his name is George rers remember that name he was famous for being one of the founders of the family research Council one of the original Super anti-gay conservative culture War groups that became very influential in Republican politics in the 1980s George rers was a founder of the family research Council he specifically worked in in the part of anti-gay politics that that says that people can be cured of the gay it can it can be reversed with just the right therapy well by 2010 there was George
rers being photographed at the airport in Miami in the company of a handsome young man named Lucien uh who Mr rers had apparently met on rentboy.com Mr rers first tried to explain that he had taken this handsome young man on an all expenses paid 10-day trip to Europe because he needed help with his luggage the young man himself seen here not helping with with the luggage eventually explained exactly what he was paid for on that European trip and George rers ultimately resigned from his job at t
he anti-gay organization in 2004 when Republican President George W Bush was up for re-election the Republican party and the Bush campaign enthusiastically promoted bans on same-sex marriage in multiple States they expected that anti-gay campaigning in as many states as possible would Goose Republican ter out and help Bush's chances of being reelected you demonize gay people scare people about gay rights you get conservative voters to turn out and they'll vote Republican while they're there Bush
was reelected in 2004 those anti-gay State ballot initiatives very well may have helped with that but then two years after bush left the White House the man who had been chairman of the Bush campaign at that time came out himself as gay and to his credit he then set about trying to write the wrong he had been part of by persuading leading Republicans to change their mind on marriage equality and and to persuade the Supreme Court to support marriage equality which they have done at least for a w
hile but honestly it's like you can't swing a cat without hitting one of these guys I mean those those anti-gay ballot initiatives that were supposed to help George W bush get reelected in 2004 they got a big boost in 2004 when a group called The National Association of evangelicals huge influential religious group decided in 2004 that they would emphatically restate their opposition to homosexuality and all its forms which effectively endorsed all the anti-gay measures that the Republicans were
promoting all over the country in advance of the election that year the National Association of evangelicals at that time was led by this man Ted Haggard who soon treated the country to not at all uncomfortable headlines like this one quote evangelist list I bought meth from gay escort again I mean follow the bouncing ball he found himself a very handsome man and it was never totally clear if he paid the handsome man for sex using the drugs as the method of payment or maybe if he paid the man f
or the sex and the drugs together kind of like a meal deal or something but but yeah president of the National Association of evangelicals I got a million of these guys uh Trump's Oklahoma State campaign chairman from 2016 was a was a Republican state senator who voted as an Oklahoma state senator that businesses should be able to put up signs that said we don't serve gays here Trump's campaign chairman in Oklahoma in 2016 busted in 2017 for soliciting sex from exactly who you think he'd be doin
g that from um the Republican mayor of Spokane Washington supported Banning gay people from working in schools later revealed to be meeting new friends new new friends all the time at gay ducom his handle was Cobra 82 because of course it was Cobra 82 sure I could go on really I got a million of them how much time do you have this weekend was the conservative political action conference it's an annual right-wing conference thing um among the things you can reliably get at CPAC every year is anti
-trans rhetoric by the dump truck full um and anti-gay sermonizing as well this year was no exception it's like that every year CPAC is run by a man named Matt schlap it has been for years and in 2022 ahead of the Congressional midterms uh Mr schlap was in Georgia he was campaigning for the Republican nominee for Senate Hershel Walker remember herel Walker Senate campaign uh the Walker campaign sent one of their mid level staffers a male staffer to drive Matt schlap around while in the car Matt
schlap allegedly put his hand on the young man's leg and then quote moved his hand and began aggressively fondling the staffer St staffer genital area in in a sustained fashion without the staffer consent staffer claims that Mr schlap then invited the staffer to his hotel room he declined early last year that young man sued match slap for sexual battery and as that lawsuit has dragged on more allegations of sexual misconduct against match laap have come to light as part of Discovery in that sexu
al battery lawsuit lawyers for the Republican campaign staffer um discovered that in 2017 at a CPAC party schlap allegedly attempted to kiss a male employee against his wishes they also discovered that at a fundraising event in 20202 Mr schlap was accused of stripping down to his underwear and um forgive me uh rubbing against another person without his consent now Mr schlap for his part has denied all allegations of wrongdoing the lawsuit says that the American conservative Union the parent comp
any to CPAC which employs match laap knew about at least two of the allegations against schlap before they become public but the lawsuit claims that the American conservative Union has not only failed to remove Mr schlap from his leadership position they also failed to pursue any kind of Investigation into the claims of sexual misconduct and so given that failure to do anything about the allegations um the American conservative Union has now been added as a defendant in the match laap sexual bat
tery lawsuit the organization has thus far spent upwards of a million dollars on Matt schaps legal fees to defend himself in the sexual battery case but they have meanwhile kept him in place to run the big annual anti gay conference because sure that's fine who will notice for months and months Republican lawmakers and conservative media have been trumpeting these bribery allegations made by smof against President Biden and his family The Washington Post today estimates that Fox News alone menti
oned it more than 2,600 times over the past single year republicans in Congress pushed the allegation endlessly even though the FBI explicitly warned them that the claim was uncorroborated and unreliable and now the man who's the source of the allegation the guy who said it uh he's in jail indicted for lying to Federal investigators about this very matter and Accused by prosecutors of feeding the FBI disinformation from Russian intelligence which would be shocking had we not lived through the la
st few years because this of course is now the third straight presidential election cycle in which Russian intelligence has done some version of this in 2016 as you may have heard Russian intelligence hacked the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign and then they weaponized the material they stole by releasing hacked emails through Wikileaks and all timed and strategically released to have maximum negative effect for Clinton and the Democrats and maximum positive effect
for Donald Trump and the Republicans and it was well known at the time that this whole thing was likely a Russian intelligence operation but Trump and Republicans and conservative media and the mainstream media frankly mostly ateed up and pounced on every single email dump as if they had just come down on Mount Si on tablets rather than being shoveled by Russian intelligence into the garbage shoot remember Trump talking at rallies about how much he loved Wikileaks he was welcoming it he was aski
ng for more Russian government and Russian intelligence sources made multiple contacts with the Trump campaign Russia ran a big weird social media campaign to try to influence American public debate and public opinion in Trump's Trump's favor the Trump campaign gave non-public polling information to a Russian intelligence agent according to the Senate intelligence committee um the Russians had this hack and leak campaign with the Democratic emails they were very busy in 2016 trying to help Trump
then four years later 2020 another try this time Trump's lawyer Rudy Julia was pedaling stories about uh Joe Biden's supposed corruption that he said he had dug up from his sources in Ukraine once again it turned out that Julie Honey's main source was Russian intelligence a report from the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence later determined that giuliani's Source was part of a US election interference operation likely directed by Putin himself with the goal of helping Trump win
a second term in 2020 and once again Republicans had been warned by americ American intelligence officials that the stuff that Giuliani was shoveling was likely part of a Russian op they apparently just did not care and again this is not some obscure thing I people got sanctioned by the US government for this people got indicted by the US justice department for this but who cares it might have helped Trump so we went along with it as far as we could and now four years later here we are again the
y they keep doing this every election cycle they keep doing some version of the same thing the Russians keep doing the same thing what seems to be changing a little bit is that the Republicans appear to have fewer and fewer qualms each year about welcoming and even participating in these Russian campaigns fool me once shame on you fool me twice shame on me fool me three times I clearly want to be fooled or maybe we should stop calling this foolish this is something else we did this in 2016 we di
d this in 2020 now in 2024 Republicans appear to be more enthusiastic about participating in it than they ever have been before but of course now this Russian disinformation campaign trying to paint Biden as as Meed in some kind of bribery Scandal it's happening with American Aid to Ukraine hanging in the balance with this life or death question looming of whether Ukraine will be able to hold off a third year of the Russian invasion Russia is doing everything can to undermine American support fo
r Ukraine and in the midst of a third straight effort by Russia to influence our election to Republicans benefit Republicans frankly seem quite receptive both to that election interference and to what Russia wants them to do in cutting off Ukraine these were adjacent headlines in the Washington Post last week Biden Administration cancels $1.2 billion in student loans with new repayment plan right next to Trump and allies planning militarized Mass deportations comma detention camps right that's t
he choice right right relief from High student loans or using the military to lock up millions of people in huge new camps adjacent headlines in the Washington Post on the same day both parties at the same point in general election campaigning thinking about what they want to be doing to present to the American people about what their idea is of governing and I don't know which of those two sides the American people is more in the mood for but it seems pretty clear to me at least that the best c
ontrast for the Democrats to draw for voters this year is maybe just the simplest one right normal popular practical accomplishments from President Biden and the Democrats versus burn it all down radicalism being screamed at the top of their lungs by Republicans under Donald Trump and you can't even understand what they're talking about half the time because they speak in their own code Barbara McQuade who you know and love from her time here as a legal analyst and explainer on MSNBC uh she has
a new book that comes out tomorrow um it's called attack from within how disinformation is sabotaging America and in her new book among other things Barb explains what she sees as the connection between disinformation which is the fundamental basis for the book and authoritarianism why you need to disconnect people from facts about the world from the knowable truth and all its complexity in order to get people to endorse extremism to endorse extreme new radical changes to reimagine their lives a
nd to reimagine their country in a way they've never thought of it before Barb in her book talks about the need to hit people emotionally rather than logically she talks about the the the sort of the utility of the wouldbe authoritarian leader or the authoritarian movement f focusing rhetorically on declinism convincing people that the country is falling apart the country used to be great but it's no longer great it's falling apart it's a disaster if you can convince people of that they will hav
e an emotional reaction about being afraid at the state of the country now they will have an emotional reaction about wanting to rescue the country if they can be convinced that things are so far gone they will then feel the need for Extreme Measures for a strong man to come in and you know maybe you got to wreck the place maybe you got to break the rules but it's a kind of resue mission for a country that is otherwise lost and what that means in Practical terms in terms of actually running ache
political campaign that in a matter of months will supposedly pick a new president what that means is every day making sure that your message undermines the idea of democracy and the idea of the rule of law so I mean this is a this isn't Theory this isn't academic this is our lives now Trump adviser Steve Bannon who you just saw there yelling about ver and trash at CPAC he spent last week telling his podcast listeners that the Tom swazi election in Long Island was stolen what yes in Steve Banno
n world this was the story of last week this is the special election to replace George Santos uh there's no suggestion there was anything wrong with the count or anything wrong with the conduct of that election at all but it doesn't matter a Democrat one and so therefore Steve Bannon tells his acolytes and his followers that that election must have been stolen because a Democrat won and they should not respect the results of it even when it doesn't matter when it's one special election for one c
ongressional seat and there's no real controversy about it still you have to say elections don't count elections aren't real now on top of that we've got the Republican National Committee losing its chair R Romney McDaniel she's being replaced sarily by a North Carolina Republican who is reportedly considered by Trump to be more solid specifically on the issue of throwing out election results Miss McDaniel was no slouch on this issue herself but apparently Trump wants somebody even stronger spec
ifically on that point he's a stop the steal guy and so now he will be now running the RNC if Trump gets his way and you know the politics of running against democracy the politics of of getting Americans to just trust elections and ultimately not want them anymore that is inextricably intertwined with getting Americans to distrust the legal system to to not trust the courts and not trust the justice system anymore to not take it seriously to not obey its dictates to not respect any of its rules
and Barb's book more than anything helped me see the connection of the the connection between those two points between getting rid of Elections and getting rid of the rule of law you have to get rid of the rule of law right you have to undermine and problematize it so that you can get away with what you are trying to do to elections right and this is all over the news right now just on Friday the Wisconsin ethics commission referred a trump pack and multiple Republican officials for felony pros
ecution for their role in a Wisconsin scheme to punish a Republican leader in the Wisconsin State Legislature who Trump thought didn't fight hard enough to throw out the election results in that state we want you to throw out those election results you don't do a good enough job we're now going to allegedly commit crimes in order to Turf you out of your position recommended for prosecution as of Friday last week the US Supreme Court refused to throw out the sanctions the the the sanctions the pr
ofessional sanctions against Trump lawyers cydney Powell and Lynn wood for their efforts to overthrow the election results Mike Lindell Mike pillow uh last week he was ordered by a judge to pay up in a contest he held where he promised $5 million cash to anybody who could disprove his claims that a foreign government helped steal the election for Biden somebody did disprove those claims and now a court says Mr pillow has to pay he of course does not want to pay but a court says he must in Georgi
a the right-wing group true the vote that apparently jined up all the false claims about supposed problems in the Georgia elections in 2020 they made hay with those claims for not just weeks around the election but months and ultimately years but when it got put through the legal system they had to admit to a judge that no they don't actually have any evidence to back up their claims that there was fraud in Georgia Trump and multiple Georgia codefendants are now going to go on trial for trying t
o overthrow the election result in Georgia which they did by citing this fake evidence from this group through the vote what will happen in that case will that case come to trial Trump and his codefendants best hope is not their defense but their unrelated personal counter offensive to try to discredit and disqualify the prosecutor to get get her thrown off the case the rule of law is protecting democracy we've got to get rid of the rule of law hypocrisy is like a cold windy day in the winter yo
u don't love it but it's not like you don't expect it but what Barb McQuade is writing about in her new book and what we are seeing from the campaign this year is something that is not inevitable but something planned something systematic and something very very very very radical the Democrats are campaigning against it by saying we're doing normal politics delivering normal practical results for real world problems the Republicans are promising to burn it all down they have to undermine the ide
a of democracy and the rule of law in order to get to their endgame
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