MAGA Can’t Stop Celebrating Layoffs at Major Civil Rights Organization

On June 12, an estimated 60 people were abruptly laid off by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Conservatives and extremists who’ve been profiled by the SPLC quickly cheered on the news.

In a hell of a self-report, Sean Davis, founder and CEO of conservative website The Federalist praised the layoffs on X (formerly Twitter). “Your entire organization is trash, and America will be better off when it’s forced to lay off every single employee,” wrote Davis. Moms for Liberty, an SPLC-designated anti-government extremist group, boosted the SPLC Union’s criticism of the organization for hoarding donations, with MfL co-founder Tina Descovich declaring, “Everything WOKE ends up rotting.”

Far-right troll Andy Ngo, whose own follower committed a deadly mass shooting inspired by his rhetoric, praised the layoffs in stereotypically unimaginative fashion, writing, “I hope the whole lot of you goes down, & one day in the future people can read about the shameful period of American history you were involved in.” Ngo has been covered previously by SPLC’s Hatewatch and described as a far-right provocateur.

The conservative rage against SPLC is to be expected, given the group’s detailed work monitoring far-right extremist movements. Moms for Liberty, for example, was categorized by the SPLC in 2023 as an anti-government extremist group for its ongoing efforts to roll back federal protections for LGBTQ youth, praising Hitler, threatening violence, and banning books.

The layoffs instead hit projects that work to serve communities in need, shuttering the Southeast Freedom Initiative, which provides pro bono legal services to detained immigrants, and the Economic Justice Project, which works to break the cycle of poverty among the country’s most impoverished communities, among other projects, according to HuffPost.

Adding to the dark celebration by far-right groups over SPLC’s sudden shrinkage, the layoffs hit 60 unionized workers, including a union chair and five union stewards, according to a statement from the union. The layoffs came two years after the SPLC reached a collective bargaining agreement with the then-nascent union, and ate a quarter of the organization’s workforce, as part of a “restructuring effort.”

“SPLC’s decision has a catastrophic impact on the organization’s work in support of immigrants seeking justice and its mission to dismantle white supremacy, strengthen intersectional movements and advance human rights through support of educators,” the SPLC Union wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “How will today’s layoffs help us achieve our goals of fighting hate, decarcerating Black and Brown people, defending democracy, and eradicating poverty? The answer is: they won’t,” the union added.

* This piece has been corrected to clarify who was impacted by SPLC layoffs.

Judge Aileen Cannon appears to be sick and tired of nonparties attempting to intervene in Donald Trump’s classified documents trial—even though she’s the one who allowed them to do so in the first place.

The Trump-appointed judge issued a paperless order Monday, rejecting without explanation a couple dozen Republican attorneys general and their proposed brief opposing special counsel Jack Smith’s pending gag order on the former president, which they decried as “presumptively unconstitutional.”

Attorneys general representing the states of Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming had all signed on to the amicus curiae. In it, they argued that the tabled gag was an affront to the First Amendment rights of everyday Americans, who have a right to hear Trump push back against legal prosecutors.

The fierce opposition arose after Smith argued for a change in Trump’s bond conditions, claiming that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s Truth Social posts were “grossly misleading” and “inflammatory.” Smith argued Trump’s posts put law enforcement and potential trial witnesses in legitimate danger.

“Those statements create a grossly misleading impression about the intentions and conduct of federal law enforcement agents—falsely suggesting that they were complicit in a plot to assassinate him—and expose those agents, some of whom will be witnesses at trial, to the risk of threats, violence, and harassment,” Smith said in May.

Cannon had previously scheduled an “unusual” hearing on June 21 to make time for oral arguments from the nonparties, including one focused on whether Smith’s appointment to the case is constitutional.

The rejection is one of few indications that Cannon actually intends to move forward with a trial that has been riddled with unnecessary and cumbersome delays. Trump faces 42 felony charges in the case related to willful retention of national security information, corruptly concealing documents, and conspiracy to obstruct justice.

Ted Cruz wouldn’t be a conservative if he wasn’t adept at historical revisionism. On Monday, he shared an absurd piece by right-wing tabloid New York Post attempting to align pro-Palestine protests with Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and melting racist gremlin David Duke.

Cruz wrote boastfully on X, “Democrats founded the Klan … and now the Klan is backing the Democrats.”

Cruz’s comment is a tired bit of conservative propaganda that he has repeatedly trotted out which conveniently ignores major facets of American political history. During the post–Civil War Reconstruction era, Democrats were indeed conservative, pro-Confederacy racists. But Cruz would probably dislike it if you learned about the Southern Strategy, a successful effort most famously deployed by the Nixon campaign to pull white racists—including members of the KKK—from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement.

The Southern Strategy was essentially a role reversal that stoked racial divisions and fearmongery for the sake of building the Republican Party’s power. To wit, Democrats of yore—then referred to as Dixiecrats—would today find themselves toting America First flags above their MAGA behatted heads while flooding Marjorie Taylor Greene’s replies with praise and drawing up plans to harass a Drag Story Hour event. It’s a tactic Republicans continue to use today.

Cruz’s comment further omits the fact that the Democratic Party has split itself in two over the pro-Palestine movement and calls for a cease-fire, with Democratic leadership consistently in opposition to both movements. Biden’s entire administration, leading Democrats like Schumer, Pelosi, and the Democratic establishment overall have all been aggressively protested against for their refusal to call for a cease-fire for the past nine months, with Pelosi infamously and absurdly decrying protests against her as the work of Russian and Chinese operatives. Duke, moreover, isn’t pro-Palestine. He’s anti-Jew, anti-LGBTQ, anti-Black, and anti-Muslim—and he took credit for the rise of Donald Trump. His stance is legitimately antisemitic and virulently racist to everyone except for the same white, Christian, cisgender, heterosexual men to whom Cruz also endeavors to appeal.

The Post article is more or less the same as its usual attempts to slander movements and people conservatives dislike. The rag’s targets span from pro-Palestine and Black Lives Matter activists to progressive politicians. It ramps up targeted hate against LGBTQ-friendly spaces and often inflames anxieties around crime—especially during election years, a move that bolsters conservative candidates and surely aided Democrats in New York losing several House seats in the midterm elections.

The Post’s incendiary rhetoric has often been cited by far-right activists mobilizing in line with Post outrage bait, most recently resulting in a series of modern-day Klan rallies against housing asylum-seekers, harassing a school briefly sheltering migrant families overnight to avoid floods, outrage over completely fabricated claims of veterans kicked out of hotels to house migrants—even provoking a right-wing dope to fling pizzas over the fence at City Hall in reaction to a bogus article about pizza ovens.

Cruz’s response to the Post’s spin is effectively Cruz acknowledging he’s prone to falling prey to absurdly inflammatory claims from a notoriously disingenuous tabloid that works tirelessly to intensify right-wing fearmongering and division. For one thing, neither Duke nor any far-right extremist or white supremacist is pro-Palestine. Duke is intensely and explicitly antisemitic. And while the Post would never report on it, whenever white supremacists think they can find a safe space in a pro-Palestine protest, they end up forcefully kicked out.

Attempts to pair protests against genocide with people who support the mass extermination of a specific group are just an effort to delegitimize opposition to mass death. It’s nothing new, but it’s always very telling who falls for the ruse. Cruz’s comment, with historical context applied, is ultimately an immense self-own—on himself and the Republican Party, which presently and historically endeavors to charm the most racist people who’ve ever lived.

A megachurch pastor, whom Donald Trump once lauded as a “spiritual adviser,” has admitted to “inappropriate sexual behavior with a young lady,” following new allegations that he’d sexually abused a 12 year-old.

Cindy Clemishire shared her account of sexual abuse by Robert Morris, who currently leads Gateway Church in Dallas, on Friday in the Wartburg Watch, a religious watchdog site.

In the 1980s, Morris would occasionally stay with Clemishire’s family when he was a traveling evangelist. In 1982, Morris invited Clemishire to his room, where he allegedly sexually molested her, warning her never to tell anyone. According to Clemishire, the abuse escalated and continued from 1982 to 1987.

Morris released a statement Saturday to the Christian Post responding to the claims.

“When I was in my early twenties, I was involved in inappropriate sexual behavior with a young lady in a home where I was staying. It was kissing and petting and not intercourse, but it was wrong. This behavior happened on several occasions over the next few years,” said Morris.

“In March of 1987, this situation was brought to light, and it was confessed and repented of. I submitted myself to the Elders of Shady Grove Church and the young lady’s father. They asked me to step out of ministry and receive counseling and freedom ministry, which I did. Since that time, I have walked in purity and accountability in this area.”

Morris neglected to mention in his statement that Clemishire was 12 at the time the abuse started. He also does not mention apologizing to her directly.

Gateway Church said that Morris underwent a two-year “restoration process” following a “moral failure,” in a statement to WFAA.

Morris was able to return to Shady Grove Church in 1987, after being forgiven by the victim’s father, he said. “I asked their forgiveness, and they graciously forgave me,” said Morris.

Clemishire said that although her family forgave him, her father never supported his return to ministry.

Morris did return, and in 2003, he founded the Gateway Church, one of the largest megachurches in the country. Gateway boasts a weekly attendance of 100,000 parishioners, according to the church’s website.

In 2016, Donald Trump named Morris to his spiritual advisory board, a convenient prop in his ultimately successful efforts to secure the white Evangelical Christian vote. In 2020, Trump visited Gateway Church, which had since expanded into several campuses across the Dallas area, amid the Black Lives Matter protests in response to George Floyd’s murder.

Clemishire told the Dallas Morning News that she was left unconvinced by Morris’s statement.

“I don’t think that it’s repentant when someone calls a 12-year-old a young lady and tries to just dismiss what happened as just some heavy petting,” she said. “I don’t believe that’s repentance. There’s no child on earth that any person should ever do that to. It’s just unacceptable. There’s zero excuse.”

Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton has found himself on the outside looking in at Donald Trump’s shortlist of potential vice presidential candidates. He’s taken to TV to raise his profile—which now means defending Trump’s election denial and minimizing the January 6 insurrection.

During a segment with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Cotton was shown a comment he had made in 2020 claiming that Trump pledged to accept the results of the election and commit to the peaceful transfer of power if he lost. When Tapper pointed out that Trump neither accepted the legitimate results of the election nor transferred power to President Biden peacefully without encouraging an insurrection, Cotton resorted to the same technicality-laden, mealymouthed nonanswer required by any GOP member hoping to stay in Trump’s good graces.

“Of course we will accept the results if the results are from fair and free elections,” Cotton said, his answer heavy with the baseless implication that the election might not be free or fair. Cotton, Trump, and the rest of the Republican Party relied on the same phrasing to cast doubt on the integrity of mail-in ballots in the run-up to 2020 elections.

“Every candidate in any race has a right to go to court, to seek legal redress if they think there’s been any kind of fraud or cheating,” he continued. Faced with his own comments and pressed by Tapper on Trump’s continued insistence that the election had been rigged and his encouragement of the insurrection after exhausting his legal avenues, Cotton deflected, minimizing the Capitol riot and casting peaceful protests outside conservative Supreme Court justices’ homes as left-wing equivalents of January 6.

“What happened on January 6, 2021, is that there was a protest in Washington that got out of hand, and it became a riot, and as I’ve said from the very beginning, anyone who injured a law enforcement officer or committed acts of violence on January 6 at the Capitol should be prosecuted and face severe consequences, and again, that’s unlike Democrats, who won’t prosecute violent protesters, for instance, from Democratic street militias outside the homes of Supreme Court justices.”

Cotton, who has previously called for the National Guard to quash protests against police brutality, remains behind Senators Marco Rubio, Tim Scott, and J.D. Vance and Governor Doug Burgum in the race to be Trump’s running mate, according to sources close to the Republican presidential nominee. It’s no wonder, then, that he’s making the rounds on television to engage in revisionist history about the threat to democracy his party poses.

Republican Senator Tim Scott started his week off by getting brutally fact-checked about just about everything. While Scott passed the Donald Trump loyalty litmus test with flying colors, he was only able to do so because he refused to fully answer a single question he was asked during Sunday’s episode of This Week With George Stephanopolus on ABC. 

When asked about the Supreme Court’s recent decision to lift a ban on bump stocks, one which was put in place by Trump himself, Scott quickly agreed with the court’s decision, before pivoting to criticizing President Joe Biden about something entirely different.

“Under Joe Biden, we’ve seen the movement to defund the police, leaving communities like the one I grew up in devastated and ravaged by a wave of violent crime that we have not seen literally in five decades,” said Scott. 

“Actually, senator as I—as you probably know, the latest stats on violent crime and on the murder rate, they’re actually down this past year,” said ABC co-host Jonathan Karl, before he attempted to go back to his Supreme Court question.

Scott, instead, refused to budge from his point that families are “trapped in their houses” every night because of spiking crime.

Just last week, the FBI released its quarterly crime report, which found that violent crime in the United States has dropped by more than 15 percent since the beginning of the year, including a 26.4 percent decrease in murder, in line with a decrease over the past two years. 

It appeared that the South Carolina Republican would rather defer to Trump’s talking points than openly agree with the court’s decision to undo his executive order. Karl then asked Scott if he would support congressional action to ban bump stocks.

“Well, I’m strongly in support of the Second Amendment,” Scott started. “But what we’re going to do in the party, and President Trump said it on Thursday, we’re going to focus—”

“I asked about the ban on bump stocks, not the Second Amendment,” Karl said, cutting Scott off again—but the senator continued undeterred, delivering a short stump speech about violence at the southern border.  

Scott continued to cement his position, not as a politician, or even a person capable of independent thought, but as a Trumpian record player, going over and over the same old tracks. 

At every turn, Scott skirted the questions being asked in order to deliver talking points for Trump. 

Karl then asked Scott how he felt about Trump’s proposal for tariffs on imported goods, which the former president raised during a meeting with House Republicans last week. Scott himself had previously criticized Trump’s approach to tariffs, but—clearly unable to own up to even the smallest defection from his beloved leader—he again pivoted to something else entirely. 

“I was in the Senate meeting. But what I can tell you he spoke about during his time with the Senate is actually exempting taxation on tips,” he said, and went on to talk about that plan, which would likely benefit hotel owners such as Trump and hurt workers in their efforts to raise the minimum wage. 

In an effort to solve the dramas surrounding its new corporate leadership, The Washington Post is returning to something that works.

The paper has tapped one of its longest serving managing editors, Cameron Barr, to lead its coverage of publisher and CEO Will Lewis’s Fleet Street scandals, NPR’s David Folkenflik reported Monday. Barr had left the organization in June 2023 after serving as managing editor for 19 years but is returning on contract to oversee controversies surrounding Lewis and Rob Winnett, the paper’s new editor in chief, currently the deputy editor of Telegraph Media Group, who is due to take his position after Election Day.

Lewis was named as a central figure in a hacking cover-up at Rupert Murdoch’s News U.K. A phone-hacking lawsuit filed across the pond by attorneys for Prince Harry, Guy Ritchie, and Hugh Grant accused Lewis of “giving a green light” to erase millions of emails pertaining to the phone-hacking accusations, even after authorities had instructed the company to retain all of its records.

But Lewis has been involved in other unsavory efforts to cover emerging details of the lawsuit, as well. Earlier this month, Folkenflik reported that the British tabloid journalist had offered him an unsavory deal in a “heated” exchange: an exclusive on the Post’s health if he promised to squash a story about Lewis’s involvement in the phone-hacking lawsuit.

Lewis’s legal troubles also appeared to fuel the unceremonious departure of the Post’s editor in chief Sally Buzbee, who reportedly refused to cave to Lewis’s demands in March and May about the paper’s own coverage of his legal battles.

As it stands, Barr may be uniquely situated to translate the British scandal to American audiences: The newsroom leader left the Post to move to England with his wife last year—a return to her home country, according to Barr’s exit announcement.

Sinclair Broadcast Group, the right-wing media behemoth swallowing up local news stations and spitting them out as zombie GOP propaganda mills, is ramping up pro-Trump content in the lead-up to the 2024 election. Its latest plot? A coordinated effort across at least 86 local news websites to suggest that Joe Biden is mentally unfit for the presidency, based on edited footage and misinformation.

According to Judd Legum, Sinclair, which owns hundreds of television news stations around the country, has been laundering GOP talking points about Biden’s age and mental capacity into news segments of local Fox, ABC, NBC, and CBS affiliates. One replica online article with the headline “Biden appears to freeze, slur words during White House Juneteenth event” shares no evidence other than a spliced-together clip of Biden watching a musical performance and another edited video of Biden giving a speech originally posted on X by Sean Hannity. The article was syndicated en masse on the same day at the same time, Legum found, suggesting that editors at the local affiliates were not given the chance to vet the segment for accuracy.

Most outrageously, the article, along with at least two others posted in June, makes the evidence-free claim that Biden may have pooped himself at a D-Day memorial event in France, based on a video of the president sitting down during the event. According to Legum, one of the article’s URLs includes the word “pooping.”

The shoddy evidence behind the segments, originally published by Sinclair’s National Desk, appears to have been lifted directly from social media posts by RNC Research, the X account operated by the Lara Trump–run Republican National Committee. On at least one occasion, a Sinclair piece quotes directly from the Trump campaign social media team’s response to an RNC Research post. “Lights are on but no one’s home,” the campaign’s reply to a post showing a “dazed” Biden watching a musical performance, was included in the syndicated article.

Sinclair’s takeover of local news is a dire development for the future of independent journalism in the United States. But the gutting of newsrooms (and the weaponization of their remnants by right-wing conglomerates) across the country isn’t just a problem for tomorrow; it’s having devastating effects on American democracy today.

Donald Trump has privately been fuming that GOP lawmakers aren’t doing enough (in his opinion) in his crusade for political vengeance following his conviction on 34 felony charges, amid his ongoing efforts to weaponize House Republicans.

Trump has been urging his close allies within the Republican Party to take up their swords for the embattled former president, who has continued to insist that his conviction is somehow the doing of President Joe Biden, Rolling Stone reported Sunday.

“I need action,” Trump told them, one source repeated to Rolling Stone.

A second source recounted to Rolling Stone that the former president had delivered an angry, profanity-laced tirade, complaining that lawmakers weren’t doing enough to punish the Biden administration for his conviction.

Since Trump’s guilty verdict, leading Trump fanboy Representative Jim Jordan has begun his own side quest against New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who led the case over Trump’s hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. Jordan invited Bragg to speak before the Ohio Republican’s subcommittee on the supposed weaponization of the federal government, but apparently even that’s not enough for his beloved leader.

“[Trump] doesn’t just want Congress to defund Alvin Bragg. He thinks there needs to be a wider net cast,” the second source said.

Speaker Mike Johnson also reportedly believes the House can have a role in overturning Trump’s conviction. House Republicans have set out to devise new legislation that would allow any president or former president to move a trial from a state court to a federal court, which would allow Trump to pardon himself should he be found guilty and wind up in the White House anyway. Trump held several meetings with Republican lawmakers before the verdict even came out, pushing for any legislation to shield him from non-federal prosecutions.

While Republicans can slow things down, any GOP-backed, revenge-fueled legislation would have absolutely no shot at passing the Senate. But that’s never been the point for do-nothing Republicans, who simply wish to disrupt governance, rather than execute plans. Too bad for them, Trump wants them to actually do something this time.

Steve Bannon is naming names and specifics on Donald Trump’s anticipated “retribution” list.

Speaking at a Turning Point Action convention on Saturday, the former Trump adviser and soon-to-be incarcerated criminal dropped that Trump will be targeting the Justice Department’s powers that be, should he return to the White House after November.

“We’re coming after Lisa Monaco, Merrick Garland, the senior members of DOJ that are prosecuting President Trump,” Bannon told the crowd. “Jack Smith. And this is not about vengeance. This is not about revenge. This is not about retribution. This is about saving this republic! We’re gonna use the Constitution and the rule of law to go after you and hold you accountable.”

Elsewhere in his speech, Bannon urged a cheering crowd to “give it all on the battlefield” between now and Election Day, and posited that a Trump win in November would either be “victory or death.”

Legal analysts were alarmed by Bannon’s violent rhetoric and described his motivations as “chilling.”

“The career ranks at DOJ, the people who do their jobs day in and day out and are committed to the Constitution, those folks aren’t legitimate targets for retribution,” former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance told MSNBC. “And I think it’s chilling to hear what’s going on here. This is payback for Donald Trump being held accountable.”

Bannon was sentenced to prison more than a year and a half ago, but he has remained free this whole time to spew disinformation and hatred online. Earlier this month, the far-right conspiracy theorist was ordered to submit to federal prison on July 1, when he will begin his four-month sentence for refusing to answer a congressional subpoena during the January 6 House select committee hearings.