Here are this week’s SWAJ Research Links, compiled by SWAJ Team Member Mark Kurth.
National Inquiries
Trump remains silent on Navalny’s death
Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination, was silent following news of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s death on Friday. Instead, his campaign referred a reporter to a statement that didn’t reference Navalny or Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Trump’s silence has been criticized by his last remaining GOP opponent, Nikki Haley, who also slammed the former president for his past praise of Putin.
“Putin murdered his political opponent and Trump hasn’t said a word after he said he would encourage Putin to invade our allies. He has, however, posted 20+ times on social media about his legal drama and fake polls,” Haley said on X, formerly known as Twitter, several hours after Navalny’s death was first reported.
“Putin did this. The same Putin who Donald Trump praises and defends,” Haley wrote in a social media post reacting to the news earlier Friday morning.
Biden, lawmakers hammer Ukraine aid holdouts after Navalny death
The Biden administration and leaders on Capitol Hill used the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny to inject fresh urgency into approving funding for Ukraine on Friday, saying now is the moment to break the legislative stalemate and strike a blow against Vladimir Putin.
And on Capitol Hill, Navalny’s death spurred calls from top lawmakers to finally pass tens of billions in stalled Ukraine aid. A bipartisan group of House lawmakers unveiled a new emergency spending bill that would grant over $47 billion to assist Ukraine, placing renewed pressure on Republican leaders to finally hold a vote on an aid package.
Takeaways from the $355 million civil fraud ruling against Donald Trump
Friday’s ruling underscored how the civil cases against Trump are still significantly damaging to the former president, endangering his business empire even as he faces four criminal trials, the first of which is set to begin next month.
Engoron found Trump liable for fraud, conspiracy and issuing false financial statements and false business records, and he barred him from serving as director of a company in New York for three years. But while he stopped short of dissolving the Trump Organization altogether, Engoron issued a blistering 93-page opinion that painted the former president as unremorseful and highly likely to commit fraud again.
“Their complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological,” Engoron wrote of Trump and his co-defendants.
What is Christian nationalism? Here's what Rob Reiner's new movie gets wrong.
Ever since the tragic events of Jan. 6, 2021, in which a handful of the violent rioters donned explicitly Christian symbols, much ink has been spilled about the rising threat of Christian nationalism, which critics charge is a malignant anti-democratic force hellbent on overthrowing American democracy.
Fears of Christian nationalism have spawned a burgeoning subgenre of books, conferences and journal articles. One widely cited survey, which included sloppily expansive definitions, found that a whopping 51% of Americans were Christian nationalists.
And the new documentary "God & Country," scheduled for release Friday and produced by Hollywood mogul Rob Reiner, warns in ominous tones about the nationalists lurking around every corner.
'We can’t do anything': How Catholic hospitals constrain medical care in America.
The Catholic Church’s directives are often at odds with accepted medical standards, especially in areas of reproductive health, according to physicians and other medical practitioners.
“Patients are being turned away from necessary care,” said Jennifer Chin, an OB-GYN at UW Medicine in Seattle, because of the “emphasis on these ethical and religious directives.”
They can be a powerful constraint on the care that patients receive at Catholic hospitals, whether emergency treatment when a woman’s health is at risk, or access to birth control and abortions.
Trump avoids condemning Russia for Navalny’s death
Former President Donald Trump has so far declined to publicly condemn Russia and President Vladimir Putin for the death of Alexey Navalny and has baselessly suggested he is being politically persecuted in the same way the Russian opposition leader was.
The lack of a direct response from the GOP presidential frontrunner is likely to fuel fresh questions about how he would approach Russia in a potential second term following comments earlier this month that he would encourage the country to invade a NATO ally that was not spending enough on defense.
Taylor Swift would win any popularity contest against MAGA
Some fans of former President Donald Trump believe pop star Taylor Swift has been employed in a kind of covert government operation to prop up Joe Biden’s reelection bid and have therefore tried to stigmatize her.
Polling shows this is a bad idea. Swift is one of the most popular figures in America, and these Republicans are out of step with others in thinking she’s being propped up by the government.
Trump-Putin 2024
We were slow in awakening to the threat of Putin. We have been sluggish in responding to that threat once awakened. But it is the most urgent foreign policy threat we face.
A broad coalition of political forces in the United States, ranging from Mike Pence on the right to Bernie Sanders on the left, is anti-Putin. Against them stand Donald Trump and some of his acolytes, who are pro-Putin.
The likely nominee of one of our two major political parties is pro-Vladimir Putin. This is an astonishing fact. It is an appalling fact. It has to be a central fact of the 2024 campaign.
2024 Election: Tom Suozzi’s Win Proves That Abortion Is a Winning Issue
Suozzi, a centrist who claims he’s more conservative than 90 percent of Democrats, had declined to support the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, which largely prohibits the use of federal funds for abortion, while in office. In this race, he was more vocal about his support for reproductive rights. Meanwhile, Pilip, a registered Democrat, held office as Nassau County legislator as a Republican and voted for Trump in 2020, gave muddled answers on her stance on abortion in a recent debate with Suozzi. Democrats painted Pilip as the anti-abortion candidate, running ads with her referring to herself as “pro-life” and accusing her of wanting to ban abortion in all cases.
Trump allies prepare to infuse ‘Christian nationalism’ in second administration
Spearheading the effort is Russell Vought, who served as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget during his first term and has remained close to him. Vought, who is frequently cited as a potential chief of staff in a second Trump White House, is president of The Center for Renewing America think tank, a leading group in a conservative consortium preparing for a second Trump term.
One document drafted by CRA staff and fellows includes a list of top priorities for CRA in a second Trump term. “Christian nationalism” is one of the bullet points. Others include invoking the Insurrection Act on Day One to quash protests and refusing to spend authorized congressional funds on unwanted projects, a practice banned by lawmakers in the Nixon era.
Army struggles to identify, report violent extremism, newly released audit shows
The audit further illustrates shortcomings first identified in a USA TODAY investigation last year, which found the armed forces could show almost no progress on orders to eliminate extremism in the ranks, despite an effort launched in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection.
The newly released audit was completed in July 2023. It was obtained by the Project on Government Oversight under the Freedom of Information Act, and released Thursday. It shows researchers with the U.S. Army Audit Agency interviewed more than 400 people from July 2022 to July 2023, including commanders at 11 commands across the country, active duty soldiers and civilian Army personnel.
The Deep Story of Trumpism
But the UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild believes that Trumpism is intimately tied—for now at least—to its namesake, because it exists beyond the logic of policy. It exists in the dreampolitik realm of feelings. “If there’s one thing I think the mainstream press still gets wrong about Trump, it’s that they are comfortable talking about economics and personality, but they don’t give a primacy to feelings,” Hochschild told me. “To understand the future of the Republican Party, we have to act like political psychiatrists.”
Fox News hyped the bogus FBI informant claims against Biden. Now it’s refusing to walk them back
Days after explosive bribery claims about President Joe Biden came ripping apart at the seams, Fox News and the broader MAGA Media universe have declined to walk back their factually-challenged narrative.
Instead, unscrupulous right-wing media figures have stuck by their corruption claims against Biden, which permeated the conservative information space to such a degree that they spawned Republican-led investigations on Capitol Hill and fueled an eventual impeachment inquiry against the sitting president.
States Fights
Wisconsin Picks New Legislative Maps That Would End Years of GOP Gerrymandering
A state Supreme Court decision finally forced Wisconsin Republicans to cede an advantage they enjoyed for more than a decade with maps that made the state one of the nation’s foremost examples of gerrymandering.
The Senate and Assembly voted to adopt voting maps drawn by the office of Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat. Evers said a week ago that he would sign his redistricting plan into law if passed unchanged by the Legislature, and proponents of fairer maps have encouraged him to do so.
The surprising legislative development promises to end a six-month battle in front of the state’s now left-leaning high court, which ruled the GOP maps unconstitutional shortly before Christmas.
Arizona lawmaker: Let's just declare Trump the winner of the 2024 election now
Remember when certain Arizona Republican legislators wanted to veto our vote for president?
Now there’s a plan afoot to simply award Arizona’s 11 presidential electors to Donald Trump even before we go the polls.
I am not making this up.
House Concurrent Resolution 2055 resolves “to change the manner of the presidential election by appointing the eleven presidential electors to the Republican primary winner to offset the removal of a Republican candidate from the ballot in Colorado and Maine.”
Or in the alternative, if Gov. Katie Hobbs doesn’t accede to Republicans’ demands, to appoint Arizona’s electors “to protect the 2024 presidential election from another maladministered and illegally run election.”
Utah’s new ‘Sovereignty Act’ sets up a process to overrule the federal government. But is it constitutional?
The Utah bill, introduced as the “Utah Constitutional Sovereignty Act,” was signed into law by Gov. Spencer Cox on January 31.
“The Legislature may, by concurrent resolution, prohibit a government officer from enforcing or assisting in the enforcement of a federal directive within the state if the Legislature determines the federal directive violates the principles of state sovereignty,” the law states.
Yet the push may stand in conflict with the US Constitution’s “Supremacy Clause,” which states federal laws take precedence over state ones. Robert Keiter, a law professor at the University of Utah’s SJ Quinney College of Law, said he was skeptical the Sovereignty Act was constitutional.
In unprecedented decision, Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled frozen embryos are children. It could have chilling effects on IVF, critics say
In a first-of-its-kind ruling, Alabama’s Supreme Court said frozen embryos are children and those who destroy them can be held liable for wrongful death – a decision that puts back into national focus the question of when life begins and one that reproductive rights advocates say could have a chilling effect on infertility treatments and the hundreds of Alabamians who seek them each year.
And, critics say, the ruling could soon have consequences nationally as other states could attempt to define embryos as people. Already, one religious group is using the Alabama ruling as precedent in a Florida abortion rights case.
Bills based on 2020 election denial are moving in Georgia and elsewhere.
In Georgia, election deniers pushed for a review that might detect counterfeit ballots because they were not folded, appeared to be marked by a machine or were printed on different card stock. In Arizona, auditors were on the hunt for bamboo fibers in ballots to prove that they had fraudulently came from Asia.
Those theories were roundly rebuked, without a shred — or fiber — of evidence to support them. National attention from voters and the mainstream news media eventually shifted to the 2024 election.
But one bill introduced in the Georgia House of Representatives seeks to address those very concerns.
The bill, which was passed in committee, would require the secretary of state’s office to post high-resolution digital images of scanned paper ballots online and keep them there for 24 months, a demand of conspiracy theorists in 2021. (Similar bills regarding ballot scans have come out of committee in the New Hampshire and Arizona Legislatures.)
‘Another hot potato’: Alabama’s IVF ruling risks political, legal backlash
The decision not only threatens GOP efforts to court suburban women and other constituencies uneasy about abortion bans, but also complicates the party’s standing with millions of people who may oppose abortion but support — and in many cases use — in-vitro fertilization and other forms of fertility care. The ruling also demonstrates how the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has made previously theoretical policy and legal battles over the most intimate aspects of American life far more immediate and high-stakes.
Top Republicans defend IVF after Alabama ruling
Days after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos can be considered children under state law, leading some hospitals in the state to pause in vitro fertilization treatment, several top Republican governors said they support the procedure.
Speaking at the POLITICO Governors Summit on Thursday, Govs. Brian Kemp of Georgia, Bill Lee of Tennessee and Chris Sununu of New Hampshire offered strong approval of the treatment that has opened up a new front in the battle over reproductive rights ahead of the November elections.
Alabama justice who ruled embryos are people says American law should be rooted in the Bible
On the same day that Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Parker handed down an opinion declaring that fertilized frozen embryos are people, imperiling women’s access to in vitro fertilization treatments, he espoused support for a once-fringe philosophy that calls on evangelical Christians to reshape society based on their interpretation of the Bible.
During an online broadcast hosted by Tennessee evangelist Johnny Enlow on Friday, Parker suggested America was founded explicitly as a Christian nation and discussed his embrace of the Seven Mountains Mandate — the belief that conservative Christians are meant to rule over seven key areas of American life, including media, business, education and government.
Vocal Locals
Archdiocese of New York condemns the funeral of a trans activist at St. Patrick’s Cathedral
More than 1,000 people filled the pews of the revered New York cathedral on February 15 to honor the legendary trans activist Cecilia Gentili, who died on February 6 at 52. Gentili was a pillar of New York’s trans community, as well as a fierce advocate for sex workers and people with HIV/AIDS. Though she grew up attending Catholic services in her home country of Argentina, she was also an avowed atheist.
But after videos from the funeral and news reports from CNN and other outlets began circulating online, some prominent Catholics and conservative groups responded with backlash. A senior leader at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the seat of the Archdiocese of New York, said after the fact that it was deceived into hosting the service.
What we do and don't know as Owasso police investigate 16-year-old high school student's death
TikTok and other social media platforms have spread the news of the Owasso High School student's death, with many of the posts and stories coming on the weekend of Feb. 17 and the following days.
According to the posts, three older high school girls beat a 16-year-old nonbinary sophomore student on Feb. 7 in a bathroom at Owasso High School, leading to the 16-year-old's death the next day. During the assault, one of the older students allegedly slammed Benedict's head on the floor repeatedly and the 16-year-old couldn't walk under their own power.
Benedict's grandmother took them to the hospital after the assault, and they were examined and released. The next day, the student was taken back to the hospital, where they died.
Many platforms have cited Tulsa-area television KJRH's reporting after Benedict was laid to rest.
Inside the Christian Nationalist Church Where Proud Boys Go to be Baptized
The baptism, which was streamed on Facebook, was led by Pastor Hansel Orzame, a 44-year-old southern Californian and a self-identified Christian Nationalist who leads “Ekklesia; The Unwoke Church.”
Orzame’s church has harnessed a rising tide of Christian nationalism, which claims that America is a fundamentally Christian nation, and that “patriots” are in a “spiritual war” against nefarious, even Satanic, forces who want to subvert the country’s cultural and political institutions.
“Christian nationalists just want to go back to the way it was, Christian values and Christian ethics,” he told his followers in response to a newly-released trailer for the documentary “God and Country,” about the disturbing rise of Christian nationalism.