Breakfast is often called the most important meal of the day. It’s also long been a fixture of Jerry Seinfeld’s comedy — from “The Tonight Show” routines about Cookie Crisp to the Honeycomb and Raisin Bran boxes lining the shelves of his cupboards on “Seinfeld.” His directorial debut, “Unfrosted,” brings the obsession full circle, chronicling […]
Maggie Rogers is headlining arenas for the first time this fall, but she didn’t want it to feel like moving into bigger spaces for her concerts would mean a more impersonal experience. So for 11 shows that just went on sale in late April, she went out and personally manned the box office on opening […]
After months of M&A talks, Paramount Global and controlling shareholder Shari Redstone might be going it alone after all. Insiders tell Variety that the expectation at the company is that neither of the two offers in play — Skydance Media-RedBird Capital Partners and Sony Pictures Entertainment-Apollo Global Management — will come to fruition. And Redstone […]
The American Film Institute is accepting applications for this year’s Cinematography Intensive for Women, presented by Panavision. Led by AFI Conservatory Cinematography Discipline Head Stephen Lighthill, the intensive will take place July 27- 30 at the AFI Campus in Los Angeles. The tuition-free, four-day workshop is designed for aspiring cinematographers committed to their journey toward […]
The “Night Court” sequel series has been renewed for Season 3 at NBC, Variety has learned. The multi-cam comedy aired its second season between December 2023 and March 2024, with the season finale airing on March 26. Per NBC, the 13 episode season has reached 24 million viewers combined across all platforms to date. It […]
SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses plot elements from “The Idea of You,” which is now streaming on Prime Video. “Don’t you miss those bombastic, blown out pop choruses of the 2010s?” asks Savan Kotecha, the executive producer behind the music of August Moon — the fictional boy band at the center of “The Idea of […]
This semester, I’m teaching a course on priests, nuns, and monks in film at Loyola Marymount University’s School of Film and Television in Los Angeles. The most common question people ask after I tell them this — after “Why,” of course — is “Who are the top priests, nuns, and monks in the movies?” Below […]
Immersive art production company Meow Wolf has unveiled its plans to open its sixth permanent exhibition in a Los Angeles movie theater sometime in 2026. Organizers said the location would be on the Westside of Los Angeles, though it’s unknown which movie theater would have the right configuration for Meow Wolf’s extensive exhibitions. Santa Monica’s […]
John Leguizamo said during an interview on Andy Cohen’s SiriusXM radio show that it was “difficult” working with Patrick Swayze on their 1995 movie “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar.” The cult classic starred Leguizamo, Swayze and Wesley Snipes as three drag queens whose road trip across America to attend a competition in […]
22-year-old R&B singer Skylar Simone has signed with Def Jam Recordings and marked her debut with the single “Shiver,” produced by the red-hot D’Mile, who co-wrote and co-produced most of Silk Sonic’s album as well as major tracks for H.E.R. and Grammy-winning best new artist Victoria Monet. “I wanted to find that perfect blend of […]
To say the Aston Martin Vulcan is a luxury vehicle would be like saying Jeff Bezos is well-off. In other words, a vast understatement. The two-door, two-seater with a cherry-red carbon-fiber body can reach a max speed of 208 miles per hour and go from 0-60 miles per hour in 2.9 seconds. Vulcans are a symbol of opulence more rarified than the imperial Fabergé eggs created for the Romanov family dynasty: 43 of those eggs are known to still exist in the world, but only 24 Aston Martin Vulcans do. And beginning in 2015, Bernie Moreno—now a Republican candidate for US Senate in Ohio—was the proud owner of one of them for a period of time.
“I’ve loved cars since I was a little kid and this car, to me, is just an absolute work of art,” Moreno, who in November will face incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown in one of the most competitive Senate races this cycle, told the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “When I saw it, I knew I had to have it.”
He didn’t just want to have the Vulcan, which he purchased for $2.3 million. He also wanted to drive it. With at least three police cars providing an escort down busy streets that were partially closed for the occasion, Moreno cruised down Lorain and Stearns roads in the Cleveland suburb of North Olmsted, at times reaching 60 miles per hour, the Plain Dealer reported. Public records requests processed by the city of North Olmsted and obtained by Mother Jones did not return records indicating Moreno paid the city for its services.
Driving the Vulcan on the street may have violated federal regulations. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has strict emissions requirements on which cars may be imported and driven in the United States. The Vulcan does not meet requirements for an everyday commuting car, but between March 2015 and February 2017, Aston Martin applied for and received nine EPA “competition” exceptions for 2015 Vulcans, according to the agency.
An EPA spokesperson says the nine exceptions were for cars that must be “solely” used for competition.
In a 2016 video, Moreno discusses the import process more broadly. Instead of shipping the Vulcan as a completed vehicle, he said that the steering wheel—worth $20,000 on its own—was delivered separately. “Nobody’s here from the EPA, right? Good,” Moreno says. “The car’s actually not legally allowed to be in the United States. It is now, but it wasn’t back in October when we got the car. So we shipped it in as car parts.”
EPA spokesperson Jeff Landis told Mother Jones in a statement that importing a non-approved car in parts would not make it compliant with the agency’s Clean Air Act vehicle certification requirements. Motor vehicles “must comply with the Clean Air Act and may not be disassembled nor purchased in a disassembled form for the purposes of evading the Clean Air Act or the Imports regulations,” Landis said.
Moreno’s campaign says he was not involved in importing the car. “Aston Martin was solely responsible for importing it. Bernie had no decision making power or anything to do with how they decided to import the car,” Moreno’s communications director, Reagan McCarthy, wrote in a statement. “It’s laughable that the leftwing media is melting down over a show car being driven for a matter of minutes down the street.”
Aston Martin confirmed it imported the vehicle and said that the vehicle was approved for import by the EPA before it was shipped. Contradicting Moreno’s 2016 comments, a spokesperson for Aston Martin said the car was not imported “piecemeal.”
According to Moreno’s account, the steering wheel faced complications in what he described as a separate importing process. The engineer bringing the steering wheel over got held up in customs, Moreno said.
“This was the day after the San Bernardino terrorist attacks,” Moreno explained, “and the chief engineer for this project is actually Italian. And he’s a little bit dark complexion, crazy hair, and he’s going through customs explaining that this box is the steering wheel for a car… They kept him in customs for five hours and interrogated him. But he finally made it through. He didn’t have a sense of humor about that. I thought that was funny.”
In a follow-up conversation with Aston Martin, a spokesperson confirmed the car was first imported in its entirety with a steering wheel that ended up being faulty. A replacement steering wheel was later shipped out, which is what Moreno was likely referring to when describing the hold-up in customs. (Moreno’s spokesperson said his description on video was “Bernie’s understanding of how it was shipped.”)
Nevertheless, Moreno no longer owns the car. In 2016, the Cleveland Aston Martin dealership, which Moreno then owned, listed the Vulcan for sale for $3.4 million—the cost equivalent of 14 new Ferrari Romas, nine Rolls Royce Ghosts, or 90 times Ohio’s median per capita income of $37,729. While the New York Timesreported in March 2024 that Moreno’s assets included the Vulcan, Moreno’s spokesperson says that Moreno’s dealership—not Moreno, personally—owned the car, and Moreno sold that dealership in 2019.
Before running for Senate, Moreno was once the largest luxury car dealer by volume in the Midwest, selling Porsches and Bentleys, in addition to Aston Martins. His financial disclosure records indicate his current assets include 43 percent of a Florida property worth between $5 million and $25 million, corporate securities worth between $5 and $25 million, at least two limited partnerships valued between $1 million and $5 million, and 65 percent of a personal driver company valued between $5 million and $25 million, among other things. Financial disclosures include wide ranges of asset values rather than exact figures, but the reports suggest Moreno’s net worth could exceed $100 million.
It’s unclear what Moreno is driving these days. Brown, whom Moreno is running against, drives a Jeep Cherokee assembled in Toledo by union members.
America’s police forces are at war with college students. Inspired by students who set up encampments on Columbia University’s lawn, more than 90 college campuses across 40 states have set up similar actions to protest their schools’ investments in Israel. Some have set up camps, while others have staged sit-ins or occupied buildings, but nearly all have been confronted by highly militarized police departments brought in by administrators. At least 2,200 people have been arrested so far, according to the Appeal, and not all of them are students. Texas state police attacked and arrested a photojournalist after falsely claiming he pushed an officer. Another 28 people were arrested by Georgia police at Emory University last week, including an economics professor who was violently assaulted after questioning an officer’s conduct.
University leaders, like Columbia president Minouche Shafik, might claim to support their students’ right to political expression, but their willingness to unleash police on pro-Palestinian protests empowers a longstanding, escalating campaign to criminalize dissent.
Since Trump’s inauguration in 2017, 21 states have passed nearly 50 laws to restrict protest. In many ways, the origins of this assault can be traced to a single event nearly 10 years ago: the police killing of a Black teenager named Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. His death and the protests that followed birthed the Black Lives Matter movement, a global reckoning with racism, policing, and surveillance.
State legislatures, many dominated by Republicans, have introduced over 250 anti-protest bills since the Ferguson Uprising often supported by the many of the same forces united against student protesters today: law enforcement, Republican leadership, pro-Israel lobbyists and right wing operatives.
“Americans seem to increasingly believe that protests are only legitimate and deserving of protection if they advance a message that we agree with,” says Elly Page, a senior legal advisor at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL). “If the right to protest isn’t protected for everyone, it isn’t protected for anyone.”
Anti-protest laws and rhetoric are already being used to silence pro-Palestinian protests around the country, but they have also critically weakened a constitutional right that will leave millions with few options in November should one party decide to overturn the election results again.
Here’s an abridged history of how we got to this point.
By the time 2017 arrived, a year that saw the introduction of at least 52 anti-protest bills, 9 of which were enacted, here’s what was brewing at the local level:
After Mike Brown is killed by Darren Wilson, protests break out in Ferguson, Missouri. Over the course of 12 days, more than 120 people are arrested while thousands more confront the Missouri National Guard. The militarization of local police departments is put on full display as similar protests break out in dozens of cities and continue through the fall and winter.
Mass racial justice protests spread to dozens of college campuses after students at the University of Missouri, also known as Mizzou, unite in opposition to a series of racist incidents, including white students hurling slurs at Black students, and unseat university president Tim Wolfe.
Hundreds of Indigenous activists across 200 tribes arrive in North Dakota to support the Sioux Nation’s year-long stand against the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Bree Newsome, a Black activist, removes the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse after 9 Black churchgoers in Charleston are killed by a white supremacist, prompting widespread resistance to confederate iconography and monuments
Support for the Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment (BDS) movement grows on college campuses. A record 15 student groups vote on BDS resolutions in 2015, according to Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). The Anti-Defamation League puts the number even higher and laments that the movement is picking up steam on college campuses.
2017-2018: Suppressing Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, and the BDS movement
Punishing campus protesters: At least eight states, including Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Oregon, Wisconsin, and Wyoming, try to force public universities to adopt mandatory disciplinary sanctions for campus protests. Only Georgia succeeds. Punishments range from suspension to expulsion.
“Critical Infrastructure” bills: Less than a year after Standing Rock, Oklahoma passes a law that imposes harsh criminal penalties for protesting near or trespassing on property containing “critical infrastructure,” which includes everything from oil and gas pipelines to telephone poles. Inspired, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a right wing think tank, creates a model bill that eventually passes in at least 20 states with hefty lobbying support from the fossil fuel industry.
Anti-Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment (BDS) bills: After the 2015 spike in support for BDS on college campuses, 50 US governors signed a statement in 2017 condemning the BDS movement as an effort to “demonize and delegitimize Israel.” By 2019, 27 states had laws or executive orders on the books requiring state contractors to pledge not to boycott Israel. Pro-Israel groups like the American Jewish Committee and the Israeli Allies Foundation helped power these bills into law. GOP governors in Ohio and Illinois received personal thank you notes from Israeli officials, according to the Center for Public Integrity.
2020-2021: Black Lives Matter Goes Global
“Anti-riot” laws: Six months after the Black Lives Matter movement reached its peak, 25 states introduced 53 bills conflating protests with riots. By the summer of 2021, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Tennessee all had anti-riot laws on the books. No actual violence or property damage is required to be a “rioter” in most of these laws, just creating “imminent danger” to people or property is enough. According to the Center for Media and Democracy, police unions and sheriff associations lobbied hard for these bills in at least nine states.
Street protest bans: Blocking traffic or a sidewalk without a permit during a protest is now a jailable offense in several states, including Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Missouri, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, and Tennessee. Preventing street violence is often cited as the primary goal, but three of these states carved out legal protections for drivers who hit protesters with their car.
2023: Cop City, Gaza, and Beyond
Domestic terrorism: When Georgia expanded their domestic terrorism law to include attacks on “critical infrastructure” in 2017, they cited the 2015 racist massacre at a Black church in Charleston, SC. Six years later, the law, along with the state’s RICO Act, is being used to prosecute over 50 people aligned with a racial justice campaign to stop the construction of an Atlanta police training facility. Lawmakers like Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who just called students protesters “terrorist sympathizers,” are embracing similar policies and rhetoric to criminalize dissent against Israel’s war on Gaza supported by groups like the Anti-Defamation League, which has described student divestment campaigns as supporting “terror against Israel.”
Police Immunity, Protester Liability: Last month, the Supreme Court declined to weigh in on a lawsuit that makes organizing a mass protest in the South an extreme financial liability. Police officers, whose actions at Black Lives Matter protests have generated millions in misconduct settlements, now enjoy stronger liability protections than protesters living in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.
Last January, not long after agreeing with an actual Nazi that western Jews have brought antisemitism upon themselves by welcoming “hordes of minorities” to their countries, Elon Musk took a quick trip to Poland. The billionaire chief of SpaceX, Tesla, and X laid a wreath at Auschwitz and then preceded on to a symposium in Krakow, where he told the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro that social media could have averted the Holocaust and bragged that he considered himself “aspirationally Jewish.” The tweet, he explained in a different interview, at a different symposium “might be literally the worst and dumbest post I’ve ever done.” But he did not take it down, nor has he moderated his views. If anything his descent into the online fever swamp has only accelerated.
It is hard to appreciate just how thoroughly one of the world’s richest men has been red-pilled until you actually follow along with his media diet. So that’s what I decided to do. Last month, I read everything Musk had to say on X for a week and tracked everyone he interacted with. He tweeted 389 times in five days. He posted the laughing/crying emoji 45 times. But there was a clear signal piercing through the noise. Musk is not a tech visionary with a side interest in politics these days, nor is he just another bored billionaire with a nativist streak; the political activism and the technological ambitions are inseparable. He believes his work is part of a civilizational struggle in which woke progressives pose an existential threat to humanity. And he spends most of his days inside a feedback loop that’s radicalizing him even more.
Over the course of the week, Musk dabbled in a range of small-scale freakouts and smoldering obsessions. He sent 13 tweets about Brazil’s supreme court, as part of a weeks-long battle with the government over efforts to censor disinformation and hate speech. He twice promoted a statistic about the murder rate among Black Americans. He spent one afternoon earnestly amplifying a follower who claimed that “Over 1,000 African migrants have taken over NYC’s City Hall.” (It was an overflow crowd for a hearing on racial disparities in the shelter system.) But one subject came to drown out all the rest. During the week Tesla recalled its CyberTruck for a faulty accelerator pedal, Musk’s most urgent public concern was Katherine Maher.
Musk tweeted about Maher, the CEO of National Public Radio who formerly served as executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, nearly 60 times. It began relatively simply, with Musk lamenting the resignation of Uri Berliner, a former NPR staffer who wrote a critical essay about what he considered the media outlet’s leftward drift. Then Manhattan Institute fellow Chris Rufo—the conservative strategist who helped orchestarate the backlash to Critical Race Theory—began dredging up old comments from Maher, in which she talked about correcting for white historical biases at Wikipedia and pushing back against disinformation at NPR. “Katherine Maher is blatantly racist and sexist – one of the worst human beings in America,” Musk tweeted at Rufo. “She’s evil,” he tweeted again, one minute later.
Rufo and the Canadian behavioral marketing guru Gad Saad are two of Musk’s favorite sounding boards when it comes to wokeness. From Rufo, Musk learns what he should be mad about—clips of Maher speaking to the Atlantic Council, clips of Maher delivering a Ted Talk, screenshots of Maher’s old tweets. From Saad, he gets a more holistic intellectual framework for being mad. Musk is obsessed with the idea that a “woke mind virus” is infecting society. Saad happens to be the author of a book called The Parasitic Mind, which Musk has said gave him “nightmares.” In March, a few months after Saad tweeted at Musk to ask him to promote the book, they held a glitchy 38-minute public discussion on X Spaces. The billionaire has continued to plug the book—including three different times in the week I tuned in.
If you only pay glancing attention to Musk, it’s tough to fully grasp both the intensity and shallowness of his conservative convictions. I knew that he previously said that the rise of Artificial Intelligence could bring about “civilizational destruction,” but I had, in my ignorance, assumed that this fear stemmed from a simple Matrix-style kind of doomism: Machines will grow sentient and enslave us. The reality, which became clear as Musk’s fixation with Maher progressed, was a bit darker: He believes AI will destroy the world with wokeness.
It was a “severe civilization-level risk,” Musk wrote in a late-night exchange with the billionaire venture-capitalist Marc Andreesen. (Andreesen’s own spiraling antipathy toward progressive buzzwords like “sustainability” and “social responsibility” has made him a leading proponent of Effective Accelerationism—sort of the anti-woke mind virus.)
“Now imagine if this is programmed, explicitly or implicitly, into super powerful AI – it could end civilization,” he said in response to a Rufo tweet about Maher’s TED Talk, in which she discusses how Wikipedia moderators think about truth when it comes to thorny subjects like religion. “Now, no need to imagine. It is already programmed into Google Gemini and OpenAI ChatGPT.”
Musk returned to the theme of civilization-destroying woke AI throughout the week. “Imagine if instead of merely rendering forced ‘diverse’ images,” he said in reply to a follower with the handle DogeDesigner, “it decided to make that true in reality, potentially killing millions of people to achieve diversity goals.”
Imagine! With those stakes, everything fits in this heroic or apocalyptic dichotomy.
“[T]he West…wishes to be eaten alive and to have its children sacrificed because then death could be the ultimate expression of its progressive purity,” Saad wrote toward the beginning of the week.
“Suicidal empathy for the L,” Musk agreed.
All of this might sound familiar. That’s because it’s a facet of the same complaint that led to his remedial education at Auschwitz last year, stripped of the most obvious antisemitic signifiers: Woke progressives are opening the doors to the forces that will destroy us all: Falling birth rates, gender ideology, flag-burning immigrants, socially-conscious AI. There was a basic fallacy in expecting a tour about the horrors of genocide to soften the views of someone currently worried about “white genocide” and civil war, and who believes the ideology of his critics could lead to millions of deaths.
Musk described the current state of his red-pilling, and how all-encompassing it is, most succinctly in a response to Rufo about a five-year-old tweet from Maher about feeling “deep discomfort” about having children.
“Once you see that the true battle is expansionists vs extinctionists,” he wrote, “you can’t unsee it.”
And once you see that Musk truly can’t see anything else, you can’t unsee that. Still, there are some things Musk does want AI to kill off. The emerging tech is a boon to Musk not just because of what it promises for his companies, but because of what he hopes it can replace. “Legacy media simply can’t compete with hundreds of millions of humans providing real-time, AI-assisted, interactive information,” he boasted, responding to a chart from DogeDesigner showing declining traffic at major news sites. Musk is doing his part. His feed looks like a newsroom after private equity came to town—one of the only articles from a legacy media outlet he shared all week was a New York Post story about X’s advertising situation, and the only reporter from a legacy news outlet he interacted with was Bill Melugin, Fox News’ man on the border.
Musk touts his platform as the future of news even as he uses it to spread misinformation. Not long after taking over the platform, he shared—and later deleted—a report from a notorious fake-news site that falsely asserted that Nancy’s Pelosi’s husband, Paul, had not been brutally attacked by a home invader and instead had gotten in a fight with a male prostitute. Communicating in emojis and exclamation marks makes it harder to commit factual errors, but he still made some. Musk twice expressed his alarm at a too-good-to-check story about a non-profit that works with migrants in Mexico handing out flyers asking them to vote for Joe Biden when they get to the United States. The non-profit said it had nothing to do with the flyers, and the text appeared to have been crudely translated using an online app. The allegation, which originated with a right-wing site called Muckraker.com, was amplified by the Heritage Foundation and found its way to Musk by way of both the Heritage Foundation and Nate Hochman, a Republican writer and activist who was fired from Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign after featuring a Nazi symbol in a campaign video. It may seem like a small thing, but there’s no such thing when it comes to truth—I’m told the future of civilization hangs in the balance.
A lot of his time is just spent saying the same grim things, to the same grim people, over and over. He has the mannerism not of a master of the universe, but of the reply guys clamoring for their attention. Musk tweeted “DefundNPR” at Rufo three times in two days, like a man at a ballpark by himself, trying to start the wave. He will sometimes respond to the same post multiple times, hours apart with a slightly different reaction. One of the big stories last week in Musk’s circle was a report from the popular account End Wokeness that the actress Naomi Watts has a daughter who is trans.
“Funny how so many progressive actors have children who are transgender,” Gad Saad wrote.
“Terrible,” Musk said.
“‘A ‘trans’ child is the ultimate Hollywood virtue signal, meaning EXTRA approval. Two is even better. 3 is god mode,” said a finance influencer and self-described Tesla shareholder, a few hours later.
“Yup,” said Musk.
It is hard to overstate that this is just what one of the most powerful men in the world does all day. It is the media diet of one of those influencers who only eats organ meat. At least Howard Hughes kept out of sight. But even amidst this right-wing emoji-storm, there were still occasional glimpses of the Musk who, until fairly recently, enjoyed a less polarizing reputation as a billionaire who built cool stuff. He does talk a lot about SpaceX, although those interstellar ambitions take on a different light when you realize his quest is now part of a civilization struggle against pronouns. If you catch him at the right moment, you can still find Musk sharing math jokes, politely engaging with people with product complaints, and offering unsolicited medical advice. “If you’re experiencing severe neck/back pain, I recommend looking into a disc replacement,” he suggested. I don’t know if that’s good advice or not, but I do at least get where he’s coming from.
Once, in the course of 389 tweets, the father of 11 even talked about what it’s like to be a parent.
“Whoa, I just realized that raising a kid is basically 18 years of prompt engineering ,” he wrote.
“Our first child will be born next month – what’s your biggest piece of advice?” a former Tesla employee asked in response.
It was right there for him on a platter—a chance to be normal. What would it be: Treasure every moment? Stock up on wipes?
“Be super careful about what schools teach your kids,” Musk replied.
This story was originally published by the Guardianand is reproduced here as part of the Climate Deskcollaboration.
The fossil fuel industry spent decades sowing doubt about the dangers of burning oil and gas, experts and Democratic lawmakers testified on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.
The Senate budget committee held a hearing to review a report published on Tuesday with the House oversight and accountability committee that they said demonstrates the sector’s shift from explicit climate denial to a more sophisticated strategy of “deception, disinformation and doublespeak.”
“Big oil had to evolve from denial to duplicity,” said Sheldon Whitehouse, the Rhode Island Democrat, who chairs the Senate committee.
The revelations, based on hundreds of newly subpoenaed documents, illustrate how oil companies worked to greenwash their image while fighting climate policy behind the scenes.
“Time and again, the biggest oil and gas corporations say one thing for the purposes of public consumption but do something completely different to protect their profits,” Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House oversight committee, testified. “Company officials will admit the terrifying reality of their business model behind closed doors but say something entirely different, false and soothing to the public.”
The findings build on years of investigative reporting and scholarly research showing that the sector was for decades aware of the dangers of the climate crisis, yet hid that from the public.
In the absence of decisive government action to curb planet-warming emissions, the impacts of the climate crisis have gotten worse, committee Democrats said. Several senators said the industry should have to pay damages for fueling the crisis.
“In my view, it should not be state government or the federal government having to pick up the bill,” said the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. “I think it’s time to ask the people who caused that problem, who lied about that situation, to pick up the bill.”
But budget committee Republicans pushed back on the very premise of the hearing. Chuck Grassley, the Iowa senator and the committee’s top Republican, said it is “undeniable that…fossil fuels are critical to our energy security.”
Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson, meanwhile, claimed that CO2 is a “plant food,” implying it has positive aspects. It’s a talking point that has long been promoted by fossil fuel industry-funded think tanks that aim to sow doubt about climate change.
“I’m not a climate-change denier, I’m just not a climate-change alarmist,” Johnson added.
Kert Davies, director of special investigations at the Center for Climate Integrity, who has long studied climate denial, noted his rhetoric was exemplary of “old school” denial tactics that have long fallen out of favor in the industry.
“The plant food thing was a popular talking point in the 1990s,” he said in an interview. “They’re falling back on these tropes…and that’s all they’ve got, because they have no other rebuttal to the findings about the deception campaigns.”
Perhaps the tensest moment of the morning’s hearing came when Louisiana senator John Kennedy questioned Geoffrey Supran, a University of Miami associate professor who studies fossil fuel industry messaging and whom the Senate committee Democrats had invited to testify.
The Republicansenator attacked Supran for retweeting posts about the protest organization Climate Defiance, which recently accosted Joe Manchin, the centrist West Virginia Democratic senatorwho has well-documented financial interests in coal, and called him a “sick fuck.” (Supran says he did not retweet anything about the action and was not aware of it until the hearing.)
“Are you going to call me a sick fuck?” Kennedy asked.
In response, Supran said Kennedy’s comments were “characteristic” of the oil industry’s “propaganda techniques.”
“Among all the tactics that the fossil fuel interests have used over the decades to deny their products have caused global warming, one of the most common is character assassination,” Supran said in an interview after the hearing. “The idea is to attack the messenger rather than the message, because they don’t have a foot to stand on with the message.”
The Republicans’ messaging, Supran added, is an indication that though the industry has adopted new forms of “climate delay,” older forms of “climate denial are still alive and well in some cases.”
He said Kennedy’s questioning also points to the “influence of oil money on American politics,” adding that research shows representatives who fight climate policy get more money from fossil fuel companies. (Kennedy has accepted more than $1.5 million from the oil industry.)
Cities and states have filed a slew of lawsuits against big oil for alleged deception. Sharon Eubanks, who was lead counsel on behalf of the US in a successful 2005 lawsuit against big tobacco and was invited by the Democrats to testify, said the US could also reasonably take legal action against the oil industry.
In her testimony, Eubanks referenced a document called the Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan, nicknamed the “victory memo” by climate-denial researchers. Circulated by top oil and gas lobby group American Petroleum Institute in 1998, the document detailed a plan to undermine climate science and promote doubt and denial.
One prong of the plan, Davies noted, was targeting US representatives. “They’re explicitly targeted, and companies spent money on giving Congress propaganda,” he said. “They’re doing the industry’s work for them.”
On Monday, Kansas Republicans voted to override Democratic Governor Laura Kelly’s vetoes of four anti-abortion measures. Three bills—which will require doctors to gather and report information from patients about why they are getting an abortion; make it a crime to force someone to obtain an abortion; and allow people to receive tax credits for donations to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers—will now become law. And a measure in the state budget reallocating $2 million to crisis pregnancy centers will also move forward, despite the governor’s opposition.
Gov. Kelly and other critics say that the measures will contribute to an erosion of abortion rights—even though, in August 2022, Kansans rejected a referendum to remove the right to abortion from the state constitution. In other words: These bills are an attempt by Kansas Republicans to further stigmatize abortion—and, in doing so, subvert the will of the 59 percent of state voters who already upheld abortion rights. And it’s not the first time: Earlier this year, eight Kansas House Republicans introduced a bill to ban all abortions except those necessary to save the patient’s life, forbid the distribution of drugs that end pregnancies, and allow individuals to file suits against doctors or anyone who helps someone get an abortion (it ultimately died in committee).
“By continuously finding ways to raise the issue and attempting to subvert the will of Kansans,” Gov. Kelly said in a statement provided to Mother Jones, “these legislators are not representing the vast majority of those who elected them to office.”
Anti-abortion group Kansas for Life, though, called the four veto overrides “big wins.”
One of the bills pushed through by Republicans this week, nicknamed the “reasons bill,” will force patients to pick “the most important factor” in their decision to seek an abortion from a set of 11 pre-written options. Patients can decline to answer, and their responses will remain anonymous. Medical facilities will now be required to report the responses twice a year to the state secretary of health and environment. Proponents of that bill—which include anti-abortion groups such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, Kansas Family Voice, and Kansas for Life—say it will facilitate useful insights into what leads people to obtain abortions. But opponents, like Planned Parenthood, say the questions are unnecessary and invasive, and only serve to further stigmatize abortion. They also say the questions are redundant, because data already exists showing why people get abortions: Research from the University of California, San Francisco says “the most common reasons for seeking an abortion are not being able to afford to have a child, the pregnancy coming at the wrong time in life and the man involved not being a suitable partner/parent.”
Gov. Kelly agreed, saying in a statement that she vetoed that bill because “there is also no valid reason to force a woman to disclose to the legislature why she is seeking an abortion.” Rep. Ron Bryce, the original sponsor of the bill, did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones Thursday afternoon.
Another bill makes “coercion to obtain an abortion” a crime punishable by up to a year in prison and a fine of up to a $10,000. It defines “coercion” as physical or financial threats of harm or abuse or threat of the legal system. But experts who work in domestic and sexual violence treatment and prevention in Kansas say the bill is too narrow in scope and ignores more common forms of reproductive coercion, including forcing someone to become or stay pregnant and prohibiting their access to birth control. “Ignoring these forms of coercion undermines the effectiveness of the legislation and leaves individuals vulnerable to manipulation and control,” according to testimony against the bill by Sapphire Garcia-Lies, executive director of the Kansas Birth Justice Society.
Additionally, data shows coerced abortions are quite rare in Kansas (and elsewhere): A June 2023 report from the state Department of Health and Environment shows that less than 1 percent of the more than 12,300 abortions in Kansas in 2022 involved reports of “physical, mental, or emotional abuse or neglect.” Kansas Republicans, though, just don’t seem to care—because when Democratic lawmakers introduced two different amendments to broaden the bill’s focus to outlawing reproductive coercion, Republicans in both the House and Senate struck them down.
This isn’t the first time Republicans have tried to co-opt the concept of reproductive coercion in their attempts to restrict abortion access: As I reported back in March—before the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case seeking to restrict the availability of mifepristone—anti-abortion activists spread myth and misinformation about why people get abortions in multiple briefs to the high court.
Gov. Kelly said she opposed the coercion bill because “it is already a crime to threaten violence against another individual,” adding she also has concerns that the “vague language” could be marshaled for wrongful criminalization of Kansans. Rep. Rebecca Schmoe, the lawmaker who originally introduced the bill, did not respond to questions.
The other measures Republicans rammed through after the governor’s vetoes include a bill providing a 70 percent state income tax credit for donations to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers plus sales tax exemptions to the centers themselves. Republicans also passed a line item in the state budget re–allocating $2 million to CPCs. Anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers are dedicated to discouraging abortion, often with the help of volunteers—not medical professionals—who peddle misinformation. Gov. Kelly said in statements explaining those vetoes that it is not “appropriate” for the state “to divert taxpayer dollars to largely unregulated crisis pregnancy centers.” Rep. Henry Helgerson, a Democrat who introduced the tax credit bill, and Sen. Jeff Longbine, a Republican who chairs the Financial Institutions and Insurance committee, did not immediately respond to questions about those measures.
Abortion is currently legal in Kansas through 22 weeks’ gestation. But some barriers remain: The state restricts public funding of abortions, and minors need consent from parents or guardians to obtain abortions. The biggest barrier of all, though, may be Republicans in the legislature who seem hell bent on ignoring the rights voters have made clear they want to protect.
“This is a deliberate move to ignore the expressly stated will of the people despite the damaging consequences of these bills,” Micah Kubic, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas, told me this week. “In their defiance of the clearly established right to reproductive healthcare in the our state constitution, these extremist lawmakers remain out of step with the everyday Kansans they serve.”
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is best known for his famous family name, his anti-vaccine activism, and his unexpected third-party run for president. He’s not particularly well known for his passion for criminal justice reform. And yet, next month, he’s scheduled to deliver the keynote address at the Detroit stop on the New Dawn for Justice Criminal Reform Tour. The six-city tour’s website promises it “amplifies the collective voice calling for equitable and humane reform” and encourages “individuals from all walks of life to contribute to the reshaping of our justice system.”
The tour’s lead organizer is a Kennedy campaign staffer named Angela Stanton King, who brings her own experience to this fight for change. As her bio explains, “With a personal narrative of overcoming incarceration and championing prison reform, she has become a pivotal figure in advocating for justice.”
Here’s what her bio doesn’t say: Stanton King, who is 47, vociferously supported Donald Trump—until she was hired by RFK Jr.’s campaign as its Black outreach director, where she now works. On culture war issues, she has little in common with Kennedy: Stanton King has several times been the subject of media attention for her anti-gay and anti-trans activism, issues Kennedy doesn’t touch. A staunch opponent of abortion, she is the founder of Auntie Angie’s House, an anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center and home for pregnant women and new mothers, while Kennedy has been generally pro-choice. But despite all that, Stanton King may be promising Kennedy something he desperately needs: an inroad with Black conservatives who are increasingly supporting Donald Trump—about 17 percent, according to a January poll.
The idea that a member of America’s most famous Democratic family could lure Trump voters in this tight race may appear counterintuitive: Until recently, it was a foregone conclusion that Kennedy’s candidacy could only help Trump. Yet Kennedy’s anti-vaccine crusading has curried favor with some on the right—and with Black conservatives, Kennedy may see an opportunity.
And if he can appeal to those voters, Kennedy could potentially peel off Black conservatives from both parties, Emory University political science professor Andra Gillespie told me. Gillespie, who studies politics in the Black community, noted that unlike white conservatives, Black conservatives sometimes still vote Democrat. Stanton King, said Gillespie, “could possibly attempt to make the claim that her conservative cachet could possibly pick off Republicans, and could possibly pick off some Democratic voters,” some of whom might have soured on Biden because of his support for Israel. Whether Stanton King will be able to deliver, though, is another question. “I think she’s completely full of it,” Gillespie said, “and [Kennedy] should be able to see right through it.”
After a childhood spent bouncing back and forth between Buffalo, New York, and the South, when she was a young adult, Angela Stanton settled in Atlanta—where she became involved in a car-theft racketeering scheme. She was convicted in 2004 and went on to serve two years in state prison. About a decade later, Stanton self-published a memoir called Lies of a Real Housewife: Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil, and alleged that Phaedra Parks, star of the reality TV series Real Housewives of Atlanta, had been part of the same criminal scheme for which Stanton had been convicted. (Parks later sued Stanton for defamation, though she eventually agreed to drop the lawsuit with prejudice.)
During that tumultuous time in her life, Stanton met Alveda King, niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., an outspoken Trump supporter and prominent figure in Atlanta’s Black conservative community. “She looked at me as a child, a child that needed to be born again,” Stanton wrote in her 2018 memoir, Life of a Real Housewife: The Angela Stanton Story. King, she wrote, brought her in to help at the crisis pregnancy center and home for new mothers that she was running at the time. The work, which included formerly incarcerated women, was particularly meaningful to Stanton because she had been chained to a bed in prison while giving birth to one of her daughters. King became her mentor and godmother, and Angela Stanton went on to change her name to Angela Stanton King.
In 2020, President Trump officially pardoned Stanton King, saying in a statement that she “works tirelessly to improve reentry outcomes for people returning to their communities upon release from prison, focusing on the critical role of families in the process. This pardon is supported by Alveda King.”
Later that year, Stanton King used the momentum from Trump’s pardon to launch a run for the Georgia congressional seat once held by legendary civil rights leader John Lewis who had recently died of pancreatic cancer. Stanton King’s campaign manager was Trevian Kutti, who had once served as the publicist for Kanye West and would later go on to be charged with Donald Trump for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia. In an interview about her campaign with the Guardian, Stanton King denied allegations that she was an adherent of the QAnon conspiracy theory. When the reporter confronted her with a tweet she had made referencing the debunked QAnon rumor that the furniture company Wayfair was trafficking children, she responded, “You know they are. You saw it. You watched the news just like I did.”
Stanton King lost in a landslide to her Democratic opponent, Nikema Williams. But just a month later, as the Covid vaccines were about to be rolled out, Stanton King discovered a new cause. In December 2020, she made an appearance at an Atlanta conference hosted by America’s Frontline Doctors, the right-wing physicians’ group that promoted conspiracy theories about the pandemic. The presenters—who included the group’s founder, January 6 insurrectionist Simone Gold—warned the crowd that the US government was using the Black community as guinea pigs for the vaccine. This was an especially potent accusation given the long and troubled relationship between the Black community and the mainstream medical establishment.
Stanton King saw an opportunity and in 2022, with her organization, the American King Foundation, she announced a new initiative called Stop Medical Apartheid to oppose “the dark history of medical experimentation on Black Americans.” In a press release, Stanton King wrote, “Medical Apartheid is Population Control. Population Control comes in different forms; Vaccines, Abortions, Mass Incarceration, and Perverted Sexual Agendas targeting children. Population Control is Racist! From the WOMB to the TOMB, it’s time Y’all!”
That same year, Stanton King spoke at the Defeat the Mandates rally in Los Angeles, an anti-vaccine event sponsored by a group of activists who also organized the anti-vaccine trucker convo. The lineup also included representatives from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s organization, Children’s Health Defense. In a sprawling speech, Stanton King thundered against vaccine mandates—but also touched on abortion (“lynching Black babies in the womb”) and transgender rights. “I’m only 45 years young, and I’ve only naturally birthed and naturally raised five children, and I say ‘naturally’ because I raised my boys to be boys and my girls to be girls,” she told the crowd, to thunderous applause.
Stanton King elaborated on that statement in a 2022 appearance on the TV talk show Dr. Phil, telling the in-studio audience that she would never accept her trans daughter’s gender identity. “I believe that it may be a form of mental illness,” she said “It’s not just that he was born male—he is a male.” Dr. Phil pushed back—and afterward, on Instagram, she posted a video of herself ranting about the show and trans people. “If you were supposed to be a woman, you wouldn’t have to go and have surgeries to get titties put on your breasts, you would already be born with them,” she yelled. “If you were a woman, you wouldn’t be born with a dick, you wouldn’t have to go get your dick cut off.” (Kennedy’s campaign didn’t respond to an emailed question about his response to these comments and his stance on transgender rights, or to any of the other questions I sent. Stanton King didn’t respond to my questions, either.)
Throughout her anti-vaccine and anti-trans crusading, Stanton King continued to support Trump in mediaappearances. “Trump can’t be President forever and I know that,” she tweeted in 2021. “But he’s the only one bold enough to fight these evil Demonic Satanic forces from the pits of HELL and I’m standing with him.”
But in late 2023, her alliances shifted. In a Twitter spaces event in late April, she said she had soured on the Trump campaign after the former president’s team declined to visit and support Auntie Angie’s House. So she reached out to Kennedy, whom she had met at the Defeat the Mandates rally in 2022, through her “really good friend,” Capitol insurrectionist Simone Gold. “He came by, and he sat down, and he talked to us for about an hour and a half,” she recalled. “And when he left that day, his perspective on abortion had changed.”
A few months later, when Kennedy asked her to work for his campaign, she was conflicted. “I did not want my relationship with Trump to be ruined,” she said in the Twitter Spaces event. Yet she had repeatedly reached out to the Trump campaign asking for a job, to no avail. “People were telling me to remember where I came from and I was nothing until Trump gave me a party and it was making it seem like because I got a pardon for Trump that you know, I wasn’t valid enough to have a paid position.” So she accepted Kennedy’s offer. By January of this year, Stanton King was knocking on doors with Kennedy in Atlanta’s historically Black West End neighborhood.
Kennedy, meanwhile, has confirmed that Stanton King’s thinking on abortion has influenced his own. While he has consistently stated that he believes that women should be able to choose abortion at any point in their pregnancies, in a recent appearance on the conservative talk show The Daily Wire, he told the story of his visit to Auntie Angie’s House. “I talked to some mothers in the last couple of weeks in Atlanta, Georgia, in this facility where I’ve been repeatedly back to—Angie’s House, run by Angela Stanton King, who is kind of a relative of Martin Luther King’s family,” he said. “She takes care of women who are being pressured to have abortions because they don’t have the money to take care of the baby, and I don’t think that that should ever be a reason in this country for a woman not carrying her child.”
Stanton King still seems conflicted about the former president. In the Twitter Spaces event, she said she blames her frustrations on “his gatekeepers,” not Trump himself. “I actually still support President Trump,” she said. “I just don’t work for him.” In April, in a since-deleted tweet, she attacked Diante Johnson, a Trump supporter and leader of the Black Conservative Federation, calling him “an open flaming Feminine closet Gay.” In another recent tweet she thundered, “Republicans think I’m helping RFK to help Trump. I have no regrets, but there’s no way on God’s green earth I’d support a party that turned their backs on Black Women & Babies while facing a Black Maternal Health Crisis. Who has their head that far up Trump’s ass cause it AINT me.”
This weekend, Stanton King’s New Dawn for Justice Tour is scheduled to make a stop at the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta. In an email to Mother Jones, a spokesperson for the King Center, the King family legacy nonprofit that runs the museum at the site, clarified that it “is not in any way affiliated with this event”—it will take place entirely outside in the area that is public space.
Will Stanton King’s imprimatur on the Kennedy campaign be enough to draw Black voters? Emory’s Gillespie doesn’t think so. She pointed to Stanton King’s failed run for Congress in 2020, when her Democratic opponent, Nikema Williams, won with 85 percent of the vote. “I think there may be a question of how deep her networks are—like, how influential could she possibly be in some of these communities?” Which, she said, made her wonder about Kennedy’s discernment. “What does this say about your judgment to put the administration together?”
Stanton King says she has big plans for the Kennedy administration. In her Twitter Spaces event in April, she spoke of “a vision that God gave me” in which there is “an Auntie Angie’s House in every Black community that has Planned Parenthood.” She said she was working with Kennedy on a policy, called More Choice, More Life, to make this vision a reality. “I’m so thankful that Bobby and his team are shedding light on what we’re doing.”
A longtime lieutenant and criminal co-defendant of far-right Chinese fugitive mogul Guo Wengui has agreed to plead guilty to fraud charges ahead of their upcoming trial. This development strengthens the position of federal prosecutors in a case in which they have called Steve Bannon, a vocal Guo ally, a “co-conspirator.”
Yvette Wang, Guo’s former chief of staff and alleged co-conspirator in defrauding thousands of Guo supporters of more than $1 billion, pleaded not guilty after her arrest in March 2023. Like Guo, who was arrested the same day and also pleaded not guilty, Wang was denied bond as possible flight risk and has been jailed since her arrest. A brief order posted Thursday by District Court judge Annalisa Torres, however, sets a hearing Friday morning for Wang to change her plea to guilty.
Wang’s guilty plea is likely an effort to shorten her possible prison sentence. There is no indication so far that she has reached a cooperation agreement with prosecutors. But her plea nevertheless bolsters the massive fraud and racketeering case against Guo. Another Guo associate charged in the case will not stand trial because he is fugitive, believed to be in the United Arab Emirates.
Guo is a former Chinese real estate mogul and billionaire who fled to the US in 2015, just before Chinese authorities charged him with a series of financial crimes. In 2017, Guo began publicly issuing allegations of corruption and other malfeasance against Chinese Communist Party leaders. His anti-CCP pronouncements and Chinese effortstosilence Guo or forcehisextradition helped him win thousands of ardent supporters among Chinese emigres and gain attention from US China hawks.
Shortly after Bannon’s 2017 ouster from the Trump White House, he began working for Guo as an adviser and consultant, helping the mogul craft an image as a fearless CCP critic and launch a series of nonprofit and media organizations the men claimed aimed to “take down the CCP.” Wang, Guo’s top assistant since he entered the US, was closely involved in that effort. Guo’s organizations also supported Trump and regularly pushed bizarre false claims about Covid and the 2020 election.
Prosecutors charged last year that Guo’s political posturing was a con. They allege that Guo used the organizations he launched with Bannon “to amass followers who were aligned with his purported campaign against the Chinese Communist Party and who were also inclined to believe [Guo’s] statements regarding investment and moneymaking opportunities,” so that he could defraud them. They charge that he pocketed hundreds of millions in supposed investments and used them to fund a lavish lifestyle that included a $3.5 million Ferrari, a $26 million mansion, a $30 million yacht, a $140,000 piano, and two $36,000 mattresses.
Bannon has not been charged in the case, but in a filing last month, prosecutors labeled him a “co-conspirator” and noted that he received at least $1 million in funds they alleged Guo misappropriated from investors. That filing was part of an effort by prosecutors to ensure that evidence related to the former Trump adviser can be admitted during trial. (Out of court statements that would otherwise be barred as hearsay can be used as evidence if they come from an alleged co-conspirator.) But that designation, along with Wang’s guilty plea, will likely cause more legal worry for Bannon, who also faces a four-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress, if his appeal effort fails, and an upcoming fraud trial in New York in a separate case.
The morning after the New York Police Department arrested pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia University, the city’s mayor appeared satisfied.
“This is not a department that was dealing with one production at a time,” Mayor Eric Adams said, flanked by top police officials, during a press conference on Wednesday. “You have to be a well-organized professional operation to deal with all of those encounters.”
This was part and parcel for Adams, a former NYPD officer with a habit of calling the city’s law enforcement “my cops” and “my police department.“But then came the first inklings of what has become Adams’ calling card as he justifies the crackdown on protests.
“When I first started seeing the protest take place in the city, it just did not fit right,” he explained. “I saw similar indicators from the Black Lives Matter march when it was brought to my attention that there were those who came to the city to disrupt our city.” The mayor then claimed that an investigation had confirmed what had been “feared”: New York City had fallen victim to a global phenomenon in which “outside agitators” sought to radicalize young people. (For what purpose, the mayor wouldn’t say.)
Adams continues to commit to such vaguery. When repeatedly pressed for specific numbers by multiple news outlets the mayor stuck to variations of “I don’t think that matters.”
The mayor goes on to say "One professor poisoning a classroom of students" is just as bad as 50.
There isn’t much doubt that some non-students were identified in the mix of the reported 300 people arrested this week; outrage over Israel’s war spreads far beyond Columbia’s campus, which hosts acres of publicly accessible space. But consider for a moment that the public is being asked to trust that nefarious “outside agitators” include Nahla Al-Arian, a retired elementary school teacher who was not on Columbia’s campus this week and yet was specifically called out by Adams. The narrative suffered another public embarrassment when what appeared to be an ordinary bike lock was offered as evidence that sinister individuals had infiltrated the city’s elite campuses. When the slippery language of who is “affiliated” with the schools is exploited, it seems to only serve to make the protests about anything but the actual issues at play. (As the city’s top brass has made clear, the specifics don’t matter anyway.)
“It’s scary because the whole world is watching what’s going on at Columbia, and these events need to be documented in real time, accurately,” Barnard student and WKCR reporter Sarah Barlyn said. “The mayor should be spreading accurate information. So should major outlets such as CNN….I wish individuals who weren’t privy to accurate information just wouldn’t share it at all.”
This is the “outside agitator” narrative stretched to its limits. It happens across political lines—the right’s hyperfocus on antifa and condemnation of the Black Lives Matter movement; former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi encouraging the FBI to investigate pro-Palestinian protesters. These instances tend to share a common goal of seeking to explain why police force is justified. In the case of Adams, the talking point refuses to see a city whose residents could be disgusted with bloodshed, so it must be someone else, an individual with questionable origins, that’s come to fuck shit up. Say it enough times and national media quickly adopts it too.
That all of this is happening against the backdrop of devastating force in Gaza shouldn’t be lost on anyone, especially on the exceedingly few individuals who have the power to create change. “No,” President Biden said on Thursday when asked if campus protests have prompted him to reconsider his support for Israel. The public can at least trust him on that one.
Former president Donald Trump will likely face additional sanctions for violating the gag order in his criminal case in New York City after a brutal contempt hearing Thursday morning. He had already been fined $9,000 on Tuesday for nine violations.
Trump is facing 34 felony counts of falsifying business records for his role in a 2016 scheme to cover up an alleged extra-marital affair with adult film star Stormy Daniels. (Trump denies any affair.)
Before the trial started, Judge Juan Merchan, who is overseeing Trump’s hush-money case, issued a gag order prohibiting Trump the former president from attacking or denigrating jurors, witnesses, court employees, prosecutors (or their families). The latest contempt hearing focused on four additional potential violations on top of the fine that has already been levied on Trump.
At Thursday’s hearing, prosecutors offered a quick argument that Trump had violated the gag order with statements he had made about his former attorney Michael Cohen—expected to be a key witness in the case against him. Cohen has said that he was the go-between in the hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
The prosecutors also said Trump was in violation for a comment in which the former president said he felt the jury was made up of Democratic voters.
“The defendant clearly thinks the rules should be different,” prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office Christopher Conroy told Judge Merchan. “It’s an insidious thing.”
While prosecutors spoke, Trump seemed irritated. He whispered with his attorneys and stifled yawns. But his demeanor changed dramatically when his attorney Todd Blanche stood to defend his client.
Blanche delivered a stuttered and stumbling rebuttal, essentially arguing that Trump needed to speak freely to defend himself as a political candidate. Trump’s body language became more and more tense, rolling his eyes and shaking his head as Blanche struggled to explain to Merchan why the former president should be allowed to say what he wants. (In recent days, Trump has criticized Blanche for not adhering to his desires.)
Blanche mentioned a recent joke by President Joe Biden at the White House Correspondents Dinner that Trump has faced some “Stormy weather” and Michael Cohen’s podcast, tweets, and TikToks, in which the presumptive Republican nominee for president’s former attorney regularly taunts his old boss and solicits donations.
“Everyone can say what they want in this case except President Trump,” Blanche complained.
“They’re not defendants in this case, that’s a very significant issue you’re overlooking,” Merchan retorted. “I don’t have authority over the press, I don’t have the authority over most of the people who are talking.”
Blanche went on to show a series of particularly taunting tweets from Cohen on the court’s overhead projector, reading the text, including repeatedly using Cohen’s pet nickname for Trump: “VonShitzinPantz.” He also put a tweet featuring a particularly uncomplimentary photoshopped picture of Trump as a bloated superhero on the courtroom’s big screen. Cohen had retweeted the picture, Blanche said.
Such a sad day that the defendant can’t lie and attack the Judge, prosecutors, and their families. pic.twitter.com/Bk35mIah9B
The post led to loud laughing in the courtroom and Blanche asked his assistants to move to the next slide.
“Quickly please,” Blanche barked.
Blanche continued, saying it wasn’t fair that Trump could not respond the way he wanted to when reporters asked him questions about Cohen. But Merchan responded that Trump cannot complain about having to face reporters when it is the former president that decides to go talk to them.
“It was your client who went down to that holding area and stood in front of the press and started to speak,” Merchan said. “It wasn’t the press that went to him. You’re telling me that scrutiny is outrageous? Nobody forced your client to go stand where he did that.”
Blanche appeared flustered.
“Judge, I agree with that,” he said, leading to more courtroom laughs, and causing Trump to sit up from his slumped position and twist to turn and stare at his attorney. On Tuesday, the New York Timesreported Trump is growing increasingly irritated with Blanche for not being aggressive enough in his courtroom strategy. Merchan didn’t appear much happier with Blanche, repeatedly cutting him off and telling him to skip the parts of his argument that did not address the immediate question at hand.
Merchan did not rule immediately, but it seems likely that if he finds Trump violated the gag order again, he will impose more fines. The maximum fine for violations of the gag order is $1,000, which on Tuesday Merchan said he did not think was sufficient to deter Trump, and warned that if Trump violated the order again he would consider jail time. But all of Trump’s most recent potential gag order violations came before the jail warning was issued, a fact that prosecutors on Thursday noted, saying they were only asking for more fines.
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