Parkland Survivor Trolls Trump’s Sneaker Venture in an Awesome Way

Gun control advocate David Hogg has found a clever way to capitalize on Donald Trump’s newly launched sneakers.

Trump unveiled the garish kicks, which his fans can find at GetTrumpSneakers.com, on Saturday at Sneaker Con in Philadelphia. If the website name seems a bit awkward, it may be because Hogg quickly snapped up the more obvious choice: ShopTrumpSneakers.com.

Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 Parkland school shooting and a co-founder of the gun control advocacy group March for Our Lives, announced his purchase on Saturday. The URL leads to a page called The Shotline, which Hogg explained allows people to send an automated call to their member of Congress urging gun law reform.

“The twist is the person who makes the call is a victim of gun violence,” Hogg said. The website uses A.I. technology to recreate the victims’ voices for the automated call.

As of Tuesday, almost 72,000 calls have been sent through The Shotline.

“Thank you to team trump for being dumb enough to not pay the $12 for the website,” Hogg tweeted Monday night, celebrating his website’s success. “I’ll give it to you for a small donation of $1 million to March For Our Lives.”

Trump launched his sneaker line the day after he was hit with a $354 million ruling for committing real estate–related financial fraud in New York state. Before he can appeal the ruling, Trump would first have to pay the entire amount plus interest, which could add as much as an additional $100 million.

Not to mention the fact that Trump owes $88.3 million to E. Jean Carroll for sexual assault and defamation, $400,000 to The New York Times, and thousands of dollars in other legal fees and fines. That’s a lot of sneakers.

Trump has positioned himself as staunchly anti–gun control. Just two weeks ago, he spoke at an event organized by the National Rifle Association. The NRA was a major supporter of Trump during his first term, and the group appears ready for a second act.

The former president swore that if he is elected, he will immediately undo all of the Biden administration’s gun regulations.

“Every single Biden attack on gun owners and manufacturers will be terminated my very first week back in office, perhaps my first day,” Trump told the crowd, promising that “no one will lay a finger on your firearms.”

The former head of the Republican Party in Wisconsin has admitted that he was a fake elector for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election—but that he only did so out of fear of retribution by the former president and his sycophantic followers.

Andrew Hitt, an attorney and former chairman of the state Republican Party, was one of several fake electors for Trump out of Wisconsin—one of the only states that hasn’t charged people who participated in the illegal scheme to misrepresent the popular vote. But on Sunday, Hitt claimed he was “tricked” into signing documents claiming Trump had won the state in the general election and that the campaign’s attempt to throw out more than 200,000 absentee ballots—which Hitt described as his preferred method of voting—“wasn’t something that [he] was comfortable with,” according to an interview on CBS News’s 60 Minutes.

Days before Wisconsin’s Democratic Governor Tony Evers certified Joe Biden’s victory in the state, Hitt says he received a “suspicious” call from the Republican National Committee asking for a “list of the Wisconsin Republican electors.”

“I was already concerned that they were gonna try to say that the Democratic electors were not proper in Wisconsin because of fraud,” Hitt told Anderson Cooper, adding that he was very involved in the election and did not believe there to be any fraud.

The new plan was in: Under the eye of Trump campaign attorney Kenneth Chesebro (whom special counsel Jack Smith has dubbed the “architect” of the fake elector scheme), Hitt and other electors from the state were expected to meet at noon at the Wisconsin Capitol on December 14 to sign a document that would insist Trump won—on the basis that the documents would only be used in a contingency in the event that the Trump campaign’s legal case succeeded.

“If I knew what I knew now, I wouldn’t have done it,” he continued. “It was kept from us that there was this alternate scheme, alternate motive.”

But that same day, the Wisconsin Supreme Court threw out the Trump campaign suit. So why did Hitt go forward with signing the documents?

“Can you imagine the repercussions on myself, my family, if it was me, Andrew Hitt, who prevented Donald Trump from winning Wisconsin?” Hitt said, pondering his fate if the Supreme Court ultimately chose to throw out the votes.

When Cooper asked if he feared for his safety from other Trump supporters, Hitt responded that it was “not a safe time.”

“If my lawyer is right, and the whole reason Trump loses Wisconsin is because of me, I would be scared to death,” he said.

The Republican-controlled West Virginia House of Delegates has passed a bill that could see librarians facing jail time.

House Bill 4654 passed the chamber Friday by a vote of 85–12, along party lines. The bill would remove criminal exemptions for schools, public libraries, and museums that distribute or display “obscene matter” to a minor, even if the minor’s parent or guardian is present. Any employees of those institutions found guilty of giving minors obscene matter can face fines of up to $25,000, up to five years in prison, or both.

The incredibly short piece of legislation gives no indication of how the new rules would affect paintings or sculptures that feature nude figures, or books that include descriptions or definitions of sexual conduct. Obscenity laws are incredibly hard to enforce, because definitions of obscenity still largely come down to individual interpretation.

As a result, there will likely be more reports of obscenity, made by people who are either more conservative or just nervous about accidentally breaking the law. And since libraries and public schools often operate on very tight budgets, they are unlikely to have the budget to fight a surge in lawsuits.

“It is going to cost our counties and our librarians when these matters go to the court system,” House Minority Leader Sean Hornbuckle told The Parkersburg News and Sentinel. “Because this is still vague, I’m scared.”

“This is a very dangerous bill.”

House Minority Whip Shawn Fluharty warned that the legislation could inspire many lawsuits over books that staff members don’t even realize are problematic. “The librarians on staff might not know if a book has obscene matter in it or may or may not have shown it to someone, but because it was in the facility and it was sitting on a shelf, it could still be prosecuted,” he said.

The bill has now been sent to the state Senate, which the GOP also controls (along with the governor’s office).

Republicans across the country have increasingly sought to ban books, claiming they are protecting minors from seeing inappropriately sexual content. But most of the books being pulled from shelves tend to discuss race, gender, and sexuality.

Seemingly innocuous texts have also gotten caught up in the fray. School districts in Florida have pulled the dictionary from library shelves for including definitions of sexual conduct and have drawn over children’s picture books.

Nobody likes Representative Matt Gaetz, and he wants everyone to know it!

The Florida Republican took to social media to snag credit for the recent GOP exodus from Congress, bragging about how much his own party hates him.

“I love this @cnn article. The fundamental premise is that I’ve made congress so miserable for so many members that they are leaving. Wonderful!” Gaetz wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, sharing a CNN article that only mentioned him twice.

“We can’t save America with the current Republican team. We have to get tougher and smarter. We need newer, bolder voices in the House,” he continued. “If you want to be a Paul Ryan/Kevin McCarthy Republican—THEY DON’T WORK HERE ANYMORE!”

“The next phase of our plan is to REPLACE the droves of retiring members with America First Patriots,” he added, urging Republican primary voters to “do their part” and send him “more backup.”

So far, 45 representatives in both parties have announced their retirements, with an additional six expected to be replaced before the general election (seven if you include George Santos’s replacement just last week).

That includes several legacy Republican policymakers, including Representatives Kevin McCarthy, Bill Johnson, Ken Buck, and Debbie Lesko, who are hanging up their hats and resigning early in a bid to escape seemingly endless grandstanding, gridlock, and complete dysfunction from House Republicans.

The beef between the Republican establishment and Gaetz hit an apex in October, when the MAGA lawmaker led a coup, dubbed the “Gaetz Eight,” to strip McCarthy of the gavel over a renewed House Ethics Committee probe into Gaetz’s alleged payments to a minor for sex.

“It’s unfortunate because you think of the brain trust you are losing. I blame a lot of the ‘crazy eights’ led by Gaetz. They want to make this place dysfunctional to try to wear people out,” McCarthy told reporters outside the Capitol. “It’s very sad.… It makes it more difficult for getting people to run in the current climate.”

Donald Trump decided to weigh in on Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s mysterious death, taking to Truth Social to memorialize … himself?

“The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country,” Trump posted to Truth Social on Monday, three days after Navalny’s death was first reported. “It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction. Open Borders, Rigged Elections, and Grossly Unfair Courtroom Decisions are DESTROYING AMERICA. WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE, A FAILING NATION! MAGA2024.”

Somehow, in his chaos of word vomit, Trump omitted a key figure at the center of the Russian political dissenter’s curious disappearance: Russian President Vladimir Putin.

After Tucker Carlson’s paltry Putin interview, Trump’s comments are yet another example of a startling shift for far-right members of the conservative party, which somehow straddles the razor wire between condemning former leaders of the Soviet Union while kowtowing to the proto-dictatorship that exists under Putin in modern Russia.

Hours later, Trump continued to make the moment about himself, deriding the nearly $355 million judgment he received on Friday for committing real estate–related bank fraud in New York.

“ALL POLITICAL PROSECUTIONS OF YOUR FAVORITE PRESIDENT, ME, MUST STOP IMMEDIATELY,” Trump wrote. “THIS IS ELECTION INTERFERENCE, AND MUST BE IMMEDIATELY STOPPED. I SHOULD NOT HAVE TO GO THROUGH ANY FAKE PROSECUTIONS BEFORE THE ELECTION. THIS IS COMMUNISM, AND A THREAT TO DEMOCRACY. OUR COUNTRY WILL NOT STAND FOR IT. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

In another post, Trump likened the ruling—which he has just 30 days to come up with the money to appeal—to a “Stalinist nightmare.”