After Deadly Colorado Springs Shooting, Herschel Walker Releases Ad Attacking Transgender Athletes

In the days since a gunman opened fire in a queer club in Colorado Springs, Herschel Walker has released an anti-trans ad and gone off on deeply anti-trans rants.

Five people were killed and at least 25 others wounded Saturday night when a gunman entered Club Q and started shooting. Many people were there to mark Transgender Day of Rememberance, a commemoration of people killed in anti-trans violence. Two of those killed were trans.

While there have been plenty of thoughts and prayers from Republicans, many have avoided mentioning that the LGBTQ community was specifically targeted. Georgia Senate candidate Walker went one step further, releasing an ad attacking transgender athletes.

The ad features NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines, who complained she had to compete against Lia Thomas, who is trans.

Walker said that letting Thomas compete against cisgender female swimmers was “unfair and wrong” and accused his opponent Raphael Warnock of being “afraid to stand up for female athletes.”

A day earlier, he delivered an unhinged speech laden with transphobia and bigotry.

“Do y’all know what the definition of an enemy is? A enemy is somebody that don’t like you. But they been telling you they don’t know the definition of a woman either,” he said at a campaign event Sunday in Carrollton, Georgia.

“I’m going to tell you the definition of a woman. Because it written in my great book. It said ‘a man and a woman,’” which Walker failed to note is not actually a definition.

Walker, who has previously complained about “wokeness,” also condemned using people’s chosen pronouns in the military.

North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson—who has previously said LGBTQ people are “filth” and that straight people are “superior” to queer people—spoke at the rally as well.

This is not Walker’s first horrendous foray into transgender policy. In September, he said trans kids won’t get into heaven because Jesus isn’t smart enough to recognize them.

Former Secretary of State and CIA Director Mike Pompeo claims the president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) union, Randi Weingarten, is the “most dangerous person in the world.”

“I tell the story often — I get asked ‘Who’s the most dangerous person in the world? Is it Chairman Kim, is it Xi Jinping?’ The most dangerous person in the world is Randi Weingarten,” Pompeo, who pushed for covert drone strikes in Afghanistan, said in an interview with Semafor published Monday.

“It’s not a close call. If you ask, ‘Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?’ It would be the teacher’s unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids, and the fact that they don’t know math and reading or writing,” the former top U.S. diplomat added.

Pompeo, who in 2017 did not disclose that his business imported oilfield equipment from a Chinese government-owned company, tied his supposed concern for kids with an angst for China.

“If our kids don’t grow up understanding America is an exceptional nation, we’re done. If they think it’s an oppressor class and an oppressed class, if they think the 1619 Project, and we were founded on a racist idea — if those are the things people entered the seventh grade deeply embedded in their understanding of America, it’s difficult to understand how Xi Jinping’s claim that America is in decline won’t prove true,” Pompeo said.

“...We should ban every element of Chinese technology that sits inside our ecosystem,” Pompeo said later. “The Chinese Communist Party is coming for your kids.”

Weingarten responded to the interview on Twitter, focusing less on Pompeo’s attacks and more on an affirmative vision of AFT’s efforts:

If this is a preview of Pompeo’s 2024 run for president, his case is already falling flat.

The computer repairman who says he worked on Hunter Biden’s laptop claimed the FBI threatened him over going public about it—while giving an interview the day before his book about the laptop comes out.

John Paul Mac Isaac appeared Monday on Fox News, where he has been a semi-regular guest, to discuss what he called the “chilling” warning that federal agents gave him.

Sporting a jaunty Scottish balmoral cap, Mac Isaac said he was “overjoyed” when FBI agents subpoenaed him for the laptop. As they were leaving, “I made a comment to Agent Mike; I said, ‘Don’t worry lads, when I write the book, I’ll change your names,’” Mac Isaac said, revealing part of an agent’s real name on national television.

“That’s when Agent Mike turned around and told me that, in their experience, nothing ever happens to people that don’t talk about these things, which was kind of chilling.”

Mac Isaac said he has faced retaliation on “multiple fronts” since reporting the laptop two years ago. He has appeared on Fox News multiple times since the news broke to discuss his struggles, and spoken on the channel once a week since the start of November.

In May, he sued House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff and multiple media outlets, including CNN and Politico, for defamation. He also wrote a book titled American Injustice: My Battle to Expose the Truth, which came out Tuesday.

Since Republicans squeaked out control of the House of Representatives, they have said with their whole chest that investigating Hunter Biden—and by extension his father, President Joe Biden—is one of their top priorities.

Not, say, inflation or antitrust or cryptocurrency crashes.

Outgoing Oregon Governor Kate Brown on Monday pardoned 45,000 state residents with minimum marijuana offenses.

The pardon applies to convictions for possession of an ounce or less of marijuana in cases before 2016 where the person involved was 21 or older. The measure applies to 47,000 state convictions and will forgive about $14,000 total in fines and fees linked to prior offenses.

“Oregonians should never face housing insecurity, employment barriers, and educational obstacles as a result of doing something that is now completely legal, and has been for years,” Brown said in a statement. Oregon legalized recreational weed use in July 2015.

She acknowledged that while state residents “use marijuana at similar rates, Black and Latina/o/x people have been arrested, prosecuted, and convicted at disproportionate rates.”

Brown’s decision comes about a month and a half after President Joe Biden pardoned more than 6,500 U.S. citizens federally convicted of simple marijuana possession, as well as those charged in Washington, D.C. He called on governors nationwide at the time to follow in his footsteps. He also instructed Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and Attorney General Merrick Garland to review how marijuana is classified under federal drug laws.

Recreational marijuana use is legal in 21 states and D.C. Maryland and Missouri are the two latest states to legalize weed, with state residents voting to pass amendments in favor of the move during the midterm elections.

Arrests for marijuana possession account for between 40 to 50 percent of all annual drug arrests nationwide, according to the ACLU, but “Black people are still more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white people in every state, including those that have legalized marijuana.”

On November 17, the Department of Labor announced that Krispy Kreme would be paying nearly $1.2 million in back wages and damages to 516 workers “to resolve overtime violations in multiple locations.” In other words, there was massive wage theft at the doughnut company and now it has to pay up.

The department first began its investigation at a Louisville, Kentucky-based Krispy Kreme, but it soon found violations to be “widespread and systemic” and expanded its probe to all 242 locations across the country.

The department determined that the $2.5 billion company had failed to include monthly bonuses in some employees’ regular pay rates, consequently paying workers less overtime.

“Overtime and minimum wage violations are common violations found in food service industry investigations,” said Principal Deputy Wage and Hour Administrator Jessica Looman in the Labor Department’s directive.

Because of that, actions like this directive would ideally serve both as consequence for malpractice and also as a warning to other companies that there indeed are accountability mechanisms for stealing from workers.

Meanwhile, Krispy Kreme denies it did anything wrong at all. “We do not agree with the department’s findings and the basis for them,” Krispy Kreme said to USA Today. “However, we have agreed to settle this matter with no admission of wrong-doing in the best interests of our business and our team members.”

While the amount owed back to each worker varies, the math averages out to about $2,300 per worker. According to court documents obtained by the Winston-Salem Journal, some workers are due upward of $13,000.