This post includes articles and commentaries written by Margaret Sullivan, Rick Wilson, Mark Follman, Arthur Delaney, Jennifer Bendery, Andrea González-Ramírez, Marshall Cohen, Daniel Dale, Lucas Ropek, Megan Garber, and the United States House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.
Here’s what I’ve found interesting:
- Tim Walz asks JD Vance an important question;
- The US Capitol was a battlefield on January 6, 2021;
- Trump amplifies his hate speech against migrants;
- North Carolina Republican pleads for right-wing lies about Helene recovery to end;
- Don’t fall for the Trump-Vance abortion ban deception;
- Debunking 12 election lies Trump is telling;
- Heritage Foundation trying to identify federal employees to fire;
- Stanislav Petrov, the man who saved the world; and
- Remembering what happened at the January 6, 2021, insurrection.
Here we go. I’m glad you’re here.
#1
JD Vance’s slick performance can’t change the danger of another Trump presidency (Margaret Sullivan, The Guardian, Link to Article)
That, of course, is the real issue – that Trump’s vice-president, after the 2020 election, did the right thing and his boss sided with the people who wanted him hanged for it. The two are done with each other. Vance is a late-coming opportunist.
In the closing minutes of the debate, Walz had his best moment when he challenged his rival with this essential question:
“Trump is still saying he didn’t lose the election. Did he lose the 2020 election?”
Vance tried a non-sequitur comeback: “Did Kamala Harris censor Americans?”
To which Walz shot back: “That is a damning non-answer.”
He was right about that. Trump’s lies and his destructive refusal to peacefully transfer power are the very reason JD Vance was standing on that stage.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Finally.
While Gov. Tim Walz may have started slow, the last 10 minutes of the Vice Presidential debate ended up being the most important of the night.
It is odd that it took Walz—and not a reporter—to point out the obvious and ask the most crucial question of his opponent, Sen. JD Vance: why isn’t Mike Pence here, and who won the 2020 election?
I have argued that any interview where a politician refuses to answer that Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. legitimately won the 2020 election should end at that moment—and then the reporter should follow up with an immediate correction. Media outlets should also stop inviting election deniers to participate in their programs because lying about the election makes it impossible to believe anything else they may say.
There needs to be a cost to lying about our elections. I hope more people see how this was Walz’s best moment in the debate. It should not have taken Walz to ask the question. But at least now we have Vance’s pathetic answer, one that should be an issue every day until this year’s election.
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#2
“Make Them Riot” — The Damning New Details of Trump’s Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election (Rick Wilson, The Elephant in the Room, Link to Article)
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Rick Wilson reminds us in this video that the United States Capitol grounds were a battleground on January 6, 2021, because former President Donald Trump sent a mob to the building to try to steal the presidency.
I had to pause for a moment to process the fact that Capitol Hill was a battleground. It had not sunk in for me in that way despite sharing a video compilation of the January 6 insurrection on social media and in the last few issues of this newsletter.
Wilson shows us the new security measures that have been put in place because Trump sent a mob of insurrectionists to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election. He describes some of the heroes of that day, including the Senate aides who saved the certificates of election from the terrorists invading the building.
Our national tradition of peaceful transfers of power ended that day. Trump, Vance, and far too many Republicans have been lying about January 6 for so long that it is easy to forget just how shocking and traumatic these events were to our nation.
The US Capitol was a battleground on January 6, 2021. But, unlike in 1814, it was not because of a foreign enemy. I hope voters make Trump and his MAGA supporters pay at the ballot box for their ongoing betrayal of our nation.
#3
Trump Amplifies His Dangerous Hate Speech Against Migrants (Mark Follman, Mother Jones, Link to Article)
For much of 2024, Donald Trump has used demagoguery against migrants to campaign for the White House. In numerous recent speeches and media appearances, he has continued to inveigh about an alleged “invasion” coming across America’s southern border. He has falsely claimed that hordes of violent and “insane” foreigners have been taking over “hundreds” of cities and raping and killing “thousands of Americans.” His repeated vows to deport millions of undocumented immigrants draw roars of approval at his rallies.
Inflaming Americans’ fears about immigration and border security was a hallmark of Trump’s presidency and previous campaigns—and his extreme rhetoric, as I’ve previously reported, has marked spasms of violence, including a horrific mass shooting in 2019 in El Paso, Texas. Earlier this month, he and his running mate, JD Vance, magnified racist lies about Haitian immigrants supposedly stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio—provoking a wave of fear, bomb threats, and major disruption in that community.
Now, in the final weeks of the presidential campaign, Trump’s rhetoric about migrants has grown even darker and more foreboding. In three campaign speeches since Friday, he conjured disturbing images of mayhem and death and spoke of the nation as if it’s on the brink of destruction. With no basis in reality, he blamed this cartoonishly grim portrait of American carnage on his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Sen. JD Vance’s decision to attack his constituents in Springfield, Ohio, is disgusting. But, one can see why Vance would seek Trump’s approval by doubling down on the hate and lies.
This ongoing effort to dehumanize the Haitian migrants, and other immigrants around the country, should set off fascist alarm bells. Earlier this week Trump went further and called Vice President Kamala Harris a murderer over these immigration policies.
As Follman explains, this isn’t Trump speaking off-the-cuff. This rhetoric is in the prepared speeches Trump is reading off a teleprompter. Make no mistake, these statements are not hyperbole. They represent their campaign strategy.
These statements establish a predicate for the atrocities Trump and his advisor, Stephen Miller, intend to implement should Trump win or steal this election.
Also, we could use a little help from the media in taking serious the potential violence the Trump-Vance-Miller immigration plans would create. Displacing 10-20 million people, including US citizens, is not going to go smoothly.
So, CBS, what the frack was your team thinking with this graphic previewing the Vice Presidential debate?
I would have thought by 2024 we would have reached the point where mainstream outlets would agree that ethnic cleansing is not an acceptable housing assistance proposal. This is the kind of idiocy that can result from sanewashing a proposal we should condemn.
#4
North Carolina Republican Pleads To End Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories About Helene Disaster Recovery (Arthur Delaney and Jennifer Bendery, HuffPost, Link to Article)
A Republican senator in the North Carolina legislature has issued a public plea for people to stop spreading conspiracy theories about the disaster recovery efforts in areas ravaged by flooding from Hurricane Helene.
In a Thursday afternoon Facebook post, state Sen. Kevin Corbin, who represents the state’s westernmost area, asked his followers for a favor: “Will you all help STOP this conspiracy theory junk that is floating all over Facebook and the internet about the floods in WNC.”
Corbin listed several examples: “FEMA is stealing money from donations, body bags ordered but government has denied, bodies not being buried, government is controlling the weather from Antarctica, government is trying to get lithium from WNC, stacks of bodies left at hospitals, and on and on and on.”
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
It has been impossible to use social media and not see radical right-wing accounts spread these lies about the federal government’s response to Hurricane Helene.
The large accounts spreading these lies include Elon Musk’s on X/Twitter. Musk has turned the social media site into an adjunct to the Trump-Vance campaign and has used his ownership power to ensure all users can see the disinformation he regularly shares.
Spreading lies about disaster relief will lead to unnecessary deaths, injuries, and financial losses. These lies lower the trust in government agencies, which prevents victims from seeking the help they need.
Local Republicans want these lies to stop. I don’t think we will see Trump, Vance, and people like Musk respond responsibly.
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#5
Trump’s National Abortion Ban Deception (Andrea González-Ramírez, The Cut, Link to Article)
On Tuesday night, as Donald Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, got pressed about his support for a national abortion ban on the debate stage, the former president turned to social media to issue an all-caps message. “EVERYONE KNOWS I WOULD NOT SUPPORT A FEDERAL ABORTION BAN, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, AND WOULD, IN FACT, VETO IT, BECAUSE IT IS UP TO THE STATES TO DECIDE BASED ON THE WILL OF THEIR VOTERS (THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE!),” he wrote. “LIKE RONALD REAGAN BEFORE ME, I FULLY SUPPORT THE THREE EXCEPTIONS FOR RAPE, INCEST, AND THE LIFE OF THE MOTHER.”
The post set off a flurry of breathless media coverage characterizing Trump as changing his position on abortion and committing not to outlaw the procedure nationwide. But this is just a rhetorical trick; as writer Jessica Valenti has noted, following the overturn of Roe v. Wade, the anti-abortion movement has repeatedly tried to replace the term abortion ban with national minimum standard or national consensus. Abortion opponents use the word ban to describe legislation with no exceptions for abortion care whatsoever, while they use minimum standard to describe bills that do include what Trump called “the three exceptions.” To the rest of us, they would do the exact same thing: effectively outlaw abortion nationwide.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
This is why Abortion, Every Day’s Jessica Valenti has been warning readers for nearly a year to be careful about how the forced-birth community is using language. Unfortunately, too many political reporters have failed to recognize the lies Trump, Vance, and their surrogates are sharing.
Trump won’t need to veto any laws. He can demand the Department of Justice enforce the 1873 Comstock Act and the FDA withdraw its approval for abortion medications. Those decisions would create a nationwide ban—yes, even in blue states.
Exceptions have been written so vaguely that doctors are uncomfortable risking their careers and freedom to provide necessary medical care. Women have died as a result. The Atlantic’s Sarah Zhang shared how these vague laws impact physicians as they deal with the real-life ramifications of forced-birth extremism.
Trump and Vance understand their forced-birth position is deeply unpopular. So, they have been trying to confuse people about what they intend to do for months. Reporters should not be serving as handmaids in their efforts to mislead voters.
Finally, can we stop listening to the people who for years called abortion supporters hysterical—and worse—for claiming that the Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade? Five of the six Justices who voted to overturn Roe were among those who lied during their confirmation hearings with statements about how Roe was settled law. We need to stop giving the benefit of the doubt to the people who worked for decades to strip women of their bodily autonomy.
#6
Fact check: 12 election lies Trump is using to set the stage to dispute a potential 2024 defeat (Marshall Cohen and Daniel Dale, CNN, Link to Article)
Former President Donald Trump has escalated his long-running assault on the integrity of US elections as the 2024 presidential campaign enters its final stretch, using a new series of lies about ballots, vote-counting and the election process to lay the groundwork to challenge a potential defeat in November.
Nonpartisan democracy experts say they’re seeing many of the same warning signs that were blinking red before Election Day four years ago, when Trump flooded the zone with election lies and conspiracy theories that he amplified after losing to Joe Biden. His campaign of deception culminated in the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
“The threats have not abated; they have only increased,” said Lindsay Daniels, a senior director at the nonpartisan Democracy Fund, which works to strengthen US democracy. “We saw a lot of activity in 2020 around peddling false claims and frivolous lawsuits. We are already seeing signs now, stage-setting, that these things may be attempted again.”
Trump has made at least 12 distinct false claims over the last two months that raise baseless doubts about the validity of a potential victory by Vice President Kamala Harris. (Recent polls suggest the race is very close, and Trump could certainly still win.)
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Since Trump is spreading these lies, you can expect to see them in news stories, social media shares, and conversations you may have with MAGA supporters.
But it is perhaps most important to be aware of these lies in case you have friends or family that are confused by the disinformation they may see.
Trump is setting the stage to try to steal this election, just as he did when he instigated the January 6, 2021, insurrection. Now is the time to be prepared to share the truth.
#8
The Heritage Foundation Is Spamming the Government With Thousands of FOIAs (Lucas Ropek, Gizmodo, Link to Article)
The Heritage Foundation, the rightwing think tank behind Project 2025, is spamming the federal government with thousands of Freedom of Information Act Requests, in an apparent effort to identify civil servants that a second Trump administration would deem undesirable, a new report from ProPublica claims.
The information requests were filed on behalf of the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, which its organizers describe as fostering a “government that is responsible and accountable to its citizens.” ProPublica reports that, via an analysis of over 2,000 FOIA requests submitted by members of the Oversight Project, the outlet found that the rightwing think-tank has been barraging agencies like the State Department and the Federal Trade Commission to search for mentions of “hot-button phrases used by individual government workers.” Those topics apparently include phrases like “climate equity,” DEI, and merely “voting.”
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Project 2025 is not just about policy planning for the next Republican president. They are also putting together a database of people who have been cleared as loyal to Trump to join his potential Administration.
This is the other side of that story. This is an effort to identify the people who Trump’s team will get rid of to make space for those loyalists.
They are targeting our nonpartisan civil servants. Will enough people use their votes to protect them?
#9
The Man Who Saved the World by Doing Absolutely Nothing (Megan Garber, The Atlantic, Link to Article)
It was September 26, 1983. Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defence Forces, was on duty at Serpukhov-15, a secret bunker outside Moscow. His job: to monitor Oko, the Soviet Union’s early-warning system for nuclear attack. And then to pass along any alerts to his superiors. It was just after midnight when the alarm bells began sounding. One of the system’s satellites had detected that the United States had launched five ballistic missiles. And they were heading toward the USSR. Electronic maps flashed; bells screamed; reports streamed in. A back-lit red screen flashed the word ‘LAUNCH.’”
That the U.S. would be lobbing missiles toward its Soviet counterpart would not, of course, have been out of the question at that particular point in human history. Three weeks earlier, Russians had shot down a South Korean airliner that had wandered into Soviet air space. NATO had responded with a show of military exercises. The Cold War, even in the early ’80s, continued apace; the threat of nuclear engagement still hovered over the stretch of land and sea that fell between Washington and Moscow.
Petrov, however, had a hunch—“a funny feeling in my gut,” he would later recall—that the alarm ringing through the bunker was a false one. It was an intuition that was based on common sense: The alarm indicated that only five missiles were headed toward the USSR. Had the U.S. actually been launching a nuclear attack, however, Petrov figured, it would be extensive—much more, certainly, than five. Soviet ground radar, meanwhile, had failed to pick up corroborative evidence of incoming missiles—even after several minutes had elapsed. The larger matter, however, was that Petrov didn’t fully trust the accuracy of the Soviet technology when it came to bomb-detection. He would later describe the alert system as “raw.”
But what would you do? You’re alone in a bunker, and alarms are screaming, and lights are flashing, and you have your training, and you have your intuition, and you have two choices: follow protocol or trust your gut. Either way, the world is counting on you to make the right call.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov is indeed a man who saved the world. His decision not to report what proved to be a false alarm prevented a nuclear exchange between the United States and Soviety Union on that day in 1983.
It is, frankly, amazing that our species survived that year. So much was happening and international tensions were as high as they could be short of a conflict.
Yuri Andropov had just taken over the Soviet Union after Leonid Brezhnev’s death in November 1982. As relations soured, U.S. President Ronald Reagan gave his “Evil Empire” speech in March 1983. The Soviet military shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in September. It was later that month when Lt. Colonel Petrov determined that the country’s early warning system was falsely reporting a massive United States nuclear launch and prevented a near-certain Soviet nuclear launch.
On October 23, the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut was attacked by a bomber, killing 241. The U.S. invaded Grenada on October 25. On November 7, the U.S. and NATO began an extensive war exercise, Able Archer. We subsequently learned how the Soviets believed the exercise was actually part of the preparations for a surprise attack thanks to the double agent Oleg Gordievsky’s efforts to warn his United Kingdom handlers.
The Day After, the famous ABC television movie about a nuclear war and its aftermath aired on November 20.
Thanks to luck and the actions of people like Petrov, we did survive 1983. He is a name worth remembering, particularly in times of crisis.
Watch to Remember What Really Happened During the January 6, 2021, Insurrection
Post-Game Comments
Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection:
“Kennedy was particularly haunted by a conversation between two German leaders after the war began. One, a former German chancellor, asked the current chancellor, “How did it all happen?” The latter, who had led his nation into war, replied, “Ah, if only one knew.” Jack told Bobby on Saturday afternoon, as the crisis looked darkest, that he wanted to avoid someone someday writing a comparable The Missiles of October. As President Kennedy recalled later, “If this planet is ever ravaged by nuclear war, if 300 million Americans, Russians, and Europeans are wiped out by a 60-minute nuclear exchange, if the survivors of that devastation can then endure the fire, poison, chaos, and catastrophe, I do not want one of those survivors to ask another, ‘How did it all happen?’ and to receive the incredible reply, ‘Ah, if only one knew.’ ” (Garrett M. Graff, Raven Rock)”
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