Crooked Media - What A Day: Can't bind a Fetterman

 -Sandy Smith, North Carolina GOP House nominee, crushing it

Tuesday’s primary elections were a big, clarifying moment for the stakes of November’s midterms. Much of it is good news, but also: Hold onto your butts. 

• The most important development by a longshot is that Pennsylvania Republicans nominated Doug Mastriano as their gubernatorial candidate. Mastriano is a live torpedo aimed right at the hull of American democracy. He's is an insurrectionist who was in Washington on January 6, a Big Lie promoter and fascist QAnon conspiracy theorist who tried to overturn Pennsylvania’s presidential election in 2020 and has essentially promised to do it if he’s governor in 2024 and Pennsylvania votes blue again. 
   
• Crucially, he’d have the power to follow through: In Pennsylvania, the secretary of state certifies election results, and the governor hand picks the secretary of state. Mastriano is very beatable, but almost everything rides on the Dem nominee, Joshua Shapiro, beating him. No pressure, Josh!
   
• Other than Mastriano, hardcore fascists had a rough night. The GOP’s other insurrectionist statewide candidate in Pennsylvania, Kathy Barnette, lost the Senate nomination, and the Trump-endorsed candidate, Dr. Oz, is stuck in a too-close-to-call head-to-head with hedge-fund guy Dave McCormick, which may be headed for a mandatory recount. Whoever wins will have the good fortune of running against John Fetterman, who crushed his opponents to win the Democratic Senate nomination. To save face, Donald Trump himself is already out there encouraging Oz to declare victory and run his own Big Lie campaign if he actually loses in the end.

But wait, there’s more:

• Trump’s most visible outright defeat last night came in North Carolina, where incumbent Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), the Trump-endorsed fascist, lost his primary to state-Sen. Chuck Edwards (R-NC). That’s a blow to Trumpism but a bigger reminder that the Republican Party—which rained hell on Cawthorn for exposing the Washington GOP’s moral deviancy—can still wield enormous influence over its nominees. That's how we know they’re fully on board with Trump, fascism, and the Big Lie. 
   
• Trump loyalist Lt. Gov Janice McGeachin (R-ID) lost her bid to unseat Gov. Brad Little (R-ID), despite having Trump’s Complete & Total Endorsement™. Little (who’s an election denier himself and no one’s idea of a moderate Republican) trounced McGeachin, who endeared herself to the MAGA movement by seizing Little’s power while he was out of state and using it to rescind his pandemic mitigation rules. The GOP’s secretary of state nominee Phil McGrane narrowly fended off two Big Lie fascists from taking over the state’s election apparatus. 

Elon Musk’s increasingly right-wing politics and his bungled, lawless attempt to execute a hostile takeover of Twitter are quickly merging into one messy story. The latest accelerant seems to be Twitter’s board of directors, which says it will enforce the terms of Elon Musk’s purchase agreement. Musk has been trying to weasel out of that agreement for several days, and even tried to pressure the Securities and Exchange Commission to step in to stop the deal on his behalf. But if any party to the deal violated securities law, it's Musk, who has taken this precise moment to brandish his new Republican bona fides. Musk now says he’s going to vote Republican this year because Democrats are “overly controlled by unions.” (The GOP: It’s a worker’s party now!) He also said “Democrats have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican. Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold.” It’s enough to make one suspect that he’s flaunting his hatred for Democrats because he suspects he's in trouble with the law and wants to preemptively discredit any legal action the government takes against him as partisan abuse of power. Just like Donald Trump.

• Attorney General Tish James (D-NY) has launched an investigation of the social-media companies that Buffalo mass murderer Payton Gendron used to "plan, promote, and stream his terror attack."
   
• Republicans on the Federal Elections Commission have blocked an investigation of the over half-a-billion dollars the Trump campaign funneled through a shell company set up by Jared Kushner and his former campaign manager Brad Parscale. 
   
• Former tea party Rep. Raul Labrador (R-ID) will likely be Idaho’s next attorney general, logging the Idaho far right’s only big victory Tuesday. 
   
• The Trump administration unlawfully retaliated against then-Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman, the twin brother of impeachment witness Alexander Vindman, because of their familial relationship, and because he also provided evidence to the impeachment inquiry.
   
• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she thinks there “might be a need for indictment” after Abbott Nutrition’s baby formula killed two infants, and its contaminated plant had to be shut down, setting the stage for the ongoing nationwide formula shortage. 
   
• The Kansas Supreme Court has upheld the Kansas GOP’s congressional map, which puts Rep. Sharice Davids (D-KS) in jeopardy. 
   
• Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) hopes to rewrite history by advancing legislation to “expunge” Donald Trump’s impeachments, which wouldn’t actually reverse the fact that the disgraced former president was impeached twice. 
   
• Martin Shkreli has been released from prison early, in plenty of time for his keynote address at the 2024 GOP convention.

The Biden administration seems to have let its brand spanking new anti-disinformation task force fall victim to (wait for it...) right-wing disinformation. Just three weeks after the Department of Homeland Security announced the formation of the Disinformation Governance Board, the administration has “paused” the board’s activities, caving to a coordinated right-wing campaign to deceive the public about the board’s purpose and smear its director, Nina Jankowicz, who has since resigned. The new body was devised to counter foreign disinformation campaigns meant to flood the southern border with immigrants and undermine U.S. elections, which on its own should’ve prepared the administration to anticipate and preempt right-wing lies: After all, the right benefits from such subversion efforts. But not only did the administration miss the opportunity to frame its own actions, and discredit predictable smears, it refused to defend itself, ceding the field to right-wing propagandists who savaged it as a “Ministry of Truth.” It’s just another demonstration of the fact that President Biden should repurpose the information strategy he used to to warn the world of looming Russian aggression in Ukraine against Orwellian liars here in the U.S., who benefit from legacy institutions that are cowed by an increasingly authoritarian American right wing.

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