This is a tweet compilation of misogynistic comments by Trump supporters. They are the American Taliban. They really do despise women.
If you are able do open it, please do. You will find it shocking and terrifying. It is a stream of nonstop hatred for women.
Jason Linkins of The New Republic writes that it doesn’t really matter what Kamala Harris’s policies are because the Supreme Court is poised to strike them down. its recent decision, overruling what is known as the Chevron doctrine, hamstrings any Democratic initiative.
If Trump should win, he will be able to appoint replacements for the two oldest justices, guaranteeing a rightwing majority for decades.
Linkins writes that “a dark shadow” blights every policy that a Harris administration might want to initiate. That dark shadow is the conservative majority’s decision in a case called Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo.
Linkins writes:
That ruling, which overturned a doctrine called “Chevron deference,” puts the future of any policy that Harris favors in grave doubt. If you want the Harris campaign to get more detailed on policy, I’m sorry to say that any conversation starts and ends with how they plan to confront a Supreme Court that has torched the separation of powers in the mad game of Calvinball they kicked off during the Trump era.
The gutting of Chevron deference is not something that the smooth-brained masses of the political media adequately understood when it came down. Chevron deference is essentially the doctrine that allows government agencies to respond nimbly to their congressional mandates; hitherto, the judiciary stayed out of the way, allowing executive branch personnel to use their expertise to interpret ambiguous regulations. Imagine, for example, the technological advancements that have occurred since landmark environmental legislation was passed decades ago. The EPA, given free rein to adapt to this changing landscape, can move more fleetly to remediate pollution thanks to Chevron. The Roberts court, instead, imagines a world where they have to return to Congress each time there is an emergency, to get specific guidance.
The best way of describing what the conservative majority did is to say it gave six unelected right-wing politicians who all enjoy a lifetime appointment a line-item veto over anything a Democratic Congress—and by extension Harris—wants to do, unless they can muster the votes to confront each problem they want to solve with an inhuman amount of hyper-specificity. As Vox’s Ian Millhiser has explained, if the executive branch “can’t regulate without getting permission from a Republican judiciary … then conservatives no longer need to worry about Democratic presidents doing much of anything that doesn’t meet the GOP’s approval…”
The Supreme Court really is the most critical policy issue in this election. The Trump-installed majority is central to what the right plans for a second Trump term. Beyond the fact that the Roberts court’s ruling in Trump v. United States imbues the chief executive with monarchic levels of unaccountability—a dangerous privilege for, frankly, any president to possess—Project 2025, which is best understood as a massive rollback of individual rights, is something that Republicans simply could never contemplate without their super-legislature in black robes.
Here, vaporizing Chevron has an asymmetric impact on the ambitions of the two parties. The GOP, having retreated from any part of the policy realm besides Project 2025’s infernal schemes, the furnishing of tax cuts to plutocrats, and deregulating everything under the sun (also a form of wealth transfer to plutocrats), need not worry about Chevron being in effect anymore.
But what makes Chevron crucial to this campaign is that the sledding for Democrats remains rough even if they prevail in November.
Indeed, even if they blow the GOP out of the water electorally, the end of Chevron deference is a fail-safe against Democratic policy, constantly running in the background as long as five of the six conservatives on the Roberts court agree. In this way, Harris and her fellow Democrats are locked out of liberal governance. Since liberal governance will form the cornerstone of anything Harris and Democrats want to do during her time in office, a confrontation with a Supreme Court that’s holding the policymaking apparatus hostage is not a fight they can duck.
All Democrats need to join in this fight, and constantly raise the salience of the Supreme Court and its attendant corruption. It would be a good idea for any policy discussion to note that the Roberts court is the primary antagonist to making things better, easier, safer, and fairer for ordinary Americans; they are despoilers of the land and pilferers of our wealth. Harris should continually remind voters that turning things around will require a Democratic president to be on hand to appoint any replacements that may be needed, and prevent the oldest conservative justices from escaping into retirement, which would allow Trump to replace them with young members of the right’s lunatic lower-court farm system.
Is it time to revisit court-packing? I think the institutionalist case against it completely collapsed by the end of the court’s last term, but I doubt Harris has the stomach to revive the idea over the next several weeks. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court will remain the rock in the road that Democrats must find a way around if they want to improve our lives. Anything you might want an ascendant Democratic administration to do faces the judicial veto of right-wingers who can’t be voted out of office. It’s true that Harris is probably not going to deliver, or even champion, the most ambitious policies that progressives favor. But whether you’re a progressive fan of Medicare for All, or a centrist dedicated to means-tested, watered-down bullshit, you’re all in the same boat, so grab an oar.
John Thompson, retired teacher and historian, has pondered how the media should cover Trump. He lies with such frequency that his lies are barely worth mentioning, whereas any error or overstatement by Harris or Walz is a news story. For instance, CNN’s Dana Bash questioned Governor Tim Walz about a 1995 drunk driving arrest and how he characterized it in his campaign for Congress in 2006. The media doesn’t have to ransack through Trump’s statements to find a lie from nearly two decades ago. Just listen to whatever he said today. He still claims that he won the 2020 election, without any evidence.
Thompson writes:
This post began as a nuanced response to the USA Today’s fact-checking conclusion that “Project 2025 is a political playbook created by the Heritage Foundation and dozens of other conservative groups, not Trump, who said he disagrees with elements of the effort.” Although the USA Today acknowledged the role of “numerous people involved in Project 2025 who worked in Trump’s first administration,” it failed in fact-checking Trump’s statement that, “I know nothing about Project 2025.”
Neither did it challenge the Heritage Foundation’s claim that this was just a plan for the next conservative President, as opposed to Trump!?!?
When I read Diane Ravitch’s reposting of Dan Rather’s Don’t Believe Donald Trump, I knew that now there is no need for the nuance I planned. Rather cited the CNN video of Russell Vought, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump, and a key author of Project 2025, who was recorded on a hidden camera.
Rather linked to the video, posted on CNN, when “Vought described the project as the ‘tip of the America First spear.’ He said that after meeting with Trump in recent months, the former president ‘is very supportive of what we do.’”
Vought also said that Trump’s current attempts to disassociate himself from Project 2025 are “just politics,” and “distancing himself from a brand.” He said Trump is “very supportive” of their efforts and has raised money for “us.”
In other words, it is clear that Rather is correct in saying, “I cannot state it strongly enough: Project 2025, with Donald Trump at the helm, is the greatest existential threat to American democracy in recent history.”
But, but as Trump and his allies continue to double-down on lies, the need to converse with journalists about how they fact-check and report on MAGA-ism will continue and, perhaps, become more complicated. And that gets me back to discussing USA Today’s fact-check as a case study in journalism’s norms during this crisis. As Slate wrote:
Of all Trump’s recent lies, his attempted dissociation with Project 2025 may be the most important—because he’s trying to convince the American people that the choice between dictatorship and democracy that they face is not before them at all.
Being a former academic historian, I believe journalists should consider how a historian would fact-check this issue, covering the recent history of Trump and the Heritage Foundation, as well decades of rightwing propaganda seeking to reduce government “to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub,” and the history of Edward R. Murrow standing up for democracy in 1954.
At a minimum, the history of Trumpism and of “astro-turf” think tanks over the last half-century, should have reversed the burden of proof for fact-checking; given that history, fact-checkers would have had to first show evidence substantiating Trump’s and his allies’ claims.
I would then recommend a 2016 Columbia Journalism Review analysis by David Mindich, For Journalists Covering Trump, a Murrow Moment. Mindich starts in 1954 with Murrow’s “now-famous special report condemning Joseph McCarthy.” Murrow said that McCarthy”:
Didn’t create this situation of fear–he merely exploited it, and rather successfully. … This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, … “We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
Mindich then explains that “American journalistic goals of detachment and objectivity are long held.” They made a good trade-off, “Journalists would avoid taking sides, and they would be given access to newsmakers–and news consumers–from both parties.” He then praised journalists who moved beyond “the usual practice of studied balance” to reveal the threatening nature of Trump. Moreover, it is time for “mainstream journalists to abandon their detachment … when a politician’s words go way beyond the pale.”
In the last eight years, Trump has gone farther and farther beyond the lines of democracy. And in the next few months, his rhetoric (and that of his supporters) is likely to go more dangerously beyond the pale. And as Mindich wrote, “journalists have been more likely to become advocates when they see others, like politicians and protesters, speaking loudly in dissent.”
So, we must join together and commit to Murrow’s principles in our fight for democracy.
If you can stand listening to and watching Trump, this is the speech that Heather Cox Richardson wrote about this morning.
Ellen Nakashima wrote in the Washington Post about the Russian propaganda campaign to advance its interests in the U.S. Its goals are to weaken the U.S. by promoting discord, to undermine U.S. support for Ukraine, and to elect Trump. Some of its propaganda is meant to make Americans mad at their own government, by focusing on real problems, like inflation and the border.
Nakashima writes:
The Russian government’s covert efforts to sway the 2024 presidential election are more advanced than in recent years, and the most active foreign threat this political season, U.S. intelligence officials said Friday.
Russia’s activities “are more sophisticated than in prior election cycles,” said a senior official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in a briefing with reporters, noting the use of “authentic U.S. voices” to “launder” Russian government propaganda and spread socially divisive narratives through major social media, as well as on sham websites that pose as legitimate American media organizations.
Moscow is targeting U.S. swing states in particular, the official said, and using artificial intelligence to more quickly and convincingly create fake content to shape the outcome in favor of former president Donald Trump.
That is “consistent with Moscow’s broader foreign policy goals of weakening the United States and undermining Washington’s support for Ukraine,” the ODNI official said, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the agency….
This week, the U.S. government announced a sweeping set of actions to counter Russian influence campaigns, including an indictment of two Russian employees of the state-run news site RT for allegedly paying an American media company to spread English-language videos on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and X.
Prosecutors also seized 32 Russian-controlled internet domains that were used in a state-led influence effort called “Doppelganger” to undermine international support for Ukraine. In addition, the Treasury and State departments announced sanctions on Russian individuals and entities that are accused of disseminating propaganda.
RT has cultivated networks to disseminate narratives friendly to Moscow, while trying to mask the content as authentic Americans’ free speech, ODNI said in an election security update Friday.
Two things place “Russia at the top of the list” of foreign governments seeking to influence the election, the ODNI official said. “They’re fairly robust and quite practiced at doing this type of activity. Also the scope and the scale of their activities are quite significant.”
“Russia is working up- and down-ballot races,” the official said. They are using artificial intelligence “to more quickly and convincingly create synthetic content” and influence-for-hire firms that leverage marketing, public relations and other expertise to complicate attribution.
“Americans are more likely to believe other Americans’ views compared to content with clear signs of foreign propaganda,” the official said. “So what we see them doing is relying on witting and unwitting Americans to seed, promote and add credibility to narratives that serve these foreign actors’ interests.”
Catherine Kim wrote a fascinating account in Politico of the Russian program to sow division in the United States and to influence the 2024 elections. Kim interviews a Finnish scholar of disinformation who says that Finnish children are taught media literacy in school to help them spot propaganda. His final advice: Turn off the computer; take a walk; play; live your life.
She writes:
A DOJ indictment on Wednesday alleged that content created and distributed by a conservative social media company called Tenet Media was actually funded by Russia. Two Russian government employees funneled nearly $10 million to Tenet Media, which hired high-profile conservative influencers such as Tim Pool, Benny Johnson and Dave Rubin to produce videos and other content that stoked political divisions. The indictment alleges that the influencers — who say they were unaware of Tenet’s ties to Russia — were paid upward of $400,000 a month.
These “conservative influencers” were chosen because they have large and devoted fans who believe whatever content they create. They apparently didn’t know who was footing the bill, but were no doubt thrilled to be paid $100,000 for each video they produced, up to four per month. Why ask questions when the pay is so good?
Now that they know who their sugar daddy was, will they rethink any of their views?
Should we think about teaching our children to be discerning consumers of social media so they are not taken in by propaganda?
Historian Heather Cox Richardson usually takes Saturday nights off. Typically, she posts a beautiful photograph. But last night was different. She had to describe what happened, what Trump said at a rally in Mosinee, Wisconsin. His speech was truly unhinged and apocalyptic. The thought that this man is tied with Kamala Harris in the Presidential race and has a strong possibility of being re-elected is terrifying.
The Constitution was absolutely correct in saying that an insurrectionist should not be allowed to run for high office; the Supreme Court was wrong to keep this insurrectionist on the ballot. The Founders wisely understood that if he did it once, he will do it again. The one time that we needed “originalists” on the High Court was the one time these pseudo-originalists decided that the Constitution does not mean what it plainly says in the Fourteenth Amendment.
By rights, tonight’s post should be a picture, but Trump’s behavior today merits a marker because it feels like a dramatic escalation of the themes we’ve seen for years. Please feel free to ignore—as I often say, I am trying to leave notes for a graduate student in 150 years, and you can consider this one for her if you want a break from the recent onslaught of news.
Yesterday, Trump ranted at the press, furious that the American legal system had resulted in two jury decisions that he had defamed and sexually abused writer E. Jean Carroll. He was so angry that, with his lawyers standing awkwardly behind him, he told reporters: “I’m disappointed in my legal talent, I’ll be honest with you.”
Today, Trump held a rally in Mosinee, Wisconsin, a small city in the center of the state, where he addressed about 7,000 people. A number of us who have been watching him closely have been saying for a while that when voters actually saw him in this campaign, they would be shocked at how he has deteriorated, and that seems to be true: his meandering and self-indulgent speeches have had attendees leaving early, some of them bewildered. In today’s speech, Trump slurred a number of words, referring to Elon Musk as “Leon,” for example, and forgetting the name of North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, who was on his short list for a vice presidential pick.
But today’s speech struck me as different from his past performances, distinguished for what sounded like desperation. Trump has always invented his stories from whole cloth, but there used to be some way to tie them to reality. Today that seemed to be gone. He was in a fantasy world, and his rhetoric was apocalyptic. It was also bloody in ways that raise huge red flags for scholars of fascism.
Trump told the audience that when he took office in 2017, military officers told him the U.S. had given all the military’s ammunition away to allies. Then he went on a rant against our allies, saying that they’re only our allies when they need something and that they would never come to our aid if we needed them. This echoes the talking points put out by Russian operatives and flies in the face of the fact that the one time the North Atlantic Treaty Organization invoked the mutual defense pact in that agreement was after the attacks of September 11, 2001, in support of the U.S.
He embraced Project 2025’s promise to eliminate the Department of Education and send education back to the states so that right-wing figures like Wisconsin’s Senator Ron Johnson can run it. He reiterated the MAGA claim that mothers are executing their babies after birth—this is completely bonkers—and again echoed Russian talking points when he said these executions are happening—they are not—but “nobody talks about it.” He went on: “We did a great thing when we got Roe v. Wade out of the federal government.”
He reiterated the complete fantasy that schools are performing gender-affirming surgery on children. “Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day at school, and your son comes back with a brutal operation. Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?” Trump’s suggestion that schools are performing surgery on students is bananas. This is simply not a thing that happens.
And then he went full-blown apocalyptic, attacking immigrants and claiming that crime, which in reality has dropped dramatically since President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took office after a spike during his own term, has made the U.S. uninhabitable. He said that “If I don’t win Colorado, it will be taken over by migrants and the governor will be sent fleeing.” “Migrants and crime are here in our country at levels never thought possible before…. You’re not safe even sitting here, to be honest with you. I’m the only one that’s going to get it done. Everybody is saying that.” He urged people to protest “because you’re being overrun by criminals.”
He assured attendees that “If you think you have a nice house, have a migrant enjoy your house, because a migrant will take it over. A migrant will take it over. It will be Venezuela on steroids.” He reiterated his plan to get rid of migrants. “And you know,” he said, “getting them out will be a bloody story.”
He went on to try to rev up supporters in words very similar to those he used on January 6th, 2021, but focused on this election. “Every citizen who’s sick and tired of the parasitic political class in Washington that sucks our country of its blood and treasure, November fifth will be your liberation day. November fifth, this year, will be the most important day in the history of our country because we’re not going to have a country anymore if we don’t win.”
He promised: “I will prevent World War III, and I am the only one that can do it. I will prevent World War III. And if I don’t win this election,… Israel is doomed…. Israel will be gone…. I’d better win.”
“I better win or you’re gonna have problems like we’ve never had. We may have no country left. This may be our last election. You want to know the truth? People have said that. This may be our last election…. It’ll all be over, and you gotta remember…. Trump is always right. I hate to be right. I’m always right.”
Trump’s hellscape is only in his mind: crime is sharply down in the U.S. since he left office, migrant crossings have plunged, and the economy is the strongest in the world.
Then, tonight, Trump posted on his social media site a rant asserting that he will win the 2024 election but that he expects Democrats to cheat, and “WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again. We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T! Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”
Is it the Justice Department indictments that showed Russia is working to get him reelected [by paying rightwing influencers to attack Harris]? Is it the rising popularity of Democratic nominees Kamala Harris and Tim Walz? Is it fury at the new grand jury’s indicting him for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election and install himself in power? Is it fear of Tuesday’s debate with Harris? Is it a declining ability to grapple with reality?
Whatever has caused it, Trump seems utterly off his pins, embracing wild conspiracy theories and, as his hopes of winning the election appear to be crumbling, threatening vengeance with a dogged fury that he used to be able to hide.
The big story in the mass media and blogs over the past two days was the way Trump answered a question in an appearance in New York City about whether he would do anything to make child care affordable; he was asked to be specific. He gave a long (two minute) reply that was meandering and incoherent. He seemed to say that the money that the U.S. will collect from tariffs will be so huge that it will wipe out the national deficit and make everything possible, including the cost of child care, assuming that tariffs would produce revenue instead of raising consumer prices. He didn’t answer the question.
Meanwhile, in another setting, JD Vance was asked about child care. He responded that parents could ask grandparents or other relatives to help out; and he suggested lowering the certification requirements for child care providers.
The New York Times must have realized, based on the keen interest in this story, that its original reporting was inadequate. At 4:42 pm EST, the Times published a story by Michael C. Bender about what happened. With this article, The New York Times squelched persistent rumors that it was not reporting on Trump’s mental acuity.
This was the headline:
The former president and his running mate gave nearly equally confusing answers when asked separately this week how they would make child care more affordable.
But instead of a crisp, camera-ready reply from a seasoned three-time presidential candidate, Mr. Trump unspooled two of the most puzzling minutes of his campaign.
His answer was a jolting journey through disjointed logic about how the size of his tariffs would take care of all the nation’s children, which only raised a new, more complicated question about why he remains unable to provide straightforward answers about policies he would prioritize in a second term.
“Well, I would do that,” he said when asked if he would commit to supporting legislation to make child care more affordable, and how he would seek to do so.
“And we’re sitting down — you know, I was somebody — we had Senator Marco Rubio and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue,” Mr. Trump continued, referring to the pair’s previous push for paid family leave and expanding the child tax credit. “It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about that — because the child care is, child care, it’s, couldn’t, you know, there’s something, you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it.
“But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to, but they’ll get used to it very quickly — and it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care.”
Mr. Trump has long portrayed himself as the nation’s economist-in-chief, a rich businessman-turned-politician now focused on increasing the wealth of everyday Americans.
He has spent two years campaigning against rising prices for Americans, from housing to food to, yes, child care. At times, he has spoken briefly about instituting “baby bonuses” for parents of newborns, and he has said that he would consider expanding the child tax credit but has not said by how much.
Mr. Trump’s rambling answer handed Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign an opportunity to press one of its central messages: that Mr. Trump is so out-of-touch with normal problems facing most Americans that he cannot be expected to find the solutions.
“He’s always been profoundly discursive, but this one is instructive,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist. “He immediately referenced the Rubio-Ivanka effort, which is actually the right answer. He just wasn’t involved or engaged in the details. So beyond that, he just pivots to a stream of consciousness about what he knows and cares about.”
Just a day earlier, on Wednesday, Senator JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, responded to a similar question about child care with a nearly equally confusing answer at an event in Mesa, Ariz.
Mr. Vance, like Mr. Trump, acknowledged that the issue of affordable child care was “such an important question.” But his initial answer was that parents should get help from grandparents or aunts and uncles.
“Maybe Grandma and Grandpa wants to help out a little bit more,” Mr. Vance said.
But many parents cannot rely on help from relatives — and many relatives are not in a position to help with someone else’s children. Mr. Vance seemed to acknowledge that conundrum, and pivoted to calling for fewer regulations on child-care providers, falsely saying that child-care specialists were required to have “a six-year college degree.”
“Americans are much poorer because they’re paying out the wazoo for day care,” Mr. Vance said. “Empower working families. Empower people who want to do these things for a living, and that’s what you’ve got to do.”
Mr. Trump’s answer offered little additional clarity.
The former president seemed to outline a theory that his tariffs would result in such prosperity that the nation could wipe out its $6 trillion spending deficit and pay for additional benefits, like reducing child-care costs.
“As much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in,” Mr. Trump said on Thursday.
But Mr. Trump’s answer ignored that most economists say that the burden of tariffs are largely shouldered by middle-class consumers in the form of higher costs. Left unsaid was that he spent twice as much borrowed money during his term in the White House as President Biden has, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
Ms. Harris has called for restoring and expanding a child tax credit and proposed a new $6,000 benefit for parents of newborns. Her child tax credit proposal would increase the maximum to $3,600 per child, up from $2,000 now.
Joseph Costello, a Harris campaign spokesman, said in a statement that the tariffs Mr. Trump is proposing as part of his “‘plan’ for making child care more affordable” would raise costs on middle-class families. “The American people deserve a president who will actually cut costs for them, like Vice President Harris’s plan to bring back a $3,600 child tax credit for working families and an expanded $6,000 tax cut for families with newborn children.”
Thursday was not the first time that Mr. Trump has punted on the question of child-care costs.
In his debate with Mr. Biden this year, before the president dropped out of the race, the moderators asked Mr. Trump twice about what he would do to help with the affordability of child care.
In his first answer, Mr. Trump went off on a series of tangents related to earlier debate topics, defending his firing of retired Gen. John Kelly as his chief of staff, denying that he had called soldiers who had died in war “suckers” and “losers,” boasting about his firing “a lot of the top people at the F.B.I.,” accusing Mr. Biden of wanting “open borders” and denouncing him as “the worst president.”
Given an additional minute to address child-care costs, the topic of the question, Mr. Trump did not mention the word once.
“Just so you understand, we have polling,” Mr. Trump began. “We have other things that do — they rate him the worst because what he’s done is so bad. And they rate me, yes, I’ll show you. I will show you. And they rate me one of the best, OK?”
The AP wrote about the annual conference of Moms for Liberty, where the guest speaker was convicted felon Donald Trump. The organization is supposed to be “non-political,” to preserve its tax-free status, but its partisan political views are undisguised. The rightwing group favors censorship, book banning, and unhinged alarmism about teachers “grooming” students to be gay or transgender.
WASHINGTON (AP) — In her welcoming remarks at Moms for Liberty’s annual gathering in the nation’s capital on Friday, the group’s co-founder, Tiffany Justice, urged members to “fight like a mother” against the Democratic presidential ticket.
Later that evening, after she had interviewed Republican nominee Donald Trump onstage, she made a point to say she was personally endorsing him for the presidency. Their talk show style chat was preceded by a “Trump, Trump, Trump” chant from the audience.
The weekend’s gathering, drawing parent activists from across the country, has showcased how Moms for Liberty has moved toward fully embracing Trump and his political messaging as November’s electiondraws nearer. The group is officially a nonpartisan nonprofit that says it’s open to anyone who wants parents to have a greater say in their children’s education, yet there was little pretense about which side of the nation’s political divide it has chosen.
A painting that was prominently displayed on an easel next to the security station attendees had to pass through before being allowed into the conference area showed Vice President Kamala Harris kneeling over a bald eagle carcass, a communist symbol on her jacket and her mouth dripping with blood. A Moms for Liberty spokeswoman said she hadn’t seen the gruesome painting and noted that the only official signage for the event included the group’s logo….
Many communities where Moms for Liberty candidates took over a majority of the school board have been frustrated by their laser-like focus on removing books, questioning lessons around race and rejecting LGBTQ+ identities. A lack of progress toward academic improvement has in turn led to a counter movement among more moderate and liberal parents and teachers unions.
Moms for Liberty says it won’t make an official endorsement in the presidential race, but it isn’t shying away from getting involved. The group’s founders recently wrote an open letter to parents warning that Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a former high school social studies teacher, would be “the most anti-parent, extremist government America has ever known.”
The group spent its first three years becoming synonymous with the “parents’ rights” movement in local school boards but recently has become more involved in national politics. It participated in the controversial conservative blueprint for the next Republican administration, Project 2025, as a member of its advisory board. The group also has invested more than $3 million in four crucial presidential swing states. The money has paid for advertising in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Wisconsin, including messages critical of the Biden administration.
But, here’s some good news:
Around the country, some school board members backed by Moms for Liberty or who carry out the group’s agenda have been recalled in recent months by community members who say their policies have caused chaos.
In Woodland, California, north of the state capital, a school board member backed by Moms for Liberty members was recalled in March after she raised fears that children were coming out as transgender “as a result of social contagion ” during a school board meeting in 2023.
In Southern California, a trustee with the Temecula Valley Unified School District Board of Education was recalled after he and two of his colleagues voted to reject a social studies curriculum because it included a history of the gay rights movement.
And in Idaho’s heavily Republican panhandle, community members from across the political spectrum rose up to recall two right-wing members of their board last year who sought to root out critical race theory and institute a conservative agenda.
Katie Blaxberg, a Pinellas County candidate who will run against the one remaining Moms for Liberty-linked candidate for that county’s school board this fall, said the “nastiness” and “divisiveness” of the group “isn’t conducive to any sort of good wor
Liz Cheney broke her silence today: she declared before an audience of students at Duke University that she will vote for Kamala Harris.
Former Representative Liz Cheney, the onetime high-ranking Republican from Wyoming who torpedoed her own political career by breaking vociferously with former President Donald J. Trump, on Wednesday told students at a Duke University event that she would be voting for Vice President Kamala Harris in November.
“I don’t believe we have the luxury of writing in candidates’ names, particularly in swing states,” Ms. Cheney said. “As a conservative and someone who believes in and cares about the Constitution, I have thought deeply about this and because of the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump but I will be voting for Kamala Harris.”
Ms. Cheney had remained silent until now, despite repeated outreach from the Harris campaign, which has been courting Republican endorsements and voters. Ms. Cheney chose not to speak at the Democratic National Convention, making the decision to wait for a stand-alone moment in September, closer to when early voting was set to begin.
It was a strategic choice to ensure her voice would not be lost in a sea of back-to-back convention speeches, according to three people familiar with her thinking.
Diane Ravitch's blog 