I want to thank Ten Bears for the link, his link will be below because WordPress messed up blogging like I do to the max. But for those who do not follow Ten Bears he posts grand links that you can choose to follow or not, and he labels them well enough that some of them get my interest, like the one below. In this one it is about how the die hard center / lean right democrats are not giving up just because the entire public seems to want Kamal a more progressive candidate. No they insist the public really wants a center / leans right one like Old Joe used to be in the old days. Maybe a split ticket of Kamal and a Joe Manchin type is what they are hinting. What they say is right wingers don’t lose hope at the convention a centrist will rise up to challenge her and win over whelming support. These guys just don’t get the 1980 – 1990s are gone. The right had it last brief gasp of power, but the country is moving forward, not backward to the 1950s. Hugs. Scottie
Many pundits are sad today because the Democratic Party won’t have a mini-primary to choose Joe Biden’s replacement on the presidential ticket. But how do Democrats feel? Morning Consult has done some polling:
A Morning Consult survey conducted after President Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign found that 65% of Democratic voters support Harris to lead the party’s ticket, more than double the level of support she had in a hypothetical look at the same question late last month following the first presidential debate.
Democrats and Democratic leaning voters were given a list of 10 names of possible Democratic candidates for president instead of Joe Biden and asked who they would most like to see win the Democratic nomination for president.
Vice President Kamala Harris tops the list with 45 percent support, California Governor Gavin Newsom receives 12 percent support, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg receives 11 percent support, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer receives 7 percent support, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear each receive 4 percent support, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly receives 3 percent support, and Maryland Governor Wes Moore, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, and Colorado Governor Jared Polis each receive 1 percent support.
Vice President Kamala Harris raised $81 million in the first 24 hours since announcing her bid for president, her campaign said, a record-breaking showing as Democrats welcomed her candidacy with one of the greatest gushers of cash of all time.
Future Forward, the flagship super PAC blessed by President JOE BIDEN, received $150 million in new commitments from major Democratic donors in the 24 hours since the president announced he would step aside from the race, Elena Schneider reports.
The fundraising boon … gives VP KAMALA HARRIS, Biden’s endorsed successor, an enormous boost as the Democratic Party reorients to a new nominee.
Sounds as if Democrats are very satisfied with Harris as the candidate. And that should be no surprise. Go to FiveThirtyEight’s collection of 2024 Democratic primary polls. When you get to the bottom of the list, keep clicking “Show more polls.” Long before Biden dropped out, in every national poll that asked respondents about a field without Joe Biden, Kamala Harris won, usually by double digits. When Harris’s lead was only in single digits, it was because her closest rival was Michelle Obama, who has made it clear she’ll never run for office.
Here are three typical polls, all posted on one day late last month (click to enlarge):
Survey USA: Harris by 27 over a field including Newsom, Buttigieg, Whitmer, Shapiro, and Wes Moore. Morning Consult: Harris by 10 over a field including Newsom, Buttigieg, Whitmer, Moore, Beshear, Cooper, Pritzker, and Moore. Data for Progress: Harris by 21 over a field including Newsom, Buttigieg, Whitmer, Pritzker, Shapiro, Cory Booker, and Amy Klobuchar.
In a field without Biden, Kamala Harris is the Democrats’ consensus choice. Kamala Harris has always been the Democrats’ consensus choice.
But bros like Ezra Klein aren’t satisfied. They still think we Democrats don’t know what we want, and need to have a bro-devised process to help focus our tiny minds:
I think there’s a middle path here that Democrats should consider. None of the top-tier candidates are going to challenge Harris for the nomination. But what about some second- or third-tier candidates? Let a few up-and-comers make their case against Donald Trump. Let’s see some CNN town halls, some multicandidate forums. Nobody is going to go negative on each other here. Give the country a reason to watch a lineup of young Democrats, most of all Harris, make their cases against Trump day after day for the next few weeks.
Think of it not as a contest. Think of it as an exhibition. Maybe the people who’ve endorsed Harris can participate, too. She’s going to need a vice president. So maybe Gretchen Whitmer and Shapiro and Kelly and Beshear should be up there, too…. Maybe a little strategic ambiguity about what these candidate forums and voter town halls are would be good.
Harris vs. “some second- or third-tier candidates”? You mean the way Joe Biden ran against Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson? We all derived a great deal of civic nourishment from that process, didn’t we?
And what does Klein mean when he writes, “Think of it not as a contest. Think of it as an exhibition,” and then “Maybe a little strategic ambiguity about what these candidate forums and voter town halls are would be good”? Beyond the obvious (We can’t allow you simple folk to know what your big-brained betters are doing), is Klein arguing that this will be described as an exhibition but will actually be a contest, because donors who want another candidate will urge writers like Klein to magnify any Harris slip-ups and promote a donor-friendly alternative?
Klein goes on to say nice things about Harris, and says she’d almost certainly emerge from his process as the nominee. (Though you never know — he writes, “If she really isn’t up to it, [Democrats] need to know that now.”) He describes this as good publicity for the party (though I’d remind him that a few excellent speeches by the presumptive nominee would also be good for the party, especially if other party stars show up in support of her).
But it’s clear that if you’re happy about the party’s consolidation around Harris, Ezra Klein thinks you’re uninformed and need educating. I worry that patronizing bros like this — and not just the ones in the media — will choose not to vote for Harris, ‘cuz she’s a girl and a bunch of girls and girlymen decided to make her the nominee by acclamation, without contests and brackets and March Madness and a Final Four. We need to outvote Republicans, but we may also need to outvote America’s Ezra Kleins.
So the other day I was so tired I couldn’t function. Ron got home after driving straight through to get home that night, so I was up until midnight after getting up at 3 am the morning before. So I was in no shape to blog. So I spent the day with my hubby after he got home from being on a long trip to bury his brother and seeing his family. Then I got up this morning at 3 am, and after feeding the cats I went on the MS site I always check first. I have been sharing and helping others on the site and have started to get quite a few doing private chats with me. They say I am kind, caring, and nice to talk to … I will take it.
But just before I was to get off there and go to my blog, a guy showed up blaming his once … unwanted … blow job from a man overturning his entire life and now he is anti gay people, rainbow flags, pride, and any showing of gays in society because they are all abusers and child molesters. He went on at length about how abusive and dysfunctional gay people were, how they were flaunting themselves in an abusive way in society, so on and so on. Remember he is in a site for males abused as children sexually and in other ways.
Anyone who knows me knows I can not resist such shit. He threatened right in his first post that if people said he needed therapy, he was bi or searching, or that he was a bigot then he was gone. I was like OK. I answered every paragraph he wrote, telling him he needed help professionally on some, telling him that because he says he now had thoughts of sex with men that he might be seeking and should again talk to professionals about it, as that is not the way sexual assaults work. One forced blow job doesn’t make a man who only thought of women before gay. I called out his bigotry when he posted how gays were now in schools with rainbow stickers to make kids gay. I even outright asked him if he was a troll. We will see. But I have been there on that site since basically 3 am to now nearly 1 pm. I am going to skip posts and go right to comments. Again like always if I missed your comment because it dropped off the list please resubmit it, I will do my best to reply. Hugs Scottie
The conservative blueprint envisions ‘a biblically based’ definition of marriage and wants to protect adoption agencies that only work with Christians
Rebecca McCrayWed 24 Jul 2024 07.00 EDTShare
In 2021, Liz and Gabe Rutan-Ram decided to take the next step toward growing their family and applied to foster a child. After identifying a three-year-old in Florida who they hoped to ultimately adopt, the Rutan-Rams turned back to their home state of Tennessee to start training to become foster parents.
But their plans quickly fell apart when the Christian state-funded foster care placement agency informed them by email that they “only provide adoption services to prospective adoptive families that share our belief system”. The Rutan-Rams, who are Jewish, were out of luck.
“There’s already emotions playing into wanting to be a parent, and then to have us attacked personally just made it that much harder,” Liz Rutan-Ram told the Guardian.
The Rutan-Rams sued the Tennessee department of children’s services, arguing that a state law permitting private agencies to refuse to work with prospective parents on religious grounds violates the Tennessee constitution’s equal protection and religious freedom guarantees. The case will soon go to trial.
The predicament facing the Rutan-Rams could become more common under a second Trump administration. Project 2025, a 900-plus page blueprint for the next Republican administration and the policy brainchild of the conservative Heritage Foundation, contains an explicitly sympathetic view toward “faith-based adoption agencies” like the one that rejected the Rutan-Rams, who are “under threat from lawsuits” because of the agencies’ religious beliefs.
Project 2025’s Adoption Reform section calls for the passage of legislation to ensure providers “cannot be subjected to discrimination for providing adoption and foster care services based on their beliefs about marriage”. It also calls for the repeal of an Obama-era regulation that prohibits discrimination against prospective parents and subsequent amendments made by the Biden administration.
Though Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from the project, his campaign’s own 16-page policy agenda echoes many of its goals, and his ties to the plan’s architects are well-established. In Milwaukee last week, the Heritage Foundation’s role in the Republican national convention was on full display, both on welcome banners at the airport and in the millions of dollars invested in the event itself. Following Trump’s announcement of his vice-presidential pick, the organization’s president, Kevin Roberts, said he was “good friends” with JD Vance, and effusively declared him “a man who personifies hope for our nation’s future”. Vance has previously said there were “some good ideas” in Project 2025.
Project 2025 is divided into four broad pillars, the first of which is to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children”. A conservative vision of family pervades the document, and the authors call on policymakers “to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family”.
The plan envisions upholding “a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family”. It would remove nondiscrimination roadblocks governing faith-based grant recipients, such as the agency that denied the Rutan-Rams. The authors argue that “heterosexual, intact marriages” provide more stability for children than “all other family forms”. In addition to calling for the passage of the Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act, which would allow adoption and foster care agencies to make placement decisions based on their “religious beliefs or moral convictions”, it also calls on Congress to ensure “religious employers” are exempt from nondiscrimination laws and free to make business decisions based on their religious beliefs.
To the Rev Naomi Washington-Leapheart, a professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University and a queer parent, the image of family portrayed by the policy agenda is blatantly exclusionary. The Christian nationalist plan rejects unmarried parents, single parents and LGBTQ+ families.
A billboard in Milwaukee, part of a campaign by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, to raise awareness of Project 2025, that ran during the Republican convention. Photograph: Americans United for Separation of Church and State
“The definition of family according to Project 2025 leaves a lot of folk out,” Washington-Leapheart told the Guardian. “This blueprint really delegitimizes the kinds of families that are day in and day out raising children, paying taxes, contributing meaningfully to society.”
The Rutan-Rams have become the face of a campaign led by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, who are representing them in their lawsuit, that seeks to shed light on what they call the Christian nationalist goals of Project 2025. As part of the campaign, visitors to the Republican convention last week may have seen billboards reading “You gotta keep ’em separated,” in reference to church and state.
Project 2025’s vision is already law in a number of states. The Rutan-Rams are battling a Tennessee law, modeled after similar laws in at least 10 other states, that permits faith-based foster care and adoption agencies to exclusively work with prospective parents who share their beliefs.
Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and author of a book titled How to End Christian Nationalism, contends that the scale and reach of Project 2025 pose a far greater danger to democracy than a patchwork of state laws.
“What’s different about Project 2025 is the sweeping nature of its plan,” said Tyler. “It would really rewrite the federal government and change policies in so many different areas at once in a way that would hasten our journey down that road to authoritarian theocracy.”
The Holston Home for Children in Tennessee, Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation did not respond to requests for comment.
Tyler worries that Project 2025’s deliberate erosion of the separation between church and state, a founding principle embedded in the first amendment to the US constitution, will get a helping hand from the US supreme court, which has handed a series of victories in recent years to Christian activists. She specifically mentioned the 2021 decision in Carson v Makin, which struck down a Maine law that banned the use of public funds for religious schools. It was “an earthquake of a decision that a lot of people didn’t really pay attention to that has really opened the door to government funding of religion”, said Tyler.
The threat of a theocracy doesn’t seem far-fetched to Washington-Leapheart.
“Project 2025 says that religion is a permanent institution that should influence American life,” said Washington-Leapheart. “That alone communicates the kind of arrogant way Christianity is situated as an inevitability. And it’s not. I say that as a Christian person who is firmly grounded in my faith. It is not an inevitable part of my identity, it is a choice I make every day.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican leaders are warning party members against using overtly racist and sexist attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris, as they and former President Donald Trump’s campaign scramble to adjust to the reality of a new Democratic rival less than four months before Election Day.
At a closed-door meeting of House Republicans on Tuesday, National Republican Congressional Committee chairman Richard Hudson, R-N.C., urged lawmakers to stick to criticizing Harris for her role in Biden-Harris administration policies. (snip-more)
=====
Monthly headlines are turning into daily headlines:
Monday was recorded as the hottest day ever globally, beating a record set the day before, as countries around the world from Japan to Bolivia to the United States continue to feel the heat, according to the European climate change service.
Provisional satellite data published by Copernicus on Wednesday showed that Monday broke the previous day’s record by 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.1 degree Fahrenheit).
Climate scientists say it’s plausible that this is the warmest it has been in 120,000 years because of human-caused climate change. While scientists cannot be certain that Monday was the very hottest day throughout that period, average temperatures have not been this high since long before humans developed agriculture. (snip-more)
A 7-month-old tree kangaroo peeked out of its mom’s pouch at the Bronx Zoo and here is the video
The second baby of a tree-dwelling kangaroo made its public debut this week in New York, poking its pink head head out of its mom’s furry white pouch. (snip-click the Video hyperlink just above the title)
We discussed this a bit here a few weeks ago, about Sinclair sending talking points to all their stations, so that local reporters had to report that as real news. Here’s some more, from yesterday, that I didn’t get to until late.
Eugene Ramirez, the lead anchor of Sinclair’s national evening news broadcast, resigned in January over concerns about the accuracy and right-wing bias of the content he was required to present on air, three sources told Popular Information. The sources — one current and two former Sinclair employees — spoke to Popular Information on the condition of anonymity, citing concerns about the potential professional repercussions of speaking out about Sinclair’s editorial processes. Ramirez’s show, which continues to air with a new host, appears on at least 70 of the hundreds of local television affiliates owned by Sinclair.
One of the primary issues that prompted Ramirez’s resignation was the requirement to include at least three stories produced by Sinclair’s Rapid Response Team (RRT) on a nightly basis. Sinclair’s RRT is a group of four reporters who work out of Sinclair’s national headquarters in Maryland. The group’s output is prodigious. A Popular Information review found that between January 1 and July 4 this year, the RRT published at least 775 stories.
Most of the RRT’s stories are short and aggregate information from other sources. Sinclair publicly claims that the RRT and other components of its national newsgathering operation, known as The National Desk, provide a “comprehensive, commentary-free look of the most impactful news of the day.” But a look at the RRT’s stories over the course of the year shows that the group frequently produces pieces that have more in common with right-wing agitprop than journalism.
Often, the articles summarize press releases or social media posts from Republican politicians or other right-wing groups. Recent headlines include:
53 parent groups confront Biden education secretary over new Title IX rules: ‘Disgraceful’
GOP senator says Fetterman proves how ‘radical’ Dems have become on Israel: ‘Nuts’
Trump PAC launches new ad hitting Democrats on border: ‘Joe Biden does nothing’
Biden mocked by US Oil and Gas Association for touting gas price drops: ‘You’re welcome’
Elon Musk rips VP Harris for ‘lying’ about Trump’s abortion stance
Through July 4, 2024, the RRT has produced 147 stories this year that portray Democrats in a negative light and just 7 stories that portray Democrats positively. Over that same time period, the RRT has produced 57 stories that portray Republicans positively and 22 that portray Republicans negatively.
Many of the pieces produced by the RRT that do not explicitly mention Republicans or Democrats (or do so only in passing) still promote a right-wing agenda, highlighting stories that portray immigrants or LGBTQ people negatively.
These are the stories that Ramirez was required to present each night. Sinclair’s headquarters sent a list of four stories produced by the RRT to the team that produced the evening news broadcast. At least three had to be read on air. One current employee at Sinclair’s headquarters described the RRT team as “the right-wing propaganda arm of the national digital operation.”
The RRT is run by Julian Baron, a 2021 graduate of Syracuse University. Despite having little professional experience (and none outside of Sinclair), Baron’s title is “Chief of Staff for News.” In that role, Baron serves as the right-hand man for Scott Livingston, Sinclair’s Senior Vice President for News.
According to a fourth source, who currently works at Sinclair’s headquarters, Baron and the RRT are also responsible for creating the “Question of the Day,” which around 200 Sinclair affiliates are required to include in their broadcasts. (The questions appear on Sinclair’s website without a byline.) Recent questions include:
Are you concerned violent criminals are crossing the border?
Do you think former House Speaker Pelosi deserves some of the blame for Jan. 6 riot?
Do you think some of President Biden’s family members broke the law in their business dealings?
Do you think the Veterans Administration should be involved in health care coverage for illegal immigrants?
Do you think the FBI is protecting the Biden family?
The reporters on the RRT team who work under Baron are Jackson Walker, Ray Lewis, and Kristina Watrobski. Walker was hired by Sinclair less than two months after graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in May 2023. Walker spent his college years writing for The College Fix, a national right-wing student publication. On X, Walker frequently highlights when his stories are circulated by Libs of TikTok, an anti-LGBTQ activist. Walker retweeted a post by Libs of TikTok that highlighted one of his articles and described the LGBTQ community as a “child mutilation cult.” Lewis is a 2023 graduate of Rutgers University. Prior to joining Sinclair, he was an intern at the New York Post, a right-wing tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch. Watrobski is a 2020 graduate of SUNY Plattsburgh and previously worked for a Sinclair affiliate in Albany.
Baron, according to three sources, has the authority to assign and publish RRT articles without any editorial oversight. In addition to appearing on the evening news broadcasts, RRT’s articles are automatically syndicated to hundreds of local news outlets, where they are given the imprimatur of mainstream media brands, including NBC, ABC, and CBS. According to two of the sources who spoke to Popular Information, this frequently caused rancor among the news staff of Sinclair affiliates, who were concerned about the posting of biased or inaccurate content on their websites.
Sinclair defended Baron’s work but acknowledged that local affiliates have objected to stories produced by the RRT on numerous occasions. “The Rapid Response Team has published several thousand stories,” Sinclair spokesperson Jessica Bellucci told Popular Information. “On perhaps one or two dozen occasions we have gotten questions from a station about those stories and had a healthy dialogue – sometimes leading to the stories being changed.”
Despite confirming the conflict between the RRT and local affiliates — and other aspects of Popular Information’s reporting — Bellucci also told Popular Information that “the statements made in your email are flatly untrue.” She suggested that Popular Information may be “misinforming us about having sources” and was only pursuing the story “in pursuit of your sixteenth minute of internet acclaim.” Bellucci accused Popular Information of “attacking our reporters for doing their job, reporting on stories that may be unpopular.”
The only specific statement Bellucci disputed was the characterization that Baron and the RRT work “outside of the normal editorial process.” Bellucci did not dispute that the Baron and the RRT team operate independently. Asked to clarify what other aspects of Popular Information’s reporting, if any, are “untrue,” Bellucci did not respond.
Don’t interrupt them
According to the sources who discussed Sinclair’s editorial process on the condition of anonymity, reading stories produced by the RRT was not the only issue that made Ramirez’s role in the evening broadcast untenable. Sinclair’s national leadership frequently booked guests from far-right groups, including Moms for Liberty and the Heritage Foundation. When Ramirez challenged the dubious claims made by these guests, he was admonished and instructed not to interrupt them. Sinclair’s leadership, including Livingston, emphasized that many of Sinclair’s affiliates were not in big cities, and the content of the broadcast had to reflect the sensitivities of those viewers. Representatives of progressive groups were almost never booked as guests.
The evening broadcast was also required to include “packages” produced by Sinclair’s Washington, D.C., bureau. Some of these packages had a strong right-wing bias or made unsubstantiated claims. Of particular concern were packages by Sinclair National Correspondent Kayla Gaskins. For example, after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in March 2023, Gaskins produced a piece questioning whether the bank was “too ‘woke’ to function.”
This package featured an interview with Bernie Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot, who said the bank’s downfall was the result of “[n]ot hiring the brightest people but hiring people based on what they look like or where they fall on the social register” and were too busy “playing the woke game” to head off problems. Marcus presented no evidence to support his claims.
The piece also featured Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and Congressman James Comer (R-KY) making similarly unsubstantiated claims, clipped from Fox News, blaming the bank’s collapse on “woke” politics or DEI initiatives. After featuring on-camera comments by Marcus, DeSantis, and Comer, Gaskin notes in the last five seconds of the piece that Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) blamed former President Donald Trump’s deregulatory policies.
Another piece by Gaskin in April 2023 falsely claimed that “children in Washington state will soon not need their parents’ permission to switch genders.” But legislation, which became law in July 2023, is limited to homeless youth, and “doesn’t change the state’s medical consent laws.” In Washington state, “those under age 18 don’t generally have the right to make medical decisions without parental consent.”
The law deals exclusively with parental notification when a young person arrives at a homeless shelter. Previously, the shelter was generally required to notify parents within 72 hours. Under the new law, when a young person is seeking reproductive or gender-affirming care, the shelter has the option of instead contacting “the state Department of Children, Youth and Families, which could then attempt to reunify the family if feasible.” The purpose of the law is to encourage vulnerable homeless youth, who may be estranged from their parents, to obtain shelter rather than living on the street.
Gaskin’s piece uncritically quotes Landon Starbuck, president of the anti-LGBTQ group Freedom Forever, claiming the “state is stepping in and medically kidnapping kids from their parents.” This echoed a false claim, circulated by Donald Trump Jr. and others online, that the law allowed “the state to TAKE CHILDREN AWAY FROM PARENTS that do not consent to their child’s gender transition surgeries.”
On the second day of the Republican National Convention, I made my way back to Milwaukee’s symphony hall to attend a town hall hosted by the conservative parents’ rights group Moms for Liberty. This wasn’t my first Moms for Liberty event—I’ve attended the annual summits for the past two years. Back in 2022, Betsy DeVos, who served as former President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education, delivered the line that got the loudest applause. “While I know that everything we did was with the interest of kids in mind and policies that would really give as much power back to the states and local communities as we possibly could,” she said, “I personally think the Department of Education should not exist.”
At the time, that statement felt a little bit edgy—like DeVos was saying the quiet part out loud. But two years later at yesterday’s event, many of the panelists expressed that same sentiment as a a foregone conclusion. “The fundamental problem that we have in the United States was the creation of the federal Department of Education,” Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY) told the crowd of maybe 400 or so mostly white women. In his remarks, erstwhile GOP presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy said, “We’re not just going to reform the Department of Education, it means we’re going to get there and actually shut it down.”
Does that mean that a ragtag group of moms single handedly turned the abolition of a behemoth government agency into a run-of-the-mill conservative talking point? Not exactly. On that issue and many others, Moms for Liberty has had a major assist from powerful conservative groups that share their goals—and are shaping the Republican agenda for 2024.
Founded in 2021 by three former school board members in Florida, Moms for Liberty rode the rising tide of anti-mask sentiment in the tumultuous year after schools were closed during the pandemic. The group’s leaders capitalized on the backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement after the murder of George Floyd. In fact, Moms for Liberty was one of the most prominent early groups to criticize the teaching of ant-racist curriculum in schools, which they incorrectly referred to as “critical race theory.” The group also vociferously opposed LGBTQ-inclusive lessons, and its members led campaigns to rid classrooms and school libraries of books deemed inappropriate.
Over time, Moms for Liberty grew in both membership and influence. Today, the group counts 130,000 members across chapters in 48 states. The organization groomed some members to run for local school boards, gradually expanding their influence throughout communities. Last year, all of the Republican presidential candidates, including former president Donald Trump, spoke at their annual conference in Pennsylvania.
In its marketing, Moms for Liberty comes off as a group of like-minded people, mostly women, who all happened to come together because of a shared concern for children. Founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Deskovich, the website says, are just a couple of “moms on a mission to stoke the fires of liberty.” But as I’ve previously reported, the organization’s connections to the Republican party run deep. Its conferences have been sponsored by the GOP training group the Leadership Institute and the conservative powerhouse think tank the Heritage Foundation. Earlier this week, after the RNC Heritage Foundation event, Moms for Liberty national director Catalina Stubbe told me that her group is “very close friends” with Heritage, which was one of the sponsors of today’s event, and whose president Kevin Roberts spoke on one of the panels.
Considering the group’s cozy relationship with Heritage, the RNC town hall panelists’ focus on abolishing the US Department of Education shouldn’t be surprising. Project 2025, the 920-page conservative policy roadmap that Heritage spearheaded, calls for the complete elimination of the Department of Education, along with the codification of parents’ rights laws similar to those in Florida, which strictly limit teachers’ use of LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum and books.
After the event, I spoke to Lydia Dominguez, a Moms for Liberty member running for school board in Clark County, Nevada. Dominguez, the mother of two teenage boys, told me that she believed schools “are being oversaturated by national agendas.” What kinds of national agendas? I asked. “They’re having CNN in the classroom,” she said. “They’re pushing national topics such as the transgender topics, sexualized content.”
————— She believed schools “are being oversaturated by national agendas…They’re having CNN in the classroom,” she said. “They’re pushing national topics such as the transgender topics, sexualized content.” —————
Monica Kepes serves as the secretary of a Moms for Liberty chapter in Washington County, Wisconsin. “I think the big bureaucratic institutions are instituting a lot of stuff that comes down through the education system,” she said. “I think the bigger you get, the more power there is, the more chance corruption and all that kind of stuff.”
At Moms for Liberty’s upcoming 2024 summit, which will take place next month in Washington, DC, it seems unlikely that the group will be able to muster a repeat performance of the star-studded speaker roster from last year. So far, this year’s list appears to be a grab bag of not especially famous ultra-conservative pundits, C-list comedians, and culture warriors. One reason for this lackluster lineup could be the fallout from a series of scandals in 2023. A group from a chapter in Kentucky posedfor a photo with the white nationalist group the Proud Boys. (Those members were later removed from the group.) Last year, a chapter leader in Indiana quoted Hitler in a newsletter. On the last evening of the annual summit a few months later, Justice, the co-founder, said in a speech, “One of our moms in a newsletter quotes Hitler…I stand with that mom!”
Butthe most damaging setbackcame in late 2023, when Christian Ziegler, chair of the Florida GOP, was accused of raping and illegally filming a woman who had been involved in a sexual relationship with him and his wife, Bridget Ziegler, a founding member of Moms for Liberty. As I wrote at the time, the situation was especially awkward because Ziegler helped craft Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” parents’ rights law, which forbids teachers in the state from talking about same-sex relationships. “The irony is crazy because you have this woman and her husband who are so concerned with preventing children from hearing anything that doesn’t totally align with their values,” one Florida mom told me at the time. “And then it’s like, I’m having to explain a three-way to a 12-year-old this week.” (Christian Ziegler has been cleared of rape charges; in March, the Florida state attorney’s office declined to criminally charge him for illegally filming the sexual encounter because of insufficient evidence.)
Unsurprisingly, no one mentioned the sex scandal (or any of the other ones) at the town hall event. But on one panel, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis took a victory lap about a bill Ziegler helped to create. “It used to be…you didn’t have to worry about your kid going to kindergarten and being told that they should change their gender,” he said. “We put the kibosh on that in Florida—we said, ‘We are not going to be indulging in things like gender ideology in our schools.’” The crowd whooped with approval.
The Republican Party seems to agree. Its official platform, released last week, calls for funding cuts for schools that embrace “woke” policies like LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum. This serves as a reminder that even though Moms for Liberty’s star appears to have dimmed over the past year, the reverberations from its movement will be felt for years to come. Moms for Liberty, cofounder Tina Descovich told the crowd, “is here to fight, fight, fight, and win, win, win.” She paused. “And winning we are.”
I did not post the full X / tweets about Kamal nor about Pete because they are exceedingly racist, bigoted and crude, a typical maga response to anything not straight cis white. I am sick of these people that tRump enabled and the sooner we beat tRump soundly and put his people back under their rocks they crawled out from for good the better for the US. But seriously if this racist bigotry is the best they can do, we already won. Hugs. Scottie
——————————————————————————————————–
For a lot of conservatives, all they can say about Kamala Harris are gross, sexist comments.
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks with D.L. Hughley highlighting how the Biden-Harris Administration has taken historic steps to advance economic opportunity by improving access to housing, creating jobs and investing in small businesses as part of her nationwide Economic Opportunity Tour on Thursday May 16, 2024 at Discovery World in Milwaukee, Wis.Photo: Jovanny Hernandez / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK / USA TODAY NETWORK via IMAGN
Republican Missouri secretary of state candidate Valentina Gomez just went on an unhinged rant attacking Vice President Kamala Harris on X, where she called her a “little wh*re,” as conservatives posted misogynist memes and jokes about Harris.
“Kamala Harris slept her way to the top, and Tulsi Gabbard already destroyed and exposed her in 2020. Kamala is just another DEI hire, and President Trump is going to eat her alive,” she said in a video.
She could become president. Here’s a closer look at her history on LGBTQ+ stances.
“Kamala Haris is a little wh*re,” Gomez wrote when posting her video. [Update: The X post was put on “limited” visibility by X on July 22, 2024, hours after this article was published.]
The comment regarding Harris allegedly having sex to advance her career, alongside the “little wh*re” comment, reflects recent bouts of misogyny against the vice president in an attempt to discredit her. Harris is the first woman to ever be vice president of the United States and could be the first woman president of the country.
The claim has also notably been spread by far-right figurehead Matt Walsh, who said on X, “Kamala Harris got her start in politics by sleeping with Willie Brown. She became Vice President because Biden needed a non-white female on the ticket… She’s made a career out of begging for hand outs from powerful men. A thoroughly unimpressive human being.”
These claims refer to a short relationship Harris had with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown 30 years ago, before he became mayor. There is no evidence that she only had a relationship with him to bolster her career. In a Reuters fact check, both Harris and Brown disputed that this relationship led anywhere and instead regarded it as largely irrelevant.
Other users attacked her as a “side chick” of Brown, referring to the fact that Brown was technically married during his time dating Harris. However, Brown was separated from his wife, making this claim misleading at best.
Other conservatives, though, just posted gross memes about Harris that sexualized her, showing both sexism and misogynoir, or the combination of sexism and racism directed at Black women.
This is seen with one post comparing Harris to the “Hawk Tuah” girl, someone known in a viral meme about engaging in fellatio.
One X user continued these claims, referring to her as “arm candy” for reality TV show host Montel Williams. The two briefly dated in 2001, however Williams has said since that he has “great respect for Sen. Harris.”
Right-wing commentator Konstantin Kisin referred to her as a “vagina of colour,” and another user referred to her and out Transportation Secretary – and possible running mate – Pete Buttigieg as the “blowjob ticket,” reflecting both misogyny and homophobia.
One political cartoonist made a comic of Harris giving fellatio to the Washington Monument, while another user made a post suggesting Harris wants to perform sexual acts on enough voters to get elected.
Another user documented multiple accounts making memes of Harris engaging in sexual acts to various different presidential logos.
Once prominent and now largely forgotten alt-right icon and “ex-gay troll” Milo Yiannopoulos made a post encouraging people to rely on him for objectification of Harris.
The attacks against Harris have been reflected in merchandise made about her. One shirt being sold says “Joe and the Hoe Gotta Goe,” a slogan that’s parroted in other right-wing merchandise that, while not officially endorsed by the GOP, has nevertheless been prominent among the Republican voter base
Gomez’s claim about former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (I-HI) attacking Harris is rooted in an old political debate where Gabbard criticized Harris’s history as California’s attorney general, pointing out her thousands of convictions of people who used cannabis. Additionally, Gabbard criticized Harris’s handling of people on death row, alleging that Harris could have done much more to protect innocent individuals.
This claim reflects the widespread public concern about Harris’s history as a prosecutor with many likening the candidate to a corrupt police officer. This is further reflected in criticism about her denying a trans woman gender-affirming care while in prison. She has since walked back on this decision.
Nevertheless, the misogyny reflected among right-wing criticisms largely ignores any critiques of her policy positions and instead aims to reflect on her sexual and romantic history. This neglects her substance as a person and a candidate and swipes aside any debates about her merit as a candidate. Notably, these types of posts are rarely directed at male candidates.
Moms for Liberty co-founders Tina Descovich and Tiffany JusticePhoto: YouTube clip
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks with D.L. Hughley highlighting how the Biden-Harris Administration has taken historic steps to advance economic opportunity by improving access to housing, creating jobs and investing in small businesses as part of her nationwide Economic Opportunity Tour on Thursday May 16, 2024 at Discovery World in Milwaukee, Wis.Photo: Jovanny Hernandez / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK / USA TODAY NETWORK via IMAGN
Scottie's Playtime 