Montana Republicans Threaten to Expel the Only Trans Legislator

The Montana House of Representatives will vote Wednesday on “disciplinary measures” against the state’s only transgender lawmaker, whom Republicans have silenced after she slammed their anti-trans legislation. That could mean censuring her or expelling her entirely.

Republicans have not allowed Zephyr to speak on the House floor since last week, when she spoke out against a bill banning gender-affirming care for minors. She warned that taking away health care would increase suicide among trans and nonbinary kids. “I hope the next time there’s an invocation, when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands,” she said at the time.

Montana residents have rallied around Zephyr, demanding she be allowed to speak. Things came to a head on Monday, when a protest broke out in the gallery after Zephyr was silenced once more. Chants of “Let her speak!” rang out as security escorted people out, arresting seven protesters. Zephyr held her microphone up to amplify the chants.

Republican House leadership set a vote for Wednesday to either censure or expel Zephyr over her “conduct.” She will be allowed to speak for the first time in nearly a week.

The House GOP has tried to cast Zephyr’s actions as disruptive. They called her initial comments inappropriate and disrespectful, misgendering her in the process, and accused her of trying to start an insurrection on Monday. They also held a press conference Tuesday, during which they insisted Zephyr was not being silenced, and then canceled House proceedings for the day.

Democratic lawmakers have come to Zephyr’s support, with House Minority Leader  Kim Abbott slamming Republicans for “doubling down on their agenda of running roughshod over Montanans’ rights—to free expression, to peaceful protest, to equal justice under the law.” But Republicans have a supermajority in the chamber, and there isn’t much Democrats can do to stop them forging ahead with their agenda.

Zephyr’s situation is painfully reminiscent of Tennessee, where two Black Democratic lawmakers were expelled for joining protesters demanding gun control. Republicans there also compared the protests to the January 6 insurrection. Both lawmakers were ultimately reinstated.

“What you’re watching here, is you’re watching people who do not want to see democracy in action,” Zephyr said Monday after the protest.

Reports in The New York Post’s Page Six, a Rupert Murdoch-owned paper, suggest that “Trumpworld insiders” are pressing twice-impeached former President Donald Trump to make Ron DeSantis his running mate … and apparently Trump is “listening” (which, for Trump, is indeed a lot!).

The reports come after earlier indications that neither of the extremists would want to run with each other.

“I think that would be a very unlikely alliance,” Trump said in March. DeSantis, for his part, said he’s “more of an executive guy.”

But a month later, as Trump continues his scorched-earth endorsement-collection campaign, leaving DeSantis embarrassed in the dust, conditions may have changed for the pair.

“Supporters say the VP offer [would] stop DeSantis from opposing [Trump] and offer a ‘youthful conservative vigor’ to the slot, which Biden doesn’t have,” the source told Page Six.

It’s an unlikely pairing. And an incredibly demonic thing to imagine.

First, it was Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Now the far right is blaming Paul Ryan for Tucker Carlson’s sudden departure from Fox.

Ryan is one of eight members of Fox’s board of directors. While there has long been some latent far-right disdain for the former Republican House speaker, the new conspiracy theory around Carlson revolves around Ryan’s disinterest in disputing the 2020 election results.

Some on the right point to court documents revealed during the Dominion v. Fox defamation lawsuit as proof of Ryan’s offense.

Fox “should not be spreading conspiracy theories,” Ryan allegedly told Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch. Ryan believed that the theories were “baseless” and that Fox “should labor to dispel conspiracy theories if and when they pop up.”

Such beliefs apparently incriminate Ryan. Perhaps the most offensive thing he said? That Fox should “move on from Donald Trump and stop spouting election lies.”

And that explains pretty concisely why the far right is embracing the theory: because they themselves still believe the 2020 election was stolen. Never mind that Fox coughed up $787.5 million to Dominion to stop further inquiry into the network’s lies about the company.

The Ryan conspiracy theory has metastasized into tangential strains. For instance, just as Fox has been infiltrated by RINO-ideology, so apparently has the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library:

Or, more readily, the whole thing is about the conservative establishment getting behind Ron DeSantis (despite his having barely a handful of endorsements from Republican establishment elected officials, while Trump has now locked up over 60):

Again, the far right is assailing Ryan for the high crime of thinking that maybe Fox shouldn’t spread lies about the 2020 election. It could very well be that Ryan thought Carlson was bad for the network—though given that numerous hosts were spreading lies about the election, some even more than Carlson, Ryan would’ve had to clean out the whole house. And that’s assuming Ryan was somehow influential enough to do so at all. Whatever decisions were made by the higher-ups to let go of Carlson, it certainly took more than the complaints of one Paul Ryan.

Erstwhile television host Tucker Carlson may have gotten too big for his britches at Fox News, and the network is reportedly poised to punish him for it.

Carlson was abruptly fired Monday, prompting much speculation as to why. He had featured prominently in court documents released by Dominion Voting Systems that showed he knew he was spreading falsehoods about the 2020 election on his show. Documents also revealed Carlson privately (and regularly) bashed Fox executives.

He went so far as to refer to one executive as the c-word. When Fox News lawyers told him they had persuaded the court to redact the slur from the legal filings, Carlson was angry, the The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. He wanted everyone to know just how much he despised that executive, according to the Journal.

The Journal, citing anonymous sources, said that “reservations had been mounting” about Carlson. There was concern among top executives that if any of the redacted information about him in the Dominion filings became public, it would be damaging to the network. But there were also concerns that “the populist firebrand had come to believe himself bigger than the network—a cardinal sin in Fox Corp.”

Media Matters senior fellow Matt Gertz suggested that Carlson may have directed the slur at Irena Briganti, who leads Fox’s Communications Department, given other text messages in the court filings. Briganti is notoriously combative, and many former Fox employees have accused her of planting negative stories about them after they left the network. Multiple women who work at Fox told New York magazine in 2016 that they did not speak out about past sexual harassment because “they were terrified Briganti would find out and smear them in the press.”

Briganti is also known for compiling dossiers of damaging information on individual Fox employees—and she might have one on Carlson. Rolling Stone reported Wednesday that Fox has assembled an “oppo file” on Carlson that they are prepared to publish should he try to attack the network.

The file reportedly includes internal complaints about workplace conduct, insulting comments made about executives and colleagues, and allegations that Carlson created a toxic work environment, according to Rolling Stone, which cited anonymous sources. If it’s true, then the file’s contents mirror allegations made about Carlson by Abby Grossberg, a former producer on his show.

Grossberg is suing Fox, where she worked for four years, alleging that company lawyers coerced her into giving misleading testimony in the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit. The move, she argued, was due to a culture of “poisonous and entrenched patriarchy” and gender-based discrimination, citing multiple examples from Carlson’s team in particular. She also said that there were constant “lies and deceit” at Fox because the network prioritized ratings above all else.

What is Joe Biden doing?

On Tuesday, the president officially declared his bid to run for reelection in 2024. In his announcement video, Biden showcased his signature optimism and persistent cause to win the “battle for the soul of America.” Yet nowhere in the three-minute video did Biden even mention the words “abortion,” “climate,” “environment,” “gun,” “immigrant,” “justice,” “labor,” “union,” or “worker.”

The video announcement paid a great deal of focus to themes of freedom and democracy and the threats “MAGA extremists” pose in eroding them: cutting Social Security and cutting taxes for the wealthy, “dictating what health care decisions women can make,” “banning books and telling people who they can love,” doing it all “while making it more difficult for you to be able to vote.”

“This is not a time to be complacent,” Biden urged, asking voters to consider a key question: whether they will have more freedom and rights, or fewer.

Biden’s ad in a broad sense focused on the abstractions: his belief that “we’re good and decent people” in a “country that believes in honesty and respect, and treating each other with dignity.”

But in so doing, Biden spent 184 seconds avoiding any mention of the most popular issues not only among his base but across political lines.

State after state is advancing restrictive abortion bans and pushing attacks on LGBTQ people. The majority of Americans—regardless of party—say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. But Biden’s only invocations of the issues were subdued: MAGA extremists are looking to dictate “what health care decisions women can make” or tell people “who they can love.”

Amid an appalling wave of gun violence across the country—from shootings of kids accidentally ringing the wrong doorbell or driving up the wrong driveway to mass shootings at schools and banks—Biden did not mention the word “gun” once.

In the aftermath of a border detention facility fire killing 40 migrants, Biden did not mention the word “migrant,” or “immigrant,” not even to hand-wave about America being a “beacon” for people fleeing oppression or searching for a better life.

Nothing about “justice” either, as police killings continue, as do protests of the construction of a bloated police facility in Atlanta (protests where masses of people have been arrested indiscriminately on no just cause and one protester was killed in cold blood).

After first billing himself the “most pro-union president in American history,” and then imposing a contract on railroad workers, Biden did not mention the words “labor,” “union,” or “worker.”

And on a ticking clock with no regard for second chances, after Biden rubbed his foot into the faces of the millions of young people who got him into office and approved the controversial Willow pipeline project, the president could not even muster the gumption to say “climate,” “environment,” or even “nature.”

Of course, it’s just an ad. On the other hand, it’s also the ad—the long-awaited confirmation that Biden is running again, and that he should earn our support lest we lose to the dangerous Republicans. Amid Biden’s lurch to the right—with no apparent electoral benefit—every display of priority matters. So if his announcement is to be graded on any scale of genuine concern for the broader slate of Democratic-mobilizing issues, or for the life-changing problems for millions of people, it fell remarkably short.