Was Chaffetz insinuating that the poor would rather spend money on frivolous things than their own self-care?

To people like myself, who grew up poor, this criticism is certainly nothing new. In conversations with Republicans about the challenges facing my working-class family, I’ve gotten used to being asked how many TVs my parents own, or what kind of cars they drive. At the heart of those questions is a lurking assumption that Chaffetz brought into the light: Maybe the poor deserve their lot in life.

This philosophy, while absurd on its face, effectively cripples any momentum toward helping suffering populations and is an old favorite of the Republican Party. It’s the same reasoning that led Ronald Reagan to decry “welfare queens” and Fox News to continually criticize people on assistance for buying shrimp, soft drinks, “junk food,” and crab legs. It gives those disinclined to part with their own money an excuse not to feel guilty about their own greed.

To further quell their culpability and show that the American Dream still functions as advertised, conservatives are fond of trotting out success stories — people who prove that pulling one’s self up by one's bootstraps is still a possibility and, by extension, that those who don’t succeed must own their shortcomings. Lately, the right has found nobody more useful, both during the presidential election and after, than their modern-day Horatio Alger spokesperson, J. D. Vance, whose bestselling book “Hillbilly Elegy” chronicled his journey from Appalachia to the hallowed halls of the Ivy League, while championing the hard work necessary to overcome the pitfalls of poverty.

Traditionally this would’ve been a Fox News kind of book — the network featured an excerpt on their site that focused on Vance’s introduction to “elite culture” during his time at Yale — but Vance’s glorified self-help tome was also forwarded by networks and pundits desperate to understand the Donald Trump phenomenon, and the author was essentially transformed into Privileged America’s Sherpa into the ravages of Post-Recession U.S.A.

Trumpeted as a glimpse into an America elites have neglected for years, I first read “Hillbilly Elegy” with hope. I’d been told this might be the book that finally shed light on problems that’d been killing my family for generations. I’d watched my grandparents and parents, all of them factory workers, suffer backbreaking labor and then be virtually forgotten by the political establishment until the GOP needed their vote and stoked their social and racial anxieties to turn them into political pawns.

In the beginning, I felt a kinship to Vance. His dysfunctional childhood looked a lot like my own. There was substance abuse. Knockdown, drag-out fights. A feeling that people just couldn’t get ahead no matter what they did.

And then the narrative took a turn.

Due to references he downplays, not to mention his middle-class grandmother’s shielding and encouragement, Vance was able to lift himself out of the despair of impoverishment and escaped to Yale and eventually Silicon Valley, where he was able to look back on his upbringing with a new perspective.

“Whenever people ask me what I’d most like to change about the white working class,” he writes, “I say, ‘the feeling that our choices don’t matter.’”

The thesis at the heart of “Hillbilly Elegy” is that anybody who isn’t able to escape the working class is essentially at fault. Sure, there’s a culture of fatalism and “learned helplessness,” but the onus falls on the individual.

As Vance writes: “I’ve seen far too many people awash in genuine desire to change only to lose their mettle when they realized just how difficult change actually is.”

Oh, the working class and their aversion to difficulty.

If only they, like Vance, could take the challenge head on and rise above their circumstances. If only they, like Vance, weren’t so worried about material things like iPhones or the “giant TVs and iPads” the author says his people buy for themselves instead of saving for the future.

This generalization is not the only problematic oversimplification in Vance’s book — he totally discounts the role racism played in the white working class’s opposition to President Obama and says, instead, it was because Obama dressed well, was a good father, and because Michelle Obama advocated eating healthy food — but it would be hard to understate what role Vance has played in reinvigorating the conservative bootstraps narrative for a new generation and, thus, emboldening Republican ideology.

To Vance’s credit, he has been critical of Donald Trump, calling the working class’s support of the billionaire a result of a “false sense of purpose,” but Vance’s portrait of poor Americans is alarmingly in lockstep with the philosophy of Republicans who are shamefully using Trump’s presidency to forward their own agenda of economic warfare. Certainly Jason Chaffetz’s comments are fueled by the same low opinion of the poor as Vance’s, as is Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s legislative agenda, which is focused on disabling the social safety net.

Though Vance’s name doesn’t appear in the Republican ACA replacement bill, the philosophy at the heart of it is certainly in tune. While the proposed bill would cost millions of Americans their access to care — Vance himself tweeted a link Tuesday to a Forbes article that stated as much while lauding the legislation — it makes sure to benefit the wealthy, gives a tax break to insurance CEOs and moves the focus of health care in America to an age-based model instead of income.

The message is loud and clear: Help is on the way, but only to those who “deserve” it.

And how does one deserve it?

By working hard. And the only metric to show that one has worked sufficiently hard enough is to look at their income, at how successful they are, because, in Vance’s and the Republican’s America, the only one to blame if you’re not wealthy is yourself. Never mind how legislation like this healthcare bill, cuts in education funding, continued decreases in after-school and school lunch programs, not to mention a lack of access to mental health care or career counseling, disadvantages the poor.

Of the problems facing working-class America, Vance writes in “Hillbilly Elegy,” “There is no government that can fix these problems for us.”

And, at least partially, one has to agree.

There is no government that can fix these problems, or at least, no government we have now.

The post Hillbilly sellout: The politics of J. D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” are already being used to gut the working poor appeared first on Salon.com.

When Fox News host Neil Cavuto asked Ryan, who voted for Trump in 2016, what “put him off,” Ryan said it is a “contribution of things” but namely Trump’s lack of moral principles.

“I think it really is just character at the end of the day, and the fact that if you’re willing to put yourself above the Constitution ― an oath you swear when you take federal office, whether as president or a member of Congress, you swear an oath to the Constitution ― and you’re willing to suborn it to yourself, I think that makes you unfit for office,” Ryan told Cavuto.

It’s not the first time Ryan has made his contempt for Trump known. He called Trump a “populist, authoritarian narcissist,” who thinks in an “authoritarian way,” in an interview last year. Having served as a speaker of the House for two years of Trump’s term, Ryan began openly criticizing the former president after he left office. “Did I think he was going to improve and grow in the job? Yeah. He didn’t," Ryan told The New York Times Magazine in 2023.

In the Fox News interview on Tuesday, Ryan, who is a Fox Corporation board member, also criticized Trump’s negative impact on the GOP.

 “He’s cost us a lot of seats,” Ryan said. “He cost us the Senate twice. He cost us the House because he is nominating, he is pushing through the primaries people who cannot win general elections but who pledge fealty to him.”

Ryan made it clear he does not support President Joe Biden either, whose policies he called “terrible." He sympathized with American voters who he said have been given two “terrible choices” for the upcoming November election.

“In a country with 350 million people, this is the choice we have?” Ryan said. “I, like the majority of Americans, wish we had a different choice.”

The post Paul Ryan says Trump puts himself “above the Constitution,” calls him “unfit for office” appeared first on Salon.com.

I don't know if that amnesia will be cured by facts and statistics, but even Fox News has to admit that the Biden economy is doing very well.

seen on Fox News. pretty pretty good! pic.twitter.com/Ta6P0JRyyj

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 6, 2024

Nonetheless, Trump and all of his various henchmen spend their days insisting that the economy is on the verge of collapse. Last night, during his low-energy victory speech, Trump said it once again and as he told Lou Dobbs in an interview in January, he hopes the economy will crash within the next 12 months so that he won't be like Herbert Hoover. (Joe Biden correctly pointed out to Evan Osnos in the New Yorker, "He’s already Herbert Hoover. He’s the only President that ever lost jobs in a four-year period—other than Hoover.”)

Despite the fact that inflation has stopped rising at the same pace as a couple of years ago, people yearn for prices to go back down to where they were before the pandemic. And just as he promised back in 2016, Trump says that only he can fix it. But he's short on details about how he's going to do that except for some vague promises to dramatically raise tariffs and deport millions of undocumented workers which will actually ignite inflation. And he has said that he will fully fund Social Security and Medicare through "growth" and selling oil leases in Alaska which might as well be a promise to pay for it with diamond mines on Mars. 

He does have one other plan that he doesn't talk about quite as much, however. Here he is sharing it with a group of wealthy donors at Mar-a-Lago back in December. "You're all people that have a lot of money. You're rich as hell. We're gonna give you tax cuts," he told them.

Trump: You’re all people that have a lot of money. You’re rich as hell. We’re gonna give you tax cuts pic.twitter.com/50Iy9ddag9

— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) December 14, 2023

Of course he is. And he's planning to cut corporate taxes too. He's a Republican and that's what they do.

Donald Trump's only legislative accomplishment in his first term was a massive tax cut bill for the rich. But that wasn't really his accomplishment, was it? That was the evergreen policy goal of the Republican Party, especially the blue-eyed dream boat Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, the Ayn Rand devotee who believed that rich men were heroes who needed to be allowed to run free and unencumbered by civic responsibility so that capitalism might save humanity. That the Republican tax cut personally benefited the new, wealthy president made it all the sweeter. 

Trump's determination to lower taxes for the rich is a given. Everything he does is first and foremost for himself and he won't even try to rationalize it. It's unlikely that the rest of the party can get away with that, so they'll no doubt return to their perennial excuse — the federal budget deficit as a reason to lower taxes, even though that makes no sense. 

That tired old saw goes back to the Reagan administration which popularized a quack theory called "supply side economics" championed by economist Arthur Laffer. He claimed that the more you cut taxes the greater the revenue to the government. Even then everyone knew it was ridiculous. Reagan's budget director, David Stockman, actually spilled the beans to journalist William Greider, telling him, "It's kind of hard to sell 'trickle down, so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down.' Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory." Trump gave Arthur Laffer the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2019.

Today another supply side guru, Stephen Moore, formerly of the Club for Growth, has co-authored the Project 2025 economic plan to completely "reform" the U.S. Treasury. He's pushing to privatize Social Security which Trump has never explicitly ruled out and told The Guardian, “Yes, I am strongly in favor of cutting tax rates to make [the] American economy No 1.” And this would presumably be in addition to extending the Trump tax cuts from 2017 which are up for renewal next year. 

Just this week, we've received some important data on the effect of those tax cuts and I'm sure you won't be surprised to learn that they did not pay for themselves or deliver the thousands of dollars in increased wages to workers as promised. The New York Times reports:

Instead, they are adding more than $100 billion a year to America’s $34 trillion-and-growing national debt, according to the quartet of researchers from Princeton University, the University of Chicago, Harvard University and the Treasury Department.

The researchers found the cuts delivered wage gains that were “an order of magnitude below” what Trump officials predicted: about $750 per worker per year on average over the long run, compared to promises of $4,000 to $9,000 per worker.

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That trickle never seems to make it down from the wealthy's palatial palaces, as CBS News outlines further:

The new paper, by David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King's College London, examines 18 developed countries — from Australia to the United States — over a 50-year period from 1965 to 2015. The study compared countries that passed tax cuts in a specific year, such as the U.S. in 1982 when President Ronald Reagan slashed taxes on the wealthy, with those that didn't, and then examined their economic outcomes. 

Per capita gross domestic product and unemployment rates were nearly identical after five years in countries that slashed taxes on the rich and in those that didn't, the study found. 

But the analysis discovered one major change: The incomes of the rich grew much faster in countries where tax rates were lowered. Instead of trickling down to the middle class, tax cuts for the rich may not accomplish much more than help the rich keep more of their riches and exacerbate income inequality, the research indicates.

This is nothing but a giveaway to their rich benefactors. It's a con that's been working beautifully for 50 years. 

Apparently, Trump just welcomed one of the two richest men in the world, Elon Musk, a major government contractor and social media influencer, to Mar-a-Lago to beg for money. Considering the batshit lunacy that Musk is posting to his X account these days, Trump can probably count on him for a billion dollars or so. Both of these men are shallow thinkers who have adopted the personas of populist demagogues speaking for the working man against the elites but in the end, they're just a couple of rich guys looking out for number one. Underneath all the MAGA bluster and BS, it's still the Republican Party — and the politicians will always cater to them that brung 'em.  

The post Trump’s big con is a flop appeared first on Salon.com.

“Look,” Ryan told Kajiwara, “Trump’s not a conservative. He’s an authoritarian narcissist. So I think they basically called him out for that. He’s a populist, authoritarian narcissist." the former speaker continued, saying that Trump's tendencies are guided by narcissism and "whatever makes him popular" or feel good at any given time. "He doesn’t think in classical liberal-conservative terms. He thinks in an authoritarian way. And he’s been able to get a big chunk of the Republican base to follow him because he’s the culture warrior,” said Ryan, who has faced criticism from both Democrats and Republicans for not strongly opposing Trump in 2016 or through his presidency.

“There has to be some line, some principle that is so important to you that you’re just not going to cross, so that when you’re brushing your teeth in the morning, look yourself in the mirror, you like what you see," the ex-congressman continued, saying he believes Cheney and Kinzinger are "liking what they see." He argued that, though many lawmakers thought Trump's reign would have ended following his second impeachment, the former president has been "resurrected." History, Ryan concluded, "will be kind to those people who saw what was happening and called it out, even though it was at the expense of their wellbeing.”

The post Paul Ryan goes off on podcast: “Trump’s not a conservative — he’s an authoritarian narcissist” appeared first on Salon.com.

By the time you read this, that vote could have taken place already — or perhaps Jordan has seen the writing on the wall and dropped out. Reports suggest there are now serious discussions of electing Speaker Pro Tem Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, who is virtually powerless, as a real-but-temporary speaker with full powers to get the House through the appropriations process. Nobody seems to know exactly how that would work, since the House has to have a speaker before it can vote on anything else (such as changing the rules about the speakership). Some congressmen are now calling for defrocked former Speaker Kevin McCarthy to be reinstated, which would mike the perfect coda to this absurd brouhaha.

One of the main objections to Jim Jordan is that he's too ideologically extreme and will hurt the Republicans' chances of maintaining the majority in 2024. There are 18 House members who were elected in congressional districts won by Joe Biden in 2020, and it's assumed they will be in danger if a full-blown MAGA wingnut becomes speaker of the House. Some of those members voted for Jordan on Tuesday so they may not be convinced, but Democrats are making it clear that they see this as an opportunity. Jordan's record is as far right as you can get, and he's joined at the hip with Donald Trump, who is likely still toxic in those districts.

But the idea that Jordan would be a departure from all the alleged statesmen who previously served as Republican House speakers, and that the maelstrom that's engulfed this Congress since the GOP took over in January is completely unprecedented simply isn't true. In fact, Jordan and the rest of the House rebels are part of a long Republican tradition.

Back in the 1980s, the "Reagan Revolution" brought into Congress a group of backbench bomb-throwers led by an obscure Georgia Republican named Newt Gingrich. He was highly adept at getting attention from the nascent right-wing media, which in those early days mostly meant talk radio. He first came to national notice in 1988, when he maneuvered to oust Democratic Speaker Jim Wright over an ethics complaint. He said at the time, “I’ll just keep pounding and pounding on his ethics. There comes a point where it comes together and the media takes off on it, or it dies. What I really want is to get some people with subpoenas poking around." (Gingrich himself had a similar ethics problem, which made this a "chef's kiss" of a political gambit, and secured his place in GOP as a bold risk-taker.) Wright was hastily replaced by another Democratic speaker, Tom Foley, but that was the play that started the process that led to where we are today.

Gingrich started his climb into the leadership right away and by 1994 he was not only the undisputed leader of the House Republicans but effectively the leader of the entire Republican Party. When he led the GOP to their massive win in that year's midterm elections, there was talk in the political media that Gingrich would become "co-president" with Bill Clinton, and might have to run against him in 1996 for the good of the country.

He and his accomplices reveled in persecuting Bill and Hillary Clinton, feeding on the tales of small-state corruption and lurid sexual misdeeds of Arkansas' gothic political culture. That launched the practice of nonstop tabloid-style congressional investigations that continues to this day. Their smash-mouth rhetoric and crude character assassination was not entirely without precedent in American politics — but it was the modern conservative movement, under Gingrich, that took it mainstream.

But the old "live by the sword, die by the sword" trope came back to bite Newt in 1997 when an insurgent group of 20 or so members from the class of '94 concluded that Gingrich had betrayed their principles and recruited his top lieutenants to bring him an ultimatum: Resign, or they would remove him by parliamentary maneuver. Unfortunately for them, the top lieutenants began bickering among themselves like Keystone Kops; the plot leaked to the press and Gingrich survived, although from that moment onward he was hanging by a thread.

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When his predictions of massive gains in the 1998 midterms turned to dust, Gingrich knew he no longer had the support of the GOP caucus and resigned. At that time it seemed like half the men in Washington were being exposed as philanderers and Gingrich was among them, as was the man who maneuvered behind the scenes to become his apparent successor, Bob Livingston of Louisiana. After Livingston's candidacy flamed out, Republicans settled on a little-known member of the leadership, Dennis Hastert of Illinois, who became who became the longest-serving GOP speaker. It was only years later that it became clear Hastert had been paying off a former student to stay quiet about his sexual abuse of underage boys as a high school teacher and wrestling coach, which landed him in federal prison. 

The next Republican speaker, after the GOP won back the House in the "Tea Party wave" of 2010, was John Boehner of Ohio, one of the original Gingrich coup plotters. As many readers will remember, he was eventually forced out by Tea Party backbenchers, one of whom was Jim Jordan among them. Boehner's eventual successor, Paul Ryan, found himself jeered at town halls and rallies and quit Congress after Democrats won back the majority in 2016. That brings us all the way to Kevin McCarthy who was ousted after less than nine months as speaker, in a parliamentary maneuver much like the one the Keystone Kop coup plotters of '97 used to threaten Gingrich.

So Jim Jordan is certainly an extremist whose legislative record is nonexistent and whose entire career in Congress has been devoted to culture-war issues, Fox News hits, insurrection and character assassination. But he's hardly unique. (Hey, he's even got a wrestling-related abuse scandal on his résumé.) If anything, he's the natural heir to the Gingrich revolution. And there are plenty more lined up right behind him. 

The post Jim Jordan’s no outlier: He fits right into the GOP’s post-Gingrich history of ruthless trolling appeared first on Salon.com.

A court filing in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against the network revealed that the Fox boss and other pro-Trump Fox hosts privately mocked the very same false election claims they aired. 

Trump’s targeted rant against Murdoch began earlier this week after the Fox executive said in a deposition that he knew there was no truth to Trump’s false claims but chose not to do anything about it as his network continued to air them.

“Rupert Murdoch should apologize to his viewers and readers for his ridiculous defense of the 2020 Presidential Election,” Trump wrote Thursday on Truth Social. “How many forms of cheating and rigging does he have to see? He should also apologize to those anchors who got it right, and fire the ones who got it wrong, or were afraid to speak up (of which there were many!). It’s time to get rid of Fake News, and call it like it is!”

Trump wants Rupert Murdoch to apologize to Fox News viewers. pic.twitter.com/P8mi9zsiKK

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) March 2, 2023

He then turned his anger toward former House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who now sits on the Fox Corp.’s board of directors.

“Rumors are flying high that idiot RINO Paul Ryan, who has greatly hurt the ‘credibility’ of Rupert Murdoch with his ridiculous stance that the 2020 Election was all “peaches and cream,” will be fired “like a dog” from the Fox Board,” Trump wrote. 

“Fox is going in the wrong direction, ratings are heading down, and Murdoch just threw certain very good people, who were correct, under the bus,” the former president continued. “He played right into the enemies camp. Viewers, and MAGA, are not happy!”

“I think that Fox Board Member RINO Paul Ryan, put his boss, Rupert Murdoch, in great legal and monetary jeopardy by convincing him to to go against his news anchors and their belief that the 2020 Presidential Election was Rigged and Stollen [sic],” Trump continued in his another post. 

“In so doing Murdoch is saying that Fox behaved badly when, in fact, evidence has proven that the Election was rife with Election Fraud and Irregularities,” he added. “Ryan is bad luck for Fox. He should either resign or be fired. Too many incompetent RINOS at FoxNews!”

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Fox is also under fire from congressional leaders including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y.

The two lawmakers sent a letter to Murdoch on Wednesday, demanding that he stop the advancement of 2020 election conspiracies on the right-wing channel and that he have the network publicly admit to wrongdoing. 

Fox has repeatedly denied the allegations against them, framing the lawsuit as an attack on the network’s First Amendment rights, and previously stated that Dominion “cherry-picked” evidence in their filing to “smear” the network. Fox Corp. has argued that its executives were not directly involved in the decision to air the false claims.

The Democrats, who also addressed Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott, Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch and Fox News Media President Jay Wallace, called out Murdoch for his admission that Fox News hosts knowingly pushed election lies.

“The leadership of your company was aware of the dangers of broadcasting these outlandish claims,” the letter states. “By your own account, Donald Trump’s election lies were ‘damaging’ and ‘really crazy stuff.’ Despite that shocking admission, Fox News hosts have continued to peddle election denialism to the American people. This sets a dangerous precedent that ignores basic journalistic fact-checking principles and public accountability.”

Schumer and Jeffries also used the letter to express their concern that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy allowed Fox News star Tucker Carlson to review the footage from the Jan. 6 Capitol riot despite his constant false narratives about the insurrection on air. 

“We demand that you direct Tucker Carlson and other hosts on your network to stop spreading false election narratives and admit on the air that they were wrong to engage in such negligent behavior,” the letter reads.

“As evidenced by the January 6 insurrection, spreading this false propaganda could not only embolden supporters of the Big Lie to engage in further acts of political violence, but also deeply and broadly weakens faith in our democracy and hurts our country in countless other ways,” it continues.

“Fox News executives and all other hosts on your network have a clear choice,” the congressmen wrote. “You can continue a pattern of lying to your viewers and risking democracy or move beyond this damaging chapter in your company’s history by siding with the truth and reporting the facts. We ask that you make sure Fox News ceases disseminating the Big Lie and other election conspiracy theories on your network.”

New letter from Schumer and Jeffries to Rupert Murdoch following Dominion lawsuit revelations pic.twitter.com/OVUep7vgk7

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) March 1, 2023

The post “He should apologize”: Trump is melting down on Truth Social over Murdoch’s deposition revelations appeared first on Salon.com.

Trump targeted Murdoch on Truth Social after court filings in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion lawsuit against the network revealed that the Fox boss, other executives and pro-Trump Fox News hosts trashed the same false election claims they aired. Murdoch said in his deposition that he knew there was no truth to Trump’s false claims but chose not to intervene as his network repeatedly aired them.

“Why is Rupert Murdoch throwing his anchors under the table, which also happens to be killing his case and infuriating his viewers, who will again be leaving in droves – they already are,” Trump wrote on Tuesday, before repeating his widely debunked claims about nonexistent widespread voter fraud. “There is MASSIVE evidence of voter fraud & irregularities in the 2020 Presidential Election. Just look at the documentary ‘2000 MULES’ and you will see large scale ballot stuffing caught on government cameras, or votes cast without Legislatures approval, or just recently, the FBI/Twitter Files Scandal. RIGGED!!!” Trump added, citing a discredited film by an ally he pardoned.

Trump in a subsequent post accused Fox News of not doing enough to push his false claims.

“There was so much Voter Fraud & Irregularities in the 2020 Presidential Election,” the former president falsely claimed, “that it amazes me how weak and ineffective FoxNews is at portraying itself in the lawsuit against them. They look too scared and frightened to reveal the massive amounts of voter fraud & Irregularities already found, and it would actually help them in the lawsuit. Instead FoxNews wants to silence its anchors and reporters, the reason so many of their viewers fled. The Election was that of a Third World Country!”

On Truth Social, Trump is continuing to push election lies and trashing Rupert Murdoch for "throwing his anchors under the table" in the Dominion deposition.

"It amazes me how weak and ineffective Fox News is at portraying itself in the lawsuit…" pic.twitter.com/0RM7LJZ6oW

— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) February 28, 2023

Trump’s posts did not address the slew of internal emails, messages and deposition excerpts revealing that even Trump’s most ardent backers at the network thought his claims about the election were false.

Fox News pushed back on the filing, accusing the company of cherry-picking statements to “smear” the network.

“Dominion’s lawsuit has always been more about what will generate headlines than what can withstand legal and factual scrutiny, as illustrated by them now being forced to slash their fanciful damages demand by more than half a billion dollars after their own expert debunked its implausible claims,” a Fox News spokesperson said in a statement. “Their summary judgment motion took an extreme, unsupported view of defamation law that would prevent journalists from basic reporting and their efforts to publicly smear FOX for covering and commenting on allegations by a sitting President of the United States should be recognized for what it is: a blatant violation of the First Amendment.”

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Trump has repeatedly hit out at Fox News in recent days, attacking the network for hyping Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a potential challenger to Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

“FoxNews is promoting Ron DeSanctus so hard and so much that there’s not much time left for Real News,” Trump wrote on Monday. “Reminds me of 2016 when they were pushing ‘JEB!’ The new Fox Poll, which have always been purposely terrible for me, has ‘TRUMP Crushing DeSanctimonious,’ but they barely show it. Instead they go with losers like Karl Rove, Paul Ryan… who have been wrong about everything! Isn’t there a big, beautiful, Network which wants to do well, and make a fortune besides? FAKE NEWS!”

President Trump rips Fox News in new statement on "Ron DeSanctus" pic.twitter.com/fY894Af16c

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) February 27, 2023

A Fox News poll published on Sunday showed Trump leading DeSantis by 15 points, though both Republicans are well ahead of any other declared or potential challengers.

Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. also hit out at Fox News, criticizing the network for not inviting him on the air and accusing former House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who sits on the board of Fox Corp., of being behind the snub.

“This guy is the guy on the board of Fox News, which also explains a lot about the direction and some of the content I’m seeing out there folks,” Trump Jr. said in a video posted to Rumble. “This explains, to me, almost everything, frankly. I know I haven’t been invited on in six months, so I’m sure that’s him pushing his RINO, America Last, war-forever garbage to the Democrats’ agenda.”

Junior says he hasn’t been invited on Fox in 6 months, and he’s pretty sure Paul Ryan is behind it. pic.twitter.com/wcmsIXthL2

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) February 27, 2023

The post Trump seethes on Truth Social after Rupert Murdoch spills the beans on the Big Lie in deposition appeared first on Salon.com.

Ryan told local news outlet WISN-TV that he would only attend the 2024 nominating convention if the party’s voters nominate someone other than Trump.

“It depends on who the nominee is. I’ll be here if it’s someone not named Trump,” he said. “I’m not interested in participating in that, no. Even in Wisconsin,” where the event will be held.

Paul Ryan says he won’t show up at the RNC in Milwaukee next year if Trump is the GOP nominee

In 2016 in Cleveland, he chaired the convention and officially announced that Trump was the party’s nominee

pic.twitter.com/lkKNRWo5T0

— Ben Siegel (@bensiegel) February 26, 2023

Ryan also predicted that Trump would ultimately fail to capture the nomination in the 2024 primaries.

“The reason I don’t think he’ll be our nominee because we’re going to lose with him,” he said. “He cost us the House in ’18, he lost the White House in ’20, he cost us the Senate in ’20, he cost us the Senate again in 2022, and he cost us probably a good dozen House seats in 2022. This is a lesson we don’t need to repeat again.”

Paul Ryan: "If we nominate Trump again we are going to lose…We lost with him in 18', 20' and 22'. We know this. He will cost us another election." pic.twitter.com/V2tT7rvWyu

— Republican Accountability (@AccountableGOP) February 24, 2023

Trump has repeatedly attacked Ryan, a frequent critic, accusing him of being a “RINO,” or Republican in name only.

“Back in my day a ‘RINO’ was somebody who was more moderate versus conservative,” Ryan told WISN. “I’m a conservative. Today, a RINO is how much fealty you pledge to Donald Trump. I’m very low on that.”

“What RINO means today is it’s a pure fealty index to Donald Trump…We’ve gone from measuring people based on their philosophy or even their temperament to like a fealty index. That, to me, is very wrong and dangerous.” — Paul Ryan at a roundtable with @SykesCharlie pic.twitter.com/q2eSZCr67Q

— Republican Accountability (@AccountableGOP) February 27, 2023

The former president responded to Ryan’s digs by lashing out at his former ally on Truth Social.

“Paul Ryan is a loser, Mitt Romney could have won without him,” Trump wrote. “I won twice, did much better the second time, and was 233 Wins out of 253 Races in the Midterms. Paul Ryan is destroying Fox, and couldn’t get elected dogcatcher in the Republican Party!”

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Ryan, who served as House speaker from 2015 to 2019 and collaborated with Trump to pass the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, has been staunchly opposed to Trump’s reelection, arguing that Trump’s shenanigans have blighted the integrity of the Republican Party and directly contributed to its electoral losses in recent years. 

Shortly after Election Day in 2022, Ryan told WISN that “Trump’s kind of a drag on our ticket.

“I think Donald Trump gives us problems, politically,” he said at the time. “We lost the House, the Senate, and the White House in two years when Trump was on the ballot, or in office. I think we just have some Trump hangover. I think he’s a drag on our office, on our races.”

Ryan doubled down on his comments in an interview with the Washington Post last week, calling Trump a “proven loser.”

“I think what happened in my party is people got intimidated by the politics. And Trump, who has chosen to engage in demagogic entitlement populism, has led a lot of people away from being responsible and from doing the right thing,” said Ryan, a staunch fiscal conservative. “I think his unelectability is his Achilles’ heel, and that in and of itself is going to be a unifying argument to move on from Trump,” Ryan added.

The Biden White House, meanwhile, called out Ryan for backing plans to cut Medicare and Social Security.

“What do Donald Trump and Paul Ryan have in common? Both ran on Medicare cuts and tax giveaways for rich special interests, then they both lost to Joe Biden,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates told the Post, adding that the proposals on the right threaten the “earned benefit programs that middle class Americans pay into throughout their entire working lives.”

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The former House speaker cast doubts on the twice-impeached former president’s chances for winning the GOP nomination for 2024, despite being the only candidate who has so far announced a campaign, and he told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Republicans should move on from his leadership.

“He’s fading fast, he is a proven loser,” Ryan said. “He cost us the House in ’18, he cost us the White House in ’20 and he cost us the Senate again and again, and I think we all know that, and I think we are moving past Trump. I really think that’s the case. I can’t imagine him getting the nomination, frankly, and I don’t mean this because I don’t want him to — I don’t want him to — but I don’t think he will.”

“The thing I take solace in, with all the machinations you saw last week, most of that wasn’t personal,” he added. “Most of that was around fiscal responsibility, most of that was about a concern about spending inflation and debt — that’s great. I think you need to persuade the country with the solutions on the problem, and I don’t think brinksmanship solves those things, but what is behind that is a good thing, which is Republicans finally reacquiring their moorings on the party of fiscal responsibility and limited government. That is the good thing I see in all of this weird stuff, and I am a Republican. I am not a member of an organized party, I am a Republican.”

Watch below or at the link:

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Back in 2015, the newly formed Freedom Caucus, born out of the Tea Party class that came into Congress five years before in the 2010 “shellacking,” managed to force then-Speaker John Boehner to resign for having the temerity to make deals with the Democrats in the Senate and the White House in order to keep the government functioning. They were a rump caucus that didn’t have the power to stop bipartisan legislation, but they had the leverage to both force Boehner out and prevent the ascension of McCarthy, his anointed successor.

At the time, McCarthy made it easier for them by telling the press that the congressional Benghazi hearings were a set-up to destroy Hillary Clinton (which was obviously true, and wouldn’t even raise eyebrows in today’s political environment). He also saw the whip count and knew he didn’t have the votes of all those Freedom Caucus kooks, and abruptly decided to bow out. After all, the superstar GOP dreamboat and former vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan was waiting in the wings and McCarthy knew he couldn’t compete with those baby blues. Ryan took the job for four years but decided not to run for re-election in 2018, largely because those same people made his life as miserable as they’d made his predecessor’s.

So this behavior was going on in the Republican Party before Donald Trump had ever uttered the words “Make America Great Again.” He didn’t invent this lunacy — he just watched it unfold and saw the opportunity to use it. After all, Trump had already done a test run with his birther nonsense, and liked the vibe. In effect, the GOP has been heading down this anarchic path for decades. Trump undoubtedly made it worse, but he didn’t create it. Right now, in fact, he seems almost irrelevant to its descent into further madness.

Trump supposedly whipped votes for McCarthy and it did no good with the diehards. It remains to be seen if he still has the loyalty of the 30 to 40 percent of Republican voters he will need to remain viable in the presidential race, but he clearly has no pull in Congress. In truth, he didn’t have much when he was president — his personal attacks on the late Sen. John McCain cost Republicans their most cherished policy objective, repealing the Affordable Care Act.

McCarthy’s catering to the far-right faction hasn’t done him a damn good either. In fact, the only people who anyone thinks might have some sway with this group are the real leaders of the Republican Party:

Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, who’s poised to be chief deputy whip, on what could possibly swing the 19 Jordan voters: “We’ll see what happens when Tucker and Sean Hannity and Ben Shapiro start beating up on these guys. Maybe that'll move it.”

— Max Cohen (@maxpcohen) January 3, 2023

Tuesday night on Fox News, Sean Hannity evoked Ronald Reagan saying something about being loyal to the party, which will have zero effect on people who think of Reagan with the same reverence they have for Grover Cleveland or Calvin Coolidge. They are more likely to pay attention to Tucker Carlson, who had this to say:

Tucker: If Kevin McCarthy wants to be the speaker, he's going to have to do things he would never do otherwise. pic.twitter.com/Em2QNnlcMe

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 4, 2023

That’s paranoid nonsense that even the Republican House majority thinks is nuts, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the crazies end up extracting this promise from whoever finally wins the gavel. Carlson is their intellectual guru, after all. And I think we know how this new “Church Committee” (as well as the “Laptop From Hell” committee and the “Lock Up Dr. Fauci” committee and all the rest) will actually unfold. These are not serious people dedicated to good-faith oversight. They’re a nihilistic carnival act run by folks who are desperate for attention. We’re in for a gruesome train wreck of a congressional session.

The problem with having insurrectionists within your own caucus is that they care nothing for the party, much less the country. They looked at the last three losing elections and now feel liberated to do their worst. All the anti-McCarthy members come from deep-red districts that voted for Trump by double digits. They have nothing personally to lose by acting out their darkest political fantasies. They didn’t come to Congress to do anything but wreck the place and if that means taking their own party down with it, they couldn’t care less.

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As CNN’s Ron Brownstein points out, Republicans consolidated their hold on red states in the last few elections. In 2022 they nailed down places like Florida, Texas, Iowa and Tennessee for the foreseeable future. But they also won 18 seats in districts that voted for Joe Biden, half of which are in New York and California, blue states which will see much higher turnout in a presidential-election year. They can’t afford to lose any of those, but this House circus is going to put every one of those members on the chopping block.

If the last three elections have shown anything, it’s that swing-state voters are decisively rejecting the far-right crusade that has so many people in red states spellbound. According to Brownstein, a new analysis of the midterms shows that “in the key House, Senate and gubernatorial races across the 15 states with the most competitive statewide contests involving candidates clearly identified with a Trump-style agenda, Democrats largely matched or even exceeded their 2020 margins — a remarkable showing during the first midterm election for the party holding the White House.”

It’s not hard to see why. In the last few years we’ve had one “historic” political crisis after another. Just since 2019 there have been two impeachments, a president refusing to honor election results, a violent insurrection and now, on the very first day of the new Congress, clear evidence that the most radical “Trump-style” officials in the GOP are pulling the strings and the larger majority in the party is helpless to stop them.

Let’s hope that all those swing-state voters who came out in 2018, 2020 and again in 2022 will now understand that this isn’t just about stopping Donald Trump, as worthy as that is. They need to make sure that Republicans are kept out of power until they demobilize this destructive faction and reinvent themselves as responsible, patriotic participants in the political process. They certainly aren’t there yet, and maybe it’s just a lost cause. 

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In journalist Mark Leibovich’s new book, “Thank You For Your Servitude,” Ryan claimed he felt “disturbed” by the events that day, CNN reported.

“I spent my whole adult life in that building,” Ryan told The Atlantic’s Leibovich. “And I saw my friends, a lot of cops, some of my old security detail – I’m still friends with a bunch of those guys. It really disturbed me, foundationally.”

RELATED: Revealed: Paul Ryan’s behind-the-scenes reaction to Donald Trump’s “unbelievable” election victory

The Wisconsin Republican also said that “something snapped in him” that day. 

“Ryan figured the president would b**ch and moan and maybe make a big show of ‘fighting’ for his supporters for a while,” as Leibovich explained in the book. “Everyone could feel good and victimized. But eventually Trump would just leave; hopefully, he would know to do this on his own. And everyone could then just get on with their lives.” 

Once viewed as a rising star in the GOP, Ryan spent roughly two decades in the Capitol serving as one of Wisconsin’s representatives in the U.S. House. During the 2012 presidential race, the former official campaigned as a running mate to then-presidential candidate Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, who lost the election to Barack Obama. Ryan was later Speaker of the House in 2015, retiring just four years later. 

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Since his retirement, Ryan has mostly stayed out of the political fray. However, that hasn’t stopped him from leveling critiques at Donald Trump and the GOP from the sidelines.

Last month, the former House speaker argued that congressional Republicans “didn’t have the guts” to impeach the former president in the aftermath of the insurrection. Trump later responded by calling Ryan a “pathetic loser.”

RELATED: Trump lashes out at Paul Ryan after he urged Republicans to move on

Ryan has also repeatedly cast doubt over the former president’s baseless claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election. 

“It was not rigged. It was not stolen. Donald Trump lost the election. Joe Biden won the election. It’s really clear,” Ryan told an ABC affiliate back in August. “

The House select committee is expected to hold two separate hearings this week as the investigation into Donald Trump’s incitement of the Capitol riot continues. The hearings are set to feature testimony from former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, who reportedly had an insider’s perspective into Trump’s failed plans to subvert the election. The hearings are also expected to feature testimony around various right wing groups’ schemes to take control of voting machines.

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1. Trump was angry with Paul Ryan for criticizing protestors in Charlottesville because “these are my people.”

According to “Peril,” as reported by HuffPost, the former president was not pleased when Ryan spoke out against white supremacy after the “Unite the Right” rally that took place in Charlottesville, Va., back in 2017.

At the time, Ryan described white supremacy as “repulsive” after Trump suggested there were good people on “both sides.” Ryan also insisted that Trump had “a moral leadership obligation to get this right and not declare there is a moral equivalency here.”

A furious Trump reportedly phoned Ryan and chastised him for not being “in the foxhole” with him.

“These people love me. These are my people,” Trump reportedly told Ryan. “I can’t backstab the people who support me.”

2. Trump’s claim that there were good people “on both sides” was fueled by “Unite the Right” rally goers’ overwhelming support of him.

At one point during his call with Ryan, he admitted that there were “some bad people,” but because of their support for him, many of them were also “good people.”

“I get that. I’m not for that. I’m against all that,” Trump reportedly said. “But there’s some of those people who are for me. Some of them are good people.”

3. General Mark Milley had defense officials take a secret oath when Trump became too unpredictable following the Capitol riots.

General Mark Milley had great concerns about Trump’s mental health following the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. In fact, he was so concerned about the president’s impulsiveness that he secretly had top defense officials take a private oath. They were to report to him first if Trump ordered them to launch nukes.

“No matter what you are told, you do the procedure. You do the process. And I’m part of that procedure,” Milley told the officers, according to the book. The top-ranking military advisor is also said said have “went around the room, looked each officer in the eye, and asked them to verbally confirm they understood.”

4. Trump threw tantrum when Pence refused to help him overturn the presidential election.

According to the book, Trump reached an unprecedented point of desperation when he wanted former Vice President Mike Pence to aide him in his effort to overturn the election. According to Vanity Fair, Woodard and Costa detailed one encounter where Trump whined and told Pence they wouldn’t be friends anymore if he didn’t participate.

After relentlessly pressuring Pence despite him having no real authority to do his bidding, Trump resorted to threats.

“You don’t understand, Mike,” Trump said. “You can do this. I don’t want to be your friend anymore if you don’t do this.”

“If you don’t do it, I picked the wrong man four years ago,” adding, “You’re going to wimp out.”

5. Trump believed Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) betrayed him.

Trump was enraged when McCarthy condemned January 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol. According to Trump, it was the ultimate betrayal. The book sheds light on Trump’s reaction to McCarthy’s words.

“This guy called me every single day, pretended to be my best friend, and then, he f****d me,” Mr Trump reportedly said of tthe top-ranking Republican lawmaker back in February. “He’s not a good guy.”

“Peril” Is set to be released on September 21.

The post “These are my people”: The 5 most shocking revelations from Woodward and Costa’s new Trump book appeared first on Salon.com.

Inspired by the Arab Spring a year before, a group of protesters started camping in Zucotti Park, which is near Wall Street and in the heart of Manhattan’s Financial District, with the message: Americans can no longer tolerate escalating wealth inequalities. It started off with a few hundred people, but spread rapidly across the country, touching the lives of countless Americans. It came down to the simple slogan: “We are the 99%!”

The motto, like the movement, represented Americans who work, day in and day out, but can’t seem to ever get ahead. Meanwhile, the 1% — people who make at least $422,000 a year by most recent estimates — are gobbling up an ever-bigger share of the pie. And the ultra-wealthy hoard even more. Recent estimates show that the top .1% of American families has more wealth than the bottom 90% combined. So a few rich people hoard all the cash while everyone else is forced to scrape by on increasingly mean resources. 

Occupy Wall Street may be gone, but these truths that it exposed cannot be unseen. 

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After decades of conservative propaganda pitting the middle class against the working poor, here was the harsh reality: The reason middle-class people struggle to pay for homes or college tuition is not “welfare queens,” but a billionaire class sucking up all the wealth. Republicans had spent decades slashing taxes for the rich and gutting spending on everyone else while triangulating Democrats stood by and let it happen — and in many cases, actively participated. This really was a rich vs. everyone else problem. 

In a lengthy piece for the Atlantic, journalist Michael Levitin makes a persuasive case that Occupy didn’t die, but was a seed that bloomed a thousand plants: The climate change strikes, the growth in the organized labor movement, and even the disorganized wage rebellion. It also framed a “populist economic message that thrust anti-corporate lawmakers such as Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez into the electoral spotlight.”

It also, I would argue, had a profound effect on the mainstream of both major political parties.

Occupy Wall Street didn’t just drag the Democrats to the left but also ruptured the traditional messaging and hierarchy of the Republican Party. It made the Democrats a better party, with a more coherent economic and social message that created a coalition between the working class and middle class. But it also destabilized the multi-decade libertarian politics of the GOP — driving out figures like former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan — and created an opportunity for white nationalists and other culture war authoritarians like Donald Trump to remake the party in their own image. 

Let’s start with the good news: Occupy’s impact on Democratic politics isn’t limited to the prominence of Warren, Sanders, and AOC. It moved the center of the party to the left, and far earlier than a lot of folks realize.

Barack Obama had mishandled the economic recovery of 2009 in many ways that had exacerbated the inequality problem. Within a month of Occupy, Obama was using the “we are the 99%” and he shaped his 2012 campaign around this economic message. (He also did better economically in his second term.) But the biggest piece of evidence for the shift is in the current president, Joe Biden. In the 90s, Biden was one of the worst Democrats in the Senate on the issues of class and economic inequality, earning him the moniker “Senator from MBNA.” He spent the decade fighting tirelessly to pass a bankruptcy bill that benefited banks but ruined the lives of countless ordinary Americans. He was held off for years through the efforts of then-Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren but eventually got it done during the George W. Bush administration. That Biden is currently unrecognizable to the modern Biden, who has been laser-focused on passing two massive jobs and infrastructure bills — one literally written by Sanders — which are meant to be funded by raising taxes on the 1%. His old buddies in the banking industry are now his enemies, spending lavishly on propaganda and disinformation campaigns to derail the bills. 

The shift isn’t just in Biden himself, but the whole party. Centrists like Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, as well as nine in the House, get an inordinate amount of media attention for their threats to derail Biden’s progressive economic agenda. But that shouldn’t distract from the remarkable fact that the vast majority of Democrats are fully on board with this expansive agenda that would do a great deal to shrink the wealth inequalities that plague us. That’s a huge shift from 2005 when Biden got 41% of Democratic senators to back his bankruptcy bill that severely hurt the middle class to benefit the banks. 

But what is just as remarkable is the shift that has happened in the GOP since the days of Occupy.

In the pre-Occupy days, things were simple for Republicans. The party was guided by the priorities of wealthy class warriors. The hoi polloi voters were brought along with deceitful arguments, leading them to believe their economic problems were due not to the rich taking all the money, but mythical “welfare queens” living high on the taxpayer dime. And the GOP base, who are motivated by racist and sexist bigotries, was ready to buy that myth. But by the 2012 election, the usual order of things was being threatened by this new, more truthful narrative about how the rich are screwing over everyone else.

Even before Occupy, Paul Ryan’s 2011 State of the Union rebuttal — where he called social spending a “hammock” that “lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency” — went over like a lead balloon. And when GOP nominee Mitt Romney was caught making a similar argument — claiming 47% of people are lazy government dependents instead of hard-working Americans — it was the nail in his 2012 campaign. This, even though Republican voters had swooned to similar rhetoric in the age of Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich. Nowadays, the majority of Republican voters believe the rich need to pay more in taxes. Even in red states, minimum wage hikes and the Medicaid expansion pass when they’re put up on ballot initiatives. 

What’s happened is that the GOP base has started to decouple their priorities — which are all about culture war, white supremacy, and sexism — from this libertarian economic agenda. This is ultimately why Donald Trump has such Svengali-like powers over the base. (It certainly isn’t his personal charisma, as much he’d like to think otherwise.) He gives the base what they want, which is red meat bigotry that is unfiltered through this bow tie Republican talk about “hammocks” and the “47%.” Plus, Trump promised to protect Social Security and Medicare, broad social programs the base loves and depends on. He was lying, of course — his only real legislative “achievement” in office was cutting taxes for the rich — but his mere existence has created a path forward for this wing of the party, which outnumbers the richer wing by a whole lot. 

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Of course, most Republican leadership is still in this for the money, and the racism is just an added bonus. And to keep the masses satisfied, they’ve been escalating the culture war antics at a dizzying pace, amping up the authoritarian conspiracy theories, gutting reproductive rights, and bringing back the racist politics of Jim Crow. It’s not that the leadership disagrees with the culture warriors on any of these issues, to be clear. But they’re putting a higher priority on them than they used to, so that they can keep up their agenda of cutting taxes and slashing social spending in peace. 

This shift of power is most evident in the politics of COVID-19. For extremely complicated but equally stupid reasons, the refusal to get vaccinated has become a sacrament of right-wing culture warriors, their way of showing their dedication to the cause of owning the liberals. In the past, this would not have flown with the GOP leadership, because the ongoing pandemic is a major threat to corporate profits. But even though Republicans have never been anti-vaccination before, all of a sudden they’ve discovered this suddenly incontrovertible “right” of right-wingers to infect whoever they wish with COVID-19. And only COVID-19. Republican support for all other vaccine mandates has not changed.

This is the first major test of what happens when culture war priorities conflict with the wealth accumulation priorities of the GOP, and, well, the culture warriors are winning. It doesn’t mean that the Republican Party is going to suddenly soften on their multiple decades of support for growing the piggy banks of the rich. But it does mean they are going to get even more baroque and hateful, as they keep trying to find some kind of culture war distractions to keep the base from abandoning them over their economic policies. 

Everything has tradeoffs, I suppose, and this is the bizarre one that we’ve faced in the decade since Occupy Wall Street: Democrats got way better, but somehow Republicans lost their goddamn minds.

That might not have been such a big deal in a better political system. The GOP is swiftly becoming a minority party, while the American population lurches left politically. In our political system, however, disproportionate representation and voter suppression gives Republicans a real shot at permanent minority rule, as long as they can keep their voters on the hook with horse paste and abortion bans. 

None of that is the fault of Occupy Wall Street, to be clear. They set out with one mission in mind: Wake people up to economic inequality and get folks to start taking action to change things. On that front, they succeeded. The Democrats have power and they are trying, most of them anyway, to pass bills that directly address the concerns Occupy raised. That’s a big shift in what was only a decade, especially with so many moneyed interests going against them. If America can survive the assault on democracy, we’re in a great position, politically, to really address the economic problems that have plagued us for decades. That, I’m sad to say, is a very big “if.”

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On Friday, May 28, Trump released a statement targeting Ryan, whom he refers to as a “RINO” — a Republican in Name Only. The former president lambasted Ryan, although the former speaker did not criticize Trump by name.

Trump also attempted to blame Ryan, who was a candidate for vice president, for the political party’s loss in 2012 as he insisted that he shouldn’t be the person to offer advice about the future of the party.

In the statement, Trump said, “Paul Ryan has been a curse to the Republican Party. He has no clue as to what needs to be done for our Country, was a weak and ineffective leader, and spends all of his time fighting Republicans as opposed to Democrats who are destroying our Country.”

Trump’s fiery remarks came less than a day after Ryan’s speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. During his speech, Ryan acknowledged the “crossroads” the party is facing.

“Once again, we conservatives find ourselves at a crossroads. And here’s one reality we have to face: If the conservative cause depends on the populist appeal of one personality, or on second-rate imitations, then we’re not going anywhere,” Ryan said on Thursday, May 28.

Though the speech was interpreted as a criticism of the GOP’s direction under Trump, it did not attack the former president by name. In, fact, when he did name Trump, it was to praise him: “To his credit, Donald Trump brought many new voters into our party.”

Ryan was, however, critical of Trump’s allies in Congress and elsewhere, saying people “will not be impressed by the sight of yes-men and flatterers flocking to Mar-a-Lago.” And he did say: “It was horrifying to see a presidency come to such a dishonorable and disgraceful end.”

Of course, the former House speaker also criticized President Biden.

“In 2020, the country wanted a nice guy who would move to the center and depolarize our politics,” Ryan said. “Instead, we got a nice guy pursuing an agenda more leftist than any president in my lifetime.”

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In the letter, posted in Politico Magazine, Sykes explains that something must be done to stop the racism and lies being spewed under the name of the conservative network.

“Unlike most of the rest of us, you are in a position to do something about it. And if you ever hope to have influence on the direction of either the network or the conservative movement, this is the moment to speak up,” wrote Sykes. He assumed Paul’s influence based on the board position but also that even former President Donald Trump tweeted about Ryan’s power at the network.

“Honestly, I don’t know if you have made an attempt to steer Fox News at all,” Sykes confessed. “Maybe you think your responsibility is merely to the corporate bottom-line. But if you have ever thought of having any influence, the recent drift of Fox News deeper into the dark waters of raw racism and disinformation, makes this question especially urgent: if not now, when?”

It’s clear that Ryan knows what Fox News host Tucker Carlson has said. Presumably, Ryan has also heard about Carlson’s impact on vaccine skepticism, which appears to have been brought about by an inability to google some of his “bad-faith questions,” according to John Oliver.

Sykes noted that Carlson has defended QAnon conspiracy theories, he’s attacked members of congress for having immigrant backgrounds and then “embraced the so-called replacement theory.”

“This is not a partisan talking point; we may now end up counting the consequences in lost human lives,” Sykes closed. “And all the while, you have stayed silent. After your interview with Cheney, CNN’s Oliver Darcy pointedly asked when you will ‘speak out about the rhetoric” that you are “quite literally profiting off of?’ Why not now? What brighter red lines could possibly be crossed? If this isn’t the moment to draw your own line, what would be? If you want to make a difference, isn’t this the moment? If you want to change your legacy, isn’t this the time?”

Read the full column at Politico.

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“We can’t whitewash what happened on January 6 or perpetuate Trump’s big lie,” the Wyoming Republican and the No. 3 House GOP leader, said Monday at the annual retreat for the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “It is a threat to democracy. What he did on January 6 is a line that cannot be crossed.”

The 2020 presidential election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.

— Liz Cheney (@Liz_Cheney) May 3, 2021

One of just 10 House Republicans to vote to impeach Trump in January, Cheney hasn’t let up on her continued criticism of his campaign to undermine the last election. It’s made her an apparent target of the leader of Republicans in the House, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California. McCarthy said in a “Fox & Friends” interview on Tuesday that Cheney’s colleagues in the House have “no concern about how she voted on impeachment,” but fret about “her ability to carry out the job as conference chair, to carry out the message. 

"I have heard from members concerned about her ability to carry out the job as conference chair, to carry out the message" — Kevin McCarthy indicates on Fox & Friends that Liz Cheney is likely toast as House Republican Conference Chair pic.twitter.com/afP2D971Zq

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 4, 2021

McCarthy was caught on a hot mic telling “Fox & Friends” co-host Steve Doocey that “I think she’s got real problems.”

“I’ve had it with her,” McCarthy went on about Cheney. “You know, I’ve lost confidence.”

As another House Republican, Rep. Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio, better summed up the situation, “If a prerequisite for leading our conference is continuing to lie to our voters, then Liz is not the best fit.” Cheney’s betting on surviving this battle, even if she loses her leadership seat in the House, as Salon’s Heather Digby Parton recently explained: 

This week Cheney herself refused to rule out a 2024 presidential bid, and it’s obvious her strategy is to run on her new reputation as the tough conservative woman who stood up to Donald Trump. It’s not a bad plan. Cheney understands politics and realizes that her only hope for the presidency is to be the anti-Trump, in the hopes that his star fades or he decides not to run and she can emerge as the GOP standard-bearer who might be able to lure back some of those suburban women and college-educated white men who had been staunch Republicans until the Trump circus came to town. 

The problem with this bet, however, is that there are no signs the GOP has any intention of abandoning Trump, or — more importantly — abandoning their anti-democratic tendencies. 

Cheney’s father rode into office with George W. Bush after losing the popular vote. The next Republican in the White House to follow, Trump, also lost the popular vote. Neither showed humility about it and the Republicans proudly marched forward relentlessly pursuing their agendas. Biden won the most votes in history and beat Trump by seven million votes despite Republican efforts to disenfranchise and confuse voters. Still, Republicans have the nerve to cry foul and complain. By contrast, we know for a fact that Trump was calling officials in Georgia (and likely every other red state) demanding that they “find” him more votes. We literally have Trump on tape trying to commit election fraud. Lot of good it did. He’s still planning on running in 2024. And as of right now, nothing is stopping him.

Liz Cheney’s latest comments came in an off-the-record interview with former House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis. Ryan, you’ll recall, now sits on the board of Fox News, where one executive told Vanity Fair in 2019, “Paul is embarrassed about Trump and now he has the power to do something about it.”

Paul Ryan may have the power to do something about it, but unlike Cheney (who at least voted to impeach Trump) he hasn’t. Instead, he’s been cashing in at the right-wing network and watched as Tucker Carlson has risen to the top spot by spewing barely diluted white nationalism. Ryan wouldn’t even say anything after Trump celebrated Mitt Romney, the man Ryan ran on a presidential ticket with a few short years back, being booed by his hometown crowd. The media-supported myth that Ryan was a serious, responsible lawmaker propped up this malevolent character for far too long. 

This is the incentive problem in the so-called conservative movement that no one seems to want to grapple with. A similar, but not identical, incentive structure led the Washington Post to host Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley for a livestream on Tuesday, where the Republican defended raising his fist in solidarity with a mob that would eventually rush the Capitol armed with weapons and in search of his colleagues. He went on to complain that he was being canceled when a Post reporter merely attempted to correct the record about his continued mischaracterization of the election in Pennsylvania, a state that was specifically targeted with misinformation by the Trump campaign. It’s why CNN’s Don Lemon hosted Pennsylvania’s former Republican senator, Rick Santorum, after the conservative pundit baselessly asserted that Native American culture is not American culture.  

Trump told conservatives that “I am your voice” in his Republican National Convention speech in 2016. He wasn’t wrong. Trump’s brand of fascist politics is merely a symptom of American conservatism. Anyone in Republican leadership could have put their foot down and said something and even done something about anything the Trump administration did. Instead, they enabled it and now want the positive press.

The post Paul Ryan can’t save the GOP — he is still a huge part of the problem appeared first on Salon.com.

He shouldn’t be surprised by any of this, however.

The GOP’s intensifying radicalization has been building for a very long time and McConnell and the rest of the establishment adopted a “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” stance because they benefited from the energy, dedication and money they received from the ever more crazy Republican grassroots. The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent observed that this actually goes all the way back to the early post-WWII years, drawing on the work of political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld’s authors of “The Long New Right,” who say that the right’s addiction to the “politics of conflict” has always made any wall between the extremists and establishment fairly porous. Sargent points to the back and forth between the mainstream and the John Birch Society in the 1960s, flirtations with the Ku Klux Klan and “Newt Gingrich’s conversion of GOP politics into nationalized scorched earth warfare,” the latter of which was the first step to openly marrying extremist rhetoric and tactics to the party itself.

Norm Ornstein, who has written a number of books on the radicalization of the modern GOP noted recently that it was Gingrich who turned the Republican Party into a cult, saying Gingrich “very deliberately generated tribalism” creating a “situation where people could view Democrats as evil, trying to destroy their way of life.” Of course, it wasn’t just Gingrich. He came to prominence at the same time that talk radio became a toxic hatefest creating star propagandists like Rush Limbaugh. Roger Ailes then joined up with Rupert Murdoch to create a TV and print empire to similarly stoke the partisan acrimony. The Clinton years were a dumpster fire of partisan rancor.

The GOP establishment was fine with that, of course. By the time the Bush administration came along, their base was well primed and the media infrastructure solid. The Republican leaders of the Bush-era may not have been as bombastic as Gingrich or Trump but they played a major part in radicalizing the Republican party as well. If you want to talk about Big Lies, look no further than “Saddam had WMDs” and “Saddam was involved in 9/11” for a couple of propaganda success stories. Years later, former Vice President Dick Cheney unsuccessfully tried to wriggle out of it, but of course, it had already gotten the job done and they had moved on to their favorite enemy: Democrats.

After Barack Obama took office in the midst of an economic catastrophe, the big money funders were on hand to help and the Tea Party was born. They ratcheted up partisan hysteria over President Obama’s health care proposal, giving their activist base something tangible to do by instructing them to storm town hall meetings and disrupt the proceedings. They were even known to hang and tar and feather lawmakers in effigy, even converging on the Capitol to get in the faces of a group of Democratic congressmen, screaming the “n” word, spitting at them and taunting an openly gay representative.

The GOP establishment said not a word and they won the 2010 midterms that year in a landslide. Imagine that.

Among their new members was a group of far-right extremists who formed themselves into the Tea Party-aligned House Freedom Caucus, who believed in using the same confrontational tactics with legislation as the Tea Party activists. There was no longer any such thing as compromise or negotiation. It was “my way or the highway” with the Democrats and if the Republican leadership didn’t like it, well, that was too bad.

By 2014, they were gleefully devouring their own. In a shot heard round the beltway, a Tea Party candidate backed by right-wing radio took on the House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., in a primary, and beat him. Cantor’s sin? He had strayed from the orthodoxy very slightly on immigration, which was bubbling up (again) on the right as a central issue. Soon, Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-OH, was forced out as well, replaced by Wisconsin dreamboat Paul Ryan. By the time Donald Trump came along in 2015, Ryan too was already in their crosshairs.

Trump watched all of this and in his instinctual, feral way, understood exactly what the Republican party base had become. He didn’t create the cult. It already existed. He just took it over.

For the past 30 years, the Republican establishment has either guided or accepted every step of their party’s descent into extremism. And no one has been more willing to make that deal with the devil than Mitch McConnell. In fact, he made one of the greatest contributions to the radicalism of the GOP by exploding one Senate norm after another and turning the filibuster into a partisan weapon.

Now he’s facing a big problem.

January 6th laid bare just how fanatical and downright seditious the Republican base has become. He’s lost his majority and has several vulnerable members up for re-election in 2022. They are going to have a hard time winning statewide if 25% of their voters reject the Republican party because it’s turned the asylum over to the inmates. He’s greatly worried about corporate America’s revulsion at his party’s behavior and their unwillingness to finance it going forward. Seeing a so-called moderate senator from Ohio, Rob Portman, cutting and running has to hurt.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, on the other hand, is caught between a deep desire to please Donald Trump and a competing desire to please his corporate donors. He’s handling his dilemma even less gracefully than McConnell. It’s anyone’s guess what will happen in the fight between Liz Cheney of Wyoming and the faction backing the Trump worshiping conspiracy monger from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene, but the mere fact that such a battle is even happening is testament to the fact that McCarthy has no control over his caucus. I’m sure John Boehner is chuckling mordantly at the thought of his former Freedom Caucus nemesis’ little dilemma as he sips his glass of Merlot on the back nine.

McCarthy also has to be thinking about what happened to Eric Cantor just six years ago. At one time the two of them, along with Paul Ryan, were feted in the GOP as the so-called Young Guns, the new generation of GOP leadership. But the rabble rousing Tea Party candidate who took Cantor’s seat was ousted by a Democrat, Abigail Spanberger, in 2018 and she held on to it in 2020, against all odds. McCarthy is now getting some blowback from Trump voters in his conservative district for failing to show undying fealty to the former president. It’s unlikely his district would go Democratic — but in California’s jungle primaries you just never know what might happen.

The radical chickens have come home to roost and they have taken over the place. The Republican establishment turned a blind eye to right-wing extremism for decades and now it’s come to define the Republican Party. They have no one to blame but themselves.

The post Why Republicans can’t dump Trump: The future of the GOP looks as bleak as its past appeared first on Salon.com.

Trump said federal entitlement programs would be the “easiest” to cut in a new interview with CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Wednesday.

The president told host Joe Kernen that “at some point” his administration will take up entitlements.

“At the right time, we will take a look at that,” he said. “You know, that’s actually the easiest of all things, because it’s such a big percentage.”

Kernen specifically asked Trump if he was willing to cut the programs, which “you said you wouldn’t do in the past in terms of Medicare.”

“We also have — assets that we’ve never had. I mean, we’ve never had growth like this. We never had a consumer that was taking in, through — different means, over $10,000 a family,” Trump said, repeating a debunked claim that his tax cuts resulted in a $10,000 median family income increase. “We never had the kind of things that we have.”

CNBC: Will entitlements ever be on your plate [for cutting]?

TRUMP: "At some point they will be"

CNBC: But you said you wouldn't do that in the past

TRUMP: "We also have assets that we never had" https://t.co/FgZnzYz33l

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 22, 2020

While Trump did not go into specifics, the comments are a sharp break from his 2015 campaign announcement in which he vowed to “save” all three entitlement programs without any cuts.

“Get rid of the fraud,” he said. “Get rid of the waste and abuse, but save it.”

The president later drew a contrast between himself and other Republican candidates in the 2016 primary race, vowing on his favorite social media platform to “bring in the funds so as not to cut Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid.”

But despite Trump’s campaign rhetoric, his administration has repeatedly proposed cutting all three programs. Trump’s most recent budget proposal called for cutting $1.9 trillion on safety-net programs like Medicare and Medicaid, and a $26 billion cut to Social Security programs, the federal retirement program and the Social Security Disability Insurance program.

Republicans have been talking about cutting entitlement spending for years, and the talks intensified after Congress passed the 2017 tax cuts, which helped the deficit soar to more than $1 trillion. But Republicans failed to cut Medicaid spending when they failed to repeal Obamacare and former House Speaker Paul Ryan was similarly unsuccessful in his effort to privatize Medicare and Social Security.

Trump’s comments drew a sharp contrast with Democrats running for president. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who has clashed with Joe Biden over the former vice president’s past calls to overhaul Social Security, vowed to expand the programs rather than cut them.

“Over and over, Donald Trump promised Americans that he would not cut Social Security and Medicare. He lied,” Sanders wrote on Twitter. “When we win, we’re not going to just protect Social Security and Medicare, we’re going to expand them.”

Biden, who has vehemently defended his record on Social Security, also promised to expand benefits rather than scale them back. 

“My administration will not cut Social Security or Medicare benefits. Period. We’ll expand them,” he said. “Meanwhile, Donald Trump is saying he would consider sacrificing seniors’ benefits to protect tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and big companies.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., also slammed Trump for “attacking every lifeline we have for struggling families” and vowed to fight to expand the programs.

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich suggested that cutting the programs was the Republican plan all along.

“This has been the GOP’s game plan from the start: 1) Cut taxes on the wealthy and corporations, claiming they’ll pay for themselves. 2) Explode the deficit. 3) Call for cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. 4) Repeat,” he tweeted, referring to past Republican attempts to gut entitlement spending to pay for tax cuts for the rich.

The White House denied to The Washington Post that Trump was pushing “benefit cuts,” insisting that he was instead “keeping his commitment to the most vulnerable Americans especially those who depend on Medicare and Social Security.”

But top White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow previously told CNBC that the administration was determined to cut federal spending and “part of the Republican plan to curb spending is tackling entitlements.”

The biggest critic of such a plan would no doubt be 2015 candidate Trump, who lambasted Republicans for plotting to reduce benefits.

“I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican, and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid,” Trump told The Daily Signal in 2015. “Every other Republican’s going to cut. And even if they wouldn’t, they don’t know what to do because they don’t know where the money is. I do. I do.”

The post Trump will “look at” slashing entitlement spending despite years of promises to do the opposite appeared first on Salon.com.

On Jan. 21, 2010, then-Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy cast the deciding vote in the Citizens United case, which was brought by a group chaired by David Bossie, who would later serve as Trump’s deputy campaign manager.

Kennedy wrote in the majority decision that limits on independent expenditures violated the First Amendment rights of corporations and other groups, effectively overturning spending restrictions dating back more than a century.

The decision allowed corporations to spend unlimited money on campaign ads as long as they did not formally coordinate with candidates or political parties. According to Kennedy, there could not be corruption, because “an independent expenditure is political speech presented to the electorate that is not coordinated with a candidate.”

Some have argued that the ruling was the “logical next step” after the court’s 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, which said election spending limits may violate the First Amendment. But the Supreme Court ruled in favor of corporate limits in 1990 and then upheld limits on corporate and union spending in 2003.

The Citizens United ruling was later compounded by Republican efforts to block transparency rules, Federal Election Commission rulings and further court decisions like McCutcheon v. FEC, paving the way for the creation of super PACs, or committees which can spend unlimited sums of money to promote or oppose candidates while hiding the identities of their donors.

The impact of the Citizens United ruling and subsequent campaign finance changes are undeniable. In 2010, the biggest Republican donor of the election cycle spent $7.6 million to support conservative candidates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CPR). Just eight years later, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, donated $122 million to support GOP candidates, or more than 15 times as much.

Democrats pumped big money into elections, too. Presidential contender Mike Bloomberg spent $95 million during the last election cycle, while fellow billionaire candidate Tom Steyer spent more than $73 million, according to CPR data.

There was certainly loads of money pumped into elections prior to Citizens United. The 2008 presidential election, which was the last national contest before the Supreme Court decision, saw about $338 million in outside spending. But the amount of outside cash injected into the presidential race skyrocketed to more than $1 billion in 2012 and $1.4 billion in 2016.

Such massive expenditures are not limited to presidential races. The 2018 midterm election cycle was the first in history to see more than $1 billion in outside spending — up from $69 million just four cycles earlier and $567 million in 2014, according to the CPR.

Super PACs quickly became the biggest outside spenders. In 2018, the House Republican-linked Congressional Leadership Fund spent $136 million, the Senate Democratic-aligned Senate Majority PAC spent $112 million and the Mitch McConnell-connected Senate Leadership Fund spent $94 million, according to the CPR.

Though both parties have raised and spent hundreds of millions in outside money — and the Citizens United ruling has been criticized by both former President Barack Obama and Trump — researchers at the University of Chicago, Columbia University and the London School of Economics and Political Science found that the rise of dark money has resulted in a huge advantage for Republicans in state legislature races, particularly in “states with weak unions.”

“We find that Citizens United increased the GOP’s average seat share in the state legislature by five percentage points. That is a large effect — large enough that, were it applied to the past twelve Congresses, partisan control of the House would have switched eight times,” the researchers wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. “In line with a previous study, we also find that the vote share of Republican candidates increased three to four points on average.”

The result has been a shift much further to the right in numerous state legislatures and an increase in “ideological extremism,” which was more prevalent among Democrats, according to the study.

In the 2010 election, the first to see a massive upswing in outside money, Republicans captured two dozen state legislative chambers ahead of a game-changing nationwide gerrymandering effort, which made it harder than ever for Democrats to win back the seats they lost.

“Without Citizens United every frontline Congressional race of the last two cycles are TOTALLY different,” Fordham Law Professor Zephyr Teachout tweeted. “A billion in outside spending in 2018. And that is just a tiny fraction of the impact.”

Despite Kennedy’s insistence that there could be no corruption because candidates cannot coordinate with super PACs, the ruling has also led to corruption as candidates flout rules preventing them from coordinating with the PACs.

“The supposed barrier between candidates and unrestricted super PACs is flimsier than ever,” Roll Call reported just four years after the ruling. “As midterm elections approach, complaints are rolling into the FEC from both parties about super PACs that share vendors, fund-raisers and video footage with the politicians they support.”

GOP leaders like Paul Ryan devised ways to solicit money directly from billionaires like Adelson by using go-betweens. The New York Times reported in 2015 that Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina had “aggressively” exploited loopholes to allow a super PAC to effectively run her campaign.

And the corruption is not merely limited to exploiting loopholes in the law. Obama warned in a State of the Union speech that the Citizens United ruling could lead to foreign interference in U.S. elections. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito could be seen mouthing the words, “Not true.”

But Obama’s foreshadowing turned out to be remarkably true. Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, the two associates of Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, were recently indicted on charges that they illegally funneled foreign money to Republican politicians, including a $325,000 contribution to a pro-Trump super PAC.

George Nader, an adviser to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates who was linked to efforts to aid Trump’s campaign during the election, was also indicted for allegedly funneling $3.5 million into elections, including a $1 million contribution to a Democratic super PAC.

In 2012, a foreign-owned company made a $1 million contribution to a pro-Mitt Romney super PAC.

Democratic presidential candidates, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., have premised their campaigns on driving big money out of politics. Sanders has long called for a constitutional amendment to repeal Citizens United, which was echoed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and others at the party’s December primary debate.

But it may be nearly impossible to meet the high threshold to ratify a constitutional amendment. There has only been one amendment ratified since 1971. While House Democrats voted to approve H.R. 1, which called for the ruling to be repealed, there appears to be little to no support for the legislation from Republicans in the upper chamber.

Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union have decried these efforts as attempts to “ban political speech.”

“In our view, the answer to that problem is to expand — not limit — the resources available for political advocacy. Thus, the ACLU supports a comprehensive and meaningful system of public financing that would help create a level playing field for every qualified candidate,” the organization said. “We support carefully drawn disclosure rules, we support reasonable limits on campaign contributions and we support stricter enforcement of existing bans on coordination between candidates and super PACs.”

Some local governments have tried to counter the rise of dark money with public financing. Seattle’s “democracy vouchers” give voters $100, which they can donate to any campaign in a local election. Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang has proposed a similar “Democracy Dollars” program, which would expand this initiative across the country.

But while cities, states and federal lawmakers grapple with the rise of dark money in politics, one thing that is clear is that Citizens United irrevocably changed politics over the course of the last decade — and beyond.

Kennedy himself admitted in 2015 that the disclosure requirement he believed would fix any potential issues of corruption was “not working the way it should.” FEC Commissioner Ann Ravel quit in 2017 over the state of campaign finance, writing in her resignation letter that “our political campaigns have been awash in unlimited, dark money” since the Citizens United decision.

“Most of the funding comes from a tiny, highly unrepresentative segment of the population,” she wrote. “Disclosure laws need to be strengthened, the broken jurisprudence of Citizens United re-examined, public financing of candidates ought to be expanded to reduce reliance on the wealthy and commissioners who will carry out the mandates of the law should be appointed.”

A Brennan Center report pointed out that a small wealthy group of Americans now wields “more power than at any time since Watergate, while many of the rest seem to be disengaging from politics.”

“This is perhaps the most troubling result of Citizens United: in a time of historic wealth inequality,” report author Daniel Weiner wrote, “the decision has helped reinforce the growing sense that our democracy primarily serves the interests of the wealthy few and that democratic participation for the vast majority of citizens is of relatively little value.”

The post The Citizens United ruling broke American democracy at the start of the decade. It never recovered appeared first on Salon.com.

Trump became the third U.S. president to be impeached under the Constitution, and the “Morning Joe” host was sickened by the defenses GOP lawmakers threw up for him during Wednesday’s debate.

“The infection is so widespread,” Scarborough said. “You know, we stopped being shocked by what Donald Trump did a long time ago, and then I started being shocked by how far the Republicans would go in defense of Donald Trump, and it has picked up every year, yesterday I saw marching into the House well to spout out nonsensical Trump talking points.”

“Conspiracy theories spouted out about all of this starting in Ukraine, that Ukraine invaded Georgia, that that this was was all a Ukrainian operation and Russians didn’t have that much — no, there is no moral equivalency between the facts that were presented by both sides,” Scarborough added.

The former GOP lawmaker was ashamed for some of his old colleagues who capered on the House floor to please the president.

“I actually saw members of Congress that I worked with years ago who were quiet, they weren’t back benchers, they were quiet, committee chair people, chairwomen, who went about their job and maintained their dignity staying focused like Paul Ryan always said, he was going to stay focused on the issues,” Scarborough said, “and yesterday even they were marching into the well talking like (Sen.) John Kennedy at a Trump rally. It was so distressing, they know better.”

“They should have just remained silent to history and, yet, they couldn’t do it,” he added, “because they felt the pressure as well to besmirch their honor, to compromise their reputation in the defense of this failed reality TV host.”

The post Scarborough: Republicans have compromised their reputation in defense of a “failed reality TV host” appeared first on Salon.com.

“If the Republican Party doesn’t start looking like the rest of the country, there won’t be a Republican Party in this country,” Hurd said in an interview with Axios that aired Sunday on HBO. “But we know where the trends are going, and we know what we need to do.”

“Minorities, people under the age of 29 and women with a college degree in the suburbs are not choosing the Republican Party,” he added.

“If the Republican Party doesn’t start looking like the rest of the country, there won’t be a Republican Party in this country.” — @HurdOnTheHill, the only African American Republican in the House, to @alexi. pic.twitter.com/HGmYM7BHD5

— Axios (@axios) November 3, 2019

The three-term congressman announced his retirement from Congress earlier this year. He said at the time that he would remain “involved in politics to help make sure the Republican Party looks like America.”

Hurd noted that he was an example of how to be a successful minority candidate in the Republican Party by “showing how to win one of — if not the — most competitive seats, in the United States of America.”

He pointed out that the congressional district he represents, which stretches for hundreds of miles along U.S.-Mexico border between San Antonio and El Paso, is predominantly Latino. The lawmaker, who previously served as an undercover CIA officer in the Middle East and South Asia, has represented the area since he defeated incumbent Democrat Pete Gallego by 2,400 votes in 2014.

Hurd has been re-elected twice, also by razor-thin margins. He toppled Gallego by 3,000 votes in a 2016 re-match before going on to best Iraq War veteran Gina Ortiz Jones by less than 1,000 votes last year, becoming one of the few House Republicans in districts that Hillary Clinton won in 2016 to survive the blue wave during the 2018 midterm election cycle. The seat in the 23rd District has flipped between Republicans and Democrats five times since the 1990s, according to the New York Times. (Ortiz-Jones has already filed to run again in 2020.)

In 2017, Hurd was appointed by former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, R-Wis., to serve on the lower chamber’s Intelligence Committee. He was also selected that year to serve on the Appropriations Committee by then-House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.

The Texas Republican has often distanced himself from President Donald Trump. He has criticized the president’s immigration proposals, including the construction of a “wall” along the U.S.-Mexico border and supported legislation to save the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), an Obama-era program which placed undocumented youth who were brought to the country as children on a pathway to U.S. citizenship.

Hurd is one of several Texas GOP lawmakers who have announced they will not seek re-election next year. His exit from Congress has disappointed Republicans and energized Democrats, who picked up 40 seats in the lower chamber last fall by going after Republican-held seats in areas where Trump has been unpopular.

In his interview with Axios, Hurd reiterated his belief that his exit from Congress will allow him to help the party in a different way, while noting Texas is nearing battleground status heading into the 2020 elections.

“Texas is a purple state. Just because we don’t have a statewide elected Democrat doesn’t mean Texas is not already purple,” Hurd said. “We should be operating as if it is purple.”

The post “There won’t be a Republican Party” if GOP does not diversify, outgoing Rep. Will Hurd says appeared first on Salon.com.

While Rand’s modern-day fans are quick to argue that Rand didn’t endorse the murder, it’s safe to say she thought highly of Hickman himself and sneered at the people who denounced him, writing that they exhibited “the mob’s murderous desire to revenge its hurt vanity against a man who dared to be alone.” This champion of individualism said that Hickman’s “degeneracy” showed “how society can wreck an exceptional being.” She got to work sketching a protagonist based on Hickman, one with a “wonderful, free, light consciousness” resulting from “the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling” and having “no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people.”

Rand eventually scrapped the idea for “Little Street,” but most historians argue that she reworked her idea of the individualistic, contemptuous hero into her later novels, “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged.” These two books, and Rand’s writings on her selfishness-oriented philosophy she deemed “Objectivism,” have become the backbone of modern conservatism, a pseudo-intellectual rationalization — beloved by Republicans such as former House Speaker Paul Ryan or Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky — for a reactionary movement that rose up to reject the feminist and antiracist movements of the 20th century.

In her purple prose, Rand romanticized the capitalist predator as a handsome, virile man whose towering intellect justifies his massive ego and disregard for the common masses. It’s why conservatives, angry about the election of Barack Obama, started publicly identifying with John Galt, who is the great-man-among-parasites hero of “Atlas Shrugged.”

The question that haunts that novel is, “Who is John Galt?” Now we finally have the answer: Donald Trump.

It turns out a philosophy of radical selfishness is not sexy or heroic, but comes in the form of a half-literate narcissist, cheered on by a bunch of sweatpants-clad fascists as he commits crimes in service of conspiracy theories he hopes will trick the ignorant masses into electing him again.

“In the abstract, Rand would have said that her ideal man upholds reason and capitalism. Based on how this plays out in her books, her ideal man is rich, sexually aggressive, sociopathically unconcerned with what others think of him,” author Adam Lee, who spent years blogging his close reading of “Atlas Shrugged,” told Salon.

“The real message Rand’s works convey is that her protagonists are exempt from the puny standards of law and morality that the common people try to tie them down with,” Lee added, noting that the heroes of Rand’s books commit rape, mock the people who will die in their shoddily built housing and threaten violence to punish wives who disapprove of their adultery.

Trump’s time in politics has been a true test of Rand’s theory, which has been embraced by modern Republicans, that this kind of sociopathic selfishness is what compels men to greatness of the sorts that we ordinary people, with our plebeian concerns about moral duty to others and the common good, cannot understand. After all, one thing that is certain about Trump is that, like a true Randian hero, he acts only for himself and to satisfy his own ego, and has no concern for others outside of how they serve his interests.

The results, it’s safe to say, are underwhelming. Trump’s Randian philosophy of pure self-interest is, of course, why he felt it wise to abandon the traditional point of international diplomacy, which is to advance national interests, in favor of viewing other nations merely as resources to be exploited for his own personal and political gain. That’s how he ended up on the phone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, extorting the man to pony up manufactured conspiracy theories about a Democratic presidential candidate in exchange for military aid.

The fallout has, needless to say, been a little less John Galt and a little more Richard Nixon ranting pathetically about his enemies. Trump’s blatant lies and grasping excuses for his behavior don’t cause the heart to soar so much as the eyes to avert in embarrassment. As the outlines of Trump’s conspiracy, with the clownish Rudy Giuliani at its center, come into view, the picture is less that of triumphant individualists sticking it to the small-brained masses than of a bunch of idiots who have vastly overrated their own abilities to pull off pointless crimes.

Nor has Trump’s Randian attitude towards his henchmen, in which he shows them no weak-minded loyalty or gratitude for their service, worked out quite as well for him as it’s supposed to. Trump’s firing national security adviser John Bolton, himself no paragon of social virtue, was the move of a classic Randian hero. Bolton, after all, had the temerity to question the great man’s judgment regarding matters like the Ukraine extortion, and had to be dispatched with contempt. But now reports that paint Bolton favorably (in itself a remarkable accomplishment) and make Trump look like a blithering idiot are worming their way into the news, suggesting that Trump’s unwillingness to keep the good opinion of his henchmen is coming back around to bite him.

Conservatives like Paul Ryan may wrinkle their noses at Trump’s uncouth demeanor and petty behavior, but this is what they signed up for in exalting Ayn Rand as some great philosopher. Despite the high-minded rhetoric, the lived reality of selfishness as a philosophy is less like the fictional figures of Howard Roark and John Galt, and more like the incoherent, small-minded sociopathy of Donald Trump. The great man of the Objectivist imagination has always been a silly fantasy. But it’s particularly rich and satisfying that now that the Ayn Rand fanboys finally have a leader who lives out their supposed ideals, the result is the comic, pathetic and catastrophic figure now disgracing the White House.

The post Right-wingers finally got their Ayn Rand hero as president — and it’s this guy appeared first on Salon.com.

Waiting for a Republican savior to heroically upend Trump’s presidency — whether that would be Robert Mueller or the anonymous New York Times op-ed author from inside the Trump White House — hasn’t yet worked out for the president’s critics. But retiring Republicans have often offered symbolic, if ultimately meaningless, criticism of the president.

Former Republican lawmakers like Sens. Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, or onetime House Speaker Paul Ryan, voted in virtual lockstep with Trump’s agenda when they held office. But after announcing their decisions to retire ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, they spoke out in far more critical terms. As the list of Republican retirements grows heading into the 2020 election, Republicans are once again theatrically upset at Trump.

But it’s not the constitutional crisis the nation is so obviously facing that has caused some Republicans to publicly split with Trump this week. Silence or deflection, the typical response of congressional Republicans in the Trump era, is how much of the GOP has dealt with the growing Ukraine scandal. But Trump’s plan to withdraw U.S. troops from some parts of Syria, thereby abandoning a pledge to protect the Kurds, an ethnic minority and military ally, has drawn an unusual degree of  intra-party rebuke. 

Calling Trump’s decision “terrible and despicable,”  retiring Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill., said he no longer backs Trump as a result. 

“In fact I called my chief of staff in D.C., I said, ‘Pull my name off the I support Donald Trump list.’ We have just stabbed our allies in the back. The Kurds go back all the way to the first Gulf War,” Shimkus said in a Thursday radio interview. Later, he clarified this on Twitter, backing down a bit: “While my votes will continue to support the president’s domestic policy agenda, because of this terrible foreign policy decision I asked that my name be removed from his campaign’s official list of supporters.”

Yes, yet another retiring Republican has furrowed his brow while continuing to vote in lockstep with Trump. Notably, several non-retiring Republicans have suddenly also found the space to criticize Trump. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, another Illinois Republican, called Trump’s troop withdrawal “shortsighted” and “wrong.” Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida tweeted that Trump’s decision will have long-term negative consequences: The “damage to our reputation & national interest will be extraordinary and long-lasting.” Even Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, a hardcore Trump loyalist on everything else, called it “impossible to understand.”

For a party with few consensus principles in the Trump era, establishment Republicans still remain committed to one highly dubious foreign-policy principle: a heavy U.S. military presence in the Middle East. Abandoning the Kurds in Syria, only to see the Turks already launch a military offense hours later, may have actually damaged to Trump where it matters: with congressional Republicans. This time, the criticism goes well beyond the soon-to-be retirees. 

“I think he’s putting the nation at risk,” top Trump surrogate Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said this week. “I think he’s putting his Presidency at risk.” Graham is running for re-election next year in a state Trump won by nearly 15 percentage points.

As Trump becomes ever more mired in scandal, the portion of Republican voters who support impeachment proceedings — still a minority — is bound to grow. Senate Republicans will remain obstinate on impeachment so long as 85% of rank-and-file Republicans support Trump, but this week’s erratic messaging around the Syrian withdrawal adds to the sense that Republicans are in disarray. 

Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who announced his retirement earlier this year, said of the Ukraine scandal: “It’s inappropriate for the president to be talking with foreign governments about investigating his political opponents.”

A man as concerned by displays of loyalty as Trump will undoubtedly lash out at such lack of support. Republicans who still hope to run for office sometime in the future fear that most. That’s why Republican senators up for re-election in swing states, like Colorado’s Cory Gardner — who said he did not vote for Trump in 2016 —are literally running scared from questions about Ukraine. 

“Do I wish President Trump hadn’t raised the issue with the Ukrainian president?” Yes,” admitted Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, also up for re-election next year, in a fundraising email this week. 

The pressure from retiring Republicans free to speak their criticism may make a difference once the primary filing deadlines pass. We may finally start to see some GOP senators start to flip on Trump more forcefully, particularly among the 22 up for re-election next year. 

As a coequal branch of government, Congress still has the hypothetical power to restrain the Trump administration, and even to remove the president. But if the only members willing to use that power are those getting ready to walk away, then ultimately Congress has no power at all.

The post Will a new wave of Republican retirements finally give the GOP a spine?? appeared first on Salon.com.

“We’re looking at that very seriously — birthright citizenship, where you have a baby on our land. You walk over the border, have a baby,” Trump told reporters outside the White House. “Congratulations, the baby is now a U.S. citizen . . . It’s frankly ridiculous.”

The president’s statement came on the same day that his administration announced a proposal to detain migrant families indefinitely, replacing a decades-old court agreement limiting the amount of time the government is allowed to detain a migrant child to 20 days.

However, Trump did not elaborate on how he would seek to end birthright citizenship.

The right to citizenship for anyone born in the U.S. is guaranteed in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, which states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

The ability of a president to end birthright citizenship has been challenged by many lawmakers and legal scholars, including one of Trump’s own judicial nominees.

James Ho, a conservative who Trump appointee to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, wrote in 2011, before his appointment, that changing how the 14th Amendment is applied would be “unconstitutional.”

“Opponents of illegal immigration cannot claim to champion the rule of law and then, in the same breath, propose policies that violate our Constitution,” he wrote.

Trump has previously vowed to end the process by which children born in the country automatically become citizens, saying he was told the change could be made “just with an executive order.” 

Speaking with Axios in October 2018, Trump promised to end birthright citizenship through an executive order — an argument he has been making since his early days as a presidential candidate when he claimed that birthright citizenship is “a magnet for illegal immigration” and so-called “anchor babies.”

“We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for 85 years with all of those benefits,” the president told Axios at the time. “It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. And it has to end.” (At least 30 countries around the world grant birthright citizenship.)

Trump’s comments last year were greeted with immediate pushback from lawmakers, including then-Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who told a Kentucky radio station that “you cannot end birthright citizenship with an executive order.”

Conservative lawyer and noted Trump dissented George Conway, the husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, wrote in an op-ed at the time: “Sometimes the Constitution’s text is plain as day and bars what politicians seek to do. That’s the case with President Trump’s proposal to end ‘birthright citizenship’ through an executive order.”

The shrinking caravan of refugees isn't a threat to the country or the constitutional order. A president who tries to end birthright citizenship by executive order is.

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) October 30, 2018

Anti-Trump commentator and veteran GOP operative Bill Kristol also criticized Trump’s remarks: “The shrinking caravan of refugees isn’t a threat to the country or the constitutional order. A president who tries to end birthright citizenship by executive order is.”

The president has made cracking down on immigration a signature issue of his presidency and re-election campaign, but many of the administration’s sweeping proposals and executive orders have been struck down by the courts.

This president should "seriously" consider reading the Constitution.https://t.co/9GeF9e5zbT

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) August 21, 2019

Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., a Democratic presidential candidate, slammed Trump’s comments on Wednesday, writing on Twitter that he “should ‘seriously’ consider reading the Constitution.”

The post Trump again says he is “seriously” considering ending birthright citizenship despite 14th Amendment appeared first on Salon.com.

When Donald Trump was running for the GOP nomination, he told USA Today’s Kirsten Powers that Ayn Rand’s raped-girl-decides-she-likes-it novel, The Fountainhead, was his favorite book.

“It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions,” he told Powers. “That book relates to … everything.”

Trump probably knew that anything by Rand would be the right answer for Republicans; the party has embraced her for decades, to the point that Paul Ryan required interns to read her books as a condition of employment.

Powers added, “He [Trump] identified with Howard Roark, the novel’s idealistic protagonist who designs skyscrapers and rages against the establishment.” Roark raged so much in the novel that he blew up a public housing project with dynamite just to get his way.

Rand was quite clear about the characteristics she wrote into her heroes, and in particular Howard Roark. In her Journals, she writes of the theme of the book, “One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one’s way to get the best for oneself. Fine!”

On Howard Roark, she writes that he “has learned long ago, with his first consciousness, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world. He knows what he wants and what he thinks. He needs no other reasons, standards or considerations. His complete selfishness is as natural to him as breathing.”

Roark seems like the kind of man who would brag about grabbing women by the genitals because, “When you’re a star, they let you do it.” But this was long before Donald Trump was on the scene.

Instead, the man who so inspired Ayn Rand’s fictional heroes was a real sociopath named William Edward Hickman, who lived in Los Angeles.

Ten days before Christmas, in 1927, Hickman, a teenager with slicked dark hair and tiny, muted eyes, drove up to Mount Vernon Junior High School in Los Angeles, California, and kidnapped Marion Parker — the daughter of a wealthy banker in town.

Hickman held the girl ransom, demanding $1,500 from her father — back then about a year’s salary. Supremely confident that he would elude capture, Hickman signed his name on the ransom notes, “The Fox.”

After two days, Marion’s father agreed to hand over the ransom in exchange for the safety of his daughter. What Perry Parker didn’t know is that Hickman never intended to live up to his end of the bargain.

The Pittsburgh Press detailed what Hickman, in his own words, did next.

“It was while I was fixing the blindfold that the urge to murder came upon me,” he said. “I just couldn’t help myself. I got a towel and stepped up behind Marion. Then, before she could move, I put it around her neck and twisted it tightly.”

Hickman didn’t hold back on any of these details: he was proud of his cold-bloodedness.

“I held on and she made no outcry except to gurgle. I held on for about two minutes, I guess, and then I let go. When I cut loose the fastenings, she fell to the floor. I knew she was dead.”

But Hickman wasn’t finished. “After she was dead I carried her body into the bathroom and undressed her, all but the underwear, and cut a hole in her throat with a pocket knife to let the blood out.”

Hickman then dismembered the child piece-by-piece, putting her limbs in a cabinet in his apartment, and then wrapped up the carved-up torso, powdered the lifeless face of Marion Parker, set what was left of her stump torso with the head sitting atop it in the passenger seat of his car, and drove to meet her father to collect the ransom money.

He even sewed open her eyelids to make it look like she was alive.

On the way, Hickman dumped body parts out of his car window, before rendezvousing with Marion Parker’s father.

Armed with a shotgun so her father wouldn’t come close enough to Hickman’s car to see that Marion was dead, Hickman collected his $1,500, then kicked open the door and tossed the rest of Marion Parker onto the road. As he sped off, her father fell to his knees, screaming.

Days later, the police caught up with a defiant and unrepentant Hickman in Oregon. His lawyers pleaded insanity, but the jury gave him the gallows.

To nearly everyone, Hickman was a monster. The year of the murder, the Los Angeles Times called it “the most horrible crime of the 1920s.” Hickman was America’s most despicable villain at the time.

But to a young Russian idealist just arriving in America, Hickman was a hero.

And while Hickman the man has, today, been largely forgotten, Hickman the archetype has lived on and influenced our nation in a profound fashion, paving the way for Donald Trump, a man with no empathy or consideration of social norms, to one day occupy the White House.

The kind of man who would pose with a tiny baby, the youngest survivor of a slaughter that he, himself encouraged with his hateful rhetoric, and mug for the camera with a thumbs-up sign.

Two years before William Edward Hickman was sentenced to death, a 21-year-old Russian political science student named Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum arrived in New York Harbor on a French ocean liner. The year was 1926, and she was on the last leg of her dream trip to the Land of Opportunity, scurrying across the Soviet Union, Germany, and France before procuring a first-class cabin aboard the S.S. De Grasse, bound for the United States.

Alissa was a squat five-foot-two with a flapper hairdo and wide sunken dark eyes that gave her a haunting stare. And etched into those brooding eyes was burned the memory of a childhood backlit by the Russian Revolution.

She had just departed Leninist Russia where, almost a decade earlier, there was a harsh backlash against the Russian property owners — the people who were rich with Russian money like Donald Trump — by the Bolsheviks. Alissa’s own family was targeted, and at the age of 12 she witnessed Bolshevik soldiers burst into her father’s pharmacy business, loot the store, and plaster on the doors the red emblem of the state indicating that his private business now belonged to “the people.”

That incident left such a deep and burning wound in young Alissa’s mind, that she went to college to study political science and vowed one day she’d become a famous writer to warn the world of the dangers of Bolshevism.

Starting afresh in Hollywood, she anglicized her name to Ayn Rand, and moved from prop-girl to screenwriter/novelist, basing the heroes of several of her stories on a man she was reading about in the newspapers at the time. A man she wrote effusively about in her diaries. A man she hero-worshipped.

He was the most notorious man in American in 1928, having achieved a level of national fame she craved — William Edward Hickman.

What young Ayn Rand saw in Hickman that would encourage her to base a novel, then her philosophy, then her life’s work, on him was quite straightforward: unfeeling, unpitying selfishness.

He was the kind of man who would revel in the pain parents would feel when their children were ripped from their arms and held in freezing cages for over a year.

In Hickman, Ayn Rand wrote that she had finally found the new model of the Superman (her phrase, likely borrowed from Friedrich Nietzsche). Only a worldview held by a man like Hickman, she believed, could ever prevent an all-powerful state from traumatizing another generation of small businesspeople and their children as the Bolsheviks had her family.

Hickman’s words as recounted by Rand in her Journals, “I am like the state: what is good for me is right,” resonated deeply with her. It was the perfect articulation of her belief that if people pursued their own interests above all else — even above friends, family, or nation — the result would be utopian.

She wrote in her diary that those words of Hickman’s were, “the best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I ever heard.”

Hickman — the monster who boasted of how he had hacked up a 12-year-old girl — had Rand’s ear, as well as her heart. She saw a strongman archetype in him, the way that people wearing red MAGA hats see a strongman savior in Donald Trump.

As Hickman’s murder trial unfolded, Rand grew increasingly enraged at how the mediocre American masses had rushed to condemn her Superman, much like today people Trump calls mediocre condemn him and the killings that may have emerged from his rhetoric, from Charleston to Charlottesville to El Paso.

“The first thing that impresses me about the case,” Rand wrote in reference to the Hickman trial in early notes for a book she was working on titled The Little Street, “is the ferocious rage of the whole society against one man.”

Astounded that Americans didn’t recognize the heroism Hickman showed when he proudly rose above simply conforming to society’s rules, Rand wrote, “It is not the crime alone that has raised the fury of public hatred. It is the case of a daring challenge to society. … It is the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, with a consciousness all his own.”

In other words, a man who lives exclusively for himself. A narcissistic psychopath. A man who could sell out his own country to foreign powers, tearing apart his nation’s people, just for his own enjoyment.

Rand explained that when the masses are confronted with such a bold actor, they neither understood nor empathized with him. Thus, “a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy [was] turned [by the media] into a purposeless monster.”

The protagonist of the book that Rand was writing around that time was a boy named Danny Renahan. In her notes for the book, she wrote, “The model for the boy [Renahan] is Hickman.” He would be her ideal man, and the archetype for a philosophical movement that could transform a nation.

“He is born with the spirit of Argon and the nature of a medieval feudal lord,” Rand wrote in her notes describing Renahan. “Imperious. Impatient. Uncompromising. Untamable. Intolerant. Unadaptable. Passionate. Intensely proud. Superior to the mob… an extreme ‘extremist.’ … No respect for anything or anyone.”

The kind of man who would tell over 12,000 lies in two and a half years, who would daily lie to the press and his nation, just because he could — and would revel in it.

Rand wanted capitalism in its most raw form, uncheck by any government that could control the rules of the market or promote the benefits of society. Such good intentions had, after all, caused the hell she’d experienced in the Bolshevik Revolution, just like they’d caused Fred Trump to be arrested and fined for refusing to maintain apartments that black people had moved into.

Ayn Rand, like Hickman, found in the extremes her economic, political, and moral philosophy. Forget about democratic institutions, forget about regulating markets, and forget about pursuing any policies that benefit the majority at the expense of the very rich — the rule-makers and rule-enforcers could never, ever do anything well or good. Only billionaires should rule the world, as Trump has suggested.

Trump personifies this, putting an advocate of destroying public schools in charge of public schools, a coal lobbyist in charge of the EPA, an oil lobbyist in charge of our public lands, and a billionaire described by Forbes as a “grifter” in charge of the Commerce Department. His chief of staff said that putting children in cages (where seven so far have died) would actually be a public good. Don’t just ignore the rules; destroy them.

Welfare and other social safety net programs were, as Rand saw it, “the glorification of mediocrity” in society. Providing a social safety net for the poor, disabled, or unemployed, she believed, were part of a way of thinking that promoted, “satisfaction instead of joy, contentment instead of happiness… a glow-worm instead of a fire.”

She, like Trump, lived a largely joyless life. She mercilessly manipulated people, particularly her husband, and, like Trump, surrounded herself with cult-like followers who were only on the inside so long as they gave her total, unhesitating loyalty.

Like Trump and his billionaire backers, she believed that a government promoting working-class “looters” instead of solely looking out for capitalist “producers” was throwing its “best people” under the bus.

In Rand’s universe, the producers had no obligations to the looters. Providing welfare or sacrificing one nickel of your own money to help a “looter” on welfare, unemployment, or Social Security — particularly if it was “taken at the barrel of a gun” (taxes) — was morally reprehensible.

Like Trump saying, “My whole life I’ve been greedy,” for Rand looking out for numero uno was the singular name of the game — selfishness is next to godliness.

Later in Rand’s life, in 1959, as she gained more notoriety for the moral philosophy of selfishness that she named “Objectivism” and that is today at the core of libertarianism and the GOP, she sat down for an interview with CBS reporter Mike Wallace.

Suggesting that selfishness undermines most American values, Wallace bluntly challenged Rand.

“You are out to destroy almost every edifice in the contemporary American way of life,” Wallace said to Rand. “Our Judeo-Christian religion, our modified government-regulated capitalism, our rule by the majority will… you scorn churches, and the concept of God… are these accurate criticisms?”

As Wallace was reciting the public criticisms of Rand, the CBS television cameras zoomed in closely on her face, as her eyes darted back and forth between the ground and Wallace’s fingers. But the question, with its implied condemnation, didn’t faze her at all. Rand said with confidence in a matter-of-fact tone, “Yes.”

“We’re taught to feel concerned for our fellow man,” Wallace challenged, “to feel responsible for his welfare, to feel that we are, as religious people might put it, children under God and responsible one for the other — now why do you rebel?”

“That is what in fact makes man a sacrificial animal,” Rand answered. She added, “[man’s] highest moral purpose is the achievement of his own happiness.”

Rand’s philosophy, though growing in popularity on college campuses, never did — in her lifetime — achieve the sort of mass appeal she had hoped. It was confined to college coffee shops, intellectual conferences, and true-believer journals, but never hit the halls of Congress, the mainstream television airwaves, or water-cooler political debates. There were the handful of “true believers,” but that was it… until today.

Now, Ayn Rand’s philosophy is a central tenet of today’s Republican Party and the moral code proudly cited and followed by high-profile billionaires and the president of the United States.

Ironically, when she was finally beginning to be taken seriously, Ayn Rand became ill with lung cancer, and went on Social Security and Medicare to make it through her last days. She died a “looter” in 1982, unaware that her sociopathic worldview would one day validate an entire political party’s embrace of a sociopathic narcissist president.

The post The right-wing American love affair with one of the most disturbing serial killers appeared first on Salon.com.

This appears to have been the case in my home state of Pennsylvania, where CNN reports that earlier this month the Wyoming Valley West School District sent out hundreds of letters to parents threatening to send their children into foster care if they were unable to pay off their lunch debts. Seriously. That crisis was resolved (or at least addressed) last week after the district decided to accept donations to assist parents with their school lunch debt, something it had refused to do at first.

It’s not clear what political affiliations the individuals behind the original decision to threaten impoverished families may have. The district did not respond to several phone calls from Salon on that question. Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, can be fairly described as a purple county in a purple state: Donald Trump got 58 percent of the vote in 2016, but Democrats had carried the county in every previous election since 1988.

Regardless, the notion that people who can’t pay for their children’s school lunches should face punishment, rather than sympathy and compassion, is distinctly related to modern-day conservative ideology. It would be inconceivable in a society where free market capitalism was recognized as flawed, and where those who are struggling because of those flaws were treated as victims deserving of help.

The incident calls to mind the famous story about New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia (perhaps apocryphal), when he presided over a court case involving a grandmother who had stolen bread to feed her starving family. (Mayors were allowed to serve as magistrates at that time.) After ruling that she had indeed broken the law, La Guardia supposedly paid her fine and ordered everyone in his courtroom to give her 50 cents “for living in a town where a person has to steal bread so that her grandchildren can eat.”

That story, true or not, harkens back to a sage truth often forgotten in modern America, but which drives the plot of Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables,” for instance: If people live in a society where they cannot feed themselves or their families without breaking the law, the problem is not with the lawbreakers, but with the society.

School board president Joe Mazur did not seem to share this view when he defended the letters to the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, even though he conceded that they were “threatening and a little strong.” He claimed that “we have people that owe money for a year, some maybe more, and we tried all kinds of ways to contact them” and that “the last letter sent out was a nice letter saying come in, we need to discuss this, and it didn’t get one return.”

In a suspiciously convenient coincidence, Mazur also said that Joseph Muth, a district official who sent the letters, had subsequently discovered that the district’s indigent students were eligible for free breakfasts and free lunches for the next five years. (Muth told CNN affiliate WNEP, however, that he still wants indebted parents to pay.)

For what it’s worth, Laurence Tribe — the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard Law School — argued that policies like the one initially threatened by Wyoming Valley West are almost certainly illegal.

“This public school policy is outrageous and almost certainly unconstitutional,” Tribe told Salon by email. “Threatening to take children away from their parents because their parents fail to pay for particular items supplied by the school violates both due process and the substantive rights of parents to bring up their own children. It also deprives people of the equal protection of the laws in violation of the 14th Amendment. I cannot imagine such a policy surviving judicial attack.”

Defenders of the school district will no doubt claim that they were just trying to be compensated for their school lunches. I suspect this is not true, and that a hostile ideology motivated the district’s actions. Consider a) the draconian nature of the letters, b) the district’s initial unwillingness to accept outside donations, c) the district’s weirdly timed discovery that it could have provided free meals the whole time and, d) the fact that the district’s approach to poor families virtually drips with contempt.

Tribe’s argument that this kind of punitive approach is unconstitutional aside, policymakers and opinion-shapers often seek to punish the poor. The New Republic published an exposé earlier this year revealing that New York City’s child welfare agency has a history of unjustly targeting low-income families, who are predominantly people of color. Conservative pundits like Ann Coulter often argue that child poverty is linked to parents’ immoral behavior — if they lived more virtuous lives, apparently, they and their children wouldn’t be poor.

As Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan emphasized cutting programs that would help starving families. Salon’s Chauncey DeVega wrote in 2017 that “conservatives are more likely than liberals or progressives to believe in what’s known as the ‘just world fallacy,’ whereby people who suffer a misfortune are viewed as somehow deserving their fate.”

But this isn’t simply a case of conservatives refusing to believe that the world can be an unfair place. One of the underlying tenets of free-market capitalism is the idea that in the long run it works best for everyone, that anyone who wants to rise out of poverty has the ability to do so. So its defenders cannot accept any evidence that people are economically suffering in America through no fault of their own. They may argue that poor people’s plight is caused by big government, high taxes, job-stifling regulations and so on — but that’s largely an attempt to change the subject.

In situations where immediate relief is required and private agencies are simply not up to the task, fans of the free market are nearly out of options. They can acknowledge that there are limits to the virtues of capitalism or they can insist that the poor themselves must be to blame, because the market is always rational.

I encountered an excellent demonstration of this principle in my interview with conservative pundit Ben Shapiro last March. I mentioned a speech Shapiro had delivered at the University of Michigan arguing that “there should be a discussion about whether the kids ought to be taken away” from families who can’t afford to feed them and therefore require free school lunches, and asked him whether he lacked compassion for those families. He responded:

No, I don’t see how that lacks compassion in any way. If you are unable to feed your child, and you cannot find a social fabric to help you take care of that child, your child should not be with you. You’re living in the freest, most prosperous country in the history of the world. It is not all that expensive to pay for a child’s lunch.

I responded that we live in a society where some people work full-time and are still unable to support their families. Shapiro cut me off.

“I do not accept your premise that we live in a society where people literally cannot afford to feed their children, [where] their children will starve without a free school lunch,” he said. He then resisted my efforts to turn the conversation into a larger discussion about systemic poverty, suggested that I wanted “to make the case for a Bernie Sanders salary redistribution” and — tellingly — added that free school lunches did not “incentivize proper behavior from parents.”

At some point, the burden must fall on those who hold views like these to recognize where their abstract theories end and the lived experiences of other people begin. That means accepting premises about the shortcomings of our economic system with which they’re uncomfortable. Certainly some people can and do rise out of poverty through hard work, talent and luck — but most people who are born in poverty will die in poverty, and not because they are sinful or lazy.

If we’re going to eradicate poverty and lessen economic inequality, we must start by abandoning dogmatic approaches toward policy and instead look at what meets the actual needs of real-life human beings. One of America’s greatest presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt, famously argued that our nation would only provide effective relief during the Great Depression if it engaged in “bold persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails admit it frankly and try another. But above all try something.”

FDR ultimately favored programs that would today be classified as “progressive,” but that wasn’t because he started out with an agenda. It was because he attempted a number of approaches, and chose the ones that were more effective. Policymakers like those in the Pennsylvania school district, and conservative ideologues like Coulter or Shapiro, are simply not willing to risk the possibility that their basic economic beliefs are wrong.

If those people had little power or influence, their arrogance might be harmless. But real people are suffering as a result of their dogmatism, and we must recognize their approach toward free-market capitalism for what it is: A dangerous secular religion, one that places such a premium on self-validation that it prefers to destroy innocent lives rather than challenge its core beliefs.

The post School lunches and the cult of free-market capitalism: America’s destructive faith appeared first on Salon.com.

Trump bragged last month that he was “absolutely right” that the tax cuts would be “rocket fuel for the American economy” but the new report shows that the positive effects of the law have been minimal and largely helped corporations without doing much to boost hiring or wages.

“The growth effects tend to show a relatively small (if any) first-year effect on the economy,” said the report from the CRS, a nonpartisan think tank that produces economic analyses for members of Congress.

Though Trump bragged that the tax cuts would pay for themselves, the report found that the growth spurred by the tax cuts amounted to 5% or less of the growth needed to fully offset the revenue loss from the Act,” or just 95% short of Trump’s estimate.

The study found that while wages grew a little, the inflation-adjusted wage growth “is smaller than overall growth in labor compensation and indicates that ordinary workers had very little growth in wage rates.”

The report’s authors also debunked Trump’s claim that money was being repatriated from offshore tax shelters. “The evidence does not suggest a surge in investment from abroad in 2018,” the report stated.

Trump also bragged that the tax cuts were resulting in big bonuses for employees, but the report threw cold water on that claim too.

“While evidence does indicate significant repurchases of shares, either from tax cuts or repatriated revenues, relatively little was directed to paying worker bonuses, which had been announced by some firms,” the report said. “With US employment of 157 million, this amount is $28 per worker. This amount is 2% to 3% of the corporate tax cut, and a smaller share of repatriated funds.”

The study did find one big winner: large corporations.

“From 2017 to 2018, the estimated average corporate tax rate fell from 23.4% to 12.1% and individual income taxes as a percentage of personal income fell slightly from 9.6% to 9.2%,” the report said.

Despite the additional money, the authors of the report said it was “premature” to say that these companies are investing more capital than they had been.

“To date this pattern has not been observed,” they said.

With the much-hyped economic growth failing to cover 95 percent of the cost of the tax cuts, Trump has proposed huge cuts to programs that help the poor, elderly and disabled to make up part of the deficit.

The budget proposal released by the White House in March called for massive cuts to Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institutes of Health, food aid and welfare programs, student loan programs and housing programs.

House Democrats ripped Trump’s plan for “using the levers of government to help wealthy individuals and corporations at the expense of hardworking Americans,” adding that the proposal is a “cynical document replete with backward priorities, broken promises, and blatantly dishonest gimmicks.”

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Among the revelations were that after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape showing Trump bragging that he could sexually assault women because he’s famous, Ryan explicitly told his fellow Republicans to feel free to abandon him: “He couldn’t shake the fact that Trump was so vulgar. People just don’t talk like that where I’m from, he thought.”

While Republicans have by now almost totally justified Trump’s remarks about women to themselves, at the time, many in the GOP decided to un-endorse Trump and condemn the behavior. That all changed after Trump won the election.

The book also details how Ryan was shocked by Trump’s unexpected victory, thinking to himself, “Oh my God . . . This guy might’ve done it,” and telling him “This is unbelievable . . . It looks like you’re going to win.”

Though Ryan held power he had not imagined during the first two years of the Trump presidency and backed nearly all of his agenda in the House, he reportedly found life miserable and frequently argued with the president on things like birthright citizenship. All of this may have contributed to Ryan’s decision to retire from the House ahead of the election that cost his party control of the chamber.

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“Damn, Donald, back at it again with the white supremacy,” read 15-year-old Alex Drake’s topical protest sign, according to video that captured the incident. As another protester raised a sign that read, “Black Lives Matter,” the crowd of mostly older white Trump supporters began chanting “All lives matter,” attempting to drown out the Janesville teenager:

Law enforcement in Janesville, home of Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan, said that “a male in the crowd groped the 15 year girl, when she pushed him away; another person in the crowd sprayed her.” Video of the incident shows Drake confronting a man she says touched her breast before she reached out to strike him:

Another video shows one Trump supporter yelling to “get that bitch out of here,” after the teenage girl stumbles from being pepper sprayed.

“Goddamn communist, nigger lover! Get out of here,” another Trump supporter can be heard shouting:

EXCLUSIVE vid shows teen get pepper sprayed after shoving protester, called a bitch & “n****r lover” at Trump rally pic.twitter.com/kB4GqQbbaG

— Candace Smith (@CandaceSmith_) March 30, 2016

Janesville Police Chief David Moore told WKOK-TV that another teenager was treated for second-hand pepper spray injuries at a local hospital.

Inside, the Trump rally was hardly more civil. Speaker Ryan’s hometown booed him when Trump merely mentioned his name — and continued to boo him to the surprise of even Trump. Ryan, of course, has been out publicly bemoaning the “ugliness” that has befallen the Republican primary, a not-so-thinly veiled jab at Trump.

“I’m sure I’m going to get along great with him,” Trump recently said of Ryan. “And if I don’t? He’s gonna have to pay a big price.”

Janesville Police additionally reported that they had to turn away two people last night who had concealed weapons, and two others who were openly carrying firearms.

Watch the entire incident here:

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Fox Corp., according to CNBC, has announced that the Wisconsin Republican is joining the Fox Corp. board along with figures in the business world, including Formula One CEO Chase Carey, Anne Dias (founder of the investment firm Aragon Global Holdings) and Roland Hernandez (CEO of Hernandez Media Ventures).

In an official statement, Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch, son of Fox Corp. board member and media mogul Rupert Murdoch, said, “We look forward to working with and being guided by them as we begin a new chapter, steadfastly committed to providing the best in news, sports and entertainment programming.”

The 49-year-old Ryan served as House speaker until early January, when a new Democratic majority was seated in the House of Representatives. Ryan did not seek reelection in 2018; although he claimed he was retiring from Congress because he wanted to spend more time with his family, many pundits asserted that a more plausible explanation was that he feared Democrats would regain the House—which they did with a net gain of 40 seats.

Ryan has been mentioned as a possible GOP presidential candidate for 2024.

Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated American investor Ken Griffin is a member of the board of Fox Corp. This article has been updated to remove his name.

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