What Do They Mean?

I think I know the answer to my question, but sometimes, like an idiot goat trying to get somebody to explain a typewriter to him, I find myself trying to make sense of something that isn't meant to make sense to me or anybody else.

Shutting down the borders is a pretty classic Daddy State type move. And when you can couple it with some good old-fashioned racial scapegoating - hey - why not?

They have yet to articulate what exactly "shutting down the border" would look like.  What does Mike Johnson mean as he calls for "... transformational policy change to secure our border, enforce our laws, and deter even more illegal immigration"?

I'm afraid it's not a big stretch to think it means machine guns, razor wire, and land mines.

And let's remember that a closed border serves to keep people in too.

Border dispute could force partial government shutdown

Far-right House Republicans are threatening to block legislation to keep the federal government operating without sweeping changes to immigration laws

Far-right Republicans in the House are threatening to force a partial government shutdown unless Congress enacts strict new changes to immigration law, imperiling crucial government services — and U.S. aid to Ukraine — over a long-fraught issue that could be critical in this year’s elections.

Dozens of GOP lawmakers toured a portion of the U.S.-Mexico border at Eagle Pass, Tex., on Wednesday to push House-passed legislation that would significantly limit migrants’ ability to claim asylum, restart construction of a border wall and cut into President Biden’s power to grant humanitarian parole to migrants. Members of the Republican conference’s most conservative flank demanded that legislation become law in exchange for their votes to approve federal spending for the rest of the 2024 fiscal year, though the GOP-led House already rejected such a trade in September.

“H. R. 2 needs to be the unflinching House policy because all of it’s important to securing the border,” Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), chair of the archconservative House Freedom Caucus, told The Washington Post. “The president and Senate majority leader have no interest in securing the border, and so therefore, we as a House majority should say, ‘We’re not going to fund a government that is going to continue to facilitate this border invasion.’”

Federal agents recorded nearly 250,000 illegal crossings along the southern border in December, the highest total ever in one month, according to preliminary Customs and Border Protection data obtained by The Post.

That crisis is complicating efforts in Washington to head off a partial shutdown. Funding for roughly 20 percent of the federal government — including for essential programs such as some veterans assistance and food and drug safety services — expires on Jan. 19, and money for the rest of the government runs out shortly after that, on Feb. 2. But lawmakers have not yet agreed on how to pass full-year spending bills or more temporary funding. Without action by the first deadline, a partial government shutdown would begin. Congress returns next week with little time to work out the details.

The White House’s top budget official told reporters Friday that the GOP tactic significantly increased the risk of a shutdown.

“I wouldn’t say pessimistic, but I’m not optimistic [about the odds to avert a shutdown],” Shalanda Young, director of the Office of Management and Budget, said at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. “Earlier this week, their border trip left me with more concerns about where they’re headed.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) did not formally back the demands to link immigration restrictions with federal spending, but with a narrow GOP majority in a bitterly divided chamber, he relies on the Freedom Caucus, a group that has been a persistent thorn in the side of Republican leadership, to maintain power. He called that immigration bill, H.R. 2, a “necessary ingredient” to any immigration policy.

“Let me tell you what our top two priorities are right now,” Johnson told reporters Wednesday. “In summary, we want to get the border closed and secured first, and we want to make sure that we reduce nondefense discretionary spending.”

Republican lawmakers and political operatives say immigration issues work to their advantage, and hope to capitalize on the porous border to maintain control of their narrow House majority, retake the Senate and propel former president Donald Trump back to the White House.

“I would prefer the Senate Democrats found enlightenment and said, ‘H.R. 2 is what we want to do.’ Turns out I live in the real world and that’s not going to happen,” Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.) said. “But if we can get a substantial win on the border, I think it is one of those rare cases where it actually really helps the country and helps us politically.”

That strategy has at least some support in the Senate, where Democrats control the chamber by a single vote, requiring help from Republicans to get around potential filibusters to pass new spending legislation.

“I think that we have a real fiscal crisis in our country, but I think the most significant crisis we have is what is going on at the southern border,” Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), a regular interlocutor between hard-right lawmakers in the House and more pragmatic Senate Republicans, told The Post on Friday. “And I encourage my Republican friends in the House to use all the negotiating leverage they can to solve this problem politically.

A bipartisan group in the Senate — Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) — has been negotiating border legislation for weeks in connection with a separate spending bill that would devote more than $100 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine and Israel and to the U.S.-Mexico border, among other priorities. That bill would include $14 billion in border security provisions. Senate Republicans have demanded immigration policy changes, as well as the security funding, before they’d vote to approve additional money for Ukraine.

But House Republicans are far more skeptical of Kyiv than their Senate counterparts, and demands to link immigration policy to ongoing government funding, instead of to the Ukraine aid, could mean the House won’t pass any assistance for the war in Ukraine.

This round of budgetary negotiations wasn’t supposed to be so complicated. In the spring, President Biden struck a deal with then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to suspend the nation’s debt limit in exchange for limiting discretionary spending to $1.59 trillion in 2024, with 1 percent growth in 2025. Because that represented a cut when taking inflation into account, Biden and McCarthy agreed to spend another $69 billion each year in a side deal, with some of that offset by repurposing existing funds.

But House Republicans, led by members of the Freedom Caucus, were unsatisfied with that arrangement. A few months later, they ousted McCarthy from the speakership when he turned to Democratic votes in September to maintain those spending levels and avert a government shutdown. In a sign of stark internal divisions, though, the GOP-led House also rejected a stopgap funding measure with steep budget cuts that included the sweeping border changes the far right now seeks. (McCarthy resigned from Congress at the end of 2023.)

After taking over as speaker, Johnson in November also needed support from Democrats to pass another stopgap funding bill, which staggered expiration dates between Jan. 19 and Feb. 2.

The $69 billion side deal that McCarthy struck has been a sticking point through the fall and winter. Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), then chair of the Freedom Caucus, told reporters just after Thanksgiving that his group would support the $1.59 trillion spending total that the debt ceiling law set — even though that was the amount that led some members to boot McCarthy from the speakership and drive the government to the verge of a shutdown — but only if it didn’t include the side agreements.

By early December, Johnson echoed the sentiment, declaring that the additional funding was not codified in law, but merely a handshake deal between his predecessor and Biden.

“This budget agreement was not a handshake agreement,” Young, from the White House OMB, said Friday. “It was a vote of Congress. It is not optional. They have to keep their word.”

“That group has got sway over Johnson. They’ve toppled McCarthy. They’re the reason why nothing’s got done in the last 12 months,” Rep. David Trone (D-Md.), a member of the House Appropriations Committee, told The Post.

Good, the Freedom Caucus’s new leader, said he has told Johnson that the speaker would “be a hero to the American people” if he threatened a government shutdown over border security.

“I think that’s a fight the American people will reward Speaker Johnson for waging,” Good said.

Runnin' Like A Scalded Dog

Speculate away, good people. Here's mine:

I think the prick is finally being booted - not because he's been livin' large and gettin' fat on the company dime, but because he's attracted too much of the wrong kind of attention, and the organization may be facing some pretty bad shit - like charges of laundering Russian mob money, and then maybe funneling some of it into American politics.

Dunno - but there's been something wrong with the way that bunch does business for a long time.

NRA chief Wayne LaPierre announces resignation

Longtime National Rifle Association chief executive Wayne LaPierre, facing a lawsuit in New York that sought to remove him from his post, announced his resignation from the organization Friday.

LaPierre is named as one of four defendants in a lawsuit over alleged fraud filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James. Last week a state appeals court ruled the suit could move forward, denying a request from the NRA to end the probe.

LaPierre cited health reasons in his decision, which was accepted by the NRA board of directors at a Friday meeting, according to a news release from the organization. In the statement, LaPierre said he would “never stop supporting the NRA.”

Andrew Arulanandam, the organization’s head of general operations, will become the interim chief executive and executive vice president, the news release said.

Today's Keith

"...where the rule of law will be erased, and replaced by the rule of threat, and coercion, and quid pro quo."

SERIES 2 EPISODE 101: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

TRUMP SUPREME COURT THREATS CONTINUE; NOW AGAINST KAVANAUGH - 1.5.24

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT:

For the second time in as many days and the fourth time in one week, Trump has gotten the message out to the Justices of the Supreme Court - and especially the three he appointed - that they’d better rule in favor of Trump in the 14th Amendment and Presidential Immunity cases because he put them there.

Attorney Alina Habba did it again, again on Fox. Wednesday it was in the afternoon; last night it was in prime time. The message is loud and clear, and God knows with the utter corruption of the conservatives on THIS court you could never convict anybody of doing anything, but this is either an illegal threat AGAINST Justice Brett Kavanaugh and others, or it is the back half of an illegal quid pro quo. Habba said she "had faith" in "people like Kavanaugh, who the president fought for, who the president went through hell to get into place. He'll step up."

A week ago today Maggie Haberman went on CNN and said Trump feared SCOTUS might rule against him because it was trying to look balanced. On Tuesday, his first simpleton attorney Christina Bobb said that any ruling - even one declaring that Trump was guilty of insurrection - would be irrelevant if the people wanted Trump as their ruler. Wednesday, Habba insisted that "Republicans" (she meant Supreme Court Justices) "unfortunately sometimes shy away from being pro-Trump because they feel that even if the law’s on our side they might be swayed much like the Democratic side would be, right? So they’re trying so hard to look neutral that sometimes they make the wrong call."

The political pressure is astonishing, even for Trump. And in the light of his stochastic terrorism against Justices Engoron and Chutkan, it is intolerable, and it portends true threats against any justice Trump feels hasn't been "loyal" to him.

THERE MIGHT be good news out of New Hampshire: one poll shows Trump leading Nikki Haley by just four points with two weeks until the primary. There was also a good opening advertising salvo by the Biden campaign against the threat Trump is manifesting. And the same Alina Habba went on another streaming show and insisted that given the choice between being smart or pretty she'd choose pretty because "I can fake being smart."

Well, no, sorry. You clearly can't.

B-Block (32:20) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD:

Like every other rich fascist before him, Elon Musk wants to destroy the National Labor Relations Board. Politico has a good joke at his expense. RFK Jr's Super Pac apparently made it up about Dionne Warwick AND Martin Sheen. And the Associated Press article that actually headlines Bothsidesism on tomorrow's 3rd Anniversary of Trump's January 6th Coup: “One Attack, Two Interpretations: Biden And Trump Both Make The January 6 Riot A Political Rallying Cry.”

Today's Podcast

• Republicans aren't messaging well
• Let the vibes rule
• Millionaire's Tax in Massachusetts
• Johnny Cash was a hippie
• Michelle Obama will not be riding to anyone's rescue - cuz Joe doesn't need no rescuing
• Let us not be queasy about strenuously defending the constitution

COVID-19 Update

I think I'm over the hump battling whatever this shit is that's making me feel like I'm coughing up the lining of my lungs, and blowing these weird cornflake-looking boogers out of my nose.

I tested yesterday, and came up negative for COVID, but dang this has been quite a fight.

I slept OK last night, and I think I'm on the mend.

That said - and thank you for indulging me on that one - here comes COVID again.

Another covid wave hits U.S. as JN.1 becomes dominant variant

The United States is in the throes of another covid-19 uptick, cementing a pattern of the virus surging around the holidays as doctors and public health officials brace for greater transmission after Americans return to school and work this week.

Coronavirus samples detected in wastewater, the best metric for estimating community viral activity, suggests infections could be as rampant as they were last winter. A smattering of health facilities around the country, including every one in Los Angeles County, are requiring masks again. JN.1, the new dominant variant, appears to be especially adept at infecting those who have been vaccinated or previously infected.

While photos of positive coronavirus tests are once again proliferating across social media, fewer people are going to the hospital than a year ago. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 29,000 covid hospitalizations in the week before Christmas, the most recent data, compared with 39,000 the previous year. The agency has reported an average of 1,400 weekly deaths since Thanksgiving, less than half of the fatalities at the same point last year.

Even so, covid remains one of the leading causes of death as well as the top driver of respiratory virus hospitalizations — worsening the strain on hospitals also seeing influxes of flu and RSV cases.

“Of the three major viruses, it is still the virus putting people in the hospital most and taking their life,” CDC Director Mandy Cohen said in an interview Wednesday.

Even mild cases can lead to the lasting complications inflicted by long covid.

When you have covid, here's how to know if you're no longer contagious

The CDC still recommends people isolate for five days after testing positive, though many Americans have stopped doing so and free tests are harder to come by, making it easier for the virus to keep spreading if people don’t know their cold is actually covid.

“As with any public health advice, getting people to adhere to policies is always challenging,” said Simbo Ige, commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health who is urging residents to follow that guidance. “Appealing to people’s desire to be part of the solution to ending covid or reducing the impact of covid is what we have seen be most effective.”

Michihiko Goto, an infectious-disease specialist who has seen a modest uptick in covid patients at the Department of Veterans Affairs in Iowa City, worries that the return of college students will seed more infection in the coming weeks.

The CDC guidance for isolation makes sense, he said, but the reality is that many people do not have the flexibility at work to do so.

“People without paid sick leave may not be able to [isolate] because they have to feed their families,” he said.

While coronavirus cases have surged every winter since the pandemic began, the CDC says it is not yet considered a seasonal disease like influenza. The coronavirus fluctuates throughout the year, and the typical winter waves could be influenced by other factors such as holiday travel, cold weather pushing people indoors and the evolution of the virus. The JN.1 variant that is now the most common in the United States has significantly more mutations than its predecessors, which could explain why people who had dodged infections during the summer surge are getting sick.

“If you look at the different peaks in cases since the beginning of the pandemic, every one of them coincided with the emergence of a new variant,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “Too many people are attributing this to seasonality.”

Few Americans are staying up to date on their coronavirus vaccines to train their immune systems to keep up with an evolving virus. According to CDC estimates, just 19 percent of Americans have received the latest version of the vaccine that lab experiments show offer better protection against the JN.1 variant than the previous formula.

“That’s not doing enough to suppress the virus from evolving, getting stronger and more evasive,” said Jessica Malaty Rivera, an epidemiologist and senior science communication adviser at the de Beaumont Foundation, a public health organization.

Medical professionals and public health officials say they’re facing growing skepticism of coronavirus vaccines, particularly among conservatives. The latest pushback came Wednesday from Florida’s top health official, who urged people to stop receiving mRNA coronavirus vaccines, citing debunked claims that they could contaminate patients’ DNA.

Mainstream health officials have encouraged vaccination, particularly for people older than 65, to minimize the damage caused by covid waves.

Wastewater tracking by the firm Biobot Analytics shows that the most recent coronavirus levels were slightly lower than the same point last year, except in the Midwest. The difference could be driven by changes in vaccines and variants affecting how much virus people shed, said Marisa Donnelly, a Biobot epidemiologist.

Donnelly said wastewater data is best used as a warning sign when levels rise.

“Right now as I’m seeing really high rates of covid-19 in wastewater, I start to worry about people who are immunocompromised or have risk factors that put them at greater risk of developing severe covid,” Donnelly said.

While the CDC had flagged New York and New Jersey in mid-December as among the first states with the highest share of infections caused by the new variant and high respiratory virus levels, hospitals in those states say those trends did not translate to crises in their wards.

“It’s not uncontrollable, and it’s nothing like it was last year,” said Cathy Bennett, president and CEO of the New Jersey Hospital Association.

Hospital leaders now talk about the coronavirus in the context of the broader respiratory virus season. RSV, most often seen in infants and toddlers in pediatric wards, has already peaked nationally. The flu season started later than normal and is now accelerating, with 136,000 emergency department visits for influenza last week compared with 79,000 for covid.

Northwell Health, New York’s largest health-care system, has seen a surge in people coming to the emergency room and outpatient facilities testing positive for the coronavirus, which was expected after Thanksgiving. Those patients are typically discharged quickly and rarely end up severely ill.

“If you are looking at very sick people in the ICUs, it’s more likely flu than covid,” said Bruce Farber, an infectious disease physician and the system’s chief of public health and epidemiology. “If you are looking at total population in the hospital with people with some respiratory illness, it’s overwhelmingly covid.”

But the addition of covid to the usual winter swirl of respiratory viruses has strained other hospitals — including in Minnesota, where wastewater levels increased tenfold in the week before Christmas.

Covid winters are making long hospital waits the new normal

“Every hospital that does pediatric care is saturated,” said John Hick, an emergency physician at Hennepin Healthcare, in downtown Minneapolis, which has 25 pediatric beds.

For the past month, hospital officials across the state have held coordination calls three times a week to triage which facilities have pediatric beds and whether certain patients can be moved into adult units, Hick said. Last week, the hospital began requiring patients and clinicians to wear masks again when interacting.

On Hick’s last ER shift a few days before Christmas, half the patients had either covid or the flu. He expects to see more covid cases in the coming weeks, given low vaccination rates.

What’s most dismaying, he said, is that many of those cases are preventable.

Signs

The actual violence is not, as yet, endemic. But given time and the corrosive effect of falsely motivating people to take extreme action when they don't feel justice has been served - makes for some very bad juju.

This Redden guy had no justification for what he did in the courtroom. My guess is he's just that kind of asshole, and that's the kind of asshole thing he does.

But take this incident and overlay it on what's going on in MAGA world. Every day, they're fed a heapin' helpin' of paranoia and victimization. They're told the system is totally rigged against them, and the courts - along with the rest of the government - are out to get 'em. So they need to rise up and "fight like hell - or you won't have a country..." 

I'm not talking about some random dickhead who apparently loses his shit and beats people up, just cuz.

And I'm not talking about people who have a legit beef with a system that fucks them over practically every day, and who show up and legit protest, willing to look for some of that good trouble that John Lewis talked about - and follow the rules of Civil Disobedience.

(Yes, there are rules for how you go about breaking the rules)

I'm talking about a double-digit cohort of dickheads who have legit concerns about getting fucked over, but have volunteered to get hoodwinked and bamboozled into thinking they're being victimized by women, or brown people, or Jews, or or or. They're mostly otherwise good decent folks who're "just going with the flow", but in many cases they're pretty hateful people deliberately misunderstanding that the ones telling them they're being played for fools are the the ones who're playing them for fools. 

So I may have gone off the path a little, but I think it's important to note the potential for violence against the institutions of democratic self-governance, especially in light of the death threats judges and politicians have been getting.

We are being radicalized, and that always makes for some very painful history.

Man leaps over bench to attack Nevada judge during sentencing, video shows

A sentencing hearing in Las Vegas turned chaotic Wednesday morning when a judge suddenly tried to scramble out of her chair as a defendant hurled himself over the bench, arms outstretched to attack her, courtroom video shows.

Deobra Redden, 30, was in court for a sentencing hearing after he pleaded guilty in November to attempted battery with substantial bodily harm, according to court records.

Video from the hearing shows Judge Mary Kay Holthus suddenly look up as others in the courtroom began to yell. Redden can then be seen leaping over the bench and pulling Holthus to the ground as flags on either side of her chair fall to the floor. Two people can be seen pulling Redden away from the judge as someone yells “get off her,” according to the video, which has been viewed more than 30 million times on social media.

Holthus and a courtroom marshal were both injured in the attack, said Mary Ann Price, a spokesperson for Eighth Judicial District Court. The judge is being monitored for her injuries and the marshal was taken to a hospital, where Price said he is in stable condition.

“We commend the heroic acts of her staff, law enforcement, and all others who subdued the defendant,” Price added.

Just before the attack, an attorney for Redden asked for a sentence of probation, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.

Holthus can be heard in the video denying the request, telling the attorney: “I appreciate that, but I think it’s time that he gets a taste of something else because I just can’t with that history.” Redden had previously served time in prison for attempted theft and domestic battery, Nevada state records show.

Redden was taken into custody Wednesday on charges of battery and battery of a protected person, according to online jail records. His attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday evening.

The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said it is investigating a battery incident, which occurred around 11 a.m. at the Regional Justice Center. Police did not name anyone involved in the incident.

Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that the scene in the courtroom was “unbelievable.”

“I’m sure he will be facing consequences for his actions,” Wolfson said in a statement to the paper.

Holthus, who became a judge for the Eighth Judicial District Court in 2019, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. She previously served more than two decades as a prosecutor for the Clark County district attorney’s office.

Weapons are barred in the courtroom, where people are instructed to “sit quietly when court is in session,” according to the Eighth Judicial District Court’s website.

Price said the court is committed to providing a safe and secure environment.

“We are reviewing all our protocols and will do whatever is necessary to protect the judiciary, the public and our employees,” she said.

Today's Wingnut

No matter what else, the god-knobbers always bring it down to, "That's what god told me, so that's what all of you have to go along with it."

It doesn't matter that the founders wanted to keep god and religion out of government. It doesn't matter that they wrote it down. The bible-thumpers are going to revise that history, in order to make the claim that this is a Christian nation, and therefor its government must be imbued with Christianity.

Wrong, And Behaving Stoopidly

... but they're pretty consistent.

Biden won

because got almost 8 million legit

votes more than Trump

A right-wing tale of Michigan election fraud had it all – except proof

Gateway Pundit, a favorite news source of former president Donald Trump’s, has pushed false claims of a stolen election even as others have pulled back in the face of consequences

The story had all the elements of a blockbuster crime saga: burner phones, semiautomatic weapons, silencers and bags of prepaid cash cards. “NOW WE HAVE PROOF!” blared the headline on the right-wing website Gateway Pundit. “Massive 2020 Voter Fraud Uncovered in Michigan.”

Keeping up with politics is easy with The 5-Minute Fix Newsletter, in your inbox weekdays.
The story referenced “thousands of fraudulent ballots” caught by Muskegon City Clerk Ann Meisch. Grateful readers deluged her office with hundreds of calls, hailing her as a hero.

But Meisch knew it wasn’t true.

According to police reports, the Michigan attorney general’s office and an interview with Meisch, an employee of a voter registration drive company had submitted to the Muskegon city clerk thousands of voter registration applications weeks before the 2020 election, some with faked signatures and faulty addresses.

Meisch’s staff spent hundreds of hours weeding out the bad applications. The guns the police found were legally registered to a landlord who had nothing to do with the registration drive. The prepaid phones and cash cards were given to temporary employees to contact new voter prospects.

“There were no fraudulent ballots,” Meisch said in an interview, “not a single one that anyone in my office was aware of.”

But for Gateway Pundit, which is run out of its founder’s home and whose small staff produces stories that help set the agenda for Donald Trump’s most ardent followers, the August story provided weeks of headlines that radiated across right-wing media and were repeatedly amplified by pro-Trump influencers. That’s despite the fact that it was published nearly three years after the election — and after Meisch’s staff had thwarted any fraud.

The outlet’s emphasis on long-debunked fraud claims helps explain why election denial has proved so durable, despite the many efforts to halt the spread of disinformation and impose consequences on those who persist in it.

Election challengers demand to enter a room to observe the counting of absentee ballots in Detroit on Nov. 4, 2020. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
Trump himself faces multiple criminal counts for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election on the disproven grounds that it had been rigged against him. The Trump lawyers who pushed false voter fraud claims have, in some cases, been hit with criminal charges, as well as censure and disbarment proceedings. In mid-December, a federal jury ordered former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani to pay $148 million to two election workers who sued him for defamation. Trump’s largest media ally, Fox News, agreed last year to pay $787.5 million to Dominion Voting Systems to settle a defamation suit.

Some right-wing outlets, such as Fox’s smaller cable-news rival Newsmax, have pulled back from election-related conspiracy theories in the face of lawsuits and threats of legal consequences.

But through it all, Gateway Pundit has continued trumpeting disproven election fraud stories, even as it faces defamation suits over its coverage of the 2020 election. It has also taken its own legal action against fact-checkers, disinformation researchers and story subjects, while pressing in court to make it harder for social media companies to crack down on misinformation.

The outlet’s reporting was a favorite of Trump’s as he clung to the presidency more than three years ago, aides said, and it has become a key amplifier of his continued fraud claims as he campaigns to return to the White House. Gateway Pundit traffic peaked in November 2020 at nearly 7 million page views, and the site still averages more than a million visits each month, according to Comscore, which measures the readership of media sites.

Less than a year from the 2024 election, the latest polls show that some two-thirds of Republicans falsely believe that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. Gateway Pundit’s influence helps explain why, experts in disinformation say. Though the site employs only a handful of regular writers, it has played an outsize role in popularizing false claims.

“Gateway Pundit is a known source of disinformation that quickly trades up the chain,” said Joan Donovan, an assistant professor at Boston University studying online disinformation and media manipulation. “Because when they report a piece of information, it gives others license to do so.”

The site’s founder, Jim Hoft, who started blogging as a hobby in 2004, is among “the best at creating a right-wing echo system,” right-wing podcast host and former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon said in an interview. Hoft did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this report.

Bannon said Hoft is often one of the first to pick up a social media post or a local news story that other right-wing personalities then repeat and aggregate. He “isn’t afraid to take a leading edge where you don’t have all the facts but they are coming together,” Bannon explained. Once Gateway Pundit puts one of its signature all-caps headlines on a story, that provides what Bannon calls an “infrastructure” upon which his own podcast and other right-wing outlets and influencers can build.

Stephen K. Bannon, left, with Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft, center, and Gary Bauer, then a host on SiriusXM radio, in 2016. (Ben Jackson/Getty Images for SiriusXM)
That infrastructure was useful to pro-Trump One America News, a small cable network that pushed conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. A former OAN producer attested that he and his colleagues were directed to consult Gateway Pundit when they arrived at work to inform the day’s programming, according to depositions and documents from a defamation lawsuit filed against the Trump campaign and others, including Gateway Pundit, by a former Dominion Voting Systems executive who was falsely accused by Trump allies of helping to swing the 2020 election.

“Check Gateway Pundit, Epoch Times and The Blaze right when you get in. … These are very helpful to find good OAN content,” read one Jan. 14, 2021, email to producers from the channel’s news director. OAN settled in the case under undisclosed terms in September.

“Gateway Pundit’s articles were chopped-up sentences that were drawn from whatever crazy thing a Twitter user was saying about election denial,” the former producer, Marty Golingan, said in an interview, “and they would spin it with maximum outrage and reactionary emotion.”

In the weeks before he left office in 2021, Trump brandished printouts of Gateway Pundit articles questioning the results of the election, say former aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private White House conversations.

“When he was looking for evidence, Gateway Pundit was one reliable place he knew he could go for validation, and maybe even some new ideas,” said one former aide.

The site has been influential in promoting false election fraud theories even though some of the most influential figures on the right say they don’t trust it. One prominent conservative radio host, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of offending political allies, said in an interview that the site’s stories are “bull----.”

Gateway Pundit represents a “a fringe segment of so-called conservative media that’s driven by conspiratorial clickbait to drive revenues to stay afloat,” the host said.

A former Trump administration official who denies that Joe Biden rightfully won the 2020 election nevertheless told The Post in an interview that if you cite Gateway Pundit in an argument, “it means you’ve lost. You can’t use it to make an argument. You can only use it to hear what you want to hear.”

Gateway’s origins

In the nearly two decades since its founding, Hoft’s website has spread debunked conspiracy theories on a wide range of topics — for instance, casting doubt on President Barack Obama’s birth certificate and suggesting that student survivors of the 2018 Parkland, Fla., school shooting were part of an anti-Trump plot. More recently, Gateway Pundit has helped spread misinformation about the attack on then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, who was bludgeoned in the couple’s San Francisco home last year by an intruder intent on kidnapping his wife. It has also falsely claimed that U.S. aid money for Ukraine is being laundered and going into the pockets of Democrats.

But the site’s most notable focus in recent years has been promoting disproven narratives about election fraud.

Hoft created Gateway Pundit in 2004, inspired by the role that bloggers played in debunking a “60 Minutes” segment on George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard, according to former associates, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private conversations. Bloggers had been the first to point out that “60 Minutes” had unwittingly relied on falsified records in telling its story; CBS ultimately retracted the piece.

Hoft, 60, rarely grants interviews. But years ago, the Iowa native described in a message posted online ahead of a high school reunion how he started the site.

“So much has happened since I left Fort Dodge,” Hoft began his note to his former classmates at a Catholic school, explaining that “something exciting happened in late 2004. I started writing a little political blog” that, after a few years, “gained thousands of readers every day.”

The work started getting him invited on “paid trips to different conservative events around the world,” Hoft wrote, including a 2007 visit to Israel sponsored by a conservative political group. There he met Andrew Breitbart, who at the time was an editor at the Drudge Report. The two became friends and developed an appreciation for the power of the internet to take a small ember of a story and turn it into a conflagration.

“Jim is a direct descendant of Andrew Breitbart,” Bannon said, referencing the founder of the right-wing media site Breitbart News. “Remember, they’re both about citizen journalism, and Jim knows how to harness the energy of regular citizens.”

Trump’s candidacy was a boon for Hoft and for Gateway Pundit, which, according to a study conducted by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, became one of the most popular sites on the right in 2015-2016. Among those sites, the study found, “Gateway Pundit is in a class of its own, known for ‘publishing falsehoods and spreading hoaxes.’”

In 2020, Gateway Pundit became a key part of what researchers at the University of Washington and Stanford University among others deemed a “disinformation campaign” produced by “hyperpartisan media and political operatives” working “alongside ordinary people to produce and amplify misleading claims.”

Instead of operating from the top down, this kind of campaign seizes on the social media posts of “concerned citizens” and turns them into shareable pieces of content that can spread to different outlets and to powerful influencers, the researchers found.

In one illustrative example given in the study, Gateway Pundit helped circulate a photo posted on Twitter by a writer for conservative outlet the Blaze in September 2020. The photo purported to show 1,000 mail-in ballots found in a dumpster in Sonoma County, Calif.

“Big if true,” read the caption. Five hours later, Gateway Pundit weighed in with this headline: “EXCLUSIVE: California Man Finds THOUSANDS of Unopened Ballots in Garbage Dumpster — Workers Quickly Try to Cover Them Up.”

The county responded in a Facebook post: “This is not true.” Instead, the county said, the photo depicted old ballot envelopes from the November 2018 election that had been discarded in accordance with California law.

Gateway Pundit updated its story after the post: “The County of Sonoma put out a statement saying the ballots were from 2018. The county says the ballots were already opened. You can judge for yourself.”

In May, Hoft, alongside a co-director of a coronavirus vaccine skeptics group, sued the researchers, alleging that the entities colluded to “censor” speech by sharing their research with social media platforms as part of an attempted crackdown on misinformation. A representative for Stanford said the case, which is in its early stages, is “completely without merit.” A representative for the University of Washington declined to speak about ongoing litigation.

Election workers under threat

People wait to cast their absentee ballots in person at a senior center in Sterling Heights, Mich., on Nov. 2, 2020, the day before Election Day. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Gateway Pundit enjoyed a social-media-fueled traffic spike similar to the one it had during the 2016 election. A German Marshall Fund analysis found that “verified account shares of its content” on Twitter increased ninefold from the first quarter of 2018 through the fourth quarter of 2020, reaching 7.2 million shares, more than for The Washington Post, NBC News or NPR. Nine of its 10 most-shared articles “included disinformation about voter fraud,” the analysis found.

One of Gateway Pundit’s highest-profile stories of 2020 was published after a volunteer Trump campaign attorney presented a misleading video during a post-election hearing in Georgia. The video purported to show that Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss, her daughter, had tampered with ballots.

That day, Gateway Pundit published the first of 58 articles on the two women that would appear over the next year and a half, despite the fact that Georgia election officials had quickly debunked claims that the pair had engaged in election fraud. Gateway Pundit’s stories cast Freeman and Moss as “crooked” operatives who counted “illegal ballots from a suitcase stashed under a table!”

In 2021, the women sued Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft and Hoft’s twin brother, Joe, who is a frequent contributor to the site. Gateway Pundit and Jim and Joe Hoft filed a counterclaim, alleging that the case against them is designed to drive Gateway Pundit out of business. The counterclaim was dismissed in 2023.

The lawsuit by Freeman and Moss, which is awaiting trial, alleges that the falsehoods about them “have not only devastated their personal and professional reputations but instigated a deluge of intimidation, harassment, and threats that has forced them to change their phone numbers, delete their online accounts, and fear for their physical safety.”

In their response, the Hofts said articles in Gateway Pundit about Freeman and Moss were “either statements of opinion based on disclosed facts or statements of rhetorical hyperbole that no reasonable reader is likely to interpret as a literal statement of fact.”

A federal jury recently ordered that Giuliani pay the two women $148 million for his own false claims that they helped steal the election from Trump. His lawyer, Joseph D. Sibley IV, told jurors that Gateway Pundit had been “patient zero” for the false claims.

Not a smoking gun

Meisch, the Muskegon city clerk, fears she may come under the same kind of attack when people learn that she doesn’t believe she uncovered massive voter fraud in her city.

“I’m just worried people will turn on me,” she said.

Gateway Pundit’s Aug. 8 story about Muskegon, a formerly booming foundry town on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan that Trump narrowly lost in 2016 and 2020, outlined a purported voter fraud conspiracy. The report was built on a police investigation that had been reported on three years earlier by local news outlets. The police had found no evidence of a broader effort to subvert the election, but referred the case to the FBI because the voter registration company at the center of the case was based out of state. The FBI did not respond to requests for comment.

Gateway Pundit published a copy of the 2020 police report, which contained new details about the investigation, including that police had found guns in the storefront that the voter registration company had rented. Almost immediately after publication, other right-wing outlets picked up and amplified the piece. The same day the story was published, Bannon hosted Hoft on his daily podcast to discuss it. Over the next two days, then-Fox News host Lou Dobbs, conservative podcaster Joe Oltmann and Right Side Broadcasting, a pro-Trump streaming service, cited the story.

Dobbs called it a guide to “how the Marxist Dems stole Michigan.” Oltmann said the gun silencers were evidence “of organized crime.” Bannon said the story showed that “demon” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, was a “liar.”

For the next 10 days, Gateway Pundit averaged a story a day on the topic, eventually publishing at least 40 pieces. During that period, an array of right-wing podcasters all discussed the story on their shows, including former Fox personality Dan Bongino, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk and Jack Posobiec, a far-right blogger.

Twelve days after the initial story was published, the Michigan attorney general’s office issued a statement responding to the report, citing its “false claims of election law violations.”

“Despite Gateway Pundit’s continuing claims to the contrary, the 2020 election has been thoroughly litigated and audited and has been proven well beyond a reasonable doubt that it was fair and accurate,” the statement read.

The voter-registration company employee who had handed in the faked registration applications to the clerk’s office had not filled them out herself; she was responsible for collecting the registration forms from many employees and submitting them in batches, according to Nessel’s office. Voters registration in Michigan are nonpartisan.

The state attorney general’s office said that while it had not ruled out that a crime may have been committed in Muskegon, numerous state agencies had investigated and none had uncovered evidence of successful fraudulent registrations because they had all been “intercepted and not filed into the state’s voter database.”

“This is once again, not a smoking gun for their long-debunked theories,” the statement read.

But Gateway Pundit was unbowed. The same day, the site published another piece on Muskegon and Hoft appeared on Bannon’s podcast again, calling Nessel’s statement “confirmation” of the Gateway Pundit story.

On Sept. 5, Trump posted about the story on Truth Social, without comment, and was reposted 3,300 times.

In late August, the Michigan Republican Party held a news conference in Lansing, the state capital, that party Chairwoman Kristina Karamo billed as an opportunity to “address the recent reports of election corruption uncovered in Michigan.”

“The constant questions surrounding our election system is an absolute threat to our republic,” Karamo said. “No one is going to continue to convince us that these are all just a bunch of anomalies.”

Gateway Pundit “slanted the story to make it seem that the attempt to interfere with the election was successful,” Karen Buie, the Muskegon County clerk, said in an interview. “There was an attempt. You can’t negate that. But it failed because we have systems in place.”

Meisch, the city clerk, said in an interview that she is bracing for even more mistrust of the system that she has worked for over 30 years to protect. Already, she said, paranoia among voters has been growing as baseless conspiracy theories spread about voting machines and drop boxes.

“We haven’t yet seen the full impact of the Gateway Pundit story,” said Meisch. “We won’t see that until the next [presidential] election.”

But for Gateway Pundit, the impact is already apparent. In July, the month before the Muskegon story, the site’s traffic fell below 700,000 unique visitors for the first time in years, according to Comscore.

In August, it more than doubled, to 1.5 million.

Today's Reddit

Finally, somebody did this joke. In retrospect, it was inevitable
byu/tim-berwolf inexchristianmemes

Overheard

You'll never checkmate Christians

because they're all pawns,

and their king doesn't exist