Jennifer Bendery, Senior Politics Reporter - Huff Post
Stephan:
Do you think MAGAt Republican Representatives Marjorie Taylor Green, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Bobert, and Jim Jordan are incompetent nut cases? Get ready, you haven’t seen anything yet. Wait until you listen to Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson. There are so many of these Republican loonies one has to ask, how can any responsible political party put people like this forward? Also, what has happened to American voters that they elect such people? I think those are important questions that deserve serious discussion.
North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who believes Beyoncé is “satanic” and that the 1969 moon landing may have been fake, is currently the leading Republican candidate for governor. Credit: Gerry Broome / Associated Press
North Carolina GOP gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson has said it himself: He’s a conspiracy theorist.
He didn’t specify in that March interview what that means in terms of what he believes. It turns out it means he has spread virtually every conspiracy theory you can think of.
Robinson, who is the state’s lieutenant governor, has said he “wouldn’t be surprised” if the 1969 moon landing was fake and the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an “inside job.” He’s “SERIOUSLY skeptical” of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and of the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas. He falsely accused David Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, of being a paid actor. He’s claimed that climate change is based on “junk science.”
And those are just the dangerous theories he’s echoed that have been previously reported.
Derek Tisler and Lawrence Norden , Counselor in the Brennan Center for Justice’s Democracy Program - Brennan Center for Justice
Stephan:
This article from the Brennan Center for Justice, I think, should be seen as a major alarm warning us how seriously our electoral system is under threat by MAGAts. Unless the Democrats take both House of Congress as well as the presidency, I am afraid, by 2025 we will cease to be a democracy and become an anocracy. I also think that unless Red state voters vote the MAGAts out of their state legislatures that it is going to become increasingly obvious that Republican governance is severely damaging the wellbeing of the people in those states. It is up to the voters what kind of future they are going to have.
Criminal Trump Credit: Drew Angerer / Getty
As Georgia prosecutors announced the indictment of former President Trump and 18 others for their efforts to overturn the 2020 election, much attention has been paid to the infamous phone call in which Trump told Georgia’s chief election official that he wanted “to find 11,780 votes.” But this phone call was only one part of a broad campaign to pressure Georgia’s public officials to cast doubt on the election results or even disregard the will of the voters. And the effort did not stop on January 6 — the lies spread and the futile pursuit to build support for those lies created lasting consequences for elections, both in Georgia and across the country.
By the end of November 2020, most states, including Georgia, had not only finished counting all ballots, but also conducted recounts and post-election audits that confirmed the presidential election outcome every time. In Georgia, counties first counted all ballots using electronic tabulators, then counted all ballots by hand, and then
John B. Alexander, Contributing Writer - Daily Kos
Stephan:
John Alexander very clearly presents the damage to American democracy that is very passionately being done by Republican cultists. Their willful ignorance, their stupidity, their racism, their fear of fact-based education, their fear of non-heterosexuals is literally tearing the United States apart. As I have said before you cannot be an ethical person and a Republican. The only way the country is going to survive as a democracy is if masses so large they drown out the MAGAts turn out and vote for Democrats at every level of government.
Iowa MAGAt voters Credit: The New York Times
Based on their indelible belief in Donald J. Trump with his specious and inflammatory commentary, there is no doubt that tens of millions of American voters fall into those categories. While living in an alternate reality, impervious to facts, they macerate the very essence of democracy they so ardently profess to embrace. The process is potentiated by the current Republican National Committee (RNC), and the feckless GOP Congressional leadership, that have descended so far from Ronald Reagan’s polity as to be unrecognizable.
Watching interviews with Iowa Republican voters is both mind-blowing and emblematic of the improbability that American democracy can survive. Demonstrating the gullibility factor, a member of the business-oriented Mudd family claimed that the reason the U.S. was continuing to support Ukraine was that Volodymyr Zelenskyy was blackmailing President Biden.
There is only one place that level of ignorance could come from; right-wing media. Attributed to Mark Twain, there is an appropriate quote, “God created war so that Americans would learn geography.” Here,
Leif Weatherby, Associate Professor of German and Director of the Digital Theory Lab at New York University - The New York Times
Stephan:
A few says ago Arkansas Republican Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders gutted the educational system of her state. She followed up the equally repulsive Gregg Abbott in Texas, and Ron DeSantis in Florida. But this is the worst one yet. I do not understand why Red state Americans don’t seem to understand that the education of their children is being degraded to the point where it is more about indoctrinating docile peasants willing to work as they’re told, than educating children to best equip them for their future. Basically, the Republican Party is doing what they do in North Korea. You would think this would become a national priority issue, but Red state Americans just don’t seem to get it. Or, maybe if they do, they just don’t care. Either way the quality of wellbeing in Republican controlled states is deteriorating day by day.
Illustration by Shoshana Schultz / The New York Times
In proposing last week to eliminate 169 faculty positions and cut more than 30 degree programs from its flagship university, West Virginia, the state with the fourth-highest poverty rate in the country, is engaging in a kind of educational gerrymandering. If you’re a West Virginian with plans to attend West Virginia University, be prepared to find yourself cut out of much of the best education that the school has traditionally offered, and many of the most basic parts of the education offered by comparable universities.
The planned cuts include the school’s program of world languages and literatures, along with graduate programs in mathematics and other degrees across the arts and pre-professional programs. The university is deciding, in effect, that certain citizens don’t get access to a liberal arts education.
Sadly, this is not just a local story. Politicians and state officials, often with the help of management consultants, are making liberal arts education scarce in some of the poorest states in the union. […]
I told you yesterday American infrastructure is antiquated and not properly maintained or upgraded, and that if the Hawaiian power company had buried their power lines the disaster at Lahaina would not have happened. This same perception is dawning on others, but not nearly enough. We are just not prepared for what is happening as all of the endless string of disasters being reported is trying to tell us.
Utility workers clear downed trees and power lines to restore electricity in the aftermath of a wildfire in Lahaina, western Maui, Hawaii on August 11, 2023. Credit: Patrick T. Fallon / Getty
In the wake of the devastating Lahaina wildfire in Maui that left at least 111 people dead, Hawaiian Electric Company is facing a lawsuit claiming that the company “chose not to deenergize their power lines” before the natural disaster despite power lines being known to cause and exacerbate wildfires.
While the exact cause of the wildfire remains unknown, Hawaiian Electric is not the first electric company to find itself facing potential liability in the aftermath of climate-related disasters. As electric companies across the U.S. begin to take steps to reduce the risks of utility-fueled fires, experts tell TIME that modernizing the electric grid and planning for extreme weather events—including having power turn-off plans and preemptively updating utility equipment—needs to be a priority in an increasingly changing climate.
“We’re not planning our infrastructure for the changes that we’re already seeing in the climate and expect […]
