carolina sheriff Clarence Burkhead, told reporters that Trump has “proven time and time again he can’t be trusted to deliver on his promises to law enforcement officers like me and my colleagues,” citing the ex-president’s proposed $4 million cut to law enforcement funding.

“Not only does Trump want to slash law enforcement funding, but he also wants to strip agencies like mine of crucial federal assets by weaponizing the FBI and Justice Department to prosecute his political enemies,” he said. “Under Trump, the Feds would waste precious time and money on his personal grievances, instead of pouring valuable resources into communities like mine that rely on assistance from our federal partners.”

Burkhead also pointed out how the ex-president “killed the most aggressive bipartisan border deal in decades,” hampering law enforcement efforts to combat gangs and drug trafficking for no reason except political expediency.

“Trump has repeatedly demonstrated to the American people that he cares about one thing himself,” he said.

He added that Harris was the only candidate on the ballot “who has spent her entire career fighting for people and standing with local law enforcement like me.”>

The content here a bother, <fredtheevil>? Then stay away, <douche>.

<Maine isn't the first state that comes to mind when one thinks of the Federalist Society and its leader Leonard Leo. The right-wing judicial outfit's heaviest support comes from red states with a strong white evangelical presence, whereas Maine is a New England state that has been going Democratic in presidential elections.

Maine has a Democratic governor, Janet Mills. And Maine's Republican U.S. Senator, Susan Collins, is a moderate conservative who is pro-choice on the abortion issue.

But the Bangor Daily News' Billy Kobin, in an article published on September 6, details Leo's recent activities in Maine politics.

"The longtime Federalist Society leader who helped former President Donald Trump cement a conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court has used his advocacy group to give $375,000 to a political network affiliated with state Rep. Laurel Libby, R-Auburn, and he has also funded a group fighting offshore wind and lobstering regulations," Kobin reports. "The Concord Fund, a Virginia-based nonprofit that is part of Leo's network of influential conservative advocacy groups, had donated to the various Maine-based causes going back to 2022."

Kobin adds, "The latest support is a sign of his potential to more forcefully influence politics in a state that Democrats — in part by running better-funded campaigns — have controlled since 2018."

The Concord Fund, according to Kobin, is "the top donor to For Our Future, a political action committee led by conservative activist Alex Titcomb and tied to The Dinner Table, which Libby helped Titcomb form after winning election in 2020."

The Federalist Society, founded in 1982, has spent the last 42 years trying to move the United States' federal courts to the far right. And the U.S. Supreme Court, thanks in part to the Federalist Society, now has a 6-3 GOP-appointed supermajority that has done everything from overturn Roe v. Wade to outlaw affirmative action in college admissions.

Kobin notes, "A Leo spokesperson said the Concord Fund is also making 'significant contributions to the Maine Republican Party for state races and groups involved in the 2nd Congressional District race.'">

<Marjorie Taylor Greene has said the country needs "more good guys with guns" to protect children, after the school shooting in Georgia.

The nation is currently reeling from the devastating violence on Wednesday, when 14-year-old Colt Gray allegedly opened fire at Apalachee High School, in Barrow County, and killed two students, Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, also 14, and two teachers, Richard Aspinwall and Christina Irimie.

As with previous mass shootings, the tragedy has sparked a debate about gun control. Greene, a Representative for Georgia's 14th congressional district, has defended gun rights, saying "more good guys with guns" not fewer guns is the answer.

She told One America News Network's Real America with Dan Ball: "When I was sixteen years old, starting 11th grade in Georgia, Joe Biden then-Senator made schools gun-free zones. And at my own school, September sixth of that year, I'll never forget it, one of my fellow students brought three guns to school and our school went on lockdown. "And it was because no one there was able to defend us from a student bringing guns into school and into his classroom.

"I know what that means. I know that reality as a student, I also know what it's like as a parent to drop your kids off in a public school not knowing if that will happen and it's tragic."

She went on: "And we're praying for these families, these victims and the teachers and students, everyone affected. But the reality is, Dan, we need to protect our kids in schools the same way Kamala Harris, Joe Biden and all our politicians are protected, the same way we protect gold and precious jewels, the same way we protect a lot of money. And that's good guys with guns. And we always need to make sure we support our Second Amendment and not disarm legal gun owners simply because a madman with a gun chose to go in and murder people.

"Murder's been around since the beginning of time and murder will continue, but the best thing we can do is we can spend America's hard-earned tax dollars to protect our kids. And I think that's something that everyone would agree with. Let's protect our kids."

Multiple people agreed with her, but responses were mixed. Anti-Trump account @4HumanUnity called her comments "beyond ignorant" and "warped logic."

He said: "The notion that 'more good guys with guns' will fix the issue is not just baseless, it's dangerous. We need less bad guys with guns."

"The comparison between school safety and security for politicians is outright ridiculous," he added, "schools aren't high-risk targets like public officials, and the idea of matching that level of security is (...) unrealistic."

Similarly, liberal account @winburn_kim said: "We have more guns in this country than any other country! And we have more gun violence! Even a kindergartner could figure this out!"

It is important to note that Joe Biden did not introduce the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990, which created gun-free zones at schools.

Biden was involved in gun control legislation, but this law was brought in by then-Senator Herb Khol and was signed into law by then-President George H.W. Bush.

Greene has long been a supporter of gun rights. She has previously said: "You have to be an idiot to think gun control will create a utopian society where criminals disarm themselves and obey the law. 'Gun-free' zones kill people."

Newsweek has contacted Green [sic] via email, outside of normal working hours, for comment.

Georgia is a state that has also backed gun rights, with firearms magazine Guns & Ammo ranking it 13th in a list of the best states for gun owners, looking at "how well each state upheld the Second Amendment in 2023."

Gun control advocacy organization Everytown frames this differently, ranking Georgia 46th for gun law strength and calling its gun laws "some of the weakest in the country." Newsweek has broken out Georgia's gun laws compared to other states here.

Gray, who was taken into police custody on Wednesday, is set to be charged with murder and tried and as an adult.>

Enjoying the latest shootings, <fredtheevil>? Don't you love all the 'proof' that 'libs' are to blame for everything bad which has happened in history?

<ike the NYPD patrolman he once was, Mayor Eric Adams has been doing his best to keep a possible crime scene under control — move along, folks, nothing to see here — but the dark cloud of scandal hanging over City Hall is proving to be bigger and thicker than Hizzoner can blow away with breezy slogans and a sunny grin.

On Wednesday, in coordinated early morning raids, FBI agents seized phones and/or searched the homes of more than half a dozen senior city officials, including Sheena Wright, first deputy mayor; David Banks, schools chancellor, and his brother Philip Banks III, deputy mayor for public safety; Edward Caban, NYPD commissioner; and Timothy Pearson, mayoral adviser.

And just like that, the leadership of New York’s government was thrown into a state of confusion, its mayor dealt what could prove to be a politically fatal blow.

“Everyone has heard me from time to time: Stay focused, no distraction, and grind,” Hizzoner later told a pack of reporters, repeating a slogan he often recites to children.

Good luck with that. When 15 FBI agents show up at your house at 5 a.m., as witnesses say happened at the Hollis home of Phil Banks, it’s safe to assume that the day’s focus will shift from managing the city’s bureaucracy to saving one’s own skin. Ben Brafman, Banks’s high-profile lawyer, confirmed that he did indeed get a call from Banks.

As the city’s small but ravenous pack of political reporters dutifully swings into action — led by The City, which first broke the news of the raids — Team Adams has tried in vain to make the story go away, using hand-waving and bluster. “Investigators have not indicated to us the mayor or his staff are targets of any investigation,” said the mayor’s counsel, Lisa Zornberg, in an official-sounding but legally meaningless statement. As Zornberg knows, the FBI is not in the habit of giving formal notice about the purpose of its search warrants to defendants, witnesses, or anybody else; that is why it shows up at your door at five in the morning.

Over at 1 Police Plaza, top members of the NYPD are wilting under the heat, according to a jaw-dropping story in the New York Post. “When the Post tried to reach chief of patrol John Chell for comment about the raids and subpoenas,” the paper reports, “NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Public Information Tarik Sheppard got on the phone and called the reporter a ‘f- - - ing scumbag.’” Minutes later, the department reportedly kicked Tina Moore, the Post’s police bureau chief, out of the press room at NYPD headquarters.

How did we get here? Adams, a micromanager, appointed nearly every one of the people under scrutiny, even in the face of what outsiders considered big red warning flags. Phil Banks, who suddenly resigned as the NYPD’s chief of department a decade ago, was an unindicted participant in a corruption scandal a decade ago in which two businessmen, Jona Rechnitz and Jeremy Reichberg, bribed multiple officials and ended up going to prison. Adams appointed him anyway.

Pearson took a job in the administration while also initially remaining on the payroll of Resorts World Casino, where he was in charge of security; the shady double-dipping arrangement ended after the New York Times published a report about it. Pearson, appointed to the city’s Economic Development Corporation, was later at the center of a mêlée at a migrant shelter that involved 100 officers, drones, and a physical scuffle with security staff; the NYC Department of Investigation is looking into the incident. Pearson has also been hit with four lawsuits accusing him of sexual harassment. Adams has not altered his duties.

Commissioner Caban came under a cloud when it turned out his brother, Richard, was operating a Bronx bar and restaurant called Con Sofrito — a place where Adams celebrated his birthday and NYPD brass liked to party — in violation of multiple building and fire-safety codes and a judge’s order to shut down an outdoor terrace. Richard Caban reportedly is among those hit with subpoenas this week....>

<....There are more scandals brewing, from the prosecution of Adams’s former building commissioner Eric Ulrich on bribery charges to the multiple convictions of people who illegally raised funds for the mayor’s 2021 campaign.

Where is all of this heading? “For starters, Mayor Adams needs to tell police commissioner Edward Caban to resign,” says the New York Post editorial board, which endorsed Adams in 2021. “Even if he’s cleared, bad blood will fester on. The only losers in this scenario are the NYPD and the people of New York City. Indeed, Adams likely needs to jettison every aide who now threatens to sink his mayoralty.”

It’s unlikely that Adams will heed the advice; this is a mayor who seems utterly incapable of ever acknowledging any degree of fault. After last week’s debacle at the West Indian Day parade, where five people were shot in broad daylight — one fatally — before the gunman got away, Adams repeatedly called the day a success. “When you look at that one person who we’re going to find that shot five people, you remove that from the equation, you got hundreds of thousands of people that were out this weekend and really heard the call of a peaceful J’ouvert and a peaceful West Indian Day parade,” Adams said at his weekly press conference. “So really, hats off to the teams.” I spoke with several residents of the neighborhood who, like me, found City Hall’s blind indifference to its own failures to be outrageous (we talked about it on my podcast, You Decide).

Worse still, according to the Post editorial, Adams “faces persistent (and often convincing) criticism that he’s a poor executive who too often values loyalty over competence. That weakness for familiarity comes at the expense of effective and clinical governance.”

Whether or not he acknowledges it, Adams now leads an administration that is in a state of crisis and falling apart. The mayor, as he often does, insists that he regularly reminds his appointees to “follow the law.” It never seems to occur to Hizzoner that it might be better to hire aides who don’t need a daily reminder not to commit crimes.>

<If there is one thing Republicans want you to know, it’s how much they bleed red, white and blue for America. None of their gatherings is complete without dozens if not hundreds of American flags, attendees sporting flag-themed costumes (some veering close to obscene mockery), Uncle Sam suits or Lady Liberty getups. Jimmy Cagney’s old schmaltz vehicle "Yankee Doodle Dandy" looks restrained by comparison.

Democrats, on the other hand, have borne the stigma ever since the Joe McCarthy era, if not the New Deal, of hankering after alien creeds — a suffocating European “socialism” (meaning anything to the left of Calvin Coolidge) or maybe outright Marxist-Leninism. Conservatives with intellectual pretensions have blamed progressives for following French deconstructionist philosophers. The cabal around Paul Weyrich, an early leader of the Heritage Foundation who left it because it was insufficiently conservative, held that every supposed evil in modern America was a consequence of the left employing the "cultural Marxist" ideas of the Frankfurt School (one of the right’s many antisemitic conspiracy theories) as a blueprint to conquer the culture.

These two contrasting identifications have embedded themselves in the national subconscious to the point that the media instinctively reflects them. Hence the anthropological expeditions to the “real America” (somewhere away from the coasts, where Bass Pro Shops outnumber Starbucks) to find a diner where genuine Americans congregate. By contrast, the press happily played along with the efforts of Vietnam-avoider George W. Bush's campaign to portray John Kerry, an actual Vietnam combat veteran, as decadently French. One half-expected Kerry to be taking along the works of Michel Foucault as beach reading to Martha’s Vineyard.

To the extent there is any truth to this caricature, it serves as a superficial explanation of the GOP’s xenophobia (remember “freedom fries?”) and near-pathological parochialism. It also dovetails with an aggressive anti-intellectualism: One would no more expect a Republican politician to speak a foreign language than to play the cello.

What, then, accounts for the GOP’s adulation of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán? As one observer puts it: “The American right’s love affair with Hungary seemingly knows no bounds.” That country’s wannabe dictator is now a regular feature at the annual CPAC convention (think of that event as the Burning Man festival, except for wingnuts), and luminaries of the American right regularly troop to Budapest to confer with Orbán and his cronies. American conservatives’ enthusiasm for foreign-based authoritarianism, and their readiness to cooperate with grandees like Orbán or Vladimir Putin, is now well established, a phenomenon I witnessed in its embryonic stage as early as 2016.

Nearly every historically conscious person is able to trace at least some aspects of contemporary conservatism to their roots in early America. Present-day Republican hostility to the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act has a straightforward genealogy: back to Nixon’s "Southern strategy," then to the Southern agrarians of the 1930s, to the post-Civil War Lost Cause movement, then the 1861-1865 secession itself and finally back to John C. Calhoun and his own ideological predecessor, John Randolph of Roanoke, who still receives sympathetic treatment from the conservative propaganda mill.

From Randolph’s dyspeptic political rants to the agrarians’ nostalgia-drenched manifestos, all the reflexes of the present-day American reactionary are prefigured: hatred of industry, cities, public education and internal improvements (the old term for infrastructure); distrust of cosmopolitanism, sophistication and the new; a worship of “tradition” that amounted to stultification; an equation of democratic principles with mob rule. Above all, a fundamental distaste for human equality, especially racial equality, but including political and social distinctions of gender and class.

Joseph de Maistre, though less well-known than Edmund Burke, embodies the essential points of the 21st-century American conservative mind at a deeper level than taxes, spending or size of government....>

<....Curiously, the agrarians, ur-Americans of Southern Protestant extraction, were influenced by the leading figure of the French Counter-Enlightenment, the arch-reactionary ultramontane Catholic Joseph de Maistre. Even in the present day, a Southern apologist for slavery has written a screed for something called the Abbeville Foundation extolling Maistre’s hatred of republics. Evidently, despising the very governmental foundation of the United States has become fashionable for a certain type of reactionary conservative.

Those are hardly the intellectual roots of American conservative philosophy that post-World War II salesmen of conservatism like William F. Buckley Jr., Russell Kirk or George F. Will chose to peddle. They professed to find the source of their ideology with Edmund Burke, the 18th-century Anglo-Irish philosopher and politician.

Among Burke’s epigrams are such unexceptionable Rotary Club maxims as “All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter,” and “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Very uplifting, but hardly in the spirit of present-day conservatives, for whom compromise is betrayal.

Maistre, on the other hand, fits the dogmatic spirit of their creed. He considered the executioner to be the indispensable backstop of civilization, the better to save wayward souls: "Man cannot be wicked without being evil, nor evil without being degraded, nor degraded without being punished, nor punished without being guilty. In short ... there is nothing so intrinsically plausible as the theory of original sin.”

Émile Faguet, a French author and critic, called Maistre “a fierce absolutist, a furious theocrat, an intransigent legitimist, apostle of a monstrous trinity composed of pope, king and hangman, always and everywhere the champion of the hardest, narrowest and most inflexible dogmatism, a dark figure out of the Middle Ages, part learned doctor, part inquisitor, part executioner.”A white circle with a black background

Maistre, though less well-known than Burke, embodies the essential points of the American conservative mind at a deeper level than taxes, spending or size of government. His Catholic zealotry prefigures present-day Catholic ideologues like Patrick Deneen and Leonard Leo, not to mention their political marionettes Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. Isaiah Berlin, the great historian of Western ideas, considered Maistre the true father of reactionary Western conservatism, and, indeed, a precursor to the past century's fascist movements.

Although worldly enough to have served as the Kingdom of Savoy’s ambassador to Russia, Maistre detested science and secular learning. And he positively wallowed in violence, in near-pornographic fashion: “The whole earth, continually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be sacrificed without end, without restraint, without respite until the consummation of the world, the extinction of evil, the death of death.”

That orgasmic vision is pretty strong meat for a tradition that claims to defend ordered liberty. But running through American conservatism like a red thread is a creepy fascination with violence, not to mention a habit of apocalyptic thinking and a longed-for showdown with satanic forces. Amid the invasion of Iraq, when self-righteous stupidity was en vogue, neoconservatives Richard Perle and David Frum wrote "An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror," a paean to redemptive violence as a cure for violence.

Maistre hits many of the key themes of American conservatism: religious dogmatism, belief over evidence, anti-scientism, the imperative of obedience to hierarchy and a habitual brooding over violence. But those themes do not satisfy certain paradoxical values that also make up the conservative mindset: a rather irreligious appetite for worldly possessions, and the desire for a pseudo-empirical justification for greed.

Here one might be tempted to believe that conservative economic theory rests on solid domestic foundations: rugged American individualism, the Horatio Alger fable and the (entirely spurious) quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich."

America was largely founded on greed, exemplified by land-grabs, gold rushes and real estate flimflams, not to mention the institution of slavery. But before Hayek and Mises, greed lacked a sophisticated theoretical foundation.

<....Ironically, then, just as 20th-century socialism rested on German thought of the previous century, post-World War II conservative economic thinking in America was largely based on the groundwork of German-speaking intellectuals.

Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises are generally considered to be among the principal founders of radical free-market doctrine in the postwar era. Hayek, the more famous of the two, described himself as a pragmatist and empiricist, but, as is common in the transmission of ideas, his followers dogmatized his theories to the point where they became a materialist religion, a mirror image of Marxist-Leninism. Hayek is frequently invoked in the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, the Pravda of the American overclass.

Hayek, like other founders of neoliberal economic theory such as Wilhelm Roepke, claimed that their championing of laissez-faire was a remedy for the horrific wars and state oppression that plagued Europe between 1914 and 1945. But in later life, he appeared to develop a soft spot for authoritarianism. In the 1970s and 1980s, Hayek was feted by Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean military dictator who seized power (with help from the CIA) in 1973. In the course of several visits, Hayek claimed he had “not been able to find a single person, even in much-maligned Chile, who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than under Allende” (the elected social democrat overthrown in the 1973 coup). Doubtless Hayek did not have many encounters with the relatives of the roughly 3.000 people murdered by the Pinochet regime.

Mises, an economist who in the early 1930s had advised the Austrofascist chancellor of Austria, Engelbert Dollfuss, settled in the U.S. in 1940. His laissez-faire views were so uncompromising that even Milton Friedman, most people’s idea of a hardcore libertarian, considered his thinking overly inflexible. Mises became the namesake of a tax-exempt foundation in Auburn, Alabama, that's so far out on the libertarian fringe it makes the Cato Institute look like the Ford Foundation. Its bullpen of “scholars” have included neo-Confederate apologists, crackpots out to disprove Einstein’s relativity theory and — wait for it! — crusaders for the legalization of drunk driving.

Perhaps the most influential European of all — at least to Americans in permanently arrested adolescence — was the Russian immigrant, Hollywood screenwriter, novelist and cult leader Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum, better known as her Promethean alter ego, Ayn Rand. Her works achieve the difficult feat of synthesizing a coma-inducing dullness with piercingly shrill extended diatribes to create reverse masterpieces worthy of the most risible North Korean propaganda. To an even greater extent than the neoliberal economists, she fashioned an ideology that is simply the worst of the Marxist-Leninism she escaped stood on its head, with a heroic Übermensch substituting for the proletarian masses. It is a pity the film version of "Atlas Shrugged" hasn’t featured on "Mystery Science Theater 3000."

Such is Rand’s cult following that former Republican congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul, a senior fellow of the Mises Institute, saw fit to name his spawn Rand, who is now the junior senator from Kentucky. Former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan was an enthusiastic fan of Ayn Rand, supposedly requiring his office interns to read "Atlas Shrugged," a clear example of unfair labor practices. Oddly, Ryan claimed to be an observant Catholic, yet idolized an author who contemptuously called Christianity a “slave religion.” Such is the syncretic nature of contemporary conservatism that blatantly contradictory elements can be fused into the monstrous ideological confection we see all around us.

Functional adults can dismiss Ayn Rand and her petty tyrannizing over acolytes, her psychodramatic love affair with cult deputy Nathaniel Branden, and her continuing ability to inspire teenagers with a Nietzsche complex. But how can we account for the fact that Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve for 20 years, was an early member of her circle, and that her writings have sold 37 million copies? Unreadable doorstops her books may be, but they would seem to reveal something about the psychology of a significant slice of Americans.

Perhaps the most influential European of all — at least to Americans in permanently arrested adolescence — was the Russian immigrant, Hollywood screenwriter, novelist and cult leader Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum, better known as Ayn Rand....>

<....Other sources of modern conservative ideas have a somewhat less direct influence on the current right-wing American zeitgeist. Carl Schmitt, the 20th-century German jurist, political theorist and Nazi official, never set foot on U.S. soil, and remains mostly unknown here. He believed that the fundamental concept in the political realm from which all else flowed was the distinction between friends and enemies, and that to be a sovereign meant being completely unrestrained by law.

Schmitt employed his judicial and political theories to defend the early Nazi-era Enabling Act (which suspended the Weimar Republic's constitution), to justify Hitler’s assumption of dictatorial rule and to support Joseph Goebbels’ campaign to burn “decadent” books. After the war, Schmitt refused to submit to denazification, and remained completely unrepentant of his prewar beliefs.

Just before the Nazi seizure of power, Schmitt had a Jewish follower and protégé, Leo Strauss, who was able to emigrate from Germany for employment by the Rockefeller Foundation thanks, ironically enough, to a supportive letter from Schmitt. According to surviving correspondence, Strauss and Schmitt had previously carried on a political dialogue in which Strauss agreed with the jurist on most points, sharing a distaste for liberal democracy, a belief in authoritarian rule and a contempt for the masses. It seems he bought into the rising tide of European fascism on all issues except antisemitism.

Strauss arrived in the U.S. in 1938, and taught philosophy, most notably at the University of Chicago, for the rest of his life. He focused mainly on the works of Plato and Aristotle and their application to politics. His method was ambiguous and esoteric — using rhetorical concealment, with a surface meaning for general readers and a hidden truth for the wise — and usually avoided any direct statement of the immediate political relevance of Greek philosophy.

Living in a liberal democracy that had given him refuge from the Holocaust, Strauss soft-pedaled his earlier enthusiasm for fascism, but consistently emphasized the authoritarian implications of Greek philosophy while praising the American constitutional system with faint damns. He also highlighted to his students Plato’s belief in the necessity of “the noble lie,” the veneer of comforting falsehoods with which wise rulers must placate the untutored masses while going about the serious business of exercising power.

A large number of Strauss' students and followers became prominent neoconservatives, including Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Francis Fukuyama, Harvey Mansfield, Gary Schmitt, Walter Berns and Abram Shulsky, who all later achieved notoriety either as political operatives or publicists advocating for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq based on false claims of hidden weapons of mass destruction.

A large number of Leo Strauss' students and followers became prominent neoconservatives, who later achieved notoriety either as political operatives or publicists advocating for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Once the wheels began to fall off the Iraq crusade, critics, pivoting off the earlier work of political theorist Shadia Drury, began to notice the sheer number of Straussians in high places who had been among the war's most vociferous proponents. Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh related that Straussians filled the Pentagon’s ad hoc Office of Special Plans, and had bulldozed the government’s intelligence agencies in order to cherry-pick dubious evidence to fit their preconceived notions. They even called themselves the “cabal,” in what seemed a parodic tribute to Strauss’ clique of wise men.

In March 2003, on the eve of war, I staffed a House Budget Committee hearing in which Wolfowitz, at the time the second-ranking official in the Pentagon, predicted that total U.S. casualties from the invasion and occupation of Iraq might amount to fewer than those suffered in the recent U.S. military intervention in the Balkans. (In other words, nearly none at all.) Did a man with access to the most extensive intelligence apparatus in the world actually believe what he told us, or was this a textbook example of Plato’s noble lie?

Considering that Strauss was a relatively obscure academic who had been dead for many years, it was surprising that revelations of his influence on the neocons produced such a well-organized and extensive pushback. The New York Times, which had vigorously supported the Iraq invasion published four op-eds defending Strauss, polemics that employed ridicule and condescension against the unsophisticated critics who supposedly didn’t “get” the philosopher’s subtle arguments. Ever since, there has been a cottage industry of conservative academics writing books and essays supporting Strauss, which almost invariably receive laudatory notices in right-wing vehicles like National Review or the Claremont Institute.....>

<....Strauss apologists never directly engage the points raised by critics. They are mostly mute on Strauss’ early dalliance with fascism, such as in a 1933 letter where he endorses “the principles of the Right — fascist, authoritarian imperial and not the pathetic and laughable imprescriptible rights of man.” He never repudiated any of those early statements, and Straussians went to some lengths to conceal from critical scholars the more controversial writings in his collected papers.

If Strauss, an unworldly academic lecturer, had no conceivable link with the neoconservative project to unleash redemptive war and exalt untrammeled executive power, why did two of his followers, neocon operatives Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt — who had both held government positions in foreign intelligence — write a 1999 essay crediting Strauss with having helped them conceptualize intelligence matters? Apparently the Platonic method of ferreting out hidden meanings was key to the neocons' certainty that Iraqi WMDs existed. Whatever Strauss intended, his followers applied what they held to be his teachings to justify a disastrous war of aggression based on imaginary evidence.

The neocons were always a small fraction of the conservative movement, and their sheer, agonizing incompetence in engineering the Iraq debacle all but finished them as a driving influence by the end of George W. Bush’s presidency. As the conservative movement became cruder and more extreme, it no longer cared to perform analyses of Plato to guide its ideology. And as the culture wars became a right-wing obsession, the locus of coercion and violence was transferred from foreign crusades to domestic soil. But it still found a foreign model to help guide it.

A moment’s reflection suggests the reason behind conservatives' tendency to lavish praise on foreign regimes and their theoreticians: The right does not much care for America, as its leading voices have been telling us for years.

As everyone knows, Donald Trump admires Vladimir Putin, and so a large portion of the Republican Party admires Putin in an imitative and slavish manner. But even before Trump became a candidate, the most regressive elements of conservatism — the paleoconservatives who developed around former Nixon and Reagan staffer (and Hitler apologist) Pat Buchanan, Christian nationalists and reconstructionists inspired by Francis Schaeffer, and the tech-obsessed neoreactionary movement fueled by Silicon Valley money, which has produced JD Vance — discovered how much there was to love about Putin’s Russia.

This New Right also seems to have an easy familiarity with the theorists of totalitarianism. In an interview this June with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, Vance invoked the legal architect of Nazi rule, Carl Schmitt — in an effort to blame liberals, the very people Schmitt despised, for wanting to carry out his precept of power over justice. As most people in the reality-based community have noticed by now, operatives of the right habitually project every desire they dare not express onto their opponents. One also wonders where Vance gained his expertise on Schmitt; I doubt the Nazi jurist was a subject in the Yale Law School curriculum.

A moment’s reflection suggests the reason behind the right’s tendency to lavish praise on foreign regimes and their theoreticians: The right does not much care for America, as its leading voices have been telling us over and over for years. Donald Trump, the exalted leader of the gang, habitually refers to his native land as a “third-world country” or a "laughing stock,” and has called fallen U.S. service personnel “suckers” and “losers;” According to one of his social media posts, “WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE, A FAILING NATION!” Vance, his running mate, makes similar disparaging remarks about the country he wants to run....>

<....All of this is logical enough, in that it necessarily flows from their views. The right has told us for some time that it has no use for non-subservient women, minorities, college students (excepting Turning Point USA’s storm troopers), non-Christians, bureaucrats, public school teachers or any other group it wants to target. A Venn diagram of all these groups certainly adds up to more than half the population. The right scorns America as it is, and, contrary to conservatives’ anti-historical nostalgia, as it always has been.

The logical weakness of reactionary movements has actually been their political strength. The seemingly contradictory elements of their platform do not bother their adherents; as we have seen countless times with the GOP, a new party line that flatly negates supposedly timeless Republican principles elicits barely a murmur among the true believers. If the leaders of the party know this fact, they are certainly not going to wise up their foot soldiers.

Perhaps the biggest contradiction of all is that the so-called thought leaders of the GOP — a party that wraps itself in the flag and feels called upon to judge the patriotism of others — are profoundly alienated from the real America as it exists today, the America in which normal people quietly live their lives, work and raise families, and dream their own private dreams. Unable to find solace in such petit-bourgeois domesticity, the socially estranged scholars of Claremont or Hillsdale or some mother’s basement have no problem ransacking the intellectual underworld of Europe during its most blood-soaked eras to find voices that can articulate their grievance, and their rage, more eloquently than they themselves.

As Austrian writer Robert Musil observed, “A man can't be angry at his own time without suffering some damage.">

<As Republicans across the country sound alarms over the potential for illegal, noncitizen voting in the upcoming presidential election — and roll out measures to prevent it — they've painted a picture suggesting the matter is a widespread fraud that threatens the legitimacy of the results. But experts say the opposite is true, and instead, these efforts to curtail what is effectively a non-issue amount to little more than voter suppression tactics.

Hinging their claims on the influx of migrants in recent years along the United States-Mexico border, GOP officials and activists have increasingly mounted concerns about the potential for noncitizen voting as November approaches. Officials have gone on to review and purge voter rolls, place constitutional amendments on their state ballots and issue executive orders as part of efforts to thwart such voter fraud. In Louisiana, a state that explicitly bans noncitizen voting in its constitution, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry recently signed an executive order requiring state agencies that offer voter registration forms to include a disclaimer that only U.S. citizens can vote.

"Voting is a privilege reserved for American citizens, and it’s crucial that we uphold this standard," he wrote in a Sunday post to X highlighting the order.

But that standard is already being upheld by the law enforcement structures in place federally to deter non-U.S. citizens from participating in this kind of voter fraud, argued Jonathan Diaz, the director of Voting Advocacy and Partnerships for the Campaign Legal Center.

"Would you risk prison time and potentially being deported to cast one ballot for president? That doesn't seem like a great trade off to me," he told Salon. "The penalties are very steep, and people who are going through the immigration system, who are here in this country and are not U.S. citizens, tend to be pretty careful about following the law because they don't want to get deported and they don't want to be charged with a crime. They're not savvy political operatives.

"All of these big, flashy efforts that these state AGs, the speaker of the House, and all of these people are doing is really just political theater," Diaz added.

U.S. law already prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections, with penalties for violators ranging from fines to up to a year of imprisonment and even deportation. Registering to vote similarly requires people to confirm under penalty of perjury that they are U.S. citizens.

Federal law also requires states to regularly review and update their voter rolls and remove anyone who is ineligible. According to the Associated Press, no state constitutions explicitly authorize noncitizens to vote, and many states also have laws barring them from voting for state offices (though a handful of municipalities nationwide allow noncitizens to vote in some local elections).

In reality, that form of voter fraud is exceedingly rare. State audits and reports from groups spanning the political spectrum have repeatedly found that a minute number of noncitizens register to vote and an even smaller crop manage to cast ballots.

A Brennan Center analysis of 42 jurisdictions in the 2016 election found only 30 incidents of suspected — not proven — noncitizen voting out of 23.5 million votes tabulated, amounting to just 0.0001% of the vote.

Analyses from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, and the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation's database have also found scant evidence of noncitizen voter registration and voting, much less widespread fraud. The former saw that the number of noncitizen votes uncovered through state audits in 2016 ranged from just three out of more than a million votes in Nevada to 41 in North Carolina, which saw nearly five million votes cast. The latter analysis, a review of Heritage Foundation data by immigrant rights group the American Immigration Council, found just 68 documented cases of noncitizens voting in the think tank's database dating as far back as the 1980s. That number represents less than 5 percent of the cases in the Heritage Foundation database, and out of millions of ballots cast over the time frame, such quantities are miniscule.

"It's infinitesimal the number of actual noncitizens who register or vote, and most of that is inadvertent. It's not like they're nefarious," said Ron Hayduk, a professor of political science at San Francisco State University whose research focuses on noncitizen voting laws.

If noncitizens do end up on voter registration rolls, it's usually due to clerical and administrative errors, and the number is not significant enough to influence the outcome of the election, Diaz explained.....>

<...."Even when there are these handful of cases, it's not for the reasons that are being elevated," Hayduk added, "that Democrats are letting immigrants into the country, they're actively registering them to win elections, and doing so in ways that dilute the votes of citizens and are a strategy to defeat the Republicans, illegitimately."

During a news conference earlier this year about the Safeguard Voter Eligibility Act, a bill GOP members of Congress are rallying behind that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., insisted noncitizen voting was a concern but did not offer any specific examples to support the claim.

“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections," Johnson said, "but it’s not been something that is easily provable.”

Diaz said, however, that concerned election officials' failure to prosecute and secure convictions in the cases that would theoretically arise from rampant noncitizen voting shows both that the safeguards against it are working and that the issue is far overblown.

If there were "these huge numbers of non-U.S. citizens on the voter registration roll," he argued, "the same attorney generals and secretaries of state pushing this narrative" every election cycle "would be prosecuting them and securing convictions, and that just doesn't happen."

Still, election officials in red states have taken a number of measures to lessen the potential for that voter fraud to take place.

Just last week, Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced that more than 6,500 potential noncitizens had been pulled from the state's voter rolls since 2021, including nearly 2,000 with "a voter history" who have been referred for investigation by the attorney general's office. In August, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, also said he'd referred 138 apparent noncitizens found to have recently voted and 459 more who registered but did not vote. Those numbers amount to small fractions of the 18 million registered voters in Texas and the more than 8 million in Ohio.

Officials in Alabama and Georgia made similar announcements, with Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen, a Republican, saying recently that 3,251 people previously listed as noncitizens by the federal government were switched to inactive status on the state's voter registration rolls, which includes more than 3 million registered voters, according to the AP.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger reported he found that 1,634 potential noncitizens attempted to register to vote between 1997 and 2022 though failed when election officials flagged them. In that time, Georgia had registered millions of other eligible voters.

In the aftermath of previous election cycles, Diaz explained, it was not uncommon for officials who claimed they identified large numbers of suspected noncitizen registered voters to amend their statements to note that the alleged offenders were mostly people who hadn't been citizens at one point but were later naturalized and lawfully registered.

"They're relying on stale, out-of-date databases and resources and making a big deal out of this to score political points and to seed this narrative that our elections are fundamentally broken and plagued by noncitizen voting, so that if their side loses, they can point to that as the reason why," Diaz argued. "Should their favored candidates win, I think they'll all of a sudden get very quiet about this supposed problem of non citizen voting. It's only a problem when they lose."

Following the footsteps of North Dakota, Colorado, Alabama, Ohio and Florida, where voters passed amendments between 2018 and 2022 limiting voting to "only" citizens, Republican-led legislatures in eight states — Iowa, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Idaho, Kentucky and Wisconsin — have introduced constitutional amendments on their November ballots aiming to explicitly declare the same.

In Texas, Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton established Wednesday a dedicated email account for reports of suspected violations of election laws, citing "significant growth of the noncitizen population," and Raffensperger last week authorized a requirement that polling places post signs in English and Spanish alerting noncitizens that it is illegal for them to vote.

Republicans in Wisconsin have in recent weeks filed a set of lawsuits challenging the state's citizen verification process for registered voters, while some in North Carolina have sued the state's election board, accusing it of failing to enforce a new law aimed at removing people who seek exclusions from jury duty because they are not citizens from voter rolls.....>

<....Along with the move to require proof of citizenship to vote — which many Americans don't have readily available — these efforts to curb voter fraud serve in "justifying the imposition, as it did historically, of restrictive voter registration procedures," Hayduk said. More often than not, these actions instead "disenfranchise eligible citizens who tend to be lower income, people with lower levels of education, often urban voters who tend to register and vote for Democrats."

The "drumbeat" of allegations of noncitizen voting also, he explained, fuels suspicion that can motivate people to go to poll sites and "intimidate" or harass others during the voting process, or place signs in neighborhoods with large immigrant, Latino or Asian American populations stating the illegality of noncitizen voting.

That behavior can have "a huge chilling effect, particularly on naturalized citizens, who are often the ones targeted by these efforts," Diaz added.

Republican officials pushing these claims also runs the risk of disrupting and straining the election administrations process should it motivate their supporters to submit lists with thousands of potentially ineligible people to their local elections offices and demand they be removed, he added, noting that many states have a formal process that allows voters to challenge others' eligibility and requires administrators to evaluate and verify or adjudicate those challenges.

Hayduk argued that the Republican mobilization behind the claims also "lays the groundwork" for them to place unsubstantiated blame on noncitizens, "contest elections, draw out the elections, create chaos and maybe motivate people to go do another Jan. 6 attack."

"The great replacement fears, immigration restrictions, the rationale to have voter ID, proof of citizenship, all of this — these are basically voter suppression tactics which have been in process or enacted in many states around the country, and they want to do that on a national level," Hayduk said.

"I think it feeds into this whole notion of who are the rightful holders of this cherished power, the right to vote?" he added. "Who are real Americans? What's the nature of America? It links to these broad debates that are happening in the country.">

<The Houston Chronicle lambasted Texas Governor Greg Abbott in a recent editorial for what it calls "beyond reckless" rhetoric surrounding election integrity.

The newspaper, the largest in the Lone Star State by circulation, accused the governor of deliberately stoking unfounded fears about the security of the state's electoral process.

The Houston Chronicle's editorial board, in a Wednesday op-ed entitled, "Texas' voter roll purge is routine practice. So why is Greg Abbott crying voter fraud?" took direct aim at Abbott's August announcement that over 1.1 million people have been removed from Texas voter rolls since September 2021.

This purge, which Abbott framed as an effort to protect elections from illegal voting, includes individuals who have moved out of state, are deceased, or are not U.S. citizens.

"The timing of these actions appears to have a clear intent: to sow confusion, scare people from voting and suppress turnout," the editorial states, which characterizes the governor's claims as part of a "rhetorical pattern" that has "played out too often—with no substantial evidence of a large-scale problem."

Abbott's office reported that among those removed were over 6,500 noncitizens, more than 6,000 voters with felony convictions, and over 457,000 deceased individuals. The governor also stated that approximately 1,930 of the removed noncitizens had a voting history and had been referred to the state's attorney general's office for investigation and potential legal action.

The newspaper's editorial board took particular issue with Abbott's speculation about potential criminal schemes involving noncitizen voters.

"As a former trial judge, state Supreme Court justice and attorney general, Abbott knows better than most that speculating about criminal plots, without any evidence, and when none of these folks have even been charged with a crime, is beyond reckless," the editorial board wrote.

Newsweek contacted Abbott's office via online form and email on Saturday afternoon for comment.

The newspaper's editorial board draws parallels between Abbott's rhetoric and the "Big Lie" propagated by former President Donald Trump and his allies following his loss in the 2020 election to Joe Biden. The newspaper suggests that rather than learning from the dangerous consequences of such claims, which culminated in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Abbott and his allies have "helped refashion Trump's Big Lie into a new buzzword: 'election integrity.'"

Abbott's announcement comes in the wake of the state's Senate Bill 1 (SB 1), a controversial voting law passed in September 2021. Critics have denounced SB 1 as part of a broader effort by Republican-led states to introduce new voting restrictions following the 2020 election.

In August 2023, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas ruled that portions of SB 1 violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964, finding that it disenfranchised eligible voters by rejecting mail ballots for minor paperwork errors.

The Houston Chronicle's editorial board also criticized Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for his office's recent raid on members of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a Latino civil rights organization, over allegations of voter fraud. The newspaper points out that despite Paxton's aggressive pursuit of voter fraud cases, his office's election fraud unit closed only six cases between September 2022 to present day.

Voting rights advocates have long argued that claims of widespread voter fraud are often used as pretexts for implementing policies that disproportionately affect minority communities and other traditionally Democratic-leaning constituencies.

The newspaper's editorial board appears to support this view, suggesting that Abbott's recent statements are part of a long history of voter suppression tactics in Texas dating back to the Reconstruction era.

"Here's the truth every Texan should know before voting: there are multiple checks in place to ensure that everyone who casts a ballot in Texas does so legally. Anyone who tells you otherwise, even the governor of our state, is spinning a tall tale," the Houston Chronicle concluded its editorial.>

Such a good boy, serving his massa in Florida so well.

<Donald Trump, who is the defendant in two criminal trials for allegedly interfering in the 2020 election, has issued a warning about Democrats cheating in November.

In a Truth Social post on Saturday, the Republican presidential candidate wrote that the upcoming election would be heavily scrutinized to avoid cheating.

"CEASE & DESIST: I, together with many Attorneys and Legal Scholars, am watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely because I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election," he wrote.

Since losing the election to President Joe Biden in 2020, Trump has repeatedly asserted that the widespread fraud influenced the outcome. He and his allies brought 62 lawsuits challenging the results, 61 of which were thrown out. One succeeded at first and was then overturned by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

"It was a Disgrace to our Nation! Therefore, the 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again," Trump wrote.

"We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON'T! Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country."

While Trump has accused the Democratic Party and Biden of cheating, he himself is the defendant in two criminal trials relating to alleged election interference, one federal, and one in Georgia. In both cases he denies any wrongdoing and says he is subject to a political witch hunt.

The federal case relates to an allegation that Trump was involved in a plot to send fake electors to the Capitol to falsely declare him the winner of various states. He is accused of pressuring then Vice President Mike Pence to count the fake electors during the certification process, rather than the electors certified by each state.

The Georgia case relates to a January 2, 2021, phone call Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger where he allegedly pressured him to "find 11,780 votes" to overturn the election in the state. The prosecution argues that Trump and 18 others were part of a criminal racketeering enterprise to unlawfully change the outcome of the election.>