In a bold move, Washington state legislators passed a law to remove all references to the word “marijuana” in a favor of “cannabis.” Lawmakers say “marijuana” has left a trail of Black and brown bodies incarcerated across the nation with its storied racist history.
HB 1210 was signed into law by Gov. Jay Inslee on March 11, 2022. In June, the word “marijuana” will be gone from every aspect of the Revised Code of Washington, and “cannabis” will replace it.
“This House Bill 1210 to change terminology from using the word ‘marijuana’ to the scientific name ‘cannabis’ is extremely important … even though it seems simple because it’s just one word,” state Rep. Melanie Morgan said in a virtual meeting in January. “But the reality is we are healing the wrongs that were committed against black and brown people around cannabis, as it was used as a racist terminology to lock up black and brown people.”
According to a 2020 report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Black Americans are “3.64 times more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana possession despite comparable marijuana usage rates.” The report adds that even though arrest rates for cannabis are down, police “still made 6.1 million such arrests” from 2010 to 2018, and “the racial disparities in arrest rates remain in every state.”
Folks who work in the cannabis industry say the word “marijuana” comes with weighted significance.
“It had been talked about for a long time in our community about how that word demonizes the cannabis plant,” Joy Hollingsworth, owner of Hollingsworth Cannabis Company, tells KIRO-7.
Morgan, who sponsored the bill, said, “The term ‘marijuana’ itself is pejorative and racist.” She added, “As recreational marijuana use became more popular, it was negatively associated with Mexican immigrants.”
The word marijuana has its roots in xenophobia.
It began being used in the early 20th century as tens of thousands of Mexican immigrants began moving to the southwest region of the U.S. to escape the Mexican Civil War. The word was used to frighten white Americans—the “marijuana menace”—and paint a racist narrative of the new immigrants. But not just immigrants, as NPR reports.
“In New Orleans newspaper articles associated the drug with African-Americans, jazz musicians, prostitutes, and underworld whites. ‘The Marijuana Menace,’ as sketched by anti-drug campaigners, was personified by inferior races and social deviants,” Schlosser’s article adds.
But it was the first U.S. Narcotics Commissioner, Harry Anslinger, who was behind criminalizing the drug. He was able to convince Congress to pass the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, banning the sale and possession of cannabis.
One statement at the time came from Dr. Frank R. Gomila, commissioner of public safety, and Miss Madeline C. Gomila, assistant city chemist, who offered a “paper” they had assembled chronicling claims about the “effects, physical and mental, of the marihuana weed.”
An example in Gomila’s “report” was the case of a high school student “now confined to an institution for the mentally diseased.” Gomila added that the student’s “experience is entirely the result of acquiring the habit of smoking marihuana cigarettes.”
The letter goes on to lay out the dangers of cannabis by citing a murder in New Orleans, blamed on the cannabis used by the assailant.
“In a downtown section a man under the influence of the weed became so frenzied and angered at his wife as to kill her out on the street in front of many witnesses.”
A Michigan Republican Party endorsement convention at DeVos Place in Grand Rapids, Michigan—complete with voting irregularities—ultimately yielded two of Donald Trump’s top 2020 election deniers as party nominees for two top statewide offices.
After thousands of votes were tabulated and a “partial human audit” ensued, Matthew DePerno and Kristina Karamo emerged as the GOP endorsees for attorney general and secretary of state, respectively, according to Bridge Michigan. The GOP gubernatorial nominee will be determined in August after 10 candidates compete to take on Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in November.
But DePerno and Karamo will ensure the Michigan Republican Party is consumed with relitigating the 2020 election, which Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden statewide by more than 150,000 votes, or roughly 3 points. Their candidacies might juice turnout among Trumpers but they could just as easily backfire in the suburbs. Either way, it’s a gamble.
Trump celebrated the elevation of his conspiracy-laden candidates, saying that Karamo and DePerno will “get to the bottom of the 2020 Election Fraud.”
DePerno’s claim to fame is floating a bunch of unfounded conspiracy theories about voting machine data from Antrim County that became the epicenter of the state’s election fraud lies. DePerno filed a lawsuit challenging the results that was summarily dismissed last year by a GOP-appointed judge; a three-judge panel unanimously reaffirmed that decision last week on appeal.
An investigation conducted last year by the GOP-led state Senate concluded there was no evidence of widespread fraud and called such claims in Antrim County “indefensible.”
The Senate Oversight Committee’s final report on the matter also urged Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel to investigate “those who have been utilizing misleading and false information about Antrim County to raise money or publicity for their own ends.”
DePerno reportedly raised some $400,000 through crowdfunding for an “Election Fraud Defense Fund.” The missing funds are now under investigation by the Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission. It’s not DePerno’s first brush with corruption claims; he was fired from a law firm in 2005 after colleagues said he had “padded” client billings.
Still, DePerno is now the pick of both Trump and the Republican Party to be the top law enforcement officer in Michigan. He had initially struggled to win a three-way race, but an election-night endorsement from Karamo, who handily won her own race, helped pull DePerno across the finish line.
They are two peas in a pod. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Karamo—now the GOP nominee to run statewide elections—has repeatedly insisted without evidence that Trump won the 2020 election. Karamo gained notoriety as a supposed “whistleblower” after she claimed on Fox News to have personally witnessed a ballot in Detroit be fraudulently counted for Biden. That didn’t happen, and the fine print in the “incident report” Karamo filled out after Biden had been declared the winner read: “Paid for by Donald J Trump for President, Inc.”
In any case, the public speaking professor-turned-election denier is now the GOP nominee for secretary of state.
Perhaps that isn’t a surprise given that both candidates had Trump’s seal of approval, but it certainly divided the room last weekend at DeVos Place, where the nominating convention was held.
One of DePerno’s opponents, state House Speaker Ryan Berman, didn’t concede, predicting there was “a good chance” the nominee would lose his law license over twin investigations being conducted by the Grievance Commission and the Michigan State Police.
“In that case, I’m going to be ready to step up and be the nominee,” Berman told Bridge Michigan.
But he wasn’t the only attendee who was disappointed by the outcome.
“The Michigan Republican Party used to be a model for how a state party should be run, but the process today is evidence that is no longer the case,” said former political director Jonathan Duke, who supported a DePerno rival. Duke added that Republicans had now elevated “the most unelectable candidate in the best political environment for Republicans in a generation.”
Similarly, a Karamo opponent, state Rep. Beau LaFave, said he was “disappointed that [Democratic Secretary of State] Jocelyn Benson will be the Secretary of State for the next four years.”
Aaron Miller, a former state representative and chair of the House Elections Committee, flat-out said he personally would not vote for either DePerno or Karamo.
“The theories on elections that have entered the mainstream are downright scary — in this room,” Miller said.
Just one more state where Trump has exquisitely threaded the needle of dividing the state Republican Party against itself while backing candidates with dubious election credentials.
There’s a new book from New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns set to come out soon that will shed light on the nasty battle over the 2020 presidential election results. This means that serious information that probably should have been reported by the Times many months ago is now beginning to leak out in order to promote the book. The Washington Post has an early copy of the book for review and on Monday released an explosive tidbit concerning Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s conversations with Martin in the hours after Donald Trump and his MAGA friends tried to overthrow the government.
It has been no secret that McConnell has long been angling, the way many do in the delusional GOP, back toward a clearly defunct status quo in his party. That status quo was long ago abandoned when he and others became entirely complicit in the corruptions of the Donald Trump administration. Since then, McConnell—who had originally described the Jan. 6 insurrectionists as “thugs” and “mobs”—has retreated as far out of the public eye as possible while also trying to retain neoconservative control over the GOP.
According to the Post, the new Times reporters’ book details a conversation between McConnell and Martin that tells a story of a man who thinks he’s gotten everything he wants and is ready to dance on Donald Trump’s self-dug grave.
Martin writes that McConnell fished for rumors about whether or not Vice President Mike Pence or Trump’s Cabinet of con artists were making any moves to try and get Trump pushed out of office early under the 25th Amendment, and even said he had spoken with Democratic leaders Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Nancy Pelosi about releasing a joint statement together urging Trump not to be anywhere near the inauguration.
Clearly none of those things happened, and now McConnell, like the turtle he resembles, has spent the past year and few months using his shell to keep from having any direct confrontations with The Donald, while also seeing if the constitutional provisions for enacting law against corrupt officials can function to keep him in control of his warring fascist political party. Sadly, these are the same provisions that he has personally worked to erode and defang.
It might be wishful thinking and Sen. Joe Manchin attention-mongering all over again, but there is increasing noise that Democrats are looking again at trying revives the parts of President Joe Biden’s agenda for climate change and social investment (formerly known as Build Back Better). “We want to get it. Look, there are lots of talks going on right now. They’re not in a great degree of granularity,” Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters before the Senate took off for Easter recess earlier this month. “We’d like to move a reconciliation bill and go as far as you can, get as much done as we can, with 50 votes.”
Reconciliation is how it has to be done, the only way to avoid a Republican filibuster, because two Democrats—Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema—refuse to consider saving everything that’s good in this country with filibuster reform. Reconciliation, which requires 50 Senate votes, is also hampered by the hostage-taking of one or both of those senators, who can derail anything on a whim by withholding their votes. So when Manchin says he would agree to three things from the Build Back Better framework—tax reform, prescription drug cost cuts, and climate efforts—he does so knowing that Sinema won’t agree on any of those things. In fact, just this month she promised the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry that she’ll protect their low tax rates.
“What I can’t tell you is if negotiations will start again or what they’ll look like,” she said. “But what I can promise you is that I’ll be the same person in negotiations if they start again that I was in negotiations last year.”
But Biden can act without them on some of this stuff, which Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) reminded the administration of yet again on Monday. She wrote to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra to outline the executive actions Biden can take on prescription drugs—actions that can be done without Congress—to lower to their cost to consumers. Which would be a really popular thing to do ahead of an election.
Warren worked with a group of more than 25 experts in law and public health from Yale Law School, Harvard Medical School, and Columbia Law School to explain the three options the administration has at its disposal, and urged Becerra to to “move swiftly to use your existing authorities to give sorely needed relief to the millions of Americans paying far too much for their prescription drugs.”
“Existing law gives the executive branch several tools to intervene when patients and public health are harmed by excessive drug prices,” the experts explained in their own letter to Warren last week. “These tools can help the Administration break patent barriers, foster competition where currently there is none, and drive down prices. Critically, using them requires no additional congressional action.”
One of the three tools they discuss is the “government patent use power,” which has been used by the government “to procure important patented technologies from manufacturers other than the patent holders, who may charge very high prices.” They provide the example of the Pentagon using it to purchase technology like night-vision goggles. The other two options for executive action are provided under the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, “intended to ensure that the public would not be deprived the benefits of inventions that it had effectively sponsored through government-funded research.” Through both “royalty-free license” and “march-in rights” established in that act, the government can break patent barriers for drugs developed with federal research money—and many, many pharmaceuticals fall into that category.
“In our view, § 1498 [the ‘government patent use power’] is a powerful general-purpose tool to target excessive pricing, while the Bayh-Dole Act is particularly helpful for patents that received government research support,” the experts write. “We believe that the two can and should be used together as part of a cohesive strategy when drugs of high public health importance are sold to US patients at excessive prices.”
Democrats and advocacy groups have been ramping up the pressure on Biden to take all the executive actions available, from immigration to canceling student debt, combatting the climate crisis, reducing fossil fuel dependence, investing in care economy jobs and standards, and regulating for economic and tax fairness. Biden has acted on Affordable Care Act premium costs, on ghost guns, and on environmental issues, but not on some of the really big stuff—the really big stuff he was imagining in Build Back Better.
Here’s one option for him from Warren, at least one item from Biden’s big agenda that can be salvaged immediately—Manchin and Sinema be damned.
On the ground, both sides nibbled on the edges. Russia made some gains south of Izyum, but were repulsed at Pashkove—the last town before reaching a critical line supplying Ukrainian forces in this entire front. And if you’re wondering, “why is there a functional rail line still supplying Ukrainian forces well within reach of Russian artillery?,” well then, you’re not alone. Russia has clearly prioritized war crime’ing over actually trying to win a war.
Down south, Ukraine pushed toward Kherson, and is just a few miles outside of Kherson city itself.
🇺🇦 has retaken several towns and villages close to the city of Kherson over the past few days. pic.twitter.com/sLLA2eRj9M
In addition to threatening Kherson on the eve of its sham “referendum,” taking the city would cut off the mass of Russian forces threatening Kryvyi Rih to its north. While strategically unimportant, Kryvyi Rih happens to be Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s hometown, and did we mention that Russia doesn’t seem to be trying to win the war? Massacring civilians and pushing to the gates of Kryvyi Rih have zero to little military purpose.
🇺🇦 is expecting assaults by 🇷🇺 to develop in the directions of Mykolaiv, Kryvyi Rih, and Zaporizhzhia. pic.twitter.com/fQVlniBoSs
Note, some late-night reports claimed Russia had retaken Oleksandrivka, which is west of Kherson, at the base of that little red “up” arrow in the map above. Except … there’s another Oleksandrivka north of Kherson, on the approach to Kryvyi Rih. It would make more sense if it was the top one, and everyone is certainly confused (as I write this, Monday night). Regardless, I’ve talked of the tug-of-war nature of this front, where wide open and exposed terrain allows artillery to shred infantry. This is where those American M113 armored personnel carriers are most desperately needed. Whichever Oleksandrivka Russia’s took, expect Ukraine to retake in the days ahead. Then lather, rinse, repeat. This isn’t just a tug of war, it’s a tug of war in mud, where no one can get a proper footing.
Now let’s take a trip down memory lane, when Russian forces spread themselves out among too many axes, diluting their effectiveness? Remember?
Also, remember when Russia was going to learn from their early failures, and concentrate their efforts in a single axis to conquer the entire Donbas region in a massive offensive? Remember? Seems like just yesterday!
Right now, Russia is attempting to advance toward:
Mykolaiv
Kryvyi Rih
Zaprozhzhia
Sievierodonetsk
Slovyansk/Kramatorsk
South, east, west, and northwest of Izyum (seriously)
Pushing out from Donetsk
Mariupol
Russia never learns. Russia will never learn. And sure, they grind out a kilometer here or there, but their losses are unsustainable. Ukraine can well afford to give up land for blood, as their reserves (300,000 strong) continue to train and equip out west, and entire new armor, infantry, and artillery battalions are formed with all the great gear streaming in from the West.
Speaking of that, the United States made their new weekly aid announcement:
More from senior State, Defense officials via pool producer @Abs_NBC: US announcing – $713 million in Foreign Military Financing for 16 European countries, including $322 million for Ukraine – Foreign military sale $165 million for non-US/NATO, i.e., Russian ammunition to Ukraine
The $165 million will buy Soviet-era munitions from eastern European countries (and maybe others) on Ukraine’s behalf, so Ukraine is getting nearly half a billion in new weapons and ammunition this week. The U.S. also graduated the first cohort training on American howitzers, and the U.S. is expanding the training program to train more Ukrainians on western systems. Note, they aren’t teaching Ukrainians from scratch how to be artillerymen, but training experienced Ukrainian artillerymen on using a new howitzer. Our gear has longer range and is more accurate than the stuff they’re using now, and Ukraine has already been amazing on their older Soviet-era gear.
Russia is clearly frustrated having its soldiers chewed up by Western weapons and munitions, and the howitzers and suicide drones will only add to the carnage in the coming weeks and months. So, once again, Russia issued the typical lame threats.
Weapons delivered from the West to #Ukraine will be “legitimate targets” for the military of #Russia, warns Lavrov.
Russian Ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov, has said Moscow has sent a diplomatic note to Washington demanding the US stop sending military aid to Ukraine.
Of course military equipment in Ukraine is a “legitimate target.” Nothing has changed from the first day of the war. Note that not now, and not ever, has Russia argued that those arms shipments are legitimate targets outside of Ukraine.
Are we going to pretend that Russia cares about whether a target is legitimate or not? As mentioned above, they’ve been more interested in war crime’ing than trying to actually win this war.
Russia can pout all it wants. It’s actually a pathetic look. Lavrov even complained about NATO countries “shipping weapons and basically advertising their efforts in this area.” It’s true, the United States and Britain have been particularly vocal in rubbing Russia’s nose in all that sweet, sweet military gear for Ukraine. Yet the last two months have shown how impotent those threats have become. Where once it set the world on edge, now they’re shrugged off. If anything, Russia seems less intent on expanding the war, not more.
p.s. Russia didhit some rail targets yesterday. But the fact that there’s a rail system operational at all at this point of the war shows how little Russia has prioritized taking out Ukrainian logistics.
If you’ve been looking at maps of Ukraine for the last two months, you might have noticed that, down in the southwest corner of the nation, beyond the city of Odesa, is a little section of land connected to the rest of Ukraine only by a bridge and a narrow road that cuts across a very narrow set of levees. That area is the Budjak, part of an area known historically as Bessarabia, which has passed around among various nations before landing with Ukraine.
The Budjak lies south and west of Odesa, and makes up a good portions of Ukraine’s coast
The area has a lot of coastline on the Black Sea, but it’s relatively sparsely populated. Even so, it’s extremely cosmopolitan, as it’s history of being passed around has resulted in a very diverse population.
On Tuesday, Russia targeted the bridge to the Budjak with a cruise missile, largely cutting it off from the rest of Ukraine.
📷Russian cruise missile hit a bridge at Zatoka. It’s the only Ukrainian bridge connecting Budjak with the rest of Ukraine. Other roads lead through Moldova. #Ukraine#UkraineRussiaWarpic.twitter.com/f2kT7yJGMM
Vladimir Putin seems to make the same claims about Ukraine as Ron DeSantis has about Disney.
Russian state TV says it has discovered an “organisation of gays and lesbians” in a building in Mariupol where Ukrainian “nationalist battalions” had been based It was apparently “funded by USAID” and “virtually under the patronage of the US President and Congress” pic.twitter.com/vfFzl4E1dM
The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, Daniel Donner, and Carolyn Fiddler, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.
●MI-AG, MI-SoS: Two election conspiracy theorists with Donald Trump’s backing, Matthew DePerno and Kristina Karamo, defeated more traditional choices at the Michigan GOP’s endorsement convention on Saturday, setting them up for general election battles against Attorney General Dana Nessel and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, respectively.
The results, though, left some vocal Republicans fuming that their party had just thrown away the chance to take down two vulnerable Democrats in this important swing state. State Rep. Beau LaFave, who badly lost his bid for the nomination for secretary of state, spoke for many when he said, “I’m disappointed that Jocelyn Benson will be the secretary of state for the next four years.”
Dissenters may get another shot, though: Under state law, both Democrats and Republicans are actually required to pick nominees for these two offices (plus lieutenant governor) at their August conventions; these April gatherings are a recent innovation to allow candidates to get an earlier start on their campaigns, but they don’t have any official imprimatur.
To that end, state Rep. Ryan Berman, who took third place in the race for attorney general, said he’ll continue his campaign in the hopes of achieving a different result at the end of the summer. It would, however, take an affirmative vote of three-fourths of delegates to overturn Saturday’s vote, something one consultant characterized as a “smash-glass-in-case-of-emergency” option.
But Berman argued that Republicans might have to avail themselves of this option: He predicted that “[t]here’s a good chance” that DePerno could lose his law license or be indicted, which Bridge Michigan explains is a reference to a pair of investigations—one by the state’s Attorney Grievance Commission, the other by the state police—into DePerno’s lawsuits aimed at overturning Trump’s loss in Michigan.
DePerno, who recently called for the arrest of Nessel, Benson, and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, was a minor figure in Michigan politics until just after the 2020 election. But he attracted Trump’s attention when he filed a lawsuit arguing that election fraud had taken place in Antrim County after vote totals initially showed Joe Biden leading Trump in this small conservative community. Those numbers, though, were the result of a clerical error that was quickly corrected to reflect Trump’s actual 61-37 win in the county, and a hand-count audit confirmed that voting machines provided by Dominion Voting Systems had correctly tabulated the results.
None of that, however, stopped the Antrim County results from becoming a prominent feature in the false Trumpian narrative claiming that Dominion had stolen the election, and DePerno has been all too happy to keep the story in the limelight. In the real world, his crusade has been an utter failure: Last week, a state appeals court issued the latest verdict against his evidence-free lawsuit, which DePerno vowed to appeal to the Michigan Supreme Court. But that setback did not bother his allies in the least, nor did a recent revelation that his former law firm fired him in 2005 after alleging he’d “padded” client bills.
Karamo likewise emerged from obscurity after she insisted she’d seen fraud in 2020 while working as a poll worker in Detroit. She’s since used her newfound far-right fame to appear at a QAnon event in August with extremist secretary of state candidates running in other states, taking the opportunity to call Benson “evil.” She later said (baselessly, of course) that Benson and other Democratic election officials had been “placed in those battleground states strategically to ensure that there was massive cheating and fraud in the election.”
Karamo also previously hosted a podcast, so you know the archives are replete with crazy. On her now-defunct show, among many other things, she announced that Beyoncé was bringing “Black Americans into paganism,” declared that LGBTQ people and anyone who has sex outside of marriage “violate God’s creative design,” called herself an “anti-vaxxer,” and labeled yoga “a satanic ritual.” (Believe it or not, she’s not even the only anti-yoga Republican on the ballot this year.)
On Saturday, she easily won the GOP endorsement outright with 67% of the vote, while DePerno was forced into a runoff after leading 2018 nominee Tom Leonard 49-40. Berman, who took third with 10%, backed Leonard in the second round, where voting was delayed for half an hour because, according to party officials, runoff ballots left out the candidates’ names and video graphics listed them in the wrong order. A party official called the issues the result of “human error,” which Bridge notes “echoed official explanations about 2020 irregularities in Antrim County that have spawned Trump’s false claims of fraud.”
But unlike in 2020, Trump’s people didn’t complain because the convention results went their way, with DePerno beating Leonard 55-45. Trump even celebrated both results before voting had even begun in either race, proclaiming that DePerno and Karamo would “get to the bottom of the 2020 Election Fraud.”
Republicans had sought to make the 3rd District, held by Democratic Rep. Sharice Davids, more favorable for Republicans by splitting up the Kansas City area and placing portions of it in the 2nd District. In so doing, the revamped district would have voted for Joe Biden by a 51-47 margin—considerably redder than Biden’s 54-44 win under the old lines.
And to avoid making the neighboring 2nd any bluer, Republicans extricated the liberal college town of Lawrence and grafted it onto the sprawling 1st District, deep-red rural turf that stretches all the way to the Colorado border. Had they not included that second step, Donald Trump’s margin in the 2nd would have shrunk to about 51-46 and made the seat vulnerable; instead, it stays at 57-41 Trump, similar to the old district’s 56-41 margin for Trump.
Judge Bill Klapper, however, ruled that these maneuvers violated the state constitution’s guarantee of the right to vote by diluting “the power of votes on the basis of party affiliation.” At the same time, he held that the map also ran afoul of the constitution’s equal protection provisions by diminishing the ability of Black and Latino voters in and around Kansas City to elect their candidates of choice by moving a disproportionate number from the 3rd District to the 2nd. Klapper did not specify a timetable for lawmakers to draw a new map but said they must do so “as expeditiously as possible.”
Republicans, who passed their map over a veto by Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly, reacted with predictable anger to the ruling and pledged to appeal to the state Supreme Court. Separately, Republican Attorney General Derek Schmidt asked the Supreme Court to review the state’s new legislative maps on Monday, triggering a process that gives the justices 30 days to decide on their validity.
Senate
●UT-Sen: In a surprising move, delegates to Utah’s state Democratic convention voted on Saturday to back conservative independent Evan McMullin’s campaign to unseat Republican Sen. Mike Lee rather than put forward their own nominee. The decision, which ended the campaign of Democrat Kael Weston, gives McMullin a better chance to put together a winning general election coalition in this very red state, though he’ll still be in for a very tough contest.
Prominent Democrats, including former Rep. Ben McAdams and Salt Lake County Mayor Jenny Wilson, had previously endorsed McMullin, with Wilson explicitly urging Team Blue against fielding a candidate of its own in order to avoid splitting the anti-Lee vote. But Weston, who was the 2020 nominee against 2nd District Rep. Chris Stewart last cycle, still went forward with his bid, and because he was the only Democratic candidate to file, it looked like he’d be on the November ballot.
However, the Beehive State’s unusual ballot access laws gave McMullin’s Democratic allies a chance to block Weston on Saturday. In Utah, as we’ve previously explained, candidates either needed to have turned in the requisite number of signatures or win enough support at their state party convention, and while contenders can simultaneously try both options, Weston only went with the convention route. That meant that, when delegates voted 57-43 not to nominate anyone, he had no fallback option. Weston, whose supporters booed McMullin when he addressed the gathering, did not explicitly endorse him afterwards, though he put a statement declaring, “Let’s all help defeat Mike Lee — the sooner the better.”
McMullin, who took 21% in the state in the 2016 presidential race as an anti-Trump conservative, has used his new campaign to argue that Utah needs to replace the extremist Lee. The independent also focused on recent revelations that Lee worked to overturn Trump’s 2020 defeat in his brief speech to convention delegates Saturday, saying, “We will show the rest of the country how we beat people like Mike Lee who try to overturn our democracy in the shadows.” McMullin, unlike most nonaligned candidates, will have the money to make his case, though Lee still ended March with a wide $2.4 million to $847,000 cash-on-hand lead.
●NV-Gov: Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo uses his very first ad for the June Republican primary to go negative on his intra-party foes, North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee and former Sen. Dean Heller, as well as Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak, by labeling them “a bunch of keyboard cowboys” who “talk tough about immigration.” Lombardo continues by saying that unlike his rivals, “I’ve deported thousands.”
●WI-Gov: Wealthy businessman Tim Michels has announced he is joining the Republican primary for governor this August, and the Wisconsin State Journal reports that he’s poised to go up with a “high-dollar” TV ad buy soon. Michels co-owns a construction company and previously ran for office a couple of times in previous decades, but his last attempt way back in 2004 saw him decisively lose that year’s Senate contest as the GOP nominee against former Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold, who prevailed 55-44.
Following the news of Michels’ entry into the race, GOP Rep. Tom Tiffany has reiterated his support for former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, who has held large leads in the few polls taken to date, though with many voters still undecided. Also in the running for Republicans are 2018 Senate candidate Kevin Nicholson and state Rep. Timothy Ramthun.
House
●FL-02, FL-05: Democratic Rep. Al Lawson told Politico on Sunday that if he decides to run again, he would do so in the Tallahassee-based 2nd District against Republican Rep. Neal Dunn rather than in the new 5th, which is contained to the Jacksonville area. Lawson for three terms has represented a plurality-Black 5th District spanning from Tallahassee to Jacksonville, and Republicans targeted him with their recently enacted congressional map by breaking up the 5th District to ensure that both cities were drawn into majority-white districts that favored Republicans, leaving Lawson with no great options.
In a sign of which way he might be leaning, Lawson also recently told a local TV reporter that his “plan right now is to be on the ballot,” though that isn’t quite a firm commitment to running again. If Lawson does choose to run in the 2nd, he would face sizable headwinds in a seat that Donald Trump would have carried by 55-44 in an area that has been trending to the right over the last decade. Furthermore, Lawson currently represents only 31% of the redrawn 2nd’s population compared to 64% for Dunn.
However Lawson argued that his ties to the area are much deeper and broader than a quick glance at the toplines might suggest: Lawson represented much of this area, including several conservative counties outside of Tallahassee, when he was in the state Senate from 2000 to 2010. Additionally, prior to his initial 2016 victory in the current 5th following court-ordered redistricting, Lawson made two runs for Congress in older versions of the 2nd District that contained a large majority of the new 2nd’s territory, coming up short by close margins in the 2010 primary and 2012 general election.
Still, with Joe Biden sporting a low approval rating and the midterms shaping up to favor Republicans this fall, Lawson would have his work cut out for him if he chooses to run here. One reason he may be holding off on making a decision, though, is that several advocacy groups and Florida voters filed a lawsuit in state court last week alleging that the new map violates the state constitution’s prohibitions on partisan gerrymandering and diluting minority representation, which could result in something close to the existing 5th District getting revived if the plaintiffs prevail.
●MA-04: Former Brookline Selectwoman Jesse Mermell, who just barely came up short by 22-21 in the crowded Democratic primary against freshman Rep. Jake Auchincloss when the current version of this seat was open in 2020, has announced that she won’t seek a rematch this cycle. Auchincloss, a relative moderate who benefitted last time from multiple more progressive opponents splitting the vote, faces no notable opponent in the September primary this cycle, and time is quickly running out for one to materialize before the May 10 filing deadline.
●MN-01: Republicans in the new 1st Congressional District held their convention over the weekend, but while a majority of delegates backed state Rep. Jeremy Munson, he was unable to take the requisite 60% needed to secure the party endorsement for the full two-year term. The GOP did not do a convention for the special election because redistricting was completed just before Republican Rep. Jim Hagedorn died, though an endorsement for the regularly scheduled race still could have given one of the contenders a lift in the May 24 primary.
Ultimately, however, Munson fell just short. He led former Department of Agriculture official Brad Finstad 55-35 in the seventh round, but attendees voted on Sunday at 1 AM local time to disperse after concluding that no one would outright win. “By one o’clock, everybody was getting kind of grumpy,” explained one delegate.
●MN-03: Navy veteran Tom Weiler defeated businessman Mark Blaxill on Saturday to win the Republican Party endorsement to take on Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips; Blaxill does not appear to have said if he’ll file to compete in the August primary for a seat Biden would have carried 59-38.
●NC-11: State Sen. Chuck Edwards’ latest ad for next month’s Republican primary cuts right to the chase and calls far-right Rep. Madison Cawthorn an Instagramer who posts all day but doesn’t actually do anything to solve the country’s ongoing problems. Edwards draws a contrast by claiming he “fought the liberals [in state government] and won,” pointing to how he advanced conservative positions on taxes, guns, and immigration.
Cawthorn is also facing further opposition from a super PAC with ties to GOP Sen. Thom Tillis called Results for NC, which has allocated an additional $126,000 to bring its total ad spending here up to just over half a million in only the last few days. The group recently went up with a spot calling out Cawthorn as a serial liar.
●OR-05: President Biden has endorsed Rep. Kurt Schrader ahead of the May 17 Democratic primary, where the moderate incumbent faces a progressive primary challenge by attorney Jamie McLeod-Skinner. In addition to Biden’s support, Schrader headed into the primary’s final stretch with a large financial advantage: Schrader outraised McLeod-Skinner in the first quarter by $714,000 to $314,000 and started April with a $2.7 million to $310,000 edge in cash-on-hand.
●OR-06: CHC BOLD PAC, which is the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’ campaign arm, says it is spending $1 million on an ad backing state Rep. Andrea Salinas in next month’s Democratic primary. Their spot notes Salinas’ background as the daughter of an immigrant father and praises her state legislative record on issues including abortion rights, healthcare, the minimum wage, and climate change.
●UT-01: Retired intelligence officer Andrew Badger outpaced freshman Rep. Blake Moore 59-41 at Saturday’s Republican convention, which secured the challenger a spot on the June primary ballot. Former Morgan County Councilmember Tina Cannon, who has the support of former Rep. Rob Bishop, will also be competing in the primary because, like Moore, she collected enough signatures to advance no matter how the weekend gathering went. But it’s the end of the line for both Vineland Mayor Julie Fullmer and businessman William Campbell, who were only pursuing the convention route.
Cannon has faulted Moore with not living in this safely red northern Utah seat, while Badger’s objections are more ideological. Badger, whom Cachevalleydaily.com says delivered “brief speeches that sounded more like revival meetings,” has pledged to join the far-right House Freedom Caucus. The story says that Moore, by contrast, has a “carefully cultivated reputation for bipartisanship,” but he tried out more conservative rhetoric on Saturday. Neither Cannon nor Badger has much money available to make their case against Moore to primary voters, however.
●Former Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, whose tenure from 1977 to 2019 makes him the longest serving Republican senator in American history, died Saturday at the age of 88. Hatch, who worked as an attorney, was a first-time candidate and political unknown when he joined the 1976 GOP race to take on Democratic incumbent Frank Moss, a decision his family and friends tried to talk him out of in order to spare him what they saw as an all-but-certain defeat. Hatch went ahead and filed a mere five minutes before the deadline, and the Salt Lake Tribune story about his nascent candidacy marked the first time he’d even been mentioned in the paper.
But Hatch gained traction thanks to two influential allies: Brigham Young University President Ernest Wilkinson, who was the 1964 nominee against Moss, and former Salt Lake City police chief Cleon Skousen, who was a powerful member of the far-right John Birch Society. (The Tribune wrote in a detailed 2012 look at this race that Hatch “tried to keep [Skousen] at a distance” while still benefiting from his financial help and volunteers.)
Hatch needed to perform well at the party convention in order to even make the primary ballot, and he reached out to delegates by mailing them cassettes he’d created through one of his side-businesses; he ended up taking a surprisingly strong second-place against former Interior Department official Jack Carlson. Hatch gained ground by capitalizing on post-Watergate distrust of the establishment, and a poll taken just before the primary showed Carlson only narrowly ahead.
Hatch then decided to take a chance and ask Ronald Reagan, who had just lost the presidential nod to incumbent Gerald Ford, for an endorsement; Reagan delivered, though Hatch’s team had to alter Reagan’s telegram backing “Warren Hatch.” After winning the nomination in a 65-35 landslide, Hatch spent the general election saying of Moss, “What do you call an 18-year incumbent? You call him home.” He went on to unseat Moss, who is Utah’s most recent Democratic senator, 56-43 as Ford was carrying the state 62-34 against Jimmy Carter.
Hatch six years later turned back Salt Lake City Mayor Ted Wilson 58-41, and he never again faced a serious Democratic opponent. He sought a promotion in 2000 when he ran for the White House himself, but he won another term in the Senate that year after his longshot presidential bid went nowhere. In 2012, though, he had a potentially serious intra-party challenge from state Sen. Dan Liljenquist, who was hoping to ride the same tea party wave that had cost Hatch’s longtime colleague, Bob Bennett, renomination two years before. The incumbent, however, insulated himself by courting conservatives and won his primary 67-33.
Hatch, who served more than twice as long as Moss had when the Republican implored voters to “call him home,” mulled running for an eighth term in 2018, but he ultimately retired.
Here’s a story that’ll get your endorphins pumping, courtesy of Politico, especially if you’ve been following how Democrats have gone ker-splat when it comes to protecting our elections and voting rights at the federal level:
A Democratic candidate recruiting group is pitching donors on an ambitious three-year program to find, train and support 5,000 candidates for local offices in charge of election administration, a sprawling national effort intended to fight subversion of future election results.
The program would recruit candidates in 35 states for everything from county probate judges in Alabama to county clerks in Kansas and county election board members in Pennsylvania—all offices that handle elections and will be on voters’ ballots between now and 2024. Spearheading the effort is Run for Something, a Democratic group that launched soon after Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential victory to recruit candidates for local elections.
If you’d like to help ’em with their efforts, we’ve got that info below the fold…
More from Politico:
The program will include every state where election administrators are themselves elected by voters. It represents one of the boldest organized attempts to put Democratic-backed candidates in these positions, in response to Trump’s endorsement for various election positions of followers who subscribe to conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen.
“Helping Democrats build sustainable power for the long-haul.”
Win or lose—and I’m betting a lot more of them will win than we expect—these Democrats will gain valuable experience while Run for Something compiles a huge knowledge bank of expertise for future campaigns. This is the kind of local grassroots campaigning that Democrats have been clamoring for, and I have a feeling that they could succeed beyond all expectations.
If you can spare a few bucks, they’d sure appreciate the support—their Act Blue page is here. In their words: “In 2008-2016, Democrats and progressives lost over 1,000 state, local, and federal offices because we neglected our political infrastructure. We’re determined not to repeat the same mistakes.”
Follow Run for Something on evil Facebook here and soon-to-be evil Twitter here.
And now, our feature presentation…
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Cheers and Jeers for Tuesday, April 26, 2022
Note: Ow! I just stabbed myself in the cheek with my pipe. Good thing I have supplemental elitist insurance. Thanks, Snobcare!
Unemployment claims last week, the lowest since 1968 and vs. 547,000 a year ago: 184,000
Amount allocated by the Biden administration for clean water projects: $55 billion
Percent of American adults who are estranged from a family member, according to a Cornell study: 27%
Percent chance that Portland, Maine just received Standard and Poor’s highest rating—AAA—that will result in millions of $$$ in savings on our debt service (and, presumably, free towing and jump-start service): 100%
CHEERS to Victory! The armed shock troops, beholden to a madman, swept in with invasion on their minds and delusions of replacing the memories of the democratic majority with far-right ideology. Everyone expected the armored column and their fanatical commanders to conduct a scorched-earth campaign with ruthless efficiency, sending women and children scattering for shelter and the political class fleeing for their lives. Happy to report they got stopped. Stopped cold. Cold and runny. By children. Children with eggs:
On Friday afternoon, the small convoy of semitrucks, pickup trucks, minivans and other cars drove to Democratic Assemblymember Buffy Wicks’ East Bay [San Francisco] home to protest her support of an abortion rights bill. As they honked and used bullhorns in the quiet residential neighborhood, neighbors gathered to heckle them right back, yelling at the truckers to get off their street.
If only all the orcs could be stopped this easily.
[The truckers drove] onto busy, one-lane College Avenue on the Berkeley-Oakland border. There, slowed down by the usual Friday afternoon traffic, they were sitting ducks outside the Safeway. A large group of kids, armed with eggs purchased atthe grocery store, began pelting the convoy. […] Furious truckers then drove out of town, heading back on the highway toward their base in Sacramento.
But anyway. Anyone hear how things are going in Ukraine?
CHEERS to liberté, égalité…andall that jazz! In an absolutely unacceptable outcome to American observers, French President Emmanuel Macron received the overwhelming share (59%-41%) of the votes in Sunday’s elections, and just like *that* the country handed him the victory. No electoral college certifications. No audits by partisan outside groups with no experience. No screaming and yelling about how the whole thing was rigged. No holding every ballot under black light to detect bamboo fibers. No threats against election workers. No storming of the French Capitol. Wow—what a sloppy and unimaginative way to run a country, huh? Low energy! But at least the “Hitler in stilettos,” who borrowed millions from Russia to fund her campaign, didn’t win.
» “Let us face it, there is no Planet B” in pushing for a stronger approach to addressing the impacts of climate change. “I am sure one day the U.S. will come back and rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement.”
» The west’s policies towards Iran “should never lead us to war in the Middle East. … We should not abandon [the Iranian nuclear deal] without having something substantial and more substantial instead.”
» “Human rights, the rights of minorities and shared liberty are the true answers to the disorders of the world.”
» We must heed the words of the great American Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
» The bust of Martin Luther King Jr. in the U.S. Capitol “reminds us of the inspiration of African American leaders, artists and writers who have become part of our common heritage.”
» The #MeToo movement is an inspiring thing, and we respect it in France as much as you do in America.
Europe dodges another bullet, denying the barbarians access through the gates. Vive le resistance.
CHEERS to Charles Richter. It’s the 119th birthday of the late seismologist who invented a scale to measure the strength of earthquakes (I forget what it’s called). Go here and pay your respects…if you feel so moved. But please don’t blame him for causing all the recent tremors. They’re not his faults.
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BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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The Green Dragontail Butterfly (Lamproptera meges), found in South and Southeast Asia. 🦋 Credit: Kazuo Unno pic.twitter.com/QSSeToSvGT
JEERS to having to address the elephant with glistening deltoids in the room. Sorry to do this, but since C&J will one day be the preeminent go-to source for recorded history among blogaeologists, I have to make note of this. Republican congressman Madison Cawthorn, who sets off the heterosexual Christian manliness alarms just by batting his titanium eyelids with a stern ka-chunk, would like you to know that this is now acceptable manly heterosexual Christian behavior:
Also: Jim Beam is now replacing wine as the blood of Christ. Please drink Him responsibly.
He cautions, however, that if your muscle bra fastens with Velcro instead of a metal clasp made from the sharpest steel shavings that cut into you like the nails did to the body of Christ, you are either a woman who doesn’t know her place or a deviant homosexual groomer who, by definition, works for Disney. Here endeth the lesson.
CHEERS to the apple of CBS’s eye. Happy 113th birthday today to CBS News legend Edward R. Murrow.
Murrow’s old news network—CBS—just hired Mick Mulvaney. Sad.
He had more journalistic integrity in his pinky than many of today’s journalistic misfits (too many of whom call CBS News home) have on their entire resumes. He was a fighter for journalistic independence free of the entertainment side of television, and his clipped and unemotional delivery only added to his gravitas. Adding: one reason I respect Rachel Maddow so much is that she, like Murrow, builds her arguments piece by piece, fact by fact, before tying them up with a damning bow. Unfortunately chain-smoking snuffed out his life prematurely at 57. Hear excerpts of his W.W. II and McCarthy hearing reports here. And, hey, don’t smoke.
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Ten years ago in C&J: April 26, 2012
CHEERS to the words we’ll never hear: “I, Newton Leroy Gingrich, do solemnly swear…” Yeah, Mr. Moon Colony is signaling the end of his campaign. (But he won South Carolina! He shoulda been the contenduh!) But I have to admit I’m feeling kinda sad this morning. I had a blast watching the triumphant return of vaudeville in the form of the Republican primary season. Now that Romney has been crowned king of the (very small, selfish and crabby) hill, I’m going through withdrawal pangs. No more 999 (Cain). No more corn dogs (Bachmann). No more Sarah Palin scene stealing. No more Mandarin proverbs (Huntsman). No more “Can’t…sorry…oops!” (Perry.) No more libertine lectures. (Santorum.) And now…no more Newt. [Sigh] Who will the penguins bite now?
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And just one more…
CHEERS to the power of brevity. One of the most memorable moments from the 2008 presidential campaign happened 15 years ago today during the April 26, 2007 Democratic debate hosted by Brian Williams. Silly question, great answer:
Williams: Senator Biden, words have in the past gotten you in trouble—words that were borrowed and words that some found hateful. An editorial in the Los Angles Times said, “In addition to his uncontrolled verbosity, Biden is a gaffe machine.”
Can you reassure voters in this country that you would have the discipline you would need on the world stage, Senator?
Sen. Joe Biden: Yes.
[Long pause]
Williams: Thank you, Senator.
You can watch the clip (this link seems to be the only one still working) here. Fifteen years later Joe is, against all odds, a virtually gaffe-free President of the United States. Are we impressed so far? “Yes.”
Have a tolerable Tuesday. Floor’s open…What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today’s Shameless C&J Testimonial
”This is not your father’s Cheers and Jeers kiddie pool.”
A right-wing racist doubling as a Michigan radio host decided last week to throw his hat in the ring for a state Senate seat—and get this: He’s running as a Democrat. Mind you, just last month he was trying to make a case that TV commercials should only feature white families. According to The Detroit News, Randy Bishop, who also goes by “Trucker Randy,” said during his podcast episode on March 31 that the media was trying to destroy the “nuclear family,” with every commercial showing a “biracial mom and dad.”
“Can’t even watch a college basketball tournament without commercials telling me I have to feel guilty because I think a family should be a White mom, a White dad and White kids,” Bishop said. “They want us to die and go away. And they’re going to try to do it through politics this year. Well, we have got to be just as smart.”
He went on to claim that Black people wield too much power in American society. “Why are we allowing such a small percentage of our population to control our society,” he asked. “Because they own the media. Because they own the politicians. Because they own the public schools.”
It’s a claim so ridiculous it’s not even worth dignifying with a rebuttal, and the Michigan Democratic Party made no such attempt. Instead, it distanced itself from Bishop with a statement posted on Facebook:
Views such as the ones Trucker Randy Bishop espouses have no place in the Democratic Party. Candidates who say or believe these things are not welcome. Randy Bishop is not a Democrat, he is a dishonest minor social media personality that enjoys getting attention from making outrageous statements. He shows nothing but disrespect to our system of government by using a run for elected office to promote his personal agenda, entirely based on lies, hate and fear.
Disgusting racist belief systems are not welcome in the Democratic Party and frankly should not be welcome in any political party or community. We will not support his efforts to run for Senate and find it deeply insulting that he would dare to put a D next to his name.
Randy Bishop, a Michigan right-wing radio host, just filed to run for state Senate. On his 3/31 show, he said: – The “LGBTQXYZ” community is “confused” about “what’s between their legs.” – VP Harris “is not Black.” – A family should be “a white mom, a white dad & white kids.” pic.twitter.com/J0APSzaICX
Bishop is running for a seat in the state’s 37th Senate district, a position currently occupied by Republican Sen. Wayne Schmidt, but he announced in January that he is instead running to fill a newly created seat on the Grand Traverse County Commission, WWTV reported.
Bishop is up against Democrats Barbara Conley and Jim Schmidt on the August primary ballot. Conley, an oncologist, had this to say about Bishop in a Facebook post on Friday:
As you know, I have two other candidates for the primary Aug 2. One of them is “Trucker Randy” Bishop, who runs a conservative radio talk show. While I don’t know him, he doesn’t seem to actually be a democrat.
He was the former chair of the Antrim Republican Party and promotes the BIG LIE and is a supporter of Garrett Soldano!
He has been convicted of felonies downstate, and runs a “conservative” radio show touting RIGHT WING ideas. He lost his facebook account for violating community standards in 2020 (see https://radio.wcmu.org/tags/randy-bishop)
Here is what Randy said at a gun rights and militia rally in 2020 in Lansing as reported by Michigan Radio: https://www.michiganradio.org/…/anti-police-brutality…: “Trucker Randy” Bishop, who has ties to the Republican Party in Michigan and two felony convictions, urged people to vote against Democrats in upcoming elections. “We have got to stop them, folks,” Bishop said. “If they get back the majority in the (Michigan) House this November … Then God help us, you know what we’ll be relying on? The Republicans and Mike Shirkey in the Senate to stop it. The same one that’s placating to Governor (Gretchen) Whitmer over the China virus (novel coronavirus).”
Please vote in the August primary for true democrats!
A California man is facing five years in prison for threatening to shoot and bomb employees of the Massachusetts-based Merriam-Webster company because he objected to the reference book publisher’s definitions of the words “girl,”“female,” and “woman.”
According to the Department of Justice, Jeremy David Hanson, 34, of Rossmoor, California, posted several threatening messages on the company website’s “Contact us” page, which resulted in the company closing its New York and Springfield offices for five business days. The messages Hanson allegedly posted were suffused with vicious anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.
Specifically, it is alleged that on Oct. 2, 2021, Hanson used the handle “@anonYmous” to post the following comment on the dictionary’s website definition of “female”: “It is absolutely sickening that Merriam-Webster now tells blatant lies and promotes anti-science propaganda. There is no such thing as ‘gender identity.’ The imbecile who wrote this entry should be hunted down and shot.”
Hanson also allegedly sent the following threatening message via the website’s “Contact Us” page: “You [sic] headquarters should be shot up and bombed. It is sickening that you have caved to the cultural Marxist, anti-science tranny [sic] agenda and altered the definition of ‘female’ as part of the Left’s efforts to corrupt and degrade the English language and deny reality. You evil Marxists should all be killed. It would be poetic justice to have someone storm your offices and shoot up the place, leaving none of you commies alive.”
It is further alleged that on Oct. 8, 2021, Hanson posted another threatening comment on the dictionary’s website and a threatening message via the “Contact Us” page that threatened to “bomb your offices for lying and creating fake…”.
As noted by the New York Times, the company, the oldest dictionary publisher in the U.S., has in recent years updated its definitions of certain words to “to be more inclusive of shifting attitudes around gender.”
The FBI tracked Hanson down through his IP address after Merriam-Webster reported the postings last October. In the course of its investigation, the agency found what it describes as “related” posts by Hanson directed to “the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, Land O’ Lakes, Hasbro, Inc., IGN Entertainment, the President of the University of North Texas, two professors at Loyola Marymount University and a New York City rabbi.”
As reported by Jonathan Edwards, writing for the Washington Post, Hanson was interviewed by the FBI shortly after the Merriam-Webster postings were made:
In an October 2021 interview with the FBI, Hanson said he knew threatening people was illegal, apologized for doing so and promised to stop. He told agents that he struggled to control his rage and used the Internet as an outlet.
His mother told agents that her son had become “fixated” on transgender issues and was prone to what she called “verbal hyperbole.” Hanson has been diagnosed with autism and depression, she said, and while they impair his ability to grasp the consequences of his actions, she believed he wouldn’t act on his threats “because he is reclusive, she supervises him, and he has no access to weapons.”
According to the Post, Hanson had been previously questioned by the FBI after he’d threatened in 2014 to “rape and kill multiple people.” He apparently expressed remorse at that time and made no further threats for five years. But after the Hasbro corporation announced it was removing the “Mr.” from its “Mr. Potato Head” toys, Hanson sent the following threat:
Hanson accused Hasbro of “pandering to tranny freaks” and threatened to “shoot up and bomb your headquarters,” according to the FBI. In a second message, Hanson allegedly added “only figuratively.”
In 2021 Hanson also threatened the University of Wisconsin for removing a 42-ton boulder from its campus. The boulder, placed in 1925, was colloquially referred to with a nickname that included a racial slur.
Hanson emailed a local elected official, a Black woman, about her role in removing the memorial according to the FBI. In the email, Hanson allegedly called the alderwoman the n-word repeatedly, in addition to multiple slurs used to demean women. He also told her that she deserved “to be raped and lynched for tearing out that boulder,” the FBI affidavit said.
Hanson also purportedly threatened to “shoot up and bomb” the head office of DC Comics and IGN Entertainment after it was announced that their new Superman character would identify as bisexual.
All of these threats drew visits from local police and the FBI. Apparently, Hanson’s mother’s explanation that her son “couldn’t control” his behavior satisfied the authorities until last month, when he was finally charged. According to Edwards’ reporting, Hanson’s latest threat, directed to a Wisconsin school board that he characterized as pedophiles, occurred last month. In that message, he threatened to kill the entire board and their families.
As Edwards’ report illustrates, it’s abundantly clear that Hanson would select the targets of his ire through perusing right-wing media and the internet. He has been charged with a single count of interstate communication of threats to commit violence:
The charge of interstate transmission of communications to injure the person of another provides for a sentence of up to five years in prison, three years of supervised release and a fine of $250,000. Sentences are imposed by a federal district court judge based upon the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and statutes which govern the determination of a sentence in a criminal case.
Hanson is due to appear in federal court on April 29.
