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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.

Listen and subscribe to Daily Kos Elections’ The Downballot podcast with David Nir and David Beard

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.

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Michigan Sen. Lana Theis, apparently feeling the heat in a primary race against Republican real estate manager Mike Detmer, took multiple shots against Democratic State Sen. Mallory McMorrow in a fundraising email campaign. According to screenshots of the emails shared on Twitter, Theis called Democrats like McMorrow “trolls” and “groomers” and accused them of sexualizing children for supporting education on systemic racism and LGBTQ+ rights. Theis introduced legislation to block transgender athletes from competing with the high school sports teams that correspond with their gender, according to the news nonprofit Michigan Advance.
“These are the people we are up against,” Theis stated in her email. “Progressive social media trolls like Senator Mallory McMorrow [D-Snowflake] who are outraged they can’t teach can’t groom and sexualize kindergarteners or that 8-year olds are responsible for slavery.”

Many a Democrat, McMorrow included, has called out this kind of cheap politicization of American history education. And after seeing McMorrow’s response to Theis’ attempt at it, it’s safe to say the Republican senator picked the wrong Democrat to try to make an example out of.

RELATED STORY: Michigan state senator: GOP lawmaker who made sexist remark to reporter sexually harassed me, too

Republicans have misrepresented Black history education as an outgrowth of critical race theory, a framework for interpreting law that maintains racism’s reach has had particularly harmful effects on the legal system and laws that govern our society. The theory would be almost exclusively confined to law school courses and the like if not for Republican fearmongers randomly asserting that it is being used to indoctrinate K-12 students.

McMorrow’s speech, initially made before her state Senate colleagues and shared on Twitter Tuesday, reinforced progressive Democrats’ message that attempting to eliminate the histories of people of color and other marginalized citizens of this country will not be tolerated. 

Because it’s worth it, read every word:

Thank you, Mr. President,

I didn’t expect to wake up yesterday to the news that the senator from the 22nd district had overnight accused me by name of grooming and sexualizing children in an email fundraising for herself. So I sat on it for a while, wondering why me, and then I realized, because I am the biggest threat to your hollow hateful scheme, because you can’t claim that you are targeting marginalized kids in the name of quote, parental rights if another parent is standing up to say ‘no.’ So then what? 

Then you dehumanize and marginalize me. You say that I’m one of them. You say, ‘she’s a groomer. She supports pedophilia. She wants children to believe that they were responsible for slavery and to feel bad about themselves because they’re white.’

Well, here’s a little bit of background about who I really am. Growing up, my family was very active in our church. I sang in the choir. My mom taught CCD. One day, our priest called a meeting with my mom and told her that she was not living up to the church’s expectations and that she was disappointing. My mom asked why. Among other reasons, she was told it was because she was divorced and because the priest didn’t see her at mass every Sunday.

So where was my mom on Sundays? She was at the soup kitchen with me. My mom taught me at a very young age that Christianity and faith was about being part of a community; about recognizing our privilege and blessings; and doing what we can to be of service to others, especially people who are marginalized, targeted, and who had less often unfairly.

I learned that service was far more important than performative nonsense, like being seen in the same pew every Sunday or writing Christian in your Twitter bio and using that as a shield to target and marginalize already marginalized people. I also stand on the shoulders of people like father Ted Hesburgh, the longtime president of the University of Notre Dame, who was active in the Civil Rights Movement, who recognized his power and privilege as a white man, a faith leader, and the head of an influential and well-respected institution. And who saw Black people in this country being targeted and discriminated against and beaten and reached out to lock arms with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when he was alive, when it was unpopular and risky, and marching, alongside them to say, ‘we’ve got you.’ To offer protection and service and allyship to try to write the wrongs and fix injustice in the world.

So who am I? I am a straight, white, Christian, married, suburban mom who knows that the very notion that learning about slave slavery or redlining or systemic racism somehow means that children are being taught to feel bad or hate themselves because they are white is absolute nonsense. No child alive today is responsible for slavery. No one in this room is responsible for slavery, but each and every single one of us bears responsibility for writing the next chapter of history. Each and every single one of us decides what happens next and how we respond to history and the world around us.

We are not responsible for the past. We all also cannot change the past. We can’t pretend that it didn’t happen or deny people their very right to exist. I am a straight, white, Christian, married, suburban mom. I want my daughter to know that she is loved, supported, and seen for whoever she becomes. I want her to be curious, empathetic, and kind.

People who are different are not the reason that our roads are in bad shape after decades of disinvestment or that healthcare costs are too high or that teachers are leaving the profession. I want every child in this state to feel seen, heard, and supported, not marginalized and targeted because they are not straight white and Christian. We cannot let hateful people tell you otherwise to scapegoat and deflect from the fact that they are not doing anything to fix the real issues that impact people’s lives. And I know that hate will only win, if people like me stand by, let it happen.

So I want to be very clear right now. Call me whatever you want. I hope you brought in a few dollars. I hope it made you sleep good last night. I know who I am. I know what faith and service means and what it calls for in this moment. We will not let hate win.

This post was originally published on this site

An implausible, fraudulent, and unconstitutional legal scheme to reverse the 2020 election has become the most recent rallying cry of Donald Trump’s allies, even as some of them have attracted federal scrutiny for their initial attempts to overturn the election.

The new scheme is a familiar one, revolving around the notion that state lawmakers hold the authority to choose alternate electors—even after certification of the Electoral College—if they find irregularities sufficient enough to have affected the outcome. But while the effort is conceivably aimed at overturning 2020, the real target is providing a framework that can be quickly implemented in case of a Republican loss in 2024.

“At the moment, there is no other way to say it: This is the clearest and most present danger to our democracy,” J. Michael Luttig, a leading conservative lawyer and former appeals court judge, told The New York Times. “Trump and his supporters in Congress and in the states are preparing now to lay the groundwork to overturn the election in 2024 were Trump, or his designee, to lose the vote for the presidency.”

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John Eastman, the fringe lawyer who convinced Donald Trump the election could be overturned, once clerked for Luttig and is now actively pushing state lawmakers in several swing states to act on the retroactive plan. At the same time, a federal judge last month declared Eastman’s scheme “a coup in search of a legal theory,” said Trump “likely” committed crimes trying to overturn 2020, and ordered Eastman to turn over a tranche of emails to the select committee investigating Jan. 6. Eastman, however, is still withholding some 37,000 pages of coup plotting from the panel.

Despite his potential legal liabilities from 2020, Eastman is also central to the ongoing effort to keep his theory of the coup alive in the hearts and minds of Trump cultists and lawmakers across the country. The fellow hucksters hawking Eastman’s fraudulent plan are also a familiar band: pillow guy Mike Lindell; disgraced former national security adviser and right-wing icon Mike Flynn; former White House aide who’s also withholding information from the Jan. 6 panel, Steve Bannon; and former Trump aide Boris Epshteyn.

Eastman’s latest handiwork is perhaps most evident in the battleground state of Wisconsin, where his fringe theory has taken hold and absolutely no one can disabuse Trump cultists of it.

Wisconsin Assembly GOP Speaker Robin Vos has been all but swallowed alive by Eastman’s plot. Vos originally sought to appease Trumpers last year by launching an Arizona-style fraudit of 2020 with an estimated $680,000 price tag for taxpayers. But the sham audit only served to foster more conspiracy-fueled distrust among Trump supporters.

A couple months ago, Vos spent nearly an hour on a conservative radio show trying to deflect callers’ claims that state lawmakers could decertify the 2020 election.

“It is impossible—it cannot happen,” Vos told listeners. “I don’t know how many times I can say that.”

The state legislature’s attorneys have likewise affirmed, “There is no mechanism in state or federal law for the Legislature to reverse certified votes cast by the Electoral College and counted by Congress.”

Still, “Toss Vos” has now become a rallying cry on the right. Vos was also held in contempt of court late last month for withholding documents related to the Assembly’s supposed investigation of 2020 voter fraud.

Vos, who met last month with Eastman and decertify activists, is a classic lesson in appeasement of Trump’s corruption: It quickly turns one dying rose into a thicket of thorns down the road.

But Wisconsin isn’t alone. Similar schemes are being promoted in some form or another in Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan. The chances of any of them ever overturning the 2020 election are zero, but that’s not the point. The point is keeping that frothy dream alive among Trumpers.  

“We are on a full, full freight train to decertify,” Epshteyn told Bannon in January on his War Room podcast. “That’s what we’re going to get. Everyone knows. Everyone knows this election was stolen.”

The long-term consequences of that fringe-favorite fever dream will likely haunt U.S. elections for years, if not decades. The short-term electoral impact in a place like Wisconsin, however, remains to be seen. At least some reality-based voters who lean conservative could be turned off by a Republican Party divided against itself over yet another Trump-fueled controversy.