It's a bad day for Proud Boys and MAGA riot organizers.
They had been depending on the anonymity of the internet to protect their day jobs as they went about promoting racist rioting and the, um, overthrow of the US government.
Turns out their passwords (middle name plus current house number, really?) have been exposed in a major hack of their chosen right-wing service provider, a company called Epik.
According to The Washington Post, "Epik long has been the favorite Internet company of the far-right, providing domain services to QAnon theorists, Proud Boys and other instigators of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol — allowing them to broadcast hateful messages from behind a veil of anonymity."
Anonymous no more!
But that veil abruptly vanished last week when a huge breach by the hacker group Anonymous dumped into public view more than 150 gigabytes of previously private data — including user names, passwords and other identifying information of Epik’s customers.
So what, Republicans? Do you think you’ll just sabotage the election, prevent millions of ballots from arriving, or counting, or maybe invalidating them to keep Trump in office and/or hold onto these Senate seats & the next day everyone will get up & grab Starbucks & move on?
Is holding onto power really worth ending democracy? You realize, of course, that at that point you don’t live in a democracy, you live in a country like China- one with capitalism and one party rule that one day, most of you will come to regret having built.
People will die. Perhaps a great many. Perhaps you. Perhaps your children. When societies collapse, its usually messy. People don’t fall into despotism without a fight. Are your small, safe grievances really so unbearable you’d trade them in for big ones- like not having power for days at a time? Not having medicine for your children when they’re sick? Not being able to sleep without a lookout?
Because you should understand this, this bubble you’ve created for yourselves, where Trump is a champion of freedom – on a crusade of liberty – that is one hell of an illusion. And you can know see that, if you want, by looking at all of the rest of the world, because they do not share the illusion with you. No, not even in the British and Australian conservative parties do they believe in the crazy conspiracies that have been weaved by this president and his party to get you to ignore his wrong doings. In the rest of the world, they are looking at you, the Republican Party of America, and they are in utter shock at what you have become.
Now YOU are on the edge of a cliff and what you do in the next couple of months will determine the fate of millions yet unborn. All the sacrifices of Americans that bled and died before you came along will amount to nothing if you decide to throw it all away for this small man who thinks himself a king.
You fear socialism in a country where fascism has signed a lease and is measuring the drapes. You, Republicans must rescind this offer. Can you do it? I don’t know. I only know that if you don’t, America as it has existed for 244 years may well come to an end and that will be on each of you because what is happening now, today, is preventable. You have the power to stop it.
Just remember this: if you break it, you buy it. And I do not think you will much like America 2.0.
The prototype has been a shit show.
I’m not a big fan of “Third Way,” for numerous reasons including that it’s a “corporate-funded centrist group” that reportedly has received secret funding from the Koch brothers. Ick. Despite that, I found its new report – The 99 House Districts That Will Determine Dems’ Fate – by David de la Fuente (an alum of NARAL and the DSCC; also on the advisory board of High School Democrats) to be interesting. We’ll get to the part about Virginia in a second, but first, here are some highlights from the report.
So what about Virginia? As you can see, every single Democratic-held U.S. House of Representatives seat from Virginia (VA02, VA03, VA04, VA07, VA08, VA10, VA11) – 7 total out of 11 U.S. House seats from Virginia, including every seat currently held by a Democrat – is included in the “99 House Districts That Will Determine Dems’ Fate” list. Here’s a brief recap as to why that’s the case.
I think this is a reasonable way of looking at things; how about you? I’d also note that there are districts not included in the 99 that I think are potentially winnable, such as VA05 and maybe even VA01 – both currently held by Republicans (Denver Riggleman in VA05 and Rob Wittman in VA01). But overall, I agree that it’s going to be crucial to hold VA02 and VA07, while cranking up turnout in the “blue” districts.
Finally, I’d note that the “Third Way” report doesn’t get into gubernatorial, state legislative and other “down-ballot” races, but that these are also VERY important – both in their own right, and also with regard to the 2020 presidential and Congressional races. Here in Virginia, of course, we are on an odd-year cycle for legislative and gubernatorial elections (the next big one, for the entire state legislature, is of course on November 5 – just a few weeks from today), but in other states it will really matter next year…
Wisconsin Democrats faced a bitter setback on Tuesday, apparently losing a state supreme court race they expected to win easily against a deeply flawed candidate. The result triggered some bitter deja vu for local liberals — and stood in sharp contrast to Democrats’ big successes in the 2018 midterms and other recent races in the state.
One big difference that Democrats could learn from as they head into the 2020 presidential campaign in what could be the most important state of President Trump’s reelection map: This race turned largely on social, not economic issues.
Conservative Judge Brian Hagedorn came into the race with a ton of baggage on social issues. He helped found a private religious school that bars teachers, students and parents from being in same-sex relationships. He made paid speeches to a group that advocates making sodomy illegal and sterilizing transgender people. And as a 27-year-old law student just over a decade ago, Hagedorn wrote pieces addressed to “fellow soldiers in the culture wars” that called Planned Parenthood a “wicked organization,” the NAACP a “disgrace to America,” and repeatedly compared same-sex relationships to bestiality.
On top of that, almost all of the judges that he and liberal judge Lisa Neubauer both served with endorsed her over him.
That led Democrats and progressive groups backing Neubauer to hammer Hagedorn as an unqualified bigot, using the vast majority of their resources to rail against his controversial social views.
Money poured in from national liberal groups including former Attorney General Eric Holder’s anti-gerrymandering organization, while business groups that usually back conservatives in these types of races mostly stayed out of the contest.
But that strategy may have backfired: Conservatives responded by accusing Neubauer and her allies of anti-Christian bigotry and plastered Holder’s face across mail pieces tying her to national liberal groups. That included mail pieces to social conservatives comparing liberals’ attacks Hagedorn to how they treated Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a message Walker himself amplified in the race’s closing days:
Were you upset with the way the media and the left (sometimes indistinguishable) treated Justice Kavanaugh? They’re doing the same thing to Judge Brian Hagedorn in WI. He needs everyone’s vote on Tuesday 4/2. pic.twitter.com/kUJ8AFohlW
— Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) March 31, 2019
Turnout boomed in the heavily Catholic Green Bay area as well as the Northwoods compared to the last off-year elections, where Neubauer got her clock cleaned. She also didn’t do well at boosting turnout in crucial Milwaukee County, a perennial problem for Democrats that only President Obama and the 2018 ticket were able to solve in recent years.
Both Neubauer’s strategy and her struggles echo what happened to Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin and across the Rust Belt in 2016. She spent the last months of the campaign hammering President Trump as being unfit for office because of his nasty comments about women and minorities, while largely ignoring economic issues in paid media. That strategy drove her base turnout but also pushed up rural support for Trump, who capitalized on rural white rage against Clinton trying to tell them what to do. And without a heavy emphasis on how Trump (and Hagedorn) would hurt average families, both liberal candidates offered few arguments to more populist voters for why they should back them.
Democrats’ closing message in this race stands in stark contrast to their approach during the 2018 midterms.
Watch this ad from Neubauer’s allies attacking Hagedorn’s “extremist agenda” towards gay people:
Now compare it to one of Democrats’ October ads last fall:
Gov. Tony Evers (D) drilled then-Gov. Scott Walker (R) on fiscal issues, attacking him for underfunding the state’s education system and infrastructure (he blasted Walker for the “Scottholes” dotting the state’s highway system) while attacking him for giving huge tax breaks to Chinese company Foxconn to build a plant in the state’s southeastern corner. That helped Evers edge Walker in a close race — the first time in four tries that Democrats were able to defeat the battle-hardened governor.
And Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), the first openly gay woman in the Senate and one of its most liberal members, pulled off a lopsided win by hyper-focusing on healthcare issues, opioid addiction and other issues that directly affect Wisconsinites.
Wisconsin Democrats argued accurately that it’s harder to focus on economic issues in judicial races that often revolve around hot-button issues and personal attacks, rather than races for offices that have more direct power over lawmaking and the economy.
“If you’re running for supreme court you can’t say you’re going to increase wages, fill potholes and make healthcare more affordable. It devolves into our side trying to disqualify theirs and vice versa,” said Joe Zepecki, a top Wisconsin Democratic strategist.
But Zepecki said that Democrats must make those economic arguments to hope for success in the state.
“Whoever our nominee is has to be somebody that can connect progressive policies to a better life. People are looking to elected officials to do something,” he said.
In some ways, this last race was a return to form for Wisconsin, where incredibly tight and high-turnout races have been the norm in both off-year and presidential elections. The difference between Hagedorn’s half-point win (pending a recount) and Walker’s one-point loss is hard to parse.
A few caveats: First, Neubauer actually won more votes than Rebecca Dallet did en route to a double-digit supreme court win last year. The big difference this time wasn’t Democratic voters — it was a surge in GOP voters. Second, Neubauer and her allies did have some ads attacking Hagedorn on non-social issues — allies slammed Hagedorn in ads for pushing to make it harder for victims of nursing home abuse and lead paint poisoning to sue. Third, no matter who the Democrat is, Trump and Republicans will find a way to drive culture war messaging in 2020.
But Democrats don’t have to play along. They didn’t across the Midwest last fall, and swept gubernatorial and Senate races in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, three states Trump barely won in 2016 and likely the three most important states on the 2020 map.
Holder admitted in a Wednesday morning speech it was a race that his side “should have won.”
If Democrats can learn the right lessons from this race, they won’t be saying the same thing in November 2020.
South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem lamented that the Trump trade wars have "devastated" her state and put the entire state economy in danger of collapse if he doesn't get the trade talks with China wrapped up soon.
Noem, a Republican, was interviewed at the POLITICO State Solutions conference where she was quite blunt:
“South Dakota has been devastated by the trade wars that are going on,” Noem said at POLITICO’s State Solutions Conference, noting that agriculture is “by far” the largest industry in the state. The Republican governor warned that the trade woes of farmers can trickle down to the rest of the state, impacting “every main street business, everybody that has another entity out there that relies on a successful ag industry.”
I don't want to be too much of a crank here, but he did promise he would do this. When they elected the old goat president, John Birch Society founder Robert Welch did a jig in hell. They've finally got their guy in the White House -- corrupt, greedy, and stupid. This is what happens when you support a party that built itself for Donald Trump.
Watch the entire discussion below, via POLITICO: