How Rep. George Santos uses MAGA playbook to survive amid lies and scandals
March 19, 2023
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‘False prophet’ Kari Lake shredded by AZ columnist after suggesting God would make her governor
March 22, 2023
Whatever you think of Kari Lake’s claims of election fraud that have been deemed to be baseless by the courts, a newspaper columnist critical of the failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate believes he’s found a role that he believes would suits the former news anchor.
The Arizona Republic’s EJ Montini notes that a Christian group that recognized Lake for her propensity to predict the future, and whiff nearly every time.
“Kari Lake made the group’s list of ‘false prophets,’” Montini wrote in a scathing piece on the far-right figure’s demagoguery as it was described by Faithful America, a Christian organization behind the "False Prophets Don’t Speak for Me" initiative.
“Unlike Arizona governor, it is a position for which she appears to have the qualifications.”
IN OTHER NEWS: Jim Jordan issues sweeping information requests to universities researching disinformation
Montini’s piece, which ran under the headline “Kari Lake still expects God (and the state Supreme Court) to make her governor” followed a gathering Lake held Tuesday at a Mesa church she described as a “prayer event,” and which the columnist described as her “latest prank.”
“We told you we'd bring our election case to the AZ Supreme court and we did,” Lake wrote in a tweet advancing the event. “Now, it's time to pray together for the Supreme Court & praise God with great expectations!”
But if recent history is any indication, Lake’s supporters probably shouldn’t expect much.
Montini notes that an Arizona appeals court judge described Lake’s assertions of election fraud to be “quite simply, sheer speculation.”
“Lake’s arguments highlight election day difficulties, but her request for relief fails because the evidence presented to the superior court ultimately supports the court’s conclusion that voters were able to cast their ballots, that votes were counted correctly, and that no other basis justifies setting aside the election results,” the ruling said.
Lake proceeded to take her case to the Arizona Supreme Court, Montini writes, tweeting at the time: “Pray for our Attorneys. Pray for the Judges. Pray for Justice. Pray for America.”
Lake’s efforts to tap into some form of divine intervention have included a march around Maricopa County’s election, horns blaring, with the expectation of a biblical battle of Jericho-style event where the walls crumble. They didn’t.
“I am not an expert in the ways of the Almighty, but it seems likely that her prayers already have been answered. Just not with the reply she’d hoped to receive,” Montini writes.
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Donald Trump has provoked a bullying crisis in America that extends from elementary school all the way to Congress. It’s time to say, “Enough!”
Marjorie Taylor Greene, an infamous bully who once chased then-17-year-old Parkland school-shooting survivor David Hogg down the street screaming epithets at him, bullied her pooch Kevin McCarthy into threatening New York City District Attorney Alvin Bragg with a congressional investigation if he didn’t back off from prosecuting her role model, Donald Trump.
Following up, Gym Jordan, notorious for his bullying any witness who appears before his committees or brings up his alleged coverup history, has now been joined by James Comer (accused of abusing a girlfriend and then getting her an abortion), and House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil in demanding Bragg give their committees all the information he’s gathered on Donald Trump’s crimes relating to his paying off porn star Stormy Daniels.
For his part, Bragg is having none of it, pushing back with a statement saying though a spokesman:
“We will not be intimidated by attempts to undermine the justice process, nor will we let baseless accusations deter us from fairly applying the law.”
Bullying has now become the trademark behavior of the GOP, the result of Donald Trump’s entrance on the scene in 2015 when he successfully bullied and cowed every other candidate for the Republican nomination for president.
This parallels the rise of fascism as the political system now most vigorously embraced by the GOP, from rigging courts and elections to using naked threats of violence and even attempted murder to try to stop the peaceful transfer of the presidency from Trump to Biden on January 6th.
As Madeline Albright wrote in her book Fascism: A Warning:
“Decades ago, George Orwell suggested that the best one-word description of a Fascist was ‘bully.’”
If we don’t take on bullies — particularly fascist bullies — they keep going further and further until either they win or you fight back and defeat them. The best political example of this writ large was Hitler. He pushed around most of Europe and they kept giving in or trying to appease him, thinking at some point he’d have gotten enough.
Neville Chamberlain thought he could negotiate with a bully and came back from his meetings with Hitler believing he’d achieved “peace in our time.” But, of course, you can never actually negotiate with a bully: you can only contain or defeat them. Which is what FDR, Churchill, and Stalin ended up having to do.
From that experience, Europe learned a lesson about dealing with fascist bullies, which is why the governments of the continent are united in their support of Ukraine against the murderous bullying of Russia’s fascist leader.
Bullies never stop. And, most importantly, every time they win they set their sights on the next conquest. Giving in to their demands only creates a newer and more elaborate set of demands.
People in the business world know this well because some of the most successful and powerful people in that realm are, themselves, successful bullies and everybody in business has dealt with them at one time or another. We typically only learn late in their careers what tyrants they were, as in the biographies of John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, and Donald Trump.
But because they’ve acquired wealth and power through bullying their colleagues, competitors, suppliers, and employees, those business bullies who move into politics (whether as elected officials or as those who buy off elected officials) bring their bullying tactics with them.
We have so many of these bullies polluting our political waters today that it’s nearly impossible to get anything done that benefits anybody except the morbidly rich bullies themselves and their friends.
As lawyer and therapist Bill Eddy writes for Psychology Today:
“Bullies don’t negotiate; they make demands, they make threats, and they fight for them. They generally lack the modern skills of win-win... So don’t think of their demands as a form of true negotiation. It’s more like warfare. And you don’t want to give in to that.”
Right now, America is suffering from an epidemic of political bullying.
Billionaires started bullying us in the 1980s at the suggestion of Lewis Powell, demanding that the top 74% income tax rate be collapsed to 25%; Reagan enthusiastically gave in (as did a few Democrats) and now the billionaires who are paying 3% tax rates (not a typo) are using their political muscle to try to eliminate funding to the IRS as part of their “negotiation” around the debt ceiling.
Trump, like all fascist bullies, delights in this.
He gets pleasure stripping power away from others while causing fear and pain in his enemies’ lives, and the more successfully he can bully high-profile people the more he seems to puff up with pleasure.
This is a crisis for America now because presidents tend to establish both the tone, tenor, and fashions of the day.
John Kennedy, for example, established an optimistic and forward-looking tone for our country, while Jimmy Carter made it fashionable to be a thoughtful, compassionate Christian and an energy geek. Bill Clinton turned us all into policy wonks, and George W. Bush transformed himself from an AWOL draft-dodger drunk into a warrior. Barack Obama established a tone of thoughtful, elegant inclusion and diversity, celebrated around the world.
Tragically, what Donald Trump showed us is that when the President of the United States is a bully, being a bully becomes fashionable.
Political bullies, from the soft-spoken Mitch McConnell to the outrageous Gym Jordan, all surfed the wave of Trump’s bullying style. Right wing media has become filled with outrage-puffed bullies, each reveling in being more brutal, oafish, and outrageously fascistic than the last.
Over the past few years, Trump followers delighted in bullying store owners and people in public spaces by refusing to wear masks. Now they’re bullying trans people, pregnant women, public school teachers, librarians, and drag queens. Bullies, being cowards deep down inside, always pick on those they see as the least able to defend themselves.
Bullying is contagious, which makes the GOP’s fascist bullying a whole-of-society crisis.
Multiple studies showed, in the months after Trump was elected, an increase in school bullying. White “Karens” (female and male) around the country found new validation in their attempts to bully people of color, including children. And Trump’s bullying use of the phrase “China virus” led to a huge spike in attacks on Asian Americans.
Trump set the tone for all these bullies: truth doesn’t matter, so long as you can hurt and intimidate somebody for your own benefit or even just for fun. As Glenn Altschuler wrote for The Hill:
“And like all bullies, Trump traffics in personal insults and group stereotypes. He began calling immigrants ‘rapists,’ complained about ‘shithole countries,’ mocked a reporter with disabilities, said the Speaker of the House has ‘mental problems,’ said four American congresswomen of color should ‘go back’ to the ‘crime-infested places from which they came.’
“He’s peddled the racist idea that immigration is an ‘invasion,’ and retweeted the claim that ‘the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.’ He responded to the #MeToo movement by declaring, ‘It’s a very scary time for young men in America.’ He spread a phony conspiracy theory that Joe Scarborough murdered Lori Klausutis, a congressional aide, in 2001.”
Remember Mitch McConnell bragging, “One of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr. President, you will not fill the Supreme Court vacancy.’” Classic bullying.
The people whose bullying tendencies drew them to guns and violence have joined the bullies in the GOP as well, with the ultimate bullying event being their assault on our nation’s Capitol on January 6.
Convicted foreign agent, bully, and Trump toady Mike Flynn, who suggested that a wholesale slaughter of minority Americans a la Myanmar “should happen” here, upped the ante by saying, when presented with a new AR15, “Maybe I'll find someone in Washington, D.C.” Spoken like a lifelong bully.
Our world is in flames, as climate scientists have been warning us would happen for at least five decades, but fossil-fuel billionaires here and abroad continue to bully civilized nations into a suicide pact. Just let them get richer and richer selling their poisons, they say…until everything collapses.
Psychologist Shawn T. Smith, author of Surviving Aggressive People, notes that bullies almost always back down when they’re confronted. Bullies, he notes, are both lazy and cowards; preying on people who fight back is too much trouble and risk.
“[B]ullies and predators,” Smith writes, “…test, …prod, and…scan for vulnerability. When they do, responding quickly is more important than responding perfectly.”
The vast majority of Americans don’t want the world these GOP bullies are trying to impose on us.
Most Americans, for example, would like to have the same kind of healthcare and educational system that Canadians, Europeans, Australians, and South Koreans have. Everybody covered, not a single medical bankruptcy, and undergraduate student debt largely nonexistent. They’d like good union jobs, a stable environment, quality public transportation, and top-notch primary schools.
So, why don’t we have what Europe got in the 1940s and Canada got in the 1960s? Because wealthy bullies who don’t want to pay their taxes buy off Republicans who, themselves, are willing to bully the American people and the press.
We have “Jan. 6th” bullies, anti-mask bullies, anti-vax bullies, an entire health insurance industry that bullies us, bank bullies who rip us off, Wall Street bullies stealing everything that’s not nailed down, anti-abortion bullies threatening women, and religious bullies threatening our courts.
Pushing back hard is imperative, otherwise we lose.
It’s way past time for average Americans to fight back: we’ve been bullied enough. Democrats and average Americans must follow Alvin Bragg’s example: stand up and put a stop to it.
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Following in the footsteps of six conservative-led states, Senate Republicans want to pull Arizona’s membership from a multistate coalition that aids in cleaning voter rolls, following false claims that the coalition is part of a liberal conspiracy to rig elections.
The Electronic Registration Information Center, also known as ERIC, is a nonprofit formed in 2012 that aims to assist states in improving the accuracy of their voter rolls and increase access to voter registration information through the sharing of voter registration information among member states. It was created by seven states with a mixture of Republican and Democratic leadership, so that the states could assist each other in identifying voters who had moved or died.
Since fringe conservative media, like The Gateway Pundit, began last year to publish stories falsely accusing ERIC of involvement in a liberal conspiracy to steal elections, Alabama, Louisiana, Florida, Missouri, Ohio and West Virginia have all either pulled out of ERIC or announced plans to do so.
Minus those that have already pulled out, ERIC still has 27 member states, along with the District of Columbia.
A last-minute amendment to Fountain Hills Republican Sen. John Kavanagh’s Senate Bill 1135 would essentially set Arizona on a path to leave ERIC, as well, even though its sponsor says it would put that decision in the hands of ERIC itself.
In its original form, SB1135 focused on new regulations and procedures for early voting. But the amendment would preclude the state from being a member of a multistate voter registration organization that requires members to provide information from voter registration records or driver’s licenses “that is otherwise required to be confidential.”
That information includes full or partial social security or driver’s license numbers or any records from the Arizona Department of Transportation.
The bill would also ban Arizona from being a member of an organization that requires the mailing of voter registration forms to people who are not registered to vote.
Both the sharing of voter registration information and periodic mailings of voter registration information to people who aren’t registered to vote and are possibly eligible are membership requirements of ERIC.
Kavanagh told the Senate on March 20 that sharing voter registration and driver’s license info was a violation of Arizona law.
“Arizona can still work with ERIC, but we can’t violate state statute,” Kavanagh said.
Sen. Priya Sundareshan, a Tucson Democrat, pointed out on March 20 that the bill seemed to essentially prohibit Arizona from being a member of ERIC, even if the bill didn’t say that outright.
Kavanagh answered that, if ERIC stopped requiring member states to share private voter information, the bill would still allow Arizona to be a member.
“It would be up to ERIC,” he said.
Sundareshan retorted that it seemed confusing to her that Republicans would back a bill limiting membership in ERIC, an organization that they had previously advocated for membership in and one of the strongest safeguards against voter fraud that election officials have available.
“It’s a little baffling that we now seek to remove access to that tool which is helpful in maintaining current and up-to-date voter rolls,” Sundareshan said.
When Arizona joined ERIC in 2018, it had the backing of all 15 counties and the Republican secretary of state, Michele Reagan.
“Our participation in ERIC will decrease provisional ballots, as well as reduce the number of voters on the rolls who don’t live in Arizona anymore,” Reagan said in a statement at the time. “Our counties work hard to ensure the registration database is accurate, and this tool will enhance their ability to keep our data as accurate as possible.”
During a Senate floor debate of SB1135 on March 21, Tempe Democrat Juan Mendez argued that membership in ERIC helped Arizona do one of the things that some conservatives have been asking for: clean up the voter rolls.
“These were sound voter roll practices from diverse states,” Mendez said. “This is how we prosecuted people who dared to vote double, over state lines.”
The Senate approved the bill on March 21, by a vote of 16-13 along party lines. The bill has little chance of actually becoming law, since even if it is passed by the House, it will likely be vetoed by Gov. Katie Hobbs, who lauded Arizona’s participation in ERIC while secretary of state.
Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and Twitter.
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