How New Jersey College Democrats Were Threatened Over a Primary Endorsement

Representative Andy Kim slammed his own party on Friday, roundly criticizing local leaders of the Democratic Party attempting to pressure a cohort of Gen Z voters against endorsing him in the race to oust incumbent Senator Robert Menendez.

“This is why people lose faith in democracy and our system,” Kim posted in a thread on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

“The Dem party will lose credibility in criticizing Trump and others about efforts to subvert democracy if some leaders in our own party seek to put their thumb on the scale of our elections in NJ,” Kim continued. “We seek fairness in our democracy and must not deviate when it advantages us.”

The online blowup followed an explosive report by The New York Times outlining how Keely Magee, a youth coordinator for the Democratic State Committee in touch with one of Kim’s rivals, first lady of New Jersey Tammy Murphy, actively pressured members of the College Democrats of America and its local New Jersey chapter in a futile strategy to sway its endorsement—an effort that members of the group said left them feeling threatened and fearful.

In a series of calls over several hours, Magee reportedly warned against the endorsement, suggesting that it could threaten funding and future job prospects for leaders of the College Democrats, reported the Times.

A spokesperson for Murphy’s campaign told the outlet that the comments and calls were made by a “young person with no connection to our campaign, one who seemed eager to help, albeit in a misguided manner.” Magee, for her part, said she was in regular communication with Murphy’s campaign consultant Dave Parano.

Murphy has not just the support of her husband, Governor Philip Murphy, in the hotly contested race but also the endorsement of some of the state’s most prominent Democrats. She has also raised a record number of funds—more than $3.2 million, according to Insider NJ—in just the first six weeks of her campaign. And yet, Kim has so far pulled off an extreme advantage in the polls, tentatively pulling nearly half of the vote and a 23-point lead over Murphy, according to a December survey by Kim’s campaign.

Both are attempting to unseat Menendez, who has been indicted on multiple corruption charges related to the foreign governments of Qatar and Egypt. Menendez allegedly tried to help New Jersey real estate tycoon Fred Daibes secure a multimillion-dollar investment from an investment company tied to the Qatari government, and pressured officials within the Department of Agriculture to help Egypt maintain a business monopoly. In the process, Menendez collected incredible gifts, including lavish watches, $480,000 in cash, numerous gold bars, and “luxury vehicles” from Egyptian officials.

“If they’re threatening us, who else?” Nate Howard, vice president of the College Democrats of New Jersey, told The Daily Princetonian. “If they’re threatening college students who are by no means power brokers, what are they doing to people who actually have power?”

This article has been updated to clarify Magee’s role.

An Oklahoma Republican lawmaker has introduced a bill that would label many people of color as “terrorists.”

State Representative J.J. Humphrey introduced House Bill 3133 on Tuesday. The remarkably short measure (the body of the bill is just 20 lines long) would create a new category of people considered terrorists within the Sooner State.

The first criterion to belong to this new category: Be a person “of Hispanic descent living within the state of Oklahoma.”

If the person is also a “member of a criminal street gang” and has been “convicted of a gang-related offense,” they would be considered a terrorist. The punishment for terrorism would be forfeiting all assets, including all property, vehicles, and money.

The bill is clearly intended to target a wide range of people of Hispanic or Latino descent, including Afrolatino people. Police and prosecutors are far more likely to deem Black and Latino people gang members than white people, meaning that people of color are more likely to have been accused or convicted of something considered terrorism.

If the concern was simply punishing acts of terrorism, there would be no reason to explicitly call out Hispanic people in the text.

Humphrey gave a weak apology after widespread backlash from Oklahoma Democratic lawmakers and social media users, but he refused to back down.

“I apologize for using the word Hispanic, but I was not wrong. Again, these are Hispanic,” he said. “Reality is they are Hispanic. There’s nothing to be ashamed with.”

Humphrey said he would change the bill so that it says “undocumented here illegally, or something like that” instead of Hispanic, which is not any better.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, the policy director of the American Immigration Council, slammed Humphrey’s proposed change.

“There are many people who claim that all they care about is violation of immigration law but when you dig deeper it’s just garden-variety bigotry,” Reichlin-Melnick wrote on social media.

After a week plagued by hand sores, deteriorating speech, and legal predicaments that included three key attorneys leaving his side and droves of courtroom faux pas in the E. Jean Carroll case, Donald Trump offered a pretty extreme idea for New Hampshire voters.

“What is your closing message to the people of New Hampshire?” asked Fox News’s Sean Hannity in a one-on-one interview with the GOP front-runner on Thursday night.

“The president of the United States, and I’m not talking about myself, I’m talking about any president, has to have immunity. Because if you take immunity away from the president—so important—you will have a president that’s not going to be able to do anything. Because when he leaves office, the opposing party, president, if it’s the opposing party, will indict the president for doing something that should have been good,” Trump said, after a brief rant about Colorado’s and Maine’s decisions to keep him off their primary ballots.

No other president in the history of the country has faced criminal charges. Trump, however, is staring down the barrel at 91 charges across four separate criminal cases, for his behavior related to the January 6 insurrection, his attempt to undermine the election results in Georgia, his alleged theft of thousands of classified documents, and the Stormy Daniels hush-money case, in the last of which Trump is accused of using his former fixer Michael Cohen to sweep an affair with the porn actress under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

Trump’s messaging on Thursday is an interesting indication of not just where his mind is at—but where he would prefer voters’ minds to be, as well, as he enters a period of extreme legal uncertainty in tandem with his race to reclaim the White House.

Presidential hopeful Nikki Haley continues to insist that America isn’t a racist country, this time by arguing … well, we’re really not sure what she’s arguing.

Haley made her bizarre, word-salady case during a CNN town hall on Thursday night. At one point, host Jake Tapper asked her if she really believed that the United States “has never been a racist country?”

“I was a brown girl that grew up in a small, rural town. We had plenty of racism that we had to deal with. But my parents never said we lived in a racist country, and I’m so thankful they didn’t,” Haley said.

“My parents would always say, you may have challenges. And yes, there will be people who are racist, but that doesn’t define what you can do in this country.”

Haley then listed all of her career accomplishments and said, “I want every brown and Black child to see that and say, no, I don’t live in a country that was formed on racism. I live in a country where they wanted all people to be equal and to make sure that they have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Tapper pushed back, noting that the U.S. was “founded institutionally on many racist precepts, including slavery.” But Haley doubled down and insisted the Founding Fathers’ “intent was to do the right thing.”

“I don’t think the intent was ever that we were going to be a racist country. The intent was everybody was going to be created equally,” she said. “And as we went through time, they fixed the things that were not ‘all men are created equal.’ They made sure women became equal too; all of these things happened over time.”

It’s unclear if Haley is saying that there are racist people in the U.S. but that racism isn’t a major issue; that her parents knew the U.S. was a racist country but tried not to let that affect her; or that the Founding Fathers weren’t racist.

But Haley’s confusing argument is undercut by the fact that she herself acknowledges that not all people were treated equally under the Constitution when it was first written. Black people were seen as property and counted as three-fifths of a person, while women weren’t even mentioned.

Haley has previously received criticism for her refusal to address the topic of racism. Earlier this week, she tried to claim that the U.S. has never been a racist country. And at the end of December, she said the Civil War was not about slavery.

But the clearest sign that racism is an ongoing issue in the U.S. comes from within Haley’s own party. Donald Trump has recently begun pushing a birther conspiracy about his Republican primary opponent. Instead of referring to her as “Nikki” (a name Haley presumably chose so white people wouldn’t have to deal with her Indian name), Trump has begun to refer to Haley as “Nimrata,” her birth name, as well as “Nimrada,” “Nimbra,” and other deliberate and offensive bastardizations of her name.

Trump is by far the front-runner in the GOP primary race. RealClearPolitics’ rolling average national poll has him more than 50 points ahead of Haley.

Out of office and almost out of sight, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has started to wage war against the clan of far-right Republicans who booted him from his high-flying position, all from behind the curtain.

First on the list: Nancy Mace.

On Wednesday, Politico reported that the South Carolina representative’s former chief of staff, Dan Hanlon, is courting donors as he weighs a potential run against his former boss, just weeks after he left her staff.

“Hanlon has been pleased with how well the idea has been received and how many people are looking for a Mace alternative, both money people in D.C. and movers and shakers in S.C.,” one anonymous Republican familiar with the decision told the outlet.

It’s now increasingly clear, however, that a huge part of that initial push was thanks to McCarthy, who allegedly encouraged Hanlon to run against Mace in the aftermath of her vote to oust him from the speakership, per The Washington Post.

McCarthy and his allies have been digging for ways to unseat the Trumpian acolyte since she locked hands with seven other Republicans, including Matt Gaetz and Ken Buck, in voting to oust the former speaker.

Though there may be more proof in the pudding—another former staffer said that Hanlon started pursuing the bid once colleagues and constituents began to take note that Mace was “increasingly difficult to work with,” and after negative reports in the press about Mace’s conduct and office culture began circulating, according to the outlet.

And Hanlon’s new chapter—which started with a bang when Mace’s incoming chief of staff called the Capitol Police to the office when Hanlon returned to give back his keys—may see some old players emerge. One of the Republicans who spoke with the Post predicted that the race may spur a walk-off, with other former Mace staffers joining the Hanlon campaign against her.