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The GOP midterm ticket is like a wide-open book with detailed depictions of the Trumpian hell that awaits America if Republicans win. Folks, it’s not gonna be fun if that happens.
- The primary goal is to fill the government with as many Trump loyalists, who will help Donald Trump himself or his anointed successor steal future elections, as possible. Pennsylvania’s GOP gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano is a cornerstone of that objective, but it also includes myriad House and Senate candidates, including Georgia GOP Senate candidate Herschel Walker, who as recently as this week said he didn’t know if Joe Biden had been legitimately elected.
- As important as any one enemy of democracy is the sheer number of them. There will be secretary of state elections in 24 states this November, and would-be election thieves are on the ballot in 14 of them, including the key swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Michigan.
- Want a sense of what it’ll mean if career election professionals yield to Trump loyalists at scale between now and the midterms and beyond? Check out this alarming TPM profile of Ken Matta, a career Arizona election official hounded out of his job by Big Lie peddlers and adherents (people like Ginni Thomas, it turns out). He believes what happened to him has happened or will happen to others like him around the country and “election deniers are bound to fill those gaps.”
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What they plan to do with stolen power is if anything more horrifying than the planned theft.
- We’ve known for a long time that Mastriano wants to abuse his power to unilaterally invalidate elections that Republicans lose and then criminalize abortion. His older fantasies are somehow darker still. The master’s thesis Mastriano wrote in 2001, when he was a major at the Air Force Air Command and Staff College, is a lurid depiction of an America ruled by a left-wing leader who rolls out the red carpet for “alternate” religions and “aberrant sexual conduct” (that is, homosexuality), and can only be stopped by a heroic military coup. Very cool stuff.
- Walker, too, wants to ban all abortions. "There's no exception in my mind," he told reporters. Trump-endorsed Michigan state senate candidate Jacky Eubanks says she wants to ban birth control altogether. “Sex ought to be between one man and one woman in the confines of marriage,” she told the website Church Militant. (!!!) For his part, the famously celibate Trump, reportedly called on Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, “to be arrested and tried for treason and potentially executed,” if you're wondering what kind of things might preoccupy him if he returns to power.
President Biden and the Democrats have taken to calling this kind of stuff “ultra MAGA.” The idea is that Trump loyalists will embrace the term, and eventually frontline Republicans will have to either embrace it, too, or disavow MAGAism. But there’s a better word for people who want to steal power and then use it to crush your bodily autonomy and popular sovereignty, and Democrats should start to get comfortable with it.
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In the latest episode of Stuck with Damon Young, Damon is joined in conversation by Marc Lamont Hill and Kara Brown to unpack what it means to be truly accountable, publicly and privately. There are only two episodes left of the season, so don’t miss out. Listen and follow Stuck with Damon Young, only on Spotify.
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The pandemic-weary world is understandably freaked about the discovery of several cases of monkeypox in Europe and the U.S., but actual monkeypox experts (who exist, because monkeypox is not a novel virus) have offered a number of good reasons not to assume that we’re in for a brand-new full-blown global public-health crisis. The Atlantic’s Ed Yong spoke to these experts who noted, among other things, that monkeypox is generally far less transmissible and deadly than COVID-19, it’s neutralized by existing smallpox vaccines (and probably an existing smallpox therapeutic), which are already stockpiled, and the strain that has caused the current outbreak should be sequenced in a matter of days, which should allow scientists to determine whether any of those properties has changed. On top of that, the virologist Angela Rasmussen observed, “There’s two possibilities to explain the widespread nature of the monkeypox outbreak: It’s more transmissible human to human and/or conditions were just right for it to spread widely,” and in her opinion “there’s currently more data to support the latter.” All the more reason to treat this as a one (1) pandemic weekend.
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- The Oklahoma legislature has passed a bill that will criminalize abortions in almost all cases from the moment of fertilization, and deputize Okalhomans as vigilantes to bring legal action against anyone who aids and abets out-of-state abortions.
- Some of the documents Donald Trump’s top coup lawyer John Eastman is trying to conceal from the House January 6 Committee include handwritten notes from Trump himself, according to John Eastman.
- Elon Musk exposed his erect penis to, and otherwise sexually harrassed, a flight attendent who worked for the SpaceX corporate-jet fleet, then paid $250,000 for her silence, according to a sworn declaration and other evidence disclosed by a friend of the victim, who remains under a non-disclosure agreement with the self-professed free speech champion.
- Right-wing Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, who’s now trying to facilitate Musk’s takeover of Twitter, participated in a November 2020 call of other powerful right-wing elites about trying to overturn the results of the election.
- An updated indictment of Donald Trump’s inaugural chair Tom Barrack—who’s accused of being a secret agent of the UAE, rewarded with lucrative business deals for influencing U.S. foreign policy—suggests that Trump’s campaign chair Paul Manafort and Barrack connived to remove language from the Republican Party platform calling for the declassification of documents detailing Saudi involvement in 9/11.
- Russia says it will cut off Finland’s natural gas supplies, nominally over Finland’s refusal to pay in rubles, but really because Finland has chosen to join NATO.
- Trump judges keep doing that thing Trump judges do knowing no one will stop them.
- Roger Stone ran a group chat called “Friends of Stone” that included several insurrectionists, including some that have since been charged with insurrection-related crimes, including seditious conspiracy. The contents of the chat are not (yet) public.
- Fifteen Discord users accepted invitations from Payton Gendron, the neo-Nazi Buffalo mass murderer, to a chatroom that contained months worth of Gendron’s racist rants, and a video feed where he livestreamed his massacre. New York Attorney General Letitia James has already announced an investigation of the social-media companies Gendron used to plan, advertise, and broadcast his crimes.
- Bangor, ME, authorities say they’ll withhold records of the call Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) made to report the chalking of the sidewalk outside her house to the police, but seem to have inadvertently revealed that she didn’t dial 9-1-1, but called in a favor directly from a specific, as-yet-unnamed law-enforcement officer.
- Bill de Blasio will run to represent the 10th district of New York presumably so he can take a motorcade to the members only congressional gym.
- Climate change isn’t all bad. For instance, as Lake Mead slowly evaporates, Nevadans get to play really fun guessing games over the identities of the mob victims whose bodies wash up on the ever-shrinking shore.
- Dr. Oz is still registered to vote in New Jersey, and may even be free to cast a ballot in the state’s June primary if he loses his campaign for the GOP Pennsylvania Senate nomination.
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American gun manufacturers produced over 11 million guns in 2020, a 300 percent increase over the nearly four-million guns they produced in 2000, when the population was just 17 percent smaller than it is today, according to an explosive new report by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and some back-of-the-envelope math by me. The ATF published the report in the immediate aftermath of the neo-Nazi gun massacre in Buffalo, NY, which lends it immediate relevance, but it also contains data that helps explain larger trends. Violent crime fell through much of the 2000 to 2020 period, but has been on the rise the past couple years, overlapping with an enormous spike in gun sales in 2020, as documented in the report.
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