Roy Moore Brushes Off Trump Urging Him Not To Run: ‘Everybody Knows I Can Win’
Former Alabama Judge Roy Moore wasn’t moved by President Trump’s urgingthat he not run for senate in Alabama (again).
In an interview with the Associated Press, Moore said he has not yet made a decision about whether he will run against his former opponent Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL) in 2020 — though he has made strong indications on Twitter and in press interviews that he plans to run — and shrugged off Trump’s Wednesday morning remarks.
“I think the president is coming under pressure from people in Washington, scared that I will run for the Senate, scared I will win and know I can win,” Moore told the AP. “Everybody knows I can win and that’s what’s worrying in Washington.”
Moore also told the AP he will announce his decision in June, which The Hill was first to report on Tuesday.
Trump tweeted on Wednesday about the “devastating” consequences that the state of Alabama might face if a Democrat won the election again in 2020 and said flatly: “Roy Moore cannot win.”
Moore fell to Jones in the special election for former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ old senate seat in 2017. Trump endorsed Moore in that election, despite several women who came forward during the election alleging Moore had made sexual advances toward them when they were in their teens and he was in his 30s.
Pelosi Slams Facebook Over Refusal To Take Down Doctored Videos
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on Wednesday put Facebook on blast for its refusal to take down a video that was doctored to make her look like she was slurring her speech.
“We have said all along, ‘Poor Facebook, they were unwittingly exploited by the Russians,'” Pelosi told local California radio station KQED. “I think wittingly, because right now they are putting up something that they know is false. I think it’s wrong.”
“I think they have proven — by not taking down something they know is false — that they were willing enablers of the Russian interference in our election,” she continued.
Facebook’s vice president for product policy and counterterrorism, Monika Bickert, told CNN last week that the social media giant wouldn’t take down the video because it doesn’t promote violence. Instead, Facebook is sending out alerts that the video is fake.
“We think it’s important for people to make their own informed choice about what to believe,” Bickert told Anderson Cooper. “Our job is making sure that we are getting them accurate information.”
She defended Facebook’s decision on the grounds that the public conversation about the video is centered on its inauthenticity, not the actual video alone.
The doctored Pelosi videos started making the rounds online late last week.
President Donald Trump and his allies, including Rudy Giuliani and Corey Lewandowski, have boosted doctored videos of Pelosi that’ve been slowed down to make her seem drunk or feeble. It’s been Trumpworld’s go-to attack against the House speaker ever since Trump stormed out of a meeting with her and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) last week.
Why Is This Republican Congressman Following White Nationalists On Twitter?
Anonymous internet bigots are a dime a dozen. But when a member of Congress subscribes to a live feed of their thoughts, we take note.
Sure, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) “follows” some usual suspects on his personal Twitter page. Among the 792 accounts the congressman keeps up with on the social network are national parks, think tanks, journalists and local restaurants in Arizona’s Fourth District. The list includes Trump supporters, plenty of “Qanon” conspiracy theory believers, accounts with anti-immigrant beliefs that mirror Gosar’s own and even the rapper Drake.
But a few are out-and-out white nationalists. Gosar’s office didn’t respond to TPM’s requests for comment on how the congressman came to follow these accounts.
One of the accounts, @marktsword, referred in a recent tweet to “ZOG,” or “Zionist-occupied government,” a reference to the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Jews secretly control various governments. The account used a racial slur in a tweet just days ago, and the same day called for “a leader who can rile the masses of Whites with their eye’s [sic] closed.”
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“Fn Jew bastards https://t.co/CQcr8YAFCE
— Mark sr(@ marktsword) May 29, 2019”
Another account Gosar follows has “88” in its handle. On far-right corners of the internet, that number refers to the eighth letter in the alphabet: 88 is a stand-in for “HH,” or “Heil Hitler.” The Twitter user wrote at one point that she’s glad she sends her daughter to a school that’s “99% white.” On Monday, responding to a group picture of a multi-racial classroom in Ireland, the account tweeted “Sad so many whites hate their own people so much that they cheer for the blatant eradication of them.” Elsewhere, she referred to black people as “animals.”
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“My daughter came home from school today talking about how her science teacher was mad about the light sentence this guy got. I’m glad I changed her school to a 99% white, country ass school. At least they’re talking about what’s really going on. https://t.co/a68E4bZyJj
—Lyllith
(@ TradNatWife88) May 14, 2019)”
TPM started looking into Gosar’s web presence last week when he “liked” a post from Stefan Molyneux, a popular right-wing YouTuber who made a case for white nationalism in a documentary about Poland he released in December. Gosar follows Molyneux on Twitter, too.
Gosar is active on the account. On Wednesday night, for example, he tweeted what appeared to be a homemade travelogue-style video documenting his air travel, tagging the right-wing internet personality Mike Cernovich. Gosar created his personal account in June 2017 — long after creating a professional account, @RepGosar, in 2011 — and has “liked” more than 1,600 posts since then.
The congressman is also known for letting loose on the platform. In April, he called a Democratic critic of his a “porn loving whiny bitch” and “a little bitch.”
So pretty much...Mueller sayin the muthafucca committed a crime...but b/c the DOJ told them that bs they can't indict a sitting president...that's why he didn't push forward wit charging him.
BUT...he's tellin Congress "I'll leave that up to yall...hint hint". So in other words...folks need to VOTE and VOTE OUT these GOP senators so the Dems can reclaim the Senate...AND THEN...produce the articles of impeachment
Census Bombshell: New Evidence Shows Citizenship Question Added To Boost GOP
The move by the Trump administration to add a citizenship question to the census can be traced back directly to the work of a Republican redistricting expert who studied how to create maps that “would be advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites,” according to new evidence revealed in court documents filed Thursday.
How the evidence even fell into the challengers’ laps is in itself an incredible turn of luck, involving an estranged daughter, a chance phone call and a casual conversation about how the files of the GOP’s gerrymandering mastermind might be useful in a voting rights lawyers.
The documents — filed by the challengers in the case in New York seeking to block the question — offer the most concrete evidence yet that the Trump administration added the question in order to boost the GOP, rather than to better enforce the Voting Rights Act — its official rationale.
The challengers already won their case at the trial court level, but it has been appealed and was heard by the Supreme Court last month. A final decision on whether the question will stay on the 2020 census is expected in June.
The new evidence backs the case made by the challengers that the administration lied about its reasons for adding the question, and, over the course of the litigation, further concealed the citizenship question’s true origins. It supports other evidence that adding the question was part of a long-held goal by conservative advocates to overhaul redistricting in a way that shifts political power away from urban and diverse communities.
According to the new evidence, Thomas Hofeller — the Republican Party’s go-to redistricting expert who died last year — was behind language that made it into the Justice Department’s formal request in December 2017 that the question be added to the census.
The evidence was found in a hard drive provided by Hofeller’s estranged daughter, who first shared it with the challengers in a partisan gerrymandering case in North Carolina. She had reached out to the challengers, the voting rights group Common Cause, to find a lawyer to help her settle her father’s estate, the New York Times reported. She mentioned to a member of the group, only in passing and after several conversations, the hard drive of Hofeller’s personal laptop that she had found while going through his personal belongings. The staffer then brought up that Common Cause had brought the lawsuit in North Carolina, and the daughter thought “Wow — this might be of use,” as she told the Times
Coincidentally, a D.C.-based law firm that was assisting the North Carolina challengers was also involved in the census case in New York. The treasure trove of Hofeller’s digital files was shared among those challengers as well, leading to the discovery of the smoking gun now being put forward in the census case.
What they found is that Hofeller conducted an analysis in 2015 on how excluding noncitizens in redistricting “would clearly be a disadvantage for the Democrats,” using the Texas legislature as a case study.
“A switch to the use of citizen voting age population as the redistricting population base for redistricting would be advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites,” the study said.
The study was commissioned by GOP mega-donor Paul Singer, a major funder of the Washington Free Beacon, who was considering whether to financially support a lawsuit that sought to require that noncitizens be excluded from redistricting.
Hofeller’s study cautioned that such a redistricting overhaul would be “functionally unworkable” without a citizenship question on the Census.
Hofeller went on to advise the Trump transition on the census, and was the “first person” to suggest that a citizenship question be added, according to the deposition of another transition advisor, Mark Neuman.
Neuman claimed in his deposition that Hofeller recommended the question to “maximize” Latino population – testimony that the challengers in the New York case say is false and worthy of court sanction.
After the trial in the case was finished and the district court judge had handed down his decision, it was revealed that John Gore, the DOJ official behind the December 2017 question request, had received a draft of the request provided to him by Neuman. The revelation came in a congressional interview of Gore, and the New York challengers are also seeking that Gore be sanctioned for false testimony in the legal case.
Neuman’s draft was in fact ghostwritten by Hofeller, according to Thursday’s court filings, which point to a file on his hard drive with the meta data showing it was created in August 2017. Language verbatim from the Hofeller file made it to Neuman’s draft, which in turn bears many striking similarities to Gore’s formal request. There are even key points in the final request that can be traced back all the way to Hofeller’s 2015 study.
The new documents fill in the picture of what voting rights advocates long suspected was the true motive for adding the citizenship question.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the census and made the call to add the question, was able to avoid a deposition in the New York case. But emails produced in the litigation show that he was pushing for the question to be added from the early days of the Trump administration. The efforts by his aides to do so — by securing a request from another agency — were first rebuffed by the Justice Department and by the Department of Homeland Security in the summer of 2017.
Ross only increased the pressure on his aides, and even sought the intervention of then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to see to it that the Justice Department submit the formal request, which claimed data from the question would enhance its enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. Around the time Ross aides were scrambling to figure out how to add it, Hofeller was helping to write the VRA rationale, according to the documents filed Thursday.
The rationale was from the beginning viewed with extreme skepticism by civil rights advocates, who note that the question will in fact discourage the participation of immigrant communities on the census, resulting in an undercount that will skew political representation and government resources away from them.
Thursday’s revelation only reenforces their suspicions that the question was specifically added specifically to diminish the political representation of immigrant and urban communities. It now turns out that the VRA rationale was in fact partially written by a redistricting expert who had studied how excluding noncitizens from redistricting would boost the electoral advantages of non-hispanic whites and Republicans.
Steve King: Treating All Cultures As ‘Equal’ Devalues Contributions Of Founding Fathers
Rep. Steve King (R-IA) earlier this week claimed that treating all cultures as “equal” would be “devaluing the contributions” of America’s Founding Fathers.
King held a town hall Tuesday in Fort Dodge, Iowa, during which he was asked about his racist rhetoric around white nationalism. A constituent identified by the Des Moines Register as Christina Russell told the congressman that she took it personally when he “criminalized Mexican culture.”
“Dehumanizing someone’s culture is not a joke,” Russell told King. “I just want to clarify that for you. Dehumanizing the Mexican culture is not a joke.”
In response, King insisted that he “doesn’t deal in race,” only “culture.”
“If we presume that every culture is equal and has an equal amount to contribute to our civilization, then we’re devaluing the contributions of the people that laid the foundation for America and that’s our Founding Fathers,” King said.
The congressman claimed that “If there are new ideas coming in from other cultures, we can welcome them but we should debate them as to whether they are a plus and enhance contribute to the civilization that we are.”
“It’s not about race, it’s never been about race,” King said. “It is about culture.”
This incident adds to King’s many racist outbursts and flirtations with white nationalism. He questioned the offensiveness of “white nationalism” during a New York Times interview in January, claimed that “you can’t rebuild your civilization with somebody else’s babies” and has retweeted neo-Nazis several times.
At one point during the town hall on Tuesday, King defended his “white nationalism” remark to the New York Times (for which House GOP leadership stripped him of his committee assignments) and claimed that the left has “weaponized” that term.
King lamented that losing his committee spots was one of the “significant injustices that’s ever taken place in Congress.”
A video of the town hall can be found on King’s Facebook page here (King’s comments on his Times interview begin at around the 21:00 timestamp; his comments about “culture” begin at the 34:00 timestamp).
Lawsuit: Miss. Election Procedures Are ‘Racist Scheme’ Meant to ‘Dilute’ African American Vote
Three African American Mississippi residents plan to file a lawsuit Thursday claiming that the state’s method of electing its governors and statewide officials is demonstrably racist. The plaintiffs will seek an injunction in the upcoming 2019 election due to the state’s “racist electoral scheme” which aims to “dilute African American voting strength.”
The lawsuit is financially backed by the National Redistricting Foundation, an anti-gerrymandering organization and affiliate of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NRDC); the committee is providing legal support for the case. Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is the chairman of the NRDC.
The complaint specifically points to Mississippi’s election procedures under which statewide candidates are required to win a majority of the popular vote as well as 62 of 122 state House of Representatives’ districts. Mississippi enshrined the procedure into the state constitution in 1890. The lawsuit claims this was an attempt by the state’s white politicians to suppress the voting power of African Americans.
Mississippi is the only state in the nation with a mandate that candidates must win a majority of state House of Representative districts in order to be elected.
According to the lawsuit, African American voters account for more than half of the state’s voting-age population in over one-third of Mississippi’s 122 House districts. However, due to gerrymandered voting maps, African American voters are heavily concentrated in these districts allegedly to intentionally prevent their supported candidates from winning House district majorities.
In an interview with the Associated Press on Thursday, Holder did not mince words in dredging up the law’s bigoted past, saying that “The election system in Mississippi has really kind of perpetuated a history of racial discrimination that finally has to come to an end.”
This is not a theoretical thing,” he told the AP. “We have seen no statewide African American elected to office since this was enacted, in spite of the fact that Mississippi has the highest percentage of African Americans of any state in the country.”
The complaint echoed Holder’s thoughts and tone:
The architects of this system for electing candidates to statewide office had one goal in mind: entrench white control of State government by ensuring that the newly enfranchised African-American citizens—who, at the time, constituted a majority of the State’s population and some of whom had been elected to statewide offices—would never have an equal opportunity to translate their numerical strength into political power.
This racist electoral scheme achieved, and continues to achieve, the framers’ goals by tying the statewide election process to the power structure of the House…So long as white Mississippians controlled the House, they would also control the elections of statewide officials.
The lawsuit also claimed that Mississippi’s current rules are intended to give certain votes more weight than others in violation of the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.
In response to the lawsuit, Bill Denny, a Republican State Representative and chairman of the House Elections Committee, told the AP that he was “comfortable” with Mississippi’s current election system.
"I think i have a shot. South Carolina is changing."
Hate to be that guy. But thats basically what Andrew Gillum said about Florida.
Exactly! Gillum might have lost, but it was a clear message of how things are changing. Trump is their last push with the worst side of their party and they know it. Those old bigots and racists are dying out. The party message will be a lot different in 20 years.And Gillum barely “losing” is reason enough for him to give it a shot
Exactly! Gillum might have lost, but it was a clear message of how things are changing. Trump is their last push with the worst side of their party and they know it. Those old bigots and racists are dying out. The party message will be a lot different in 20 years.
Me too bruh.I hope ur right