Here are this week’s SWAJ Research Links, compiled by SWAJ Team Member Mark Kurth.
National Inquiries
8 false Trump electors have accepted immunity deals, lawyer says
Trump and his inner circle orchestrated a plan for GOP electors in seven states he lost to sign documents claiming to be legitimate presidential electors. Those false electors became a component in a desperate last-ditch bid by Trump to overturn the election on Jan. 6, 2021. Citing the certificates signed by the false electors, Trump and a cadre of fringe attorneys claimed there was a conflict that only Congress and then-Vice President Mike Pence could resolve on Jan. 6.
Bracing for impact: Biden world preps for Hunter Biden fallout
There is a sense among Biden allies that he’ll face some blowback either way. If Hunter Biden is charged with a crime, Trump and Republicans will try to link his behavior to his father’s conduct and fitness for office. And if charges are not brought, Republicans have telegraphed that they will claim that the Department of Justice was biased and that Attorney General Merrick Garland, a Biden appointee, rigged the decision.
The Proud Boys Have Already Moved Onto Their Next Target: LGBTQ Events
Part of the motivation is obvious. The Proud Boys are following the direction of currents on the right. There has been a rise in anti-LGBTQ policies and rhetoric. The American Civil Liberties Union counts that 45 states have passed laws limiting gender-affirming care. Homophobic accounts like Libs of TikTok had added to general anti-drag and anti-trans sentiment.
The play also appears to be opportunistic. In an interview with NPR from June of last year, Kathleen Belew, a history professor at Northwestern, who has extensively studied the white power movement, described far-right groups showing up at LGBTQ events as “performative publicity.”
The Far Right’s Dangerous Fertility Myths
It seems that the likes of Owens, Rose, and Johnson are on the defensive because they’ve been caught in a lie. Along with many other conservatives, they have relentlessly pushed the narrative that only the so-called traditionalist (“trad”) daughter and wife are protected from male brutality—and it’s women of the infertile, unyoked, and unsubordinated variety who are prone to beating, rape, and other torments. In fact, Owens nodded to this very narrative when she claimed disbelief that a man could “speak to a woman like that, least of all when she is eight months pregnant.” Much like the sex abuse scandals dogging Josh Duggar, Doug Phillips, Bill Gothard, and other devotees of the “Quiverfull” movement, which mandates supersize families, the Crowder affair exposes that the pronatalist patriarchal milieu is not a refuge from violence but a primary site of it.
At Least 9 Dead, Including Gunman, in Shooting at Texas Mall
According to the Gun Violence Archive, a database of shootings in the United States, there have been 199 “mass shootings,” which it defines as the shooting of at least four people, in 2023. There were a particularly deadly spate of large-scale shootings this past week.
Last weekend, a gunman killed five people in Cleveland, Texas, near Houston, after he was asked by neighbors to stop shooting in his yard. He was captured after a multiday manhunt.
On Monday, a registered sex offender fatally shot six people, including his wife and three of her children, near Tulsa, Okla., before turning the gun on himself.
On Wednesday, a gunman opened fire at a medical office building in Atlanta, killing one and injuring four others. That, too, led to a manhunt before the suspect was caught.
Husband Sued Over His Ex-Wife’s Abortion; Now Her Friends Are Suing Him
This week, two of the women, Jackie Noyola and Amy Carpenter, filed their response in court: They are countersuing Mr. Silva for invasion of privacy in addition to offering a number of defenses to his claims. Ms. Noyola and Ms. Carpenter, who are close friends of Brittni Silva, Mr. Silva’s ex-wife, said he searched her phone without her consent and read their private messages.
Abortion-rights advocates have raised the alarm over how private information might be used in both civil and criminal cases against people who have abortions, and those who help them. In Nebraska, prosecutors used Facebook messages between a mother and daughter to bring charges against them after the daughter’s abortion.
What has gotten into Republican women?
For better or worse, people understand why white men are Republicans: Because the GOP is built around the preservation of white male domination over everyone else. But why so many women vote Republican is a question that causes great consternation, since the party is not exactly subtle about its hostility to women's rights. Their last president and current party leader bragged, on tape, about sexual assault! Is it that these women hate themselves?
The tweet gets closer to the real answer: Republican women, like Republican men, enjoy cruelty to others. They also assume their class and race privilege will shield them from the misogyny of their party. But when that assumption gets rattled, they often panic.
Jury Finds Trump Liable for Sexual Abuse and Defamation
In the civil case, the federal jury of six men and three women found that Ms. Carroll, 79, a former magazine writer, had sufficiently proved that Mr. Trump sexually abused her nearly 30 years ago in a dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan. The jury did not, however, find he had raped her, as she had long claimed.
The Corruption of Lindsey Graham
So why focus on Graham?
First, because he was a central player in the Republican party’s capitulation to Trump. And second, because he talked constantly. He produced an enormous trove of interviews, speeches, press briefings, and social media posts. Through these records, we can see how he changed, week to week and month to month. We can watch the poison work.
It’s a slow death. The surrender to despotism doesn’t happen all at once. It advances in stages: a step, a rationalization. Another step, another rationalization. The deeper you go, the more you need to justify. You say what you need to say. You believe what you need to believe.
So let’s go back to the beginning. Let’s see who Lindsey Graham was before he drank the poison.
Trump world booked CNN hoping for a big audience. Now, they’re in the thick of it.
Trump’s camp anticipates that Tuesday’s verdict, which found him liable for sexually abusing Carroll, for which she was awarded $5 million in damages, will come up. But they also see the CNN town hall as an opportunity to reach a major national audience, according to a person familiar with their thinking. And they also see political opportunity ahead. The Trump campaign is expected to fundraise off the Carroll decision, that person said.
Analysis: CNN faces harsh criticism after Trump unleashed a firehose of lies during its live town hall
Yes, some news was made. The town hall spotlighted his insistence on continuing to peddle 2020 election lies. Additionally, he said the US should default on its debt if the White House does not agree to Republican spending cuts, refused to say whether he wants Ukraine or Russia to win the war, and declined to give a straight answer on abortion.
But for most of the night, the nation’s eyes were transfixed on Trump’s abuse of the platform that he was given. At one point, he even insulted Collins, calling her a “nasty person,” to which the crowd of New Hampshire Republican primary voters broke out in cheers.
Cable carnage: Trump turns CNN town hall into televised combat
In what became an hour-long form of television combat on a variety of issues, Trump received routine applause from the Republican and Republican-leaning crowd, including over his dismissal of a recent verdict that found him guilty of sexual assault. He did not flinch when asked by the moderator, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, if he owed his one-time VP Mike Pence an apology for the riot he helped incite while Pence was at the capitol.
Donald Trump’s CNN Town Hall Was a Disaster
Licht, who took the reins at CNN last year, has marked his tenure by bouncing many of the network’s most vocal Trump critics while handing shows to people such as Gayle King and Charles Barkley. He is clearly trying to restore the network’s down-the-middle reputation and win back Republican viewers. I have written before about why I think that this is a bad strategy, even if I get what he’s going for. Licht seems to be under the mistaken impression that what viewers want and America needs right now is a cable news network oriented around presenting a “balance” between the left and the right, something that requires pretending that today’s Republican Party is basically normal. The only people served by this strategy are the ambitious maniacs in the right’s electoral vanguard, and the cowards and cynics who have chosen to countenance proto-fascism as a fair trade for lower taxes. The rest of us are reduced to screaming into our sofa cushions as we flash back to that escalator in 2015, and the credulous media coverage that kick-started our apparently still-ongoing national nightmare.
States Fights
DeSantis courts evangelicals with strict abortion law; opponents counterpunch in his backyard
“Floridians know what is best for their own bodies and their own lives,” Sarah Standiford, national campaigns director for Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said in an interview Thursday. “People are ready to vote for reproductive freedom and to take back power from lawmakers who have literally gone against the will of the people.”
Standiford confirmed Planned Parenthood and partner organizations intend to spend millions of dollars as they seek to gather roughly 890,000 valid signatures by Feb. 1 across a state that has become increasingly conservative. By comparison, a 2024 ballot initiative to legalize marijuana has already raised $30 million.
Three Cases in North Carolina, Decades of Democracy Undone
Last week, a newly transformed and newly Republican North Carolina Supreme Court announced it was becoming a full, faithful, and enthusiastic partner in the ongoing crusade to achieve disabling electoral suppression. November’s election had delivered notable changes to the high court’s membership. A 4-3 Democratic majority gave way, in January, to a domineering 5-2 Republican tribunal. And the newly empaneled majority clearly had the work of its predecessor in its sights. On April 28, the Court issued three major decisions, all by the predictable partisan margins, which the Charlotte Observer deemed “sweeping blows to democracy in North Carolina.”
Georgia GOP chairman says he was just following orders from Trump lawyers
At least eight of the Republican “fake electors” in Georgia have accepted immunity deals in the ongoing criminal investigation, according to a court filing last week, and the newly secured cooperators could offer insights into a key prong of Willis’ sprawling investigation into election interference.
Willis had previously notified all 16 GOP fake electors in Georgia that they were targets in her investigation.
Other Republicans who served as pro-Trump electors, including Shafer, could still face legal exposure in her investigation, according to people familiar with the matter.
Florida Rejects Dozens of Social Studies Textbooks, and Forces Changes in Others
State officials originally rejected 82 out of 101 submitted textbooks because of what they considered “inaccurate material, errors and other information that was not aligned with Florida law,” the Department of Education said in a news release.
But as part of an extensive effort to revise the materials, Florida worked with publishers to make changes, ultimately approving 66 of the 101 textbooks. Still, 35 were rejected even after that process.
Ron DeSantis Signs Bill Banning Chinese Citizens From Buying Land In Florida
The contentious measure, Senate Bill 246, also targets citizens of Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria and Venezuela.
Under the law, people or entities hailing from those six countries, including businesses, will be prohibited from acquiring agricultural land in Florida, and barred from buying any property within 10 miles of military bases and infrastructure like seaports, airports, power plants and water treatment facilities.
Tommy Tuberville’s office clarifies his white nationalist comments
“Do you believe they should allow white nationalists in the military?” the Alabama senator was asked during an interview on WBHM that was posted online on Monday. “Well, they call them that. I call them Americans,” Tuberville said.
How to Win a Green New Deal in Your State
The BPRA authorizes and directs the state’s public power provider—the New York Power Authority (NYPA)—to plan, build, and operate renewable energy projects across the state to meet the ambitious timetable to decarbonize the grid mandated by the Climate Act of 2019. The NYPA, the largest public utility in the country, provides the most affordable energy in the state, but until now, it has been prohibited from building and owning new utility-scale renewable generation projects because of lobbying by profit-seeking private energy companies.
Vocal Locals
A Tennessee teacher planned a Mother’s Day class. Then came the MAGA rage.
By now, it’s well understood that the right’s efforts to restrict classroom discussion are all about marginalizing LGBTQ people under the guise of protecting children. But they also harbor a less obvious aim: to convince parents that kids are under threat in the first place. That mild-mannered teacher over there? She just might be scheming to pervert, indoctrinate and snatch away childhood innocence.
Caroline Mickey, the librarian at Alpine Crest Elementary School outside Chattanooga, Tenn., just learned this the hard way, when her idea for a Mother’s Day-themed lesson came under sudden and heavy fire from parents in the area. The vitriol of the attack, and the school district superintendent’s rapid decision to cancel her lesson in response, caught her off guard.