webodec3ARCHIVEPreview
Open in TheBrain

domestic violence RO

12/17

promote 2nd on xmas fair truck attack, macho tag aha

precursor to mass shooters (// animal abuse?)

merri ok

restraining order

see rape

see hierarchy, strict fr  property (edit bd and I tie]

xian? nat’l?

gop does it, excuses it, or blocks laws against it? vawa?

trump-domestic-violence-authoritarian

5 26 nyt op ed gessen

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RWW 9 26

Rep. Lisa McClain (R-MI) told Face The Nation’s Margaret Brennan on Sunday that she supports embattled congressman Max Miller (R-OH) despite domestic abuse allegations against him because he has an “R” by his name.

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AN 5 26

MAGA Congressman Max Miller (Ohio) is being accused of beating the mother of his 2-year-old daughter in front of her in an incident that unfolded on Feb. 1 of this year.

According to court filings uncovered by the Daily Mailand three sources cited by the website, Miller's ex-wife Emily Moreno sought changes to their custody agreement after concerns over his “dangerous physical behavior” in their daughter’s presence.

Moreno, the daughter of Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno (R) alleged in the filing that Miller "struck her during a custody exchange at his home in full view of the couple’s 2-year-old daughter, leaving bruises on her arm, elbow, and torso," the report said.

Photos obtained by the Daily Mail show bruising and redness on her body after the alleged incident.

The Bay Village Police Department confirmed that they responded to a report of child abuse that day, but did not say whether it was the Miller/Moreno encounter. They wouldn't give further information other than to say that the investigation remains open, said the DailyMail.

In June 2024, Moreno alleged that Miller threw a pot of boiling water at her. The water hit her chest, causing redness that was also shown in the photos. The incident also occurred in the presence of their daughter.

The couple then began divorce proceedings and reached a settlement in June 2025, where they would agree to share custody of their daughter. Miller would provide $2,500 per month in child support.

An April TMZ report cited a claim from Moreno that Miller “regularly speaks to me in an inappropriate, aggressive and demeaning manner, which is not in the best interest of our child.”

She also alleged that Miller “has conducted dangerous physical behavior in the child’s presence.”

“I do not believe it is in our child’s best interest for [Miller] and me to jointly make a decision for her,” Moreno added, saying she feared it would "cause direct harm" to their child.

Miller previously wrote a letter to Moreno after the alleged boiling-water incident, in which he apologized but didn't admit any culpability. He called himself worthless and claimed guilt was "eating him alive," the letter reviewed by the DailyMail said.

“I don’t know what to do. I do know you love me, protect me and care for me. I failed to do that for you,” Miller allegedly wrote. “I’m sorry and I just want to close my eyes and wake up and everything be normal.”

“I know that won’t happen,” the letter continues. “I’m sorry I failed you and Ruth. It’s eating me alive. I love you, even if you think I don’t. I love you so much. I’m so sorry. I’m just a f—— up and worthless.”

“These images, combined with the documented history in court filings, directly contradict years of Mr. Miller’s denial,” said Moreno’s attorney, Andrew Zashin. “Any claim that Ms. Moreno fabricated these allegations collapses in the face of contemporaneous physical evidence.”

“It is unfortunate that these matters have become public when Ms. Moreno has made every effort to keep them private and out of court for the sake of their daughter,” he added. “But the ongoing pattern of behavior, coupled with the continued denials, has made silence no longer possible.”

Miller is up for relection in November. He will face Democrat Brian Poindexter. Donald Trump won the district in 2024 by 11 points (55-44).

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[### I Asked the Pentagon About Pete Hegseth's Mentor. Then ...

Mother Jones

https://www.motherjones.com › politics › 2025/12 › eri...](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/12/eric-geressy-goodreads-pentagon-dod-pete-hegseth-jack-posobiec-threat/)

4 days ago — Six weeks ago, Jack Posobiec asked me to comment on whether I have a “creepy fetish for Asian women.” That was one of several false and wildly ...See more

Six weeks ago, Jack Posobiec asked me to comment on whether I have a “creepy fetish for Asian women.”

That was one of several false and wildly personal allegations that the far-right pundit and newly minted member of the Pentagon press corps said that he planned to include in “a story that I’m writing about you.”

I immediately understood his October 28 email to be a threat, though it was not made explicit. The day before, I had sent the Pentagon press office a series of questions concerning Eric Geressy, a senior Pentagon adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Geressy, who served with Hegseth during a tour in Iraq in the mid-2000s, is part of the Pentagon effort to instill a “warrior ethos” within the US military. He now leads a team reviewing the role of women in the armed forces.

Calling Geressy “my toughest critic and my best mentor,” Hegseth in March presented him with the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second-highest award for valor, for Geressy’s conduct following an ambush in Baghdad in 2007.

Posobiec’s email arrived the day after my inquiries…This was either an incredible coincidence or a deliberate message: Publish your article and get smeared.

I had discovered that Geressy’s email address was linked to a public Goodreads page with a “currently reading” list that included various books featuring stories about “Asian wife sharing.” These pornographic works, with titles such as “Asian Wife Went With Her Dad’s Friend: A Cuckold Story,” appeared on the list alongside two books by Hegseth and a handful of military histories. They contain detailed descriptions of cuckolding, group sex, and scenes involving “ladyboys”—a term used to refer to Thai transgender women. The page, active since 2021, was taken down the day after I contacted the Pentagon and Geressy about it.

I also asked about a 1997 domestic violence allegation against Geressy, about his dating habits, and past relationships with foreign women. [chinese national?]I inquired if the Pentagon had assessed those relationships as part of Geressy’s security clearance process, and, more broadly, if his personal life might create concerns about his susceptibility to foreign influence operations.

The Pentagon repeatedly asked for more time to address those questions. Eventually chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell responded, in part: “Geressy has served for 38 years in the government, has been vetted numerous times by the relevant agencies, and has never posed a security risk or engaged in improper behavior as this piece tries to suggest. Mother Jones has stooped to a new low with this shoddy hit piece and should be ashamed of itself.”

Posobiec’s email arrived the day after my initial inquiries. The false claims he asked about, particularly the Asian fetish thing, seemed to mirror my questions. Posobiec, who in 2016 promoted the bogus Pizzagate conspiracy theory, gave me a deadline, 5 p.m. on October 29, that was the same as the one I had given the Pentagon press office. A Pentagon spokesperson and Posobiec both denied coordination. Geressy declined to comment. But considering the questions, timing, and Posobiec’s links to Defense Department officials, the situation seemed clear. This was either an incredible coincidence or a deliberate message: Publish your article and get smeared.

Posobiec’s email claimed I have “a history of objectifying women,” and that I had engaged in some kind of misconduct. The email also included questions about my marriage.

Posobiec’s questions suggested one of his “two sources” may have been a real woman with whom I did have a brief relationship nearly a decade ago. Contrary to the email’s depiction, that relationship was perfectly amicable at the time. But it was part of some personal messiness, especially around the end of my first marriage, that is embarrassing.

My first instinct was to laugh this off. Who cares what the Pizzagate guy writes? But getting lied about by someone with 3 million X followers is not that funny. Comet Ping Pong never housed a Democratic pedophilia ring in its basement. But that didn’t make it less dangerous when the restaurant was targeted by QAnon crazies, including a guy who fired an AR-15 into a room that had just been full of kids.

I have done reporting that angered other well-known figures on the right—Roger Stone, Miles Guo, Steve Bannon—and that drew some doxxing and half-assed personal attacks from their allies. But I am not famous. Who cares about me?

The threatened audience for the smear, clearly, was my peers—and my wife. It seemed meant to scare me into spiking my own story. That is not journalism, but an attack on journalism.

This apparent threat became more explicit as the possible publication date we had given the Pentagon approached. In tweets, Posobiec asked his followers if he should publish a story about mistreatment of women by a “DC-area liberal reporter.” After our possible publication date passed, though, he went quiet.

That left my editors and me with a problem. Here was what we believed to be an attempt to strong-arm Mother Jones, and perhaps an expansion of the administration’s war on the press. This was news. But the development also complicated an already tricky story. And if we delayed publication, or decided the story was not important enough to run, we risked leaving the impression that we, and I, had been intimidated into silence.

We knew that we would not drop the article because of Posobiec’s ploy, nor rush into running it before we were ready. Instead, we did what reporters are supposed to do when confronted with a journalism dilemma: more journalism.

My emails to the Pentagon and Geressy were part of an effort to check the information we had gathered. We wanted their side of the story. My questions went largely unanswered, but I kept asking. I talked to more people. And I worked to verify the information we had.

We had linked the Goodreads account to Geressy based on various pieces of identifying information, including an email address he had used. The account was listed under the username Eric J—Geressy’s middle name is Joseph. At one point, the page noted that Eric J lived in a specific Florida town, which matched Geressy’s known residence. Also, some of the non-erotic books displayed on the account were seemingly of interest to him; they included books, like Hegseth’s The War on Warriors, that mention Geressy’s military service. These titles appeared on the page between 2021 and July of this year.

Screenshot of the Goodreads page linked to Geressy’s email address. The page was deleted after we asked him and the Pentagon about it.

The same email address was also linked to other apps, including Yelp and MyFitnessPal, that appeared to be Geressy’s, along with a MySpace page that includes what looks like a photograph of him.

Geressy declined to comment, and did not confirm he had a Goodreads account. In theory that made it possible, if highly unlikely, that someone could have used his email account, obtained through a hack or other means, to set up the Goodreads account. So we tried to rule out that possibility.

I spoke to Nathaniel Fried, the CEO of OSINT Industries. That’s a British organization whose platform matches personal information such as emails and phone numbers to online accounts; we had relied on this platform to connect Geressy’s email address to the Goodreads account. Fried said that while OSINT can’t tell you for sure who signed up, “it’s 100 percent that that email has an account.” In other words, either Geressy or someone using his email and personal information created the account.

I also asked Amazon, which owns Goodreads, about the account. After much back and forth, the company said it did not currently have a record of an account linked to Geressy, or the email address he appears to have used. But they also said that they do not retain identifying information for deleted Goodreads accounts. Since the account linked to Geressy had been deleted weeks before, right after I reached out to the Pentagon and Geressy for comment, this statement gave us little new information. Overall, Amazon’s carefully parsed response did nothing to refute the connection.

“It’s all about whether you are susceptible to a foreign service getting any leverage against you. It may not be disqualifying, but it should be looked at.”

Still, none of that fully bore on the main consideration. That is, whether personal reading tastes, past relationships, or apparent dating habits are worth reporting on. After extensive discussion, we decided that in this case, they are.

For one thing, former national security officials told us that for Pentagon personnel in particular, relationships with foreign partners are a major concern.

Geressy lived in 2016 with a woman who evidence suggests may be a Chinese national. That woman started a limited liability company during that time with a name that references Chinese investment. It was registered at Geressy’s home address, then dissolved a few months later. (I am omitting some specifics to avoid including identifying information.) The Pentagon said that Geressy has never been deemed a security risk. But it did not provide verifiable answers to questions about whether that relationship and company were examined as part of Geressy’s security clearance review. Neither did Geressy.

Geressy has had what appears to be a stormy personal life that has included three marriages. In 1997, a jury acquitted him of a domestic violence charge after an accusation by his then-wife, according to court records.

Email addresses Geressy used, and other identifying information, including his first name and biographical information, also appeared in three data breaches, between 2011 and 2016, of adult websites geared toward finding sexual partners, according to databases that include the hacked data. Those sites are Fling, AdultFriendFinder, which then called itself “the World’s Largest Sex & Swinger Community,” and Ashley Madison, which billed itself as “the most famous name in infidelity.”

The presence of Geressy’s email and other information in these data breaches does not confirm he used these sites, according to cyber researchers.

But as John Sipher, a former senior CIA officer, told Mother Jones, in normal circumstances, a government official who might be involved with such websites and who had romantic relationships with foreigners would draw scrutiny. “It’s all about whether you are susceptible to a foreign service getting any leverage against you,” Sipher said. “It may not be disqualifying, but it should be looked at.”

And there is a second point. Geressy is a top official in a Defense Department that has booted trans people from the military based on President Trump’s executive order that argues that “adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.” Geressy is not responsible for trans policy, but he is part of a Pentagon leadership that concerns itself with subordinates’ private lives.

Trump’s Pentagon wants reporters to be not just docile recipients of the administration’s preferred narratives but active propagandists. That is a direct attack on the free press. It is also an insidious danger.

In The War on Warriors, one of the books on the Goodreads page linked to Geressy, Hegesth cited his mentor to support the position that women should not serve in combat roles. “From my perspective,” Hegseth quoted Geressy as saying, circa 2007, “overwhelmingly most females want nothing to do with combat arms.” According to Hegseth, Geressy had argued that the Army had unfairly awarded medals to some women who had served in combat. “If SGM Geressy was a transvestite—or gay, or black, or a woman,” Hegseth wrote, “he would have three Distinguished Service Crosses and be on the front of a Wheaties box.”

The Pentagon is already beset by scandals in which top officials, most notably Hegseth himself, have been accused of conduct that falls short of the standards it demands of other Defense Department officials and service members. Critics have argued that for lower-ranking personnel, actions like Hegseth sharing military plans outside of approved channels, or the adultery heacknowledged during confirmation hearings, would result in firing. The racy selections on the Goodreads account linked to Geressy’s email may be comparatively minor. But that a public page listing such titles existed until we flagged it adds to the impression that the department’s leadership is not only hypocritical, but inept.

Hegseth has reacted furiously to reporting on some of his missteps. He has raged over coverage of his sharing of plans for bombing targets in Yemen with a Signal group that included the editor of the Atlantic. (The department’s inspector general reported that Hegseth’s actions could have put US troops at risk.) He fired aides accused of leaking news of a plan to give Elon Musk a top-secret briefing on US war plans versus China. Posobiec’s email came as the Pentagon took an increasingly hostile stance toward the media.

Kingsley Wilson, a former conservative influencer who is the department’s press secretary, told me that she did not speak to Posobiec about my story and did not believe Parnell did either. Posobiec also denied coordinating with the Pentagon. Geressy did not respond to a question about it.

But it came amid broader pushback to our reporting. “This is a garbage story made up of false allegations, decades-old claims that proved untrue, and disgusting innuendo aimed at smearing a man who was awarded the Army’s second-highest military honor for extraordinary heroism in combat,” Parnell said.

That response is consistent with the combative press relations posture of the second Trump administration. Shortly before, when a reporter asked the White House press secretary to identify who had suggested Trump meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Budapest, she responded: “Your mom did.”

Similar truculence drives the Defense Department’s recent decision to force outlets that assign reporters to the Pentagon to agree to a policy that bars reporters from revealing news the department does not authorize. Most news organizations refused. (The New York Times recently sued the Pentagon, arguing that the policy violates the First Amendment.) Posobiec is among a group of pro-Trump influencers who accepted the restrictive terms. The result is that the new press corps the Pentagon grants access to is largely composed of far-right activists.

The Pentagon press shop maintains close ties to its newly constituted press corps. Wilson, the department’s press secretary, occasionally appears on a program Posobiec hosts. In an October episode, she thanked him for agreeing to the department’s restrictions. “Now we get to have incredible journalists like yourself who are going to be here in the Pentagon reporting on what the Department of War is doing every single day,” she said.

On Wednesday night, after weeks of silence, I heard from Posobiec again. He said he was “finalizing my story,” and wanted to know if me, my wife, “or your in-laws” wished to comment. His message arrived an hour and forty minutes after I wrote to Geressy, posing some last questions and telling him I was “finalizing this story.”

Trump’s Pentagon wants reporters to be not just docile recipients of the administration’s preferred narratives but active propagandists. That is a direct attack on the free press. It is also an insidious danger. It threatens to make us bad at our jobs. It can be harder work to treat people whom we cover critically like complete human beings, people who deserve empathy and a real chance to explain themselves. If the department yanks credentials for tough reporting, if a press secretary just attacks a story without engaging with questions, and if inquiries draw personal attacks, why give spokespeople, or the officials they work for, any opportunity to respond at all?

The answer, I think, is that in journalism, like everywhere else, we should treat people the way we want to be treated. This story, with its weird personal twist, drove home that necessity. By proposing to smear me, Posobiec inadvertently provided a reminder of how responsible reporters ought to act.

I have worked to be fair—and honest. This attempt won’t appease the Pentagon or the people who threatened me. And the choice here, between appearing to be coerced into silence or maybe getting slandered, lacks an option that doesn’t feel shitty.

But what I can control are the standards I aim for. Those are ultimately up to me. But they reflect the values of Mother Jones, and the influence of other journalists, one of whom is my wife. She makes the judgment I’ll live with.

[### The Brand-New Pentagon Press Corps Is Gaga for Hegseth

The Intercept

https://theintercept.com › 2025/12/13 › hegseth-new-pe...](https://theintercept.com/2025/12/13/hegseth-new-pentagon-press-reporters/)

2 days ago — After nearly all legacy news organizations declined to sign on to Hegseth's rules, the new Pentagon press corps is all his cheerleaders.

[### Hegseth team invites far-right activist Jack Posobiec on ...

The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com › ... › Military](https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/02/13/pete-hegseth-jack-posobiec/)

Feb 13, 2025 — Trump administration officials at the Pentagon invited a far-right activist, Jack Posobiec, to participate in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's first trip ...See more

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AN 9 25

'Deranged psychopath': Experts sound alarm over Trump's 'green light' of domestic violence

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TRUMP PARDON ATTY FIRED BC WD NOT GIVE MEL GUNS BACK BC DOMESTIC ABUSE 2025

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an 4 25

Even before California became deep blue during the 1990s, its neighbor to the north, Oregon, was leaning Democratic. President George H.W. Bush won California in the 1988 presidential election, but he lost Oregon to Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis by roughly 5 percent.

Nonetheless, some rural areas of Oregon still lean GOP, and the Oregon Republican Party performs well in some rural areas of the state — especially those near Idaho. But the Oregon GOP is experiencing some turbulence following the resignation of its former chairman, the Rev. Jerry Cummings, on Wednesday, April 9. With Cummings' resignation, former Oregon Vice Chair Connie Whelchel took over the position.

According to Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) reporter Dirk VanderHart, Cummings resigned "amid revelations of ongoing personal financial woes and troubling allegations from a 16-year-old divorce."

READ MORE:'Devastating': Trump admin marks thousands legally 'dead' to stop them from making money

VanderHart reports, "The quick fall from party influence comes less than two months into Cummings' tenure atop the Oregon GOP. It follows a story from the Oregon Journalism Project on Tuesday, (April 8) that detailed a litany of court proceedings that cast him in a negative light. One of those is a 2009 divorce case that contains allegations Cummings' ex-wife used to obtain a restraining order against him."

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Cummings' ex-wife, according to follows, accused him of violence — an allegation the former Oregon GOP chairman flatly denies.

"More recent legal troubles involve two 2024 civil filings that call Cummings' fiscal responsibility into question," VanderHart explains. "One case suggests he deposited invalid checks at OnPoint Community Credit Union, then withdrew more than $17,000 that didn’t actually exist. The other accuses Cummings of taking out $93,000 in business loans that he failed to make payments on."

The OPB reporter adds, "The financial cases present a significant concern for a person at the helm of a political party. Cummings’ responsibilities as GOP chair included fundraising, and donors were unlikely to trust him with their checks after the lawsuits came to light."

READ MORE:'Trump has eclipsed Jesus himself': Here’s what really drives evangelicals’ MAGA rage

Whelchel is describing the allegations against Cummings as "deeply troubling."

In an official statement, Whelchel said, "These revelations were not known to the Executive Committee or Party leadership prior to their publication, and they are in no way reflective of the values or standards we hold While these developments are deeply unfortunate, they will not derail our mission."

READ MORE:Supreme Court's unanimous decision against Trump reveals an important detail

*Read the full Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) articleat this link.

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an 2 25

The Washington State Patrol is investigating a Nazi sympathizer who posted a social media reply that appears to threaten the state’s governor with gunfire.

Greyson Arnold wrote in reply to an X post by Gov. Bob Ferguson last month that “the federal government must act quickly to arrest you or it will be the 2nd amendment and judgment by lead.”

Arnold was responding to a post by Ferguson highlighting a new state program to assist families targeted for deportation by the Trump administration, which the governor described as “ripping families apart” and resulting in “kids losing their parents” and “businesses losing their workers.”

A former podcaster, the 35-year-old Arnold is part of the Groyper movement, an optics-obsessed cluster of far-right activists who seek to move white nationalist ideas into the political mainstream. Arnold was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, but was not arrested. The day after Donald Trump took the oath of office and issued mass pardons for the Jan. 6 defendants, Arnold posted a video of himself on the Capitol steps on Jan. 6 stating, “This is an American baptism. The American spirit is awakening.”

Arnold has cultivated ties with far-right Republicans such as former gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, and Rep. Paul Gosar in Arizona. In 2022, Joe Kent, a Republican candidate for Congress from Washington state who is now set to direct the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center appeared in a video for an interview conducted by Arnold. When confronted with Arnold’s pro-Nazi views, the campaign disavowed him, claiming Kent did not know who Arnold was.

CNN compiled a list of atrocious pro-Nazi views expressed by Arnold, including a conspiracy theory purporting that there were Jewish plans to “genocide the German people,” describing Adolf Hitler as “a complicated historical figure which many people misunderstand," and calling the Nazis a “pure” race.

Arnold also briefly worked as a field organizer for the Washington State Republican Party in 2022, before he was fired for his social media posts. Despite his extremist views, FEC records show that Arnold registered voters last summer for Citizens for Free Enterprise, a super PAC led by former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey.

The Executive Protection Unit of the Washington State Patrol was alerted to the Arnold’s “judgement of lead” post by a legislative assistant at the state capitol in Olympia, according to Chris Loftis, a spokesperson for the state law enforcement agency. The legislative assistant, in turn, received a tip from “an extremist watchdog group” in Arizona, Loftis said.

“We did visit the gentleman’s residences of record,” Loftis told Raw Story. “WSP detectives visited an address in Spokane and, at our request, Arizona officials visited an Arizona address. Greyson Arnold was not in either location, so we did not speak to the gentleman in either visit.”

Loftis said he was unable to comment further because the matter remains under investigation.

In a message last week to his 7,200 Telegram subscribers, Arnold appeared to double down on the threat,

“The new WA ‘governor’ just sent law enforcement to my house who claimed this tweet is a credible threat of violence,” he wrote.

“To make it clear,” Arnold added, “if you protect criminal illegal aliens then you are participating in the genocide of the American people, and if the federal government doesn’t act then it is up to the American people to.”

In comments below the message, Arnold’s subscribers endorsed the apparent call to violence, with one writing on Monday: “That’s literally what the 2nd amendment was made for. Literally killing your own government.”

In an X post last week, Arnold appeared to express confidence that he has the backing of Attorney General Pam Bondi.

“Looks like the [law enforcement officers] who tried to harass and intimidate my family are going to get prosecuted,” he wrote.

Arnold’s post referenced a news item reporting, "Bondi just ordered the Justice Department to freeze all funding for sanctuary cities and has instructed attorneys to begin prosecuting officials preventing ICE from doing their job.”

Asked whether the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Washington intends to take the action sought by Arnold, spokesperson Emilie Langlie told Raw Story that as a matter of policy the Justice Department would decline to confirm or deny the existence of any investigation “unless or until something is filed on the matter in court.”

Arnold has a conviction in Arizona for disorderly conduct-fighting. A police report obtained by Raw Story indicates that officers responded to a domestic violence call at Arnold’s home in Lake Havasu City in December 2021. The alleged victim told officers that Arnold became frustrated when she told him his bank account was overdrawn. She said he slammed down a plate of food, threw down a glass of orange juice, and smashed a bottle of liquor on the counter, and then followed her from the kitchen to the living room, where he held her in a chair and prevented her from going to the bathroom.

“Too bad, b----, I’m the man and you need to listen to me,” Arnold said, according to the victim.

According to the report, Arnold admitted to forcing the victim into the chair, and notes from the report indicate he told the officer that she “is a very easy woman to move around and he just wanted her to sit in one spot and listen to what he had to say.”

Arnold was also charged with intentionally placing another person in fear of imminent physical injury and criminally defacing or damaging property worth less than $250, but court record show the charges were dismissed when he pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct.

Arnold’s social media posts have become increasingly unhinged in recent weeks, targeting not only the governor but also local and federal judges and migrants.

Replying to a post showing photos of King County Superior Court Judge Johanna Bender shopping at a supermarket, Arnold wrote: “What’s her home address and usual locations she visits, I’m sure the families she’s hurt would like to know.”

In another post referencing a photo of U.S. District Court Judge Loren AliKhan and a decision by her to block President Trump’s freeze on spending for federal aid programs, Arnold posted a GIF of Dwight K. Schrute, the character from the TV show “The Office,” firing a rifle.

On the same day as his “judgement by lead” post in reference to Gov. Ferguson, Arnold posted a video recorded from his car window as he cruised past a group of men standing on the side of a public roadway outside a self-storage business.

“I am mapping hotspots where illegals congregate and documenting where they reside to report directly to ICE,” he wrote. “This includes not only Home Depot, but schools, hospitals, and places of worship. Together we can find them and send them home, to Mexico.”

In another post that echoes the history of ordinary Germans looting Jewish homes when they were deported during World War II, Arnold posted a reply on X expressing indifference to a news story about a Guatemalan woman who had been deported and was upset that she still owed her parents money after they raised more than $25,000 to pay a smuggler.

“We should be doing our duty as Americans and helping strip them of any wealth before deporting them,” he wrote.

Arnold could not be reached for comment for this story.

Many of Arnold’s comments on X reflect a preoccupation with the global labor force. He talks about his experience working in China from 2015 to 2020. His posts express a negative view of Indian tech workers in the United States, in contrast to his own experience as a foreign worker in China.

“The only time I was even able to geta STEM-related job was in China,” he posted on X on Jan. 31. “America doesn’t hire Americans.”

In another post on the same day, he wrote: “China didn’t need Indians. We took in the inferior races and now the U.S. is crumbling. I choose the Chinese team if my team is just foreigners.”

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September 18, 2024 rww

* Scott Lively claims that “the term ‘homophobia’ and its derivatives are no less offensive and demeaning to defenders of the natural family and traditional sexual morality than the term ‘faggot’ is to men afflicted with SSADness [same-sex attraction disorder]”: “A slur is a slur, and none of them has a legitimate place in civil discourse.”

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an 6 24 raw

Supreme Court on Friday ruled in an 8-1 vote that the government had the right to restrict access to firearms for alleged domestic abusers.

However, there was one notable dissent in the ruling: Justice Clarence Thomas.

As flagged by Slate's Mark Joseph Stern, Thomas argued that all regulations of firearms should be deemed in violation of the Second Amendment "unless it is consistent with the Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation."

Thomas then claimed that there is "not a single historical regulation" that "justifes the statute at issue."

Commenting on this, Stern said that Thomas seemed to be arguing that restricting abusers' access to firearms was off-limits because "wife-beating was not generally a crime" at the time of the country's founding in the 18th Century.

Stern was not the only observer to express shock at the logic behind Thomas' ruling.

"And Thomas’s dissent is utterly ridiculous and disingenuous," argued former tennis starMartina Navratilova. He is a disgrace to our highest court. Anita Hill should have been believed!!!"

"Clarence Thomas is the only Supreme Court justice who wants to arm domestic abusers," wrote former Chicago Sun-Times editor Mark Jacob. "He’s a pox on our society."

Matt Fuller, the cofounder of the centrist think tank Third Way, also had a horrified reaction to the Thomas dissent.

"Three reactions: 1) I can't believe this was even a question 2) Thank God 3) Clarence Thomas is a corrupt lunatic," he wrote.

Fred Guttenberg, a gun safety advocate whose daughter was murdered in the Parkland school shooting, said that Thomas' dissent "is only further proof that he is simply a threat to America."

NOTUS Reports' Matt Fuller, meanwhile, simply posted a description of the brutal assault that respondent Zackey Rahimi allegedly gave to his girlfriend and commented, "Clarence Thomas thinks this person should be allowed to have a gun."

red flag gun laws?

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Christian nationalists’ new anti-divorce campaign risks increasing domestic violence: report - Alternet.org

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OMG

no lnx many

https://www.vox.com/scotus/23841718/edgelord-federal-judiciary-james-ho-fifth-circuit-abortion-guns

The edgelord of the federal judiciary

Imagine a Breitbart comments forum come to life and given immense power over innocent people. That’s Judge James Ho.

By Ian Millhiser  Aug 26, 2023,

James Ho sits on a panel speaking as video of him is projected on a screen behind him at the Federalist Society’s 2022 National Lawyers Convention in Washington, DC.

Trump Judge James Ho speaks at a 2022 event hosted by the Federalist Society. Shuran Huang/Washington Post via Getty Images]

Ian Millhiser is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court.

If you could breathe life into 4chan, the dark corner of the Internet where shitposters, edgelords, Groypers, and trolls of all kinds thrive, and then appoint this new lifeform to the federal bench, you would have created Judge James Ho.

Ho, appointed by former president Donald Trump in 2018 to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, recently argued that anti-abortion doctors may seek a court order banning a commonly prescribed abortion medication, because “doctors delight in working with their unborn patients — and experience an aesthetic injury when they are aborted.”

He’s written that a federal law prohibiting gun possession by people that a court has determined to be a “credible threat to the physical safety of [their] intimate partner” is unconstitutional. Among other things, Ho claimed that this law “should give us pause” because women getting a divorce sometimes seek such court orders as “a tactical leverage device” in their divorce proceedings.

Ho’s very first opinion as a judge, a dissenting opinion in a case he did not even hear, claimed that all laws limiting the amount that wealthy donors may give to political campaigns are unconstitutional.Under Ho’s understanding of the Constitution, nothing prevents Harlan Crow, the billionaire Republican donor famous for lavishing gifts on Justice Clarence Thomas, from funding an entire presidential campaign.

Also, speaking of Harlan Crow, Ho held his official ceremony swearing him in as a federal judge in Crow’s personal library.

Ho’s work, in other words, is often indistinguishable from that of a professional troll. He revels in taking deliberately provocative positions. He often joins a fairly extreme opinion written by a colleague, and then writes separately to take an even more extreme position. His judicial opinions mingle Fox News talking points, men’s rights activism, Federalist Society fantasies, and discredited legal doctrines that are now taught to law students to warn them of the Supreme Court’s worst mistakes.

Ho seems to never miss an opportunity to weigh in on a political controversy. When he’s not writing concurring opinions arguing that the Supreme Court should bring back the Lochner era, an age when conservative justices imposed their own laissez-faire ideology on the rest of the nation, he can often be found lecturing law schools on the evils of “cancel culture.”

(That said, Ho did not respond to a request to be interviewed for this piece.)

When I speak to other judges, I often hear them use a derisive word to describe this kind of behavior: “auditioning.” It’s an increasingly common practice among Republican judges itching for a promotion.

In his final years as a lower court judge, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote several opinions laying out his plans to shift power from federal agencies to the judiciary — a high-priority issue for the Federalist Society, which played a key role in picking Trump’s judges and justices. These opinions reportedly “proved decisive” in the Trump White House’s decision to give Gorsuch a big promotion.

Similarly, in his final year as a lower court judge, Justice Brett Kavanaugh — who previously had a thin record on abortion — went out of his way to convey both in a published opinion and in a speech to a conservative think tank that he opposed Roe v. Wade. Trump picked Kavanaugh for the next seat to open up on the Supreme Court.

The most alarming thing about Judge Ho, in other words, isn’t his penchant for trolling. It is the very real possibility that he will be rewarded for it. No judge in America has auditioned harder for a Supreme Court appointment in a Republican administration. And, if the next president is Donald Trump, Trump has already shown that he prefers judges who go out of their way to show their loyalty to Republican causes.

What does Jim Ho’s version of the Constitution look like?

Lochner v. New York (1905) is one of a handful of decisions that legal scholars refer to as the “anti-canon” — a list of cases taught to law students as examples of how judges must never, ever behave. The list also includes the pro-slavery decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) and the segregationist decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).

Ho wants to bring back Lochner.

Lochner stuck down a New York state law that limited, to 60 hours a week, the amount of time worked by bakery workers. At the time, these workers were typically paid by the day or by the week, so the law had prevented these workers from being forced to work extraordinarily long shifts for no extra pay.

Other cases applying Lochner’s reasoning struck down minimum wage laws and stripped workers of their right to unionize.

Lochner was grounded in what it described as the “right of the individual to ... enter into those contracts in relation to labor which may seem to him appropriate or necessary for the support of himself and his family.” The idea was that, if a worker entered into a contract to work long hours for little pay, then the law could not alter this contract — even if the contract was itself the product of exploitation or desperation.

Lochner, in other words, not only stripped the government of much of its power to protect workers, it did so on the dubious ground that, by insisting that workers adhere to whatever exploitative employment contracts their bosses imposed upon them, the Court was actually defending the rights of those workers. The Court ultimately abandoned Lochner in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish (1937).

Ho picked an inauspicious case, Golden Glow Tanning Salon v. City of Columbus, to offer his love letter to Lochner. In it, a Mississippi tanning salon claimed that Covid era lockdowns violated the salon owner’s “right to work,” a common argument made by modern day libertarians who seek to revive Lochner. (A “right to work” is synonymous with Lochner’s so-called right to “enter into those contracts in relation to labor which may seem to him appropriate.”)

Though all three judges who heard Golden Glow agreed that the Supreme Court’s decisions repudiating Lochnerism prevented them from ruling in the tanning salon’s favor, Ho wrote a brief concurring opinion that relied heavily on scholarship by right-wing lawyers arguing that Lochner should be revived. He suggested that the anti-worker right recognized in Lochner has a “better historical grounding than more recent claims of right that have found judicial favor.” And he urged the Supreme Court to take up a pending case seeking to revive Lochner (the justices declined to do so).

Ho’s passion for the sorts of economic “rights” favored by Gilded Age robber barons is matched by his disdain for abortion. He wrote about the “moral tragedy of abortion” in one of his judicial opinions. And he’s urged his Fifth Circuit — which is already the most right-wing federal appeals court in the country, and is typically hostile towards reproductive freedom — to be even more aggressive in quashing abortion rights.

Just last week, for example, a three-judge panel that includes Ho attempted to ban the drug mifepristone, which is used in more than half of all US abortions. That decision will have no effect, because the Supreme Court preemptively blocked it last April — a pretty clear sign that even this very conservative Supreme Court thinks that the legal arguments against mifepristone are weak.

But Ho didn’t just join this attempt to ban the drug, in a case called Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA,he wrote a separate opinion arguing that his colleagues were insufficiently hostile to abortion rights.

Technically, the Fifth Circuit’s majority opinion in Alliance did not purport to ban mifepristone outright, it merely ordered the FDA to reinstate restrictions on the drug that the agency abandoned in 2016. As a practical matter, this order would prevent the drug from being marketed in the United States for at least a few months, because it would take a long time for government regulators and the drug maker to comply with the pre-2016 rules. But Ho would have gone even further, ordering the FDA to rescind its decision to approve the medication way back in 2000.

There are so many errors in Ho’s legal reasoning that it would be tedious to list them all here. One of them is that the statute of limitations to challenge an FDA approval of a drug is six years. While there are legitimate reasons that time period can sometimes be extended, Ho can’t rescue a lawsuit that was filed more than two decades after mifepristone’s approval.

On guns, Ho joined the Fifth Circuit’s decision inUnited States v. Rahimi (2023), a decision the Supreme Court is likely to reverse in its upcoming term, holding that people who violently abuse their romantic partners or their partner’s child have a Second Amendment right to own a gun — even after a court proceeding determines that the abuser is “a credible threat to the physical safety of such intimate partner or child.”

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Rahimi is another case where Ho joined an alarming decision written by one of his colleagues, and then wrote separately to argue for an even more extreme position.

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Ho argues that one reason his court should be skeptical of a law seeking to disarm people subject to domestic violence restraining orders is that women who are not victims of abuse allegedly obtain these orders to “secure [favorable] rulings on critical issues such as [marital and child] support, exclusion from marital residence and property disposition.”

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As evidence that this is a real problem that actually exists, Ho cites a handful of court decisions — including a 1993 decision by a court in New Jersey that invalidated a restraining order because of a lack of evidence that the man subjected to it was violent, and a 2005 incident where comedian David Letterman was briefly subject to a restraining order before a court tossed that order out.

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The fact that Ho had to rely on decades-old cases in faraway jurisdictions to show that judges sometimes issue domestic violence restraining orders for invalid reasons is a sign that, maybe, this isn’t as big of a problem as Ho makes it out to be. Nevertheless, Ho would potentially arm hundreds of men who have murderous intentions in order to save someone like Letterman from having to go without a firearm for a couple of weeks.

Ho could be the future of the federal judiciary

Ho’s penchant for tacking to the right of his already quite reactionary colleagues marks him as an outlier, even within a conservative federal judiciary. But he’s hardly an extreme outlier, especially on the far-right Fifth Circuit.

In Collins v. Mnuchin (2019), for example, Ho signed onto an opinion by Judge Don Willett that threatened to invalidate every single action taken by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which was created in 2008 to stabilize the US housing market during a historic recession. Had Willett’s approach prevailed in the Supreme Court, it could have potentially collapsed the US housing market and triggered a global economic depression (the Supreme Court voted 8-1 against Willett’s approach).

Notably, however, Ho was one of a total of seven judges who signed onto Willett’s attempt to burn down more than a dozen years of work by a federal agency. There is no shortage of judicial arsonists on the Fifth Circuit.

Similarly, the Supreme Court will hear several cases in its upcoming term in which it is likely to reverse similarly aggressive decisions by the Fifth Circuit. Those most likely include the Alliance case about mifepristone, as well as the Rahimi guns case, and two decisions declaring the entire the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unconstitutional and gutting the federal government’s power to enforce securities law.

The leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination are already signaling that they want to pick justices who are well to the right of the three already very conservative justices Trump placed on the Supreme Court. In his infamous speech before the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, Trump said that he is “not happy with the Supreme Court” because they supposedly “love to rule against me.” (When Trump was president, the Court often manipulated its own procedures to rule in Trump’s favor, but the Court rejected his bid to overturn the 2020 election.)

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis attacked Trump’s justices in June, claiming that “none of those three are at the same level of Justices Thomas and Justice Alito,” two justices who fairly consistently vote like Fifth Circuit judges.

Ho, meanwhile, is auditioning harder than anyone in the judiciary to catch Trump or DeSantis’s eye. And, even if the next Republican president decides to pick someone less flamboyant for the high court, they will have no shortage of candidates who are eager to light decades' worth of settled law — along with entire federal agencies — on fire.

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// animal cruelty?

https://www.alternet.org/georgia-gop-official-arrested-dog/

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gun control sen framewk

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/tucker-carlson-attacks-red-flag-laws-meant-address-mass-shootings

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loss kid cust wife testify pa

https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/sean-parnell-2655776062/

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/wisconsin-bail/

xmas holiday mkt, so not political?  kochs boast about crim just reform? recent left DA wins eg SF?

After an SUV plowed through a holiday parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin on November 21, killing five people and injuring 48, including many children, hard-right pundits treated the subsequent arrest of Darrell Brooks like a gift.

Jennifer Van Laar, the editor of popular conservative blog Red State, tweeted, "FIFTY PAGES in Darrell Brooks' criminal record. Drugs, violence, crimes of moral turpitude, sexual offenses. But hey, let's allow him to bond out on $1000 even though he's charged with jumping bail."

Alt-right troll Jack Posobiec and COVID-19 disinformation spreader Chuck Callesto echoed this idea. Turning Point USA's Benny Johnson went a step further, blaming Milwaukee District Attorney John Chisholm for the incident. So did Mike Cernovich, who ripped into Chisholm as a "Soros DA," despite Chisholm never receiving money from George Soros or his affiliated PACs.

DA Chisholm, as a writer at Red State put it, is allegedly a "radical leftist who has sought to institute 'criminal justice reform' via 'bail reform.'" It is insinuated that Chisholm quietly ushered Brooks out on a serious and recent domestic violence charge on $1,000 bail, then rolled it back in the media after the tragedy, claiming that his deputy prosecutor made a mistake (Chisholm has now launched an investigation into the Brooks bail decision).

Such commentators are in desperate need of a fact-check.

Wisconsin is not like California or New Jersey, which saw bail reform legislation pass in the last few years. It has not had a substantial amendment to its bail law in at least 10 years, according to the Wisconsin state legislature's website.

However, the current law does state that a judge can hold a person charged with a crime in jail pretrial "only upon a finding by the court that there is a reasonable basis to believe that bail is necessary to assure appearance in court."

Meanwhile, both chambers of the Wisconsin legislature have been dominated by Republicans every year in the last decade.

Besides which, if we look at bail reform on a statistical, rather than anecdotal, level, it does not reduce public safety. The vast majority of people facing charges return to court regardless of money bail. In addition, detaining people pretrial, effectively punishing poverty, is "criminogenic," because people lose their jobs and community ties are weakened.

"Money bail compromises public safety," according to analysis from the Prison Policy Initiative.

As Cernovich points out to support his cause, Chisholm has delivered criminal justice reform talking points. But Chisholm has rarely delivered anything on decarcerationbuttalking points. The Democrat, first elected in 2006, has spent much of his career carefully avoiding policies that would make right-wing opponents angry.

In 2017, for example, Chisholm explained how he refuses to categorically drop marijuana possession cases, despite many of his peers elsewhere doing just that.

Chisholm is also the orchestrator of a national strategy to increase the use of drug-induced homicide prosecutions to people who sell drugs as murderers, despite people who have overdosed often not wanting this response. He has sent Assistant District Attorney Patricia Daughtery to national conferences to evangelize these prosecutions. Daughtery has gone so far as to advise officials to build cases using tactics that are disrespectful to the same people she is supposedly trying to protect, such as using the cell phones of people who overdosed.

Additionally, during Chisholm's tenure, Wisconsin had the highest rate of Black incarceration in the nation, with about 65 percent of Black Wisconsinites living in Milwaukee County. University of Wisconsin law professor Ion Meyn has raised concerns that part of this is due to higher prosecution rates and lower plea bargain rates for Black suspects.

Amid Chisholm's middle-of-the-road approach to his office, Milwaukee has one of the highest violent crime rates in the country, with 1,332 incidents for every 100,000 residents. His attempt to please everyone and incense no one has achieved little, and there are numerous progressive steps he should be taking. Chances are, the politicization of the Brooks case will increase the DA's timidity and push him in the opposite direction.

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11 21

Political violence is on people's minds now that Kyle Rittenhouse has been acquitted. According to USA Today, far-right groups celebrated last week's unsurprising verdict. "Kyle Rittenhouse is the hero we've been waiting for" was posted on the Gab profile for VDare, a self-consciously fascist organization headquartered in the foothills of Washington, Conn. The takeaway appears to be that it's now OK to shoot anti-racists as long as the shooting can be credibly characterized as "self-defense."

Protests broke out in Kenosha, Wis., where Rittenhouse traveled two summers ago to"protect" propertywhile demonstrators, including some violent looters, protested the police murder of George Floyd. These newest protests were accompanied by a father-daughter duo carrying the same long gun Rittenhouse did. Instead of being white, though, they were Black. Instead of protecting property, they were protecting "anti-Rittenhouse protesters," said the New York Post.

Political violence is on people's minds. The right to petition the government for redress of grievances enshrined in the First Amendment seems to be running against the grain of the right to bear arms enshrined in the Second Amendment. After Rittenhouse's acquittal, anti-racists may feel it's too dangerous to petition. (The fascists are taking it to mean they can shoot first and often.) But some won't let the Second Amendment nullify the First. They'll arm up.

When racists with guns meet anti-racists with guns, it's likely the results will be bad, bad, very bad. USA Today, citing a study by Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, said "armed protests are six times more likely to turn violent compared to protests where no guns are present." That study examined more than 30,000 public demonstrations over 18 months between January 2020 to June 2021.

READ: [The dark Trumptopia we inhabit is the world science fiction warned us about]

Lead researcher Roudabeh Kishi told USA Today: "Oftentimes guns can kind of play a role with just increasing tensions. They're used as intimidation and kind of makes a tense environment even more tense. And so sometimes we'll see other types of violence breakout, not necessarily always a shooting," she said. "So it's like an indirect way arms can actually contribute to violence and destruction."

Political violence is on people's minds. Lee Drutman, a political scientist and New America fellow, said today that "violence is the alternative to politics. By normalizing violence, we undermine politics."

But what if political violence is normal? What if it should always be on people's mind. And what if our democratic politics is always already being undermined in some way by political violence. I suggest Rittenhouse's acquittal will not be the cause of future political violence. It is the effect of past political violence always already at work. We don't see it, though. Political violence is so normal it's practically invisible.

Political violence is the predictable consequence of democratic politics seeking to advance the cause of liberty, equality and justice for all coming into conflict with conservative politics seeking to maintain a social order in which white men rule American society with impunity.

READ: Charlottesville defendants found liable for civil conspiracy and ordered to pay millions in damages]

Because democracy won't stop, and conservative politics won't stop, that means political violence is always already there. It's better to see Rittenhouse's acquittal not as a cause of future violence but, I think, as an inflection point after which private political violence goes public.

Private political violence? What we are seeing now, in the potential for armed racists to silence free speech through intimidation or murder, didn't come from no where. It started at home, in the family, especially between husband and wife. When women challenge "authority," when children challenge "authority," conservative politics does not turn to democracy as a means of resolving conflict. It turns to violence.

It also covers it up. When a husband hits his wife, when a father hits his kids, our discourse almost never calls it political violence though the maintenance of the man's authority over his wife and children is almost always the reason he hits his wife and children. We call it "domestic violence." We call it "child abuse." These terms are accurate but incomplete. Suffering is a political problem in democratic politics. Suffering is a political goal in conservative politics. Without suffering — without punishment for those people who deserve to feel their pain — anything can happen. Even liberty, equality and justice for all.

Political violence has been growing acutely since we elected a Black president. The violence was enabled by Republicans loosening gun laws after Barack Obama's reelection. The Supreme Court is considering whether to make carrying a firearm openly a constitutional right. The NRA never gloried in mass murders. It did after Rittenhouse's acquittal. The private political violence that inspired the nation's worst shooting massacres is inspiring the institutionalization of public political violence. Where that leaves democratic politics, God only knows.

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no longer disqualifying for high office in trump gop

kos an 11 21

As Donald Trump has consolidated power in the Republican Party this year, his slow-but-steady takeover has sometimes masked the overwhelming creep of extremism into every corner of the Republican Party.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's embrace of Herschel Walker this week as the establishment pick to win back Georgia's Senate seat is a perfect example.

On the one hand, McConnell's cowardly cave to Trump's chosen candidate is such a laughable outcome for a guy who's hailed as a "master tactician" and repeatedly told reporters that his only red line for candidates was electability. While Walker is potentially electable in today's Republican Party, his open struggle with mental illness and alleged history of abusing women makes him a wounded candidate right out the gate. Whatever Walker's upsides might be, he isn't who you pick if ensuring electoral success is truly your North Star.

Lurking just one layer beneath McConnell's acquiescence to Trump's demands is the unmistakable surrender of the establishment wing of the GOP to Trump. He is 100% calling the shots now about the Grand Old Party's future, and there's no pretending otherwise.

And as the Republican establishment bows to Trump, his manifest dominance of the party has also convinced candidates running for critical seats that no amount of personal baggage is prohibitive. In fact, men with violent histories are flocking to Republican primaries, often earning Trump's endorsement. That is the case not only for Walker, but also Sean Parnell, an Army veteran running for Pennsylvania's open Senate seat. Parnell, who won Trump's early backing partly by pushing a fraudit of the Keystone State's 2020 election results, is in the middle of a contentious divorce and custody battle over his three children. Parnell's estranged wife once called 911 during a domestic dispute, and also secured two temporary protective orders against him as their marriage crumbled. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, temporary orders only require a hearing with the accuser; making them permanent would have required a judge to hear from both parties, which never happened.

But now Senate Republicans are in the position of potentially fielding two Trump acolytes, each with a mountain of personal baggage that hasn't even been fully mined, in two seats that will surely play a role in deciding the fate of the upper chamber.

Trump also might play an outsized role in mucking up the reelection of a man he despises: Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp. This week, we learned that former GOP Sen. David Perdue, who Trump campaigned for in the run up to the state's January runoffs, might mount a primary challenge to Kemp. Trump would love nothing more than to knock off Kemp, who he blames for not overturning the state's 2020 election results.

Perdue's potential entrance is already radicalizing the race on the Republican side and will surely continue to do so. On Friday, Kemp announced that Georgia was suing President Joe Biden over his vaccine mandate for federal contractors. It's a clear bid to cater to Trump's fringe anti-mitigation, pro-pandemic base—setting up a telling trajectory for a Kemp-Purdue primary that could hamstring Republicans in the general election. On top of that, if Perdue does enter the gubernatorial race, he will lean heavily on the support of Trump, who will spend his every waking breath grousing about 2020 and the supposedly stolen election in Georgia. The net effect would be months of Trump constantly reminding his voters that Georgia elections aren't secure, and that their vote may not even matter in the end. That's on top of the fact that Trump voters already decided to stay home the last time Perdue was on the ballot.

Beyond Trump's impact at the federal and state level, his toxicity is also permeating local elections. Buzzfeed News reports that at least a dozen Republicans who attended Trump's Jan. 6 festivities at the Capitol are on the ballot for next week's elections. They include incumbent state lawmakers, first-time candidates for statehouses, and local officials—mostly running in New Jersey and Virginia, which have off-year elections. But that also suggests that the number of Jan. 6 participants running for office this year might just be the tip of the iceberg.

All of this information is just more evidence pointing to the fact that, whether or not Republicans take over congressional majorities next year, the party itself will be uniquely radicalized with an even more profound Trump bent following the midterms.

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hunter kos

....What is self-evident is that the Trumpian right, like all far-right movements, is a reactionary movement made up of people who feel the world has wronged them in some not necessarily coherent way and who are extremely susceptible to suggestions that it is the fault of ethnic minorities, religious minorities, or both. If they have a tax lien on their properties (even while most of those around them don't have any property to put under lien in the first place), it must be because migrants have it Too Good These Days. If they lose their jobs due to a pandemic, they are not willing to entertain the notion that it was mere genetic happenstance that let such a thing loose—it must have been an intentional plot by The Communists.

Many, if not the vast majority, of Americans have faced financial problems in their lifetimes. Few turn into flag-waving, government-attacking fascists.

So this may be barking up the wrong tree, as far as attempting to find a connection between fascist Trump supporters and the alleged economic anxieties, rather than white supremacy-based authoritarianism, that drove them to such a point. A far more solid predictor of violence remains the obvious one: already having a past history of violence. Those who resort to violence to solve their own personal problems are already predisposed to look to violence to solve the larger problems too; both the "Proud Boys" and dozens upon dozens of far-right militias demonstrate what happens when the violence-eager find each other, get gallons upon gallons of booze into their bloodstreams, and start looking to act out on their inner fantasies....

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420 rww

White Nationalist Activist and Father Both Arrested for Crimes Against Women

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Republican bigotry and obedience to the NRA endanger renewal of the Violence Against Women Act

Joan McCarter / Daily KosDecember 6, 2019

The Violence Against Women Act expired in February. While the Democratic House has responded, passing an expanded reauthorization of it in April, Moscow Mitch McConnell has refused to take it up in…

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Air Pollution Exposure Is Linked to Increased Violent Crime, Domestic Violence

AIR POLLUTION

1 hour ago

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https://www.democracynow.org/2019/6/3/headlines/report_disappearance_and_murder_of_1000s_of_indigenous_women_a_canadian_genocide

In Canada, a national inquiry found that the disappearance and murder of thousands of indigenous women and girls over decades amounts to a “Canadian genocide.” The report, which was obtained by CBC News ahead of its official release today, says that “We do know that thousands of Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA (two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex and asexual) have been lost to the Canadian genocide to date” and are the result of “state actions and inactions rooted in colonialism and colonial ideologies.”

TOPICS:

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/rump-is-facing-impeachment-the-nra-is-facing-bankruptcy-its-a-good-day-in-america/

Here’s a good one for you. Wayne LaPierre, the executive director of the National Rifle Association (NRA) sent out a fundraising appeal in March pleading with its members for donations. “We’re facing an attack that’s unprecedented not just in the history of the N.R.A. but in the entire history of our country,” LaPierre whined. “ cannot survive without the N.R.A., and the N.R.A. cannot survive without your help right now.”

Then what did LaPierre do? Why he stepped-up NRA lobbying against The Violence Against Women Act, which the House of Representatives reauthorized a few weeks later. Because of course the NRA doesn’t need the donations of women who might benefit from the provision in the Violence Against Women Act which prohibits sales of firearms to anyone who has been convicted of stalking, assaulting, or otherwise harming a domestic partner.

The NRA can’t afford to lose too many lobbying battles like that one anymore. As The New Yorker reported this month, “the N.R.A. is troubled; in recent years, it has run annual deficits of as much as forty million dollars.” LaPierre has presided over a reduction in the main mission of the NRA – gun safety, training, and representing hunters – to less than 10 percent of its budget. What do they spend the other 90 percent on, you might ask? Messaging, according to The New Yorker. “The N.R.A. is now mainly a media company, promoting a life style built around loving guns and hating anyone who might take them away.”

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How long does it take to become respectable again after you’re forced out of your job after a history of domestic violence comes to light? If you’re a square-jawed white Republican, and the measure of respectability is an op-ed in a major newspaper, the answer is apparently about 13 months. That’s the mark set by former White House staff secretary Rob Porter and the Wall Street Journal on Thursday night.

Porter’s op-ed is about Donald Trump’s trade agenda, but the substance of what he wrote is much less noteworthy than the fact that he had the opportunity at all. This is a man whose two ex-wives came forward to describe his abuse. His security clearance was held up as a result—and White House security clearance issues are still playing out, more than a year later—and then-chief of staff John Kelly’s reputation took a major hit due to his botched handling of the issue.

Rob Porter is a violent man who epitomizes more than one White House scandal, but he’s also an Ivy League-educated Rhodes Scholar Republican, so 13 months is all it took for the uber-establishment Wall Street Journal to welcome his sage thoughts on trade. It’s a perfect symbol of the Republican way of the world.

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https://www.alternet.org/animal-rights/animal-cruelty-clear-predictor-future-violence-so-why-are-perpetrators-merely-slapped