This election won't see another Jan 6 - Trump can't raise a crowd. But there will be something new; his backers are desperate. In 2020 TX AG Ken Paxton was one of Trump's main allies. Now, 2 weeks before the election, Paxton previews a plan: to contest the Texas vote. 1/
The scariest players in 2020 weren't Proud Boys; they were rogue state attorneys general, led by Ken Paxton: elected officials all in for sedition. It was Paxton for Texas who sued to reject the votes of the swing states. What will he do this year? 2/ docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…
On January 6 morning, as the mob gathered at the Capitol, Ken Paxton spoke at Trump's rally: "Texas fights...Twelve straight lawsuits...", claiming Trump won deep red Texas only because he averted fraud. What will he do in 2024 for Trump and Ted Cruz? 3/
Paxton has already been impeached for corruption in Texas; he barely avoided conviction. Democracies don't fall from mob violence. They fall when elected officials corrode them from within. Don't sleep on this threat . 4/
Texas voters now lean bluer, but Texas pols can create national chaos. Paxton's new ally Elon Musk kept busy this month paying voters to register in PA and registering a Texas corporation called "United States of America Inc." Just imagine what for. 5/
As Fox revisits Hilary's email server, let's do a comparative politics test. Question: why did the Jan 6 Committee have to subpoena phone records of Trump officials? Answer: because they were ALL using private emails and phones for government business. Yet no media covered it. 1/
Do you want to learn how Trump aide Vince Haley managed the 1776 Commission, worked on the Jan 6 speech, or negotiated Mike Flynn's pardon? It was on his @ newt. org email from when he worked for Newt Gingrich. Not submitted to the National Archives. 2/ govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GP…
Just look at the J6C's material: only a tiny portion is from the National Archives. Most of it is personal devices and personal emails, used by Trump officials for government business. Wildly insecure and also illegal. But sure, talk about Hillary. 3/ govinfo.gov/collection/jan…
People missed the likely explanation for Trump's bizarre ramble yesterday, when he falsely said his uncle taught the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. Trump is under huge stress right now about the Jeffrey Epstein files. And it's Epstein who claimed that he studied with the Unabomber. 1/
That detail came out in 2019. After Epstein's address book got released, reporter Leland Nally called the numbers in it, and got a wild interview with Stuart Pivar, who said he was a close friend of Epstein's: "Jeffrey once told me that he studied math with the Unambomber." 2/
Epstein's story is a lie: Kaczynski quit teaching in 1969, when Epstein was in high school. But the interview reminds us again how odd it is that in 1974, after Epstein dropped out of college, he was immediately hired to teach math & physics at Dalton, a prep school. How? 3/
A part of the Epstein nothing-to-see-here fiasco no one's talking about: what happened to the "army of FBI agents" pulled off their cases in March to work on the Epstein files? Pam Bondi made people move to DC, pull all-nighters redacting the files. Did they just.. go home? 1/
Bloomberg: Pam Bondi demanded all the FBI's Epstein files, then ordered "hundreds" of agents to work on them (bizarrely via their personal phones). They were "holed up in offices at the bureau’s sprawling Central Records Complex". Are they still there? 2/ bloomberg.com/news/newslette…
The public should know what happened to Bondi's redaction effort, when and why (and if) the decision was made to send FBI agents home. And if she won't answer maybe one of those hundreds of agents is mad enough to leak. Keep your eye on who is next laid off at the FBI, too. 3/
As Hungary's Viktor Orban sucks up to Putin and accuses Ukraine of "choos[ing] war", a reminder, again, that Orban, Netanyahu, and Trump all owe their careers to the same US political operative - Arthur Finkelstein. Arguably the man most responsible for our dystopian times. 1/
Arthur Finkelstein was the dark master of the negative campaign, orchestrating facts-free and values-free assaults on political opponents. A gay, Jewish man who specialized in electing anti-gay homophobes. 2/
No one's explained yet if Finkelstein had a direct tie to Russia, but Finkelstein created Putin's bootlicker Orban, and Finkelstein is the one who brought Paul Manafort to Trump out of Ukraine where he was busy installing pro-Russia politicians. 3/
Yes, the NYT is shameful for sourcing an anti-Mamdani article from notorious white supremacist Jordan Lasker. But it's worse. Lasker, who they call an "academic", is a student whose only paper of note is INFAMOUS for unethical data use that got his tenured co-author fired. 1/
Who is the NYT's "academic" source? Lasker is or was a PhD student at Texas Tech, but his only paper of note is earlier, from 2019: "Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability", whose misuse of data triggered a major investigation and got Cleveland State Prof. Bryan Pesta fired. 2/
The Chronicle of Higher Ed wrote about the scandal. It wasn't just that the article was "racist pseudoscience". It was that the authors misused data from the NIH and lied on their data application - filed by Bryan Pesta. A flagrant ethics violation. 3/ archive.is/KwbGy
Reminder: Elon Musk, whose Starship just blew up on the test stand (with its extra fuel tanks nearby), was allowed for THIRTY YEARS to lie about his training in science. He started lying in 1995, kept lying - and suffered no consequences. But physics itself has consequences. 1/
Just listen to the man's nonsense about how he is shaped by physics and consider: the press allowed him to bullshit like this for 30 YEARS. Of course he got convinced he can just make up his own reality. If anyone died in the Starship explosion tonight, blame the press too. 2/
In 2022 I did a 69-Tweet thread on Elon's fake AstroBoy Genius image, hoping to ward off what was coming: Elon helping to overthrow democracy. What you saw on the launchpad tonight, that's what he's doing now to US science, to our country: exploding it. 3/