Convicted of CHEATING in an election; Republicans are cheaters .

"That woman from Sea Isle doesn’t realize by going after Kylie Kelce she’s brought the 2 scariest groups in the world together: Philadelphia sports fans and Swifties," another joked, due to the fact that Kylie's brother-in-law, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, is dating pop sensation Taylor Swift.

PROJECT 2025 THREATENS NOT ONLY WORKERS’ LIVELIHOODS, BUT ALSO THEIR VERY LIVES

PROJECT 2025 THREATENS NOT ONLY WORKERS’ LIVELIHOODS, BUT ALSO THEIR VERY LIVES Posted by MLToday | May 27, 2024 | Other Featured Posts | 0 Project 2025 Threatens Not Only Workers’ Livelihoods, But Also Their Very Lives facebook Twitter Like Gmail BY REBECCA GORDON April 9, 2024 Truthout

The right-wing plan aims to gut everything from anti-discrimination protections to child labor standards.

Recently, you may have noticed that the hot weather is getting ever hotter. Every year the United States swelters under warmer temperatures and longer periods of sustained heat. In fact, each of the last nine months — May 2023 through February 2024 — set a world record for heat. As I’m writing this, March still has a couple of days to go, but likely as not, it, too, will set a record.

Such heat poses increasing health hazards for many groups: the old, the very young, those of us who don’t have access to air conditioning. One group, however, is at particular risk: people whose jobs require lengthy exposure to heat. Numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that about 40 workers died of heat exposure between 2011 and 2021, although, as CNN reports, that’s probably a significant undercount. In February 2024, responding to this growing threat, a coalition of 10 state attorneys general petitioned the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to implement “a nationwide extreme heat emergency standard” to protect workers from the kinds of dangers that last year killed, among others, construction workers, farm workers, factory workers, and at least one employee who was laboring in an unairconditioned area of a warehouse in Memphis, Tennessee.

Facing the threat of overweening government interference from OSHA or state regulators, two brave Republican-run state governments have stepped in to protect employers from just such dangerous oversight. Florida and Texas have both passed laws prohibiting localities from mandating protections like rest breaks for, or even having to provide drinking water to, workers in extreme heat situations. Seriously, Florida and Texas have made it illegal for local cities to protect their workers from the direct effects of climate change. Apparently, being “woke” includes an absurd desire not to see workers die of heat exhaustion.

And those state laws are very much in keeping with the plans that the national right-wing has for workers, should the wholly-owned Trump subsidiary that is today’s Republican Party take control of the federal government this November.

We’ve Got a Plan for That!

It’s not exactly news that conservatives, who present themselves as the friends of working people, often support policies that threaten not only workers’ livelihoods, but their very lives. This fall, as we face the most consequential elections of my lifetime (all 71 years of it), rights that working people once upon a time fought and died for — the eight-hour day, a legal minimum wage, protections against child labor — are, in effect, back on the ballot. The people preparing for a second Trump presidency aren’t hiding their intentions either. Anyone can discover them, for instance, in the Heritage Foundation’s well-publicized Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership, a “presidential transition” plan that any future Trump administration is expected to put into operation.

As I’ve written before, the New York Times’s Carlos Lozada did us a favor by working his way through all 887 pages of that tome of future planning. Lacking his stamina, I opted for a deep dive into a single chapter of it focused on the “Department of Labor and Related Agencies.” Its modest 35 pages offer a plan to thoroughly dismantle more than a century of workers’ achievements in the struggle for both dignity and simple on-the-job survival.

First Up: Stop Discriminating Against Discriminators

I’m sure you won’t be shocked to learn that the opening salvo of that chapter is an attack on federal measures to reduce employment discrimination based on race or sex. Its author, Jonathan Berry of the Federalist Society, served in Donald Trump’s Department of Labor (DOL). He begins his list of “needed reforms” with a call to “Reverse the DEI Revolution in Labor Policy.” “Under the Obama and Biden Administrations,” Berry explains, “labor policy was yet another target of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) revolution” under which “every aspect of labor policy became a vehicle with which to advance race, sex, and other classifications and discriminate against conservative and religious viewpoints on these subjects and others, including pro-life views.”

You may wonder what it means to advance “classifications” or why that’s even a problem. Berry addresses this question in his second “necessary” reform, a call to “Eliminate Racial Classifications and Critical Race Theory Trainings.” Those two targets for elimination would seem to carry very different weight. After all, “Critical Race Theory,” or CRT, is right-wing code for the view that structural barriers exist preventing African Americans and other people of color from enjoying the full rights of citizens or residents. It’s unclear that such “trainings” even occur at the Labor Department, under CRT or any other label, so their “elimination” would, in fact, have little impact on workers.

On the other hand, the elimination of “racial classifications” would be consequential for many working people, as Berry makes clear. “The Biden Administration,” he complains, “has pushed ‘racial equity’ in every area of our national life, including in employment, and has condoned the use of racial classifications and racial preferences under the guise of DEI and critical race theory, which categorizes individuals as oppressors and victims based on race.” Pushing racial equity in employment? The horror!

Berry’s characterization of CRT is, in fact, the opposite of what critical race theory seeks to achieve. This theoretical approach to the problem of racism does not categorize individuals at all, but instead describes structures — like corporate hiring practices based on friendship networks — that can disadvantage groups of people of a particular race. In fact, CRT describes self-sustaining systems that do not need individual oppressors to continue (mal)functioning.

The solution to the problem of discrimination in employment in Project 2025’s view is to deny the existence of race (or sex, or sexual orientation) as a factor in the lives of people in this country. It’s simple enough: if there’s no race, then there’s no racial discrimination. Problem solved.

And to ensure that it remains solved, Project 2025 would prohibit the Equal Economic Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, from collecting employment data based on race. The mere existence of such “data can then be used to support a charge of discrimination under a disparate impact theory. This could lead to racial quotas to remedy alleged race discrimination.” In other words, if you can’t demonstrate racial discrimination in employment (because you’re enjoined from collecting data on the subject), then there’s no racial discrimination to remedy. Case closed, right?

By outlawing such data collection, a Republican administration guided by Project 2025 would make it almost impossible to demonstrate the existence of racial disparity in the hiring, retention, promotion, or termination of employees.

Right-wingers in my state of California tried something similar in 2003 with Ballot Proposition 54, known as the Racial Privacy Initiative. In addition to employment data, Prop. 54 would have outlawed collecting racial data about public education and, no less crucially, about policing. As a result, Prop. 54 would have made it almost impossible for civil rights organizations to address the danger of “driving while Black” — the disproportionate likelihood that Black people will be the subject of traffic stops with the attendant risk of police violence or even death. Voters soundly defeated Prop. 54 by a vote of 64% to 36% and, yes, racial discrimination still exists in California, but at least we have access to the data to prove it.

There is, however, one group of people Project 2025 would emphatically protect from discrimination: employers who, because of their “conservative and religious viewpoints… including pro-life views,” want the right to discriminate against women and LGBTQ people. “The President,” writes Berry, “should make clear via executive order that religious employers are free to run their businesses according to their religious beliefs, general nondiscrimination laws notwithstanding.” Of course, Congress already made it clear that, under Title VII of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, “religious” employers are free to ignore anti-discrimination laws when it suits them.

But Wait, There’s More

Not content with gutting anti-discrimination protections, Project 2025 would also seek to rescind rights secured under the Fair Labor Standards Act, or FLSA, which workers have enjoyed for many decades. Originally passed in 1938, the FLSA “establishes minimum wage, overtime pay, recordkeeping, and child labor standards affecting full-time and part-time workers in the private sector and in Federal, State, and local governments,” according to the Department of Labor.

Perhaps because the federal minimum hourly wage has remained stuck at $7.25 for a decade and a half, Project 2025 doesn’t launch the typical conservative attack on the very concept of such a wage. It does, however, go after overtime pay (generally time-and-a-half for more than 40 hours of work a week), by proposing that employers be allowed to average time worked over a longer period. This would supposedly be a boon for workers, granting them the “flexibility” to labor fewer than 40 hours one week and more than 40 the next, without an employer having to pay overtime compensation for that second week. What such a change would actually do, of course, is give an employer the power to require overtime work during a crunch period while reducing hours at other times, thereby avoiding paying overtime often or at all.

Another supposedly family-friendly proposal would allow workers to choose to take their overtime compensation as paid time off, rather than in dollars and cents. Certainly, any change that would reduce workloads sounds enticing. But as the Pew Research Center reports, more than 40% of workers can’t afford to, and don’t, take all their paid time off now, so this measure could function as yet one more way to reduce the overtime costs of employers.

In contrast to the Heritage Foundation’s scheme, Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed a genuinely family-friendly workload reduction plan: a gradual diminution of the standard work week from 40 to 32 hours at the same pay. Such proposals have been around (and ridiculed) for decades, but this one is finally receiving serious consideration in places like the New York Times.

In deference to the supposedly fierce spirit of “worker independence,” Project 2025 would also like to see many more workers classified not as employees at all but as independent contractors. And what would such workers gain from that “independence”? Well, as a start, freedom from those pesky minimum wage and overtime compensation regulations, not to speak of the loss of protections like disability insurance. And they’d be “free” to pay the whole tab (15.3% of their income) for their Social Security and Medicare taxes, unlike genuine employees, whose employers pick up half the cost.

Young people, too, would acquire more “independence” thanks to Project 2025 — at least if what they want to do is work in more dangerous jobs where they are presently banned. As Berry explains:

“Some young adults show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs. Current rules forbid many young people, even if their family is running the business, from working in such jobs. This results in worker shortages in dangerous fields and often discourages otherwise interested young workers from trying the more dangerous job.”

The operative word here is “adults.” In fact, no laws presently exclude adults from hazardous work based on age. What Berry is talking about is allowing adolescents to perform such labor. Duvan Tomás Pérez, for instance, was a 16-year-old who showed just such an “interest” in an inherently dangerous job: working at a poultry plant in Mississippi, where he died in an industrial accident. The middle schooler, a Guatemalan immigrant who had lived in the United States for six years, was employed illegally by the Mar-Jac Poultry company. If there are “worker shortages in dangerous fields,” it’s because adults don’t want to take the risks. The solution is to make the work less dangerous for everyone, not to hire children to do it.

We’re Gonna Roll the Union Over

Mind you, much to the displeasure of Project 2025 types, this country is experiencing a renaissance of union organizing. Companies that long thought they could avoid unionization, from Amazon to Starbucks, are now the subject of such drives. In my own world of higher education, new unions are popping up and established ones are demonstrating renewed vigor in both private and public universities. As the bumper-sticker puts it, unions are “the folks who brought you the weekend.” They’re the reason we have laws on wages and hours, not to speak of on-the-job protections. So, it should be no surprise that Project 2025 wants to reduce the power of unions in a number of ways, including:

Amending the National Labor Relations Act to allow “Employee Involvement Organizations” to supplant unions. Such “worker-management councils” are presently forbidden for good reason. They replace real unions that have the power to bargain for wages and working conditions with toothless pseudo-unions.

Ending the use of “card-checks” and requiring elections to certify union representation. At the moment, the law still permits a union to present signed union-support cards from employees to the National Labor Relations Board and the employer. If both entities agree, the union wins legal recognition. The proposed change would make it significantly harder for unions to get certified, especially because cards can be collected without the employer’s knowledge, whereas a public election with a long lead time gives the employer ample scope for anti-union organizing activities, both legal and otherwise.

Allowing individual states to opt out of labor protections granted under the Fair Labor Standards Act and the National Labor Relations Act.

The measures covered here are, believe it or not, just the highlights of that labor chapter of Project 2025. If put into practice, they would be an historically unprecedented dream come true for employers, and a genuine nightmare for working people.

Meanwhile, at the Trumpified and right-wing-dominated Supreme Court, there are signs that some justices are interested in entertaining a case brought by Elon Musk’s SpaceX that could abolish the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal entity that adjudicates most labor disputes involving federal law. Without the NLRB, legal protections for workers, especially organizing or organized workers, would lose most of their bite. Despite the court’s claim to pay no attention to public opinion, its justices would certainly take note of a resounding defeat of Donald Trump, the Republicans, and Project 2025 at the polls.

A New “Contract on America?”

The last time the right wing was this organized was probably back in 1994, when Newt Gingrich published his “Contract with America.” Some of us were so appalled by its contents that we referred to it as a plan for a gangster hit, a “Contract on America.”

This year, they’re back with a vengeance. All of which is to say that if you work for a living, or if you know and love people who do, there’s a lot on the line in this year’s election. We can’t sit this one out.

-Rebecca Gordon is the author of Mainstreaming Torture, which has been hailed as a “morally challenging” and “courageous work” that reveals how torture has been “sanitized” in the U.S. She teaches philosophy at the University of San Francisco. Prior to her academic career, Gordon spent decades working as an activist in peace and justice movements in Central America, South Africa and the United States.

Voyeurs and flashers-indecent exposure instead of gender dysphoria

Voyeuristic disorder requires one or more contributing factors that may change over time with or without treatment: subjective distress (guilt, shame, intense sexual frustration, loneliness), psychiatric morbidity, hypersexuality, and sexual impulsivity; mental health impairment; and or the propensity to act out ...

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Uzbekistan leader Shavkat Mirziyoyev held talks on Monday and signed a number of agreements aimed at deepening bilateral relations, including one that envisions Moscow building a small nuclear power plant in the Central Asian country.

The Cult of Trump is far more dangerous than the trans cult. US Republicans are fascists. 2/3 of Woke - anti-male supremacy and anti-white supremacy-are correct! They are part of the struggle against fascism. Only trans is rightwing. : @charlesbrown1365 • Os ago Trans are male supremacists, but not fascists.

s Joseph Stiglitz, the Columbia professor and Nobel laureate, touts his new book “The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society,” he has a two-fold message: The American Dream is a myth and freedom isn’t free. And especially when it comes to Gen Z, the generation that shook the political landscape with a protest movement headquartered steps from Stiglitz’s office, he tells Fortune he’s “had a lot of discussions with various people trying to understand what’s going on.” Stiglitz says the protest movement gripping his institution and many others “does hit home” and recalled his own history as a civil-rights protester in the 1960s. “This may sound hard to believe,” he says, “but I was there in the march in Washington in August 1963, with Martin Luther King. And I was there when he gave the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.” This had an influence on his thinking as a young man, he says, and “an enormous impact on the direction of our country, at least for a while.” This mournful tone fits much of Stiglitz’s career, as the left-leaning economist and author finds himself in increasingly lonely company: the pro-capitalist progressive. Opinion polls widely indicate a disaffection with capitalism among some millennials and more Gen Zers, exemplified by the surprising electoral successes in the last decade of the so-called Democratic Socialists, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. But Stiglitz has all along maintained that socialism is not the answer; rather, a well-regulated capitalism is sorely needed. At the same time, he has decried the hard-right turn in American political and business culture, to the point where he doubts the impact of Reverend King’s famous speech. “Neoliberal capitalism devours itself,” Stiglitz tells Fortune, arguing that it rewards dishonest people and leads to a lack of trust. It’s not sustainable, in his view, because it places self-interest above any sense of community and the broader interests of society. “We're seeing it begin to fray now,” he adds. Everywhere, countries have done too little to guard against the neoliberal turn, he argues, and these countries that have done too little to protect citizens from the marketplace have seen the rise of populism and authoritarianism. Obviously, he fears Trump’s return in November. “I think it'll be terrible for the economy. And even worse, for our basic rights.” But he also says Americans are underrating the international reaction. Businessmen abroad have expressed a “kind of nervousness” about Trump’s re-election, he says. “And the closer we get to the election, the more nervous they say they feel.” Freedom for the wolves The title of Stiglitz's book is an implicit callback to one of Regan’s favorite thought leaders, the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, who preached the efficiency of free markets above all in his landmark work “The Road to Serfdom.” As Stiglitz writes, freedom has more than one meaning, and in the America of the 21st century, there’s “freedom for the wolves and death for the sheep.” (Stiglitz notes this is a paraphrase of Isaiah Berlin, an anti-Communist, pro-capitalist liberal intellectual from the Cold War era.) In Stiglitz’s book, he argues the country’s neoliberal turn since the days of Ronald Reagan has pushed the American Dream further out of reach for everyone, especially Gen Z. He tells Fortune the media likes to tell “nice stories” akin to the 19th-century young-adult novelist Horatio Alger: of upward mobility being rewarded, reinforcing the idea that anybody can make it if they work hard. “But from the point of view of social science, the question is, what is the likelihood, and it's very rare,” he adds, citing data of worse outcomes for the United States than any other advanced economy. “I would say it's a myth.” But the American Dream is also about freedom, which includes freedom from harm and freedom to live up to your potential. “And again, America does more poorly,” he says, specifically citing the epidemic of gun violence that grips the country. “An important freedom is freedom from fear. And from a very early age, we tell our kids to be afraid.” We should listen to our children, he adds: “The disparity between what they were told and the reality is very large.” As they enter the labor market, being raised on notions of the American Dream, he adds, “they know it’s going to be really hard to get to own a home...they know the average college graduate has about $30,000, $40,000 in student debt, so it's going to be a noose around their neck for a long while.” Stiglitz declines to be drawn on the question of excessive police brutality in breaking up the Columbia protests, citing the long tradition of peaceful protests from Martin Luther King back to Mahatma Gandhi, but also a tension with civil disobedience that may be warranted by a specific cause. “I’m aware of the tensions between various freedoms,” he says, adding that he usually wishes for a civil dialogue that arrives at a peaceful resolution. The coercion of the traffic light As for a fix, Stiglitz uses the word “coercion” in his book, but he offers up a potentially illuminating metaphor: the stoplight. “You can't go through an intersection when it's red. And if you do, you'll see all kinds of consequences. You'll be arrested. So it's coercion unambiguously. But in New York, or London, if you didn't have stoplights, you couldn't move at all. And you'd have gridlock.” When Fortune brings up the biggest economic gridlock going these days, the housing market, Stiglitz refers back to his previous work. While cautioning that he hasn’t studied the current housing market closely, he has studied mortgage financing, a “peculiar system” where the government bears roughly 90% of the risk through underwriting, unchanged since the great crash of 2008. “Remarkably, for me, [is that] in the 16 years since then, we haven’t really fixed the financial part.” We still have a system where a lot of the profits go to the financial sector, but the government continues to bear most of the risk. If this were a stoplight, in other words, it might be blinking yellow without directing traffic efficiently at all.

So why did H. heidelbergensis give rise to H. sapiens in Africa? "That's the thousand dollar question," Brenna Henn, a population geneticist at the University of California, Davis, told Live Science. To try to answer it, she said, we must first examine the process through which H. sapiens first evolved. A 1987 paper published in the journal Nature traced all modern human mitochondrial DNA back to one population in Africa which lived between 200,000 and 150,000 years ago. Related: When did Homo sapiens first appear? However, Henn and other scientists challenge the idea that only one population gave rise to modern humans. When modern humans began to emerge, our Homo sapiens ancestors were spread out in dozens of specialized populations across Africa. Africa is a massive continent with a highly diverse set of ecosystems, so these populations had to adapt to suit their specific areas. In a 2023 study published in the journal Nature, Henn and her colleagues found that it was likely that at least two of these stem populations were the originators of H. sapiens. They proposed that, despite living separately for thousands of years, individuals from these populations still mingled at some point, creating a loose stem population that eventually became our species. Henn speculated that the ecological diversity of the African continent and the subsequent intermingling of multiple populations may be what allowed modern humans to evolve. "Because you had all of that either genetic or behavioral diversity, that's really what facilitated a complex package that allowed Homo sapiens to be what they are," she told Live Science. Curtis Marean, a professor of paleoanthropology and associate director at the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, said that scientists still disagree about whether one population, or Henn's theory of a small few populations, gave rise to modern humans. However, he said these two similar theories are more accepted than the newer pan-African hypothesis, which argues that humans evolved at the same time all over the African continent. "It doesn't really fit with any theory that we have about how evolution happens," he said. He agrees with Henn that Africa's immense size likely created the genetic diversity that allowed for the advanced cognition and social cooperation of modern humans to evolve. RELATED MYSTERIES —Will humans ever be immortal? —How would Earth be different if modern humans never existed? —Could climate change make humans go extinct? "The more genetic variation you have, the higher probability you have of something interesting evolving," he told Live Science. Although Europe and Asia combined are also enormous, he said Africa's warmer climate could have given H. sapiens the advantage. The glacial periods that happen every 100,000 years would have walled the Eurasian hominids in with ice, Marean said, whereas the African H. sapiens would have lost little of their range during those periods. With a more connected range, H. sapiens had more room to diversify and more access to each other, allowing for more gene flow. Marean emphasized that all of this is very theoretical and there is still a lot to discover, such as which population(s) developed into modern humans and whether language played a role in modern humans' cognitive development. Marean hopes future research will explore these questions. "The study of human evolution is about how we came to be," he said. "It's hard to imagine anything that's more important than that."

Michigan Republicans divided ! Goodie, goodie!

At the Kent County event, however, many attendees seemed to feel nothing but scorn for him. That anger flowed from a single decision Meijer had made in Congress: He voted to impeach then-President Donald Trump. In response, he faced a far-right primary challenger who had served in the Trump administration and said Biden’s 2020 victory was “simply mathematically impossible.” Meijer narrowly lost. Now, as a Senate candidate, he was trying to make amends, even pledging to vote for Trump — whom he had once called “unfit for office” — if the former president won the Republican nomination. But to some, he was still a traitor. “How did you vote to impeach Trump when he said in his [Jan. 6] speech, ‘I want a peaceful demonstration,’” a man angrily asked. “You don’t have to go any further than that to know that he was right and that he shouldn’t have been impeached.” “I was there,” another man called out. “We were peaceful.” “No shouting now,” the emcee said. Then-Rep. Peter Meijer (R-MI) on Tuesday, Aug. 2, 2022 in Grand Rapids. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images) One audience member accused Meijer of taking a bribe in exchange for his impeachment vote. Another challenged him to name five “political prisoners from Jan. 6” who were “sitting in prison and falsely accused.” I watched Meijer struggle to complete a sentence before being cut off. A third person pointed a finger at him as he questioned whether Meijer was actually in the Capitol complex on Jan. 6, 2021, as he’d claimed. “I have a photo I took in the House,” Meijer said, trying to defend himself without sounding defensive. Mostly, he listened wide-eyed, sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup. An older woman asked, in a gentler tone, if Meijer would redo his impeachment vote if he could. Would he at least have abstained instead of voting “yes”? Meijer responded by saying that when he was in Congress, someone had once joked that they’d throw him off a bridge if he ever voted “present.” A deep voice rang out on the far side of the room. The man in the “Stand for God” shirt. “Sorry?” Meijer said, not hearing him. The man repeated himself: “You should’ve gotten thrown off the bridge.” The System Falls Apart What divides the Republican Party of 2024 is not any one policy or ideology. It is not whether to support Donald Trump. The most important fault line in the party now is democracy itself. Today’s Republican insurgents believe democracy has been stolen, and they don’t trust the ability of democratic processes to restore it. This phenomenon is evident across the country, in Georgia and Nevada, in Arizona, Idaho and Florida. But it’s perhaps the starkest in Michigan, a place long associated with political pragmatism and a business-friendly GOP, embodied by governors George Romney, John Engler and, most recently, Rick Snyder. It was a son of Michigan, former President Gerald Ford, who once said, “I have never mistaken moderation for weakness, nor civility for surrender.” I grew up in Michigan. My own political education and my early years as a journalist coincided with a stunning Republican resurgence in my home state. Over several decades, Michigan’s dynastic families — the DeVoses and Meijers and Van Andels on the west side, the Romneys and Fords on the east — poured money and manpower into the Michigan Republican Party, building it into one of the most vaunted political operations in the country. They transformed Michigan from a bastion of organized labor that leaned Democratic into a toss-up state that, until recently, had a right-to-work law and put Republicans in control of all three branches of government for eight of the last 14 years. Michigan Republicans were so successful that other states copied their tactics. As Dick DeVos, heir to the Amway fortune and a prolific Republican donor, once told a gathering of conservative activists, “If we can do it in Michigan, you can do it anywhere.” Several years ago, however, my home state stopped making sense to me. I watched as thousands of political newcomers, whose sole qualification appeared to be fervor of belief, declared war on the Republican establishment that had been so dominant. Calling themselves the “America First” movement, these unknowns treated the DeVoses and other party leaders as the enemy. I had covered the DeVoses and the Michigan Republican Party long enough to know that they were not just pro-business but staunch conservatives who wanted to slash taxes, abolish regulations and remake the public education system in favor of vouchers and parochial schools. Yet the new “America First” activists disparaged prominent Michigan Republicans as “globalist” elites who belonged to a corrupt “uniparty” cabal. That cabal had denied Trump a rightful second term and needed to be purged from the party. With a consequential election looming, I traveled back to Michigan earlier this year to understand how this all happened. I sought out the activists waging this struggle, a group of people who don’t trust institutions or individuals except Trump and one another — and sometimes not even that. Could they triumph over the elites? I found chaos, incompetence, strife, a glimpse of a future post-Trump Republican Party and, all around me, danger for our system of government and the state of the country. “We can’t keep going through election after election like this where a large plurality of the country just does not accept the outcome of the majority and refuses to abide by it,” said Jeff Timmer, a former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party who now works with the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. “That’s when the system falls apart.” Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks to supporters during a rally on February 17, 2024 in Waterford, Michigan. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) A Call From God After Peter Meijer’s event in Kent County, I drove west toward Lake Michigan to meet a plumber named Ken Beyer for lunch. Barrel-chested and with a neatly trimmed goatee, Beyer is in his late 50s but looks younger. He’s disarmingly earnest, the kind of guy who’d offer to help you fix a flat tire in a snowstorm. In less than two years, Beyer had risen from a political nobody to a district chair in the state GOP and a leader of the “America First” movement in Michigan. He is known for his fiery videos, in which he might equate a rival to Adolf Hitler or warn that “the storm is upon us.” Like many of his “America First” allies, he questions whether democracy still exists in this country. “I don’t know if any election is fair anymore,” he said. Over chicken tenders and iced tea, Beyer, a church-going Christian, told me about a series of what he saw as divine revelations that had delivered him to this point. The pandemic and 2020 election had shaken him. He no longer recognized his own country. He feared that the moment had come, he said, “where freedom and the American dream end.” His next revelation happened on Jan. 6, 2021. Because he was convinced that Democrats stole the White House from Trump, he had gone to Washington to make his voice heard and show support for the president. Standing on the steps of the Capitol, he encountered a reporter with the conservative outlet Newsmax who needed help carrying gear. Beyer grabbed a tripod and backpack and filled in as a makeshift field producer for one of the biggest events of the 21st century. “What God wanted me to do,” he later said, “was help capture the history of what’s happening and get the truth out of what really was going on there.” Back in Michigan, Beyer enlisted the help of a young videographer who had produced content for Beyer’s plumbing business, and together they churned out videos about COVID-19 (overblown), election fraud (rampant) and the “truth” of Jan. 6 (“a big prayer meeting”). He read about disturbing allegations about voting-machine software changing votes. He listened to poll workers allege that mysterious suitcases of mail-in ballots had arrived overnight at the state’s largest ballot-processing site in downtown Detroit (a claim that was later debunked). The more he heard, the more he came to believe that his home state had been central to the Democrats’ plan to steal the 2020 election. In his free time, Beyer urged Republican lawmakers to investigate the allegations of fraud made by Trump and his allies. Most Republicans brushed him off. A few, like Peter Meijer, had openly turned on Trump, voting for impeachment or dismissing Trump’s stolen-election theories. Beyer couldn’t understand it. “Why weren’t they fighting for him?” he said. According to more experienced people in the party, there was a simple answer: Many of the claims brought forward weren’t true. A long-awaited investigation by a Republican-led state Senate committee found “no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud” in Michigan. If Republicans wouldn’t act, Beyer reasoned, then they were just as bad as the Democrats. Trump supporters in other states had also encountered Republican indifference in response to Trump’s fraud allegations. What were they supposed to do now? Patriotically dressed delegates on the floor at the Michigan Republican Convention in Lansing, Michigan, on Saturday, February 18, 2023. (Photo by Sarah Rice for The Washington Post via Getty Images) The Re-Founding Fathers A solution arrived in the form of the “precinct strategy.” It was a plan promoted by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon to ensure that the political establishment in both parties didn’t “steal” future elections. Precincts are the smallest geographical unit in American elections. In Michigan, there are roughly 4,700 precincts typically made up of a few thousand active registered voters. Each precinct elects at least one delegate as its representative to a county convention, and sometimes three or four. In all, there are upwards of 8,000 delegate positions in Michigan. If a state political party is a pyramid with a chairperson at the top, precinct delegates occupy the lowest, broadest tier. Until recently, it was an obscure position. Thousands of the seats often sit empty. If enough Trump supporters filled them, Bannon said, they could form a majority within the party, elect allies to leadership positions and, eventually, take control. Ken Beyer had never heard of a precinct delegate until he stumbled across the website for MI Precinct First, a group inspired by Bannon’s plan. He decided to run. He believed that this, too, must be part of God’s plan for him. “I believe that He’s using people like me throughout the United States to become the re-founding fathers,” he told me. The precinct strategy proved successful. In Michigan, thousands of new activists, many recruited by “America First” groups, became precinct delegates in 2022. In Ottawa County, a deeply conservative enclave along Lake Michigan, the number of delegates leapt from 170 to 330. The same trend played out in other battleground states. “The Trump apparatus did very little correct except infiltrate the party right down to the precinct level,” said Timmer, the former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party. “Not just in Michigan but all over.” The first test for the new “America First” delegates came in late August 2022. In Michigan, the voters select most nominees for elected office in a normal primary election. But for two key positions with oversight of elections — attorney general and secretary of state — the precinct delegates decide the party’s nominees at a statewide convention. These conventions were often sleepy affairs, the outcome predetermined. But this time, when the party’s chair, a wealthy donor and former U.S. ambassador named Ron Weiser, took the stage, the cavernous ballroom filled with boos and jeers. “How many of you believe we can sweep in November?” Weiser asked. “With the new people!” a woman wearing a “Keep America Great” hat yelled. “With ‘America First’!” Over the opposition of Weiser and other longtime party operatives, the “America First” contingent nominated two election deniers for attorney general and secretary of state. Matthew DePerno, a combative lawyer who had promoted a viral yet baseless theory about voting fraud in tiny Antrim County, Michigan, vowed to use the power of the attorney general’s office to investigate election crimes. Kristina Karamo, a tall, commanding woman in her late 30s with a breathless speaking style, was the “America First” pick for secretary of state. A community college instructor and live-trivia host, Karamo had come to prominence after she testified before the Michigan Legislature about irregularities involving ballot counting and voting machines she said she’d witnessed as a poll challenger in Detroit in 2020. Kristina Karamo addresses the delegates before they vote for Michigan Republican Party Chair at the Michigan Republican Convention in Lansing, Michigan, on Saturday, February 18, 2023. (Photo by Sarah Rice for The Washington Post via Getty Images) As a show of political force, nominating DePerno and Karamo was impressive. As an electoral strategy, it was disastrous. Both candidates were trounced in November, and Michigan Democrats won control of all three branches of government for the first time in more than 30 years. DePerno conceded defeat right away. Karamo did not. To outside observers, her stance was laughable: She had lost by 615,000 votes, roughly the population of Detroit. But Beyer and many other “America First” delegates saw Karamo’s actions as brave and principled, the opposite of DePerno’s cowardly and hypocritical concession. Several months later, she and DePerno ran against each other to be the next chair of the Michigan Republican Party. DePerno won endorsements from Trump and Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO and a funder of the election-fraud movement. But the delegates rallied behind Karamo and delivered her the victory. In just two years, Bannon’s precinct strategy had gone from a quixotic scheme to a reality. No sooner had Karamo won than paranoia set in. Standing on the convention floor just before her victory, a well-connected precinct delegate approached Beyer to deliver a message. “He says, ‘Leadership is going to let you guys have this one,’” Beyer recalled. Karamo would be chair, in other words, because party leaders let it happen. Why’d they do that, Beyer asked. “Because they believe that they can make her fail quicker than they can Matt DePerno.” File Number One A state political party is like the HVAC unit of American politics. When it does its job, you don’t think about it. It hums away in the background, as unsexy as it is essential. State parties recruit candidates to run for office. They mobilize voters. They raise money that helps candidates spread their message and win elections. Karamo had other priorities when she took over the Michigan Republican Party. Top of the list: “election integrity.” She created a new “election security operations” team to recruit hundreds of volunteers as poll challengers, dropbox monitors and recount specialists, and to serve on county canvassing boards, which certify the final vote count. To oversee this work, she enlisted grassroots activists best known for filing a lawsuit that accused Detroit’s election clerk of running an “illegal election” in 2022. (A judge dismissed the case, calling it “frivolous” and “rife with speculation.”) Training and embedding “America First” activists in every part of the election process was critical to the future of the party and the state. “Otherwise,” one of Karamo’s advisers told a group of activists, “the big money is going to come right back in and start doing all this for us and selecting all the candidates for us again.” Karamo’s plan to “secure” elections had two objectives: Not only did she and her team hope to catch future cheating by the Democrats, but they sought revenge against the Republican establishment. To do that, Karamo turned to a lawyer and political outsider named James Copas. He was given a special project: write a new constitution for the state Republican Party that would give as much power as possible to precinct delegates. People like Ken Beyer. There was no greater priority for Karamo’s team. “If you were to look in my records, I opened 82 different project files,” Copas told me. “The constitution was file number one.” Karamo showed little interest in the day-to-day work of running the party. Bills went unpaid, emails unanswered. When members of the party’s state committee, in effect the board of directors, questioned her, she ignored them or removed them from leadership positions. Even her allies were critical. “I can tell you unequivocally that there was no chance that Kristina was qualified to be the chair,” Copas said. “So what? She was elected.” (Karamo did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) Near the end of 2023, Copas circulated a draft of his proposed overhaul of the party constitution. The new constitution proposed a radical change: Eliminate open primary elections and replace them with closed caucuses. Under the current system, about a million people voted in an August GOP primary to choose nominees for local elected offices, state legislative seats, judgeships and federal House and Senate races. Instead of those million or so voters casting ballots, fewer than 10,000 precinct delegates — the same precinct delegates who had powered Karamo to victory — would meet behind closed doors and select the candidates. The aim of this proposal, said Joel Studebaker, who was Karamo’s chief of staff, was to break up the “corruption club” that had ruled Michigan Republican politics for far too long. “We want something that’s pure,” he told me. “The best answer for that is putting power in the hands of the people.” The irony, critics pointed out, was that Karamo’s proposal would disenfranchise far more people than it empowered. There was another reason the closed-caucus model appealed to the “America First” faithful: It meant there was no need for voting machines, mail-in ballots, high-speed scanners or any of the other technologies that election-fraud believers had spent the last two years railing against. “You’re eliminating cheating in the election system,” Beyer told me. The backlash was fierce. “Nothing says ‘we respect democracy’ like cutting out millions of Michigan voters,” wrote one prominent Michigan conservative activist. Karamo’s proposed voting reforms and the party’s dire finances plunged the organization into turmoil with the 2024 elections less than a year away. Even some of Karamo’s own supporters turned against her. Privately, a group of delegates discussed whether to urge her to step down for the good of the party. Karamo had no plans to resign. If her enemies wanted her gone, they would have to try to remove her. And so they did: On Jan. 6, 2024, a group of anti-Karamo delegates on the Republican state committee invoked party bylaws and voted to remove Karamo as chair. Two weeks later, the same faction elected former U.S. representative Pete Hoekstra to replace her. Former U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the new Chairman of the Michigan Republican Party, talks with the media about the vote results at the MI GOP State Convention on March 2, 2024 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. (Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images) Up From the Ashes By the time Trump walked onstage in Waterford Township, Michigan, in mid-February with his red hat pulled low, the Michigan Republican Party was a national punchline. Karamo had refused to leave office, saying the vote to oust her was “illegitimate.” An unsigned statement issued by the state GOP called it a “political lynching.” Her critics filed a lawsuit in state court to enforce the removal vote, and Karamo said only a judge’s order could make her leave. In the meantime, she urged her followers to travel to Detroit on March 2 for a special convention. There, they would vote on her controversial plan to rewrite the Michigan GOP’s constitution. At his mid-February rally, Trump waded into the chaotic mess that was the Michigan Republican Party despite his supporters urging him not to. He described Hoekstra as “your new Michigan Republican Party chairman,” a line that was greeted with a mix of cheers and boos. The boos continued as Trump said he’d recommended Hoekstra for the job. “I said, ‘Do you think you could ever get this guy Hoekstra? He’s unbelievable,’” Trump said. The Trump campaign seemed to recognize that the longer Karamo remained in charge, the weaker the state party was and the less chance he had to win Michigan. For both Trump and Biden, Michigan is arguably a must-win state. Still, some of Trump’s most ardent supporters saw his support for Hoekstra as a betrayal. “I’m not happy with Mr. Trump right now,” one voter said at a Republican town hall I attended. “I think he should keep his nose out of Michigan politics.” When I asked Beyer what he thought, he said he suspected Trump was playing a double game. “If you know anything about election integrity, you know it’s a rigged program here,” he said. For Trump to win, “he’s gotta join the riggers.” I heard a Karamo supporter say she had read on “Truth” — meaning Truth Social, the social media platform partly owned by Trump — that Trump hadn’t even written the endorsement of Hoekstra that appeared on his account. Around the time of Trump’s visit to Michigan, I went to hear Karamo speak in Saginaw County, an hour and a half north of Detroit. The event was part of a barnstorming tour of the state meant to rally her supporters and assure them that she remained the party’s legitimate leader. To her supporters, the date of the vote to remove her, Jan. 6, 2024, had taken on a mythological quality — it was the new Jan. 6. Their Jan. 6. The audience sat rapt as Karamo told them that it wasn’t just 2020 and 2022 that were rigged. “Our election system has been corrupted for decades. There’s an entire network protecting the corrupt system.” At the end of her remarks, she reminded her supporters to go to Detroit on March 2. The date had taken on an outsize significance. Not only would delegates choose which presidential candidate received Michigan’s 39 remaining delegates on the path to the Republican nomination, but they would vote on Karamo’s constitution plan. Hoekstra, who was calling himself the rightful chair, was planning a separate event on the same day in Grand Rapids. The schism in the party would be on full display. A few days before the dueling conventions, a judge issued a preliminary ruling that Karamo had been properly removed. The Detroit convention was called off, and her constitutional overhaul was shelved for the time being. With Karamo’s event canceled, Beyer, now a regional GOP chairman as well as a delegate, said he would carry the torch for the “America First” movement. In an act of defiance aimed at “Adolf” Hoekstra, as Beyer called him, he and Studebaker announced their own miniconvention. On the morning of March 2, Beyer picked me up at a Wendy’s on the drive to his breakaway convention. A deluge of text messages lit up his phone as we drove down the highway. Beyer told me that the theme for Hoekstra’s convention was “Up From the Ashes.” “It’s fitting,” he said. “Because they lit the match. They don’t like the new group of people that have come in over the last two years.” He paused. “They’re burning down the Republican Party to get rid of people like me.” After Beyer and Studebaker had run their protest convention, they jumped in Studebaker’s truck and drove to Hoekstra’s event in Grand Rapids. There, Studebaker ran into some operatives aligned with Trump’s team in Michigan. Studebaker was furious with them and with Trump for abandoning Karamo and for, as he saw it, thwarting the will of the delegates. “He’s going to lose Michigan if he keeps doing this,” Studebaker said. The delegates will still vote for Trump, he added, but they’re not going to knock doors and they’re not going to give money. They might tune out of state and national elections and focus on local races. The operatives were unmoved. “We gotta go,” one of them said. “Trump stuff.” Guests attend a rally hosted by Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump on February 17, 2024 in Waterford, Michigan. People waited in lines for hours outside the event as temperatures held in the mid-20s and a strong wind cut through the crowd. The Michigan primary election is scheduled for February 27. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) A Future Without Trump Not long afterward, Trump disappointed his grassroots followers again. In Michigan’s high-stakes Republican Senate contest, Trump endorsed Mike Rogers, a former representative, all but assuring that Rogers would clinch the nomination in the August primary. As for Peter Meijer, that throw-you-off-the-bridge exchange in the cafe in February had proved prophetic: His comeback bid was doomed. In late April, he dropped out. Trump’s endorsement of Rogers left his supporters mystified. Like Meijer, he had been a vocal critic of Trump, once calling the former president “more gangster than presidential.” He had chaired the powerful House intelligence committee, which led Trump followers to label him a member of the “deep state.” A former aide to Trump had tweeted: “Can’t imagine a worse or more dangerous ‘Republican’ candidate for Senate than Mike Rogers.” Jim Copas, who quit his role with the party shortly before Karamo was forced out, told me he was disgusted with Trump’s actions. “I’ve lost complete faith in the state GOP and I’ve lost complete faith in the national GOP,” he said. Speaking of Trump, he added: “To be honest, I think Don has learned a little bit about being a politician and he’s forgotten his soul.” Beyer hadn’t given up on Trump. He still “loved” the man, he said, but he wasn’t taking direction from Trump. “I’m not gonna always listen to him,” Beyer told me. “I’m not part of a cult.” He had his own plans. In one of our last conversations, he laid out a more religious, more uncompromising version of the “America First” movement. He had started his own PAC called Faith Family Freedom and he planned to target the precinct delegates around the state who had opposed Karamo and replace them with “America First” allies in the next round of delegate elections this August. He had already signed up 350 supporters in various counties, he said, to help with his efforts. If the Republican establishment — the DeVoses and the Meijers, Pete Hoekstra and the people who had voted to remove Karamo — fought him and his compatriots, Beyer stood ready. “They’re not after Trump. They’re not after Kristina,” he told me. “They’re after me. They’re after everybody like me. That’s what this is all about.”

CNN reported recently that the ad used a template that was created by Turkish graphic designer Enes Şimşek, more than a year ago. It was made available on stock footage and video effects resource hub VideoHive, and Şimşek reportedly used language he copied from Wikipedia's article about World War I as placeholder text. That controversial placeholder text read: "German industrial strength and production had significantly increased after 1871, driven by the creation of a unified reich."

"When I was doing this job, I never even thought that one day such an event would happen," Şimşek wrote in a post to his website. "I guess [the Trump campaign] forgot to change some of the text when they edited the project. And things grew very mad."

READ MORE: 'Not an accident': Trump's 'unified Reich' video alarms historians and fascism experts

In an interview with CNN, Şimşek confirmed that he created the template, which he said he only sold 16 copies of for $21 USD apiece. Two other examples of the template's use were reportedly a French language video posted to Facebook, and a music video posted to YouTube.

"I didn’t know it is my power to change politics … I don’t know what could be crazier than that,” Şimşek told the network. “Imagine if your work shakes a country.”

Şimşek's explanation seems to back up the Trump campaign's version of events, in which it stated that Harp simply overlooked the "unified Reich" phrase when posting the video to Trump's Truth Social platform (it was up for roughly 12 hours before eventually being taken down). However, other text in the video is in line with Trump's public policy plans.

The New York Times noted that "one article in the video asserts that Mr. Trump would deport 15 million migrants in a second term," which tracks with previous reporting about his plans to launch a massive immigrant detention and deportation program if he won the November election. And the "unified Reich" oversight is not the first time the Trump campaign has deployed language reminiscent of Adolf Hitler's regime.

READ MORE: 'Language of tyrants': Columnist warns 'bloody-minded' Trump 'embracing Hitleresque phrases'


After the release of the "unified Reich" video, Biden campaign spokesperson James Singer said the video was Trump showing Americans "exactly what he intends to do if he regains power," which is to "rule as a dictator over a 'unified reich.'" "Parroting Mein Kampf while you warn of a bloodbath if you lose is the type of unhinged behavior you get from a guy who knows that democracy continues to reject his extreme vision of chaos, division and violence," Singer said. Click here to read CNN's full report.

Republicans are wolves in sheep’s clothing; victimizers lying that they are victims