Here are this week’s SWAJ Research Links, compiled by SWAJ Team Member Mark Kurth.
National Inquiries
Men are going to brutal boot camps to reclaim their masculinity. How did we get here?
"Man camps," or all-male experiences designed for men's self-improvement, have gained attention on social media, where more extreme versions of these programs, such as the Modern Day Knight Project in Southern California, share videos of the treatment participants endure, often to the tune of hundreds of thousands of views.
AI is destabilizing ‘the concept of truth itself’ in 2024 election
Politicians around the globe have been swatting away potentially damning pieces of evidence — grainy video footage of hotel trysts, voice recordings criticizing political opponents — by dismissing them as AI-generated fakes. At the same time, AI deepfakes are being used to spread misinformation.
On Monday, the New Hampshire Justice Department said it was investigating robocalls featuring what appeared to be an AI-generated voice that sounded like President Biden telling voters to skip the Tuesday primary — the first notable use of AI for voter suppression this campaign cycle.
Donald Trump has a big problem ahead
Donald Trump has a problem no matter what happens in New Hampshire on Tuesday night: There’s a whole swath of the Republican electorate and a good chunk of independents who appear firmly committed to not voting for him in November if he becomes the nominee.
It’s an issue that became starkly apparent in polling ahead of the Iowa caucuses, when an NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll of voters in that state found that fully 43 percent of Nikki Haley supporters said they would back President Joe Biden over Trump. And it’s a dynamic that has been on vivid display as the campaign shifted this week to New Hampshire.
Gen Z Republicans to the GOP: Hello???
The fourth annual Run GenZ conference was an opportunity for aspiring conservative elected officials to learn how to kickstart their careers in politics. In between sessions on personal narrative building and women’s leadership, they noshed on a taco lunch in the hotel lobby and discussed a common belief that the Republican Party needs better youth representation — but isn’t doing enough to get it.
It was a fraught topic, particularly at the conference. Just weeks earlier, every Run GenZ member on the Republican National Committee’s Youth Advisory Council — an initiative started last year to ameliorate concerns about youth engagement — resigned from the council, including Run GenZ’s founder and president, 26-year-old former Iowa state Rep. Joe Mitchell. In their letter of resignation, the leaders lambasted the RNC’s attempt to reach young voters as a “fundraising ploy” with no actual vision.
Trump’s New Hampshire win had some bright red warning signs
“In a state with so many independent primary voters, with Trump above 50, it’s pretty hard to argue that Republican primary voters are looking for anyone else,” said former New Hampshire GOP chair Fergus Cullen.
Still, bright red warning signs are flashing for Trump. A wounded Haley is vowing to fight on, telling a crowd on Tuesday night that “this race is far from over.” A Supreme Court decision threatening Trump’s ballot status looms. And voters he’ll need in November are either, at best, not voting for him, or at worst vowing to never vote for him.
Here are five things New Hampshire told us about the primary as it moves to Nevada, South Carolina, Michigan and beyond.
The Anti-Trans Crusade Was Supposed to Make DeSantis President. What Happens Now That He’s Gone?
How did attacking a harmless minority, one few Americans care about or even really understand, become the top policy priority of one of the two major political parties in the U.S.? The answer isn’t complicated, and it has nothing to do with trans people at all. The anti-trans moral panic was manufactured to sell Ron DeSantis as the savior of the Republican party after Trump. Everything else ultimately stems from the miscalculation that tried, and failed, to bring us President Meatball Ron.
Memo to the White House: 5 lessons for Biden from Trump's triumphs in Iowa, New Hampshire
Donald Trump's steamroller ride to the Republican presidential nomination, a race that is now all but settled with his double-digit victory in the New Hampshire primary Tuesday, has displayed his strengths and exposed his vulnerabilities.
Trump commands the Republican voters who determine the nomination, but faces resistance from the independent and moderate voters he'll need to prevail in the general election. His multiple criminal indictments haven't slowed his roll, but a conviction might.
And the issue of abortion, the lodestone of Democrats' electoral hopes, has unfolded in ways that suggest Trump might be able to finesse some of its political cost.
Trump wants to send troops to the inner cities. A top senator wants to rein him in.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a senior member of the Homeland, Armed Services and Judiciary committees, told POLITICO he is seeking Republicans and Democrats to join his latest effort to overhaul the law involving deployments inside the U.S., known as the Insurrection Act.
The Biden Campaign Is Finally Talking About Abortion
President Joe Biden’s campaign sharpened his messaging on abortion rights this week with several events and a policy blitz, framing the 2024 election as a choice between Democrats who want to restore the protections of Roe v. Wade and Republicans who would implement more extreme restrictions, including a national abortion ban. But for all its fiery rhetoric, the campaign’s proposals to contain the damage caused by the U.S. Supreme Court aren’t rising to meet the urgency of the moment.
New York man found guilty of murder after 20-year-old woman was shot and killed when car turned in wrong driveway
Monahan had pleaded not guilty to charges of murder in the second degree, reckless endangerment and tampering with physical evidence in the death of 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis on April 15, 2023. He was convicted of all charges after about two hours of deliberations.
Monahan shot at the vehicle when it accidentally turned into his driveway while the occupants looked for a friend’s house in Washington County, roughly 55 miles north of Albany. Gillis died a short time after the shooting.
Good economic news forces the GOP to switch narrative to the border. There must be fear!
We realize that for many months we have asked you to pay attention to the economy and be hopping mad at Biden and his “Bidenomics” for making everything so horrible.
Well, now we have a different request. Please DO NOT pay any attention whatsoever to the economy and instead focus entirely on the crisis along our southern border. Do not glance at how the stock market is doing, and under no circumstances check your 401(k) balances.
In Trump E. Jean Carroll verdict, former president ordered to pay $83 million
Former President Donald Trump must pay advice columnist E. Jean Carroll a stunning $83.3 million for defaming her in 2019, when he denied her allegations of sexual assault and said "people should pay dearly for such false accusations," a federal civil jury ruled Friday.
Carroll's lawyers had asked the anonymous nine-person jury for heavy damages against the former president, and the panel didn't disappoint: Carroll was awarded $18.3 million in compensatory damages, and $65 million in punitive damages. The jury deliberated for just three hours after a trial spanning several days of testimony and arguments.
CDC issues alert that measles cases are up, urging health providers to watch for disease
In an email Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged vigilance among health providers across the U.S. following reports of nearly two dozen cases of the preventable virus since December. Health providers should look for patients with rash and fever, symptoms of measles, and pay attention to patients who have recently traveled internationally, the alert said.
Democrats’ not-so-secret weapon in House races: Donald Trump
Democrats are banking on the former president again being one of their best get-out-of-the vote weapons as they work to retake the narrowly divided House this year.
The party plans to spend millions of dollars tying vulnerable Republicans in key House races to Trump and his MAGA base, anticipating the likely GOP standard bearer will be a millstone in hotly contested districts.
New York in particular will serve as a test case for how far the anti-Trump message will carry as Democrats seek to flip five House seats across the state. All five are represented by first-term GOP lawmakers whose districts President Joe Biden carried in 2020.
How New Hampshire exposed Trump's vulnerabilities and Biden's path to beat him
Trump's poor showing with New Hampshire's independent voters − combined with some Republicans who said they won't back the former president if he is the Republican nominee − underscored the risk Trump poses for the GOP as their nominee.
Perhaps most alarming for the former president, about 90% of Haley's voters in New Hampshire − a battleground in the general election − said they would be dissatisfied if Trump were the nominee. And 83% of Haley voters said Trump, who is facing multiple criminal indictments, would be unfit for office if convicted.
"The warning signs are there," said Simon Rosenberg, a longtime Democratic strategist. "This idea that somehow Trump is strong and is doing better than he did in 2016 and 2020 − it's a joke. What we are seeing is the non-MAGA wing of the Republican Party is very reticent about joining forces with MAGA in 2024."
'Very clear' or 'narrow and confusing'? Abortion lawsuits highlight confusion over emergency exceptions
A North Dakota judge's recent decision to deny a request blocking part of the state's restrictive abortion law highlights an issue abortion-rights advocates say is impacting doctors nationwide: The exceptions in strict abortion laws can be vague, causing medical providers to question when they can perform an abortion in a medical emergency.
A lawsuit in North Dakota is one of several recently filed by advocates seeking to clarify and expand the circumstances under which doctors can provide abortions during medical emergencies in states with strict abortion bans. Mary Ziegler, a professor of law at University of California, Davis, said the emergency exceptions written into these laws can be confusing for physicians and, given their high penalties, can lead doctors to "err on the side of protecting themselves and not providing care to patients."
States Fights
Revealed: far-right figures try to create Christian nationalist ‘haven’ in Kentucky
The promoters have presented the planned development as an “aligned community” for rightwingers who want to “disappear from the cultural insanity of the broader country” and “spearhead the revival of the region”.
The move is the latest effort by the far-right to establish geographical enclaves, following in the footsteps of movements like the so-called “American Redoubt”, which encourages rightwingers to engage in “political migration” to areas in the interior of the Pacific north-west.
But the underlying finances of land offerings associated with the “Highland Rim Project” (HRP) in Kentucky suggest that buyers will pay a steep premium for living in a remote ideological enclave, while the scheme’s promoters are set to collect tidy profits after making few apparent improvements to the land.
Chip Roy: Texas should ignore Supreme Court’s border razor wire ruling
“They have a duty under the Constitution … and every other norm of leadership of any sovereign state, to protect your citizens, period, full stop. There is no exception to that,” Roy told Fox News Digital on Tuesday. “And if the Supreme Court wants to ignore that truth, which a slim majority did, Texas still had the duty, Texas leaders still have the duty, to defend their people.”
Vocal Locals
‘Our System Needs to Be Broken, and He Is the Man to Do It’
So Johnson’s journey from that VFW last fall to how he says he’s set to vote this week — a four-and-a-half-month turnabout from literally wanting to “pull us back together” to literally wanting to “pull it apart” — offers as instructive an insight as I’ve yet encountered into how on earth we are where we are. Trump could be just a disgraced ex-president facing time in prison. Instead, at least for now, he is a durably dominant political force credibly eyeing a return to the White House. And if Trump wins in New Hampshire on Tuesday (and polls say he probably will), and if he beats Joe Biden come November (and polls say he certainly might), it will be because of Johnson and the many thousands of others like him who looked for ways to quit Trump but ultimately couldn’t, didn’t and haven’t — and not remotely reluctantly but with an explicit sense of vengeance.