The giant white, aerial blob that US officials described as a Chinese spy balloon was seen plummeting towards the Atlantic Ocean near Surfside Beach, South Carolina, on Saturday afternoon, having been shot down by a US military fighter jet.

“I ordered the Pentagon to shoot it down on Wednesday, as soon as possible,” President Biden told reporters in Hagerstown, Maryland, en route to Camp David. Military officials advised that the best time to do so was when the device was safely flying over water off the East Coast, he said.

Biden: "On the balloon, I ordered the Pentagon to shoot it down on Wednesday as soon as possible [for safety] … they successfully took it down." pic.twitter.com/2GbSzejnZI

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 4, 2023

Live television images showed the balloon suddenly losing shape amid a plume of smoke and falling towards the ocean over several minutes. The dramatic turn of events came after the Federal Aviation Administration closed airspace and halted departures of planes to three Atlantic coast airports due to “national security initiatives.” Contrails from fighter jets were seen streaming across bright blue skies near the balloon.

Bucking decades of political tradition, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) voted for a new line-up of early primary dates in the 2024 presidential cycle. It was a long-awaited move that top Democrats, including President Joe Biden, have championed for years in hopes of making the country’s nominating process more representative of the party’s voters.

The calendar assigns South Carolina as the first state to hold a 2024 presidential primary on Feb. 3, 2024, followed by New Hampshire and Nevada on Feb. 6. Georgia and Michigan would also move up in the nation’s primary order, whereas Iowa—which has been the first state to participate in the nominating process for decades—would be moved out of the early window entirely.

The DNC’s goal is to make the nominating process more equitable. Iowa and New Hampshire have long been the first states to get a say in which candidate should be the party’s nominee for President, but those states are not among the most racially or economically diverse, and people of color make up sizable blocs of the party. “Our early states must reflect the overall diversity of our party and our nation—economically, geographically, demographically,” President Joe Biden wrote to the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee in December. “This means more diverse states earlier in the process and more diversity in the overall mix of early states.” 

So congrats to South Carolina, Georgia, Nevada and Michigan for moving up in the (political) world? Not so fast.

New Hampshire has a state law that stipulates it must be the first state in the nation to hold presidential primaries. Changing this law may be difficult given that Republicans control both chambers of the New Hampshire legislature and the governor’s mansion and aren’t eager to comply with DNC rules. New Hampshire Democrats aren’t exactly trying very hard to get their state Republican counterparts to help them on this matter, either. 

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Deep in the confines of the hulking, brutalist headquarters of the US Department of Energy, down one of its long, starkly lit corridors, sits a small, unheralded office that is poised to play a pivotal role in America’s shift away from fossil fuels and help the world stave off disastrous global heating.

The department’s loan programs office was “essentially dormant” under Donald Trump, according to its head, Jigar Shah, but has now come roaring back with a huge war chest to bankroll emerging clean energy projects and technology.

Last year’s vast Inflation Reduction Act grew the previously moribund office’s loan authority to $140 billion, while adding a new program worth another $250 billion in loan guarantees to retool projects that help cut planet-heating emissions. Which means that Shah, a debonair former clean energy entrepreneur and podcast host who matches his suits with pristine Stan Smiths, oversees resources comparable to the GDP of Norway: all to help turbocharge solar, wind, batteries and a host of other climate technologies in the US.

With a newly divided Congress stymieing any new climate legislation in the foreseeable future, Shah has emerged as one of Washington’s most powerful figures in the effort to confront global heating. Shah says such focus on him is “hyperbolic” but the White House is pinning much of its climate agenda on an office that barely had a dozen people when Shah joined in March 2021. It now has more than 200 staffers as it scrambles to distribute billions in loans to projects across the US.

President Joe Biden seems to be pretty unhappy about the suspected Chinese spy balloon flying over Montana. His administration signaled this by postponing Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to Beijing—less than a day before Blinken was supposed to depart.

Donald Trump apparently prefers a different response. “SHOOT DOWN THE BALLOON!” the former commander-in-chief Truthed this morning. A few hours later, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley demonstrated her status as the sane, serious alternative to Trump by tweeting the same thing, but with some lowercase letters mixed in.

Shoot down the balloon. Cancel Blinken’s trip. Hold China accountable.

Biden is letting China walk all over us. It’s time to make America strong again.

— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) February 3, 2023

The past two weeks have marked a significant escalation in the years-long struggle over the proposed construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center (PSTC), a $90 million project that would be built on nearly 100 acres of city-owned land in an unincorporated section of DeKalb County—Georgia’s fourth largest county that encompasses a sliver of southeast Atlanta. The forest—once the homeland of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, then the site of a slave plantation and notorious prison camp—for at least a year has been occupied by activists who call themselves “forest defenders.” They have camped among the trees with the goal of blocking the construction of the PSTC, a massive complex for law enforcement that would include training and recreational facilities.  For them and other opponents of the project, PSTC is known instead as “Cop City.”

On January 18, a multi-agency task force that included Atlanta police, the Georgia State Patrol, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation raided what they estimated to be about 25 campsites throughout the forest. During the operation, a Georgia state patrol trooper shot and killed a 26-year-old activist named Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, who went by the nickname “Tortuguita.” The state’s Bureau of Investigation released a statement claiming that officers approached Terán in a tent, and then Terán shot at a state trooper first, wounding him, before officers returned fire. Law enforcement has said there is no body camera footage. 

Fellow activists dispute this account and have called for an independent investigation. Terán’s mother, who is originally from Venezuela but now lives in Panama City, Panama told The Guardian that she believes her child was “murdered in cold blood” and that she will work to “clear Manuel’s name.” Protests following Terán’s killing led to a police cruiser in flames and smashed windows at the Atlanta Police Foundation headquarters, Wells Fargo, and Truist Bank branches in downtown Atlanta. In response, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp called a state of emergency and activated the Georgia National Guard (though they were not deployed).

In his State of the State address the day before the state of emergency was declared, Kemp decried the violence of “out-of-state rioters” and applauded the police response to the protests. “That’s just the latest example of why here in Georgia, we’ll always back the blue!” he said. 

In countries in the global south that are on the frontiers of resource extraction, being an environmental activist is extraordinarily dangerous. A 2021 Global Witness report estimated 1,700 environmental activists have been killed in the last decade. But, as Kate Aronoff wrote in The New Republic, Terán’s death is a worrisome sign that this deadly violence against environmental protesters could become a reality in the United States, too. Terán’s death is the first known example of someone killed by law enforcement while engaged in environmental “land defense” activism.

On January 5, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) tweeted about the unexpected passing of Quentin Williams, a Democratic member of the Connecticut House of Representatives. “Terrible news today of Q Williams sudden death,” he wrote. “I’m sending every good thought I have to his family and friends today.” Most of the replies to Murphy’s tweet echoed the senator’s sentiments; many commented that it was especially sad to lose someone so young—Williams was just 39 when he died. But some of the commenters seemed determined to take the conversation in an entirely different direction. “Vaccine related?” asked one. “How many shots did he get?” wrote another. “Let me guess he has taken the Covid vaccine,” speculated a third. At least one tweeter added a hashtag you may have seen popping up: #diedsuddenly.

Williams’ vaccination status had nothing to do with his death—he was one of two people killed in a head-on collision. But the commenters on Murphy’s tweet reflect an increasingly popular conspiracy theory that healthy people are dying shortly after receiving the vaccine. Indeed, in the last two months, every time a celebrity dies—from former NFL player Ahmaad Galloway to Lisa Marie Presley—adherents of this theory have swarmed social media to blame the shots. Despite no evidence that such a correlation exists, this myth is remarkably persistent, especially since the November 2022 release of a slickly produced documentary called Died Suddenly, which baselessly claims that many people who take the vaccines develop potentially fatal blood clots.

The film has been widely debunked, even by some people within the anti-vaccine movement, but that hasn’t stopped it from going viral. By late December, the phrase “died suddenly” was surging on Twitter, with an average of nearly 4,000 mentions per day. Then, on January 2, NFL player Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field from cardiac arrest after a relatively routine tackle. Experts believe the most likely cause was a rare phenomenon called commotio cordis, which can happen if a person receives a blow to the chest between beats of the heart. According to an analysis by the online extremism watchdog group Center for Countering Digital Hate, the morning after the game, the number of mentions skyrocketed to nearly 17,000—an increase of 328 percent. Hamlin did not die—after a week in the hospital, he was discharged—and neither did the hashtag. Nearly a month after Hamlin’s collapse, it’s still trending on Twitter.

The 16 million people who have watched the film Died Suddenly on the far-right platform Rumble may have been expecting more of what they saw on social media: titillating speculation about Covid vaccines’ role in celebrity deaths. Yet viewers of Died Suddenly encounter much more than just a tired and repeatedly discredited strain of medical misinformation. Its premise is that the vaccines are a tool of global elites who want to “depopulate” the world—a variation on the “Great Reset” narrative that “globalists” like George Soros and Bill Gates orchestrated the pandemic in order to reprogram people to accept a new age of Marxism. This conspiracy theory gained traction in neo-Nazi and white nationalist groups, which are increasingly intermingling with the anti-vaccine movement.

One of the leaders in combining these two movements is Stew Peters, the 42-year-old producer of Died Suddenly. Although his name may not be as well-known as Alex Jones or Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., his influence is considerable. He didn’t start out as an anti-vaccine crusader. Rather, Peters launched his far-right media career several years ago, when he began posting videos of himself monologuing about his work as a bounty hunter in Minneapolis. Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, suggests that Peters has discovered that vaccine skepticism is a powerful way to mobilize new followers. “This is a guy from the far right who sees an opportunity to weaponize the pandemic, to increase distrust in the government,” he says. “Even among otherwise hostile, non-aligned groups, if they can find a point of mutual interest, they will coalesce around it.”

At first I figured the Republicans would be all over this. I guess I figured wrong.

I’m referring to the bombshell working paper that made headlines earlier this week, in which a team of academic and Treasury Department economists found that the IRS audits Black taxpayers at roughly three to five times the rate of non-Black taxpayers. 

The authors, whose findings were based on an anonymized 2014 dataset consisting of more than 148 million tax returns and 780,000 audits, write that the disparities seem to be driven largely by racial differences in audit rates among taxpayers claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit.” 

The IRS has long scrutinized claimants of the EITC and certain other refundable tax credits at higher-than-average rates, regardless of race, in part because they are low-hanging fruit. The credit—aimed at low- to moderate-income taxpayers—is often claimed in error, and such audits are a cheap and easy by-mail job for a chronically underfunded tax agency.

Even among those claimants, the study found, Black taxpayers, who accounted for an estimated 21 percent of EITC filers, were selected for 43 percent of the audits. Now, IRS staffers don’t sit around deciding whom to audit—the selection is algorithmic and nominally race-blind. But the agency’s secret sauce somehow produced results that are far from colorblind.

House Republicans removed Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) from the Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday because she is a Black, Muslim woman. Officially, that’s not the reason. But the facts speak for themselves: The removal is the culmination of years of targeting Omar by Donald Trump, the rightwing media, and Republican lawmakers who attacked her religion, ethnicity, and history as a refugee. The GOP majority has an official reason for ousting Omar—and then there’s the reason both they and everyone else know is really behind this outrage. 

There's only one Reason why House Republicans have punished Ilhan Omar https://t.co/xzpis2vYmn pic.twitter.com/ERdFLHiNBK

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) February 2, 2023

Their nominal reason is that past anti-Semitic comments make her unsuited to serve on the Foreign Affairs Committee. The resolution to remove Omar contains a list of offenses. Read closely, it reveals how the party (along with some moderate Democrats) have targeted Omar since she was elected in 2018, taking her words out of context to make her a boogeyman for the right. 

The first offense is a February 2019 tweet in which Omar attributed lawmakers’ support for Israel to the deep pockets of the pro-Israel lobby, touching on the anti-Semitic trope that Jews buy influence and control. That tweet caused outcry on both sides of the aisle. Omar’s response included the words: “I unequivocally apologize.”

Misdirection, an essential tool for magicians, is not usually a component of media criticism. But in a lengthy critique of the coverage of the Trump-Russia scandal published this week by the Columbia Journalism Review, veteran investigative reporter Jeff Gerth deflects attention from the core components of Russiagate, mirroring Donald Trump’s own efforts of the past six years to escape accountability for his profound betrayal of the nation. Though Gerth’s target is media outlets, particularly the New York Times (where he worked for 29 years), Gerth ends up bolstering Trump’s phony narrative that there was no Russia scandal, just merely a hoax whipped up by reckless reporters and Trump’s enemies in the press, with the assistance of the Deep State. 

In a massive 24,000-word, four-part article, Gerth dissects how the Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and other news organizations during the 2016 election and afterward reported on Trump’s and his campaign’s interactions with Russia. (He briefly references, without criticism, the story I published that first revealed the existence of the dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele and that reported that the FBI was investigating its allegations.) Gerth does probe genuine errors committed by his former employer and others. The Times, for instance, reported shortly before the 2016 election that the FBI’s investigation had found no link between Trump and Russia, when the bureau had barely begun its inquiry and had reached no final conclusions. And after the election, the Times produced a report in early 2017 that seemingly went too far in the opposite direction when it reported that US intelligence had evidence that “Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election.” (Trump’s campaign chair, Paul Manafort, we later learned, had been huddling with a suspected Russian intelligence official during the campaign, but FBI officials handling the Russian investigation at the time saw this Times article as going too far.)

Gerth finds plenty of ammo for his assault on the media. But here’s where he goes wrong: He misrepresents the scandal that is the subject of the media coverage he is scrutinizing. He defines the Trump-Russia affair by only two elements of the tale: the question of Trump collusion with Moscow and the unconfirmed Steele dossier. This is exactly how Trump and his lieutenants want the scandal to be perceived. From the start, Trump has proclaimed “no collusion,” setting that as the bar for judging him. That is, no evidence of criminal collusion, and he’s scot-free. And he and his defenders have fixated on the Steele dossier—often falsely claiming it triggered the FBI’s investigation—to portray Trump as the victim of untrue allegations and “fake news.” Gerth essentially accepts these terms of the debate. 

Yet the focus on collusion and the Steele material has been a purposeful distraction meant to obscure the basics of the scandal: Vladimir Putin attacked the 2016 election in part to help Trump win, and Trump and his aides aided and abetted this assault on American democracy by denying such an attack was happening. Trump provided cover for a foreign adversary subverting a US election. Throughout the thousands and thousands of words Gerth generates, he downplays or ignores these fundamentals and how the media in 2016 covered them (which was shoddily). Instead, he zeroes in on the reporting related to collusion and Steele. In doing so, he offers an examination predicated on a skewed view of reality.

Gerth sets off a worrying signal in the fifth paragraph of this opus, when he writes that there was “an undeclared war between an entrenched media, and a new kind of disruptive presidency, with its own hyperbolic version of the truth.” Hyperbolic version of the truth? What does that mean? Gerth does acknowledge that the Washington Post “has tracked thousands of Trump’s false or misleading statements,” but to cast Trump’s lies as “hyperbolic” truth—as if there are two morally equivalent sides here—indicates this analysis is not going to fare well. (Trump, of course, lied repeatedly about his doings in Russia.)

Three weeks after his death at the hands of Memphis police, Tyre Nichols is finally being laid to rest. On Wednesday, friends and family gathered to celebrate Nichols’ life at the Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church in Memphis, Tennessee. Several lawmakers and civil rights advocates, including the Reverend Al Sharpton and Vice President Kamala Harris, attended the ceremony and expressed their condolences. 

“On the night of January 7, my baby brother was robbed of his passion, his talents, his life, but not his light,” said Nichols’ older sister, Keyana Dixon, through her tears. “All I want is my baby brother back. And even in his demise, he was still polite. He asked the officers to please stop. He was still the polite young man he always was. My family will never be the same.” 

Following the release of body-camera footage from the brutal beating by police, much of the world knows Tyre Nichols, a Black man, for his death. But today’s service was dedicated to remembering how Nichols—an avid skateboarder, loving son, and father to a 4-year-old boy—lived. 

“He set his own path. He made his own light,” said Nichols’ older brother, Jamal Dupree, who said he originally didn’t plan on speaking. “He was very peaceful and very respectful. I spent a lot of time away from my brother, and I wish that I hadn’t because I want to know the person everyone else knew. And now five officers made it so I’ll never be able to. But I’ll never forget my brother. I’ll never forget my Gemini twin.”

A Sacramento native, Nichols traveled to Memphis to visit his family in 2020 but, according to his mother, RowVaughn Wells, remained in the city when the pandemic hit. He eventually got a job at FedEx and settled down in the area. Wells has spoken openly since his death of an intensely close bond she shared with her son, who she said had a tattoo of her name on his arm.  

One of the little-noticed moves by President Biden in his first days in office was an executive order that required federal agencies to examine their policies and programs to identify whether and how they perpetuate barriers to equal opportunity. It was a stab at addressing structural inequality in the wake of the national protests over the death of George Floyd. At least some of that work seems to be coming to fruition. 

This week, the Treasury Department released a study looking at racial disparities in the benefits that come through the tax code—like special lower tax rates for capital gains or deductions for employer-provided health insurance. In theory, these policies are color-blind. But the Treasury report shows that they are anything but. 

Tax expenditures have become a popular tool in Congress to provide benefits to families that otherwise would be bigger targets for budget cutters. They don’t show up as program expenses the way anti-poverty programs like food stamps or TANF benefits do. But the differences are staggering. Consider TANF, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, otherwise known as welfare. Congress has refused to increase the block grant for the program since its inception in 1996, so it’s been stuck at $16.5 billion, with its real value falling by 40 percent thanks to inflation. In many states, the maximum monthly TANF benefit to a poor family with a single parent and two kids is a pittance, particularly in states where many Black people live below the poverty line. In Alabama, for instance, the maximum benefit for a family of three is just $215, a figure that hasn’t budged since 2005.

Compare the TANF budget to the loss of revenue to the government caused by the special treatment of capital gains, investment income that’s taxed at a much lower rate than ordinary wages. In 2023, Treasury researchers estimate that tax break will cost the country $146 billion, or nine times more than the entire annual TANF budget. And who are the major beneficiaries of those tax breaks? White families, who make up 67 percent of the population but claim 92 percent of the benefits. And these aren’t just white families. They’re rich white families. The Treasury report doesn’t mention it, but 75 percent of all long-term capital gains were reported by the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans in 2019. (For a good explanation of how this works, read this piece by Mother Jones editor Mike Mechanic, author of Jackpot: How the Super Rich Really Live and How Their Wealth Harms Us All.)

By far the biggest tax expenditure is the exemption for employer-provided health insurance, which will cost the country $225 billion this year. Eighty-two percent of those benefits will accrue to white people. See a pattern? You don’t have to be a woke SJW to see the injustice here. 

A few weeks ago, I was having lunch with a friend who is a former cop and a MAGA-leaning conservative. We were arguing about politics as usual, when he went on a rant about “President Ron Klain.” White House chiefs of staff generally aren’t household names, so I was impressed with his level of knowledge about the inner workings of the Biden White House. But then I realized that the familiarity was the result of the long running conservative attack on Biden’s mental fitness, a narrative that suggests Klain is the real wizard behind the curtain, running the show for a senile, geezer Democratic president. Thanks to Fox News and Republicans in Congress who regularly refer to him as “Prime Minister Klain,” Ron Klain has become a household name for a lot of ordinary Americans. 

In fact, in 2021 Fox News host Sean Hannity went on a tear about Klain, claiming that the “puppeteer” behind the “cognitively impaired” president didn’t understand ordinary people. “Shadow President and master puppeteer—so kind, so thoughtful and loving—Ron Klain…believes we smelly Walmart shoppers of America, that cling to God, guns, Bibles, and religion don’t need to worry about inflation,” Hannity said.

But Hannity and the Republicans may not have Klain to kick around much longer. The New York Times reported Saturday that the chief of staff is planning to step down in the coming weeks:

Mr. Klain has been telling colleagues privately since the November midterm elections that after a grueling, nonstop stretch at Mr. Biden’s side going back to the 2020 campaign, he is ready to move on, according to senior administration officials, and a search for a replacement has been underway.

The officials, who discussed internal matters on condition of anonymity, would not say whether a successor has already been picked or when the decision would be announced, but indicated that it would come at some point after the president outlined his agenda for the coming year in his State of the Union address on Feb. 7. Mr. Klain likely would stay around for a transition period to help the next chief settle into the corner office that has been his command post for many crises and legislative battles.

When he ran for president in 2008, the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) denounced the views of Texas evangelical minister John Hagee as “crazy and unacceptable” and rejected his endorsement for the GOP nomination. But tomorrow, former Vice President Mike Pence, who has presidential aspirations for 2024, will engage in a fireside chat with Hagee at his Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, where Pence is scheduled to appear as part of his book tour for his memoir So Help Me God.

Hagee, now 82, had been popular with Republicans in the George W. Bush administration, but by the time McCain ran, the minister’s toxic rhetoric had become too much even for most Republicans. As I wrote a couple years ago:

Among other things, he has said that gays caused Hurricane Katrina, referred to the Catholic Church as the “great whore,” called Hitler a “half-breed” Jew, and said that Hitler was part of God’s plan to get the Jews back to Israel. 

Hagee’s influence waned after the 2008 rejection by McCain, but he came back in full force with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. In person and through his organization, Christians United for Israel, Hagee pushed the new administration to go to war with Iran, which was part of his apocalyptic vision for the End Times and the restoration of Jesus Christ. Pence made a show of support by appearing at his events.

As I noted:

On Friday, for the 50th year in a row, tens of thousands of anti-abortion proponents gathered in Washington, DC, to demonstrate their commitment to “protecting the lives of the unborn.” Originally created to protest Roe v. Wade, the 1973 US Supreme Court decision that established the constitutional right to an abortion, the March For Life has long included prominent conservatives, local activists, and busloads of school children from Catholic schools, all determined to end legal abortion.

But because the Supreme Court overturned Roe in its 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, relegating the power to legislate abortions to individual states, Friday’s march—occurring just two days before what would have been the 50th anniversary of the landmark ruling—was unlike those that came before it. “While the march began as a response to Roe, we don’t end as a response to Roe being overturned,” Jeanne Mancini, the president of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund, told the crowd. “We will continue to march until abortion is unthinkable.”

With the landmark Supreme Court battle behind them, anti-abortion activists now must decide what to do next, navigating the many competing objectives among the broader movement. Are emergency contraceptives considered abortifacients or not? What about contraceptives generally? Should abortion be permitted in cases of rape, incest, or to protect the health of a mother?

Marie Miller, a protestor from Texas, tells me she won’t be satisfied until there is a national abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest. Her sign says “Save the innocent baby! Slaughter the rapist.”

— Abby Vesoulis (@abbyvesoulis) January 20, 2023

Donald Trump is not afraid to file a lawsuit, and he certainly no stranger to being sued himself. Once in court, Trump and his attorneys are prodigious filers of complaints, appeals, and protests. In fact, his legal strategy is often “more is better.” But that strategy is suddenly hitting a wall—a federal judge in Florida ruled on Thursday that Trump and one of his attorneys, Alina Habba, are on the hook for $937,000, as punishment for a lawsuit Trump brought against a host of perceived enemies, including his 2016 presidential opponent, Hillary Clinton. Trump filed the lawsuit—which named a total of 31 people and alleged racketeering and a conspiracy to hurt his candidacy by falsely accusing him of colluding with Russia—last March. It was dismissed in September, but the defendants asked to be reimbursed for their costs in having to fight it.

It’s the second time in as many weeks that Trump and Habba have been rebuked by a judge for their litigation tactics. On Janunary 9, a New York judge rejected Trump’s request that a $250 million civil fraud lawsuit, filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James, be dismissed. That judge went beyond simply denying the request and said Trump and Habba had engaged in “frivolous litigation.” In that case, however, the judge ruled that he didn’t need to punish Trump or his lawyers because they had learned their lesson. 

In the Clinton case, the judge was not so forgiving.

“This case should never have been brought,” Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks wrote in his order on Thursday. “Its inadequacy as a legal claim was evident from the start. No reasonable lawyer would have filed it.”

Middlebrooks wrote that there were many, many problems with the lawsuit Trump filed against Clinton and her supposed co-conspirators. For starters, it was poorly written—repetitive, vague, and meandering—Middlebrooks wrote. When Middlebrooks ordered Habba to clean up her argument, what he got back was basically fiction, the judge said.

In the summer of 2011, as Washington deadlocked over the once routine task of raising the nation’s debt ceiling, Kevin McCarthy, then the House GOP whip, decided to mix things up. At a closed-door caucus meeting, the California Republican cut the lights to screen a clip from the heist movie The Town, where Ben Affleck and Jeremy Renner plot a violent act of revenge.

“I need your help,” Affleck’s character says. “I can’t tell you what it is. You can never ask me about it later. And we’re gonna hurt some people.”

When the lights flicked on, Allen West, a first-term Florida congressman who had become a conservative hero after firing a gun past an Iraqi detainee’s head, rose to offer a version of Renner’s response.

“I’m ready to drive the car,” West said. 

For McCarthy, his political ambitions have always come with a catch: To get where he wanted to go, he first had to hand over the keys. His elevation to speaker of the House in January on the 15th ballot was the culmination of his life’s work and a demonstration of his powers. In nailing down a belligerent caucus, McCarthy leaned on relationships cultivated over a decade-and-half on the campaign trail, at the Capitol, and on the fundraising circuit. But it was also a reminder of the compromises he made to get there. McCarthy won the gavel, but not the authority it traditionally brings, by ceding control to the insurrectionists and austerity-obsessed hard-liners who blocked his nomination 14 times. His victory was in many ways the story not just of his own career, but of the trio of Republican “Young Guns” with whom he rose through the ranks. McCarthy is the last one of them standing, because he already surrendered long ago.

Former President Donald Trump has given many denials to writer E. Jean Carroll’s allegation that he cornered her and raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s. He’s called Carroll’s story “all fiction,” “a con job,” and “a big fat hoax.”

“I know nothing about this woman,” Trump insisted in 2019, when Carroll first made her allegation public in a New York magazine article. “She’s a liar and a sick person,” he repeated recently. “She made it up probably to sell a book or for her own ego.”

Yet perhaps the most quoted of all Trump’s defenses is his insulting insistence that Carroll is “not my type,” as he told the Hill in an Oval Office interview shortly after Carroll’s story went public. The New York Times, USA Today, and many other outlets promptly ran his insult in their headlines. The Atlantic broke down the quote’s inherent misogyny: how it reduces an “unruly woman” to a sexual commodity, then dismisses her. Carroll, meanwhile, filed a defamation lawsuit over Trump’s denials, including the “not my type” quote, saying the president smeared her when he called her a liar. 

But a newly unsealed deposition from that lawsuit has thrown Trump’s “not my type” defense into question. According to the deposition transcript, when Trump was shown a picture of himself with his then-wife, Ivana Trump, talking to Carroll, Trump misidentified Carroll as his second wife, Marla Maples. 

“It’s Marla,” Trump responded when Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan presented the photo, as he pointed to Carroll.

Florida’s ongoing war against so-called “wokeism” has reached a new low. On Wednesday, 28 presidents of Florida’s state and community colleges announced that they would seek to eliminate policies and academic programs that are viewed as forcing a “belief in critical race theory” or subjects related to intersectionality.

“Our institutions will not fund or support any institutional practice, policy, or academic requirement that compels belief in critical race theory or related concepts such as intersectionality, or the idea that oppression should be the primary lens through which teaching and learning are analyzed/ improved upon,” the Florida College System presidents wrote in a joint statement.

The alarming move comes weeks after Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered Florida’s colleges and universities to submit comprehensive reports outlining spending data on programs related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and critical race theory, prompting fierce condemnation that the move would pressure universities to simply cut such programs from their budgets. The request builds on Florida’s “Stop WOKE” Act, which aims to restrict race-based teachings in Florida schools and colleges.

Speaking to WFTV 9, Jonathan Cox, a sociology professor at the University of Central Florida, said that he stopped teaching classes on racial inequality thanks to the “Stop WOKE” Act. 

“A lot of the proponents say they want to help develop critical thinking skills and not indoctrinate them, but they’re really doing the exact opposite,” Cox said. 

Soon after Elon Musk purchased Twitter in late October, the tech mogul reinstated Donald Trump’s account, which the company had shut down permanently after Trump used Twitter to help instigate the January 6 insurrection. The twice-impeached ex-president hasn’t tweeted again yet, instead sticking to posting on his own far less influential and financially shaky Truth Social platform. But he is planning to use Twitter again soon and his presidential campaign is actively seeking his reinstatement on Facebook, according to news reports this week.

As Trump eyes the White House in 2024, his desire to once again exploit social media platforms with vast reach is no mystery. A tsunami of political advertising and misinformation deployed by his 2016 campaign on Facebook was widely credited as key to that year’s election victory. He later used Twitter not only to galvanize a delusional movement to overturn his 2020 election loss but also to distract from and dominate news cycles throughout his four years in office.

Trump’s influence is comparatively tiny via Truth Social; he has under 5 million followers there, versus more than 88 million on Twitter and 34 million on Facebook. Yet, that has not prevented him from further stirring random extremist violence with lies, deranged conspiracy theories, and demonization of his alleged enemies. Trump long ago honed this incitement technique, known to national security experts as stochastic terrorism. It is a destabilizing and ongoing danger to the nation—and one certain to scale back up with Trump’s return to mainstream social media.

Political violence provoked by Trump and extremist allies who now mimic his playbook has indeed continued ever since the attack on the Capitol and Trump’s banishment from Twitter and Facebook. Central to the phenomenon, of course, is the endless lie from Trumpworld that the 2020 election was supposedly stolen through fraud. (Many official investigations and court proceedings proved it was not, and Trump knew so.)

In the past few weeks, that false narrative apparently motivated a series of shooting attacks at the homes of four Democratic officials in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The alleged ringleader was 39-year-old Solomon Peña, a defeated GOP candidate for the state legislature, who, according to court documents detailed by the Washington Post, is accused of hiring several gunmen as well as participating in the drive-by attacks. No one was injured in the late-night shootings, but bullets that pierced through drywall at one house narrowly missed a state senator’s sleeping 10-year-old daughter.

There is something odd about the relationship between GOP fabulist George Santos and Andrew Intrater, a sophisticated and wealthy New York financier, Republican donor, and cousin to sanctioned Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. Intrater was one of Santos’ top political donors. At Santos’ behest, he invested hundreds of thousands of dollars with a firm where Santos worked. And even after this company was accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of running a Ponzi scheme that threatened Intrater’s investment, Intrater and his domestic partner continued to pour money into Santos’ political campaign. What’s the explanation for his curious and sustained support for Santos? Intrater, Mother Jones has learned, the wealthy head of a sizable investment fund—seemingly as savvy an investor as they come—has told associates that he, like others, was conned by Santos. 

The bizarre tale of Santos, the world-champion Long Island liar and conniver who’s now in Congress, has myriad subplots: his alleged criminal past in Brazil, the mysterious origins of millions of dollars he claims to have earned in the past three years, his suspicious campaign finance shenanigans, and much more. One of these involves his interactions with Intrater, who hit the headlines in 2018 for having hired Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, as a business consultant after Intrater made a whopping $250,000 contribution to Trump’s inauguration committee. Intrater ran an investment business then named Columbus Nova that had deep and direct ties to Vekselberg’s Renova Group conglomerate. In April 2018, Vekselberg and the Renova Group were sanctioned by the Treasury Department for assisting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “malign activity around the globe.” After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, Spanish authorities seized Vekselberg’s $90 million yacht at the request of the United States.

Intrater has been one of Santos’ most generous patrons. During Santos’ first congressional bid in 2020, Intrater and his girlfriend, Diana Pentinen, each donated the maximum amount of $5,800 to his campaign. In 2022, they went much further, sending over $67,000 to Santos’ campaign and political committees backing Santos. Though Intrater made donations to over two dozen other Republican House and Senate campaigns that year, Santos, by far, received the most support. Intrater also donated $100,000 to Rise NY PAC, a New York state political committee connected to Santos. (Santos’ sister, Tiffany, was paid by this PAC.) Pentinen donated to no federal candidates other than Santos. Intrater and Pentinen each also donated $60,829 to then-Rep. Lee Zeldin, the GOP candidate for New York governor. 

And there’s more: Intrater had a significant financial connection to Santos. 

In 2020 and 2021, Santos worked as the New York representative for a Florida-based investment firm called Harbor City Capital. But on his financial disclosure forms covering those years he listed no income from the company. (Santos, though, did receive some form of payment this firm.)