Twitter Janitors Are Striking After Being Laid Off With No Warning

As Elon Musk continues on his quest to make Twitter as garbage as possible, he is ensuring no one will be around to clean it up—online or off.

On Monday, janitors and allies picketed outside of Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, in response to more than 20 workers being haphazardly laid off, according to a representative from SEIU Local 87, the union that represents the workers. Late last week, workers were told with no notice that Friday would be their last day.

Workers have been picketing most of Monday morning, and the union representative said they will continue until their demands for recourse are met—whether it’s getting their job back or attaining some form of compensation for lost wages and being abruptly fired with no notice.

This is not the first time Musk laid off unionized workers. At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic (shortly after Musk had said, “The coronavirus panic is dumb,” before over one million Americans would proceed to die from the virus), the Tesla CEO laid off 280 janitors and bus drivers. This, while fellow tech giants, including Facebook and Google, committed to keep paying their hourly workers during the pandemic.

This is a developing story.

A woman who says she was in a romantic relationship with Herschel Walker says the Georgia Senate candidate abused her and is lying to American voters.

Cheryl Parsa, who dated Walker for five years in the early 2000s, told NBC that he physically attacked her in 2005 after she caught him with another woman.

When Parsa confronted him, Walker backed her against a wall and grabbed her throat. “You want to see a man? I’ll show you a man!” he shouted, his face so close to hers that he sprayed her with saliva.

Walker then tried to punch her, but Parsa says she was able to dodge and get away.

“I believe the deception now is on the American people, and I have to say what I know,” she said in an interview Sunday.

Parsa has also described Walker’s manipulative tendencies. She attended a few of his sessions with a therapist helping him work to control his dissociative identity disorder, or DID, a mental health condition where people have multiple, distinct personalities. Both Walker and his therapist convinced her to stay in the relationship longer than she wanted, insisting she was the only one who could save him from himself.

“He knows how to manipulate his disease, in order to manipulate people, while at times being simultaneously completely out of control,” she told The Daily Beast on Friday.

“He is not well.… He cannot be a senator. He cannot have control over a state when he has little to no control of his mind.”

Walker has been accused multiple times of physical abuse and emotional manipulation. His ex-wife and son have both said he threatened to kill them. The Daily Beast spoke with four other women, in addition to Parsa, whom Walker dated from the 1990s to the early 2010s, sometimes simultaneously.

The other women, who spoke anonymously, describe how Walker would overwhelm them with expressions of almost aggressive affection, known as “love-bombing.” He also proposed to at least one of the women while seeing some of the others.

Walker has branded himself on the campaign trail as a MAGA Republican and ultraconservative traditionalist. He has condemned absentee Black fathers and does not believe in abortion.

He has not responded to Parsa’s accusations, but he has denied the accusations from his ex-wife and son, who says his father is not present in his life. Walker has also denied allegations from two other women, who came forward anonymously in October, that he forced them to get abortions while they were dating.

This article has been updated to clarify Parsa’s allegations.

Over two years after he lost the 2020 election, former President Donald Trump whined on Saturday once again about it, this time calling to terminate the U.S. Constitution and reinstate him back to power.

“Do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”

Following Trump’s call to throw out the results of an election he lost by seven million votes, Republicans have largely remained silent—particularly party leadership. Neither Senator Mitch McConnell nor Representative Kevin McCarthy have said a word. This after McCarthy pledged to read the Constitution on the first day of the next congressional session.

RNC chair and election denialist Ronna McDaniel has also remained mum.

Among the Republicans who have spoken out, there’s little that gives confidence.

Representative David Joyce, chairman of the Republican Governance Group, a coalition of self-proclaimed “moderate” Republicans, refused to denounce Trump on ABC Sunday. After confirming he would support “whoever the Republican nominee is,” he said Trump simply “says a lot of things.”

Also on Sunday, Representative Mike Turner said he “vehemently disagree[s]” with Trump’s statement, saying it’s “certainly not consistent with the oath we all take.”

Incoming Representative Mike Lawler said, “The Constitution is set for a reason, to protect the rights of every American. So I certainly don’t endorse that language or that sentiment.”

Representatives and outspoken Trump critics Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger both criticized the former president’s comments. Both are outgoing members of Congress.

All this radio silence follows a refusal by many Republicans, including the leadership, to simply and clearly denounce Trump’s antisemitic proclivities. Then, as now, reveals how pathetically submissive the Republican Party is.

Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker may not even know what chamber of Congress he’s running for.

In the final weekend before Tuesday’s runoff race, Walker and his opponent, Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock, both hosted multiple events to try and galvanize supporters.

But in an interview with Politico, Walker seemed confused about which house he was running for. He also seemed to think that a victory would mean Republican control of that chamber.

“They’re not [less motivated] because they know right now that the House will be even so they don’t want to understand what is happening right now,” he said Saturday about Georgia voters. “You get the House, you get the committees. You get all the committees even, they just stall things within there.”

Republicans have taken control of the House of Representatives, but only by a handful of seats. It also remains unclear if the entire party—which is split between Donald Trump loyalists and more moderate lawmakers—will be able to present a united front.

Democrats, however, have kept control of the Senate. A Warnock victory is not necessary for a majority but is still important. If he wins reelection, then Democrats will have an outright 51-49 majority, meaning control over the committees, as opposed to a 50-50 split with a tiebreak.

Walker has made gaffe after gaffe since he started running. He has lied repeatedly and been accused of domestic abuse and forcing partners to get abortions. At his events, he mostly focuses on far-right dog-whistle topics, such as boosting transphobia or railing against pronouns and “wokeness.” Republicans rarely let him speak alone in interviews.

Warnock, meanwhile, has pushed hard on issues such as the economy and health care. He has tried to appeal to younger voters and independent or more center-leaning Republicans.

“This is not about Republican and Democrat. This is not about right and left. This is about the difference between right and wrong,” Warnock said at a rally on December 1.

On Friday, the Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee voted to make South Carolina the first state on the presidential primary calendar. South Carolina would replace Iowa, which has hosted the first presidential nominating contests for 50 years.

The upheaval of the nominating calendar comes largely from an effort spearheaded by President Joe Biden to readjust the order, ostensibly to make the primaries more demographically representative of the nation.

Per Biden’s recommendations, the DNC ordered Nevada and New Hampshire to concurrently vote second, three days after South Carolina, with Georgia to follow the week after, and Michigan to round out the first five contests two weeks after Georgia.

The proposal will still need to be approved by the full DNC at a meeting that will take place early next year, but as of now it seems unlikely to fail.

House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, South Carolina’s only congressional Democrat (whose endorsement of Biden helped generate a media storm during the primaries), said the move to prioritize South Carolina was apparently a surprise. “I didn’t ask to be first,” he said. “It was his idea.”

“He knows what South Carolina did for him, and he’s demonstrated that time and time again, by giving respect to South Carolina,” Clyburn said.

DNC Chair Jaime Harrison of South Carolina echoed Clyburn, saying he did not know Biden was recommending South Carolina to lead the presidential nomination calendar until Thursday evening. He claimed to want the process to play out without his influence.

“Folks, the Democratic Party looks like America,” he said. “This proposal reflects the best of our party as a whole, and it will continue to make our party and our country stronger.”