Progressive Star Katie Porter Announces 2024 Senate Run

Representative Katie Porter announced Tuesday that she is running for California senator in 2024.

The progressive star will run to replace long-serving Senator Dianne Feinstein. In her announcement video, the representative highlighted threats to democracy and socioeconomic inequality. She called out the Senate as a place where “rights get revoked and special interests get rewarded,” name-dropping Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in particular.

A former law school professor, Porter has made a name for herself as a tough interrogator and a progressive who can still appeal to swing voters. She is often seen on the House floor with whiteboards breaking down complex numbers and has achieved name recognition in a body of 435 members based on merit, not controversy—no small feat. Recently, she went viral for reading The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck during Kevin McCarthy’s interminable run for House speaker (and even coordinated her outfit to the dust jacket).

The California representative is also a strong fundraiser, raising more than $25 million during the November midterms and finishing with $7 million still in her coffers. She won her third term after a tight race that ended with days of vote counting. Although the Senate seat is expected to remain solidly blue, Porter is well positioned to run a competitive campaign.

Porter’s announcement comes before Feinstein has given any indication that she will retire. Feinstein, 89, has served in the Senate for 30 years and accomplished major achievements, such as chairing the Senate Intelligence Committee and assembling the 2014 CIA torture report, which found the agency had misled the government and American public about its use of torture in interrogating terrorist suspects. But in the past year, there have been concerns that she is losing the mental ability to continue serving.

Porter’s Senate bid would give Feinstein an opening to retire gracefully, passing the baton to the next generation as Nancy Pelosi did to Hakeem Jeffries.

“Everyone is of course welcome to throw their hat in the ring, and I will make an announcement concerning my plans for 2024 at the appropriate time,” Feinstein said in a statement after Porter’s announcement.

“Right now I’m focused on ensuring California has all the resources it needs to cope with the devastating storms slamming the state.”

This post has been updated.

Lynette Hardaway, better known as “Diamond” in the ultra-pro-Trump duo Diamond and Silk, passed away Monday night, the pair’s official Twitter account said. She was 51.

Hardaway and her sister Rochelle Richardson (“Silk”) have been some of Donald Trump’s most vocal supporters since he launched his first presidential campaign in 2015.

Trump announced Hardaway’s death on Truth Social before the official Diamond and Silk tweet, calling it “really bad news for Republicans and frankly, ALL Americans.” Both posts said her death was unexpected, but neither shared the cause of her death.

Diamond and Silk gained notoriety during Trump’s 2016 campaign through their political commentary videos on YouTube, in which they embraced his MAGA ideology. They said they had switched their political affiliation from Democrats to Republicans after Trump announced he was running.

Trump was quick to latch on to them, hyping up the fact that they were two Black women, thus supposedly proving that he was not racist. Diamond and Silk spoke at his rallies for the 2016 campaign, attended his inauguration, and testified in Congress multiple times in 2018 about Facebook supposedly suppressing their content.

Their fame and close relationship with the then president helped them get contributor jobs at Fox News, which at the time was aggressively pro-Trump. Diamond and Silk held multiple commentator roles at Fox News from 2016 to 2020, when the network cut ties with them for actively pushing Covid-19 conspiracy theories on air.

The women said that Covid-19 death numbers were being inflated to make Trump look bad. They also said they would refuse to get a Covid vaccine if Bill Gates had been involved in its production, accusing him of trying to control the global population, and suggested that 5G technology was being used to infect people with the coronavirus. All of these claims are untrue.

Diamond and Silk then landed their own show on far-right network Newsmax, calling themselves Trump’s “most loyal supporters.”

On Monday, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene posted a pseudo-hype video celebrating herself and the GOP House majority after the caucus made history in hosting the longest House speaker election since before the Civil War.

The video, posted with the caption “It’s time to begin … and they can’t stop what’s coming,” was set to Dr. Dre’s “Still D.R.E.,” with a smattering of clips showing Greene dramatically striding through the halls of Congress, apparently to showcase her prowess as a political operator greasing the wheels of the House voting 15 times before Representative Kevin McCarthy finally won the speakership.

Garnering over four million views and some 14,000 likes (just 0.35 percent of viewers actually liking the video), the clip was removed after Dr. Dre himself requested Twitter remove the video. “I don’t license my music to politicians, especially someone as divisive and hateful as this one,” he told TMZ.

Dr. Dre’s lawyer, Howard King, had a few more words to share with Greene. “One might expect that, as a member of Congress, you would have a passing familiarity with the laws of our country. It’s possible, though, that laws governing intellectual property are a little too arcane and insufficiently populist for you to really have spent much time on,” King wrote in a cease and desist letter addressed to Greene. King also sent a separate letter to Twitter requesting the company block her post.

Greene had told TMZ she was locked out of her account for using the copyrighted music without permission. And after so gleefully using Dr. Dre’s music in her engagement-snatching video, she snapped back at the eminent musician. “While I appreciate the creative chord progression, I would never play your words of violence against women and police officers, and your glorification of the thug life and drugs,” she told TMZ.

Perhaps such a 180 can be best left with the words of another classic Dril tweet that always seems relevant to the right wing in America:

Supporters of former far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro attacked the nation’s Supreme Court, Congress, and presidential palace in hordes on Sunday. And Brazil’s government—led by new President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—has minced no words on the attack.

Lula excoriated the “barbarism in Brasília,” calling the rioters “fascists, the most abominable thing in politics.” He then signed an edict mobilizing federal forces to intervene in the havoc.

“I wanted to tell you that all the people who did this will be found and punished,” Lula said as he signed the decree. “These people have to be punished, and we are going to find out who financed these vandals that went to Brasília, and they will all pay with the force of the law for this irresponsible gesture, this anti-democratic gesture, this gesture of vandals and fascists.”

And the decree is already in motion.

While the January 8 riot has drawn comparisons to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, one clear distinction is that the former has prompted both clear-eyed identification of who the culprits were—not just protesters or rioters but fascists—and an immediate effort to bring said fascists to justice. While hundreds have already been apprehended in Brazil in less than 24 hours, it took twice as long for the United States to charge 53 people.

It’s barely been a day, so it’s too early to completely evaluate Brazil’s efforts to hold the fascist rioters accountable. But the response thus far appears promising, and it is not just directed at individual rioters but also the systems that have directed them.

“We are going to find out who the financiers of these vandals who went to Brasília are, and they will all pay with the force of law,” Lula said, suggesting that the rioters were linked to the illegal logging, mining, and cattle ranching interests that pushed for the rampant deforestation that occurred under Bolsonaro’s reign.

The attackers acted on a fascist impulse to defend who they falsely see as their rightful ruler: a man who said he was committed to the transfer of power but refused to explicitly concede the election. Lula called it as it was, vigorously shutting down the fascist impulse and holding fast to the alternative politics he was duly elected to carry out.

A Brazilian lawmaker requested Monday that the Foreign Ministry begin the extradition of Jair Bolsonaro from the United States over the attack on Brazil’s government.

Supporters of the far-right former leader invaded and trashed several government buildings in Brasília over the weekend, in an attack that felt frighteningly reminiscent of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Bolsonaro, who spent New Year’s Eve at former U.S. President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, is still in Florida. He checked into a hospital earlier Monday with severe abdominal pain.

Erika Hilton, one of the first two openly transgender people elected to the National Congress of Brazil, formally requested that Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira begin the extradition process for Bolsonaro due to “serious events and attacks on the powers of the Federative Republic of Brazil.”

She slammed the riot as the work of “extremist groups” supporting the former president.

Several Democratic officials have also called for Bolsonaro to be extradited, including Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Joaquin Castro.

Bolsonaro is already at the center of four criminal probes in Brazil for accusations of fraud and abuse of power. The allegations include using the federal police to protect his sons and spreading baseless claims that the October election—which he lost to leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—was fraudulent.

A veteran, Bolsonaro has often been dubbed the “Tropical Trump” and is an outspoken admirer of the former U.S. leader. The similarities between the two men, particularly in the run-up to Brazil’s election, have been overwhelming. In addition to spreading disinformation and now the attack by his supporters, Bolsonaro also has not formally conceded and skipped his successor’s inauguration.