A surge in child trafficking misinformation pushed by QAnon conspiracy theorists is stirring public panic, generating violence and interfering with official efforts to protect minors, experts warn.
From the US to South Africa, AFP Fact Check has debunked claims about girls found locked in shipping containers or lured in the street with roses fitted with a location-tracking chip.
A Facebook post shared one million times last month claimed 39 missing children had been found in a trailer in the US state of Georgia. In reality, they were discovered in separate locations in August as part of a police operation and a majority were not trafficking victims.
Another hoax falsely accused US furniture retailer Wayfair of trafficking children inside storage cabinets.
These stories have stoked the flames of QAnon, a far-right movement claiming that US President Donald Trump is waging a secret war against a global liberal cult of Satan-worshipping paedophiles.
QAnon crept up three years ago on the fringes of social media but has since spilt into the mainstream thanks to widely-shared posts on platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
"A lot of conspiracy theories are about pure people being exploited by a corrupt and decadent elite", said Paris-based extremism and technology expert Julien Bellaiche.
"This is a pro-Donald Trump conspiracy theory but we're also talking about a global cabal and an anti-establishment message that you can identify with practically anywhere in the world."
Influencers boost QAnon
QAnon has broadened its appeal particularly among women by focusing on child trafficking, experts say.
Many of the posts feature the hashtag #SaveTheChildren or #SaveOurChildren, which have become synonymous with QAnon.
Influencers on Instagram have helped spread child trafficking misinformation by sharing QAnon narratives in innocent-looking posts, according to Marc-Andre Argentino, a technology and extremist expert at Concordia University in Canada.
"These influencers provide an aesthetic and branding to their entire pages, and they in turn apply this to QAnon content, softening the messages, videos and traditional imagery that would be associated with QAnon narratives," he said in a recent Twitter thread.
"However, behind the branding and soft colours lies the QAnon we all know, along with all it entails: racism, medical/COVID disinformation, violence, and now the negative impact the hijacking of 'save the children' is having on NGOs… that actually save lives."
International charity Save The Children has also sounded the alarm, saying its name in hashtag form had experienced "unusually high volumes" of traffic and caused "confusion among our supporters and the general public".
Influencers are not the only public figures to seemingly promote QAnon. Trump himself at times appears to fan conspiracy theories.
In a September interview, he described his presidential race rival Joe Biden as a puppet controlled by "people that you've never heard of, people that are in the dark shadows".
Of QAnon supporters, he said that "they like me very much".
'Pizzagate'
While some might ridicule these types of conspiracy theories, they have had very real consequences in the past.
During the 2016 US presidential ballot, users on the anonymous 4chan messaging board linked Hillary Clinton to a child sex ring involving a pizzeria in Washington DC.
The false claim prompted one man to fire an assault rifle inside the popular restaurant. No one was hurt.
Since Pizzagate's successor QAnon has burst into the mainstream, banners and t-shirts emblazoned with the letter Q have popped up at anti-lockdown demonstrations in Berlin, Paris and London.
A popular QAnon theory claims the pandemic was invented to divert from child trafficking incidents.
And in the US, QAnon believer Marjorie Taylor Greene is set to enter Congress after she won a primary contest in August.
While viral rumours can spark panic, misinformation around child trafficking is often born out of wanting to help, not harm, French expert Bellaiche said.
"Many people fall down the rabbit hole out of compassion and wanting to help solve a horrific issue. But it can be tricky. You can go down a path that leads you to a destination you didn't think about at first."
'Panic and pandemonium'
False reports have also sprung up around Europe and Africa.
Facebook posts shared more than 8,000 times falsely alleged that a building in South Africa's administrative capital Pretoria was a human trafficking hotspot.
In response, South African police have warned against "continued peddling of fake news" that "seeks to sow panic and pandemonium" and take away attention from genuine cases.
Experts say the ongoing pandemic has created ideal conditions for conspiracies to flourish.
"During lockdown, people had a lot of time to spend online and were looking for answers to things they can't control," Bellaiche said.
"The more you watch hours and hours of video, the more you feel like you belong to a collective."
One of the treatments made available to Trump would have been defeated by his own efforts to thwart the scientific research that made it possible: fetal cell tissue from abortions.
The fully-human antibody molecules, made by the pharmaceutical company Regeneron, come from two sources: antibodies identified from humans who have recovered from COVID-19 and the company's "VelocImmune" mice, which have been genetically modified to have a human immune system, according to a statement provided to Salon by the drug manufacturer.
The lab tests used to evaluate the effectiveness of the antibodies were derived from what the MIT Technology Review pointed out was a standard cell supply known as HEK 293T. It originated as kidney tissue derived from an abortion in the Netherlands in 1973, the same year Roe v. Wade was decided.
Those cells have since been "immortalized" in labs — they keep dividing endlessly, similar to cancerous growth — and have gone through other genetic changes, according to MIT. Over such a length of time, they can become disassociated from their origin.
"It's how you want to parse it," a Regeneron spokesperson told MIT. "But the 293T cell lines available today are not considered fetal tissue, and we did not otherwise use fetal tissue."
But the line connecting the cell lines remains unbroken. The president undeniably benefited medically from cells originating from aborted fetuses.
Regeneron told MIT that other labs also use 293T cells to make what it describes as "pseudoparticles," or virus-like bodies which have the coronavirus' "spike" protein. Those particles are necessary in order to test how different antibodies work against the virus. Both antibodies in Regeneron's treatment would have gone through those tests, MIT reported.
The Trump administration has restricted medical research using fetal tissue from abortions. In 2019, Trump himself overrode top administration scientists, such as Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Alex Azar, and tightened the reins on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to fund such research. It was an effort pushed by Vice President Mike Pence in an apparent appeal to religious conservative voters.
"This is a major pro-life victory, and we thank President Trump for taking decisive action," Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, a lobbying group which opposes abortion, said at the time. "It is outrageous and disgusting that we have been complicit, through our taxpayer dollars, in the experimentation using baby body parts."
Sometime that year, the Food and Drug Administration website removed a PDF explaining the genesis and use of HEK 293 fetal cells, according to Salon's search of the Internet Archive.
This August, the Human Fetal Tissue Research Ethics Advisory Board — which the HHS established in February, and comprises a number of anti-abortion appointees — recommended that Azar not fund 13 out of 14 research proposals which incorporated fetal cells.
While those rejections keyed in on blocking access to new abortion tissue — as opposed to research involving common cell lines already in use for many years — some scientists want to study abortion tissue precisely so they can create new cell lines.
According to a statement provided by Regeneron to Salon, development and manufacturing of the president's "miracle" antibody cocktail was accomplished in part with federal funds from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), which operates under the HHS and partners with the NIH, whose funding for research has been targeted by Trump and other administration conservatives.
In a video posted Wednesday to social media, Trump said he would make the abortion derived treatment available to COVID-19 patients "for free."
No sooner had the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh escalated last month than the huge Armenian community in Los Angeles began mobilizing to send food, medical equipment and other supplies to the "homeland."
"The second it started, we were like 'what are we going to do?' and we started working immediately," said Sosse Krikorian, who spoke with AFP this week near Los Angeles as she sorted aid destined for the tiny enclave at the heart of the fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
The territory -- referred to as the Republic of Artsakh by Armenians -- is recognized as part of Azerbaijan but its population is majority ethnic Armenian.
For Los Angeles's Armenian community -- one of the largest in the world -- the decades-old conflict, thousands of miles away, is very much personal and the latest escalation of violence has triggered an outpouring of support.
"We're all very connected to our homeland. Armenia is sacred for us," said Nora Hovsepian, chairwoman of the Armenian National Committee of America-West Region (ANCA-WR).
Hovsepian estimated the number of Armenians across the United States to be at 1.5 to two million, with about one million living in California alone, the majority of them in the Los Angeles area.
"Every Armenian that you talk to these days wants to do something, whether it's donating money, donating goods, calling media outlets or calling members of Congress," added Hovsepian who was born in the US and whose ancestors fled the Armenian genocide.
'Armenia is my homeland'
The outpouring of solidarity from the community in LA is visible throughout the city, notably in the majority-Armenian suburb town of Glendale or in "Little Armenia," where many shops proudly display the Armenian flag or have set up collection boxes.
Celebrities who trace their roots to Armenia, like singer Cher or reality TV star Kim Kardashian, have also sought to shine a spotlight on the deadly conflict on social media.
Others like 21-year-old Krikorian help by gathering aid supplies destined for the fighters on the frontline.
"We already shipped over 1,000 boxes of medical supplies... and we have another flight coming up soon," proudly says her father Joe Krikorian, who heads a non-profit that provides extensive first-aid training in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh.
"They're running short on a lot of things," he added. "We're getting calls every day 'we're out of sutures, we're in need of tourniquets' and we're trying to get it there as soon as possible."
Krikorian, who was born in Lebanon, said dozens of volunteers and family members have turned out to help at his company while other organizations in the LA region were collecting clothing or food.
"I only have American citizenship but Armenia is my homeland -- it's my blood, it's my roots, my grandparents were part of the genocide" said the 48-year-old.
Armenians say that up to 1.5 million people were killed by Ottoman Turks during World War I in what amounted to genocide, a claim supported by some 30 countries. Turkey rejects the genocide label and says that Turks also died in civil strife.
Raffi Sarkissian, a board member at ANCA who heads a small team of volunteers planning to travel to the enclave in the coming days, said the biggest challenge has been sorting out logistical issues to ensure the aid reaches the enclave.
He said a lot of the aid has been stuck in Europe or the US because of the heavy fighting and his aim was to set up a supply chain to ensure medical equipment and other supplies reach Armenia and eventually the front line.
"Right now, because of logistics, we need to be on the ground over there," he said. "That way we can assess with the local government whatever is needed."
With less than thirteen months before the 2021 mayoral vote in New York City, candidate Maya Wiley implied contrast with the current mayor during an interview with Spectrum News 1.
"I believe deeply in this city and its ability not just to recover, but to reimagine New York, so that it is actually a place where every single one of us all can live with dignity," Wiley told "Inside City Hall" anchor Errol Louis.
“It requires an unconventional approach that recognizes we have to stop tinkering, we have to get off a treadmill of incrementalism, because we need transformation in this city. We need a city that not just comes back from COVID, but that comes back in a way that re-envisions the economy as one that serves to propel all people into prosperity," she argued.
The network noted the contrast she was implying.
"Maya Wiley may be Bill de Blasio’s former chief counsel, but she is already striking back at his perceived shortfalls as she runs for mayor, calling for significant change instead of 'incrementalism' and hinting at the failures of his 'Tale of Two Cities' promise," NY1 noted. "Incremental change and a city that hasn’t helped all New Yorkers have been major points of consternation for liberals when looking back on de Blasio’s time at City Hall."
CNN anchor Chris Cuomo on Thursday blasted Attorney General Bill Barr.
Cuomo played a video of Rep. Pramila Jayapal questioning the attorney general, which has new importance after the plot to kidnap or murder Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI).
In the clip, Rep. Jayapal grilled Barr about widely reported press accounts of the armed takeover of the Michigan state capitol.
At least two of the men arrested appeared at the rally.
— (@)
"He's damned by his own words," Cuomo declared.
"These people were investigating it at the same time. A sitting governor, over a dozen bad guys, months of planning, murderous intent, derivative of the main domestic terror threat we face," he explained. "And he's clueless? How? How is that okay?"
President Donald Trump announced plans to resume campaign rallies despite his COVID-19 infection.
"Watching the news coverage and angry at the state of the race, Mr. Trump has been imploring aides to let him resume campaign rallies as soon as this weekend, which now could be possible. He showed up again in the Oval Office on Thursday despite efforts to get him to remain in the residence until he was more fully recovered," The New York Timesreported Thursday. "Around the White House and inside the Trump campaign, some advisers are worried. Others are looking at the calendar and arguing that there is still a lot of time left while they realize there are few if any opportunities to change the trajectory of the race. That would be especially true without next week’s debate."
During a Thursday night appearance on Fox News, Trump refused to tell Sean Hannity if he has had a negative coronavirus test.
But Trump did announce he hopes to resume campaign rallies regardless of his infection status, saying he was hoping for a Saturday rally in Florida and a Sunday rally in Pennsylvania.
On Thursday, the Democratic challenger to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Jaime Harrison, threatened to withdraw from the upcoming Senate debate unless Graham takes a COVID-19 test — as Harrison and the debate moderators have already agreed to do.
Graham has refused, responding, "I will continue to follow the guidance of my doctors, not my political opponent."
— (@)
Graham's refusal triggered instant speculation that he may have an ulterior motive for refusing the test — as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, a positive test could further complicate the upcoming hearings for President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett.
RANGELEY, Maine — On a crisp, sunny day in late September, Susan Collins was on a campaign bus tour through Maine, the state she’s represented in the U.S. Senate since 1997.
Collins, up for reelectionin November, had started the day’s bus tour at a sawmill in nearby Dixfield — “I’ve never seen such a sophisticated, high-tech mill, it is truly extraordinary” — and she would end it in Farmington at Gifford’s Ice Cream Stand, the company that produces the ice cream Collins serves with Maine blueberry pie when she hosts the weekly Senate Republican lunch.
In between, she took a walking tour of the business district in Rangeley, a mountainous, nearly all-White town in the western region of the state where the average annual household income is just under $60,000 — slightly lessthan the national average — and the year-round population of roughly 1,200 swells to more than 10,000 in the summer when tourists arrive. Collins dined with supporters at Moose Alley, a bowling and arcade center, then walked Main Street with a town selectman, stopping at the local hardware store, restaurants and a coffee shop.
During this quintessential campaign swing, it was easy to conjure what the previous three reelection bids, won by double-digit margins, may have looked like for the last Republican representing New England in Congress. Cars slowed down and drivers beeped their horns, leaning out windows shouting: “We love you, Susan!” and “Alright, Susie!”
But it wasn’t one of Collins’ past reelection bids. As Collins walked the streets of Rangeley, polls showed her underwater, trailing by an average of 6.5 points. Democratic challenger Sara Gideon, the 48-year-old outgoing speaker of the Maine House of Representatives, had as of June 30 raised $24 million to Collins’ $17 million, according to the nonpartisan OpenSecrets, with much of it from out-of-state.
“Look at this way: if it were any other year we wouldn’t even know who Sara Gideon is. This would be a slam-dunk, 60-40, 70-30 vote for Susan Collins,” said Moose Alley owner Nancy Bessey, a Collins supporter. “We only know about [Gideon] because people outside the state have decided to make us know about her.”
Just two years ago, Collins, a Republican from this frontier state where the prevailing political ideology has long been nonconformity, seemed poised for a smooth reelection to her fifth term.
Look at this way: if it were any other year … This would be a slam-dunk, 60-40, 70-30 vote for Susan Collins.
Nancy Bessey, a Collins supporter
Born into the fifth-generation of a lumber family in Aroostook, Maine’s northernmost county on the U.S.-Canada border, Collins, 67, cut her political teeth as an aide to William Cohen, a Republican representative and senator who famously broke with his party by voting to impeach Richard Nixon. After succeeding her mentor to the Senate in 1996, Collins coasted to reelection in 2002, 2008 and 2014 by 16-, 23- and 37-point margins, winning each of the state’s 16 counties even when a Democratic presidential candidate carried the state. She was in the top tier of the most popular senators and considered by some to be the most bipartisan. In 22 years, she had never missed a single vote.
Then, in 2018, Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and everything changed for Collins, who ultimately voted to confirm him after weeks of national scrutiny.
“I don’t look at whether the person would be the individual whom I would appoint if I were president. That is not my test. I’m not a president; I’m a senator,” Collins said in a recent interview.
“I look at whether their political philosophy is within the mainstream, whether they’re qualified for the position and whether they have the experience for the position,” she added.
After the vote, Collins’ approval ratings went down and her unfavorables went up. Democrats saw her seat as an easy target to flip in 2020 to win Senate control. The race long ago became the most expensive in Maine’s history. Outside groups have spent more than $60 million supporting or opposing the two women. For months, Collins has trailed Gideon in polls, though one released on Tuesday showed Collins having narrowed the gap to one point.
Maine, a state of roughly 1.3 million that casts just four electoral votes and has largely been a nonfactor in presidential elections, has been thrust into the national spotlight like never before.
The narrative in the Maine Senate race — advanced since Gideonentered in June 2019 and echoed in media coverage — is that Collinsis no longer the independent lawmaker that she once was. But has she changed over her years in the Senate?
Liberals lauded Collins when she helped “save” Obamacare in 2017. But she opposed President Barack Obama’s signature health care law when it first passed Congress in 2009 and 2010, along with then Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe, a fellow Republican. Last week, she was one of six Republicans who joined Democrats in a largely symbolic effort to protect individuals with preexisting conditions should the Supreme Court rule against Obamacare in a case it is expected to hear next month.
Collins voted in 2017with her Republican colleagues to support a $1.5 trillion tax overhaul that delivered major savings to corporations and the wealthy, as well as eliminating the penalty for not complying with the Affordable Care Act’s “individual mandate.” But before voting, she asked for and received assurances from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that there would be votes on Obamacare market stabilization bills. The measures later stalled over partisan disagreement about abortion.
Last year, she voted against a Democratic amendment in a larger defense spending package that would block a U.S.-Mexico border wall’s construction, saying the amendment was too broadly written. Yet she’s also twiceintroduced measures to block Trump from diverting military funds to construct the wall, saying it was not about whether she supported or opposed the wall itself, but to prevent a presidential power grab. (Trump vetoed both.)
When the Senate began preparing for its impeachment trial early this year, Democrats saw Collins as a potential collaborator in their quest to call witnesses and review documents. She convened meetings with several like-minded Republicans to consider it. At the trial’s outset, she opposed the subpoena efforts, saying she wanted to stick to thesequence and process used during the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. By its end, she was one of two Republicans who voted to subpoena additional documents and witnesses, including Trump’s former national security adviser. The effort failed.
Collins ultimately voted to acquit Trump on both articles of impeachment. She reminded reporters that she broke with her party to do the same in 1999, when she was among only a handful of Republicans who voted to acquit Clinton on both impeachment counts that he faced. She told the New York Times earlier this year that she was “furious” with Clinton even as she voted to acquit him. Ahead of Trump’s acquittal, she lamented the president’s “poor judgement” and said she hoped he had learned a lesson.
Collins has earned a reputation as a moderate because she has at times been a critical swing vote. But the longtime senator is ideologically conservative, albeit with a more socially liberal bent than many of her colleagues. It is the conservativeness of her approach, more than anything, that dictates when she breaks withher party, and it is usually to uphold precedent or balance executive and congressional powers. She believes the system works, even in a time when that is up for debate.
“Her record, if anything, is almost a model of consistency, pretty much across the board,” said Mark Brewer, a professor of political science at the University of Maine.
As Collins was finishing up that late September campaign swing, news broke that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died. For many conservatives, the Supreme Court is a driving political force. For Collins, the court is what has troubled her current reelection bid.
When Trump nominated Kavanaugh, liberals believed he was skeptical of Obamacare and would not uphold Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion nationwide. So they zeroed in on Collins, who supports abortion rights and had cast a deciding 2017 vote to protect Obamacare, as a potential ally willing to cross the president. After all, Collins had in the months before the 2016 election said publicly that she would not vote for him.
The group Mainers for Accountable Leadership began soliciting pledges and promised to funnel millions of dollars to Collins’ eventual Democratic opponent if she did not vote no on Kavanaugh — a move she characterized as bribery. In the U.S. Capitol, reporters keen to decipher the nominee’s chances trailed Collins, along with Sens. Jeff Flake and Lisa Murkowski, who were also thought to be potential party defectors in the chamber where Republicans held a slim 51-to-49 majority.
Collins’ political predicament grew more precarious after sexual assault allegations surfaced against Kavanaugh once his confirmation was underway. The FBI got involved. Protesters staged sit-ins wearing the red cloaks of the “Handmaid’s Tale,” a dystopian novel and television series. In addition to an initial two-hour meeting, Collins interviewed Kavanaugh for another hour by phone.
On October 5, 2018, word began to circulate that Collins would appear on the Senate floor to announce her vote. In a 43-minute speech, Collins said Supreme Court confirmation processes had been in partisan decline for 30 years and with Kavanaugh’s it had hit “rock bottom.” She had always opposed “litmus tests” for nominees, she said, and had “never considered the president’s identity or party” when she voted to confirm all six justices collectively nominated during her Senate career by Presidents George Bush, Barack Obama and Trump. She believed Kavanaugh would uphold court precedent related to Roe, she said, along with the Affordable Care Act and same-sex marriage.
Collins said she found Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony alleging that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her “sincere, painful and compelling.” But, Collins continued, the witnesses who testified during the proceedings “could not corroborate any of the events.” It was not a criminal trial with a presumption of innocence until proven guilty, she said, but “fairness would dictate that the claims at least should meet a threshold of more-likely-than-not.” She did not think they did.
The next day, the Senate voted 50-to-48 to confirm Kavanaugh, with Sen. Joe Manchin being the only Democrat to vote in the affirmative. Murkowski voted “present,” and Republican Sen. Steve Daines missed the vote due to his daughter’s wedding. Collins and members of her staff received death threats. Former television journalist Dan Rather said she had sided with the “old bulls” over women. Collins said later that she was sad, given her fulsome explanation at the time, that the Kavanaugh decision might cost her votes. Her approval ratings have declined ever since.
Sen. Susan Collins, photographed after the confirmation vote of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, in 2018.
(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
“I normally would not be one to put too much stock in one vote, in terms of changing a politician’s focus, but you can trace a lot of this, for Collins, back to the Kavanaugh vote,” Brewer said. “It was unlike any other vote for her. I thought, initially, it would create this firestorm and then it would die down, but it hasn’t.”
Collins points out that in addition to Trump’s two Supreme Court nominees (Kavanaugh and Justice Neil Gorsuch) she likewise voted to confirm those nominated by Obama (Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor) and Bush (Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito). Her approach to lower-court nominees has been as consistent: Under four different presidents — two Democrats; two Republicans — she has voted to approve nearly every nominated federal judge, according to a 2020 analysis by the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram.
Even still, after Ginsburg’s death last month, Collins said she would not vote for a Trump Supreme Court nominee before the November election. The promise — made before Trump named appeals court Judge Amy Coney Barrett as his replacement — had nothing to do with whom the president might pick and everything to do with abiding by a precedent set during Obama’s presidency by McConnell, which the majority leader himself has abandoned.
Gideon nonetheless tried to keep focus on Collins’ judicial nominations record, airing an ad that accused Senate Republicans, Collins included, of “just rubber-stamping Trump’s judicial nominees.”
After a recent “Supper with Sara” near her home in Freeport, Gideon was more circumspect on the topic of just how much Collins has changed than some of her campaign ads. “There’s a degree to which perhaps she has changed. I also think that when Donald Trump is president and Mitch McConnell is majority leader it becomes much harder to sit on both sides of the issue, which is something that she loves to do,” Gideon said.
Both Collins and Gideon are running — if not as ideological moderates — as pragmatists, who say they want to put national partisan rancor aside in order to get things done for people in Maine. But the most-watched Senate campaign in Maine’s history, and among the most well-funded nationally, has not been without its own policy distortions, record misrepresentations and political acrimony.
Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon and Collins participate in the debate at the Holiday Inn By The Bay alongside fellow candidates on Friday, September 11, 2020.
(Staff photo by Brianna Soukup)
One Gideon ad suggests that the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), the coronavirus relief package that Collins played a key role in drafting and that she touts on the campaign trail, mostly benefits big donors and ignores small businesses. It was called a “misleading narrative” and given three (of four) “Pinocchios” by Washington Post fact checkers. Another from the campaign on Collins’ prescription drug record was described by fact checkers as “cherry picking” and presenting an “incomplete picture.” One from the outside group Maine Momentum, which is run by former staffers to Gideon and U.S. Democratic Rep. Chellie Pingree and does not have to disclose its donors, says Collins “voted for a tax bill that puts Medicare and Social Security in jeopardy.” That ad also received three Pinocchios.
The ad barrage turned more personal over the summer as both candidates ran spots about one another’s husbands. Collins pushed back against Gideon’s PPP ad by releasing one that highlighted how the law firm where Gideon’s husband works had received a $1 million to $2 million forgivable loan from the program. Gideon then ran one saying Collins is in a “perfect Washington marriage” with her lobbyist husband and that she has “pushed for policies that benefited his lobbyist business.” The Associated Press evaluated the ad’s claims as “unsupported” and said it offered “no proof.” The ad cited actions Collins took in 2011, before she was married. Her husband last registered as a lobbyist in 2006 and retired altogether in 2016.
Collins has waded into the muck in other ways. One recent ad from her campaign, which said that Gideon had “voted to defund” the police when she was on Freeport’s town council and direct the money to a nonprofit for which she was a board member, was rated as false. She has also implied that Gideon could do more to reconvene the legislature to deal with COVID-19; state Republicans have blocked Gideon’s effort.
Perhaps most striking in a state with one of the nation’s highest rates of registered female voters and women who cast ballots are the gendered attacks on Collins. The Lincoln Project ran an ad saying “Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump control her voice.” A mailer sent to voters this week, with no information about its funder, shows Collins in Trump’s embrace as he kisses the nape of her neck, saying she was “swept into the arms of a golden-haired hottie.” Collins has bristled at suggestions it is a man, and not she, who is responsible for her decisions.
Collins is trying to keep her focus local even as the country watches. Maine is the state with the oldest average population, and her Senate office has in recent weeks highlighted bipartisan efforts to improve access to osteoporosis testing and examine barriers women face to retirement security. Multiple times during her most recent debate, she brought up potato farming, an agricultural mainstay in the state’s northern region from which she hails. Collins is in line to be the top Republican on the appropriations panel — a fact that is brought up often by Maine’s pragmatic voters.
Her campaign released a new ad campaign this week highlighting a recent endorsement from Bill Green, a retired television personality familiar to nearly everyone in Maine. In one, he says: “Did you know that Susan Collins hates dogs? That’s kind of what I’m expecting to hear next from a ridiculous smear campaign.” Collins has a black Labrador Retriever.
Adding to the race’s uncertainty is the fact that in November, Maine will be the first state to use ranked-choice voting in a presidential election — a system that is untested but experts speculate could ultimately benefit Gideon over Collins.
After the ice cream stop in Farmington, Collins hypothesized about what had changed over the past two years, if anything, to make her race so competitive. It was clear she had given it some thought. She traced it back to before Trump’s presidency, and even before the 2011-2019 tenure of former Maine Gov. Paul LePage, a bombastic and divisive leader who liked to say he was “Donald Trump before Donald Trump.”
When she joined the Senate, Sen. John Chafee, a moderate Republican from Rhode Island, had counseled her to never campaign against a Senate colleague from either party, she said. That custom began to erode in 2004, when then Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist — a “good friend” of Collins’ — campaigned against then Democratic Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle.
Reporting and commentary have become “totally intermingled,” and “social media reinforces what people already think, rather than exposing them to alternative viewpoints,” she lamented. Then there is the “enormous amount of out-of-state money,” which has “taken a toll,” she said.
It has becomemore and more difficult to be a senator in the middle, whatever that might mean.
“It started with the growth of these groups on the far left and the far right who started to demand 100 percent adherence to 100 percent of their views 100 percent of the time. And if you didn’t? You were threatened with a primary or a massive amount of money being spent against you,” Collins said.
On Thursday, a federal judge demanded that the Department of Justice clarify whether recent tweets from President Donald Trump have formally declassified the entire Russia report from former special counsel Robert Mueller.
— (@)
Earlier in the week, the president tweeted multiple times that he has declassified "all Russia Hoax Scandal information" — raising questions about whether the redactions in the Mueller report are still in force.
Following the arrested of terrorists in Michigan who plotted to kidnap the state's Democratic governor, a state legislator explained keeping a bullet proof vest underneath her desk in the capitol.
MSNBC's Chris Hayes interviewed Democratic state Sen. Dayna Polehanki. On April 30th, Polehanki shared a photo on social media showing armed men taking over the state capitol. Two of the men in the photo were among those arrested.
— (@)
Polehanki noted there were again armed men at the capitol on Thursday.
"I had to be escorted to my office today by the sergeants at arms because there were guns at the capitol today," she explained.
"Every day when I enter the capitol floor, look into the gallery for armed men. I keep a bulletproof vest under my desk, and that's just how it is in my workplace," she explained. "It's unfortunate."
President Donald Trump is taking a far different approach than he did in the 2016 campaign after nominating Judge Amy Coney Barrett to fill the U.S. Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
"Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett heads into her confirmation hearings next week with a detailed record that has led many liberals and conservatives to believe she would support restricting, if not outright overturning, the landmark decision that guarantees a woman’s right to an abortion," Seung Min Kim wrote in a new Washington Postanalysis.
"But as her nomination fight unfurls in an increasingly heated election season, top Republicans — from President Trump to individual senators — appear to be playing down the impact Barrett’s confirmation would have on the fate of abortion rights in the United States," the newspaper noted. "In a pair of general-election debates, both Trump and Vice President Pence danced around the question of the law and abortion access — a stark contrast to then-candidate Trump’s explicit promise four years ago to nominate only justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision legalizing the procedure. And in the Senate, an upstart conservative Republican’s push to confirm justices who view Roe as wrongly decided is causing visible discomfort among his GOP colleagues who believe Supreme Court nominees should face no such litmus test in their confirmation process."
Barrett's nomination could impact the 2020 elections.
"Recent polling suggests that Americans oppose overturning the nearly 50-year-old decision by a wide margin, although by how much depends on the poll," the newspaper reported. "A Fox News poll released this week found that 61 percent of registered voters said the Supreme Court should let the ruling stand, while 28 percent said it should be overturned, roughly 2-to-1 opposition. A September national survey by the Marquette University Law School found that 56 percent of Americans opposed the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade while 32 percent supported it."
NOLA.com is reporting a lurid tale that resulted in the arrest of a local priest.
"The lights inside Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church in Pearl River were on later than usual on Sept. 30, so a passerby stopped to take a closer look," NOLA reported. "Peering inside, the onlooker allegedly saw the pastor of the small parish half-naked, having sex with two women on the altar, according to court documents. The women were dressed in corsets and high-heeled boots. There were sex toys and stage lighting. And a cell phone was mounted on a tripod, recording it all."
The witness reportedly began shooting their own video of the scene and called police.
"Officers then booked the Rev. Travis Clark, who has been pastor of Saints Peter and Paul since 2019, on obscenity charges," NOLA reported. "New details, however, have emerged in court filings that paint a lurid picture of a priest purportedly taping himself engaged in sexual role play while desecrating a sacred place within the church."
"Public records additionally show one of the women allegedly involved, 41-year-old Mindy Dixon, is an adult film actress who also works for hire as a dominatrix," NOLA reported. "A social media account associated with her published a post on Sept. 29 saying she was on her way to the New Orleans area to meet another dominatrix 'and defile a house of God.'"
On Thursday, White House physician Dr. Sean Conley released a statement saying that he anticipates President Donald Trump will be safe to resume attending public events by as early as Saturday.
"Saturday will be day 10 since Thursday's diagnosis," wrote Conley. "Based on the trajectory of advanced diagnostics the team has been conducting, I fully anticipate the President's safe return to public engagements at that time."
— (@)
Conley has headed up the president's treatment since he first tested positive for COVID-19 and was transported to Walter Reed Medical Center. He has drawn criticism for giving opaque answers on the president's health.
