Driving the Day:
Republicans are bringing extremism to the mainstream. https://t.co/EwiO9ivRqy
— Defend Democracy Project (@DemocracyNowUS) May 16, 2022
What To Watch For Today:
Primaries featuring MAGA extremists and election conspiracy theorists in Idaho, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oregon, and Pennsylvania.
Must Read Stories
Today’s Primaries Reflect The Rise Of Far Right Extremists And Conspiracy Theorists In The GOP
- Politico: A Primary For The Heart Of Trump’s GOP: The shock over the GOP’s Pennsylvania predicament continues to ripple across the party, leaving state Republican strategists and officials nervous and despairing on the eve of Tuesday’s primary. The prospect that the party might blow its chances in a key industrial swing state this fall by nominating far-right election deniers is very real. In the GOP primary for governor, state Sen. Doug Mastriano has held a comfortable lead in recent polls, while conservative commentator Kathy Barnette has surged to within just a few percentage points of Dr. Mehmet Oz and David McCormick in the Senate primary. It shouldn’t be a surprise. There are few states as deeply infected as Pennsylvania by Donald Trump’s election fraud lie. The idea of a rigged election was nurtured and fanned by Pennsylvania congressional and state legislators from the moment on Nov. 7, 2020, that the Associated Press declared Joe Biden the winner of the state.
- HuffPost: Living With The Far-Right Insurgency In Idaho: A lot has been written about both the radicalization of the Republican Party and the decline of democracy in the U.S. — about the country being at a precipice. It’s maybe easy for those warnings to become background noise, or to dismiss them as doom-mongering pieces of clickbait. But in Idaho, the nightmare scenario is crossing into reality, as an authoritarian GOP sets about to create a whiter, Christian nation. These MAGA radicals have gestured at the future they want: no rape and incest exceptions to Idaho’s abortion ban; no emergency contraception; no gender-affirming health care for minors; the banning of books; the jailing of librarians; and maybe no public education altogether. […] The people I talked to were not all that accustomed to alarmism, which made it striking to hear some of their voices tremble when they talked about what’s happening to their home. Their message for the rest of the country? It’s gonna get bad. The GOP really will go that far.
New Details Emerge On Leading Pennsylvania Candidates’ Participation In January 6
- CNN: Barnette Said She Was Leading Buses To Dc For ‘Our 1776 Moment’ On January 6, 2021: Pennsylvania Republican Senate candidate Kathy Barnette said she was bringing three buses of “pissed off patriots” for the January 6, 2021, “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the US Capitol riot. Calling it “our 1776 moment,” Barnette promised those attending the rally would make their voices heard, according to previously unreported comments from the time reviewed by CNN’s KFile. In another interview before the rally, Barnette said she helped bring three buses to Washington.
- NBC: Doug Mastriano Aide Who Blocked Press At Campaign Event Was At Capitol On Jan. 6: A staffer with Doug Mastriano’s Pennsylvania gubernatorial campaign who helped block media access to an event over the weekend was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when he appeared to smile and laugh as rioters smashed media equipment on Capitol grounds. Grant Clarkson is one of the Mastriano campaign associates who prevented reporters from covering an event over the weekend hosted by Mastriano and Kathy Barnette, a Republican Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, according to an NBC News analysis of photos and video from the event matched with his online social media presence. Former President Donald Trump has endorsed Mastriano, a far-right state senator who supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and was himself on the grounds of the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Republicans Are Bringing Extremism To The Mainstream Of Their Party
- Washington Post (Dana Milbank): Republicans Are Bringing Extremism To The Mainstream: This past weekend’s massacre in Buffalo has put a deserved spotlight on Elise Stefanik, Tucker Carlson, Newt Gingrich, Matt Gaetz, J.D. Vance and others trafficking in the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. But the problem goes well beyond the rhetoric of a few Republican officials and opinion leaders. Elected Republicans haven’t merely inspired far-right extremists. They have become far-right extremists. A new report shows just how extensively the two groups have intertwined. The study, released on Friday by the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, a decades-old group that tracks right-wing extremism, found that more than 1 in 5 Republican state legislators in the United States were affiliated with far-right groups. The IREHR (which conducted a similar study with the NAACP in 2010 on racism within the tea party) cross-referenced the personal, campaign and official Facebook profiles of all 7,383 state legislators in the United States during the 2021-22 legislative period with thousands of far-right Facebook groups. The researchers found that 875 legislators — all but three of them Republicans — were members of one or more of 789 far-right Facebook groups. That works out to 22 percent of all Republican state legislators.
- NPR: GOP Leadership Has Enabled White Nationalism, Liz Cheney Says: In the wake of the Buffalo supermarket shooting, Republican Rep. Liz Cheney is accusing her party’s leaders of enabling white nationalism, white supremacy and antisemitism. “History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse,” she tweeted Monday morning. Cheney then went a step further, calling on Republican leaders to “renounce and reject these views and those who hold them.”
- New York Times: The Right’s Violence Problem: Over the past decade, the Anti-Defamation League has counted about 450 U.S. murders committed by political extremists. Of these 450 killings, right-wing extremists committed about 75 percent. Islamic extremists were responsible for about 20 percent, and left-wing extremists were responsible for 4 percent. Nearly half of the murders were specifically tied to white supremacists. As this data shows, the American political right has a violence problem that has no equivalent on the left. And the 10 victims in Buffalo this past weekend are now part of this toll. “Right-wing extremist violence is our biggest threat,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the ADL, has written. “The numbers don’t lie.” The pattern extends to violence less severe than murder, like the Jan. 6 attack on Congress. It also extends to the language from some Republican politicians — including Donald Trump — and conservative media figures that treats violence as a legitimate form of political expression. A much larger number of Republican officials do not use this language but also do not denounce it or punish politicians who do use it; Kevin McCarthy, the top House Republican, is a leading example.
What Experts Are Saying
Frank Figliuzzi, former assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI: “The New York Times, citing two people who’d been briefed on the matter, reported Thursday the convening of a federal grand jury that is investigating the handling of 15 boxes of classified White House documents that were squirreled away at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Florida home… To borrow a concept from the world of classified information access, here’s what you ‘need to know’ to process this development. First, a grand jury means the Justice Department believes a crime may have been committed. While some pundits have asserted that convening the grand jury is part of a routine damage assessment to explore the national security aspects of what the intelligence community calls a ‘spill’ of classified documents, that’s a misleading explanation. To be sure, every agency that has a piece of the intelligence reporting in the boxed documents will have to be notified, will have to conduct analyses of the threat that could be posed if their reporting gets into the wrong hands and will have to determine what steps can be taken to prevent a recurrence. But that kind of routine cleanup of a spill doesn’t require a grand jury. A grand jury investigates potential crimes.” MSNBC Opinion
Jason Stanley, Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University: “America has many mass shootings. But this mass killing of Black Americans in a Buffalo supermarket must serve as a wake-up call to our country. White replacement theory is deeply ingrained in the worst aspects of American and European history. With its attacks on ‘critical race theory’, this is a fact that the American political right is deliberately and knowingly trying to erase from our collective consciousness, so they can appeal to it again as a political weapon against liberal democracy. As Gendron’s manifesto makes clear, white replacement theory is not just an attack on minorities. It is a weapon directed by fascists at American democracy itself.” The Guardian
Headlines
The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections
Business Insider: GOP congressman who’s been subpoenaed by the January 6 committee is backing Kathy Barnette, a PA Senate candidate who marched with Proud Boys in DC
Daily Beast: Dr. Oz Refuses to Say 2020 Election Was ‘Rigged’
New York Times: Republicans Play on Fears of ‘Great Replacement’ in Bid for Base Voters
Talking Points Memo: How Christian Nationalism And The Big Lie Fused To Fuel Doug Mastriano’s Candidacy
Opinion
Wall Street Journal (Tom Daschle and Trent Lott): Congress Can Prevent Another Jan. 6 Crisis
Washington Post (Greg Sargent): How Elise Stefanik and the GOP sanitize ‘great replacement’ ugliness
