MAGA Fumes Over Microphone Rule at Biden-Trump Debate

It’s exceptionally cool and normal that the network hosting the Biden-Trump debate has been forced to roll out stopgaps to prevent a descent into chaos. CNN on Wednesday explained in child’s terms how they’ll be muting mics at Thursday night’s presidential debate to avoid interruptions, sending MAGA viewers into a frenzy.

CNN’s Victor Blackwell and Phil Mattingly demonstrated how it will sound when a candidate attempts to interrupt the other, showing a green light appearing on their podium when their mic is on and—get this—turning off when their mic is off. According to Mattingly, the same explainer was provided to both the Trump and Biden campaigns and by appearing at the debate, both are agreeing to abide by the muted mic rules. Notably, the muting appears intended to protect against cross talk, a disruption where no one can make head or tail of what anyone is saying—not to preemptively silence the content of a candidate’s response.

The very simple rule was enough to set off Trump’s base.

While MAGAs fume, many view CNN’s decision to mute mics as a grim indictment on the state of debate that requires technological intervention to ensure the basic rules are followed—and the unwillingness to let the debate get derailed by a certain Republican presidential candidate prone to ranting incoherently.

Senator Tim Scott made a wild comment suggesting that his being in contention for Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick demonstrates that we’re living in a post-racism utopia.

During an interview with Ainsley Earhardt on Fox & Friends that aired Thursday, the South Carolina Republican was asked how being on the short list for Trump’s running mate made him feel.

“I think it’s exciting, no matter the outcome,” Scott gushed. “It’s the evolution of the Southern heart that we see on display, and we Southerners get so little credit for the progress we’ve made.

“The whole notion of judging a person on the content of their character, not the color of their skin has happened,” Scott continued. “It’s not going to happen. It’s not around the corner. It’s in the rearview mirror. We are living Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream.”

Since dropping out of the race, Scott has been desperately shilling to join Trump’s ticket as his vice president, and he has repeatedly contradicted his own policy positions so he can breathlessly repeat the former president’s campaign talking points. 

Unfortunately for Scott, Trump is exactly the kind of racist he imagines American society has moved past. 

Trump uses his Black friends to claim he isn’t racist, and while his campaign bragged about receiving endorsements from dozens in a group called Black Americans for Trump, the team  failed to mention that a few of them were on the Trump family’s payroll. Recently, Trump has railed against so-called “anti-white racism” and claimed that Black voters will like him more because of his indictments and his mug shot, comparing his legal battles to the systemic discrimination experienced by Black people in the U.S. As recently as Wednesday, Trump literally phoned it in on a roundtable event with Black business leaders in Atlanta. 

Meanwhile, recent polling found that Black voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania feel Trump should receive jail time at his sentencing in July. A study conducted in April by the Pew Research Center found that a vast majority of Black voters still identify as or lean Democratic, and 77 percent said they’d back President Joe Biden, despite Trump’s claims that Black voters are abandoning the incumbent. 

During the interview, Scott also revealed that the former president had come to him in 2017 after his infamous remark on the deadly “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Trump angered many by claiming that there were “very fine people on both sides,” despite the fact that one side was entirely neo-Nazis, including one man who drove a car into a crowd.

At the time, Scott had criticized Trump, saying his moral authority had been “compromised.”

“He wanted me to share with him my perspective,” Scott told Earhardt. “He listened, and after we finished talking, he said, ‘Help me help those I have offended.’”

Looks like that’s going really well.

The House of Representatives voted Thursday to bar the State Department from using funds from the international affairs budget to cite any number of Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza.

The House voted 269–144 to add an amendment mandating the change to an appropriations bill for the State Department. The amendment was co-sponsored by representatives across party lines, although the votes in favor were overwhelmingly Republican. The appropriations bill still needs to pass the Senate, and it is unclear how it will fare in the second chamber. But if it passes, then the Orwellian move will effectively make the denial of Palestinian deaths U.S. policy.

Representative Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, tore into her colleagues for putting forward the measure.

“Since 1948, Mr. Speaker, there has been a coordinated effort, especially in this chamber, to dehumanize Palestinians and erase Palestinians from existence,” Tlaib told the chamber prior to the vote. “My colleagues want to prohibit our own U.S. officials from even citing the Palestinian death toll.”

Tlaib went on to read the latest casualty figures of Palestinian deaths from Israel’s brutal war in Gaza into the congressional record: 37,718 killed, including more than 15,000 children, with more than 86,377 injured.

“Six children, Mr. Speaker, six are killed in Gaza every single hour. But Palestinians are not just numbers. Behind these numbers are real people—mothers, fathers, sons, daughters who have had their lives stolen from them and their families torn apart, and we should not be trying to hide it,” Tlaib said.

“There is so much anti-Palestinian racism in this chamber that my colleagues don’t even want to acknowledge that Palestinians exist at all. Not when they’re alive, and now, not even when they’re dead. It’s absolutely disgusting. This is genocide denial.”

It appears that many in Congress, their financial backers, and maybe even President Joe Biden want to hide what’s going on in Gaza. Some lawmakers have said that they supported a ban on TikTok because it was a major source of advocacy for Palestine, while others want to ship college students protesting for Gazans to Gaza itself. The House voted to censure Tlaib in November, even though many in Congress have used inflammatory, violent, and racist rhetoric in supporting Israel’s attacks on Palestinians.

Their goal seems to be for Israel to continue the war indefinitely with U.S. support, which only perpetuates the human rights crisis in Gaza. Perhaps these politicians don’t want a peaceful end to the conflict. After all, they refuse to say no to Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, even though he is accused of war crimes, and they refuse to end weapons shipments to Israel to force an immediate cease-fire.

Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene will do practically anything to avoid saying she’d accept the 2024 election results no matter the outcome—even going so far as to throw a temper tantrum live on air.

During an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on Wednesday, Greene refused to answer whether she would support the outcome of the presidential election if it swung in favor of Joe Biden, and then proceeded to get testy with the interviewer, accusing the Australian host of being a sellout to the U.S. Democratic Party when she attempted to switch the topic.

“If it doesn’t go your way, if Biden wins, will you accept the results?” asked 7.30 host Sarah Ferguson.

“Again, what does this have to do with Julian Assange?” Greene asked. “Seriously, really?”

But Greene wouldn’t let her answer, instead chattering as Ferguson attempted to explain it’s the “next natural question about truth.”

“What network is this? What is this, ABC Australia? Is she getting her marching orders from the Democrat Party? Is this what she decided to come up with today?” Greene said, looking off-camera.

“You’re a prominent figure in U.S. politics. The first debate is tomorrow. The result of the election is on the minds of not just Americans but the whole world, so it’s a natural point of curiosity,” Ferguson continued. “But I understand we’ve reached the end of the questions that you want to answer, thank you for talking to us about Julian Assange and for joining the program.”

In April, Greene lamented that the Capitol rioters were unsuccessful in stopping the certification of the presidential election results on January 6, and claimed that if she “had it [her] way,” Biden “wouldn’t even be president.”

The Supreme Court on Thursday halted the Environmental Protection Agency’s “good neighbor” rule intended to combat air pollution. In a 5–4 decision, the conservative majority of the court upheld a stay against an EPA regulation that requires states limit their emissions to offset the effects in states downwind of their pollution, claiming the rule would cause “irreparable harm.” In a stunner, conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett broke from the conservative bloc and wrote the dissenting opinion, joined by liberal justices.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh led in the court’s decision against the EPA, arguing that the good neighbor policy was too difficult to reasonably implement because who would be included is dependent on the winds. Barrett ripped that finding to shreds, writing that the court’s decision “enjoins the enforcement of a major Environmental Protection Agency rule based on an underdeveloped theory that is unlikely to succeed on the merits” and that the Supreme Court’s decision “downplays EPA’s statutory role in ensuring that States meet air-quality standards.”

The EPA issued its good neighbor rule in response to several states failing to create their own plans for implementing federal ozone pollution reduction rules issued in 2015 under the Clean Air Act. As Barrett notes, the 23 states that either didn’t submit any plans or submitted ones that didn’t meet EPA standards have been found by the agency to have “significantly contributed to ozone pollution in downwind states.” Twenty-one states “proposed to do nothing to reduce their ozone emissions,” the dissent adds. The EPA is statutorily required to ensure states comply with federal air quality standards, and to create a federal implementation plan if they don’t: In this case, it created the good neighbor plan. Upwind states promptly sued to prevent the EPA from rejecting their plans and to keep the good neighbor plan from going into effect, joined by regulated industries.

The Supreme Court’s decision to stay the good neighbor rule follows lower court rulings that deterred its implementation in 12 of the 23 states included in the ruling. Lawyers for the EPA noted during oral arguments that which states are included in the rule isn’t fixed, since wind patterns change.

The concept behind the policy takes into consideration states that are downwind of other states emitting pollutants. If, for example, states are buckets on a slope, and they’re all limited to filling a gallon bucket with water, the buckets further down the slope will inherently end up overflowing with the water poured into buckets further up slope from them. The good neighbor rule intends to reduce the amount of water poured into buckets further up the slope so those further downstream aren’t overloaded. Except in this case, the water is toxic pollutants and the buckets are giant industrial manufacturers toxifying our air and soil, with downwind states getting choked by pollutants emitted by their upwind neighbors.

The Supreme Court’s decision halting the implementation of the good neighbor rule is another step by the court’s conservative majority to curtail the EPA’s regulatory power, and, according to Barrett, it’s a step that’s not going to hold up on its merits if the case comes back to the Supreme Court.