Greg Sargent/The New Republic:
MAGA’s Ugly, Hateful Response to Bridge Horror Is About to Get Worse
If they can try to turn the tragic Baltimore bridge collapse into a culture war, they’ll go anywhere—hurting their own people in the process.
Now, after the disastrous collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, MAGA figures and some GOP politicians are reviving that playbook yet again, in some cases with hateful, conspiratorial gusto. But this time the absurdities are of a next-level sort. That’s because the disaster, by severely hampering Baltimore’s port operations, is impacting regions and industries that rely on the port to export goods. Those include areas sometimes called “MAGA country,” places in the agricultural and industrial heartland throughout the Midwest.
In short, the Baltimore collapse demonstrates with unusual clarity that when it comes to calamities of this sort, we really are all in it together. That, of course, is exactly what the MAGA worldview seeks to deny at all costs—and is once again trying to do here.
From Pizzagate to the 2020 Election: Forcing Liars to Pay or Apologize
Michael J. Gottlieb is part of a cadre of lawyers deploying defamation, one of the oldest areas of the law, against a tide of political disinformation.
Michael J. Gottlieb can never remember the exact amount — it’s $148,169,000— that a jury ordered Rudolph W. Giuliani to pay the Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. But Ms. Freeman’s words after the December 2023 victory are indelible to him.
“Don’t waste your time being angry at those who did this to me and my daughter,” said Ms. Freeman, 65, who with her daughter Ms. Moss, 39, was falsely accused by Mr. Giuliani of aiding an imagined plot to steal the 2020 presidential election.
“We are more than conquerors.”
Less than a decade ago, the two women would have struggled to find a lawyer. But Mr. Gottlieb, a partner at the firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher and a former associate counsel in the Obama White House, represented them for free. Convinced that viral lies threaten public discourse and democracy, he is at the forefront of a small but growing cadre of lawyers deploying defamation, one of the oldest areas of the law, as a weapon against a tide of political disinformation.
EJ Dionne/Washington Post:
The common lesson from the MSNBC uproar and Trump’s Bible business
In the case of NBC, the problem with hiring McDaniel was not that she served as head of the Republican National Committee or that she is a conservative. In fact, MSNBC, the network’s now staunchly anti-Trump cable arm (where, I should say, I was happy to work as a paid contributor for some years) loaded up on right-leaning commentators, especially back in 2016 when the network bragged in an ad: “People might start accusing us of leaning too far to the right.”
Nor was the issue McDaniel’s past role as a political operative. You can make a case that news outlets over the years signed up too many veterans of government and political campaigns and thus blurred public perceptions of who is a “journalist.”
…
No, the problem with McDaniel and what led to a staff uprising was her complicity in Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election and her joining in his lies over the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory. In her interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press,” McDaniel paid the price of admission by saying, “The reality is Joe Biden won, he’s the president, he’s the legitimate president.” Then she added: “I have always said, and I continue to say, there were issues in 2020. I believe that both can be true.”
“There were issues.” Really? This is giving with one hand and taking with the other, a soft way of rationalizing the GOP’s war on elections.
Teri Kanefeld/at Teri Kanefeld has a different point of view and looks at McDaniel as part of the ‘outrage’ broadcast model:
The Ronna McDaniel Story
Important Note: Not all legal pundits on MSNBC and CNN news shows offer hotheaded and wrong opinions. There are also smart and reasonable takes. If all the legal experts were hotheads, the programs would have no credibility. Too often, though, the emotionally evocative responses are most memorable partly because they are evocative and partly because they come first: The smart reasonable can take more time and first impressions are hard to dispel.
The partisan pundit model causes people to be less informed and angrier: The way cable news talk shows present “news,” the facts get lost in an avalanche of opinions, speculation, and conjecture. Because opinions, speculation, and conjecture are often calibrated to create a strong emotional reaction in the viewer, viewers can be left both outraged and confused about the facts.
Here is the direct link to cleveland.com for that piece.
The Heritage Foundation quietly released draconian new IVF policy recommendations for the next GOP president
Heritage has been a staunchly anti-IVF voice, supporting Alabama’s controversial Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos cultivated through IVF treatment have the same rights as living children, and that a person can be held liable for destroying embryos.
The list of policy suggestions in the recent blog post echoes the MAGA-backed Project 2025, a comprehensive plan Heritage has spearheaded for the next GOP presidential administration that includes calls to eliminate the term “reproductive health” from federal rules and regulations and to tighten restrictions on abortion rights and access to certain emergency contraceptives. In its pieces on IVF, Heritage expands on the extreme conservative agenda outlined by Project 2025.
Heritage research associate Emma Waters has been a leading voice from the organization on reproductive issues, specifically denouncing IVF procedures and other “reproductive technologies.” In a March 19 piece, titled “Why the IVF Industry Must Be Regulated,” Waters makes various misleading and fearmongering claims:
House Intel chair says Ukraine aid will have ‘overwhelming support’ in Congress after recess
“The Speaker has made very clear statements that when we get back, it’s the next top agenda, after having just passed all the bills that fund the federal government,” Turner said Sunday. “I believe this is going to have overwhelming support in Congress, and we’ll put a bill on the president’s desk.”
CBS News correspondent Ed O’Keefe then pressed Turner on whether the bill will have strong support from GOP members, or if it will require adding a loan payment plan or border security provisions.
“I think there already is significant and very strong support among Republicans and certainly across Americans, across the country,” he said.
Chris Geidner/”Law Dork” on Substack:
“Trending: Easter Controversy,” or: How little lies pave the way for the next big lie No-News Weekend Internet is stupid-dangerous in the Trump era — as this weekend’s attack on the Transgender Day of Visibility shows.
For a group of Republicans looking to demonize Joe Biden and transgender people, this was all that they needed to start a weekend of hate. Then, for kicks I guess, they added in an attack on the “new rules” for the White House children’s egg decorating contest — specifically, that submissions can’t be overtly religious — as a second anti-Christian thing that Biden has done despite the fact that the Biden administration didn’t change the rules.
It’s disgusting and done in extremely bad faith — but also dangerous.
Because of that danger, I’m going to go through what happened in detail and discuss why it’s so disturbing.
Cliff Schecter on more lies: