The (no longer) much too early 2024 election thread

[N.E. Brigand]

With his eye appparently on 2024, nationally syndicated radio talk show host Jesse Kelly, a conservative who used to be a regular correspondent for Fox News, wrote today that America "needs a dictator" because Americans "are not worthy of freedom," and he predicted that a "dictator is coming."

Why do so many Republicans hate America?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I know that the potentially dire future of the U.S. is no laughing matter, but the entertainment value is ramping up.

[N.E. Brigand]

I guess there's nowhere for DeSantis to go but up after that.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I assume you are referring to the fact that his Twitter launch crashed?

[Dave_LF]

Never underestimate their ability to find new depths

[RoseMorninStar]

What? Trump? There are quite a few people in my neighborhood who refer to him as an 'Angel Warrior' (I'm not kidding).

[N.E. Brigand]

The Donald Trump campaign is attacking Ron DeSantis for having supported Donald Trump.

[N.E. Brigand]

At presidential candidate and Florida governor Ron DeSantis's urging, Florida has made it pretty easy for a few noisy parents to ban books in Florida schools. If a parent merely claims that a book is offensive, it pretty much gets pulled from the shelves. The most recent victim of this nonsense was Amanda Gorman, the young poet who spoke at President Biden's inauguration. Claiming that Gorman's book-length version of that poem, The Hill We Climb, included "indirect hate messages" -- and misidentifying the book's author as Oprah Winfrey -- a Miami Lakes woman named Daisy Salinas got her children's school to remove it from the library. Never mind that Salinas admits she hasn't read the entirety of the short book. Never mind that the specific pages Salinas cites can in no way be claimed to promote hate. It's no longer available to students who formerly could read it.

So this is interesting:

"The Florida mom who sought to ban Amanda Gorman’s poem says she’s sorry for promoting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

“I want to apologize to the Jewish community,” Salinas told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Wednesday. She was saying sorry for a Facebook post she shared in March offering a summary of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a notorious antisemitic forgery written more than a century ago in Russia.

“I’m not what the post says,” Salinas said. “I love the Jewish community.” ...

Salinas’ post about the Protocols included a list of steps depicting how “Jewish Zionists” would achieve world domination. The graphic included stages such as “Place our agents and helpers everywhere,” “Replace royal rule with socialist rule, then communism, then despotism,” and “Sacrifice people (including Jews sometimes) when necessary.”

Reached by JTA on Wednesday, Salinas confirmed that the post about the “Protocols” was hers and apologized for it, saying she hadn’t read it beyond the word “communism.” Salinas said her aversion to communism stems from her Cuban identity. She added that English is not her first language.

“I see the word ‘communism,’ and I think it’s something about communism,” she said. “I didn’t read the words.”

I do feel sorry for Salinas's kids.

[N.E. Brigand]

This official DeSantis campaign launch video is every bit as strange as others have said:



Among other faults, I think that the video suffers a bit from what Michelle Goldberg describes here: it's "deeply, fatally online".

[N.E. Brigand]

It appears that Ron DeSantis may be breaking the law by having his Florida gubernatorial staff solicit donations for his presidential campaign from Florida lobbyists (source: NBC). These lobbyists feel pressured to donate because they need the governor's office to support their efforts.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Be afraid.

[N.E. Brigand]

"What if America First is actually a coordinated campaign run by Saudi autocrats to end US democracy?"

Marcy Wheeler raises that question in light of the news that two advisors to Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy have belatedly registered as foreign agents of the government of Saudi Arabia for their work on behalf of LIV Golf.

The person who is most famously receiving money from LIV Golf is Donald Trump. Is he a Saudi agent?

[N.E. Brigand]

Perhaps meolcegebrædan?

[N.E. Brigand]

Donald Trump's campaign continues to attack Ron DeSantis for having supported Donald Trump.

(Also the Trump campaign wrongly claims that DeSantis voted to confirm Trump's appointment of FBI Director Chris Wray. He did not. In part because he could not: DeSantis was in the House not the Senate, and only the latter votes on presidents' nominees.)

[N.E. Brigand]

Now that DeSantis has formally announced his candidacy, I'll follow up on this post from the Biden's America thread here:

Yesterday in the Miami Herald: Operatives linked to DeSantis promised to fly migrants to Delaware — but left them stranded.

On Monday, some reporters noticed that a flight that appeared to be scheduled the next morning to fly from San Antonio to Wilmington and suspected that Florida's governor, Ron DeSantis, was about to launch a follow-up stunt to the human smuggling to Martha's Vinyard that he'd ordered last week. The new flight was cancelled a the last minute, and DeSantis said that scheduling the flight in the first place was just a way to "punk" the media. But if that was so, why were a bunch of migrants put up in a hotel and told they'd be flown to Delaware?

An update in the Miami Herald: "Texas sheriff recommends criminal charges in DeSantis’ migrant flights to Martha’s Vineyard."

[N.E. Brigand]

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a fringe candidate running to be the 2024 Democratic nominee for president. He was interviewed this week by Twitter's current CEO, Elon Musk, and also this week, his praises were being sung on Twitter the company's former CEO and founder, Jack Dorsey. It's pretty well known that Kennedy holds dangerous views on vaccines. I hadn't realized that he also promotes a number of other insane conspiracy theories.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Among the conspiracy theories that RFK Jr. holds his father's death exactly 55 years ago today (the day after he was shot) was done by the CIA.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Is Convinced The CIA Killed His Father: Investigation "Deliberately Botched by The LAPD"

[N.E. Brigand]

I don't know what former New Jersey governor, sometime advisor to President Donald Trump, and newly-announced presidential candidate Chris Christie hopes will come of this, but at a town hall tonight in New Hampshire, he frankly told the Republican voters gathered to hear him that the Trump family "grift ... is breathtaking," and he said -- correctly in my view -- that Saudi Arabia had bribed Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump with $2 billion as payment in 2021 for favors that the Trump administration did for Saudi Arabia in 2017-2020. And then Christie told the audience that this money had been stolen from them, the voters.

I can't forget that Christie helped Trump become president by demolishing Sen. Marco Rubio in a 2016 debate, shortly before Christie himself dropped out of the race.

[N.E. Brigand]

Climate protesters upset by the recent approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline managed to shut down a speech by Sen. Joe Manchin yesterday. I happen to disapprove of the heckler's veto (which as a form of censorship), and I think this group should target Republicans rather than one of the few Democratic senators to represent a very conservative state, but Manchin himself told supporters afterwards that the protest improved the odds of his reelection next year.

[Dave_LF]

Christie is a despicable, unreformed hypocrite, and I totally support his current efforts to tell the truth about Trump.