Sen. Braun suggests that interracial marriage should be left to states to decide — then clarifies remarks by Christopher Wilson

 Sen. Mike Braun, R-Ind., suggested Tuesday that the legality of interracial marriage — on which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1967 — was an issue that was best left for individual states to decide. Hours later, however, he issued a statement attempting to clarify his remarks.

 Braun was fielding questions from reporters in Indiana about the possibility that Roe v. Wade, the high court decision that protects a woman’s right to have an abortion, would be overturned later this year by the Supreme Court. The senator said he felt that such a decision would not qualify as “judicial activism” because he did not agree with the original 1973 ruling. Overturning Roe, Braun argued, would put the country back into a neutral position regarding abortion

 "This should be something where the expression of individual states are able to weigh in on these issues through their own legislation, through their own court systems. Quit trying to put the federal government in charge,” Braun said.

He was then asked about the Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia, which banned states from enacting laws that restricted interracial marriages.

 When it comes to issues, you can’t have it both ways,” Braun responded. “When you want diversity to shine within our federal system, there are going to be rules and proceedings that are going to be out of sync, maybe, with what other states would do. It’s the beauty of the system.”

Braun was then asked to confirm whether he meant he would be OK with the Supreme Court leaving the issue of interracial marriage up to the states.

“Yes,” Braun replied. “I think that’s something, if you’re not wanting the Supreme Court to weigh in on issues like that, you’re not going to be allowed to have your cake and eat it too.”

Early Tuesday evening, Braun issued a statement saying he “misunderstood” the line of questioning about interracial marriage.

"Earlier during a virtual press conference I misunderstood a line of questioning that ended up being about interracial marriage, and let me be clear on that issue — there is no question the Constitution prohibits discrimination of any kind based on race. That is not something that is even up for debate, and I condemn racism in any form, at all levels and by any states, entities, or individuals,” Braun said.

Braun’s comments came while the Senate Judiciary Committee was holding a confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Black woman from Florida whose husband is white.

A Gallup tracking poll last taken in 2013 found that 87 percent of American adults approved of marriage between Blacks and whites, but only about 20 percent approved at the time the Supreme Court ruled in 1967.

A Yahoo News/YouGov poll released in December found that just 24 percent of Americans wanted Roe v. Wade to be overturned, but many expect the court to strike down the protections after it heard oral arguments late last year on a Mississippi abortion ban law.

 

Ginni Thomas's activism sparks ethics questions for Supreme Court justice By John Kruzel

The revelation this week that Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, attended the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol has renewed questions about Clarence Thomas’s impartiality.

Critics say the new detail is just the latest example of Ginni Thomas’s political activity posing an ethically troubling overlap with her husband’s judicial position.

“Virginia Thomas should be able to back whatever causes motivate her. The problem is that Justice Thomas continues to participate in cases related to her political activities,” said Steven Lubet, a professor of legal ethics at Northwestern University Law School. “He is the one whose conduct should be questioned.” 

Judges on lower federal courts are bound by a code of conduct that requires recusal for conflicts of interest, or even if their impartiality might be reasonably questioned. But Supreme Court justices are permitted to decide for themselves whether recusal is appropriate in a given case. 

In Clarence Thomas’s three decades on the bench, he has never stepped aside from a case due to a real or perceived conflict of interest resulting from his wife’s political activities, according to a letter sent this month to him by several progressive groups, including the court expansion advocacy group Take Back the Court.

 It is striking that in more than 30 years on the Supreme Court you have never — not once — recused yourself from a case because of a conflict of interest presented by professional political activities of your wife, a prominent Republican strategist who has been involved in some of the most controversial matters to come before the Court,” the March 8 letter states.

The Supreme Court’s public information office did not respond to a request for comment.

The previously unknown detail about Ginni Thomas’s participation in the pro-Trump rally emerged from an interview she gave to the conservative media outlet The Washington Free Beacon.

 She told the outlet she attended the Jan. 6 rally at the Ellipse but got cold and left before former President Trump took the stage at noon. Dubbed “Stop the Steal,” the event promoted Trump’s lie that he won the 2020 election, which fueled the deadly insurrection later that day.

 “I was disappointed and frustrated that there was violence that happened following a peaceful gathering of Trump supporters on the Ellipse on Jan. 6,” Ginni Thomas told the outlet. “There are important and legitimate substantive questions about achieving goals like electoral integrity, racial equality, and political accountability that a democratic system like ours needs to be able to discuss and debate rationally in the political square. I fear we are losing that ability.”

 Ethical scrutiny of the justice and his spouse has waxed and waned over the years. A prominent example arose from the court’s 5-4 ruling in Bush v. Gore that handed the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush. 

At the time that Clarence Thomas cast a decisive vote for Bush, Ginni Thomas worked at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, where she was recruiting personnel to staff a future Bush administration.

More ethical questions grew out of the Supreme Court’s review in 2017 of Trump’s policy banning inbound travel from several Muslim-majority countries. From 2017 to 2018, Ginni Thomas’s consulting firm received more than $200,000 from the Center For Security Policy, whose president filed an amicus brief in the case that urged the justices to uphold the ban

 When the case was decided in summer 2018, Clarence Thomas cast a decisive vote in the 5-4 ruling upholding the Trump administration’s travel restriction. 

The latest entanglement to draw headlines related to the Jan. 6 pro-Trump riot and subsequent investigation by the House select committee. 

In addition to attending the “Stop the Steal” rally, Ginni Thomas was one of roughly five dozen activists to sign a letter in December to top House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) urging him to remove outspoken Trump critics Reps. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) and Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) from the Jan. 6 panel.

 

The following month, Clarence Thomas raised eyebrows as the only justice who indicated that he would have granted Trump’s request to block a trove of his administration's records from being handed to the House committee investigating the circumstances of the Jan. 6 attack.

Critics say that in light of his wife’s political activities, the justice should have recused himself from that case and future matters tied to the Jan. 6 attack. 

“The clear conflict of interest was driven home by the fact that you were the only member of the Supreme Court to side with Trump by publicly dissenting from the Court’s decision to allow the Committee to obtain the records in dispute,” read Take Back The Court’s letter sent to Clarence Thomas this month.

 “That case is unlikely to be the last case related to the Jan. 6 insurrection that will come before the Court,” it continued. “We ask that you recuse yourself from any future involvement in any such cases.”

In the Washington Free Beacon article published Monday, Ginni Thomas pushed back on the notion that her political involvement has any bearing on her husband’s work.

 

“Like so many married couples, we share many of the same ideals, principles and aspirations for America,” she said. “But we have our own separate careers, and our own ideas and opinions too. Clarence doesn’t discuss his work with me, and I don’t involve him in my work.”

But according to Gabe Roth, executive director of the left-leaning court-reform advocacy group Fix The Court, it would be fair to say that “a reasonable person might question Clarence Thomas’s impartiality” given what he described as a years-long pattern.

“I don't think Ginni is the be all, end all of problems,” said Roth, an advocate for a code of conduct for Supreme Court justices. “But if it's making folks pay closer attention to these issues, that might not be the worst thing, especially since we know Clarence is probably not going to change his tune on any of this.”

Republicans Push Crackdown on Crime Wave That Doesn't Exist: Voter Fraud: ByReid J. Epstein and Nick Corasaniti NYT

The Florida Legislature last week created a law enforcement agency — informally called the election police — to tackle what Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Republicans have declared an urgent problem: the roughly 0.000677% of voters suspected of committing voter fraud.

In Georgia, Republicans in the House passed a law on Tuesday handing new powers to police personnel who investigate allegations of election-related crimes.

And in Texas, the Republican attorney general already has created an “election integrity unit” charged solely with investigating illegal voting.

 Voter fraud is exceedingly rare — and often accidental. Still, ambitious Republicans across the country are making a show of cracking down on voter crime this election year. Legislators in several states have moved to reorganize and rebrand law enforcement agencies while stiffening penalties for voting-related crimes. Republican district attorneys and state attorneys general are promoting their aggressive prosecutions, in some cases making felony cases out of situations that in the past might have been classified as honest mistakes.

It is a new phase of the Republican campaign to tighten voting laws that started after former President Donald Trump began making false claims of fraud following the 2020 election. The effort, which resulted in a wave of new state laws last year, has now shifted to courthouses, raising concern among voting rights activists that fear of prosecution could keep some voters from casting ballots.

“As myths about widespread voter fraud become central to political campaigns and discourse, we’re seeing more of the high-profile attempts to make examples of individuals,” said Wendy Weiser, the vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center.

It’s nearly impossible to assess whether the talk of getting tough on voter crime is resulting in an increase in prosecutions. There is no nationwide data on how many people were charged with voter fraud in 2020 or in previous elections, and state data is often incomplete. The state numbers that are available show there were very few examples of potential cases in 2020 and few prosecutions.

 Florida election officials made just 75 referrals to law enforcement agencies regarding potential fraud during the 2020 election, out of more than 11 million votes cast, according to data from the Florida secretary of state’s office. Of those investigations, only four cases have been prosecuted as voter fraud in the state from the 2020 election.

In Texas, where Attorney General Ken Paxton announced his new “election integrity unit” in October to investigate election crimes, The Houston Chronicle reported that the six-prosecutor unit had spent $2.2 million and had closed three cases.

 And in Wisconsin, where a swath of Republicans, including one candidate for governor, are seeking to decertify the state’s 2020 presidential election results on the basis of false claims of fraud, a report released last week by the Wisconsin Election Commission said that the state had referred to local prosecutors 95 instances of felons’ voting in 2020 when they were not allowed to. From among those cases, district attorneys have filed charges against 16 people.

“The underlying level of actual criminality, I don’t think that’s changed at all,” said Lorraine Minnite, a Rutgers University political science professor who has collected years of data on election fraud in America. “In an election of 130 million or 140 million people, it’s close to zero. The truth is not a priority; what is a priority is the political use of this issue.”

The political incentives to draw attention to the enforcement of voting laws are clear. A Monmouth University poll in January found that 62% of Republicans and just 19% of Democrats believed voter fraud was a major problem.

That may mean the odds of being charged with voter fraud can be linked to the political affiliation of the local prosecutor.

In Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin, District Attorney Eric Toney was in office for nine years without prosecuting a voter fraud case. But after he started his campaign for attorney general in 2021, Toney, a Republican, received a letter from a Wisconsin man who had acquired copies of millions of ballots in an attempt to conduct his own review of the 2020 election. The letter cited five Fond du Lac County voters whose registrations listed their home addresses at a UPS Store, a violation of a state law that requires voters to register where they live.

 Toney charged all five with felony voter fraud.

“We get tips from community members of people breaking the law through the year, and we take them seriously, especially if it’s an election law violation,” Toney said in an interview. “Law enforcement takes it seriously. I take it seriously as a district attorney.”

One of the voters charged, Jamie Wells, told investigators that the UPS Store was her “home base.” She said she lived in a mobile home and split time between a nearby campground and Louisiana. Wells did not respond to phone or email messages. If convicted, she stands to serve up to three and a half years in prison — though she would most likely receive a much shorter sentence.

 In La Crosse County, Wisconsin, District Attorney Tim Gruenke, a Democrat, received a similar referral: 23 people registered to vote with addresses from a local UPS Store, and 16 of them voted in 2020. But Gruenke said he had concluded that there was no attempt at fraud. Instead of felony charges, the local clerk sent the voters a letter giving them 30 days to change their registrations to an address where they lived.

“It didn’t seem to me there was any attempt to defraud,” Gruenke said. “It would be a felony charge, and I thought that would be too heavy for what amounted to a typo or clerical error.”

Toney linked his decision to his views about the 2020 election in Wisconsin, which the Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, won by more than 20,682 votes out of 3.3 million cast.

 While he had never challenged Biden’s win, he said he believed that “there is no dispute that Wisconsin election laws weren’t followed and fraud occurred.”

“I support identifying any fraud or election laws not followed to ensure it never happens again, because elections are the cornerstone of our democracy,” Toney said.

(Wells, one of the voters Toney has charged, also said she believed something was amiss in the 2020 election. “They took it away from Trump,” she told investigators.)

DeSantis in Florida is perhaps the best-known politician who is promoting efforts to bolster criminal enforcement of voting-related laws. The governor, who is up for re-election in November, made the new police agency a top legislative priority.

 The unit, called the Office of Election Crimes and Security, takes on work already done by the secretary of state’s office, but reports directly to the governor.

“Florida is going to be on the cutting edge of this,” said Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action, a conservative advocacy group that supports the bill.

DeSantis isn’t alone. In Arizona, state Sen. Wendy Rodgers, a Republican who is trying to overturn the 2020 election, is sponsoring a bill that would establish an “election bureau” to investigate fraud with sweeping authority, including the ability to impound election equipment and records.

In Georgia, Republicans in the House passed a voting bill on Tuesday that would, among other changes, expand the authority of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to identify and investigate election violations, including the ability to conduct election audits of any subpoenaed documents

 Republican efforts also extend to election administrators. Republicans in Texas last year increased the penalties on election workers who are accused of influencing a voter’s decision while offering assistance, such as translations.

But Florida’s legislation would be the first in the nation restricting how election officials can defend themselves in court. The bill bars them from accepting legal defense provided or funded by a nongovernmental agency.

That provision has drawn bipartisan criticism. “The principle that a state would deny legal representation of an election official’s choice when they’re being pursued for criminal charges is profoundly against the rule of law,” said Ben Ginsberg, a lawyer for Republican presidential campaigns and national committees before breaking with the party during the Trump era.

Ginsburg and Bob Bauer, a prominent Democratic lawyer, have started the Election Official Legal Defense Network, an organization of lawyers that gives free legal advice and representation to election administrators.

Sentences for those convicted of voter fraud vary widely. A Minnesota man who was on probation for a felony was ordered to pay a $214 fine this week after pleading guilty to lying about his voting eligibility on an absentee ballot application. He never returned the ballot.

 But in Memphis, Pamela Moses was sentenced to six years in prison in January after registering to vote when she had a felony conviction. The voter fraud conviction was thrown out last month and a new trial ordered when a judge ruled that the Tennessee Department of Corrections had improperly withheld evidence that was later uncovered by The Guardian.

In a statement, the Shelby County district attorney, Amy Weirich, a Republican who faces re-election this year, blamed Moses for the long sentence. “I gave her a chance to plead to a misdemeanor with no prison time,” Weirich said. A spokesman said Weirich hadn’t decided whether to pursue a new trial.

Moses, a musician and Black Lives Matter activist, said she hadn’t known she was ineligible to vote.

“They did make an example out of me,” she said in an interview. “They showed every Black person in Tennessee and whoever else saw this case, you better not vote, they’re going to put you in jail.”

 

Yes, Trump and Reagan Were a lot alike. That's not a good thing. By Kevin M. Kruse, MSNBC Opinion Columnist

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., argued Monday night that former Presidents Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump were essentially cut from the same cloth. “For all their differences in temperament and style,” he asserted in his speech at the Reagan presidential library, “there’s a deeper continuity in the beliefs of our 40th and 45th presidents

 Cotton declined to “sketch out the similarities with great details about policies and programs.” Instead, he noted that both men adorned the walls of the Oval Office with paintings of President Andrew Jackson and thus both were, at heart, Jacksonian populists. It’s a rather weak case, but there is one to be made linking Reagan and Trump — just, perhaps, not the one Cotton intended.

The senator is correct that Reagan and Trump displayed starkly different temperaments and styles. As president, Reagan projected a sense of sunny optimism. His first inaugural address encouraged Americans to “dream heroic dreams” in support of “national renewal,” while his re-election campaign confidently declared it was “morning again in America.”

Tump, in sharp contrast, consistently presented an uglier and more pessimistic perspective. His inaugural address rattled off a list of grievances and grudges that constituted a dire state of “American carnage.” That dark and dismal tone for Trump’s inaugural — which a bewildered former President George W. Bush could only describe as “some weird s---” — only deepened as his administration wore on.

 These presidents’ personalities were, in turn, projected on the nation they led. But while these stylistic differences are important, they ultimately matter less than the shared legacies of the two presidents.

The populist tradition is a long one in American history. Rather than reach all the way back to Jackson in the 1830s as Cotton did, we can find a more recent and more relevant example in the 1960s campaigns of George Wallace.

 As many historians (including me) have noted, Trump’s political campaigns bore an eerie resemblance to the wild rallies that Wallace staged in the ‘60s. Like Jackson before him and Trump after, Wallace championed the cause of “the common people,” largely by stoking their sense of victimization and promising to exact revenge on the source of their resentment.

 Reagan sits well within that tradition, too. During the 1960s and 1970s, as a surrogate for presidential candidate Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., and then as a two-term governor of California, he sounded many of the same themes as Wallace in private and in public. Reagan pressed the precise “law and order” message that Wallace pioneered, for instance. He also used the same kind of racist dog whistles, including exaggerated stories about a “Chicago welfare queen” and a “strapping young buck” who used food stamps to “buy a T-bone steak.”

Little wonder that contemporaries saw the two men as linked. After Watergate seemingly ruined the Republican brand, National Review publisher William Rusher suggested starting over with a new Conservative Party — one led by a Reagan-Wallace presidential ticket

 Most notoriously, Reagan launched his general election campaign in 1980 with a visit to Philadelphia, Mississippi — the infamous site where three civil rights activists were killed in 1964, with the local police’s complicity. “I believe in states’ rights,” Reagan told the lily-white crowd. Such a “states’ rights” appeal, civil rights legend Andrew Young noted, was simply “the electoral language of Wallace, Goldwater and the Nixon southern strategy.” A Mississippi Republican admitted as much: The speech, he told reporters, was an effort to win over “George 

Wallace inclined voters.

 As president, Reagan continued in this vein, opposing affirmative action and busing programs while fighting to save tax exemptions for racially segregated schools. The reality of his stance on racial issues was, for many, obscured by the president’s cheery disposition. In a scathing article in The Nation titled “Smiling Racism,” civil rights activist and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Roger Wilkins laid it bare: “Reagan’s dirty little secret is that he has found a way to make racism palatable and politically potent again.

 Of course, while civil rights leaders recoiled from Reagan’s racial record, those “George Wallace inclined voters” were drawn in by the same words and deeds. Rep. Trent Lott, R-Miss., told a convention of the Sons of Confederate Veterans that “the spirit of Jefferson Davis lives in the 1984 Republican platform.” Even Trump’s white nationalist supporters have been more subtle.

While Reagan’s racial appeals “unleashed an invisible monster on American politics,” as Wilkins charged, more immediately visible were his efforts to downgrade trust in the very government he led. Trump ranted about agents of a “deep state” who are deliberately undermining the country, but in Reagan’s framing, government agents were well-intentioned but utterly incompetent. The president often joked that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

But Reagan didn’t simply voice voters’ distrust of the federal government. He deepened that distrust with the record of his own White House. As the conservative pundit P.J. O’Rourke concluded at the end of the Reagan era, “Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.”

 The proof came in many forms, some deliberate, some not. Like Trump would later, Reagan staffed key administration positions with officials who were bitterly opposed to the agencies they allegedly led. His first head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Thorne Auchter, had run a Florida construction firm that OSHA had repeatedly fined. He greatly reduced the agency’s operations to spare other businessmen the same fate. Similar appointments elsewhere — such as Anne Gorsuch Burford at the Environmental Protection Agency and Clarence Thomas at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — likewise helped hamstring agencies that conservatives loathed

 Other Reagan officials went further, using government posts to commit illegal deeds or line their own pockets. Even leaving aside the massive scandal that was Iran-Contra, the Reagan administration racked up a staggering record of corruption and criminality: bribes from military contractors, a series of rigged grants at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, misused funds at the EPA, lobbying scandals that circled around Reagan’s deputy chief of staff and a senior advisor, and on and on. Nearly three dozen Reagan administration officials were indicted in all.

 The inquiries and investigations into the Trump administration are still unfolding, of course, and it’s not yet clear what the final tally of indictments and convictions might be. Whatever the case, the ultimate conclusions the public will draw — that the government is incapable of working well and government officials are capable of doing bad — will be very much in the tradition of Reagan.

 There are, to be sure, major differences between the two presidents. (Most notably, Reagan eventually embraced immigration reform, including amnesty for many undocumented immigrants.) But when it comes to some of the key problems confronting us now — the craven appeals to the worst elements in our electorate and the cynical denigration of government service — Reagan and Trump were clearly on the same page. Reagan delivered his damage with a smile, while Trump did it with a scowl or a sneer. But the outcome was still the same.

As he prepares for his own possible run for the presidency, Cotton is confident that Republicans can carry on this tradition. He’s likely correct — and that’s precisely the problem.

 

Russia's invasion puts a new light on Trump's Ukraine pressure campaign By Domenico Montanaro NPR

A "perfect" call, it was not.

Then-President Donald Trump was withholding hundreds of millions of dollars in aid for Ukraine's defense as he was asking its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to investigate Trump's potential 2020 rival, Joe Biden, and his son, Hunter Biden.

That 2019 call got Trump impeached. But the Senate acquitted him, and he dismissed the controversy as a politically motivated hit job — and his base went along.

Now, with Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine and Zelenskyy being hailed around the world as a hero for his resolve, that call is put into a very different light.

Now, with Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine and Zelenskyy being hailed around the world as a hero for his resolve, that call is put into a very different light.

"There's just a lot of evidence that Trump was wrong on this issue [Ukraine] and that in many ways, we undermined the NATO alliance and we undermined Zelenskyy's position in the eyes of Russia and Putin," said Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist and former senior adviser on Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign.

 Trump has shifted his positions on the war in Ukraine. Shortly before Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion, Trump called Putin "smart" and "savvy" because Putin had declared portions of Ukraine "independent," something Putin had no right to do.

After the invasion began, Trump defended saying that Putin was "smart," then called President Biden "weak" and described NATO countries as "not so smart."

"The problem is not that Putin is smart — which of course he is smart," Trump told a crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference. "But the real problem is that our leaders are dumb. Dumb. So dumb."

 As scenes of war and death in Ukraine at the hands of Russia have played out for the world to see on television screens all day for days on end, Trump has changed his tune.

In recent days, he called what's happening there a "holocaust"; said many times over that the war would never have happened if he were still president; and even called for the U.S. to attack Russia but make it look like it was actually China — by flying American planes with a Chinese flag on the side.

"And then we say, 'China did it,' " Trump told Republican donors Saturday in New Orleans, according to a recording obtained by The Washington Post. " 'We didn't do it — China did it,' and then they start fighting with each other and we sit back and watch."

 It's the kind of simple-sounding amateur solution that Trump has floated throughout his political life, one that is impracticable in a complicated world.

 "Trump is on the wrong side of the issue, I think it's fair to say," said Stephen Hayes, editor at the conservative outlet The Dispatch. "I don't think he's likely to bring a lot of people back to a pro-Putin stance. If anything, we're likely to see the hostility towards Putin and toward this brutal invasion increase, I think, in pretty significant ways, as it becomes clearer and clearer what Putin is actually doing."

Unlike other issues, from Medicare to trade, in which Trump has brought Republicans to his view, he has struggled to lead on his position on Putin and Ukraine.

"I do think this is a situation where it's going to be harder for Trump to bring that base along," Hayes said. "And maybe that's one of the reasons that we're starting to see him soften that position."

Trump's approach to the world faces a test

Whether it will matter for Republican voters, as Trump continues to strongly tease a 2024 presidential run, is tougher to say.

"I think it is a risk," Madden said. "But if the question is, how motivated are our base Republican voters on issues of national security and foreign policy or the threat of Russia? It's not as big an issue as some of these other cultural issues, where there is much closer alignment with Trump."

The culture wars, tax cuts and wanting government to do less really appear to be the unifying axis right now for the Republican Party. But if Ukraine continues to get the kind of attention it's getting, that could change things, Hayes said.

 "The reality ultimately does matter, right?" he said. "If we just see this kind of destruction that continues to get the kind of media attention it deserves, it changes things. It'll end up changing things in our country. And I think people won't stand for that. I really do."

Few Republicans, however, have called Trump out for his coziness toward Russia and his initial softer stance toward Putin. Instead, they are speaking more clearly in their denunciation of Putin but charging that Biden has botched the response.

Trump's former vice president, Mike Pence, reportedly took an oblique shot at Trump in a speech before GOP donors Friday.

 "There is no room in this party for apologists for Putin," Pence said. "There is only room for champions of freedom."

He also praised NATO, which Trump has continuously criticized.

"Where would our friends in Eastern Europe be today if they were not in NATO?" Pence said. "Where would Russian tanks be today if NATO had not expanded the borders of freedom?"

The problem, Madden says, is that this kind of message isn't being delivered repeatedly across the Republican Party and done so explicitly.

"That's one of the things about any sort of counterpoints for Trump within the Republican Party right now is those efforts have never really been broad," Madden said. "They've never really been sustained. They've never been methodical. They've always just been glancing blows. And that's why he still has such a strong command over the party apparatus."

 

 

 

Why White Evangelical Christians are Putin's Biggest American Fan Base By Anthea Butler, MSNBC Opinion Columnist

 While the world looks on in horror as Russia's invasion of Ukraine unfolds, one group has been praising Russian President Vladimir Putin. It turns out Putin has a fan base in America’s right-leaning evangelical politicians and pundits.

At this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, which wrapped up over the weekend, Lauren Witzke, a GOP candidate for the Senate in Delaware, said: “Here’s the deal. Russia is a Christian nationalist nation. They’re actually Russian Orthodox. ... I identify more with Putin’s Christian values than I do with Joe Biden.”

This isn’t an uncommon stance among some Republicans and white American evangelicals today, who have previously admired Putin because of the alignment of their beliefs with his about homosexuality, authoritarianism and fealty to former President Donald Trump. Many believe Putin’s nationalism, coupled with their Christian belief, is the way America should be.

A few months ago, it’s likely that not much attention would have been paid to a statement like Witzke’s, nor would her support for Putin be so closely connected to her support for Trump. But in light of Russia's current actions, more pro-Putin American evangelicals are coming into sharp focus. Televangelist Pat Robertson proclaimed that Putin is “being compelled by God” to invade Ukraine — his take on Putin’s motivations is questionable at best, but his support for Putin as part of a divine plan is notable.

 As things escalate in Ukraine, evangelicals and Republicans alike are faced with a hard choice: How do they support the authoritarian policies of Putin while Ukraine and its evangelical population face the horrors of war? I suspect it will be difficult for evangelicals and Republican officials to continue to be as effusive as their idol, Trump, has been about Putin. Because if they indeed believe in the so-called family values of the church, the images we’re seeing of Ukrainian parents’ being separated from their children to escape Russian forces is much harder to justify.

 Evangelicals are a long way from how they historically thought about Russia and communism. Back in the 1950s, white evangelical leaders like Billy Graham preached against the evils of communism and called then-Soviet states “godless” and a threat to Christianity and America.

Fast-forward to the 21st century, and today’s evangelical leaders, as well as Republicans, have embraced Russia — and, more specifically, Putin. In 2014, Putin made the cover of the evangelical magazine Decision in a piece in which Graham's son Franklin lauded his handling of the Winter Olympics and his protection of Christians. Franklin visited Russia in 2015, and ever since, has promoted Putin as a godly leader. A few days before the invasion of Ukraine, he asked people to “pray for Putin” but not for Ukrainians, creating a decent amount of backlash.

 But whether or not American evangelicals try to distance themselves from Putin in this current news cycle, they have long gravitated toward the Russian president for his hard-line stance against Muslims and, most importantly, his anti-LGBTQ agenda. Putin’s rhetoric about the nation, the family and the church (in this instance, the Russian Orthodox Church), has captivated many and spurred them to embrace similar kinds of political action here in America. Consider all of the anti-gay and anti-transgender laws that are cropping up in states like Texas and Florida. These laws are part of a constellation of family-focused conservative religious ideals also embraced by Putin and other Eastern European leaders who have clung to a hard line against any so-called “anti-family” ideology.

 For members of the religious right, alliances with these leaders present a new frontier in their hope to achieve a theocracy in America. According to journalist Sarah Posner, those on the religious right see Eastern European countries that embrace the Orthodox Church and its family values as the way forward. Because of these interactions between Eastern Europe authoritarian leadership and religious and political leadership of the GOP in America, clampdowns in the U.S. on abortion rights, trans children’s rights and gay rights are therefore all coming back full force on the state level. We can’t of course forget that Trump’s consistent and solid support of Putin is also a significant factor.

 Meanwhile, other faith leaders in America held a vigil for peace in Ukraine, and Pope Francis visited the Russian Embassy in Rome, a sign of the seriousness of the situation. As the conflict in Ukraine continues, admiration of Putin by some white evangelicals and Republicans may lead to more than they bargained for.

Anthea Butler is a professor of religious studies and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Pa. saw a big increase in reports of white supremacist propaganda last year, but it’s not clear why by Ximena Conde

 Pennsylvania has seen a significant increase in white supremacist stickers, fliers, and other literature promoting hate, according to a new report from the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.

In 2021, 473 incidents of this type of messaging were reported to the ADL — almost double the number from the year prior and the highest total in the nation. In 2019, there were 81 incidents reported in Pennsylvania. Each incident represents a cluster of fliers or stickers spreading white supremacist messaging.

The trend is alarming because leafleting can be a precursor to other extremist behaviors, said Andrew Goretsky, regional director for ADL Philadelphia.

“Hate starts with white supremacist propaganda and hate propaganda, but it then escalates from there into more criminal behavior,” said Goretsky

 According to the ADL, groups distributing these messages may avoid using clearly racist and bigoted language in efforts to recruit new members, opting instead for ambiguous phrases like “United We Stand.”

One group that uses this tactic is the Texas-based Patriot Front, which the ADL says is responsible for 82% of white supremacist propaganda nationally and has two large chapters in Pennsylvania.

In September, the group was reported distributing material in Philadelphia, as well as Laureldale in Berks County and Pike County in the northeastern part of the state.

 The ADL couldn’t definitively say why Pennsylvania saw such a jump while New Jersey saw a significant decline in reported incidents. In 2020, more than 300 incidents of white supremacist messaging were reported in the Garden State, ranking it fourth in the country. That number dropped to 179 in 2021, despite being the home base for another active white supremacist group called the New Jersey European Heritage Association.

 

Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University-San Bernardino, which tracks hate crimes in the United States and abroad, offered some possibilities.

“Wherever there’s active leadership, we see this,” he said of hate groups. “And it’s oftentimes done by a small number of people to get the kind of publicity that they crave.”

Levin said groups will often travel in a region to make it seem as though they have more members and encompass a larger geographic area than they do.

But while a history with hate groups can be an indicator of future spread of propaganda, Levin said investigating these incidents can be a deterrent to perpetrators, possibly explaining New Jersey’s drop.

 

He pointed to then-New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal releasing data in April 2021, showing 1,400 bias incidents in the state from the previous year. The FBI would label fewer than 400 of those incidents as hate crimes, saying others lacked evidence or didn’t rise to “intimidation.”

Still, officials had already sounded the alarm.

“Why go speeding when the radar guns are out?” said Levin. “You can just go next door. And Pennsylvania is a less densely populated state, so there are more places to do it.”

 Levin cautioned against focusing on one state or one method of tracking hate incidents because there’s usually an ebb and flow to the ways these groups operate.

Instead, both Goretsky and Levin urged people to look at the overall levels of hate activity. While the ADL found a 5% drop in incidents of propaganda in 2021 nationwide, it remained the second-highest year for this type of messaging since the organization began tracking this information in 2017. Nationally, there was also a 27% increase in anti-Semitic messaging.

 Separately, the ADL recorded a record 108 white supremacist rallies in 2021, and double the number in 2020. A July Patriot Front demonstration in Philadelphia, which ended in members of the group being chased away by bystanders, was included in the count.

One bright spot in the ADL’s report was college campuses, which saw the lowest number of propaganda distribution incidents since 2017, possibly due to the pandemic keeping students off-campus.