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The Biden administration is as of now not moving to block an order from a federal district court judge invalidating the mask mandate for transportation hubs including airports and train stations. A Biden administration official told CNN that the mask rule will not be in effect while the administration reviews the ruling.

“The agencies are reviewing the decision and assessing potential next steps,” the Biden administration official said Monday night. “In the meantime, today’s court decision means CDC’s public transportation masking order is not in effect at this time. Therefore, TSA will not enforce its Security Directives and Emergency Amendment requiring mask use on public transportation and transportation hubs at this time. CDC recommends that people continue to wear masks in indoor public transportation settings.” Major airlines and Amtrak quickly moved to drop their mask requirements for travelers.

So once again, an inexperienced and unqualified conservative activist judge is making federal policy. Trump-appointed judges have blocked or struck down the administration’s vaccine requirements for federal contractors, vaccine requirements for health care workers, vaccine requirements for federal workers, and now masks for domestic travelers. Those are just a few of the more than a dozen rulings taken by Trump judges to delay or block important Biden policies.

“Moreover,” writes People for the American Way’s Elliot Mincberg, who detailed these rulings in a report for PFAW, “the methods used by Trump judges—including nationwide injunctions by Trump judges in a single district, unsigned ‘shadow docket’ rulings with little or no explanation, and judicial second-guessing of expert health and other agency determinations—threaten to do even more damage in the future.” That report is from September 2021, when Trump judges had blocked just 15 of Biden’s policies.

This is the definition of “activist” when it comes to judges—they’re not “legislating from the bench,” as conservatives have always tried to paint liberal judges. They are policy-making from the bench, subverting the co-equal executive branch to prevent a Democratic president and his executive branch from using its constitutional power to govern.

And doing it in as ham-handed, unprincipled, and just plain wacky ways as you would expect from unqualified judges. The latest ruling from Florida woman, district court Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, is “your brain on textualism,” writes Lisa Needham. “In an order that reads like that of a particularly long-winded law student, she marched through not one, not two, but three dictionaries to determine that the word ‘sanitation’ cannot encompass face masks, because face masks don’t clean anything.”

This is real. That’s what Mizelle actually argued. “At most, it traps virus droplets. But it neither ‘sanitizes’ the person wearing the mask nor ‘sanitizes’ the conveyance,” she wrote of mask usage. Never mind that trapping virus droplets so that they don’t a) infect the wearer or b) spread to another person IS THE WHOLE POINT.

It is also worth remembering that this judge—the tenth Trump judge deemed “not qualified” by the American Bar Association confirmed by Mitch McConnell’s Republican Senate—was elevated to that position after Donald Trump had lost the election. She was confirmed by McConnell and team in a rush of votes that the Senate was completing instead of doing anything to help the American people still suffering the worst of the pandemic. This was before there were vaccinations available, and as the previous rounds of aid were being depleted.

There are myriad ways in which this is horrifying. Here’s just one: how Judge Mizelle and her husband Chad are positioning themselves to be the next Clarence and Ginni Thomas. She did clerk for him, after all.

Thus the conservative death cult masquerading as “pro-life” strikes again.

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I can think of a million reasons why I wouldn’t support Mehmet Oz to represent Pennsylvania in the U.S. Senate, and now I can add one more.

Oz, who holds dual Turkish and U.S. citizenship, has seemingly refused to acknowledge that what happened to the Armenian people at the hands of the Turks was in fact genocide, and Armenian Americans are rightfully up in arms about the possibility that a genocide-denier, endorsed by a Big Lie conspiracy theorist, could take office.

“Sometimes silence is louder than words,” Vic Gerami, award-winning journalist and the editor and publisher of The Blunt Post, told Daily Kos in an email.

RELATED STORY: You’re fired! Biden gives Dr. Oz the boot and appoints José Andrés to presidential council

The Armenian genocide was the systematic murder and deportation of Armenians at the hands of the Turks of the Ottoman Empire in 1915 during World War I. Leaders of the Turkish government decided to massacre and drive out the Armenians, leaving between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians dead.

“Dr. Oz’s failure to recognize the Armenian Genocide by the Ottoman Turks is evident to 1.3 Armenian Americans, most of whom are descendants of the survivors of the genocide … If denial is the final act of genocide, then Turkey’s campaign of disinformation and revisioning history is the ultimate terror. As a high-profile public figure, Dr. Oz had numerous opportunities to show up as a leader and do the right thing. But he’s shown us who he is. We believe him,” Gerami says. 

Mark Momjian, a well-known lawyer based in Philadelphia and the former chair of the Armenian Center at Columbia University, told NBC News: “No one in this community will ever vote for Dr. Oz … We are convinced that he is part of a denial campaign when it comes to the Armenian genocide.”

In an article for The Armenian Weekly, published a few days after Oz announced his Senate run, writer Harut Sassounian compared Oz to Donald Trump, saying neither has a “background in politics” and noting that “the world-at-large suffered enough in the hands of the incompetent celebrity Trump.”

Sassounian also pointed out that even though Oz is a medical doctor, he has continued to promote the use of hydroxychloroquine as a cure for COVID-19 and although he’s running in Pennsylvania, he lives in New Jersey. According to Business Insider, Oz used his in-laws’ address to register in the state at the end of 2020.

But the most damning incident comes from Hurriyet Daily News, which reported in July 2014 that the Assembly of Turkish American Associations (ATAA), a nonprofit founded in 1979, prepared a “master plan” to “respond to the Armenians’ claims on every front.”

Measures included forming “activist committees” to lobby lawmakers, launching social media blitzes, and pressuring news organizations. Additionally, there were two dozen “day-long conferences,” and Oz, along with (then) Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent, was listed initially as one of the keynote speakers. According to The Armenian Weekly, a spokesperson for Oz said, “Dr. Oz is not involved in this in any way.”

The U.S. House and Senate recognized the Armenian genocide in 2019. In April 2021, President Biden followed suit and became the the first U.S. president to acknowledge it.

“Over the decades Armenian immigrants have enriched the United States in countless ways, but they have never forgotten the tragic history that brought so many of their ancestors to our shores. We honor their story. We see that pain. We affirm the history. We do this not to cast blame but to ensure that what happened is never repeated,” Biden said in a statement coinciding with Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day.

In mid-March, The Washington Examiner reported that Oz said if he wins the Senate seat, he will renounce his Turkish citizenship.

If elected, he would be the first Muslim to serve in the Senate, although he was raised secular and his wife is Christian. He has said that he has only kept his Turkish citizenship to make it easier to care for his mother who lives in Turkey and is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

The reality is that in the same way Trump refuses to acknowledge his affiliation with and support from far-right extremist groups—and has continued to deny his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection, in addition to a million other lies and denials—Oz needs to either come out and say there was a genocide in Armenia, or face consequences from the voters who will surely reject him for failing to do so.

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A relief kitchen in eastern Ukraine that has been partnering with Chef José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen (WCK) organization was leveled by Russian invaders, wounding several workers, the organization’s CEO said on Saturday. Nate Mook said in a video posted to Twitter that he’s told one person in the surrounding area was killed from the missile strike.

The organization has fed an untold number of people since its founding more than a decade ago. “It’s the first time, in the 12 years since WCK was founded, that one of its relief kitchens has come under attack. It’s also the first time WCK has operated in a war zone,” The Washington Post reported.

The humanitarian crisis in Ukraine is getting worse by the hour and the need for resources continues to grow. Please donate what you can to help the humanitarian efforts.

“Not too long ago, a missile hit here, and as you can see, tremendous amounts of damage,” Mook said in the video. Behind him is the shell of building. “This was a big hit as you can see,” he continues. “There’s over a dozen cars burned out all around me,” he says, scanning the camera over to show pieces of vehicles visible in what remains of a tree. “Just a tremendous amount of carnage left behind for no reason,” noting that the area is home to many. “I don’t know what else to say. Just absolutely horrific brutality.”

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Mook on Sunday shared a picture featuring three of the hospitalized workers, saying they were recovering well following the missile attack. ”Yulia—next to me—said she’s excited to come back to help feed 1000s once her burns heal.” He also wrote that the partnering restaurant, Yaposhka, was working to move equipment that had not been destroyed to a new kitchen.

Andrés had announced just hours into Russia’s unprovoked invasion that he would be traveling to Poland to aid displaced refugees. Responding to Mook’s tweets, he vowed to continue the mission. “To everyone caring and sending good wishes to the team in Kharkiv, thank you, the injured are fine, and everyone is ready and willing to start cooking in another location,” he tweeted.

On Tuesday, Mook said that not only had the Yaposhka team opened at a new site, the injured workers had also been released from the hospital.

Since traveling to this war zone to aid in humanitarian efforts, WCK’s #ChefsForUkraine effort had distributed nearly 300,000 daily meals as of early April, the organization said. The effort has distributed meals “in more than 30 cities and towns across Ukraine, as well as delivering thousands of tons of food and supplies by truck and train.” 

That has included delivering supplies to towns liberated by Ukrainian soldiers. WCK said that humanitarian workers were the first faces that civilians trapped outside Kyiv had seen for a month. “We brought hundreds of hot meals and 6,000 kilos of food for families to cook.” 

Andrés’ efforts in Poland has also continued, and expanded to neighboring countries that have received displaced Ukrainians, WCK continued. Ten-thousand daily meals are being distributed in Poland while nearly two dozen suppliers are at work across Moldova. In Hungary, “we have daily meal service at a train station … that serves as a major transportation hub,” the organization continued. Efforts are also underway in Romania, Slovakia, and Spain.

In a statement reported by CNN, Andrés made a plea for an end to Russia’s invasion. “Please stop killing civilians non-stop day and night,” he said. “That’s why people are afraid, that’s why a lot of people are still in bunkers, its why many people, they don’t want to be in the comfort homes and many nights, they go to the safety of the subway. That’s why, again, this war needs to end.”

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Firsts across the country just keep on coming: In Louisiana, Gary Chambers Jr. not only wants to be the first Black senator in the state, but wants to better the state’s health, education, infrastructure, and economy to increase the state’s rank.

“When I look at this state and its people, we are so much greater than our state’s ranking,” Chambers said. “And it’s in part because of the leaders that we’ve had who make decisions that are against the people of this state.”

Chambers is an activist and now a Democratic challenger for the state’s U.S. Senate seat. According to NBC News, the 36-year-old has gone viral on social media for calling out local politicians and fighting for communities of color.

Among one of his popular campaign posts is one of him smoking marijuana, and another one of him burning the Confederate flag.

“We need to burn the remnants of the Confederacy from every piece of legislation that exists in this country in order for this country to be whole again,” Chambers told NBC News in March. “And we need to build that conversation by talking about the racial inequities that exist.”

Chambers’ first ad, entitled “37 Seconds,” was released in January. During this ad he smoked a blunt in an open field and spoke of the high rate of arrests and prosecutions related to marijuana. He added that Black Americans are four times as likely to be arrested for marijuana despite usage being at the same rate as other racial groups. The ad was viewed more than 6 million times.

According to an analysis by NOLA.com, while Black people make up 60% of the state’s population, they accounted for 86% of all arrests and summonses issued for weed in 2020.

Advocates for the decriminalization of marijuana applauded Chambers’ ad but noted the backlash it would attract.

“We certainly appreciate somebody who is getting out front, making a lot of noise about this issue, and not just doing it in a provocative way, but also explaining the many different criminal injustices,” Peter Robins-Brown, the executive director of Louisiana Progress, told NBC News. He noted that many viewers “got caught up on what he was doing and they didn’t listen to what he was saying.”

As of this report, marijuana has only been decriminalized in 27 states. It is still illegal at the federal level. Chambers said legalizing marijuana at a state and federal level would reduce some racial inequalities.

“We should not be okay going on about our day … while people are having a luxury in one part of the country, while other folks are having a penalty for that same luxury,” Chambers said.

If elected, Chambers hopes to change this through supporting policies like “Medicare for All” and raising the national minimum wage to $15 per hour. His main campaign focus is combatting racial injustice.

Despite his competitor having raised a more significant amount of money than he has according to the most recent data available from the Federal Election Commission, Chambers remains optimistic about his campaign. At this time, he has raised about $1.2 million while his opponent, Republican incumbent Sen. John Kennedy, has raised more than $23 million.

“This is a very winnable race,” Chambers said, citing the reelection of Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards in 2019. “If the DNC and … state party take this race seriously … we can raise the resources and build the infrastructure to win this election.”

In his second campaign video, which was called “Scars and Bars” and released in February, Chambers burned the Confederate flag. This action made his video go viral, but many believe it took away from his message of how the Confederacy enforced laws to limit or revoke the rights of Black people and communities due to the reactions burning the flag engendered.

“They said, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ But here in Louisiana and all over the South, Jim Crow never really left,” Chambers said in the video. “And the remnants of the Confederacy remain.”

“Our system isn’t broken,” he added.“It’s designed to do exactly what it’s doing, which is producing measurable inequity.”

But this isn’t the first time Chambers made headlines for what people call his controversial tactics. According to NBC News, two years ago, posts of Chambers went viral after he called out a school board member for allegedly shopping on her laptop during a meeting about the removal of Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s name from a school building. Chambers changed his planned remarks to call the board member “arrogant,” “horrible,” and an “example of racism in this community.”

“Some things can only be fixed if you call it out,” Chambers said. “Too often we like to pretend things aren’t as bad as they are, and if you just say it then people can say, ‘OK, let’s do something about this.’ And that’s what we do.”

Despite the backlash Chambers has faced and the potential loss of his message in his actions of burning the flag and smoking, the videos worked well for exposure. According to The Washington Post, within 24 hours of the videos being released, Chambers saw his biggest fundraising haul of the campaign. It was a “six-figure day,” Chambers told the Post.

Chambers’ campaign comes at a time when the public is demanding lawmakers draw congressional districts that better represent the state’s population. According to NPR, census data shows that roughly one-third of the state’s population identifies as Black; however, only one of the state’s six congressional districts has a majority minority population. A second majority-Black district is likely to result in the loss of a safe Republican seat in Congress, NPR noted.

As a result, Chambers sees a possible victory in this election as an overall win for Black people.

“There will be some redemption in that moment being possible not just for me, but for all of the thousands, if not millions of Black people who lived in this state over the years,” Chambers told NBC News. “Who were brilliant and talented enough to have served in the United States Senate, but racism and bigotry would have prevented them from being able to have this opportunity that I have today.

“I think about what it would mean in that moment for all those people, more than what it would me for myself.”

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For those that don’t know, “Libs of TikTok” is a Twitter account that specializes in anti-LGBT content, most of it deeply paranoid stuff intended to portray specific LGBT Americans as predators or “groomers.” If that sounds familiar, that’s not by accident; the account is now wildly popular with the Fox News crowd, with hosts like Laura Ingraham using its content to generate new hate campaigns and death threats. Note that the “groomer” talk has become the latest QAnon-inspired National Republican Thing, a recent fascist insistence that not just LGBT Americans but any “libs” that support them are probably secret pedophiles.

Anyway, the anonymous activist behind that account has just been exposed by The Washington Post, and the whole conservative movement is extremely freaking upset that the person with an account devoted to getting people fired or hounded by death-threat spewing hate campaigns over short snippets of misleadingly-presented video is themselves facing their 15 minutes of fame.

The actual revelation is, as you might expect, pretty banal. The brains behind the hate account belong to a conservative woman who has a day job in real estate but has flitted from one conspiracy theory to the next—including stints with QAnon “sex trafficking” claims to anti-pandemic disinformation to claims of election conspiracies before landing on new claims of there being LGBT “groomers” absolutely everywhere—and would turn her anonymous conspiracy beliefs into internet fame points redeemable on Fox News and other conspiracy-eager outlets.

There’s not much to it, and if you’re going to devote your life to posting video clips directing angry mobs toward random schoolteachers because you, personally, like to spread conspiracy theories about them, then yeah, at some point, you’re going to want to invest in anti-leopard insurance yourself.

At the very least, you’d have to be a special kind of twit to stare at the news coverage in between new posts attacking random Americans who might not even be the people you’re claiming they are, and think, “I don’t deserve this.”

That out of the way, let’s talk for a moment about why this extremely generic conspiracy crackpot— whose transition from conspiracy sphere to conspiracy sphere is about the most rote path you could possibly take as a far-right, hate-obsessed nobody—managed to finally stumble on popularity when she started claiming that The Libs are “grooming” your children.

For the record, and there won’t be a quiz on this afterward, because I have not yet been put in charge of such things: One of the most influential Republican Speakers of the House in recent history was exposed as a serial child predator not all that long ago.

Republicans eagerly backed Roy Moore, whose predation attempts on teen girls were so prolific and well-known as to get him banned by the local mall. (Republicans, when the accusations against Moore surfaced, defended him by noting that the Bible encouraged sex with young girls.)

Rep. Matt Gaetz is still under investigation, but it’s been well established at this point by witnesses, that Gaetz “groomed” younger girls at drug-fueled parties and trafficked at least one minor girl across state lines for the purposes of sex.

Rep. Jim Jordan was elevated to omnipresence when he was exposed as one of the many, many athletic coaches in America who knew his athletes were being sexually molested and worked to cover it up.

Rep. Lauren Boebert’s husband was arrested for exposing his penis to underage girls at a bowling alley, of all places, and Boebert still launched a career based on QAnon hoaxes that assume everyone except her husband is secretly something-something-pizza-basement.

We could go on, but that is the landscape of current Republicanism, before and after the election of a truly thickheaded reality television faker with a long history of being a total pervert, one who was immediately adopted by the (religious) base as the new avatar of everything they wanted America to be.

Now, the conservative movement is many things, but subtle it is not. It has a public heartbeat that is very hard to ignore, and one that takes no great genius to predict. Republicans began claiming President Joe Biden was “senile” in response to concerns over Donald Trump’s diminished vocabulary and increasingly out-of-touch-with-reality announcements. Republicans launched an enormous effort to claim Ukraine and Democrats were the real culprits behind 2016 election hacking—in direct response to intelligence community findings that Russia provided significant aid to Donald Trump’s campaign efforts, while multiple Americans working with Donald Trump either sought to coordinate campaign actions to Russian efforts or, in the most famous case, straight-up shared polling data with a Russian cutout.

Republicans are currently attempting to make a great deal of unknown something over Hunter Biden making money from his status as Biden’s son; that effort, which continues despite primary advocate Rudy Giuliani subsequently being raided by law enforcement for take-your-pick, was launched after an endless barrage of stories about all the ways Donald Trump’s family was blending their White House roles with their own financial schemes, up to and including Trump’s Master of Everything, Jared Kushner, getting his financial ass bailed out by the same Saudi regime that Kushner gave such deference to at his White House post. That’s the heartbeat. Pick any Republican scandal, and you can predict what conspiracy theory Fox News producers will be most fervently looking to put on the air immediately afterward.

Take a wild guess, then, why the entire Republican ecosystem has now latched on to the idea that Americans who are not powerful Republicans are “groomers” and “pedophiles.” Go on. Take a wild, speculative guess on why specifically the sort of Fox News Republicans who still hand a microphone to Matt Gaetz, who still treat Donald Trump as their personal messiah, are going absolutely batshit with new theories in which every last American who does not like those skeevy people is secretly a pedophile.

Republicanism no longer has a party platform, but it has a single overriding media strategy. Whatever a prominent Republican has recently been exposed for doing becomes the fertilizer for the very next conspiracy theory. 

So yes, there’s no surprise why this particular nobody managed to stumble into the next big Fox News thing when she decided that an account devoted to accusing random non-movement Americans of pedophilia and “grooming” was what she, personally, needed to focus her life on at this point in time. The entire Republican movement has been exposed, incontrovertibly, as morally bankrupt. There is literally no crime, from sex trafficking to rape to tax fraud to international extortion to goading violence against public officials to an outright coup, that will get the Conservative Jesus crowd to not rise up and declare that Republicans have the right to do those things.

The QAnon movement started out this way. It was a repackaging of Nazi and neo-Nazi claims that their enemies (Jews) “harvested” children for their secret rites. Every not-Nazi was supposed to be assisting in the “trafficking” of those victims. People believed it all immediately because it pushed every button they needed to be pushed, everyone ran with it, people held up signs and made asses of themselves and started gargling bleach while waiting for dead celebrities to give them guidance.

Those conspiracy theories didn’t go anywhere. They’re still everywhere in the conservative base, and they’re continually shifting their theories to test what people most want to hear. Right now, Republicans want to hear that schoolteachers are the enemy because schoolteachers are teaching children about things like diversity and acceptance and that you can’t just write “my dad said Jesus did it” when explaining the difference between exothermic and endothermic reactions. Schoolteachers are the enemy because they are telling kids that wearing masks helps people not get sick. Schoolteachers are the enemy because schoolteachers made a big fuss about not wanting to die of a preventable disease when red-hat parents decided that the entire world was pulling a prank to make their Republican leader look bad. Schoolteachers are in deep trouble because the school libraries these days have books that discourage suicide for teens struggling with sexual questions, and Republican America remains damn pissed off those books exist. Schoolteachers are enemies of the movement because it is schoolteachers who hand out history books and explain what slavery was, what lynching is, and what the people being honored with huge bronze statues in the town square actually did that made other Americans put up monuments to them.

So now schoolteachers—all schoolteachers but especially any schoolteacher who isn’t white, conservative, heterosexual and/or bigoted—are “grooming” children, say the voices Fox News has chosen to rally around.

And if that happens to use up airtime that would otherwise go to reporting on who, in America, credibly stands accused of sexual predation or coverups? If that muddles the reporting so that now it’s “both sides” that stand accused of such things, even if some of those accusations consist of crank real estate agents shouting at their bedroom walls? Book that person immediately.

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Byllye Y. Avery has fought for the health care needs of women for over three decades. She’s been a stalwart for reproductive health dating back to the 1970s when she co-founded the Gainesville Women’s Health Center and Birthplace, a midwifery birthing center in Gainesville, Florida.

In 1983 she founded the National Black Women’s Health Project, which today is known as the Black Women’s Health Imperative, the first nonprofit created by Black women focusing on the health and wellness of Black women. 

Avery received the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for Social Contribution in 1989 and in 2002 she launched the Avery Institute for Social Change, focusing on health care reform.

She’s spent much of her 84 years on the planet devoted to reproductive justice and addressing the health needs of people who can become pregnant—particularly Black women.

RELATED STORY: ‘The day I found Harvey Milk’s dead body was the moment I knew’: Cleve Jones, famed LGBTQ activist

We spoke to Avery to get her thoughts about the current onslaught of policies attacking reproductive rights in states such as Texas, Oklahoma, and Florida—policies that severely impact women of color.

“It’s very sad to me. I can remember when Roe v. Wade was passed, and I remember Judy Levy, who was one of the women I founded the Gainesville Women’s Health Center and Birthplace with, said to me, ‘Byllye, we’re going to have to fight the rest of our lives to keep this right,’” Avery says. “I thought once the Supreme Court declared something that we had it forever. She said, ‘No, this can be taken away from us.’”

The truth is from the day Roe v. Wade passed in 1973 Republicans have been working to dismantle it.

Referring to the many appointments of conservative federal judges and most recently Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, Ralph Reed, the former leader of the Christian Coalition and a campaign adviser to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush told The Washington Post, “Evangelicals developed a strategy, stuck with it, and it paid off. … The significance of this moment for that constituency is that they bet on a long-term, historical, multi-decade transformation of the federal courts in a way that would no longer be hostile to their values.” 

Avery says it’s up to those who she calls the “bleeding women,” meaning anyone of reproductive age, to figure this one out—but warns that it might take another 30 years to unravel these state laws once they pass.

She says when she speaks to groups of women, she tells them to “get their heads out of the sand,” and “make a plan.”

“Don’t think you can’t just not talk to your daughters (or anyone who may get an abortion) about this, because women don’t like to talk about abortion. And part of my conviction, whenever I stand in front of them, I know that 50% of women have had abortions. So I just speak to the issue,” Avery says.

Avery says it’s not going to be enough to carry signs; people today need to come up with their “coat hanger” for this issue. Avery is talking about the coat hanger as a symbol of why abortion rights and access matter. Women often used coat hangers to self-induce an abortion before the passage of Roe v. Wade.

Avery’s idea is for pro-choice activists to begin to “politicize birth,” essentially forcing states to pay to “support a baby up through at least the 12th grade. That’s what I would do if I was a young person.”

What a novel idea. If states want to refuse to allow abortion, then those same states need to ensure that for example, free universal high-quality daycare is available through pre-K to anyone who wants or needs it. In fact, health care should be free universally to anyone who needs it, particularly from pregnancy through adulthood. Of course, education should also be free through college, and programs such as Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) that offer food subsidies, pediatric nutrition, and breastfeeding education to help families and children through age five, should also be free and universal.

“Texas has no know idea the kind of problem they’re creating. They have absolutely no idea of the numbers of unwanted children the state’s going to have to take care of,” Avery says.

The Good Fight is a series spotlighting progressive activists around the nation battling injustice in underserved and brutalized communities by a system that often overlooks them.

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Tuesday marks the 27th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, the violent attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building that killed 168 people and injured 680 others. The domestic terror attack was carried about by two white supremacist, anti-government, right-wing extremists in the Michigan Militia.

As the nation reeled in horror at the specter of homegrown and deadly political terrorism, one teenager in Missouri decided to step up to defend the terrorists: 15-year-old Josh Hawley, who would go on to become a U.S. senator who is using his vaunted position to achieve the aims of those terrorists from the inside. Hawley wanted to explain the terrorists, and to defend the mindset of the militia movement that led the two men, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, to murder.

“Many of the people populating these movements are not radical, right-wing, pro-assault weapons freaks as they were originally stereotyped,” Hawley wrote. “Dismissed by the media and treated with disdain by their elected leaders, these citizens come together and form groups that often draw more media fire as anti-government hate gatherings.”

He described these militia members as “Feeling alienated from their government and the rest of society.” That alienation, he said, leads them to “become disenchanted and slip into talks of ‘conspiracy theories’ about how the federal government is out to get them.” And by the way, he continued, the Los Angeles police detective whose racism was exposed during the OJ Simpson trial, Mark Fuhrman, should be called a racist. “In this politically correct society, derogatory labels such as ‘racist’ are widely misused, and our ability to have open debate is eroding,” he wrote.

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Seems like 15-year-old Josh Hawley has a lot in common with Sen. Josh Hawley, the man who raised his fist in solidarity with the terrorists who swarmed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, leading to the deaths of five people.

That same day, Jan. 6, Hawley went on to vote to throw out Pennsylvania’s election results. He was one of the eight Republican senators attempting to subvert the voters and the Constitution. Seven Democratic senators called for an ethics probe of both Hawley and Sen. Ted Cruz over their apparent enthusiasm for the insurrection.

Hawley responded to that with yet another column, this one claiming he was the victim of cancel culture for what he called “representing the views of my constituents and leading a democratic debate on the floor of the Senate.” He insisted he was defending the “basic principles that join all Americans together—the right to speak freely, to debate openly, and to address our differences graciously without fear of being silenced or punished for dissenting views.”

A little over a year later, the same Hawley who seemed to imply that the violent attack on the Capitol was somehow addressing differences “graciously” is still pandering to the extreme conspiracy theorists. Hawley twisted Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s experience as a judge and member of the Sentencing Commission to imply that she was somehow a protector of pedophiles, that she was somehow complicit in the sexual abuse of children.

That’s another conspiracy theory that nearly resulted in mass bloodshed when a North Carolina man shot up Comet Ping Pong restaurant in northwest Washington in December 2016 because he was convinced that the restaurant was a hub of child sex slavery. Edgar Maddison Welch is one of those “alienated from society” people Hawley empathized with as a teen. He, by some miracle, didn’t harm anyone when he fired three shots inside the restaurant, surrendering after he found no evidence that children were being held at or trafficked from the pizzeria. He was sentenced to 36 months of probation by Jackson, the same judge Hawley has tried to smear. Coincidence?

It’s all enough to make you wonder how many white hoods Josh Hawley keeps hidden way in his closet.

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Days after Michigan’s Grand Rapids Police Department released footage of how they fatally shot 26-year-old Patrick Lyoya, a Black man, an autopsy report related to the incident has confirmed that Lyoya was shot in the back of the head. According to Daily Kos, the department’s official autopsy report was expected to be released in 60 days as the medical examiner is awaiting toxicology and tissue test results. That will be shared with state police and will not immediately be released to the public.

However, lawyers with Lyoya’s family said Tuesday that an independent autopsy showed that he was fatally shot in the back of the head.

“There’s no question what killed this young man. … It was a powerful bullet,” Dr. Werner Spitz, a 95-year-old forensic pathologist and former medical examiner who performed the autopsy, said during a press briefing on Tuesday.

The autopsy confirms what was depicted in the video footage released last week. In it, an unidentified Michigan police officer is seen lying on Lyoya’s back before shooting him. “The only injury on this body was a typical bullet wound of entrance,” Spitz said.

According to CNN, the shooting was described by a representative of the family who saw it as “execution-style.” In the roughly 20-minute long video, Lyoya can be seen struggling with the officer who at one point tells him “stop resisting” as body camera footage shows him knee Lyoya.

Requests for the video followed protests across the state demanding justice and transparency for what happened to Lyoya. Lyoya, who was unarmed, was killed after a traffic stop in western Michigan on April 4 after being pulled over for having an unregistered license plate.

“This independent autopsy report confirms what we all witnessed in the horrifying video footage: Unarmed Patrick Lyoya was conscious until the bullet entered his head, instantly ending what could have been a long and fruitful life,” attorney for the family Ben Crump said, according to the Associated Press.

“My heart is broken to see an officer being on top of my son and to shoot him in the back of his head, my heart is really broken,” Peter Lyoya, Patrick’s father, said during a press conference last week, according to Reuters. “I’m asking for justice for Patrick.”

While Crump and the family are demanding “that the officer who killed Patrick not only be terminated for his use of excessive and fatal force, but be arrested and prosecuted for the violent killing of Patrick Lyoya,” police officials have said the name of the officer who shot and killed Lyoya will only be released if the officer is charged. As investigations continue, findings will be given to the Kent County prosecutor for consideration of any charges.

According to the AP, Lyoya’s funeral is planned for Friday at Renaissance Church of God in Christ in Grand Rapids. Costs are expected to be covered by Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network.

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GOP Texas Gov. Greg Abbott may be trying to move on from his disastrous stunt, but he remains the target of international ire. Mexican President Andres Manuel López Obrador called Abbott’s failed policy forcing commercial vehicles to undergo unnecessary secondary inspections “a very despicable way to act,” NBC News reports, adding that the right-wing governor was only thinking of reelection. Fact check: true.

Abbott has also touted supposed agreements with a number of Mexican governors as part of ending his redundant checks, but The Texas Tribune reported that three of these agreements already existed. Abbott and the governors did not have the authority to sit down together in the first place, López Obrador said.

RELATED STORY: Greg Abbott ends disastrous stunt that cost fruit and vegetable producers an estimated $240 million

“With all due respect, states have no legal authority to do agreements with a foreign country,” López Obrador said according to The Dallas Morning News. “Instead of thinking—and I say this respectfully—‘How will I fix the problem of inflation?’ He is politicizing and even violating international rights.”

But this is Abbott we’re talking about, a man who has shown no shame or hesitation in violating his own state’s laws by illegally jailing hundreds of asylum-seekers with no formal charges as part of Operation Lone Star, another border scheme. Advocates first noted the unlawful detention of hundreds of migrants last fall. Months later, these illegal imprisonments have continued. But the abusive treatment of asylum-seekers too often gets ignored, or minimized as normal. Among Republicans, it’s encouraged.

However, it’s been quite a different story for Abbott’s policy of redundant checks, which were announced on April 6 and gone by April 15. The reason? Economic losses, and lots of them.

“Ray Perryman, president of the Waco-based economic research firm Perryman Group, estimates that the delays cost the U.S. $4.2 billion for the period from April 6 to April 15 based on the economic impact of previous border slowdowns, including in 2019,” The Dallas Morning News continued. Fresh Produce Association of the Americas President Lance Jungmeyer previously told CNN that the losses to vegetable and fruit producers alone were estimated at over $240 million. Perryman told The Dallas Morning News that the firm plans to release more details on its findings this week.

The Dallas Morning News reports that López Obrador said he thinks Abbott “aspires to be a (2024 presidential) candidate for the Republican Party, and so he thinks that with this action he will win support,” even if it does fuck up the economy. But we already know that when confronted on his own failings, Abbott likes to point the finger at the president.

“In theory, this might seem like a drastic political blunder, especially for a governor in an election year,” MSNBC’s Steve Benen wrote this week. “It’s easy to imagine Abbott paying a high political price for a debacle of this magnitude. But in practice, the governor released a video via social media over the weekend boasting about what a great job he did. In other words, Abbott seems to think this should be a political winner for re-election campaign.” Of course Abbott will boast that he did a good job, and maybe his supporters will convince themselves he was right because all they care about is owning the libs. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep repeating the truth, which is that it was a fucking shit show.

“It’s great that it has been resolved,” López Obrador continued in The Dallas Morning News report. “I just hope (Texas) will not act this way again. It doesn’t help them. … How can a person who aspires to be president of a great nation like the United States act this way?”

RELATED STORIES: Facing international blowback over unnecessary checks, Abbott stages photo-op with Mexican governor

Abbott’s increased truck inspections in response to Biden admin leading to huge delays, rotting food

Texas refuses to be transparent about Operation Lone Star. Probably because it’s all a scheme

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Greg Sargent, talking to Way to Win’s Jennifer Fernandez Ancona:

“Every story has a hero and a villain,” Ancona said. “You have to paint Republicans as the villain. Connecting the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol with how extreme they are on covid is a powerful combination.”

And who is the hero of the story? The group recommends Democrats explicitly name the coalition that beat Trump in 2020 — by saying, for example, that White, Black, Latino and Asian voters came together against him, and should do so again in 2022 …

“The voter is the hero of the story,” Ancona told us, suggesting messaging along these lines: “We all came together across all our differences before. We can do it again.” After all, everyone says they hate our current divisive politics; this tells them whom to blame, and how to overcome it.

Jennifer is our guest on this week’s Daily Kos’ The Brief, our weekly show about politics. The topic? Messaging, why she thinks this message would help defuse Republican culture war attacks, and what the chances are of Democrats adopting this—or any—unified message.

You can watch the show live right here on Tuesdays at 1:30 PM PT/4:30 PM ET, while the podcast version goes live Wednesday mornings at all the usual places, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify. A full list of places to download the show is available here.