Areeba Shah, Salon

Several new reports detailed the growing violence and intimidation against LGBTQ+ people, with white nationalists targeting Pride events and showing up to Drag Queen story hours at local libraries, shouting homophobic and transphobic slurs.

The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) released a report last year, which found that there was a nationwide surge of at least 174 anti-LGBTQ+ demonstrations.

Online and offline these attacks have taken different forms, but all with the same purpose – to demonize the LGBTQ+ community.

The core narratives driving these attacks against the LGBTQ+ community include disinformation about gender-affirming care for LGBTQ+ youth, false allegations of "grooming" children and the indoctrination of a "so-called LGBTQ+ agenda" in schools, said Sarah Moore, an Anti-LGBTQ+ Extremism Analyst at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in partnership with Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD).

"This grooming story in particular really picked up in traction in 2021 with the passage of the 'Don't Say Gay' bill in Florida, in which different folks started using the term 'grooming' and misappropriating it by making it into something that is demonizing the LGBTQ+ community as a whole," Moore said.

Republican-controlled state houses across the country have introduced a record 315 discriminatory anti-LGBTQ+ bills with a majority of these bills targeting the transgender and non-binary communities.

Last month, the Arkansas Senate advanced Senate Bill 43, an anti-LGBTQ+ bill that restricts drag performances. If passed, it would classify them as "adult-oriented businesses," where anyone under 18 could not watch.

Banning LGBTQ+ events and spaces – including labeling drag performances as predatory – is part of a large-scale attack on the LGBTQ+ community, which has significantly grown after receiving support from right-wing media outlets and personalities.

Social media accounts with high followings have played a major role in spreading dangerous and false narratives that further marginalize the LGBTQ+ community.

Libs of TikTok, for example, use its influence to push out baseless tropes and conspiracy theories online, which gain even more traction after being picked up by far-right media personalities.

"They're intentionally spreading news to audiences that they know are likely to act upon those narratives," Moore said. "Libs of TikTok is spreading these false allegations of grooming, that same rhetoric [is] being picked up on the ground by folks that are [for example threatening] to let's say bomb Boston Children's Hospital or folks that are protesting at drag shows. They're using the same language and capitalizing upon the same claims that are being made by a number of these influencers."

ADL found that a number of drag events targeted by threats and protests in person were first targeted by right-wing media outlets like Fox News and the Daily Wire, and social media accounts like LibsOfTikTok.

Narratives promoted by LibsOfTikTok have been picked up by right-wing media figures and politicians, including Tucker Carlson, Glenn Greenwald, Ron DeSantis and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Carlson has dedicated Fox News segments to attacking the LGBTQ+ community and even invited an anti-trans author Abigail Shrier to spread misinformation about medical care for transgender people on his show.

Despite having "very little idea of what it means, medically," to be trans, as Carlson noted on the segment, he continued to let Shrier make sensational claims attacking best practice care for trans kids.

Shrier, who doesn't have a medical degree, "equated being trans to having anorexia, engaging in self-harm, being involved with witchcraft and 'demonic possession'" in her book, according to Media Matters.

But despite a lack of expertise on the topic, individuals like Shrier drive views and engagement.

Right-wing content about trans kids' health care often receives high engagement according to a Media Matters study of Facebook, which found that content about trans issues from right-leaning sources "earned nearly two times the engagement of all other sources combined" on Facebook.

"Once folks realize that this was something that they could sensationalize and get a lot of traction out of, that's when we started seeing groups picking up on this extremist narrative and turning their attention from previous causes like fighting against mask mandates or COVID vaccines or even the anti-CRT movement and turning that action and that call to action into something that is now anti-LGBTQ+," Moore said.

Media Matters found that Fox hosts spent more time attacking trans people and drag queens than they did covering the second January 6 hearing.

Groups like Gays Against Groomers have even profited off of spreading dangerous narratives attacking the LGBTQ+ community by selling merchandise including phrases like "ok groomer," "protect children" and "protect kids from transitioning."

In the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, far-right extremist groups have juggled through different cultural and racial issues, trying to "find purchase" among the wider right and trying to regain momentum, said Sam Jones, head of communications at ACLED.

In 2021, many of these groups started focusing on Critical Race Theory and abortion as issues, but they didn't have the "same staying power" as opposition to LGBTQ+ equality did, Jones added.

"[It] was a natural candidate in many respects, as it fit easily into the false 'child protection' narrative strategy that was already employed around CRT and abortion, for example, and allowed them to repackage longstanding tropes and prejudices for a modern right-wing audience," he added.

ACLED found that anti-LGBTQ+ mobilization — including demonstrations, political violence, and offline propaganda activity — rose to its highest levels since they first started collecting data for the United States in 2020.

Nearly 200 anti-LGBTQ+ incidents were reported in 2022, marking an increase of three times compared to 2021 and 12 times compared to 2020.

Since the attack on the Capitol and through the November 2022 midterm elections, far-right mobilization has only continued to evolve in the United States, according to ACLED.

Despite far-right candidates losing in the midterms, anti-LGBTQ+ organizing succeeded "in mobilizing far-right extremists and bringing them together with other like-minded groups and individuals in the wider activist right," Jones said.

A mixture of different extremist groups have come together coalescing around the messaging of anti-LGBTQ+ tropes and narratives, including the Aryan Freedom Network and the Nationalist Socialist Club, but the Proud Boys has been the most active in anti-LGBTQ+ efforts – attending a third of all of the protests.

Outside of the extremist groups, a number of attendees also tend to be individuals who are not aligned with these organizations, she added. This can be dangerous, Moore pointed out, since the language that is being used by extremist groups "is designed to get an audience angry and drive them into action".

Some of these people include individuals who are part of Christian organizations or QAnon or local white nationalist groups.

"These kinds of events are targets for these large organized groups, both in the sense of the literal sense that they are targeting a perceived enemy politically, but it's also a target for them in the sense that they can typically find people… who are like-minded or trying to get into this kind of activism, and they can take and bring them into their coalition," Jones said.

ACLED also found that demonstrations involving far-right militias and militant social movements are five times more likely to turn violent or destructive than demonstrations where they are not present. That risk factor grows even more for particularly violent actors like the Proud Boys, especially if participants are armed.

Once we get closer to the 2024 presidential election, "Trump's candidacy could further reinvigorate certain sectors of the far right during the campaign season and election period," Jones said.

Last year, ACLED recorded over 100 pro-Trump demonstrations around the country, and about a quarter of these involved far-right militias and violent groups like the Proud Boys.

"The remaining pro-Trump demonstrations were predominantly made up of individuals with no clear affiliation to organized far-right actors," Jones said, "which presents an opportunity for more extreme groups seeking to recruit and expand their networks at these types of events."

Former President Donald Trump accused Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis of engaging in "grooming" behavior in his latest attack against his top rival for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

The former president on Truth Social Tuesday reposted a post accusing DeSantis of drinking alcohol with minors when he was a high school teacher.

"That's not Ron, is it? He would never do such a thing!" Trump wrote sarcastically.

The picture shows a 23-year-old DeSantis standing and smiling between three women with blurred-out faces.

One of the women in the photos is holding a brown glass bottle but DeSantis isn't pictured drinking. The caption on the post reads, "Here is Ron DeSantimonious grooming high school girls with alcohol as a teacher," followed by the vomit emoji.

The original message Trump reshared was from a user named Dong-Chan Lee, whose account describes him as a "paleoconservative" and Trump supporter.

In another repost, Trump added more sarcastic commentary, writing "No way?" while Dong-Chan Lee's caption read "Ron DeSantis was having a 'drink' party with his students when he was a high school teacher. Having drinks with underage girls and cuddling with them certainly look [sic] pretty gross and ephebophiliaesque."

The first time this photo of DeSantis appeared online was last year after Hill Reporter – a Democratic super PAC blog – posted it.

The photo was taken after the 2001-02 academic year that DeSantis spent as a teacher at the elite Darlington School before attending Harvard Law School, according to The New York Times.

Darlington is a boarding school located in Rome, Georgia, where DeSantis coached baseball and football and taught history and government, the Times reported.

Several students recalled DeSantis going to parties with the seniors, the New York Times reported, citing anonymous sources. Two students recalled DeSantis attending at least two parties where alcohol was served after graduation.

The students reported not being bothered by his attendance but now question it, the report said.

Some of his former students also described him as a "total jock" who partied with students and thought it was "very special" that he graduated from Yale.

Two other students remembered a prank that involved DeSantis challenging a student, who had bragged about how much milk he could drink, to guzzle as much milk as he could in one sitting. The student did and ended up throwing up while dozens of other students watched.

"I think about it, now — I'm a teacher now in public school," Adam Moody, who witnessed the incident told the Times. "I put myself in that moment, and it's just unthinkable. There's a cruelty to the sense of humor. There's a cruelty to the mentorship."

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Trump's "grooming" accusation against DeSantis suggested hypocrisy on the part of the Florida governor, whose staff has accused LGBTQ people as well as those who oppose his "Don't Say Gay" bill of "grooming."

Ahead of the gubernatorial election, Trump nicknamed DeSantis "DeSanctimonious," and said it was "disloyal" for the governor to leave open the question of running for president given that Trump's 2018 gubernatorial endorsement helped him win his first election.

But Trump's attack drew backlash from some of his longtime supporters, many of whom are looking to back DeSantis in 2024.

"Trump is falsely accusing DeSantis of pedophilia," tweeted right-wing commentator Ian Miles Cheong. "It is only fair to point out the fact that he traveled on Epstein's Lolita Express seven times. It is also fair to point out that Trump lied about the number of times he traveled on that plane."

DeSantis, who has yet to announce whether he is running for president, has largely ignored Trump's attacks but hit back after the latest jab.

"I'd just say this: I spend my time delivering results for the people of Florida and fighting against Joe Biden," he told reporters. "I don't spend my time trying to smear other Republicans."

Mark Pomerantz, a former senior prosecutor on the Manhattan district attorney's team investigating former President Donald Trump and his organization's business dealings, said there are "many bits and pieces of evidence" the district attorney could use to bring criminal charges against the former president.

Pomerantz made the comments in a "60 Minutes" interview promoting a new book about his time investigating Trump, in which he compares him to John Gotti, the head of the Gambino organized crime family, also known as the "Teflon Don" who died in prison in 2002.

"If you take the exact same conduct — and make it not about Donald Trump and not about a former president of the United States, would the case have been indicted? It would have been indicted in a flat second," Pomerantz told CBS News' Bill Whitaker.

New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a civil lawsuit against Trump, the Trump Organization and his three eldest children, alleging they engaged in a decade-long fraud scheme by using false financial statements related to the company's business to obtain favorable loan and insurance rates and tax breaks.

The allegations come nearly a year after Pomerantz resigned from the DA's office. The release of his new book has prompted pushback from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

Bragg's office asked to review the book before its publication to ensure it wouldn't reveal information obtained from a grand jury, CNN reported.

"After closely reviewing all the evidence from Mr. Pomerantz's investigation, I came to the same conclusion as several senior prosecutors involved in the case, and also those I brought on: more work was needed," Bragg said in a statement to CNN. "Put another way, Mr. Pomerantz's plane wasn't ready for takeoff."

In January, a New York judge fined the Trump Organization $1.6 million for running a years-long tax fraud scheme. The Trump Corp. and Trump Payroll Corp. were convicted last year of 17 felonies, including tax fraud and falsifying business records. Trump himself was never charged or convicted.

Trump responded to the release of Pomerantz's book with a lengthy rant on Truth Social.

"Wow, the book just put out by Crooked Hillary Clinton's attorney, Mark Pomerantz, is turning out to be a hit on the District Attorney and the 'weak' case 'with many fatal flaws,'" he posted Friday night. "Prosecutors in the D.A.'s Office actually quit in protest in that they thought it was 'irresponsible' and very 'unfair' to 'President Trump.' They also felt they didn't want to rely on a SleazeBag disbarred Lawyer From Hell like Michael Cohen as a witness. IN OTHER WORDS, THEY THOUGHT THE CASE WAS TERRIBLE - A LOSER!"

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Trump's lawyer also sent a letter to Pomerantz threatening legal action against the former prosecutor if he releases the book.

The lawyer, Joe Tacopina, said in a statement to CNN that Pomerantz's "desperate attempt to sell books will cost him everything. Not to mention, it is clear that he was very much in the minority in his position that President Trump committed a crime."

After the 60 Minutes interview aired, Trump returned to Truth Social, continuing to attack Pomerantz.

"Pomerantz & his law firm were Clinton's lawyers who then went to work for the D.A. to 'get Trump,' that Pomerantz & his antics make it impossible for me to be treated fairly, & NOBODY WAS HURT!" Trump said.

Pomerantz's book, "The People vs Donald Trump: An Inside Account," will be published on Tuesday. It lays out the complicated investigation into Trump and those close to him who were charged with crimes, according to an advance copy obtained by The New York Times.

"Pomerantz got himself a book deal, and is obsessively spreading falsehoods about me," Trump wrote on Sunday. "With all of this vicious disinformation being revealed by a 'prosecutor,' how can I ever be treated fairly in New York, or anywhere else? End the Witch Hunts!"

The state House elections committee last week voted to pass House Bill 2308 – a bill that would bar any future secretary of state from overseeing and confirming the results of an election if they are a candidate. The bill comes after then-Secretary of State Katie Hobbs won the gubernatorial election in November.

"There's a lack of confidence from some of my constituents in the election itself," Republican state Rep. Rachel Jones of Tucson, who presented the bill, said during the committee meeting. "I think the optics of that – of a secretary of state running their own election for governor and then certifying that election was a major concern."

State Rep. Melody Hernandez, a Tempe Democrat, questioned why the bill was being presented now but wasn't a concern when GOP Secretaries of State Ken Bennett and Michele Reagan were on the ballot in 2014 and 2018.

Jones countered that the environment changed after the 2020 election and claimed that "there's a lack of confidence in our election process" now, which brought the issue to the forefront.

When state Rep. Oscar De Los Santos, a Democrat from Laveen, asked her if she had "any concrete evidence that there were any misdeeds from the secretary of state in the 2022 election," Jones responded saying "It was more just the optics."

"It was instilling a lack of confidence in the results of the election," she added.

While there has been no evidence of corruption in the election process, Arizona Republicans have continued to sponsor bills they claim will instill faith in the election system for voters. Citing a survey from Rasmussen Reports, which has a history of Republican-leaning polling, Jones shared that 71% of U.S. voters stated they believed the midterms were "botched" during the committee meeting.

But voting rights organizations raised concerns that advancing such bills can create more uncertainty around the election system and even increase threats against election administrators.

"These are the same people who brought you the 'fraudit' following the 2020 election," a Democratic source who asked to remain anonymous told Salon. "So, it just continues to be more bad-faith conspiracy theories and, frankly, I think voters are tired of it. This has been going on now for two years. And because of it, we've seen so much of violent rhetoric, resulting in threats to the safety of secretaries of state and election administrators up and down the ballot."

The Maricopa County elections office recorded nearly 140 threatening and hostile communications against election workers between July and August of last year, according to Reuters.

Many of these threats stemmed from conspiracy theories related to the 2020 presidential election that were promoted by former President Donald Trump and his allies.

The threats asserted false claims of fake ballots, fixed voting machines and corruption among election officials in the county during the 2020 election.

The same efforts that were used to sow doubt about the election system after the 2020 election are being repeated now, said Hannah Fried, executive director of All Voting is Local and All Voting is Local Action.

"Despite the fact that our elections were overwhelmingly proven to be secure, reliable, trustworthy, there are still going to be efforts to drive mis- [and] disinformation from 2022, and use that as a pretextual basis for passing new laws, and that is exactly what we are seeing in Arizona," Fried added.

The Arizona legislature also passed three other bills, two of which the committee split along party lines.

House Bill 2319 would tell judges to "aggressively" favor an election-law interpretation that provides greater transparency and HB 2322 would put observers appointed by each party in charge of voter signature verification.

Observers would have the ability to challenge the decisions of election workers at polling places, voting centers and other counting facilities.

"Signature verification processes, often, the way they're carried out can be to the detriment of older voters," Fried said. "For example, people whose signatures have changed, you really want to be mindful of any kind of change because it can have a really direct impact on people's right to vote."

Beyond Arizona, other states are also enacting similar efforts to "chip away" at the opportunities that have helped more people access voting, she added.

If these efforts continue to advance in other states, it will allow legislators to strip power from people they didn't agree with, which defeats the purpose of having separate branches of government, a Democratic source told Salon.

"This is a hyper-partisan attack based on the fact that they don't like election results," said Kim Rogers, the executive director of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State. "And I think that Arizona, frankly, has one of the strictest voter fraud guidelines already in the country."

Republicans have pushed out unproven claims of voter fraud when it comes to in-person early voting and voting by mail. Many candidates even made the centerpiece of their campaigns promising to ban some of these efforts.

Republican Arizona gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake said she would support slashing early and mail-in voting citing unsubstantiated or disproven claims of widespread voter fraud. When she lost to her Democratic opponent Katie Hobbs by just over 17,000 votes in the midterm election, Lake refused to concede and instead filed a lawsuit against Hobbs and Maricopa County election officials claiming election fraud.

While her suit was dismissed in court last month, her efforts to sow doubt in the integrity of the election system have continued.

Lake came under fire recently for posting photos of voters' signatures on Twitter. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes asked Attorney General Kris Mayes to investigate her for potentially violating a state law that prohibits "records containing a voter's signature" from being used by another person who isn't the voter.

Even after election workers in Maricopa County were forced into hiding after receiving threats related to the 2022 midterms, Lake has continued to peddle conspiracy theories.

Now, the Republican-controlled Arizona legislature is passing bills fueled by such election conspiracy theories, which Fried pointed out has been a concerted effort to undermine election integrity for the last couple of years.

"There are points of connectivity between all of this," she added. "It's not happening by accident… people who are trying to break our systems are getting smarter about it, and the really kind of over-the-top stuff that we sometimes see getting replaced with things that look reasonable on the surface are not reasonable."

More than a dozen donors who contributed significant amounts of money to George Santos' 2020 congressional campaign do not appear to exist, an investigation by Mother Jones found.

Santos' campaign reported that Victoria and Jonathan Regor had each contributed $2,800 to his first bid for a House seat, but after searching through various databases, Mother Jones found that no one in the United States with such names exist.

The apparent donors listed their address as 45 New Mexico Street in Jackson Township, New Jersey, but even that was questionable since the numbers on New Mexico Street in Jackson end in the 20s.

Another donor by the name of Stephen Berger, who was included in Santos' 2020 campaign finance reports, contributed $2,500 – the maximum amount.

He was listed as a retiree living on Brandt Road in Brawley, California, but a spokesperson for William Brandt told Mother Jones that Brandt has lived at that address for at least 20 years and "neither he or his wife have made any donations to George Santos. He does not know Stephen Berger nor has Stephen Berger ever lived at…Brandt Road."

The contributions are among more than a dozen major donations to the 2020 Santos campaign for which the name or the address of the donor cannot be confirmed.

Separately, the documents identify that a $2,800 campaign donation was attributed to a friend of Santos, but the person denied making the donation to Mother Jones.

These contributions account for more than $30,000 of the $338,000 the Santos campaign raised from individual donors in 2020, according to Mother Jones.

Under federal campaign finance law, it is illegal to donate money using a false name or the name of someone else.

The newly-elected GOP lawmaker, who has faced repeated calls to resign from Congress for fabricating his resume and lying about his background, received more criticism after the Mother Jones report was released.

"Somehow, George Santos's campaign finance scandal just got a lot worse," the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said on Twitter, questioning whether Santos' donors "even exist."

"If the Santos' campaign fabricated donors, I would expect federal indictments soon," Democratic voting rights attorney Marc Elias tweeted. "That would be a serious crime and an easy one to prove and prosecute."

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"This is a lot of crime," tweeted attorney Max Kennerly, "just piles and piles of crime, all blessed by House Republicans."

Santos has remained under scrutiny after a New York Times investigation revealed that the congressman is not the man he portrayed himself to be in front of voters. From lying about his heritage and falsely claiming to be Jewish to telling stories about his mother being in the World Trade Center during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Santos keeps making headlines for fabricating his background.

Even as Republicans have called for Santos to resign, the Republican congressman has defended himself and denied most of the allegations being made against him.

"From interviewing clowns to creating fake 'posts' the media continues to down spiral as their attempt to smear me fails," he said on Twitter. "I am getting the job I signed up for done, while you all spiral out of control."

Republicans are speculating whether Rep. Vern Buchanan, R-Fla., might retire from Congress and shrink Speaker Kevin McCarthy's, R-Calif., narrow margins after losing the Ways and Means chairmanship, Puck's Tara Palmeri reported.

Buchanan was reportedly angry at McCarthy and accused him of sabotaging his candidacy for the committee chairmanship after he was passed over as the most senior person on the committee by Rep. Jason Smith, R-Mo., a member who was fifth in line.

While votes for chairman were being counted, Buchanan walked over to McCarthy and said, "You fucked me, I know it was you, you whipped against me," according to Puck News.

A source told Palmeri that Buchanan's outburst "was so heated that the Speaker's security detail stepped in with a light touch." Palmeri added that a spokesperson for McCarthy denied this.

Other Republicans also received their committee assignments for the new Congress, including Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., who were placed on the House Oversight Committee. Greene was also assigned to the House Homeland Security Committee while Gosar was placed on the House Committee on Natural Resources, where he previously served before being booted by Democrats.

The White House condemned both of these additions to the Oversight Committee, Axios reported.

"[I]t appears that House Republicans may be setting the stage for divorced-from-reality political stunts, instead of engaging in bipartisan work on behalf of the American people," White House spokesperson for oversight Ian Sams said in a statement to Axios.

Greene and Gosar had both lost committee spots in the last Congress as Democratic retaliation for incendiary remarks, but McCarthy vowed to put them back on committees and pledged to kick some House Democrats off of theirs.

Other GOP hardliners like Reps. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., and Scott Perry, R-Penn., were also added to the House Oversight Committee, according to Republican sources, CNN reported.

Freshman Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., who is facing legal issues and mounting calls to resign for repeatedly lying about his background, was also awarded seats on two low-level committees.

The House Republican Steering Committee, controlled by McCarthy and his top allies, asked Santos to serve on two House panels: the Committee on Small Business and the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, CNN reported.

The New York Republican had privately lobbied GOP leaders to serve on two more high-profile committees, one overseeing the financial sector and another on foreign policy, but top Republicans rejected that pitch.

Santos fabricating parts of his résumé has remained the subject of controversy, but McCarthy has said that it should be left up to voters in his district to decide his fate and not lawmakers.

Other top Republicans have echoed similar opinions.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., said on Tuesday that Santos has been "answering some very serious questions" and now he has "to focus on the things that he promised he would do."

Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., who sits on the Steering Committee, defended the plan to install Santos on committees.

"In this country you're innocent until proven guilty," Donalds said. "There have been members who issues have come up (for) in the past. They were allowed to be on their committees, be sat on committees. And then the legal process takes hold and we make adjustments. So that's probably what's going to happen."

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., criticized former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard — now a Fox News host —for giving embattled GOP Rep.-elect George Santos "zero grace" in a recent interview during which Gabbard questioned Santos' integrity over extensive fabrications on his résumé.

Gabbard was filling in for Tucker Carlson on his Fox News primetime show when she interviewed Santos after he admitted to falsifying multiple aspects of his biography, including his educational and professional background and his alleged Jewish ancestry.

"If I were one of those in New York's 3rd District right now, now that the election is over, and I'm finding out all of these lies that you've told, not just one little lie or one little embellishment — these are blatant lies — my question is, do you have no shame?" Gabbard asked Santos Tuesday evening. "Do you have no shame? And the people ... you're asking to trust you to go and be their voice for them, their families and their kids in Washington?"

Santos, who emerged after days of silence following a major investigative report in the New York Times and several subsequent articles highlighting multiple discrepancies in his biography, deflected the question and instead pointed to Democrats.

"Tulsi, I can say the same thing about the Democrats," Santos responded. "Look at Joe Biden. Joe Biden has been lying to the American people for 40 years. He's the president of the United States. Democrats resoundingly support him. Do they have no shame?"

Greene posted the interview clip on her Twitter Tuesday night along with a thread attacking Gabbard's legislative history and called for Republicans to give Santos another chance.

"I do appreciate that Tulsi says words that sound conservative now even though she can't take action to back them up," Greene said. "I am glad she, like George, realized she made mistakes and was wrong every time she voted to support killing the unborn, taking away our gun rights, and legislated to kill America's energy independence and the fossil fuel industry."

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During the interview, Gabbard also questioned Santos about representing himself as an "American Jew" and saying that he had "been to Israel numerous times for educational, business and leisurely trips."

To which Santos responded: "My heritage is Jewish. I've always identified as Jewish. I was raised as a practicing Catholic," Santos said. "Not being raised a practicing Jew, I've always joked with friends and circles, even within the campaign, I'd say, guys, I'm 'Jew-ish.' Remember, I was raised Catholic."

In a previous campaign video, Santos had said that his "grandparents survived the Holocaust" and included on his campaign website that his "grandparents fled Jewish persecution in Ukraine, settled in Belgium, and again fled persecution during WWII." But after several reports cast doubt on his story and more reporting revealed that his family shows no evidence of Jewish ancestry and no plausible connections to the Holocaust in Europe, Santos has awkwardly backed away from those claims without exactly admitting they were false.

"So, look, I understand everybody wants to nitpick at me," The New York Republican said. "I'm gonna reassure this once and for all. I'm not a facade. I'm not a persona. I have an extensive career that I worked really hard to achieve. And I'm going to deliver from my experience because I remain committed in delivering results for the American people."

But Gabbard continued the interview in a similar vein, emphasizing that "a lie is not an embellishment on a résumé," and suggesting that Santos' false claims about his educational and professional background call his integrity into question.

"Congressman-elect Santos, we've given you a lot of time. I think the time that is owed is to the people of New York's 3rd. It's hard to imagine how they could possibly trust your explanations when you're not really even willing to admit the depth of your deception to them," Gabbard said.

While multiple Democrats have called for Santos to resign over his résumé fictions, Greene continued to defend him in her Twitter thread, convincing her Republican colleagues to give Santos a second chance.

"I hope Tulsi is sincere, just like I hope George is sincere. I think we Republicans should give George Santos a chance and see how he legislates and votes, not treat him the same as the left is."

This is not to say that liberals or progressives are incapable of embracing ludicrous theories. Both sides do it! But let's be honest: Republicans have a particular gift for this stuff, which has reached new heights of late with baseless claims that the "deep state" used ballot drop boxes to rig the 2020 election or that electronic voting machines were somehow programmed — by the Chinese government? the Italian military? an incomprehensible cabal linked to the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez? — to defeat Republicans.

These theories have either been debunked entirely or fall into the unfalsifiable category of speculative fiction. But to honor conservatives' unique achievements in this field, Salon created a roundup of the most unhinged Republican conspiracy theories of 2022:

Voting as late as possible on Election Day will "stop the steal"

In the lead-up to the 2022 midterms, a close ally of Republican Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano sought to convince voters to cast their ballots "as late in the day as possible" on Election Day in order to "overwhelm the system" and "stop the steal of 2022".

Conspiracy theorist and QAnon supporter Toni Shuppe claimed this strategy would prevent hackers from altering voting-machine totals and avoid voter fraud.

This brilliant plan wasn't just confined to Pennsylvania. The local Republican Party and allied groups in El Paso County, Colorado, proposed similar plans, with the GOP county clerk saying that people were discussing voting as late in the day as possible to "overwhelm the system" and "expose the algorithm."

Apparently the idea here is that lots of Republican votes late in Election Day would derail Democrats' plans to commit fraud, since they wouldn't be sure how many ballots they would need to win elections.

Voting as late in the day as possible, claimed the Republican clerk of a Colorado county, would "overwhelm the system" and "expose the algorithm" used by nefarious Democrats.

An aide to Michael Peroutka, the Republican candidate for Maryland state attorney general, made the same suggestion, encouraging voters at a rally to arrive at the polls in the last two hours before they close. "Vote on Nov. 8 as late in the day as possible," Peroutka's campaign coordinator said. "If everyone could stand in long, long lines at 6 o'clock, that would actually help us."

The messaging was further amplified and widely circulated on right-wing social networks like Gab and Truth Social. "VOTE IN PERSON on NOVEMBER 8th! VOTE AS LATE IN THE DAY AS YOU CAN! This helps make it harder for the DEMOCRATS to cheat and create fake ballots," a user with almost 6 million followers wrote on Oct. 22.

Republicans also recycled their claims from 2020 that mail-in voting was somehow manipulated to create widespread fraud. ballots. It's worth noting that Mastriano and Peroutka, like most other Republicans who spread election falsehoods, lost their races, leading at least some Republicans to conclude that this entire strategy may have been flawed.

The "great replacement" makes it to the mainstream

The "great replacement" theory, which claims that liberal elites are deliberately driving high levels of immigration in order to "replace" white Americans — or even to kill them off — was once confined to the far-right white nationalist fringe. But at this point it has been almost completely normalized within the Republican Party. Fox News' Tucker Carlson had mentioned replacement theories more than 400 times on the air before the deadly mass shooting that killed 10 Black people in a Buffalo supermarket last May. It later became clear that the shooter, a young white man, believed in this hateful fiction and had driven for several hours to stage a violent assault in a predominantly Black neighborhood.

Different versions of the theory have been used by white supremacists to justify racial hatred and violence for decades, but only recently have major media commentators like Carlson and elected Republicans adopted it at scale.

In an interview with Fox News host Larry Kudlow, for instance, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., criticized the Biden administration's stance on immigration. "This administration wants complete open borders," Johnson said. "And you have to ask yourself why? Is it really they want to remake the demographics of America to [ensure] that they stay in power forever?"

Another apparent believer, Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., falsely claimed that Democrats want to grant amnesty and a path to citizenship to "8 million illegal aliens."

"Yes, there is definitely a replacement theory that's going on right now," Boebert added. "We are killing American jobs and bringing in illegal aliens from all over the world to replace them if Americans will not comply with the tyrannical orders that are coming down from the White House."

During a House Foreign Affairs Committee meeting on the root causes of migration from Central American countries, Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa. — who was also an enthusiastic supporter of Donald Trump's 2021 coup attempt — said that many Americans fear that "national-born American[s]" are being replaced in an effort "to permanently transform the political landscape of this very nation."

Several U.S. Senate candidates in 2022 also endorsed the conspiracy theory to varying degrees, in an apparent effort to align themselves with the most zealous Republican voters. Republican J.D. Vance, who won the Ohio Senate race, released a campaign ad entitled "Are you a racist," in which he claimed the media had censored Republicans and called them racists for "wanting to build Trump's wall."

"Joe Biden's open border is killing Ohioans with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country," Vance added. (In fact, newly arrived immigrants cannot vote, and there is currently no pathway to citizenship for most undocumented immigrants or asylum seekers.)

Another Senate candidate Eric Greitens of Missouri, claimed that Biden was "wiping out the distinction between citizens and non-citizens, and he's doing it on purpose."

Despite Republicans' disappointing results in the midterms, there are no indications the party intends to back away from this rhetoric.

Adults who support equal rights and access to care for LGBTQ youth are "groomers"

This ugly combination of homophobic slur, sex panic and psychological projection might have been the biggest hit of the GOP's conspiracy-theory year. Fox News host Laura Ingraham claimed on her show, for example that public schools that accept or embrace gay, lesbian, bisexual, nonbinary and trans youth have become "grooming centers" where "sexual brainwashing" takes place.

Many Republicans have espoused similar claims, suggesting that support for LGBTQ youth amounts to "grooming" them for sexual activity, and some have explicitly made charges of pedophilia.

When Florida Republicans were pushing legislation to ban discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in classrooms, Gov. Ron DeSantis' press secretary, Christina Pushaw, defended Florida's "Don't Say Gay" bill by accusing opponents of preying on children.

"The bill that liberals inaccurately call 'Don't Say Gay' would be more accurately described as an Anti-Grooming Bill," Pushaw wrote on Twitter. "If you're against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don't denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children. Silence is complicity. This is how it works, Democrats, and I didn't make the rules."

On the day DeSantis signed the bill into law, the Walt Disney Company, one of Florida's largest employers, released a statement saying the bill "should never have been signed into law" and that Disney's "goal as a company" was to see for the law "repealed by the legislature or struck down in the courts."

Disney then became the target of "grooming" accusations, with far-right Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers tweeting that "Disney should now be known as the grooming company." Rogers continued to attack those who support LGBTQ youth as "groomers" while campaigning for Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin, who mounted a far-right Republican primary campaign for governor (and lost).

In an interview that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia posted on Twitter, she referred to Democrats as "the party of pedophiles" and blamed them for all the "horrible things" happening in the country.

"The Democrats are the party of princess predators from Disney," she added. "The Democrats are the party of elementary school teachers, trying to transition their elementary-school aged children and convince them they're a different gender. This is the party of their identity, and their identity is the most disgusting, evil, horrible things happening in our country."

Marjorie Taylor Greene, of course, pushed the "groomer" smear all the way to calling Democrats "the party of pedophiles" and "the party of princess predators."

Several Republican candidates have also promoted closely related anti-LGBTQ conspiracy theories that feed on anxiety around trans youth in particular. Michigan secretary of state candidate Kristina Karamo falsely suggested that sexual abuse stems from the LGBTQ community and said in a podcast episodes that the "political LQBT movement" will "indoctrine [sic] society with sexual perversion" and that as a result, "pedophilia is going to be normalized." (She lost.)

Michigan gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon repeatedly claimed that "grooming" was taking place in schools and attorney general candidate Matthew DePerno actually called his Democratic opponent, Attorney General Dana Nessel, "Michigan's Groomer General," amplifying false beliefs associated with QAnon. (Dixon and DePerno lost too.)

The attack on Paul Pelosi was fake

After the brutal home-invasion attack in which Paul Pelosi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was seriously injured, right-wing outlets began circulating groundless claims — many rooted in salacious homophobic rumors — casting doubt on what had happened.

Some Republican officials went on to suggest that the man who broke into the Pelosis' San Francisco home and attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer was in fact Pelosi's secret lover, even though the man's social media revealed that he was obsessed with right-wing conspiracy theories. The assailant was later charged with attempted murder and attempted kidnapping of a U.S. official.

Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., circulated a photograph on Twitter that showed a group of young white men holding oversized hammers beside a gay Pride flag, with the comment "LOL," according to the New York Times.

These conspiracy theories spiraled out of control after a local TV news reporter tweeted that the attacker was clad only in his underwear at the time of his arrest. The reporter later deleted the tweet after police said it was untrue.

Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana tweeted a photo of Nancy Pelosi looking distressed and called her husband's attacker "the nudist hippie male prostitute LSD guy."

Republicans seemed especially unwilling to acknowledge that the attacker was inspired by right-wing ideology. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas called the man "a hippie nudist from Berkeley," and Marjorie Taylor Greene continued to insist that the media was spreading misinformation and the intruder was a friend of Paul Pelosi.

"The same mainstream media democrat activists that sold conspiracy theories for years about President Trump and Russia are now blaming @elonmusk for 'internet misinformation' about Paul Pelosi's friend attacking him with a hammer," Greene said on Twitter.

Donald Trump Jr. mocked the attack on his social media, sharing a "Halloween costume" intended to represent the hammer-wielding intruder.

Alongside a photo of a distressed-looking Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Clay Higgins, R-La., falsely asserted that the attack was a prostitute. "That moment you realize the nudist hippie male prostitute LSD guy was the reason your husband didn't make it to your fundraiser," said his later-deleted tweet.

Whether or not Republican candidates and officeholders personally believe in all these conspiracy theories, they have clearly adopted or adapted them in an effort to draw in supporters from the most extreme fringes of American politics, many of whom share an ideology that supports or condones political violence. Once upon a time, that would have been seen as off limits: In the 1960s, Republicans tried to force overt white supremacists and anti-Communist conspiracy theorists out of the party. In 2022, the boundary between "mainstream" Republican politics and dangerous rhetoric on fringe internet message boards has almost completely evaporated.

The landmark case hinges on the "independent state legislature" theory brought by North Carolina legislators, who want to eliminate the system of checks and balances governing federal elections and appropriate full power themselves. This could mean, for example, that state legislatures are free to appoint a slate of presidential electors as they see fit, regardless of which candidate a state's voters favored.

The theory asserts that under the U.S. Constitution, state legislatures have full authority to set the rules when it comes to making state laws that apply to federal elections, and that state constitutions and state courts have no power or authority over them. If the Supreme Court affirms the theory in deciding the Moore case, state legislatures will effectively be freed to gerrymander electoral maps and pass restrictive voting laws with little to no supervision by state courts or other entities.

Some legal experts have even suggested that the independent state legislature theory could create a pathway for election subversion. Legislators could throw out election results they don't agree with, as mentioned above, and appoint their own presidential electors.

But others are concerned about where the money is coming from in backing the theory.

"It's obviously a fringe, extremist legal theory that's being funded by these wealthy conservative donors, and these are people who know their extreme agenda isn't popular," said Kayla Hancock, director of power and influence at Accountable.US. "So they're spending millions of dollars to stack the Supreme Court and chip away at our democratic rights and freedoms by influencing these institutions."

The independent state legislature theory has previously been rejected by a majority of Supreme Court justices and is widely viewed as well outside the mainstream of legal thought, even for high-profile judicial conservatives, as Mother Jones has reported.

But over the last two years, that changed with the founding of a nonprofit called the Honest Elections Project, which has promoted the theory extensively. The group is closely linked to Federalist Society co-chairman Leonard Leo, seen as immensely influential in building the current Supreme Court's conservative supermajority.

Leo has a history of operating a network of interlocking nonprofits that support right-wing advocacy and lobbying. He helped conservative nonprofits raise $250 million from mostly undisclosed donors to promote conservative judges and causes. He advised Donald Trump during the nominations of Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, according to Accountable.US.

"It's interesting to see that this man, who has all this power in influencing the court and the structure of the court, is also funding groups that are filing amicus briefs to try and influence that same court," Hancock said. "A lot of these groups that Leo is funding are also engaging in advocacy work to place restrictions on ballot access and gerrymandering. So I think it's broader than just this legal theory. It's an all-out assault on our elections."

The Honest Elections Project stoked fears about voter fraud prior to the 2020 election and even wrote letters to election officials in Colorado, Florida and Michigan that relied on misleading data to accuse jurisdictions of having bloated voter rolls and threaten legal action, the Guardian reported. The group also spent $250,000 on ads against mail-in voting, calling it a "brazen attempt to manipulate the election system for partisan advantage." In fact, there have been almost no verified cases of fraud in voting by mail anywhere in the country, and many Republicans have blamed their party's relatively poor showing in the 2022 midterms on a reluctance to encourage mail-in voting

Since its founding, HEP has advocated against laws designed to expand voting access. It also sued the state of Michigan, forcing the state to clean up its list of registered voters, and blocked a settlement in Minnesota that eased absentee voting rules.

In 2020, the group submitted a legal brief in support of Pennsylvania's Republican Party, which asked the Supreme Court to overturn a state court decision that allowed mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted if they arrived up to three days later. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court had ordered the three-day deadline extension to "prevent the disenfranchisement of voters" due to postal delays during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Referencing the U.S. Constitution's Elections Clause and Electors Cause, the Honest Elections Project argued that state legislatures are "vested with plenary authority that cannot be divested by state constitution to determine the times, places, and manner of presidential and congressional elections."

Along with the Honest Elections Project, four other right-wing groups have filed amicus briefs in Moore v. Harper Amicus Briefs supporting the independent state legislature theory, including the American Legislative Exchange Council (known as the conservative "bill mill"), the Public Interest Legal Foundation, America's Future Inc. and the Claremont Institute, where election conspiracy theorist John Eastman wrote the now-infamous memos urging Vice President Mike Pence to reject the electoral votes from certain states.

DonorsTrust, which has been described as the "dark money ATM" of the conservative movement, has funded a majority of the donations, giving almost $70.5 million to these groups, according to the Accountable.US report.

The group funnels anonymous donations to hundreds of organizations, including several right-wing legal and policy groups favored by the Koch network as well as other mega-donors, according to Sludge.

"These groups that operate behind the scenes, they know that their agendas are unpopular and so they're using broad networks of right-wing organizations to try to influence the courts," Hancock said. "In this specific instance, these people are going in front of the courts in order to advance their fringe agenda from the shadows, because they know they're not going to be able to enact these unpopular policies otherwise."

Three Supreme Court justices have signaled apparent support for the independent state legislature theory, but North Carolina legislators would need at least two more votes to prevail. Voting rights advocates have warned that the theory could fundamentally reshape the mechanisms of American politics and bring immense chaos to the electoral process. The court is expected to issue a ruling next summer.

The Justice Department is asking a federal judge to hold former President Donald Trump's legal team in contempt of court for failing to comply with a subpoena issued this summer ordering him to return all classified documents in his possession, sources told The Washington Post.

U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell has not yet held a hearing or ruled on the DOJ's request, which came months after Trump's lawyers assured the department that a search had been conducted for classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence, before the FBI later executed a court-authorized search that led to the discovery of more than 100 documents marked as classified. Trump's team recently reportedly found two additional items marked classified at a Florida storage locker after Howell ordered them to keep looking.

Trump's legal team has refused to designate a custodian of records to sign a document attesting that all classified materials have been returned to the federal government. This has remained a key area of disagreement in the matter after Trump attorney Christina Bobb signed a declaration affirming that all documents had been returned over the summer — before the DOJ discovered additional documents.

The former president's team has taken the position that such a request is unreasonable.

"President Trump and his counsel continue to cooperate and be transparent, despite the unprecedented, illegal, and unwarranted attacks by the weaponized Department of Justice," Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement to the Post.

Trump is under investigation for three potential crimes, including mishandling classified documents, obstruction and destruction of government records.

"What the DOJ is trying to do is simply get an answer... from some person to say yes, you have all of [the classified documents]... and I can't begin to imagine how long this has taken to finally percolate to the stage where DOJ is asking for this," former FBI official Peter Strzok told MSNBC.

After the raid, Howell ordered Trump's legal team to conduct a search for more records, which reportedly uncovered two more classified documents around Thanksgiving in a storage unit in West Palm Beach, Fla, according to the Post.

Searches at other Trump properties, including his Bedminster golf course in New Jersey and at Trump Tower in Manhattan, did not yield any records, according to the report.

Former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman predicted that attorneys like Bobb and fellow Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran "will point the fingers at others and ultimately Trump in seeking to excuse their noncompliance."

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"Part of the dynamic with the Trump Team contempt motion is that the lawyers are afraid to sign certifications of compliance, given that their client can't be trusted," Litman wrote on Twitter. "There's a poetic justice to the fact that Team Trump can't even comply with a subpoena, a simple act which defendants, and anyone else, do every day, because of fault lines leading in all directions to Trump's dishonesty," he added.

"If you represented Trump, you wouldn't want to certify under oath that he returned all the classified materials either," quipped former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti.

New York University Law Prof. Ryan Goodman agreed that Trump's attorneys had good reason to be nervous given that their earlier declaration was proven to be false.

"This just reached a whole new level of seriousness," he tweeted, noting that the DOJ motion "adds significantly to the likelihood of indictments."

But restoring voters' faith in mail-in voting may take years, if the GOP effort is effective at all. Trump and his allies have repeatedly echoed falsehoods about voter fraud and stoked fears around absentee ballots.

The former president has promoted the widely discredited film "2000 Mules", which alleged widespread voter fraud in the last presidential election.

"Republican states are rightly taking steps to ensure elections are safe and secure," a Republican strategist who worked on the Georgia midterm election told Politico. "Our problem now is a messaging and operational one. We start by throwing out the Trump B.S. lies and telling people the truth about their votes and the power of their vote. Who would have imagined telling people, 'the election is rigged' and then asking them to vote wouldn't work?"

Now, some Republicans are hoping to undo his mess and tout a different message around mail-in voting to restore voters' trust.

Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., won early voters by about 16 percentage points, entering Election Day with a 300,000 vote lead, CBS News reported. He also earned 64% of the absentee mail vote and almost 58 percent of the early vote, according to the secretary of state's office.

"Our voters need to vote early," RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said on Fox News. "There were many in 2020 saying, 'don't vote by mail, don't vote early', and we have to stop that, and understand that if Democrats are getting ballots in for a month, we can't expect to get it all done in one day."

Republicans had predicted a "red wave" for months before the midterms. But once it failed to materialize, several allies of Trump turned against him and blamed him for candidates underperforming.

Trump as recently as last week disparaged early voting and voting by mail, posting on Truth Social: "you can never have fair & free elections with mail-in ballots--never, never, never. Won't and can't happen!!!"

Herschel Walker's failure in the pivotal Georgia Senate race came as the last blow, finally convincing Republican operatives and lawmakers to issue a wake-up call to their party persuading them to take early voting seriously.

"[P]eople are awakening to it, even the Trumpistas," GOP strategist Karl Rove, who runs RITE, told Politico. "It's a sad commentary that we have to do that and there is resistance. He's creating a class of people who may for a long time believe the elections are stolen as long as there's a presence of mail-in ballots, and that causes people to say my vote doesn't count, I don't need to bother to vote."

Even Fox News hosts, who have repeatedly echoed Trump's claims about mail-in and early voting, are shifting their stance.

When the Georgia runoff elections showed Walker was likely going to lose, Fox News host Sean Hannity asked House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., about the "reluctance some Republicans" have "about voting early and voting by mail," adding it was "too big of a margin for Republicans to always have to make up". McCarthy agreed: "You're exactly right."

Fellow Fox host Laura Ingraham grew frustrated while interviewing Kellyanne Conway, former counselor to Trump, who said if Republicans don't "bank ballots early, we're going to keep losing."

"How come we didn't?" Ingraham asked. "We didn't do it in 2020, because everyone said, 'Don't vote early, because that's corrupt.'" She went on to say that "a lot of people at the top of the Republican Party" echoed this sentiment, which ultimately impacted Republican candidates.

While Trump has been under fire for casting doubt on mail-in voting, others are also blaming him for making poor choices when it came to candidates.

"Every Republican in this country ought to hold Donald Trump accountable for this," Geoff Duncan, Georgia's Republican lieutenant governor, said in an interview with CNN. "The only way to explain this is candidate quality."

Regardless of the reasons, several of Trump's allies are abandoning him and his conspiracy theories. Republican operative Scott Jennings warned on Twitter that "Georgia may be remembered as the state that broke Trump once and for all."

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani defended his role in challenging the 2020 presidential election after the D.C. Bar accused him of misusing his law license and called for it to be revoked.

The ethics case, brought by the D.C. Bar's Office of Disciplinary Counsel, will determine whether Giuliani violated attorney ethics rules with the federal court by filing a "frivolous" post-election lawsuit in Pennsylvania that falsely claimed the November 2020 general presidential election was wrought with fraud on behalf of then-President Donald Trump, Politico reported.

Giuliani appeared as the first witness in his own attorney misconduct hearing in a trial scheduled for the next two weeks. The panel will issue a report with recommendations after hearing arguments and testimony.

Ultimately, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals will rule on whether to impose sanctions, which can range from a written reprimand to stripping Giuliani's license to practice. A state court in New York suspended Giuliani's license last year for spreading "false and misleading" statements on behalf of Trump about the 2020 election.

Phil Fox, the lead prosecuting attorney for D.C. Bar's Office of Disciplinary Counsel, called Giuliani's fraud allegations "unfounded" and said his lawsuit wasn't based on facts or the law.

"What this case is about is that Mr. Giuliani was responsible for filing a frivolous action, asking a federal court to deprive millions of the people in Pennsylvania of their right to vote," said Fox, an attorney for the D.C. Bar's Board on Professional Responsibility.

"There was no precedent for this. In addition to the fact that there was no precedent, there was no factual basis [for the suit]," Fox added.

By filing the lawsuit, Giuliani violated the Pennsylvania Rules of Professional Conduct and "engaged in conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice," the ODC said.

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Giuliani defended his actions, saying he had acted reasonably based on information he received from the Trump campaign and other parties claiming that Pennsylvania's election processes were unconstitutional, Bloomberg reported.

During his testimony, the ex-Trump lawyer also claimed he has been "persecuted" by federal investigations for the last four years.

"My role was to show how Pennsylvania involved the same set of eight or 10 suspicious actions — illegal actions, whatever you want to call them, irregular actions — that could not be the product of accident," he said.

Giuliani also claimed he wrote only one or two paragraphs of the initial complaint that was filed and that local Pennsylvania attorney Ron Hicks did most of the work.

The Pennsylvania lawsuit focused on two main issues, which included problems with independent observers being distanced from watching poll workers and Pennsylvania using mail-in ballots.

Giuliani argued that instead of observers being allowed to watch people counting votes, they "were being put in pens like they were cows."

"The only thing we had at this stage of the litigation was that in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, we had a number of ballots that were being counted without any inspection by an independent party," Giuliani said. "You have to plead fraud with specificity with what you have, with what is available. But in discovery you get the additional information. This was specific enough for this stage of the pleading. That's why it's evidence, and not a conclusion."

Legal experts were unimpressed with Giuliani's argument.

"Rudy Giuliani's defense in his bar discipline case is that he was a bad lawyer who was just sloppily throwing allegations out there … even though he was trying to help the President overturn the election," tweeted former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti. "He's half right—he *is* a bad lawyer. But he's also a dishonest one."

Shortly after acquiring Twitter, Elon Musk posted, "The bird is freed." But what did that mean in practice? The platform saw nearly a fivefold increase in the use of the N-word within 12 hours after the shift of ownership. The most engaged tweets were overtly antisemitic. The site was flooded with anonymous trolls spewing racist slurs and Nazi memes.

But, the surge in overt racism and bigotry wasn't the only sign of how drastically, and how rapidly, Twitter changed under Musk's ownership. The billionaire went on to restructure the company — firing top executives, laying off 50 percent of the company's staff, revamping the Twitter subscription service and reinstating numerous accounts that had been banned under the previous regime for violating the site's posted guidelines.

Many such accounts with a history of spreading conspiracy theories and hate speech subsequently purchased "blue checks" for $8 a month through the on-again, off-again Twitter Blue subscription and continue to spread misinformation and extreme content on the app, according to Media Matters.

Anti-LGBTQ accounts like Libs of TikTok and Gays Against Groomers had been suspended from Twitter several times for hateful conduct and spreading anti-LGBTQ rhetoric targeting Pride events and individuals. Both accounts have now been reinstated and carry the blue checkmark.

White supremacists Jason Kessler and Richard Spencer, who had their verifications revoked some time ago, have gotten them back under Musk. Kessler was a principal organizer of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and Spencer for a time was the most prominent neo-Nazi and overt white supremacist in America. (At least until the rise of Nick Fuentes.)

With previously suspended accounts returning to Twitter and continuing to spread conspiracy theories online, more ordinary users will inevitably encounter content that otherwise only existed on fringe platforms like 4chan and 8chan, said Gianluca Stringhini, assistant professor at Boston University, who studies cybersecurity and online safety.

Conspiracy theories and other forms of false information "make their way into Twitter and Facebook and mainstream platforms and that's when regular people see them and they suddenly become viral," Stringhini said. Hate speech and intolerance toward marginalized communities follow, he added, which can have multiple real-world effects, up to and including violence.

Musk is planning to launch a revised verification feature soon that will have different-colored check marks for businesses, government agencies and individuals, the Washington Post has reported.

Musk's earlier version of Twitter Blue, which offered users a blue check (but no significant form of verification) for $8/month, failed after accounts impersonating large corporations, political figures and other celebrities (including Musk himself) ran rampant on the site. Infamously, an account impersonating the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly caused the real company's stock to drop by more than 4%.

Twitter has recently disabled new sign-ups for that service and Musk tweeted on Nov. 25 that the company was "tentatively launching Verified on Friday next week." That presumably meant Dec. 2, which has now come and gone with no launch announcement

The platform's "legacy" blue checks from the pre-Musk era were predominantly used by large companies, journalists, politicians, celebrities and other public figures, who had to apply to Twitter and provide extensive identifying information. (Most staff members at Salon, for example, have blue checks that predate Musk's purchase.)

Essentially, the blue check has traditionally served as a strong indication that an account legitimately belonged to a named individual or identity with a reputation to uphold, Stringhini said. But what concerns him is now is the apparent absence of content moderation under Musk's greatly reduced staff.

"In my work, I try to automate content moderation and the texture of speech, but it is a very, very challenging problem, a nuanced problem," he said. "Even if you try and automate it as much as possible, you will always need to have a human making the final decision based on context."

Twitter's algorithm prioritizes tweets that attract the most engagement, whether or not the content is overtly inflammatory or hateful, Stringhini said. But the platform can always make the decision to demote the most noxious tweets and prevent them from going viral. Without a moderation team of actual humans tracking users, he noted, that is nearly impossible to do.

White supremacists are using the appearance of respectability offered by forums like Twitter to infiltrate public conversations, said Libby Hemphill, a professor at the University of Michigan's School of Information and the Institute for Social Research.

"They try to look presentable: If you think about the Unite the Right rally [in Charlottesville], you're looking at clean-cut white boys," Hemphill said. They use "similar strategies linguistically online" to appear "polite," avoiding overt racial slurs and profanity.

Elon Musk did society a favor, says Jennifer Grygiel. "He showed us the vulnerability of the public's access to information and how flawed it was. It's never been about free speech."

Previously banned white supremacists who are returning to Twitter have existing audiences, she said, which makes them "more dangerous than a new person trying to come up with an audience," since amplification on social media is largely a function of audience and reach.

"Right now, the cost of being hateful doesn't outweigh the benefits," Hemphill said. "I don't just mean the financial costs — there aren't enough social consequences for being hateful."

Elon Musk has himself contributed to the problem, Hemphill added, by "spreading anti-trans right-wing nonsense." She speculated that "losing $44 billion" — Musk's purchase price in taking Twitter private — "might be enough to get him to change his behavior. But he can afford it, so maybe not."

Even before Musk's takeover, Twitter served as a tool for spreading propaganda, said Grygiel, the Syracuse professor, saying that in a sense Musk had offered society a gift. "He showed us the vulnerability of the public's access to information and how flawed it was," Grygiel added. "Fundamentally, Twitter's model is flawed when it comes to public discourse. It's never been about free speech. It's always been about the speech of whoever owns it."

The platform continues to elevate powerful actors, including corporations and governments, and functions as a tool for enabling propagandists, Grygiel added. "This isn't a place where, essentially, we're getting social movements and the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter. This is where you're going to see government voices lifted up over those of the free press."

Musk appears to run Twitter as a sovereign individual, in charge of who gets assigned what labels, Grygiel added, which changed the fundamental nature of Twitter. "He shifted it away from journalism and pointed it toward himself, and he dangles that in front of the government as a leverage point."

Academics and journalists, Grygiel suggested, need to consider "life post-Twitter" and congregate on a platform that doesn't get to decide "who is verified and worthy and who isn't."

Beyond examining the dangers that conspiracy theorists pose to Twitter and the widespread impact of misinformation, "we need to look at what is central to society and helping it function," Grygiel said, offering an answer. "News — and I'm talking free press-style news, free of the government. How can we get there in a social media world?"

Although the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI have identified domestic terrorism, specifically white supremacist violence, as "the most persistent and lethal terrorist threat," the federal government has continued to allocate resources to focus on international terrorist threats instead, according to the report.

The 128-page report is the culmination of a three-year investigation, which relies on public testimony and interviews with federal law enforcement officials and executives from Meta (formerly Facebook), Twitter, YouTube and TikTok, as well as more than 2,000 "key documents" that offer insight into the most significant terror threats facing the U.S.

The report also identifies the role social media companies have played in amplifying extremist content, and says that both DHS and the FBI still fail to track and report data on domestic terrorism, despite a provision in the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act that requires them to do so.

"DHS and FBI's inability to provide comprehensive data on the domestic terrorist threat creates serious concerns that they are not effectively prioritizing our counterterrorism resources to address the rising domestic terrorist threat," said Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich, the committee's chairman, in a statement.

Over the last two decades, Congress restructured federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies to focus on the threat posed by international terrorists following the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

But it's also true that in recent years attacks from domestic terrorists have surged, with 110 domestic terrorist plots and attacks in 2020 alone — a 244 percent increase from 2019, according to a 2021 Center for Strategic and International Studies study.

"The data is clear that the problem is right-wing extremism when it comes to terrorism," said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. "That was most on display on Jan. 6, when white supremacists were mixing with QAnon conspiracists and anti-government people to literally overthrow our democratic system."

Social media has also contributed to the growing threat of far-right extremism, since it allows people to access "white supremacist materials within seconds and become indoctrinated," Beirich added. Even more concerning, she says, are people in positions of power who are adapting or mainstreaming the same messaging as domestic terrorists.

It's not just that the "great replacement" theory is all over the internet, Beirich said. "It's also that politically powerful people are endorsing and furthering it, so it doesn't sound like some fringe idea that should be stuck way out on the edges of society."

Beirich pointed out that several Republican candidates for office in the midterm election endorsed the "great replacement" conspiracy theory — a white nationalist ideology centered on the claim that immigrants are being deliberately imported into the U.S. and other Western countries to "replace" the white population. Belief in the "replacement" theory has been linked to several acts of racist violence, including the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand and the August 2019 mass shooting in a Walmart in El Paso, Texas.

"It's not just that this material is all over the internet," Beirich said. "It's also that politically powerful people are endorsing and furthering it, so it doesn't sound like some fringe idea that should be stuck way out on the edges of society. They're giving it an endorsement."

The Senate report found that social media platforms have allowed for "increased recruitment, dissemination, and coordination of domestic terrorist and extremist related activities."

While these platforms may have rules and guidelines in place to remove extremist content, their business models are designed to maximize user engagement, which often ends up promoting extreme content that can translate into real-world violence.

A study by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses on Terrorism found that, in 2016 alone, social media played a role in the radicalization process of nearly 90 percent of extremists in the United States.

Federal agencies have failed to adapt to the shifting landscape of social media and adequately address domestic terrorist threats online, said Patrick Riccards, the CEO of Life After Hate — a nonprofit that helps deradicalize people from violent far-right groups and other extremist organizations.

"These groups are incredibly smart, incredibly savvy," Riccards added. "When you look at their skill and abilities with regard to the digital universe, in terms of recruiting, organizing and executing action, they are a generation or two ahead of where the FBI was."

On top of this, the FBI and DHS both have different definitions for "domestic terrorism," which can lead to the agencies categorizing the same event in different categories, the report highlights. Terrorist acts labeled as "international" rather than "domestic" provide law enforcement and national security agencies access to greater surveillance, investigative and prosecutorial tools and resources.

"These differences often lead to disparate treatment of immigrant and U.S. minority populations and inconsistent investigations of terrorist attacks, including whether or not to categorize an attack as terrorism," the report said.

"These groups are incredibly smart, incredibly savvy. When you look at their digital abilities in terms of recruiting, organizing and executing action, they are a generation ahead of the FBI."

One reason why these agencies are still so focused on international terrorism, Riccards said, is because it's still "more acceptable" for them to spend "federal government resources going after the future generations of bin Ladens — going into the Middle East and saying, we're not going to let another 9/11 happen again — than it is to go after Americans who half of this country may share political beliefs with."

Riccards continued: "Now the domestic terrorists are wearing suits and ties. They're not stomping heads in the streets. They're raising money. They're organizing. They're incredibly successful at [promoting] online propaganda and constantly creating new platforms to spread it. It's a new world when it comes to domestic terrorism, and in many ways we're still trying to fight it under old rules and old ways of thinking."

He added that, to this day, when shootings take place in a synagogue, a mosque or an LGBTQ-oriented nightclub, the media does not reflexively refer to them as "terrorist" acts and instead often describes such events as committed by a "lone gunman" who suffered from mental illness or who lost their way. That contributes, Riccards said, to a wider failure to address the real problem.

The administration in power also plays a significant role in influencing the federal government's priorities when it comes to counterterrorism. Under Donald Trump, DHS focused on international terrorism despite the clear and rising threat of domestic extremism, the report points out. That led to a decrease in staffing and budget allocations directed at countering anti-government extremists, white supremacists and other potentially violent actors.

DHS's Countering Violent Extremism program, which was focused on preventing violence and terrorism of all kinds, was also impacted by Trump's presidency. While the program had largely focused on combating Islamic extremism, its focus shifted toward the end of the Obama administration, Beirich said, to include white nationalism and extremism.

In 2017, DHS announced that 31 grantees would receive $10 million in funding to support local efforts to combat extremism, with at least two of those groups focused on countering right-wing extremism. After Trump took office, both of those grantees — Life After Hate and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — were cut from the list.

"Life After Hate works with people who are trying to leave extremist movements like white supremacy and whatnot, and the Trump administration came in and just canceled it," Beirich said.

When shootings take place in a synagogue, a mosque or an LGBTQ club, the media doesn't reflexively call them "terrorist" acts. Instead, we hear that such crimes are committed by a "lone gunman" who lost their way.

In 2021, Joe Biden became the first president to issue a national strategy aimed at dealing with domestic terrorism, and that same year DHS also designated combating domestic violent extremism as a "National Priority Area" within its Homeland Security Grant Program for the first time. Furthermore, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has established a dedicated domestic terrorism branch within the DHS Office of Intelligence & Analysis (I&A).

While the Biden administration has taken a steps in the right direction by acknowledging the longstanding threat of domestic terrorism, the Senate report finds that "DHS has not provided the Committee with sufficient information or data that would enable the Committee to determine what actions it has taken to accomplish those goals and assess the effectiveness of those actions."

In discussing both his organization's specific goals and the overall challenge of addressing domestic terrorism, Riccards said: "We love telling stories about redemption in this country, but we don't necessarily like practicing redemption, in believing that people deserve second chances." Homeland Security under Biden and Mayorkas is trying to address the challenge, he said, "but you're talking about throwing a pebble in the ocean at this point. There is so much happening that we are just playing catch-up each and every day."

Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., the head of the Senate GOP's campaign arm, on Tuesday sent a letter to Senate Republicans launching a challenge to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to lead the caucus next term.

"I believe it's time for the Senate Republican Conference to be far more bold and resolute than we have been in the past," wrote Scott, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. "We must start saying what we are for, not just what we are against. I do not believe we can simply continue to say the Democrats are radical, which they are. Republican voters expect and deserve to know our plan to promote and advance conservative values. We need to listen to their calls for action and start governing in Washington like we campaign back at home."

Scott and McConnell have long been involved in a battle about the best strategy and vision for the party. The two also held differing views when it came to spending resources in the midterm election, the quality of candidates running and messaging, CNN reported.

But their rivalry, which has mostly existed behind the scenes, publicly erupted after the Republican Party's poor performance in last Tuesday's contests.

Tensions between the two Republicans and their aides started simmering leading up to the elections. McConnell was cut out of NRSC strategy discussions, his aides blamed Scott for releasing a policy plan that suggested changing Social Security and a source close to Scott blamed McConnell for allowing Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., to propose a national abortion ban, The Washington Post reported.

After Republicans failed to win back the majority, the pair's ongoing battle grew even more intense with their political operations getting involved and blaming the other for the poor outcome.

"Senator Scott disagrees with the approach that Mitch has taken in this election and for the last couple of years, and he made that clear, and Senator McConnell criticized Senator Scott's management of the NRSC," Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley told reporters, according to CNN.

The two engaged in a tense discussion during a private three-hour Senate GOP meeting, according to several senators. Following the meeting, Scott was disinvited from speaking at the party's weekly leadership press conference, according to Scott spokesman McKinley Lewis.

But that wasn't the only development coming out of the meeting. Sens. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Thom Tillis, R-N.C., called for an independent review of how the National Republican Senatorial Committee spent its resources for the midterm election, Politico reported.

Blackburn told Scott that there needed to be an accounting of how money was spent so that senators understood how and why key decisions were made, according to two people familiar with the discussion, Politico reported.

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People aligned with McConnell and Scott have also started to get involved in their feud on social media.

Curt Anderson, a Scott adviser, criticized Senate Leadership Fund, the McConnell-linked super PAC for its lack of commitment to winning the Georgia Senate runoff election.

"Watched Monday Night Football here in Georgia last night, and the evening news. Schumer's superpacs running tons of ads attacking Walker. McConnell's superpac running zero ads attacking Warnock. Have they given up?" he tweeted.

Steve Law, the CEO of McConnell's Senate Leadership Fund, fired back, saying that NRSC was barely making a dent in the race.

"But don't worry little buddy—we're used to covering for you," Law responded.

Law also retweeted a screenshot of an NRSC email, which showed that the committee kept 99% of the funds Herschel Walker was raising.

"Good committees raise enough so that they don't have to steal from their candidates," Law said.

"Now it's total open warfare between McConnell world and Scott world," tweeted MSNBC host Chris Hayes.

"The open hostility between Rick Scott's and McConnell's teams is just off the charts," noted Washington Post reporter Aaron Blake.

Despite their teams publicly feuding, Scott wrote in his letter that "there is no one person responsible for [the Republican] party's performance across the country" and blamed a lack of Republican voter turnout for candidates losing.

Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee put out a statement calling attention to the ongoing feud between Scott and McConnell.

"Senate Republicans are getting nasty, petty and viciously personal – everything we could ask for heading into the Georgia runoff," the statement said. "For our part, Senate Democrats are unified and focused on re-electing Rev. Warnock."

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