Trump had an ad calling for a “unified Reich”. So I’m making fun of that, natch. (Sorry for the different format it’s not a permanent change.) SEE ME LIVE: http://www.traecrowder.com
As President Joe Biden and some Israeli officials call for a viable post-war plan for Gaza’s governance and reconstruction, Fareed argues Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hasn’t offered one because continuing the war against Hamas will allow him to stay in power and avoid a looming prosecution.
At first I thought it was his fragile ego preventing him from admitting how low his crowd but then someone pointed out that one of the taking points of why tRump had to have won the 2020 election was he had much bigger crowds than Biden. Yes these people think crowd sizes at rallies means you win the most votes. They are setting the stage to do violence and try to take over the government when tRump loses the 2024 election. Hugs. Scottie
Former President Donald Trump repeatedly boasted about the crowd size attending Thursday’s political rally in the Bronx, as his custom. However, a local New York evening news report from ABC7’s Jim Dolan revealed a different story about how many people attended and who actually made up the crowd. B-roll of the event shown to viewers during Dolan’s report painted a remarkably different picture than what Trump boasted about regarding crowd size.
So you are bragging that in a city of 1.4 million people, less than 2% of the population came out to support him.
HOWEVER, the actual fact is, the venue was capped at 3,500 people. And it is estimated that there were only about 3000 in attendance; or .2% of the population.
DOWN IN HISTORY: Former President Trump vowed to "save" deep-blue New York City as 25,000 supporters descended on his rally in the Bronx, a town not necessarily known for its kindness to Republicans. How he shattered political norms: https://t.co/wEon8QccB5pic.twitter.com/SxcIvrWebN
When MAGA tries to tell you that 25,000 people from the Bronx showed up at a park that holds 3,500. Notice how no pics from Trumps people are aerial shots? This was taken while he was on stage speaking. Share with all please. Shut their lies down. pic.twitter.com/GXQXUM5t1S
— Jeffrey Levy 🇺🇸 🇮🇱 🌊 (@jeffreymlevy) May 24, 2024
DISINFORMATION ALERT: Numerous left leaning accounts on @X are sharing this image of Trump’s Bronx rally. This image was taken at 11: 09 AM EST, and the rally officially started at 6:00PM. with Trump taking the stage at 6: 30 PM. EST. NYC marshall’s estimated that there were… pic.twitter.com/DiOlL2shhY
So, my feeling is that what this is about, besides soothing Trump’s ego, is to build the narrative that there is significant support for Trump in the area. Then, when he loses the election, it fuels the “stolen” story. “How could he have only gotten 3000 votes in the Bronx? 25000 showed up for his rally!!”
This kind of nonsense seems petty, but it’s not. Push back at it.
More generally, it reinforces the idea that evidence can’t be used to support a proposal. The only thing that matters is the politics/theology/status of the person making the point.
This is a handy site: https://blog.lime.link/visu… It allows you to visualize different crowd sizes. The larger crowds are at venues with known attendance capacities.
Far-right activist Ammon Bundy speaks in front of the Ada county courthouse in downtown Boise, Idaho, in April 2021. Photograph: Darin Oswald/AP
Ammon Bundy poses in Emmett, Idaho in 2018.
Photograph: Kelsey Grey/AP
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At least 66 members of an anti-government group founded by far-right militia figure Ammon Bundy have attempted to win local positions of influence in the Republican party in Oregon, the Guardian can reveal.
The candidates stood for Republican precinct committee person (PCP) slots in three central Oregon counties in this week’s elections, with some facing no opponent and thus winning their positions by default. The role of PCPs includes electing the executive of the county-level GOP apparatus.
The move is part of what appears to be a coordinated attempt to capture the local Republican party infrastructure, following a far-right strategy of “entryism” into more mainstream political bodies.
The electoral fate of all 66 candidates is not yet clear.
Evidence for these PCP candidates’ membership in the People’s Rights Network (PRN) group People’s Rights Oregon 5 (PRO5), and the coordinated nature of their political campaign, comes in part from dozens of hours of their conversations on a radio network set up by and for PRN members. These conversations were intercepted and recorded by an amateur radio operator who provided them to the Guardian.
That source’s name is being withheld due to fears of retaliation from members of the organization, prominent members of which have paramilitary ties.
Other recorded conversations include planning and evaluation of protests against Covid-19 vaccines and masking rules; stories of members’ armed interactions with intruders; and a discussion of the possibility that a contact serving in the military might be able to “scrounge up” some supplies for the group.
The revelations about the group’s highly organized participation in the Republican primaries raise questions about the extent of anti-government infiltration in the Republican party at the grassroots level, both now and in the immediate future.
PRO5’s strategy resembles the “precinct strategy” as coined by Arizona GOP activist Dan Schultz and promoted by Maga figures including Steve Bannon and Trump himself. That reflects a “shared instinct on the far right post-2020”, according to Devin Burghart of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR), an organization that researches far-right extremism.
“They want to take over the local party apparatus and change it from the ground up,” he said.
People’s Rights, from pandemic to politics
Bundy founded PRN in April 2020, leveraging burgeoning Covid denialism and his own prominence in far-right circles after leading an armed standoff with federal law enforcement at Oregon’s Malheur national wildlife refuge in 2016.
In the first wave of the Covid pandemic, PRN attracted notoriety for protests against lockdown measures, mask mandates, and vaccines.
Ammon Bundy poses in Emmett, Idaho in 2018. Photograph: Kelsey Grey/AP
The group spread nationwide, and was organized by state, with each state under a state assistant reporting to Bundy, and states subdivided into areas, each under an area assistant. PRO5 is Oregon’s fifth area.
PRO5 has about 1,400 members. Burghart said it is “one of the most successful areas in terms of organization”.
He said: “One of the things separating them from other chapters is the early pivot to politics, which meant they no longer had to rely on Covid denialism, or the succession of conspiracy theories other chapters have tried to mobilize.”
That early pivot resulted in successes in Deschutes county Republican primaries in 2022, with People’s Rights members being elected to enough PCP roles there that they were able to take control of the Deschutes county Republican central committee. PRN PCPs then elected fellow members Scott Stuart as chair, and Connie Whelchel vice-chair.
Stuart – who as a prominent PRO5 activist extensively promoted false conspiracy theories about Covid and the 2020 election, and showed up to a Fourth of July parade in Redmond, Oregon in a Confederate uniform and waving a Confederate battle flag – was now in charge of the county Republican apparatus.
Now PRO5 appears to be rolling out the same strategy in neighboring counties in PRO5’s territory.
Radio network
People’s Rights communicates via radio networks that sometimes involve localised groups organized around particular cities or localities, and sometimes the general membership of the entire group.
The radio network the group uses to communicate incorporates inexpensive handheld radios whose normally short, line-of-sight range is extended by repeaters. Members are thus able to communicate over an almost 50-mile (80km) radius with simple devices. The group started building out its repeater network in July 2020 – in the midst of the pandemic – and added further repeater stations regularly until August 2023.
While repeaters for public benefit are often maintained by amateur radio clubs, nonprofit organizations or public safety agencies, these are set up for the exclusive use of People’s Rights affiliates.
The group prevents unwanted users from transmitting via their repeaters by setting their own radios to send a subaudible tone that identifies them as members of the group to the repeater device. But many of the handheld radios in use by the group use the General Mobile Radio Service (GMRS) system. GMRS operators are legally required to register with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
The recordings capture the group’s weekly, members-only radio meetings, where members often sign in using their FCC-assigned GMRS callsigns, and where views are aired and plans are hatched regarding Covid-19 restrictions, school boards and local Republican politics.
Registrations are public and searchable on a dedicated FCC website, where individual names and addresses are listed along with call signs that person is licensed and required to use on specific radio service, and FCC registration numbers (FRNs) assigned to individuals.
FCC records thus allow individuals in the PRO5 radio network to be identified by their callsign.
Candidates for power
By cross-matching FCC records of callsigns used in PRO5 radio meet-ups, the Guardian was able to corroborate the source’s information that at least 34 PRO5 members ran for PCP positions in Deschutes county; 12 ran in Crook county; and at least 20 in Jefferson county.
In some precincts they were assured of success.
In precinct 2 of Jefferson county, for example, where 17 PCP slots are available, at least 12 of 18 candidates are identified as PRO5 members; in precinct 11, the only candidate is Paul W May, a People’s Rights member; and in precinct 21, all four candidates for four available slots are members.
With only 49 candidates running for positions in Jefferson county, and PRO5 guaranteed at least 21 committee seats, they will likely constitute a powerful voting bloc for central committee positions when votes are tallied.
One PCP candidate in Deschutes county, where PRO5 already dominates the local Republican apparatus, is BJ Soper, a longtime “patriot movement” figure who has participated in armed standoffs with government agencies, and who has a long list of ties to paramilitary groups.
In 2015, Soper served as a “standing guard” at the Sugar Pine Mine standoff in southern Oregon, where Oath Keepers, Three Percenters and the Soper-organized Pacific Patriots Network (PPN) rallied around miners whose unapproved construction work had drawn enforcement notices from the Bureau of Land Management.
PPN was also present in the early stages of the Malheur standoff, and although Soper initially disapproved of the Bundy-led occupation of the US Fish and Wildlife Service facility at the refuge, at the end of the first week of the standoff PPN issued a “call to action” to “secure a perimeter around the wildlife refuge, its occupiers and the citizens of Harney county”.
Months later, Soper was reportedly running weekly firearms training with another group, the Central Oregon Constitutional Guard.
During the pandemic, Soper rallied to Bundy’s standard, and himself criticized Covid restrictions, mask mandates and vaccines, and wrote on Facebook in 2020 that Osha’s extension of social distancing into 2021 was “a political coup meant to destroy this country”, adding: “I have not worn a mask yet and I refuse to do so at any point. I’ve not social distanced myself at any point since this nonsense has started.”
The same year he became PRN assistant for all of Oregon except area 5, which encompasses Redmond, his city of residence.
Burghart, the IREHR extremism expert, said, “he’s been quite adept at walking the fine line of legality”, adding that Soper “has learned from Bundy’s successes and failures” and has played a central role in PRO5’s successful organizing.
Radio recordings
Recordings of their radio conversations indicate that while the PRO5’s earliest years were dominated by Covid-19 denialism and protests against vaccine and mask mandates, they soon reflected the group’s growing preoccupation with local Republican politics.
As early as the summer of 2021, however, members were being encouraged to involve themselves in local politics.
In a 11 July weekly meeting which included Soper, PRO5 member and current Deschutes PCP candidate Mark Knowles mentioned that there had been “a lot of interest in precinct committee seats in Deschutes county, and told listeners that with a one page application – you could be appointed and have a real say in Deschutes Republican politics”.
Increasingly, speakers at the weekly radio meetings issued reminders of upcoming Republican meetings and social events, including a 22 September 2023 Deschutes Republican Party golf tournament, and a 24 March Deschutes county Republicans dinner at the Bend Elks Club.
After PRO5’s successes in Deschutes county in 2022, their radio meetings become more and more intertwined with local Republican party business. On 12 March 2023, Brian Gatley of Redmond told the Redmond “Little Group of Patriots” radio meeting that “I was down in Bend all afternoon for the [Deschutes Republican Party] meeting,”.
PRO5 member Scott Stuart was elected chair of the Deschutes Republicans after their success in fielding PCP candidates in 2022.
Later in the same meeting, another member, Redmond’s LoriLark McBride, suggested a high level of internal organization in PRO5 directed at the capture of the local Republican apparatus.
“John [McBride] and I attended the PCP training and it was great.”
Both McBrides later stood for election in Deschutes county precinct 17.
The Louisiana Senate passed legislation Thursday afternoon to forbid school staffers from talking to students in grades K-12 about sexual orientation or gender identity. House Bill 122 passed 28-7, with all Senate Republicans and two Democrats in support. It now heads to Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican who has claimed without citing evidence that some teachers aim to indoctrinate students with “radical” ideas. Landry is expected to sign the measure into law.
Sen. Beth Mizell, R Franklinton, said the bill’s intent was not to harm LGBTQ+ students but to make schools a “safe space” where parents know that staff won’t discuss sensitive topics with their children. The lawmaker behind HB 122, Rep. Dodie Horton, R-Haughton, also authored a bill to require all public schools and universities in the state to post the Ten Commandments. The Senate overwhelmingly approved that measure last week.
Last year Democratic former Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards vetoed Mizell’s anti-trans bill and Horton’s first attempt at a “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Mizell is an occasional guest on hate group leader Tony Perkins’ podcast. Horton has said she tried again on her “Don’t Say Gay” bill upon the encouragement of her pastor.
Louisiana lawmakers pass 'Don't Say Gay' bill banning classroom talk about sexuality, gender https://t.co/MEh80h9RkP
All this is going to do is fuck up queer kids more than they already are by society, and maybe that’s what they want. Cruelty is always the point. They want to punish queer kids if they dare to come out.
They were very upset when LGBT kids started thriving and everyone around being all functional and stuff, they are ddesperate to traumatize and invest in bullying a whole other generation for them to use to claim America needs complete Christonazi rule.
So I live in Louisiana and I work in a public university. The Ten Commandments will really go over well on my campus, which has a very high student population of Muslims, and, as far as I can tell, almost no Jews. I should post the three versions of the Ten Commandments on my office wall. In Hebrew. Which, yes, I can read.
Don’t say gay. We really are going backwards. I graduated from high school in 1979, and no one ever said anything about gay, except when taunting the faggots and calling them, well, faggots. Like me. I hate this state and have already told my husband that I am leaving upon my retirement in two years.
Similar to you, homophobia was strong in my remote town in northern Alberta. I graduated in 1977, when nothing positive was ever said about gay except ‘faggot’ and ‘homo’ and the french versions fifi’ and ‘tapette’. No wonder I came out at 33, who would want to admit to anyone, or themselves, they were gay in that environment? That’s why is so depressing to see this anti-gay movement today.
I attended the third largest high school in the country, with 6000 students. And it was still a horrible place to be gay. I didn’t come out until I was 27 after a heterosexual marriage and divorce.
Yup, I tried hard to be straight, I had many girlfriends and at least three of them would have married me. Living a lie for so long just destroyed me psychologically. Straight people just don’t understand what we’ve been through. Hugs madknits!
Apparently the “compromise” is allowing things to exist, as long as the people upset by them never have to confront them. Of course, that won’t last very long, since the only way to be certain they’ll never encounter anything upsetting is to eliminate it entirely (which in the case of LGBTQ+ existence requires ignoring the reality that it will always exist, no matter how hard they try to stamp it out.)
They take our important LGBTQ phrase ‘safe space’ and appropriate it for their homophobe parents. Plus, she has the audacity to say “the bill’s intent was not to harm LGBTQ+ students”!
If Trump reoccupies the White House, his religious right puppet masters will demand that he appoint a Secretary of Education who’ll enact these “don’t say gay” requirements nationwide and at all public school levels. Plus, “forced outings” by schools to parents.
Get out your “If Trump Wins” bingo card and be prepared to mark the square described above.
Republicans can not win on their ideas and polices because people don’t like them, they don’t want their policies, they don’t like republican ideas. Republicans are basically the white party trying to rig the system so when they lose being a majority they can still be in charge for decades longer. So to get that minority rule, they have to cheat. Wow. Hugs. Scottie
Florida wants local elections officials to use data collected by far-right activists, some of whom falsely believe the 2020 election was stolen, to potentially remove people from the state’s voter rolls, according to emails obtained by NBC News.
The network of activists has been collecting voter data in 24 states, and on May 3, one of them emailed the Florida-specific information to a top state election official. It included the names of roughly 10,000 voters from across the state the group insists should be examined for potential removal from the voter rolls, a process commonly referred to as list maintenance.
The state’s chief elections official then forwarded that information to county election supervisors and asked them to “take action.” The “concerned citizen” who sent the May 3 email was Dan Heim, a longtime Florida-based activist who has made unfounded voter fraud claims across the state.
Read the full article. As you’ll see at the link, anti-gay hater Cleta Mitchell has a role in all this. In 2022, Florida secretary of state Cord Byrd was exposed for flying a QAnon flag from his boat.
Florida is using a fraud-hunting tool used by the right to look for voters to remove from the rolls https://t.co/6tf0tA3xan
"Cord Byrd, who cursed at Black Democratic lawmakers" will oversee Florida elections. His wife is on the state Board of Education, helping ban math text books and implement "Don't Say Gay". And "…the couple was seen flying a QAnon flag on their boat." https://t.co/2eATIr5CFV
It still blows my mind that voter rolls can be culled/purged with impunity in the US.
Again, most other western nations use tax returns as the voter roll registration, no need for this farcical nonsense. They also allow for same day registration with proper ID.
I know why it’s done, precisely for the reason the GQP are doing it now, but damn!
Will the news media still pretend that Florida is a swing state?
Even if there were enough people willing to vote Democratic, the amount of suppression and gerrymandering that has already taken place (to say nothing of that which is planned for future elections) has been enough to convince the Republicans there that they can safely overtake even Texas with their partisan batshittery.
Doesn’t help that the state Democratic party is arguably the most incompetent in the nation. They can’t stop running Charlie MIA Crist for governor for fucks sake!
Trump seems convinced that if he wins another four years in the White House, state prosecutors will still be waiting for him on the other side of his term — ready to put him on trial, or even in prison, just as they are now.
To avoid such risks, the former and perhaps future president of the United States wants Congress to create a very specific insurance policy that would help keep him out of prison forever, two sources familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone. Trump vaguely alluded to this idea last week outside his New York criminal hush money trial, when he said he has urged Republican lawmakers to pass “laws to stop things like this.”
In recent months, the sources say, Trump has spoken to several GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill, attorneys, and other associates about the possibility of Republicans passing legislation in a second Trump term that would shield former presidents (i.e. Trump) from non-federal prosecutions.
Aimee Dilger / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images
Ninety percent of LGBTQ+ youth in the U.S. say politics have negatively impacted their lives in the past year, according to a new report from LGBTQ+ suicide prevention organization The Trevor Project.
On Wednesday, researchers at the nonprofit unveiled their sixth annual survey on mental health among LGBTQ+ young people. Drawing on responses from more than 18,000 LGBTQ+ people between the ages of 13 and 24, the survey correlated anti-LGBTQ+ political issues with negative mental health outcomes for youth.
Recent politics had a negative impact on 90% of LGBTQ+ youth, researchers found, and 39% said they or their families had considered moving to another state due to new anti-LGBTQ+ policies or laws. (That number rose to 45% of trans or nonbinary youth.) Nearly half of respondents aged 13-17 said they had been bullied for being LGBTQ+ in the past year.
In turn, the report found that 39% of all respondents had seriously considered suicide in the past year, a drop of just 2% since the Trevor Project’s 2023 survey. That rate was higher for trans youth, and significantly so for young people of color. Only 50% of respondents who wanted mental health care were able to access it last year, the report also found.
At the same time, researchers stressed that young people are not naturally disposed to poorer mental health — rather, LGBTQ+ youth are “placed at higher risk because of how they are mistreated and stigmatized in society.” Respondents whose family, school, and/or community supported their identity, and who did not experience anti-LGBTQ+ bullying or discrimination, reported significantly lower rates of suicidal attempts or ideation.
“Once again, this year’s survey shows that considering or attempting suicide is not uncommon among LGBTQ+ young people,” said Dr. Ronita Nath, Vice President of Research at The Trevor Project, in a statement accompanying the full report this week. “However, many of the contributing risk factors for suicide are preventable, and often rooted in victimizing behaviors of others. The results of this survey clearly identify a need for adults and allies to create more affirming environments for LGBTQ+ young people, and better support them in being their true selves.”
The new report also looked at the impact of having a supportive school environment, finding that youth who had access to LGBTQ+-affirming spaces — especially gender-affirming spaces for trans youth — generally reported better mental health and lower rates of suicidal thoughts. An analysis of hate crime data in the Washington Post in March found a spike in intimidation and assault against LGBTQ+ students in K-12 schools between 2021 and 2022. Analysts found that the increase was more pronounced in states where lawmakers had introduced new policies restricting LGBTQ+ speech in schools.
In a lengthy interview with The Atlantic, Radcliffe talked about his relationship — or lack thereof — with the Harry Potter author.
“With such striking numbers and families literally wanting to uproot their homes to seek safety, lawmakers must seriously reconsider the real and damaging impact that their anti-LGBTQ+ policies and rhetoric create,” said Janson Wu, Senior Director of State Advocacy and Government Affairs, in the Trevor Project’s statement this week. “No ‘political victory’ should be worth risking the lives of young people.”
Since last year, the Trevor Project’s leadership has faced criticism for alleged mismanagement and labor violations related to the national 988 suicide prevention hotline. Last summer, members of the Trevor Project employee bargaining unit said they were laid off in an act of alleged union busting, while outside workers contracted for the crisis line said they were abruptly let go despite the now-permanent program’s expansion. In April, the Trevor Project laid off another six percent of its staff, leading some to comment that the internal mood was increasingly “gloomy.”
“The crisis workers are the lowest paid people in the organization […] which just baffles me because, you know, they’re doing the literal work of the mission of the org,” one anonymous source told the Washington Blade last month.
If you are in crisis, please call, text, or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.
According to a new report, anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes in K-12 schools have quadrupled in U.S. states that have laws restricting the rights of LGBTQ+ students.
A Washington Post analysis of FBI data on anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes taking place in K-12 schools and on college campuses, published on March 12 found that anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes “serious enough to be reported to local police” more than doubled across the country in recent years. The Post found that while an average of 108 anti-LGBTQ+ school hate crimes were reported between 2015 and 2019, that average rose to 232 between 2021 and 2022. According to FBI data, the most common hate crimes reported at schools were intimidation, simple assault (assault where no weapon was used), and vandalism.
However, this rise in school hate crimes was more pronounced in the 28 states that have enacted policies restricting LGBTQ+ students’ self-expression and/or limiting how teachers can talk about gender and sexuality in school. In these states, reported anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes on K-12 and college campuses more than tripled from an average of 28 per year between 2015 and 2019 to an average of 90 between 2021 and 2022.
As the Post points out, this increase is even more staggering when you remove college campuses and look at the anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes in K-12 schools only. In states that have enacted restrictive laws, there were more than four times the number of anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes across elementary, middle, and high schools, per year, from 2021 to 2022, compared with the years 2015 to 2019.
Although it’s only March, the American Civil Liberties Union is currently tracking a whopping 478 anti-LGBTQ+ bills across the U.S. this year, with 190 of those bills targeting student and educator rights.
Gerald Declan Radford, 65, initially claimed he shot Lay in self-defense. Prosecutors believe that Declan was the aggressor and was motivated by Lay’s sexual orientation.
Meanwhile, nonprofits that work with LGBTQ+ youth have reported an increase in crisis calls. According to the Post, The Trevor Project received over 500,000 crisis contacts during the fiscal year ending in July 2023 compared to the 230,000 the group received the previous year, while the Rainbow Youth Project received over 1,400 calls to its mental health crisis hotline per month in 2023 compared to 1,000 per month in 2022. According to the Rainbow Youth Project, calls from Oklahoma to the group’s hotline more than tripled after details about Nex Benedict, the trans Oklahoma teen of Choctaw ancestry who died the day after three older girls reportedly beat them in a school bathroom, became national news.
“Young people will say, ‘My government hates me,’ ‘My school hates me,’ ‘They don’t want me to exist,’” the Rainbow Youth Project’s founder and executive director, Lance Preston, told the Post. “That … is absolutely unacceptable. That is shocking.”
Ammon Bundy poses in Emmett, Idaho in 2018.
Photograph: Kelsey Grey/AP————————————————————————————–
Scottie's Playtime 