cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20362954

Cody Bloomfield

September 13 2024, 6:00 a.m.

"Treating the Stop Camp Grayling protesters as terrorists is the latest episode in a worldwide trend of governments smearing climate and environmental activists as terrorists — an ongoing Green Scare. Misapplication of the terrorism label frequently serves as pretext for invasive surveillance and sustained scrutiny."

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently made headlines for calling perennial Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein “predatory” and “not serious.” AOC is right.

Giving voters more choices is a good thing for democracy. But third-party politics isn’t performance art. It’s hard work — which Stein is not doing. As AOC observed: “[When] all you do is show up once every four years to speak to people who are justifiably pissed off, but you're just showing up once every four years to do that, you're not serious.”

To be clear: AOC was not critiquing third parties as a whole, or the idea that we need more choices in our democracy. In fact, AOC specifically cited the Working Families Party as an example of an effective third party. The organization I lead, MoveOn, supports their 365-day-a-year efforts to build power for a pro-voter, multi-party system. And I understand third parties’ power to activate voters hungry for alternatives: I myself volunteered for Ralph Nader in 2000, and that experience helped shape my lifelong commitment to people-first politics.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20358918

By Ayah El-Khaldi

Published date: 13 September 2024 16:05 BST

By delaying any investigation or prosecution of Trump until almost two years after he became attorney general, Garland hamstrung Jack Smith, the dogged and beleaguered special counsel, leaving little time for the predictable unpredictabilities of two high-stakes prosecutions. Both were as solid as federal cases get, and now neither has any chance of being completed before the election, leaving voters without clear legal conclusions about Trump’s responsibility for the Jan. 6 riot and the highly classified documents he took from the White House.

Archived at https://ghostarchive.org/archive/QGUMD

The Supreme Court was hit by a flurry of damaging new leaks Sunday as a series of confidential memos written by the chief justice were revealed by The New York Times.

The court’s Chief Justice John Roberts was clear to his fellow justices in February: He wanted the court to take up a case weighing Donald Trump’s right to presidential immunity—and he seemed inclined to protect the former president.

“I think it likely that we will view the separation of powers analysis differently,” Roberts wrote to his Supreme Court peers, according to a private memo obtained by the *Times. *He was referencing the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision to allow the case to move forward.

Roberts took an unusual level of involvement in this and other cases that ultimately benefited Trump, according to the Times— his handling of the cases surprised even some other justices on the high court, across ideological lines. As president, Trump appointed three of the members of its current conservative supermajority.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/13360785

Donald Trump made clear on the Philadelphia debate stage this week, as he has throughout his three presidential campaigns, the basis of his run for office. Trump is running on the platform that non-white immigration is an existential threat to the nation. This time around, Trump has made his primary message, the so-called Great Replacement Theory (GRT), more vivid than ever. It is therefore of existential importance in understanding the stakes of this election to have clearly in mind what has happened in the past when GRT has been the central driving narrative both of individuals and of states.

According to the Great Replacement Theory, the nation’s greatness, its traditions and its practitioners, are existentially imperiled by an influx of foreign races, ethnicities or religions. The foreign elements are sometimes described in the narrative of GRT, as vermin or diseases.

GRT was central to the official Nazi motivation for the genocide of the Jews of Europe. Hitler blamed the loss of World War I on Jewish betrayal of Germany. But this betrayal, for Hitler, was intimately connected to the Great Replacement Theory, via the introduction of Black soldiers in the French army subsequently occupying the Rhineland, the so-called “Black Horror on the Rhine.” In Mein Kampf, Hitler writes:

Elon Musk, the billionaire king of bad takes, came up with a new one to cement his reign on Sunday night.

Responding to a second potential assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life, the X owner questioned why no one was trying to kill the Democratic president and vice president.

“And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” he posted, adding a thinking-face emoji.

A near-instantaneous firestorm of criticism predictably followed, with several people telling him to “delete your account” and others tagging the U.S. Secret Service’s X account.

New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger has issued a lengthy warning in the Washington Post (9/5/24) on the dangers another Donald Trump presidency would pose to a “free and independent press.”

You might expect this to be a prelude to an announcement that the New York Times would work tirelessly to defend democracy. Instead, Sulzberger heartily defends his own miserably inadequate strategy of “neutrality”—which, in practice, is both-sidesing—making plain his greater concern for the survival of his own newspaper than the survival of US democracy.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.