Belief that the 2020 election was stolen is now so common among Republican politicians that they’re asked about it in primary debates. Here are some of the candidates in the June 7 primaries who support the Big Lie.
The problem here is the word "even". Otherwise, the point is worth making. We've seen repeatedly how much more Democrats and their allies can get away with, versus Republicans- and EVEN ordinary Trump/GOP supporters.
If you don’t want to listen to the discussion please listen to the first few minutes as she lists the shootings that happened in just the last few days. Hugs
As we just completed the first weekend of June, 12 people have been killed and another 38 were injured due to mass shootings, compared to the long Memorial Day weekend that left nine dead and 60 injured. If that wasn’t depressing enough, almost 45% of Republican voters believe mass shootings are “inevitable” when living in our ‘free’ society, a stark contrast from 85% of Democrats and 73% of Independents who said mass shootings are preventable responding to the same poll.
“The first weekend of June had a greater number of mass shooting deaths in the United States than the previous three-day weekend, which ended with Memorial Day.
The tally for weekend violence through Sunday night was at least 12 killed and at least 38 injured in mass shootings, defined by the Gun Violence Archive as an incident in which “four or more people are shot or killed, not including the shooter.”
“More than 4 in 10 Republicans think mass shootings are inevitable in a “free society,” according to a new poll by CBS News and YouGov.
The survey results came on the heels of a string of mass shootings across the country that have prompted Congress to once again consider legislation on gun control.
One of the questions in the poll asked respondents if they feel that mass shootings are “unfortunately something we have to accept as part of a free society” or “something we can prevent and stop if we really tried.”
In response, 44% of Republicans said mass shootings are inevitable “as part of a free society.” Meanwhile, 85% of Democrats and 73% of Independents said mass shootings are preventable “if we really tried.””
Florida Sheriff Bob Johnson encourages residents of Santa Rosa Country to shoot first, ask questions later. Johnson says doing so would save taxpayers money. David Shuster breaks it down on Rebel HQ.
A pro-Herschel Walker political action committee called 34N22, run by failed GOP operative Stephen Lawson (AKA Little Stevie Lawson), was caught engaging in possible felony crimes by handing out gas vouchers to voters in their efforts to unseat Raphael Warnock. Ben Meiselas reports.
Republicans can not only not follow the election laws, but they are clearly OK with violating any laws or regulation to
As I said in a recent post these hyper religious anti-LGBTQ+ should be careful complaining about men with beards reading and talking with children. I again post several pictures of their savior god who is in a dress, wearing a beard, surrounded by children. What is it these people think is happening in public with children and drag performers? It is only dress up. It is not a stip and have sex show. Plus when they do the drag queen story hour again everyone is in public and they are just men in costumes reading to kids. And why do these assholes think they get to tell everyone else what they can do and can not do when it comes to raising their own children. These are the same assholes who claim no one can make them vaccinate their kids, no one has the right to demand their kids wear masks at schools. Yet they feel entitled to tell you what event you can allow your child to attend. Entitled wannabe kings of the world or as I call them big asshole jerks. Hugs
From Texas state Rep. Bryan Slaton:
The events of this past weekend were horrifying and show a disturbing trend in which perverted adults are obsessed with sexualizing young children.
As a father of two young children, I would never take my children to a drag show and I know Speaker Dade Phelan and the rest of my Republican colleagues wouldn’t either.
Protecting our own children isn’t enough, and our responsibility as lawmakers extends to the sexualization that is happening across Texas.
I promised my voters that I would stand up for their values and fight to protect Texas kids.
I was re-elected on that promise and I intend to keep it by authoring legislation to defend kids from being subjected to drag shows and other inappropriate events.
I look forward to working with my colleagues to pass this important legislation.
Slaton, who is fond of making public appearances carrying an assault weapon and wearing a belt of ammunition, first appeared on JMG in March 2021 when he introduced a bill making abortion a death penalty crime for doctors and even women who undergo the procedure.
Earlier this year he introduced a bill requiring genital exams for trans athletes in public schools.
As I reported yesterday, extremists on Saturday mobbed and attempted to enter the Dallas gay bar hosting the event that has enraged the usual haters.
Drag shows are no place for a child.
I would never take my children to a drag show and I know Speaker Dade Phelan and my Republican colleagues wouldn’t either.
Reminds me of the line in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” from Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer’s character): “Isn’t it interesting how fascists always abuse the word ‘freedom?’”
Parents have the FINAL WORD on how they raise their propertymini-mes children!!!!
Unless it’s something the most holy and righteous straight-and-narrow Rethuglicans declare to be perverted and evil, then parents absolutely CANNOT be trusted!!!!
are you going to ban Milton Berle, Flip Wilson (Geraldine), Laugh-in, The Three Stooges, all sorts of 1930s-2000’s Broadway plays, college plays, school plays, and the like to “protect” kids from “drag queens” ?
Your wife is Asian ..guess who plays female roles in Japanese and Chines plays from long ago? Yep — men.
But sure, walk around with police-killing bullets and a weapon of war on your shoulders … and watch the innocents get slaughtered, doing nothing in the legislature, except make it easier to destroy our youth …
The Arizona Senate candidate has a unique theory about why there’s a gun violence problem in the United States.
Roger Sollenberger
Political Reporter
Gage Skidmore/The Star News Network/Wikimedia Commons
Tech investor and Arizona Republican Senate hopeful Blake Masters acknowledges that the United States has a gun violence problem. But he also has a theory about why there’s a problem—it’s “Black people, frankly.”
Masters boiled the issue down in an April 11 interview on the Jeff Oravits Show podcast, telling the host that “we do have a gun violence problem in this country, and it’s gang violence.”
“It’s people in Chicago, St. Louis shooting each other. Very often, you know, Black people, frankly,” Masters clarified. “And the Democrats don’t want to do anything about that.”
It’s unclear why Masters—who has pushed the baseless “great replacement” conspiracy theory narrative—felt compelled to single out Black people. Moments earlier in the interview, during a discussion about Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings, Masters told Oravits that “most Americans just, you know, just want to stop obsessing about race all the time,” adding that “the left’s biggest tool in their toolkit is just to divide people on the basis of race, and that’s really messed up.”
Republicans frequently cite urban gang violence, most often in Chicago, in attempts to tap out of the gun control debate. While their redirections are often as misleading as they are cliche, those officials aren’t always as forthright as Masters about the racial undertones.
But Masters, whom the white nationalist website VDARE fêted last year as an “immigration patriot,” was quite clear about his vision of two Americas.
After pinning gun violence on gangs and Black people—and saying, falsely, that Democratic administrations “don’t want to do anything” about gang shootings—the Stanford-educated libertarian went on to complain to Oravits that gun control efforts target “law-abiding people like you and me.”
“When they ban ‘ghost guns’ and pistol braces, that’s all about disarming law-abiding people, like you and me, that’s what it’s about,” Masters said, referencing government efforts to crack down on the surge in privately made, untraceable firearms. “They care that we can’t have guns to defend ourselves.”
Masters—a Bitcoin evangelist who routinely hawks automated surveillance technology developed by his benefactor, billionaire tech mogul Peter Thiel—claimed that “it’s pretty rare” for homemade firearms to show up in criminal activity. But his information might be outdated.
Ghost guns aren’t just built and owned by technocrats, to be appreciated as physical instantiations of political theory. They’re also on the rise among criminals, including in gang activity, according to officials with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, as well as fresh police data VICE published this week, which documents a 90 percent increase in seizures last year.
The day of the Oravits interview, President Joe Biden announced a rule change to address the ghost gun problem. In response, Masters tweeted a photo of his own “ghost” gun kit, claiming that he would be a “felon” under the new rule if he made “another one just like it today.”
That’s not accurate.The Biden administration has not banned those weapons, which don’t have serial numbers and can be 3D-printed at home. The new rule doesn’t make it illegal to build your own gun; it applies to people who sell gun kits. Those sellers are now required to become licensed firearms dealers, run background checks on buyers, and include serial numbers on their kits.
The rule also targets violence in urban areas—a sore point for Masters—where ghost guns are multiplying.
Last year, police seized more than 225 of the weapons in New York City, along with 300 seizures in Baltimore and 455 in Chicago, CBS News reported. And government data shows that law enforcement agencies reported recovering 20,000 suspected ghost guns in criminal investigations last year alone—nearly as many seized over the previous four years combined.
A Masters campaign spokesperson did not reply to a request for comment.
Back in the interview, Masters—who has likened federal campaign disclosure laws to Kristallnacht—veered into conspiratorial territory.
Democrats “don’t like the Second Amendment,” he said, because “it frankly blocks a lot of their plans for us”—an unhinged, fact-free statement that liberal officials have cooked up a plot to physically force conservatives to comply with some unarticulated maleficent regime, but have been bayed by fears that a constitutionally endowed populace will shoot them if they try.
Masters also tossed out misleading red meat gripes about crime in West Coast cities Los Angeles and San Francisco, where Masters lived much of his adult life before relocating to Arizona ahead of his Senate bid.
Those cities, he told Oravits, have “legalized crime,” claiming that “you can’t get arrested if you smash someone’s window and take a purse or an iPhone.”
It’s not immediately clear what Masters was referring to, but the riff appears to be a nod at Prop 47, which California voters passed at the state (not city) level nearly eight years ago. The Prop 47 coalition included Democrats along with libertarians like Masters, who wanted to roll back felony punishment for lesser offenses, including property crimes like shoplifting.
Prop 47 didn’t “legalize crime,” but reclassified certain felonies as misdemeanors. But after the recent rise in property crimes such as “smash and grab” robberies, most Californians support tougher sentencing laws, including overhauling parts of Prop 47.
“They talk about crime but I find it crocodile tears,” Masters said, an apparent reference to Democratic outrage over an unending drumroll of domestic massacres. “Because if they were actually tough on crime they would get serious about gang violence.” (Masters himself did not put forward a solution to gang violence in the interview.)
Masters, 35, is a fairly new name in GOP politics, but he has benefited from powerful friends—including his mentor, Thiel, who threw $10 million into a super PAC backing his primary bid.
Thiel’s support went a long way to landing a recent endorsement from former President Donald Trump, who officially blessed Masters on Thursday. It wasn’t a surprise—Trump has a score to settle with Masters’ top opponent, Arizona attorney general Mark Brnovich, who resisted Trump’s pressure to invalidate his state’s 2020 election results.
Masters is fiercely anti-tech while being fiercely pro-tech, backs a national abortion ban, claims Democrats want to “import a million people every year to replace Americans who were born here,” has said that the media and big tech “conspired to manipulate the 2020 election”—which he claims “Trump won”—and calls the gender pay gap a “left-wing narrative.”
(The “new right” crowd also counts another Trump-endorsed Thiel protege: Ohio Senate candidate JD Vance.)
Masters won Trump’s endorsement on Thursday, nine days after an 18-year-old used a legally purchased semiautomatic rifle to slaughter 19 elementary school students and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas.
“Blake will fight for our totally under-siege Second Amendment, and WIN!” Trump wrote in his announcement. An hour later, Biden called on the country to support an array of gun control measures in a primetime national address.
Rarely are Republicans so explicit about their bullshit counterarguments. But please read this whole report, because there’s more to this guy. What Masters says is false and deranged, frankly
— Roger Sollenberger (@SollenbergerRC) June 6, 2022
Explosions shook the city of Kyiv on Sunday morning after Russia launched its first attack in the capital in over a month. CBS News foreign correspondent Chris Livesay joins CBS News’ Ali Bauman with more on the attack.
This state cannot adequately fund their schools now and just wasted billions on a border stunt that failed. But they will do anything other than talk about how easy it is to get a gun in their state to shoot school kids. Hugs
Patrick said he wants police in as many Texas schools as possible to have bulletproof shields before the fall. He’s asked other state leaders to move around money in the state budget to make it happen.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, center, has asked state officials to move $50 million in the state budget to provide bulletproof shields for school police officers before the start of classes in the fall. Credit: Sergio Flores for The Texas Tribune
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Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick called on state leaders Friday to move around $50 million in the state budget to buy bulletproof shields for school police officers following a mass shooting last month at an elementary school in Uvalde where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers.
“I am asking the Speaker of the House to join the Senate members of the Legislative Budget Board and me next week in a budget execution letter to move $50 million to either the Governor’s Office or Department of Public Safety (DPS) to begin buying these bulletproof shields as soon as possible so every member of school law enforcement has one,” Patrick said in a statement Friday afternoon. “This will begin the funding necessary to eventually provide bulletproof shields to all law enforcement.”
Patrick’s request would require the approval of House Speaker Dade Phelan and other House members of the state’s Legislative Budget Board. But because lawmakers have already appropriated the money for the two-year budget cycle, it would also require letters from the agencies where the money would be taken certifying that the transfer would not negatively impact their functions.
Patrick said he would send a draft letter Monday and asked Phelan to act quickly. Phelan’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
State Republican leaders have already signed off on twosimilar transfers worth about $1 billion this year to send money to Gov. Greg Abbott’s costly border security initiative, Operation Lone Star, which was running out of funds. Patrick, who approved those transfers, said the same should be done to provide bulletproof shields to school police officers.
“We have used transfer authority this year to spend billions on the border. We can surely find this amount of money to better protect our kids,” Patrick said, adding that there are “several sources in the current budget that can be tapped to provide this funding.”
Patrick did not name those sources.
During the last of these budget transfers in April, DPS, one of the agencies that Patrick is suggesting should be given money to pay for the bulletproof shields, was forced to relinquish $160 million of its approved budget to keep Operation Lone Star going. Without that transfer, leaders for the Texas Military Department, which has assigned 10,000 service members to the mission, would have been unable to continue the operation.
Patrick said the state should start by providing bulletproof shields to all school police officers and then expand to all law enforcement officers. The state could experience supply-chain issues in obtaining the shields, but it should push to get “every quality shield we can find.”
“This straightforward solution can begin right away,” Patrick said. “If all responding law enforcement had bulletproof shields last week, lives may have been saved.”
Patrick’s plan continues the trend in the state’s Republican leadership of responding to mass shootings by pushing for more teachers to be allowed to use firearms in schools and funding school police. But the law enforcement response to the shooting has been roundly criticized after state and law enforcement officials gave inaccurate information in the initial aftermath of the shooting that has since been debunked.
Police responding to the shooting took more than an hour to engage the gunman who was inside a classroom shooting at children and teachers. The police chief for the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, Pete Arredondo, determined police were dealing with a “barricaded suspect” and that the children were no longer in danger, state officials said. The leader of DPS later said it was the “wrong decision, period.”
Patrick said that if every police officer in the state had a bulletproof shield, “their ability to respond to an active shooter situation would be greatly enhanced.”
Texas lawmakers have responded in a similar manner in the past. After a gunman with a high-powered rifle ambushed and killed five Dallas police officers in July 2016, state lawmakers responded by allocating $25 million in the state budget for police agencies across the state to buy bullet-resistant vests that could withstand rifle ammunition.
Last session, after two DPS troopers were fatally shot through a windshield in their patrol car, lawmakers agreed to foot the bill to bulletproof windshields in DPS patrol cars, Patrick said.
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