Lazy Caturday Reads

Black Cat Halloween, by Iva Wilcox

Good Afternoon!!

I’m moving slowly today, because I have what I think is just a cold. I don’t have a fever, but I’m still feel pretty sick. So I’ll get right to the news.

The top story yesterday and today is the violent attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi, who is second in the like of succession to the presidency, was the target of the attack, but she was not home at the time. The attempted assassination overshadowed what would have been the top story–Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. Dakinikat wrote about both stories yesterday.

Here’s the latest news and commentary on the attack on Paul Pelosi:

The Los Angeles Times: Accused Pelosi attacker David DePape spread QAnon, other far-right, bigoted conspiracies.

In the months before police accused him of attacking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Friday morning, David DePape had been drifting further into the world of far-right conspiracies, antisemitism and hate, according to a Times review of his online accounts.

In a personal blog that DePape maintained, posts include such topics as “Manipulation of History,” “Holohoax” and “It’s OK to be white.” He mentioned 4chan, a favorite message board of the far right. He posted videos about conspiracies involving COVID-19 vaccines and the war in Ukraine being a ploy for Jewish people to buy land.

DePape’s screeds included posts about QAnon, an unfounded theory that former President Trump is at war with a cabal of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring and control the world. In an Aug. 23 entry titled “Q,” DePape wrote: “Either Q is Trump himself or Q is the deepstate moles within Trumps inner circle.”

DePape’s daughter, Inti Gonzalez, told The Times that her father wrote the blog. She said that she and her mother were reeling from the news that DePape had been arrested in connection with the attack on Paul Pelosi.

“I’m a little shocked,” she said, “but not really that shocked, in all honesty.”

Authorities have not revealed a motive for the attack at the Pelosi home in San Francisco early Friday. But law enforcement sources said the assailant shouted, “Where is Nancy? Where is Nancy?” before confronting Paul Pelosi, and San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott called the attack “intentional.” [….]

DePape followed a number of conservative creators online, including Tim Pool, Glenn Beck, DailyWire+ and the Epoch Times. He also followed an account on YouTube called Black Pilled and reposted several of its videos on his blog. “Blackpilling” is internet slang for coming to believe supposedly unacceptable facts about society, and the reposted videos include accusations such as the FBI covering up child rape.

Read more at the LA Times link.

There are more details about DePape’s on-line activities in this story at Vice News: Man Accused of Attacking Nancy Pelosi’s Husband Left Trail of Far-Right Hate.

The man who allegedly broke into Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home and bludgeoned her husband Paul with a hammer appeared to ascribe to a grab bag of far-right conspiracy theories online, including Holocaust denial, election fraud, and Pizzagate.

VICE News identified several blogs under the name David DePape that contained rambling screeds against minorities, politicians, and women….

VICE News found two online blogs under DePape’s name: “The Loving God” and “Frenly Frens.” One of them, which was updated the night before the attack and frequently over the last months, features a wide range of topics, including “pedogate, “great reset,” “voter fraud,” “da jewbs,” and “Covid.” Many of the tags referred to women, including one directly about Amber Heard—the target of many misogynistic attacks stemming from her lawsuit with Johnny Depp.

Recent headlines on “Frenly Frens” include “It’s OK to be White,” “Faking of Adolf Hitler for History,” and “Q.” The posts go on long diatribes against women, Jewish people, and Black people. One recent post referred to the Holocaust as a “hoax.” The writings also touch on popular far-right culture war topics, like “drag queen story hours,” “cultural marxism,” and child “grooming.”

Yet another post references frequent visits and posts to the /pol/ board of 4chan, an infamous board for racism and bigotry.

Searches on each blog turned up no posts with “Pelosi” within them.

VICE News took numerous steps to verify that the blogs belonged to DePape. Public records indicate that there’s only one person named David DePape in the state of California. An SFgate article from 2013 about a Bay Area woman named Gypsy Taub, who was planning a naked wedding, identified “David Depape” as the best man and a “hemp jewelry maker.” The article also reported the two lived together.

There’s much more at the link if you can stomach it. It’s all very familiar and it’s obvious that this man was influenced by Trump and his followers. Of course Republicans are taking no responsibility for spreading the Trumpist lies that DePape bought into or for spending years attacking Nancy Pelosi.

The Washington Post: Attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband follows years of GOP demonizing her.

In 2010, Republicans launched a “Fire Pelosi” project — complete with a bus tour, a #FIREPELOSI hashtag and images of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) engulfed in Hades-style flames — devoted to retaking the House and demoting Pelosi from her perch as speaker.

Eleven years later, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) joked that if he becomes the next leader of the House, “it will be hard not to hit” Pelosi with the speaker’s gavel.

And this year, Pelosi — who Republicans have long demonized as the face of progressive policies and who was a target of rioters during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — emerged as the top member of Congress maligned in political ads, with Republicans spending nearly $40 million on ads that mention Pelosi in the final stretch of the campaign, according to AdImpact, which tracks television and digital ad spending.

The years of vilification culminated Friday when Pelosi’s husband, Paul, was attacked with a hammer during an early-morning break-in at the couple’s home in San Francisco by a man searching for the speaker and shouting “Where is Nancy? Where is Nancy?” according to someone briefed on the assault.

Many of the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 also chanted “Where’s Nancy?”

Bloomberg: Musk’s Twitter Roils With Hate Speech as Trolls Test New Limits.

In the wake of Elon Musk buying Twitter Inc., a tide of slurs and racist memes swelled on the platform, sparking concern that the site is entering an era of hateful speech.

Twitter has long wrestled with how to enforce content policies fairly on its platform in order to appease the advertisers, users and powerful world leaders that use its service. But as Musk, a self-styled “free speech absolutist,” took over ownership of the company, some conservative officials, partisan extremists and conspiracy peddlers saw reason to celebrate the change.

“It seems like this is a group of people who think the rules magically changed as soon as he signed on the dotted line,” said Katie Harbath, the chief executive officer and founder of Anchor Change and former public policy director at Facebook.

Dr. Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics at George Washington University, said as soon as Musk took control of Twitter, online trolls began encouraging each other to push the boundaries on Twitter.

“Unfortunately, this spike in hateful language is entirely predictable,” said Tromble, who has studied Twitter for years. “For most of these trolls, it’s a game. But for others, including certain political influencers, saying hateful, outlandish things helps them increase their audience and make money. And they see this as a golden opportunity to gain even more attention.”

The flood of speech underlines the difficulty Musk faces in fulfilling his promise to restore people’s ability to speak freely while managing the palatability of the platform for advertisers, to whom he pledged in a letter Thursday that Twitter would not spiral into a “free-for-all hellscape” under his leadership. Musk has repeatedly opposed Twitter’s enforcement strategies, such as banning some high-profile accounts permanently.

Musk tweeted that Twitter will form a content-moderation council that includes “widely diverse viewpoints.”

The Washington Post: Twitter workers await their fate as Musk deputies evaluate their work.

Tuesday Reads

Good Afternoon!!

Olive trees in Cavalier, Henri Manguin, 1906

We’re just two weeks away from the midterm elections and the polls are all over the place. It looks like Republicans are in the cat bird seat, and that could be terrible for our democracy. But polls have been unreliable in the recent elections going back to 2016. We are just going to have to wait and see what happens.

From Nate Cohn at The New York Times: If These Poll Results Keep Up, Expect Anything on Election Night.

To this point, this year’s midterm campaign has been about one big question: Can Democrats defy political gravity and overcome the long history of drubbings dealt to the president’s party?

After months showing the Democrats running very well for a midterm year, the polls now offer pretty strong evidence that the party can’t overcome political gravity — at least not entirely. Democrats are being dragged back to earth.

Now, the question is whether Democrats can survive the landing — especially in the Senate, but also in a large chunk of Democratic-leaning House districts.

Looking back, political gravity began to reassert itself several weeks ago. After Labor Day, polls suggested Republican gains in key Senate races where Democrats had shown important summer strength. President Biden’s approval rating stopped increasing. Then the favorable news environment that seemed to give Democrats an opportunity just vanished, perhaps in no small part because of bad inflation news and a falling stock market.

It’s been enough to let Republicans reclaim the lead on the generic congressional ballot, in which voters are asked whether they’ll back Democrats or Republicans for Congress. On average, Republicans have led by two to three percentage points nationally in polls of registered or likely voters released over the last week or so — with Republicans faring even better among likely voters than the polls of registered voters imply.

It’s very difficult for me to understand how voters can choose gas prices over saving democracy and how they can believe that Republicans will be better for the economy than Democrats.

Of course, the voters — not the polls — will have the final say on all of these questions. As such, we spend a lot of time going through the risks of polling error in this newsletter. But for this post let’s imagine that the polls are exactly right about the national political environment. If so, the race is in a very delicate spot. Everything from a Democratic hold in the Senate and a narrow House majority to a total Republican rout becomes imaginable.

Apples and Roses, Fairfield Porter

Why the wide range of possibilities? On one hand, a Republican lead of two or three points is not inconsistent with a Democratic hold of the Senate. It’s a tough environment for battleground-state Democrats, but it’s probably survivable for strong Democratic candidates against weak Republicans.

Indeed, Democrats still lead Senate races in Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia, which would be enough for them to retain the chamber. It would be a mistake to view these races as anything other than tossups in this environment, though, especially with polls trending toward Republicans (with the exception of Georgia). The point is simply that it remains quite possible for Democrats to retain control.

On the other hand, a lead of two or three points would also open the door to a Republican rout. To start with the simple stuff: It would be easy for Republicans to squeak out a win in one of Pennsylvania, Arizona or Georgia, and take the Senate. But it would also be easy for the Republicans to make large gains in the House — a lot easier than people might think.

So basically, who the hell knows what’s going to happen?

Scott Clement at The Washington Post has some suggestions about how the read the polls: There are a ton of midterm election polls. Here’s a guide for how to read them. Check those out at the link.

But these approaches to polls ignore the fact that Republicans have every intention of cheating in 2022 and 2024.

Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley at Rolling Stone: Trump Plans to Challenge the 2022 Elections — Starting in Philly.

IN EARLY SEPTEMBER, Donald Trump welcomed a handful of Republican allies to Manhattan’s Trump Tower with an urgent message: He saw a “scam” happening with midterm election voting in Philadelphia and elsewhere in Pennsylvania, and he wanted conservatives to do something about it.

“During our briefing, he was concerned that 2020 is going to happen again in 2022,” says former senior Trump administration official Michael Caputo, referencing Trump’s debunked assertion that voter fraud in Philadelphia helped win Pennsylvania for Joe Biden. Caputo — who attended the meeting alongside Bradford County Commissioner Doug McLinko and retired CIA officer Sam Faddis — says they had a message back to the former president: “Our teamencouraged him to be concerned … [Furthermore], I’m advising Republicans to recruit and train election observers and a team of attorneys to oversee historically problematic precincts.”

But it’s not just one meeting, and it’s not just Philly.

In recent months, Trump has convened a series of in-person meetings and conference calls to discuss laying the groundwork to challenge the 2022 midterm election results, four people familiar with the conversations tell Rolling Stone. In these conversations, pro-Trump groups, attorneys, Republican Party activists, and MAGA diehards often discuss the type of scorched-earth legal tactics they could deploy.

And they’ve gamed out scenarios for how to aggressively challenge elections, particularly ones in which a winner is not declared on Election Night. If there’s any hint of doubt about the winners, the teams plan to wage aggressive court campaigns and launch a media blitz. Trump himself set the blueprint for this on Election Night 2020, when — with the race far from decided — he went on national television to declare: “Frankly, we did win this election.”

Henri Matisse, Still Life with Oranges

Trump has been briefed on plans in multiple states and critical races — including in Georgia. But Pennsylvania has grabbed his interest most keenly, including in the Senate contest between Democrat John Fetterman and the Trump-endorsed GOP contender Mehmet Oz. If the Republican does not win by a wide enough margin to trigger a speedy concession from Fetterman — or if the vote tally is close on or after Election Night in November — Trump and other Republicans are already preparing to wage a legal and activist crusade against the “election integrity” of Democratic strongholds such as the Philly area.

Trump’s focus on Pennsylvania, however, seems to be more about his own political future than about party allegiance or fealty to his celebrity endorsee. As he hosts meetings on possible 2022 election challenges, he’s also been laying the groundwork for a run in 2024 — where Pennsylvania again promises to be critical and competitive. As one source who has spoken to Trump several times about a potential post-election-day legal battle over the Oz-Fetterman race puts it, Trump views a potential midterm challenge as a “dress rehearsal for Trump 2024.”

Read much more about Trump’s plans at the Rolling Stone link.

From Mediaite: Hillary Clinton Claims ‘Right Wing Extremists’ Already Have a Plan to ‘Literally Steal the Next Presidential Election.’

The midterm elections may be only days away, but Hillary Clinton is sounding the alarm on the 2024 presidential election, claiming “right wing extremists” already have a plan in place to “literally steal” an election for which there are no official candidates.

Clinton’s message was made for the the group Indivisible. According to their website, the organization is “grassroots movement of thousands of local Indivisible groups with a mission to elect progressive leaders, rebuild our democracy, and defeat the [Donald] Trump agenda.”

The video was released last week, but got renewed attention this week as conservative critics called out Clinton’s message about the potential legitimacy of the next presidential election.

“I know we’re all focused on the 2022 midterm elections, and they are incredibly important, but we also have to look ahead because, you know what, our opponents certainly are. Right-wing extremists already have a plan to literally steal the next presidential election, and they’re not making a secret of it,” Clinton said in the video.

At issue for the former presidential candidate is the “right-wing controlled Supreme Court,” which she argued could before 2024 give more power to state legislatures to “overturn presidential elections.” Others have sounded the alarm over state legislatures gaining more control in how to conduct elections in 2024.

Watch the video at Mediaite.

We really have to hope that the DOJ will bring him down before he is able to get back into the White House. And they are continuing to move forward. Here’s the latest on the stolen documents case from The New York Times: Prosecutors Pressure Trump Aides to Testify in Documents Case.

Federal prosecutors investigating former President Donald J. Trump’s handling of national security documents he took with him from the White House have ratcheted up their pressure in recent weeks on key witnesses in the hopes of gaining their testimony, according to two people briefed on the matter.

Moonlight, by Thure Sundell

The effort by the Justice Department shows how the investigation is entering a new phase as prosecutors seek to push recalcitrant witnesses to cooperate with them.

A key focus for prosecutors is Walt Nauta, a little-known figure who worked in the White House as a military valet and cook when Mr. Trump was president and later for him personally at Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s private club and residence in Florida.

Prosecutors have indicated they are skeptical of an initial account Mr. Nauta gave investigators about moving documents stored at Mar-a-Lago and are using the specter of charges against him for misleading investigators to persuade him to sit again for questioning, according to two people briefed on the matter.

At the same time, the prosecutors are trying to force a longtime aide and ally to Mr. Trump, Kash Patel, to answer questions before a grand jury about how the documents were taken to Mar-a-Lago and how Mr. Trump, his aides and his lawyers dealt with requests from the government to return them, according to a person briefed on the matter….

Shortly after the F.B.I. executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago in August to reclaim the classified documents, Mr. Patel publicly proclaimed that the former president had declassified the records before leaving office. But Mr. Patel refused to answer many questions this month before a grand jury in Washington hearing evidence about Mr. Trump’s handling of the documents, citing his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, according to a person briefed on the matter.

In response, prosecutors asked a top federal judge in Washington to force Mr. Patel to testify — a move fought by Mr. Patel’s lawyers, who are concerned the government wants to use Mr. Patel’s own statements to incriminate him. CNN reported on Thursday that Mr. Patel had appeared before a grand jury.

The efforts to gain the testimony of Mr. Nauta and Mr. Patel demonstrate how department officials will have to make decisions in the coming weeks and months about whether to charge the witnesses, offer them cooperation agreements, grant them immunity or give up on trying to obtain their testimony, according to the people briefed on the matter.

Check out this video for a helpful explanation of what DOJ is doing with Patel.

Yesterday a bunch of so-called “progressives” from the House recommended that Biden should negotiate directly with Russia to achieve peace in Ukraine–as if Ukraine weren’t an independent country under attack and as if Russia would honor any agreement. It did go well for them and now they are trying to walk it back. I was really surprised to see Jamie Raskin involved in this.

Andrew Feinberg The Independent: Progressive Democrats in Congress slammed over letter calling for US-Russia talks over Ukraine.

A group of 30 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus has had to quickly retreat after a letter calling for direct US-Russia talks to resolve the war in Ukraine touched off a firestorm of criticism.

In the 24 October letter to President Joe Biden, the 30 signatories – including CPC chair Pramilla Jayapal of Washington, former CPC chairs Mark Pocan of Wisconsin and Barbara Lee of California, Democratic “squad” members Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Cori Bush, and other high-profile progressives such as Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin – called for the US to mount a “proactive diplomatic push, redoubling efforts to seek a realistic framework for a cease fire” as a condition of future military support for Ukraine.

Egon Schiele – Landschaft in Niederösterreich

The letter lays out a series of concerns, chief among them the fact that the US has not maintained a bilateral dialogue with Moscow as part of efforts to bring the war to a close. The lawmakers relayed these concerns to Mr Biden despite months of statements from the administration stressing that the US would not engage in direct talks without participation from Ukrainian officials.

A Ukrainian journalist, Anastasia Lapitina, took to Twitter on Monday to slam the letter, writing that the signatories seem not to understand that Russian “operates on a completely different set of assumptions about the world and this war” than the progressives who spearheaded the missive to Mr Biden….

“They [Russia] have never accepted our independence, and they won’t start now. Our subjugation is their fundamental goal. Diplomacy will not change that,” she wrote.

A former commanding general of US forces in Europe, Mark Hertling, wrote in agreement: “These 30 [members of Congress] are exceedingly naive about this crucial point”. […..]

The backlash against the letter was sufficiently intense that Ms Jayapal was forced to issue a statement to “reaffirm” the progressive caucus’ support for Ukraine just five hours after the letter became public.

“Let me be clear: we are united as Democrats in our unequivocal commitment to supporting Ukraine in their fight for their democracy and freedom in the face of the illegal and outrageous Russian invasion, and nothing in the letter advocates for a change in that support,” she wrote.

Nancy Pelosi weighed in on the issue. The Insider: Pelosi reaffirms US support for Ukraine ‘until victory is won’ after progressive lawmakers push for talks with Russia.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Tuesday that US support for Ukraine will continue ‘until victory is won,’ an implicit rebuke of progressive lawmakers who just a day earlier pushed the White House to talk with Russia.

“Under President Biden, our support for Ukraine – and our determination to defend democracy – is here to stay until victory is won. Slava Ukraini!” Pelosi said in a statement that also praised Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s “courageous and patriotic leadership.”

The speaker’s vow comes amid a series of conflicting messages from congressional leaders over long and how robust US support will be as Ukraine continues to repel Russia’s invasion. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has implied that Republicans may curtail US support for Ukraine if they regain the majority in upcoming midterms.

What are your thoughts on these stories? What else is on your mind today?