Category: 2020 Election

The warning from Kamala Harris and the convention’s third night: Our house is on fire

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The star of the third night of the Democratic convention peeked out from backstage at the beginning of the evening to plead with viewers to vote. “Each of us needs a plan, a voting plan,” said Sen. Kamala D. Harris, the vice-presidential nominee. It has come to this. She was urging Americans to plot their strategy for accessing the polls because the pathway may be blocked.

Her words were reminiscent of the sort of warning an emergency worker might give to a complacent family: Have an escape plan in case your home should suddenly go up in flames.

How will you all get out? Do you have a fire extinguisher? What will you save? Where will you meet to make sure everyone is safe and accounted for? Will you be able to repair the damage? Continue reading.

Trump Phone Calls Add to Lingering Questions About Russian Interference

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A Senate committee went further than the Mueller report on key points about Russia’s election sabotage operations and the Trump campaign.

WASHINGTON — More than 200 pages into a sprawling, 1,000-page report on Russian election interference, the Senate Intelligence Committee made a startling conclusion endorsed by both Republicans and Democrats: Donald J. Trump knew of and discussed stolen Democratic emails at critical points late in his 2016 presidential campaign.

The Republican-led committee rejected Mr. Trump’s statement to prosecutors investigating Russia’s interference that he did not recall conversations with his longtime friend Roger J. Stone Jr. about the emails, which were later released by WikiLeaks. Senators leveled a blunt assessment: “Despite Trump’s recollection, the committee assesses that Trump did, in fact, speak with Stone about WikiLeaks and with members of his campaign about Stone’s access to WikiLeaks on multiple occasions.”

The senators did not accuse Mr. Trump of lying in their report, released Tuesday, the fifth and final volume from a three-year investigation that laid out extensive contacts between Trump advisers and Russians. But the report detailed even more of the president’s conversations with Mr. Stone than were previously known, renewing questions about whether Mr. Trump was truthful with investigators for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, or misled them, much as prosecutors convinced jurors that Mr. Stone himself misled congressional investigators about his efforts to contact WikiLeaks. Continue reading.

Facebook removes QAnon conspiracy group with 200,000 members

Facebook has deleted a large group dedicated to sharing and discussing QAnon conspiracy theories.

QAnon is a wide-ranging, unfounded conspiracy theory that a “deep state” network of powerful government, business and media figures are waging a secret war against Donald Trump.

A Facebook spokeswoman said the group was removed for “repeatedly posting content that violated our policies”.

Last month both Twitter and TikTok also cracked down on QAnon content. Continue reading.

QAnon: What is it and where did it come from?

President Trump has spoken of how supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which has grown online in the US, appear to like him very much.

Mr Trump told journalists that he didn’t know much about the movement, but added that he’d heard that “these were people who love our country.”

The movement is facing a crackdown from Facebook as well as Twitter, who have taken action against thousands of accounts and web addresses linking to videos and websites spreading QAnon’s bizarre ideas.

So what is QAnon and who believes in it? Continue reading.

Trump praises QAnon supporters: “I understand they like me very much”

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President Trump claimed at a press conference Wednesday that he doesn’t know much about the fringe conspiracy theory QAnon, but that he understands its supporters “like me very much” and that they “love America.”

Why it matters: QAnon is a sprawling internet conspiracy theorythat baselessly alleges that a powerful cabal of sex traffickers within the “deep state” is engaged in a global fight to take down Trump. The FBI identified fringe conspiracy theories, like QAnon, as domestic terrorist threats in 2019.

  • Marjorie Taylor Greene, a vocal supporter of QAnon, won the Republican nomination in Georgia’s deep-red 14th Congressional District runoff last week. Trump tweeted his congratulations and called her a “future Republican Star.” Continue reading.

Trump goes all-in on ugly white grievance politics

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Not that this should come as a surprise, but with the Republican National Convention less than a week away, Donald Trump is sending every possible signal that whatever its official themes may be the GOP gathering’s true subject will be white grievance politics. Unlike in the past, where concerns about not appearing overtly racist have forced Republicans to resort to dog whistles and coded language, Trump seems to believe to that his best bet is to serve the racism straight up, thereby vanquishing any remaining doubts about whether our president is actually a white supremacist.

Late Tuesday night, Trump praised Laura Loomer, who won the Republican primary in Florida’s 21st congressional district, which is Trump’s official place of residence. To call Loomer a “far right” or “fringe” candidate is understating the case. She’s an obsessive bigot with a long history of unvarnished hatred of Muslims — or anyone she just suspects may be a Muslim — calling them “savages” and labeling herself a #ProudIslamophobe. Her rhetoric is openly genocidal, such as when she declared that “we should never let another Muslim into the civilized world” and urged taxi and ride-share companies not to hire Muslim drivers. (It may be reassuring to know that she almost certainly won’t win in November. The district is solidly Democratic, and Republicans didn’t even bother to run a candidate against incumbent Rep. Lois Frankel in 2018.)

Loomer has been banned by both Uber and Lyft for this overt bigotry, and then was banned from Twitter after tweeting about Rep. Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota Democrat who is one of two Muslim women in the House: “Ilhan is pro Sharia Ilhan is pro-FGM Under Sharia, homosexuals are oppressed & killed. Women are abused & forced to wear the hijab.” Continue reading.

Loomer win creates bigger problem for House GOP

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House Republicans have a growing conspiracy theorist problem.

Laura Loomer, well known for her offensive remarks about Muslims and her embrace of conspiracy theories, became the latest far-right activist to win a primary on Tuesday night, one week after Marjorie Taylor Greene‘s win in Georgia.

President Trump has embraced both candidates, but some in the House GOP conference see them as threats if Republicans are to reverse 2018 defeats in the suburbs that plunged them into the minority. Continue reading.

Obama casts Trump as threat to democracy

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Former President Obama on Wednesday warned Americans that democracy is at stake in November’s election, admonishing President Trump as categorically unfit for the job and pleading with voters to back his onetime vice president. 

“I am also asking you to believe in your own ability — to embrace your own responsibility as citizens — to make sure that the basic tenets of our democracy endure,” Obama said from the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, where he was flanked by the text of the U.S. Constitution. “Because that’s what’s at stake right now. Our democracy.” 

Obama used Wednesday’s speech and its symbolic backdrop to frame the upcoming election in stark terms. He warned against complacency, arguing that cynicism and apathy in the face of Trump’s attacks on democratic norms would cause the entire system to wither away “until there’s no democracy at all.” Continue reading.

Postal Service blocked lawmakers from key evidence on DeJoy’s selection, Schumer says

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The Senate’s top Democrat says he has new evidence that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin intervened in the postmaster general appointment process.

The U.S. Postal Service blocked congressional lawmakers from interrogating the firm that helped select Louis DeJoy as the nation’s postmaster general, prompting a sharp rebuke from Senate Democratic Leader Charles E. Schumer, who called on the organization Wednesday to be more transparent as a federal investigation unfolds.

The spat over access has hindered lawmakers as they investigate DeJoy’s recent, controversial changes to mail delivery and, in the process, potentially concealed key details about the involvement of President Trump and his top aides in those decisions, Schumer (N.Y.) warned in a letter to the agency. The missive threatens to add to the already sky-high tensions between the administration and the Senate as DeJoy prepares to testify at a Senate hearing Friday, then a House hearing on Monday.

Schumer fired off his initial inquiry to the USPS in June, asking to learn more about the process that selected DeJoy, a former top Republican fundraiser, to lead the Postal Service. The postmaster general is a position filled by the USPS Board of Governors, which in this case relied on an executive search firm, Russell Reynolds Associates, to guide its thinking. Continue reading.