A young racist man who spends too much time online should have heard a lot to like from Donald Trump during Tuesday’s debate. But from what I saw from the usual suspects on the right, his performance didn’t earn their praise. Winning is most important in their hierarchy of power and they knew they were watching a loser.
Trump’s open embrace of far-right disinformation started from the very beginning of the debate, when he alluded to Springfield, Ohio. In case listeners didn’t catch the blatantly racist reference to a fake story that’s been circulating about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Ohio, he made it explicit later in the debate.
"I’ve seen people on television!": Trump’s open embrace of far-right disinformation started from the very beginning of the debate when he alluded to Springfield, Ohio. pic.twitter.com/tmnnmaCGvQ
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in,” Trump said. “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in this country and it’s a shame.”
This was not the first time that Trump has referenced Springfield in recent days. JD Vance has done the same, as has a who’s who of right-wing influencers. It has all felt like a mob with pitchforks in hand.
Trump, of course, was not done. In a word salad of MAGA paranoia, Trump claimed that Harris “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.” As others quickly pointed out, it was not far off from a chyron from Succession meant to parody right-wing media.
When it came to foreign policy, Trump went out of his way to praise Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban. This might have been welcome news to New Right figures who’ve spent years posting about Orban and the authoritarian crackdowns he has used to shore-up his self-proclaimed “illiberal democracy.” But Trump couldn’t even make his odious points coherently. As he put it:
I’m just quoting [Orban]. China was afraid of [Trump]. North Korea was afraid of him. Look at what’s going on with North Korea by the way. He said Russia was afraid of him. I ended the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and Biden put it back on day one. But he ended the XL pipeline. The XL pipeline in our country. He ended that but he let the Russians build the pipeline going all over Europe and heading into Germany. The biggest pipeline in the world. Look, Viktor Orban said it. He said the most respected, most feared person is Donald Trump.
Rod Dreher, a right-wing blogger who moved from the United States to Hungary largely due to his affinity for Orban and the direction he is taking the country, accepted that Trump had lost.
Hate to say it, but Kamala won this by looking and sounding normal. Trump blustered and failed to keep focus. Yeah, moderators on her side, but that can’t excuse Trump’s missing so many chances to go after her. Trump barely laid a glove on her all night. Depressing.
As Trump flailed during his Orban tangent, Harris looked on with a mix of amusement and seemingly genuine confusion. Across the stage was an angry and unhinged old man walking into every trap she laid for him when he was not stepping into ones of his own making.
Denying this was pointless for his fans. So, they turned to a tactic that losers have likely embraced for as long as debating has existed: From Catturd on down they blamed the moderators.
Kamala Harris came to the presidential debate to invite voters not yet on her side to join her. Donald Trump was there to stoke the fears, grievances, and hatreds of the MAGA Americans already in his corner. She spoke in well-composed sentences, as she tried to persuade voters with her economic proposals, declaring she was interested in what she could do for them and asserting Trump was more interested in himself. Trump, often rambling, stuck to his playbook and described America as a hellhole, accusing Vice President Harris and President Joe Biden of purposefully trying to destroy the nation. She pitched optimism. He peddled darkness. She often smiled (and added several eye rolls). He scowled or wore an expression of condescension for much of the night.
These performances illustrated their differing approaches to politics. Following the traditional rule that campaigns ought to be about addition not subtraction, Harris sought to expand her electorate. Trump, as he has usually done, focused on firing up his enraged base. It was a case of coalition politics versus the harnessing of extremism.
Within this context, Harris slammed Trump for being simultaneously extreme and stale. With a near-perfect blend of sass and derision, she repeatedly baited Trump, and he almost always chomped at the chum. She slammed him for being obsessed with personal grievances and being tied to an old playbook of division and insult. When she pointed out that people leave his rallies before he’s done because they are exhausted by the same-old rhetoric, steam nearly shot out of his ears, and he barked that “people don’t go to her rallies.” (Fact-check: untrue.) She cited top officials from his first presidency who now oppose Trump and brand him a threat to the country, and he responded, “I’m a different kind of person,” and boasted he had fired many of the supposedly best people he had originally hired. He bragged that in 2020 he had received more votes than any other Republican president ever had, not mentioning Biden received seven million more.
Harris succeeded in her two goals: To present herself and her aims in a positive light and to make Trump seem small, vindictive, mean-spirited, and old. For his supporters, he likely came across as vigorous and fervent, and he landed a few punches, blasting Harris for the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal and, at the end, asking why she had not yet implemented the economic proposals—such as an expanded child tax credit, a first-time home-buyers program—she was now touting. But mostly Harris succeeded by maneuvering Trump into being Trump.
He tossed out—often in a hard-to-follow jumble of words that probably could only be deciphered by his true devotees—one debunked lie after another. Undocumented immigrants are stealing and eating people’s pets in Ohio. (“I see people on television talking about it,” he said as way of confirmation.) And undocumented migrants are violently taking over apartment complexes in Colorado. Doctors in Democratic states are executing babies after they are born. Crime is down throughout the world but increasing in the United States. Everyone—Democrats, Republicans, and all legal scholars—wanted Roe v. Wade overturned. Harris and the Democrats are scheming to confiscate all guns. Joe Biden has pocketed money from Ukraine and China. Harris is a “Marxist” and hates Jews, Arabs, and Israel. He has had no connection to Project 2025. Nancy Pelosi was responsible for the violence on January 6. Top professors at the Wharton School have praised his tariffs plan (which many economists have said will lead to inflation and unemployment). The economy when he was president was the best ever.
It was Trump’s greatest hits of conspiracy theories, fabrications, and disinformation. Occasionally ABC News moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis called him out on his false statements. But it didn’t seem necessary for them to interrupt his every lie, especially when they occurred during unhinged jags. No doubt, all Trump’s bunk plays for his people. But how well does this stuff register beyond that, especially when delivered in an irate and occasionally incoherent fashion?
Harris was tough on him, essentially calling Trump a racist and dismissing him as a weak person who admires dictators and who threatens both civility and democracy. Trump helped her out on this front. When Muir pressed him on whether he regrets his inaction during the initial hours of the January 6 riot, Trump refused to answer the question and shifted to his main move of the night: accusing Biden and Harris of allowing millions of criminals to pour into the country. Once again, he refused to acknowledge his 2020 loss.
Trump also declined to say whether he would, if elected, veto a national abortion ban. (His vice presidential pick, JD Vance, has stated that Trump would, but Trump at the debate remarked that he has never spoken to Vance about this.) Harris, expectedly, was clear and fierce on reproductive rights and decried the “Trump abortion bans” that have been implemented in 20 states after the fall of Roe. She described the horrific realities that women have been confronted in these states, as she stared at Trump, who did not return her gaze.
On another key topic Trump would not answer the question. Asked if he wants Ukraine to win the war against Russia, he would only say that the war should end. He claimed he could end this war in an instant, but he would not explain how. (He was not asked about the recent news stories reporting that Russian leader Vladimir Putin has been mounting covert information operations against the United States to help Trump.)
Throughout the evening, Trump was once again all doom and gloom. The United States is on the verge of total collapse. He is the best, his foes are the worst. And Harris, who came across as a confident normie with a binder full of policy ideas, kept insisting it was time to “turn the page” on Trump and his chaos. She treated him like a loser, jabbing him for having a “hard time processing” his defeat and calling his confusion about such facts “troubling.” Trump’s counter: Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban likes him and…Biden “hates” Harris.
Trump was fully himself, and Harris was in her zone. He was the familiar (though older) blathering MAGA King of Carnage, and she was a fierce former prosecutor who effectively delivered her two-fold case. She did what all politicians should do: She respected the audience, showing that she understood her task was to win them over. He was there to perform a rerun of The Trump Show, with little new material. To call the debate an evisceration of Trump would be going too far. But it did what a debate should do: reveal how each candidate sees the world and make clear the differences between them. As soon as it ended, Harris’ campaign called for another face-off. Trump ought to think twice before saying yes.
The fantasy of a Taylor Swift endorsement is finally a reality—for Kamala Harris.
Shortly after the first presidential debate between the vice president and former President Donald Trump on Tuesday, the pop superstar made her support for Harris official on Instagram. Swift posted a photo from her Time magazine shoot featuring one of her cats, Benjamin Button—a clear dig at the “childless cat lady” attacks from Trump’s running mate, JD Vance.
The caption, which can be read in full below, referenced Trump’s false claim that he had accepted her endorsement back in August. “It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter,” she wrote. “The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth.”
“I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election.”
The announcement is all but certain to infuriate the former president, particularly after his disappointing debate performance against Harris.
At tonight’s debate, former President Donald Trump repeated baseless claims, increasingly popular among Republicans, that there is mass noncitizen voting in the United States. It has been a persistent theme of the campaign—one that combines two of Trump’s main recurring grievances: anti-immigrant sentiment and the Big Lie.
“Our elections are bad,” Trump said. “And a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote. They can’t even speak English. They don’t even know what country they’re in practically. And these people are trying to get them to vote. And that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country.”
Noncitizen voting is a non-issue, despite Republicans’ best efforts to make it one. Some of it goes back to a debunked video. In late July, the Oversight Project—a self-described “legal and investigative” group linked to the Heritage Foundation that purports to be “battling corruption and weaponization”—promoted a video with supposed evidence of widespread cases of noncitizens admitting to being registered voters. Behind the camera, a man introduces himself to residents of an apartment complex in Norcross, Georgia, saying he works at a company that helps Hispanic people register to vote. He goes on to ask them if they’re US citizens or not, and a handful of respondents appear to confirm that they are noncitizens who are registered to vote.
In the video, Anthony Rubin—the founder of the right-wing Muckraker website known for pulling undercover stunts like infiltrating migrant caravans to denounce an “invasion” and exposing flyers allegedly calling on migrants at a border encampment to vote for Joe Biden—says 14 percent of noncitizens with whom they spoke admitted to being registered to vote, and then extrapolated that statewide to claim 47,000 noncitizens would be registered to vote in Georgia. “Based on our findings,” he concludes, “the integrity of the 2024 election is in great jeopardy.” The video reached 56 million views on X, with a boost from Elon Musk, who has been spreading false claims about noncitizen voting and accusing Democrats of “importing voters.”
NON-CITIZENS REGISTERED IN GA
Footage obtained by @realmuckraker shows numerous non-citizens admitting to being registered voters.
A staggering 14% of the non-citizens spoken to admitted to being registered to voters. pic.twitter.com/0p38irDBZH
It turns out, these unfounded allegations of noncitizen voting can be—and have been—easily and exhaustively debunked.
As the New York Times recently reported, three of the seven people depicted in the video later provided context that contradicts the assertions made, saying they had either only told the man what they thought he wanted to hear to make him go away, or that they feared that by telling the truth, meaning that they weren’t registered to vote, they might be coerced to register and get in trouble with immigration authorities. Georgia investigators also found no evidence that those people had voter registrations, according to the Times.
A study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that in the 2016 election, election officials in 42 jurisdictions overseeing the tabulation of 23.5 million votes only referred about 30 cases of “suspected noncitizen voting” for investigation or prosecution—or 0.0001 percent of votes. In 2020, the Cato Institute concluded that “noncitizens don’t illegally vote in detectable numbers.” Even the Heritage Foundation’s own data proves that the idea of massive noncitizen voting in the United States amounts to a long-lastingmyth. An analysis by the American Immigration Council of Heritage’s database containing 1,546 instances of voter fraud found just 68 cases of noncitizen voting since the 1980s. And only 10 of them involved undocumented immigrants.
Despite all the evidence, the GOP and right-wing activists continue to push conspiracy theories about noncitizen voting and are even proposing legislation barring noncitizens from voting in federal elections (which already is the law).
“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said during a press conference earlier this year about the introduction of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE), a bill making it a requirement to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote. “But it’s not been something that’s easily provable. We don’t have that number.”
With Johnson now trying to attach the proposed legislation to a stopgap funding bill, Donald Trump suggested congressional Republicans should force a government shutdown if the effort is unsuccessful. “The Democrats are trying to ‘stuff’ voter registrations with illegal aliens,” he posted on Truth Social. “Don’t let it happen—Close it down!!!”
Critics of the SAVE Act say the legislation can only result in more voters of color and naturalized citizens being disenfranchised, pointing to the fact that millions of US citizens don’t have access to a passport or birth certificate to present as proof of citizenship when registering to vote. Moreover, states already have systems in place to verify the citizenship status of voters. “This bill would do nothing to safeguard our elections, but it would make it much harder for all eligible Americans to register to vote and increase the risk that eligible voters are purged from voter rolls,” the White House said in a statement in July.
“In 2020, we heard wild stories of voting machines flipping votes, of boxes of ballots, of ballot paper that supposedly had bamboo fibers in it to prove it came from China,” Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center, said in a congressional testimony. “This year, we’re hearing the beginning of wild stories about widespread, huge numbers of noncitizens voting in federal elections.”
Why now?
“It’s being pushed preemptively, I believe, to set the stage for undermining the legitimacy of the 2024 election,” Waldman added. “This year, the ‘Big Lie’ is being pre-deployed.”
Former President Donald Trump has “concepts of a plan” to replace the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. At least that’s what he claimed during his debate against Vice President Kamala Harris in Philadelphia tonight. Having access to affordable health care remains a key issue for Americans, according to Pew Research Center.
Moderator Linsey Davis of ABC News asked Trump if he had plans to get rid of the Affordable Care Act, something he vowed and failed to do during his presidency. Recently, Trump walked back this claim, saying he would keep the Affordable Care Act, unless he was able to find a good replacement. Trump, in his response, was very vague, concerning an issue as serious as health care—except he knew Democrats were to blame for any problems.
“Obamacare was lousy. It’s not very good today. And what I said that if we come up with something…we’re going to do it and we’re going to replace it. But remember this, I inherited Obamacare because Democrats wouldn’t change it. They wouldn’t vote for it. They were unanimous. They wouldn’t vote to change it. If they would have done that, we would have had a much better plan than Obama’s.”
Davis followed up, asking if he had a plan in mind to replace it. Trump seemed unable to remember that during his time as president, he had the opportunity to create a new health care program, but was unable to do so. Today, he still can’t seem to provide a coherent answer, saying,
“I have concepts of a plan. I’m not President right now, but if we come up with something, I would only change it if we come up with something that’s better and less expensive. And there are concepts and options we have to do that, and you’ll be hearing about it in the not too distant future.”
Vice President Kamala Harris just showed why she is a better candidate on abortion than President Biden ever was.
In a blistering response to former President Donald Trump’s rambling about his ever-shiftingstance on abortion—which included appointing three of the five Supreme Court justices who overruledRoev. Wade—Harris put the ex-president on blast for what she has been calling the “Trump abortion bans” now present in over a dozen states.
“One does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government and Donald Trump certainly should not be telling a woman what to do with her body,” Harris said.
And when Trump repeated his false claim that “every legal scholar” wanted Roe overruled, Harris promptly laid outthe devastating consequences of the Dobbs decision.
“Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term, suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because the health care providers are afraid they might go to jail, and she is bleeding out in a car in the parking lot—she didn’t want that. Her husband didn’t want that,” Harris said.
“A 12 or 13 year old survivor of incest being forced to carry a pregnancy to term—they don’t want that,” she continued. Harris pledged to sign legislation restoring Roe into law if Congress passed it during her presidency—and noted that Trump could very well sign a national abortion ban if reelected, as Project 2025recommends.
“Understand, in his Project 2025, there would be a national abortion monitor that would be monitoring your pregnancies, your miscarriages,” she said. “I think the American people believe that certain freedoms—in particular, the freedom to make decisions about one’s own body—should not be made by the government.”
Tonight, Harris showed exactly why abortion rights advocates see her as their ideal messenger: In clear and forceful language, she described the health care apocalypse Trump helped create, and the first-hand experiences of pregnant people bearing the brunt of it. When Biden talked about abortion during the first debate, on the other hand, it was a garbled, confusing mess that ended with him talking about immigration.
But in fairness, Trump was also clear about his stance on abortion: When asked two different times, he refused to answer whether he would veto a federal abortion ban if Congress passed one.
The opening minutes of the very first question of the first presidential debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday saw the former president alluding to a racist lie—which has been roundly debunked by law enforcement officials—about Haitian immigrants.
“You see what’s happening with towns throughout the United States,” Trump said in response to a question regarding his plans for the economy. “You look at Springfield, Ohio. You look at Aurora in Colorado. They are taking over the towns, they’re taking over buildings, they’re going in violently. These are the people that she and Biden let into our country.”
But that was just the mere mention of “Springfield, Ohio,” now shorthand for a virulent conspiracy theory that has swiftly captured the Republican Party in recent days. Later in the debate, Trump unleashed, fully leaning into the blatant racism by repeating the vile lie that immigrants, specifically those from Haiti, in far-flung corners of the US are eating pets.
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in,” Trump said. “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in this country and it’s a shame.”
The remarks, by a former president and GOP presidential candidate, are evidence of the complete and total platforming of a viral lie, as it progressed from one single Facebook comment to far-right influencers, then to prominent members of Congress, and tonight, the presidential debate stage.
"They're eating the pets," says Donald Trump, repeating a debunked claim about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.
“There have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community,” police said on Monday. pic.twitter.com/wYs96Aekt1
Melania Trump broke her months-long silence on the assassination attempt against her husband with a video that amplified unproven conspiracy theories about the July shooting before swiftly turningto promote her forthcoming memoir.
The video—which, in my opinion, resembles a deep fake overlaid with a Kris Jenner filter— was posted to X on Tuesday morning, and featuredMelania standing before a black backdrop while ominous music plays in the background. “The attempt to end my husband’s life was a horrible, distressing experience,” she says, addressing the camera.“Now, the silence around it feels heavy. I can’t help but wonder, why didn’t law enforcement officials arrest the shooter before the speech?”
“There is definitely more to the story,” she adds, “and we need to uncover the truth.” A visual of the cover of her eponymous book then flashes on the screen, along with a message encouraging followers to order the book at her website. It’s unclear what, if any, connection the memoir, slated for release in early October according to the publisher, will have to her husband’s shooting. The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to questions.
The rare video appearance makes Melania now one of many people in Trump’s orbit who has conspiratorially suggested that nefarious forces enabled the shooting. As my colleague Mark Follman has covered, two of Trump’s sons, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), and Republicans in Congress have cast blame on Democrats for the shooting—all without evidence. (As Mark reported, the motive of the shooter—who was a registered Republican—remains unknown.) Trump himself has also taken part in thenarrative, telling television psychologist Dr. Phil in a late August interview, “I think to a certain extent it’s Biden’s fault and Harris’ fault. And I’m the opponent. Look, they were weaponizing government against me, they brought in the whole DOJ to try and get me. They weren’t too interested in my health and safety.”
“They’re saying I’m a threat to democracy,” Trump added in that interview. “They would say that, that was[a] standard line, just keep saying it, and you know that can get assassins or potential assassins going…Maybe that bullet is because of their rhetoric.”
This continuing vilification adds to what law enforcement and threat assessment sources have told me is a paramount risk headed toward the election: potential bloodshed stemming from Donald Trump’s long-running campaign of incitement, including his message that he is supposedly the victim of a sweeping conspiracy by his political opponents. That core Trump narrative has now been supercharged by the assassination attempt, in which three attendees also were shot, one fatally.
As Melania mentions in her video, questions do remain about the catastrophic security failures that allowed the shooter to scale a roof without law enforcement intervening sooner. But those questions are the subjects of ongoing federal investigations—which will not be led or solved by Melania or anyone else in MAGA-world.
Reproductive rights advocates in Missouri have beaten back a last-ditch effort by Republican officials to stop voters from having their say on abortion in November. On Tuesday afternoon, the Missouri Supreme Court ordered that a proposed amendment to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution will remain on this year’s ballot.
The ruling ensures that Missourians will have the opportunity to vote on Amendment 3, which would establish a right to “reproductive freedom”—defined as the ability to make and carry out one’s own decisions about contraception, abortion, and healthcare during pregnancy. If approved, the amendment will set a high legal bar for how the state can regulate abortion prior to “viability”—the difficult-to-pinpoint moment when a fetus becomes likely to survive outside the uterus. After viability, the measure would let the state ban abortion, with exceptions to protect the life and health of the pregnant patient.
The decision caps a roller-coaster of a year for Missouri reproductive-rights advocates, who faced hurdle after hurdle to get the measure on the November ballot. Supporters gathered more than 380,000 signatures this spring, circumventing a legislature dominated by hard-line abortion foes who passed the state’s current, near-total abortion ban. A St. Louis University/YouGov poll of 900 likely voters in mid-August found that 52 percent supported Amendment 3 and 34 percent opposed it.
“Today’s decision is a victory for both direct democracy and reproductive freedom in Missouri,” Rachel Sweet, campaign manager for Missourians for Constitutional Freedom, the group behind the amendment, said in a statement. “This fight was not just about this amendment—it was about defending the integrity of the initiative petition process and ensuring that Missourians can shape their future directly.”
Ballot initiatives have become a central part of the strategy to restore and expand abortion rights in the post-Roe v. Wade era. They’re also key to Democrats’ efforts to turn out voters in battleground states in this year’s tight presidential election. Abortion rights are popular, even in solidly red states; the pro-choice side has won all seven abortion-related measures on state ballots since 2022.
That’s led Republican officials in GOP-dominated states including Arkansas, Florida, and Nebraska to pull out all the stops this year to prevent abortion-rights measures from getting to the ballot in the first place—filing lawsuits, delaying or invalidating petitions, and spreading misinformation.
In Missouri, Tuesday’s ruling comes in response to a last-minute lawsuit by two Republican state lawmakers, Rep. Hannah Kelly and Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman, working with anti-abortion activists and lawyers from the Thomas More Society,a law firm aligned with conservative Catholics. They argued that Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft should never have certified Amendment 3 because it did not specify which state laws it would repeal. (Missouri law requires initiative petitions to “include all sections of existing law or of the constitution which would be repealed by the measure.”) In a court filing, they claimed that the Amendment 3 campaign “defrauded potential signers” and that the measure “would have far-reaching effects,” including on Missouri’s rules on human cloning and single-sex bathrooms.
Amendment supporters responded that no state laws would be automatically repealed. Instead, advocates would have to file lawsuits challenging anti-abortion laws, with judges making the final decisions about which ones violate the new constitutional amendment. “This is another example of someone flailing, trying to gum the works of a campaign that has serious momentum,” said Mallory Schwartz, executive director of Abortion Action Missouri,part of the pro-Amendment 3 coalition. “What they’re really doing is trying to deny people access to direct democracy.”
The Missouri Supreme Court’s decision overturns a surpriseruling by Cole County Circuit Judge Christopher Limbaughlast Friday evening declaring that the vote on the amendment should be canceled—though he left time for an appeal. Judge Limbaugh, a cousin of the late conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh,was appointed to the bench by his former boss, Republican Gov. Mike Parson, barely five weeks ago.
Ashcroft defended his certification in a hearing before Limbaugh. But following the Friday ruling, Ashcroft sent the abortion-rights campaign a letter announcing that he was decertifying Amendment 3 himself. “On further review in light of the circuit court’s judgment, I have determined the amendment is deficient,” he wrote.
In its Tuesday ruling, the Missouri Supreme Court ordered Ashcroft to recertify Amendment 3 for the ballot, ruling that the deadline for him to issue a certification decision had passed.
For Ashcroft and other Missouri Republicans, the decision is yet another rebuke in a long and exhausting campaign to keep the amendment off the ballot. In at least four previous lawsuits, Missouri courts have slapped down state officials’ attempts to interfere with the amendment.
First, state Attorney General Andrew Bailey, who is running for reelection, held up the initiative for months by pushing a baseless theory that the initiative could cost the state billions in federal Medicaid funding and declining to rubber-stamp a cost estimate prepared by the state’s auditor. After a legal battle, the Missouri Supreme Court ordered Bailey to stop stonewalling.
Then last fall, Kelly and Coleman—the same legislators behind the latest lawsuit—seized on Bailey’s phony theory about Medicaid funding and sued the state auditor over his cost estimate. They too were slapped down by the courts, which found the cost estimate “fair and sufficient.”
Meanwhile, Ashcroft—an outspoken abortion opponent whose job requires him to craft neutral summaries of ballot initiatives—issued summaries claiming the measure would permit “dangerous, unregulated, and unrestricted abortion.” Last October, an appeals court ruled those summaries were “replete with politically partisan language.” A circuit court judge completely rewrote them.
But Ashcroft didn’t learn his lesson. Last month, on the same day he certified the amendment for the ballot, he issued “fair ballot language” to be posted at polling places that made a slew of false claims, including that the measure would prohibit legal recourse against “anyone who performs an abortion and hurts or kills the pregnant women.” Last Thursday, Cole County Circuit Judge Cotton Walker threw out Ashcroft’s description, calling it “unfair, insufficient, inaccurate and misleading.”
Tuesday’s Supreme Court rulingis a crucial win for the fight to expand abortion rights in Missouri, which has some of the most restrictive laws in the country. Even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, only one clinic remained open in the state, providing fewer than 100 abortions annually. Hours after the fall of Roe, state officials invoked a dormant law making it a felony to provide abortion in virtually all cases.
Missouri isn’t the only place where state officials have been making last-ditch efforts to block or blunt voter referendums on abortion. On Monday, the Nebraska Supreme Court heard arguments in a trio of lawsuits over dueling amendments—one to protect abortion until viability and another to ban abortion after the first trimester. Argumentsfocused on whether the protective amendment violates a state rule requiring ballot measures to only cover a single subject, according to the Nebraska Examiner.
Last month in Arkansas, the state Supreme Court threw out thousands of signatures in favor of an abortion-rights measure, ruling that organizers had failed to file training certifications for their paid canvassers in the proper format, the Associated Press reported. The decision affirmed state officials’ move to disqualify the measure from the ballot.
In Florida, the state Attorney General lost a lawsuit arguing that an amendment to protect abortion rights until viability was “too complicated” for voters to understand. But last month, the state Supreme Court approved a fiscal impact statement for Amendment 4 written with the help of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative group behind Project 2025. Meanwhile, the state’s Agency for Health Care Administration unveiled a website on Thursday full of false claims about the initiative, as my colleague Julianne McShane reported. And the Florida Department of State is reportedly investigating 36,000 voter signatures submitted by amendment organizers.
As it stands on Tuesday, ten states will vote on abortion-related measures on the ballot come November. Missouri is one of two where voters could overturn a near-total abortion ban.
Melania Trump broke her months-long silence on the assassination attempt against her husband with a video that amplified unproven conspiracy theories about the July shooting before swiftly turningto promote her forthcoming memoir.
The video—which, in my opinion, resembles a deep fake overlaid with a Kris Jenner filter— was posted to X on Tuesday morning, and featuredMelania standing before a black backdrop while ominous music plays in the background. “The attempt to end my husband’s life was a horrible, distressing experience,” she says, addressing the camera.“Now, the silence around it feels heavy. I can’t help but wonder, why didn’t law enforcement officials arrest the shooter before the speech?”
“There is definitely more to the story,” she adds, “and we need to uncover the truth.” A visual of the cover of her eponymous book then flashes on the screen, along with a message encouraging followers to order the book at her website. It’s unclear what, if any, connection the memoir, slated for release in early October according to the publisher, will have to her husband’s shooting. The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to questions.
The rare video appearance makes Melania now one of many people in Trump’s orbit who has conspiratorially suggested that nefarious forces enabled the shooting. As my colleague Mark Follman has covered, two of Trump’s sons, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), and Republicans in Congress have cast blame on Democrats for the shooting—all without evidence. (As Mark reported, the motive of the shooter—who was a registered Republican—remains unknown.) Trump himself has also taken part in thenarrative, telling television psychologist Dr. Phil in a late August interview, “I think to a certain extent it’s Biden’s fault and Harris’ fault. And I’m the opponent. Look, they were weaponizing government against me, they brought in the whole DOJ to try and get me. They weren’t too interested in my health and safety.”
“They’re saying I’m a threat to democracy,” Trump added in that interview. “They would say that, that was[a] standard line, just keep saying it, and you know that can get assassins or potential assassins going…Maybe that bullet is because of their rhetoric.”
This continuing vilification adds to what law enforcement and threat assessment sources have told me is a paramount risk headed toward the election: potential bloodshed stemming from Donald Trump’s long-running campaign of incitement, including his message that he is supposedly the victim of a sweeping conspiracy by his political opponents. That core Trump narrative has now been supercharged by the assassination attempt, in which three attendees also were shot, one fatally.
As Melania mentions in her video, questions do remain about the catastrophic security failures that allowed the shooter to scale a roof without law enforcement intervening sooner. But those questions are the subjects of ongoing federal investigations—which will not be led or solved by Melania or anyone else in MAGA-world.
After facing off against Donald Trump in June, President Joe Biden explained his poor debate performance in part by telling reporters, “It’s hard to debate a liar.” He had a point—by one estimate, Trump made more than 30 false claims that night, on everything from Roe v. Wade and January 6 to China, taxes, and, depending on who you ask, his own golf game.
In fact, there’s a name for Trump’s apparent tactic: The “Gish Gallop.” The term refers to a rhetorical strategy of, basically, overwhelming your opponent with false or incoherent information. As Robert Talisse, a professor of philosophy and political science at Vanderbilt University and co-author of the book Why We Argue (And How We Should): A Guide to Political Disagreement in an Age of Unreason, describes it, to employ the Gish Gallop is “to paralyze and immobilize the dialectical opponent by just burying him or her in a morass of bad arguments and empirically questionable claims.” As a result, the opponent can’t address all of the claims at once, or get to any prepared remarks—making it appear as if the “Gish Galloper” has won the debate.
The name comes from creationist Duane Gish, who frequently took on scientists in evolutionary debates in the 1980s and 90s. National Center for Science Education director Eugenie Scott coined the term, writing in 1994 that the formal debate format meant “the evolutionist has to shut up while the creationist gallops along, spewing out nonsense with every paragraph.”
To see what she means, here’s a clip of Gish from the early ’80s. He goes on at about the 24-minute mark:
Knowingly or not, four decades later, Trump appears to have embraced the same tactic. “Like Gish before him, Trump ceaselessly repeats claims that have been publicly discredited,” journalist Mehdi Hasan argued in the Atlantic last year in an excerpt of his book, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking. “Trump owes much of his political success to this tactic—and to the fact that so few people know how to beat it.”
To better understand the Gish Gallop’s little-known history, how to identify it, and strategies for defeating it, I called Professor Talisse for a rundown ahead of the Kamala Harris-Donald Trump debate.
Read an edited and condensed version of our conversation below:
Does the Gish Gallop function differently in political debates, compared to debates about evolution?
When we’re talking about politics, we’re almost always talking about political identities and partisan affiliations. In the case of evolutionary biology, with the original Gish Gallop, there was an element of identity, too. The debaters were affiliated with either a certain kind of religious identity or an identity that takes itself to be enlightened and more scientific. So in that respect, the original Gish Gallop context is similar to the context of political debates, where part of what the Gish Galloper is doing is trying to give his allies the experience of seeing somebody on their side “own” the other side, to use a bit of internet lingo.
And “owning” the other side has almost nothing to do with having a better command of the facts. Owning just means overcoming. Especially in presidential debates, political debating is really just a competition among the two debaters for the headlines the next day, for the soundbite, and for the clip that’s going to get a million views on social media.
It is not a logical thing. It’s not a rational thing. It’s not even about staying on topic. As Steve Bannon called it, “flooding the zone [with shit],” right? The political variant of the Gish Gallop is to say so much stuff that is objectionable to the other side that your interlocutor gets paralyzed by the sheer quantity of things to object to. And even in that case, the interlocutor has been taken off his or her own messaging.
So it’s a two-pronged strategy: One purpose is to simply overwhelm your opponent, so they don’t know which thing to respond to—
Right, they don’t know which ball to swing at.
—and then secondly, the opponent can’t bring up their own points, whatever they were hoping to talk about.
Yes. And one other aspect of this that I think is a little bit less often noticed: Part of the Gish Gallop is also about controlling what will be talked about by ordinary citizens the next day. Will it be some candidate’s policy proposal, or will it be one candidate saying, “There you go again,” like Reagan did, right? Will it be the zinger, or will it be something of substance?
One of the more distressing features of democracy under the technological conditions we live in—social media, 24/7 news—is that a lot of our politics are wrapped up in controlling the topics of conversation among friends and families and coworkers. For every moment one spends on the day after the debate saying, “Could you believe what Harris said?” or “Can you believe what Trump said?” is time not talking about an issue that might be more substantive, like the facts about immigration, or the facts about school shootings.
If Trump deployed the tactic at the debate on Tuesday, how might viewers recognize it?
I think it’s increasingly a tactic, this variant mutation of the Gish Gallop. What we’re seeing now, particularly from Trump, are that his statements increasingly involve a string of unrelated thoughts, each of which typically leaves somebody scratching their head—like sharks and batteries and claims that he understands nuclear energy because he has an uncle who taught at MIT. The claim is, on its face, kind of absurd in a way that you have to wonder, what could he possibly mean by that? And the more time you spend wondering is time you’re not spending thinking about other things.
“[Trump’s] statements increasingly involve a string of unrelated thoughts, each of which typically leaves somebody scratching their head.”
So what I would recommend to my fellow citizens who are invested in presidential politics is to read the transcript—not watch the debate. When we listen to somebody speak, especially if we’re well-disposed to them, we tend to cognize—what we’ve heard tends to be a lot more coherent than what’s actually coming out of the mouth of the speaker. Once you realize that the Gish Gallop is part of a strategy, I think the right inoculation is to start reading the transcripts and not trying to make sense of what’s being said [on live television].
But aren’t you losing something by not seeing all the information conveyed through things like gestures and facial expressions and tone?
Yeah, that’s the cost, right? There’s no silver bullet here. But in my view, knowing that this tactic is so prominent and so central to modern debating strategies, reading the transcripts, even after you’ve watched the live event, elucidates a lot of things.
If you’re really interested in making sure you get the whole thing, watch the debate and then read the transcript. Take note of how your impression of the event changes after you’ve read it. I’m always surprised about how much of what appears in the transcript that I don’t remember hearing. [Editor’s note: You can view a list of presidential debate transcripts dating back to 1960 here.]
For Harris, or anyone who’s debating someone using the Gish Gallop, how do you combat it? How do you beat the Gish?
I’m not a debater myself, but I think the best strategy is calling it out and then trying to get back on topic. Saying, “This is a Gish Gallop. You’ve said eight things, all of which are objectionable. If I had more time, I could give you my objections to all of them. Let me now just respond like this,” and then as quickly as possible, the interlocutor should get back on message. That’s the way to do it.
It wasn’t particularly interesting, so I shrugged and accepted ignorance. With the GOP having transformed into a party of shitposters, I assumed I was out on a joke that, with God’s grace, would pass before my job required me to learn about something either racist or stupid—or probably both.
But, shortly after, a clue arrived in the form of a meme. Ah, I realized looking at an image Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) posted on X, it would be both—racist and stupid—and I was going to have to understand it.
To start, it’s critical to note that the origins of these posts, from some of the highest levels of the US government, can seemingly be traced to a single falsehood. Here’s what happened. A participant of a random (exceedingly obscure) Facebook group that discusses local criminal activity in Springfield, Ohio, warned that a friend of their neighbor’s daughter had recently lost her cat, before describing an unfounded trend of Haitians eating cats they had found on the street. From there, a rumor started claiming that Haitian immigrants kidnapping and eating cats—a claim police have since roundly debunked—and quickly spread to the screenshots of some of the far-right’s most prominent figures, including Charlie Kirk, before landing in Elon Musk’s universe. (How no one stopped to question whether to believe a random Facebook post from the girlfriend-in-Canada telephone lineage of “neighbor’s daughter’s friend” is beyond my understanding.)
From there, it was JD Vance, the most embarrassingly online vice presidential candidate in history—with his long record of vilifying Haitian immigrants in his home state—who proved to be the accelerant in mainstreaming the lie within the GOP:
Months ago, I raised the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio.
Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn't be in this country. Where is our border czar? pic.twitter.com/rf0EDIeI5i
Now, it’s wholly unsurprising to see Donald Trump’s running mate seizing upon a racist lie; such behavior is effectively a requirement of Trump’s White House. But even after years of Republican fealty, the party’s gleeful embrace of it is something to behold. Do they truly believe that Haitian immigrants are roaming the streets in search of cats to eat? Of course they don’t. But this is what happens when a party funnels its ambitions into blatant racism.
It’s worth revisiting an old piece from my colleague Tim Murphy, on how the modern GOP has moved far past the dog whistle to pure racism:
Our politicians aren’t dog-whistling racism to win racist votes in a calculated game. They’re just racist. And realizing that is for the best. After all, the euphemisms politicians use are never just euphemisms. When racist white people talk about “the schools” or “the neighborhood,” those aren’t stand-ins for something deeper and more nefarious: Those are the deeper and more nefarious things, the load-bearing pillars of structural racism. This speech isn’t coded so much as it’s loaded.
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
As Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump prepare for their debate on Tuesday night, those who care about US action on climate change are bracing themselves for disappointment.
They know that at candidate forums and interviews—for presidential and down-ballot candidates alike—climate often doesn’t come up at all. Even worse, the few questions that do get asked are stuck on a controversy that science resolved long ago—is climate change real? As a result, debates provide little enlightenment on the difficult choices political leaders face as the costs of severe weather, heat and wildfire mount, and the clean energy future develops in a US economy caught up in a fossil fuel surge.
Since his first run for president in 2016, Trump has easily deflected the soft climate questions tossed his way. He declares himself an avid environmentalist—”I believe very strongly in very, very crystal clear clean water and clean air,” he once said—while minimizing the severity of climate change. Virtually all scrutiny of Harris’ climate policy has focused on her once-stated support for a fracking ban, even though there is no legal authority for a US president to enact such a prohibition, and Harris abandoned the stand when she became President Joe Biden’s running mate in 2020.
Ahead of the debate, the Inside Climate News staff came up with questions that challenge the candidates’ past statements on energy policy and more accurately reflect the hard decisions the next president will face as the world’s leading oil and gas producer confronts its role in both aiding and addressing a planetary crisis.
Questions for Trump
1. Private companies have announced more than 300 major new clean energy projects and electric vehicle plants across the country based on the support they’re getting under the Inflation Reduction Act. This private investment is expected to create more than 100,000 jobs; Michigan, Georgia, Texas, South Carolina, and North Carolina each have 20 projects or more underway. You’ve said you would end the IRA subsidies. What would you do about the projects in these states that would be put at risk?
Context: The nonprofit group Environmental Entrepreneurs has tracked 334 new clean energy and vehicles project announcements in 40 states since passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, totaling $125 billion in investment, expected to create 109,000 jobs.
2. You take credit for making the United States energy independent during your presidency. But under the Biden/Harris administration, we are even more energy independent by any measure—our energy imports are lower now and our exports are higher; our energy consumption is lower now and production is higher. Aren’t you just promising more of the same? Would you lift the ban on oil imports from Russia, which rose dramatically during your presidency?
Context:
3. You have often said that wind energy is damaging to land, wildlife, and even human health, while making energy more expensive. But wind electricity now provides 10 percent of US electric power, with Texas far and away the leading state for wind farms. What is your plan for wind power as president and would you act to shut down the wind farms now operating?
Context: Wind energy can have impacts on wildlife and the environment, according to the Department of Energy, and federal authorities require developers of projects on federal land and water to analyze potential impacts and minimize them. Oil, gas, and coal development also have wildlife and environmental impacts, with one 2012 study showing that fossil fuel-generated electricity kills nearly 20 times more birds per gigawatt-hour than electricity generated by wind.
4. You have said rising sea levels would create more oceanfront property. But the changes already underway have meant flooding, erosion and damage to homes and businesses both on the coast and inland. With losses mounting and the federal flood insurance program more than $20 billion in debt to taxpayers, should the U.S. government continue to insure the properties most at risk? And if not, what do you think the federal government should do about homes and businesses that can’t get private flood insurance, especially in your home state of Florida?
Context: In his August 12 interview with Elon Musk, Trump asserted that sea level is expected to rise one inch every 400 years, but a comprehensive 2022 study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded that sea levels on the US coast are on track to rise 10 inches in the next 30 years. NOAA projects the incidence of flooding in the US will increase tenfold as a result.
5. When you first ran for president, you promised to bring back coal jobs. But eight coal companies went bankrupt during your presidency and the United States lost 12,700 coal jobs—a decline of 25 percent. What is your plan to help coal workers?
Context: The coal industry has been weakening steadily over more than a decade due to what most economists see as a sectoral decline in the industry due to competition from cheaper natural gas and renewable energy. Eight US coal companies went bankrupt between October 2018 and October 2019. Under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act—the main vehicle for President Joe Biden’s climate policy—coal states like Wyoming and West Virginia have been given a competitive advantage in attracting clean energy development projects and associated federal funding in order to address displaced workers.
Questions for Harris
1. As California attorney general, you took legal action against oil companies over oil spills and other pollution, and as a presidential candidate in 2019, you talked about the federal and state litigation against tobacco companies as a model of how to address fossil fuel companies’ role in the climate crisis. Do you believe the Justice Department should join with states taking action against oil companies over climate damages?
Context: In 1998, 52 state and territorial attorneys general signed a massive $200 billion agreement with the nation’s four largest tobacco companies to settle dozens of lawsuits they brought to recover their smoking-related health care costs. The next year, the Justice Department also filed suit against Big Tobacco and after years of legal wrangling and a nine-month trial, a federal judge in 2006 ruled that the manufacturers had violated the federal organized crime law, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. That litigation is ongoing 25 years later, as the industry continues to challenge remedies imposed by the court, which are designed to prohibit it from making false or deceptive claims about tobacco products.
2. Despite the progress made on clean energy during the Biden administration, the US isn’t on track to hit the Paris climate agreement targets for greenhouse gas reductions. This not only endangers lives and property, it undermines US credibility in persuading other nations, especially China, to reduce their climate pollution. What would you do to change that?
Context: The Climate Action Tracker, a nonprofit international research organization, projects that US greenhouse gas emissions are on track to be about one-third below 2005 levels by 2030, falling short of the Biden administration’s pledge to cut them in half. Another research organization, the Rhodium Group, reached a similar conclusion, calculating that to meet its Paris target, the United States would have to achieve a 6.9 percent emissions reduction every year from 2024 through 2030, more than triple the 1.9 percent drop seen in 2023.
3. In 2019, you said that we “have to acknowledge the residual impact of fracking is enormous in terms of the health and safety of communities.” As president, what would you do to protect the health and safety of communities who are exposed to air pollution and water contamination caused by the fracking process?
Context: Almost 2,500 scientific papers have documented negative health impacts from fracking, according to the Physicians for Social Responsibility and Concerned Health Professionals of New York. They include a 2022 Yale study showing Pennsylvania children who grew up within a mile of a natural gas well were twice as likely as other children to develop the most common form of juvenile leukemia, and a 2023 University of Pittsburgh study showing they were seven times as likely to suffer from lymphoma. The oil and gas industry has maintained high-pressure water fracturing for oil and gas production from underground shale formations is safe, but the industry has had to pay to provide new water supply for residents with contaminated wells. The issue is especially divisive in Pennsylvania, which became the nation’s second-largest natural gas producing state (after Texas) due to fracking, and is a key state in the presidential race.
4. Did you support President Biden’s move to pause further permitting of liquefied natural gas export facilities while the government assesses the potential climate impact? Now that a federal judge has ordered the administration to resume permitting, would you go forward with new LNG projects or seek to overturn the judge’s order?
Conext: Biden’s LNG permitting pause in January put into question the future of at least 17 terminals currently being considered along US coastlines to export natural gas overseas. The move was challenged by a coalition of Republican-led states and in July, a Trump-appointed federal judge ordered the administration to resume permitting LNG terminals. Although the Biden administration is appealing that order, on September 3, it approved a short-term expansion of one existing terminal’s permit to export from the Gulf of Mexico.
5.Farm work is among the nation’s most dangerous occupations and has become even deadlier due to more intense and frequent heat waves driven by climate change. Nearly half of farmworkers nationwide are undocumented and face even greater risks because they’re afraid to complain about unsafe working conditions. Will you give these workers some form of legal status and implement a federal heat standard that ensures the health and safety of those exposed to dangerous heat conditions at work?
Context: Rising temperatures have prompted questions about whether employers should be required to provide shade, rest periods, and cool water to workers who face health risks because of extreme heat, particularly those who must work outdoors, like farmworkers and construction workers. After the heat-related death of a 38-year-old farmworker in Oregon during the historic 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave, that state put new heat-protection rules in place. But Florida’s legislature and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis approved legislation early this year banning localities from establishing such rules. The Biden administration proposed the first federal worker heat protection standards in July, three years after the president first promised them. It will be up to the next president to decide whether to finalize that plan or abandon it in the face of certain legal challenges from business groups and their political allies.
The Florida government seems to be doing everything it can—including potentially breaking the law—to prevent voters from approving an abortion rights ballot measure in November.
On Thursday, the state’s health department debuted a webpage spreading misinformation about Amendment 4, a ballot measure appearing in November seeking to override the state’s six-week abortion ban that the Florida Supreme Court approved in April. If it receives the required 60 percent of votes to pass, the amendment would guarantee the right to abortion before the point of so-called fetal viability, which is generally understood to be around 24 weeks gestation. But the state’s new webpage—which DeSantis has since defended as a “public service announcement”—attacks the initiative with a litany of false claims, including that it “threatens women’s safety,” would “eliminate parental consent” for minors seeking abortions, and could “lead to unregulated and unsafe abortions” by allowing people without healthcare expertise to perform the procedure.
Those claims, though, are easily debunked by taking a look at the actual text of the amendment, which explicitly states that a patient’s healthcare provider is responsible for determining when an abortion after viability is necessary to protect a patient’s health. It also says that passage of the amendment would not override the authority of the legislature to require that a minor’s parent or guardian is notified before they obtain an abortion.
But the state’s campaign against the amendment doesn’t stop there. On the same day of the site’s launch, the Tampa Bay Times reported that the Florida Department of State was looking for evidence of fraud in the more than 30,000 citizen signatures used to get the amendment on the November ballot. Two election supervisors told the paper that the move was “highly unusual” given that the signatures had already been approved by local supervisors. The Tampa Bay Times also reported Friday that police had visited the homes of at least two voters who had signed the petition supporting Amendment 4 seeking to verify their signatures.
The anti-abortion efforts are the latest in Gov. Ron DeSantis‘ ongoing fight to defeat Amendment 4 after launching a political spending committee aimed at doing just that in May. (It has raised $3.7 million to date.) Now abortion rights advocates say DeSantis’ government is hoping to scare voters into voting against the amendment. “To our knowledge, it is unprecedented for the State to expressly advocate against a citizen-led initiative,” Bacardi Jackson, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, said Thursday. “This kind of propaganda issued by the state, using taxpayer money and operating outside of the political process sets a dangerous precedent.”
On Friday, the Florida Democratic Party said in a statement that it had submitted a public records request seeking information on when the agency started working on the webpage and who was involved. “Ron [DeSantis] and his buddies know they’re losing, and they’re willing to do anything—including breaking the law—to rig the results in their favor,”Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried said in a statement, adding that the party is also pursuing legal action to try to have the page taken down. State Senate Democratic Leader Lauren Book also said her office was investigating legal action in response to the webpage.
The Florida Agency for Health Care Administration did not respond to questions from Mother Jones about how much the web page cost to establish and maintain, who demanded its creation, why it includes false and misleading information, and how officials respond to criticism about the site. Instead, the agency provided the following statement: “Part of the Agency’s mission is to provide information and transparency to Floridians on the quality of care they receive. Our new transparency page serves to educate Floridians on the state’s current abortion laws and provide information on a proposed policy change that would impact care across the state.”
Now some have warned that the DeSantis administration’s use of government resources for political purposes could be illegal. Meanwhile, polling suggests the majority of Florida voters support the amendment.
The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.
“I hate saying, ‘I told you so.’”That is one of the biggest lies. I, for one, enjoy saying it. That is, on the right occasions. And I’d like to point out that in recent months I have repeatedly warned that Russian tyrant and war criminal Vladmir Putin intended to mess with the US election to help Donald Trump once again. (See here, here, and here.) This week, in a pair of actions, the Justice Department outlined elaborate schemes mounted by covert Moscow operators to influence the 2024 campaign. But in each instance, the feds declined to explicitly state the obvious: The Kremlin efforts have been designed and mounted to aid Trump’s bid to regain power.
In one case, the Justice Department seized 32 internet domains used in a Russian operation called “Doppelganger” to spread disinformation in the United States. These sites mimicked legitimate American news sites. (One example: washingtonpost.pm—as opposed to washingtonpost.com.) The Russians, the DOJ noted, “used these domains, among others, to covertly spread Russian government propaganda with the aim of reducing international support for Ukraine, bolstering pro-Russian policies and interests, and influencing voters in U.S. and foreign elections.” The sites often posted legitimate stories but would include a false piece that would aim to undermine US support of Ukraine. (One fake Washington Post article claimed the paper had obtained secret video showing that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was scheming with Washington regarding dangerous biolabs.)
In a released statement, Attorney General Merrick Garland said of this covert project: “As alleged in our court filings, President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle…directed Russian public relations companies to promote disinformation and state-sponsored narratives as part of a campaign to influence the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election. An internal planning document created by the Kremlin states that a goal of the campaign is to secure Russia’s preferred outcome in the election.” But Garland did not specify Moscow’s preference.
In the other action, the Justice Department indicted two employees of RT, the Russian state-controlled media operation, for allegedly secretly funneling $10 million to an American right-wing media outfit. The goal, as Garland put it, was to “create and distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging.” The indictment did not name the firm. But as soon as the indictment was released on Wednesday, I and other journalists quickly found one big fat clue: The document noted that the unnamed media outlet identified itself as a “network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political and cultural issues.” That’s how Tenet Media, an operation created last year featuring the work of right-wing and libertarian firebrands such as Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Benny Johnson, describes itself. It was easy to Google the phrase and discover that only Tenet popped up. (Meanwhile, the Justice Department also indicted Dimitri Simes, a Soviet-born American citizen, longtime foreign policy think-tanker, and Trump campaign adviser in 2016, for making more than $1 million by working for a sanctioned Russian television channel.)
Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco characterized this clandestine operation as an attempt “to pump pro-Russia propaganda and disinformation across social media to U.S. audiences” and “to illegally manipulate American public opinion by sowing discord and division.”
The RT-Tenet story was quite a bombshell: A clutch of far-right and generally pro-Trump commentators influential on social media, particularly among younger people, has allegedly been covertly subsidized by Moscow. One of the founders of the company, Lauren Chen, a right-wing influencer, has been associated with Turning Point USA, the rabidly pro-Trump outfit run by Charlie Kirk, and with Blaze Media, the outlet founded by conservative wild man and conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco characterized this clandestine operation as an attempt “to pump pro-Russia propaganda and disinformation across social media to U.S. audiences” and “to illegally manipulate American public opinion by sowing discord and division.” The statement released by the Justice Department to announce this indictment did not mention the 2024 election.
The Justice Department was avoiding saying that these covert Russian ops were attempting to get Trump back in the White House. But it’s not hard to add two and two here. If you’d looked at the YouTube channel for Tenet Media, you would have found one video after another bashing Kamala Harris. While months ago, Tenet was posting all sorts of provocative right-wing material on the US-Mexico border, Ukraine, Black history month, culture wars, and other hot-button issues, while denigrating President Joe Biden—Pool has decried Ukraine as the United States’ greatest enemy and exclaimed, “We should apologize to Russia!”—it has in recent weeks become largely focused on assailing Harris.
Moreover, the affidavit in support of the seizure of those 32 domains includes as attachments internal documents from the Doppelganger operation that state the program’s intent. Where an American presidential candidate or political party was mentioned, the Justice Department redacted their identities and referred to them as “Candidate A” or “Candidate B” and “Political Party A” and “Political Party B.” But one need not be Sherlock Holmes to suss out that “A” represents Trump and the Republicans and “B,” Biden and the Democrats. Thus, the meaning is clear when one of these quasi-redacted documents states, “It makes sense for Russia to put a maximum effort to ensure that [Political Party A] point of view (first and foremost, the opinion of Candidate A supporters) wins over the US public opinion.” (Bold in the original.) This Russian document cites the operation’s goal as to “secure victory” for the GOP candidate. It lists as targets swing state voters, American Jews, Latinos, and the “community of American gamers, users of Reddit and [messaging] boards, such as 4chan (the ‘backbone’ of the right-wing trends in the US segment of the Internet).”
The Doppelganger project, according to these documents, has been bent on exploiting all the various social media platforms and amplifying media persons on YouTube and elsewhere to exacerbate political conflict within the United States and spread an assortment of talking points: The United States is a country in decline, US support of Ukraine is bankrupting the United States, the Democrats are corrupt and dishonest losers. A list of “campaign topics” in one planning document included “record inflation…risk of job loss for white Americans, privileges for people of color, perverts, and disabled…threat of crime coming from people of color and immigrants.” Memes, social media posts, comments on social networks and in group chats, and video content (“including news stories in the Fox News style”) promoting all of this were to be directed at Republican voters, Trump supporters, “supporters of traditional family values,” and “White Americans representing the lower-middle and middle class.” The alleged operation to finance Tenet Media would be in sync with these overarching aims.
Earlier this year, according to the indictment, the Russians allegedly running the Tenet Media operation succeeded in encouraging Tenet to promote video of Tucker Carlson gushing about a Moscow supermarket during a visit to Russia to interview Putin—a visit for which Carlson was rightfully and mightily mocked.
The affidavit and the indictment are chock-full of fascinating details illuminating the ins and outs of this clandestine Russian campaign. Earlier this year, according to the indictment, the Russians allegedly running the Tenet Media operation succeeded in encouraging Tenet to promote video of Tucker Carlson gushing about a Moscow supermarket during a visit to Russia to interview Putin—a visit for which Carlson was rightfully and mightily mocked. (Two years ago, I revealed Kremlin memos showing that Putin’s regime pressured Russian media outlets to feature Carlson in their propaganda reports on the war in Ukraine.) One Russian document attached to the affidavit spells out a social media plan to make Mexico seem like a threat to the United States to help Trump’s candidacy.
As they have done for eight years, Trumpers rushed to declare all of this no big deal and nothing but a Biden administration/Deep State effort to smother the speech of right-wingers. David Sacks, the Silicon Valley bigwig who’s raising money for Trump, huffed, “Even by the standards of Russia, Russia, Russia hoaxes, the Tenet Media/Lauren Chen case makes no sense…As far as Red Scares go, this one seems pretty lame and people are seeing through it. Hopefully this means we’re at the end of Russiagate hoaxes.”
On Fox, host Laura Ingraham, not surprisingly, dismissed the seriousness of the alleged Russian intervention: “The DOJ seems to be back to Russia, Russia, Russia because they announced indictments against Russians for alleged election interference…Are they laying the groundwork for more censorship?” Her guest, failed GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, embraced the Russia denialism that has infected the Republican Party for eight years: “The reality is that they already did this in 2016. So they have a historical practice. When they are afraid of Donald Trump coming back to office, they invent every figment of imagination of Russia or somebody else putting him there without actually paying attention to the threats coming from our administrative state to free and fair elections in the United States.”
On Friday, Trump referred to the indictment and the seizures of the domains as a “scam.”
For their part, Tim Pool and Benny Johnson maintained they were unaware they were receiving Moscow gold and depicted themselves as victims. They did not publicly reflect on why the Kremlin wanted to prop up them and their comrades with millions of dollars.
With Trump and his political allies either dubious about or opposed to US assistance to Ukraine, Putin has more motivation than ever to try to aid his longtime admirer.
This is the third American presidential election in a row in which Putin has waged covert information warfare against the United States to help Trump. In 2016, he ordered a hack-and-leak operation and a clandestine social media campaign to hinder Hillary Clinton and boost Trump. Four years later, Ukraine officials tied to Russian intelligence spread disinformation designed to smear Joe Biden. He’s one for two and back for the rubber match. With Trump and his political allies either dubious about or opposed to US assistance to Ukraine, Putin has more motivation than ever to try to aid his longtime admirer.
In its public statements, the Justice Department avoided a simple declaration: Russia is secretly screwing with the American information ecosystem to assist Trump. Garland wants to keep these cases from appearing political. But they are deeply political. Russia is conniving to put a lying, misogynistic, chaotic, narcissistic, right-wing authoritarian into the White House—and Trump World is once again denying this reality and, thus, abetting a foreign adversary’s attack on the United States. There should be immediate congressional investigations and hearings. This ought to be front-page news for weeks and fundamentally shape the final leg of the campaign. But if the past is any guide, it won’t. That means Putin has a shot at winning. Even exposure of his plot by the Justice Department might not be enough to thwart it. If Moscow succeeds, it will be not because of any Russian brilliance but due to American decline and weakness.
After facing off against Donald Trump in June, President Joe Biden explained his poor debate performance in part by telling reporters, “It’s hard to debate a liar.” He had a point—by one estimate, Trump made more than 30 false claims that night, on everything from Roe v. Wade and January 6 to China, taxes, and, depending on who you ask, his own golf game.
In fact, there’s a name for Trump’s apparent tactic: The “Gish Gallop.” The term refers to a rhetorical strategy of, basically, overwhelming your opponent with false or incoherent information. As Robert Talisse, a professor of philosophy and political science at Vanderbilt University and co-author of the book Why We Argue (And How We Should): A Guide to Political Disagreement in an Age of Unreason, describes it, to employ the Gish Gallop is “to paralyze and immobilize the dialectical opponent by just burying him or her in a morass of bad arguments and empirically questionable claims.” As a result, the opponent can’t address all of the claims at once, or get to any prepared remarks—making it appear as if the “Gish Galloper” has won the debate.
The name comes from creationist Duane Gish, who frequently took on scientists in evolutionary debates in the 1980s and 90s. National Center for Science Education director Eugenie Scott coined the term, writing in 1994 that the formal debate format meant “the evolutionist has to shut up while the creationist gallops along, spewing out nonsense with every paragraph.”
To see what she means, here’s a clip of Gish from the early ’80s. He goes on at about the 24-minute mark:
Knowingly or not, four decades later, Trump appears to have embraced the same tactic. “Like Gish before him, Trump ceaselessly repeats claims that have been publicly discredited,” journalist Mehdi Hasan argued in the Atlantic last year in an excerpt of his book, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking. “Trump owes much of his political success to this tactic—and to the fact that so few people know how to beat it.”
To better understand the Gish Gallop’s little-known history, how to identify it, and strategies for defeating it, I called Professor Talisse for a rundown ahead of the Kamala Harris-Donald Trump debate.
Read an edited and condensed version of our conversation below:
Does the Gish Gallop function differently in political debates, compared to debates about evolution?
When we’re talking about politics, we’re almost always talking about political identities and partisan affiliations. In the case of evolutionary biology, with the original Gish Gallop, there was an element of identity, too. The debaters were affiliated with either a certain kind of religious identity or an identity that takes itself to be enlightened and more scientific. So in that respect, the original Gish Gallop context is similar to the context of political debates, where part of what the Gish Galloper is doing is trying to give his allies the experience of seeing somebody on their side “own” the other side, to use a bit of internet lingo.
And “owning” the other side has almost nothing to do with having a better command of the facts. Owning just means overcoming. Especially in presidential debates, political debating is really just a competition among the two debaters for the headlines the next day, for the soundbite, and for the clip that’s going to get a million views on social media.
It is not a logical thing. It’s not a rational thing. It’s not even about staying on topic. As Steve Bannon called it, “flooding the zone [with shit],” right? The political variant of the Gish Gallop is to say so much stuff that is objectionable to the other side that your interlocutor gets paralyzed by the sheer quantity of things to object to. And even in that case, the interlocutor has been taken off his or her own messaging.
So it’s a two-pronged strategy: One purpose is to simply overwhelm your opponent, so they don’t know which thing to respond to—
Right, they don’t know which ball to swing at.
—and then secondly, the opponent can’t bring up their own points, whatever they were hoping to talk about.
Yes. And one other aspect of this that I think is a little bit less often noticed: Part of the Gish Gallop is also about controlling what will be talked about by ordinary citizens the next day. Will it be some candidate’s policy proposal, or will it be one candidate saying, “There you go again,” like Reagan did, right? Will it be the zinger, or will it be something of substance?
One of the more distressing features of democracy under the technological conditions we live in—social media, 24/7 news—is that a lot of our politics are wrapped up in controlling the topics of conversation among friends and families and coworkers. For every moment one spends on the day after the debate saying, “Could you believe what Harris said?” or “Can you believe what Trump said?” is time not talking about an issue that might be more substantive, like the facts about immigration, or the facts about school shootings.
If Trump deployed the tactic at the debate on Tuesday, how might viewers recognize it?
I think it’s increasingly a tactic, this variant mutation of the Gish Gallop. What we’re seeing now, particularly from Trump, are that his statements increasingly involve a string of unrelated thoughts, each of which typically leaves somebody scratching their head—like sharks and batteries and claims that he understands nuclear energy because he has an uncle who taught at MIT. The claim is, on its face, kind of absurd in a way that you have to wonder, what could he possibly mean by that? And the more time you spend wondering is time you’re not spending thinking about other things.
“[Trump’s] statements increasingly involve a string of unrelated thoughts, each of which typically leaves somebody scratching their head.”
So what I would recommend to my fellow citizens who are invested in presidential politics is to read the transcript—not watch the debate. When we listen to somebody speak, especially if we’re well-disposed to them, we tend to cognize—what we’ve heard tends to be a lot more coherent than what’s actually coming out of the mouth of the speaker. Once you realize that the Gish Gallop is part of a strategy, I think the right inoculation is to start reading the transcripts and not trying to make sense of what’s being said [on live television].
But aren’t you losing something by not seeing all the information conveyed through things like gestures and facial expressions and tone?
Yeah, that’s the cost, right? There’s no silver bullet here. But in my view, knowing that this tactic is so prominent and so central to modern debating strategies, reading the transcripts, even after you’ve watched the live event, elucidates a lot of things.
If you’re really interested in making sure you get the whole thing, watch the debate and then read the transcript. Take note of how your impression of the event changes after you’ve read it. I’m always surprised about how much of what appears in the transcript that I don’t remember hearing. [Editor’s note: You can view a list of presidential debate transcripts dating back to 1960 here.]
For Harris, or anyone who’s debating someone using the Gish Gallop, how do you combat it? How do you beat the Gish?
I’m not a debater myself, but I think the best strategy is calling it out and then trying to get back on topic. Saying, “This is a Gish Gallop. You’ve said eight things, all of which are objectionable. If I had more time, I could give you my objections to all of them. Let me now just respond like this,” and then as quickly as possible, the interlocutor should get back on message. That’s the way to do it.
It wasn’t particularly interesting, so I shrugged and accepted ignorance. With the GOP having transformed into a party of shitposters, I assumed I was out on a joke that, with God’s grace, would pass before my job required me to learn about something either racist or stupid—or probably both.
But, shortly after, a clue arrived in the form of a meme. Ah, I realized looking at an image Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) posted on X, it would be both—racist and stupid—and I was going to have to understand it.
To start, it’s critical to note that the origins of these posts, from some of the highest levels of the US government, can seemingly be traced to a single falsehood. Here’s what happened. A participant of a random (exceedingly obscure) Facebook group that discusses local criminal activity in Springfield, Ohio, warned that a friend of their neighbor’s daughter had recently lost her cat, before describing an unfounded trend of Haitians eating cats they had found on the street. From there, a rumor started claiming that Haitian immigrants kidnapping and eating cats—a claim police have since roundly debunked—and quickly spread to the screenshots of some of the far-right’s most prominent figures, including Charlie Kirk, before landing in Elon Musk’s universe. (How no one stopped to question whether to believe a random Facebook post from the girlfriend-in-Canada telephone lineage of “neighbor’s daughter’s friend” is beyond my understanding.)
From there, it was JD Vance, the most embarrassingly online vice presidential candidate in history—with his long record of vilifying Haitian immigrants in his home state—who proved to be the accelerant in mainstreaming the lie within the GOP:
Months ago, I raised the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio.
Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn't be in this country. Where is our border czar? pic.twitter.com/rf0EDIeI5i
Now, it’s wholly unsurprising to see Donald Trump’s running mate seizing upon a racist lie; such behavior is effectively a requirement of Trump’s White House. But even after years of Republican fealty, the party’s gleeful embrace of it is something to behold. Do they truly believe that Haitian immigrants are roaming the streets in search of cats to eat? Of course they don’t. But this is what happens when a party funnels its ambitions into blatant racism.
It’s worth revisiting an old piece from my colleague Tim Murphy, on how the modern GOP has moved far past the dog whistle to pure racism:
Our politicians aren’t dog-whistling racism to win racist votes in a calculated game. They’re just racist. And realizing that is for the best. After all, the euphemisms politicians use are never just euphemisms. When racist white people talk about “the schools” or “the neighborhood,” those aren’t stand-ins for something deeper and more nefarious: Those are the deeper and more nefarious things, the load-bearing pillars of structural racism. This speech isn’t coded so much as it’s loaded.
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
As Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump prepare for their debate on Tuesday night, those who care about US action on climate change are bracing themselves for disappointment.
They know that at candidate forums and interviews—for presidential and down-ballot candidates alike—climate often doesn’t come up at all. Even worse, the few questions that do get asked are stuck on a controversy that science resolved long ago—is climate change real? As a result, debates provide little enlightenment on the difficult choices political leaders face as the costs of severe weather, heat and wildfire mount, and the clean energy future develops in a US economy caught up in a fossil fuel surge.
Since his first run for president in 2016, Trump has easily deflected the soft climate questions tossed his way. He declares himself an avid environmentalist—”I believe very strongly in very, very crystal clear clean water and clean air,” he once said—while minimizing the severity of climate change. Virtually all scrutiny of Harris’ climate policy has focused on her once-stated support for a fracking ban, even though there is no legal authority for a US president to enact such a prohibition, and Harris abandoned the stand when she became President Joe Biden’s running mate in 2020.
Ahead of the debate, the Inside Climate News staff came up with questions that challenge the candidates’ past statements on energy policy and more accurately reflect the hard decisions the next president will face as the world’s leading oil and gas producer confronts its role in both aiding and addressing a planetary crisis.
Questions for Trump
1. Private companies have announced more than 300 major new clean energy projects and electric vehicle plants across the country based on the support they’re getting under the Inflation Reduction Act. This private investment is expected to create more than 100,000 jobs; Michigan, Georgia, Texas, South Carolina, and North Carolina each have 20 projects or more underway. You’ve said you would end the IRA subsidies. What would you do about the projects in these states that would be put at risk?
Context: The nonprofit group Environmental Entrepreneurs has tracked 334 new clean energy and vehicles project announcements in 40 states since passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, totaling $125 billion in investment, expected to create 109,000 jobs.
2. You take credit for making the United States energy independent during your presidency. But under the Biden/Harris administration, we are even more energy independent by any measure—our energy imports are lower now and our exports are higher; our energy consumption is lower now and production is higher. Aren’t you just promising more of the same? Would you lift the ban on oil imports from Russia, which rose dramatically during your presidency?
Context:
3. You have often said that wind energy is damaging to land, wildlife, and even human health, while making energy more expensive. But wind electricity now provides 10 percent of US electric power, with Texas far and away the leading state for wind farms. What is your plan for wind power as president and would you act to shut down the wind farms now operating?
Context: Wind energy can have impacts on wildlife and the environment, according to the Department of Energy, and federal authorities require developers of projects on federal land and water to analyze potential impacts and minimize them. Oil, gas, and coal development also have wildlife and environmental impacts, with one 2012 study showing that fossil fuel-generated electricity kills nearly 20 times more birds per gigawatt-hour than electricity generated by wind.
4. You have said rising sea levels would create more oceanfront property. But the changes already underway have meant flooding, erosion and damage to homes and businesses both on the coast and inland. With losses mounting and the federal flood insurance program more than $20 billion in debt to taxpayers, should the U.S. government continue to insure the properties most at risk? And if not, what do you think the federal government should do about homes and businesses that can’t get private flood insurance, especially in your home state of Florida?
Context: In his August 12 interview with Elon Musk, Trump asserted that sea level is expected to rise one inch every 400 years, but a comprehensive 2022 study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded that sea levels on the US coast are on track to rise 10 inches in the next 30 years. NOAA projects the incidence of flooding in the US will increase tenfold as a result.
5. When you first ran for president, you promised to bring back coal jobs. But eight coal companies went bankrupt during your presidency and the United States lost 12,700 coal jobs—a decline of 25 percent. What is your plan to help coal workers?
Context: The coal industry has been weakening steadily over more than a decade due to what most economists see as a sectoral decline in the industry due to competition from cheaper natural gas and renewable energy. Eight US coal companies went bankrupt between October 2018 and October 2019. Under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act—the main vehicle for President Joe Biden’s climate policy—coal states like Wyoming and West Virginia have been given a competitive advantage in attracting clean energy development projects and associated federal funding in order to address displaced workers.
Questions for Harris
1. As California attorney general, you took legal action against oil companies over oil spills and other pollution, and as a presidential candidate in 2019, you talked about the federal and state litigation against tobacco companies as a model of how to address fossil fuel companies’ role in the climate crisis. Do you believe the Justice Department should join with states taking action against oil companies over climate damages?
Context: In 1998, 52 state and territorial attorneys general signed a massive $200 billion agreement with the nation’s four largest tobacco companies to settle dozens of lawsuits they brought to recover their smoking-related health care costs. The next year, the Justice Department also filed suit against Big Tobacco and after years of legal wrangling and a nine-month trial, a federal judge in 2006 ruled that the manufacturers had violated the federal organized crime law, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. That litigation is ongoing 25 years later, as the industry continues to challenge remedies imposed by the court, which are designed to prohibit it from making false or deceptive claims about tobacco products.
2. Despite the progress made on clean energy during the Biden administration, the US isn’t on track to hit the Paris climate agreement targets for greenhouse gas reductions. This not only endangers lives and property, it undermines US credibility in persuading other nations, especially China, to reduce their climate pollution. What would you do to change that?
Context: The Climate Action Tracker, a nonprofit international research organization, projects that US greenhouse gas emissions are on track to be about one-third below 2005 levels by 2030, falling short of the Biden administration’s pledge to cut them in half. Another research organization, the Rhodium Group, reached a similar conclusion, calculating that to meet its Paris target, the United States would have to achieve a 6.9 percent emissions reduction every year from 2024 through 2030, more than triple the 1.9 percent drop seen in 2023.
3. In 2019, you said that we “have to acknowledge the residual impact of fracking is enormous in terms of the health and safety of communities.” As president, what would you do to protect the health and safety of communities who are exposed to air pollution and water contamination caused by the fracking process?
Context: Almost 2,500 scientific papers have documented negative health impacts from fracking, according to the Physicians for Social Responsibility and Concerned Health Professionals of New York. They include a 2022 Yale study showing Pennsylvania children who grew up within a mile of a natural gas well were twice as likely as other children to develop the most common form of juvenile leukemia, and a 2023 University of Pittsburgh study showing they were seven times as likely to suffer from lymphoma. The oil and gas industry has maintained high-pressure water fracturing for oil and gas production from underground shale formations is safe, but the industry has had to pay to provide new water supply for residents with contaminated wells. The issue is especially divisive in Pennsylvania, which became the nation’s second-largest natural gas producing state (after Texas) due to fracking, and is a key state in the presidential race.
4. Did you support President Biden’s move to pause further permitting of liquefied natural gas export facilities while the government assesses the potential climate impact? Now that a federal judge has ordered the administration to resume permitting, would you go forward with new LNG projects or seek to overturn the judge’s order?
Conext: Biden’s LNG permitting pause in January put into question the future of at least 17 terminals currently being considered along US coastlines to export natural gas overseas. The move was challenged by a coalition of Republican-led states and in July, a Trump-appointed federal judge ordered the administration to resume permitting LNG terminals. Although the Biden administration is appealing that order, on September 3, it approved a short-term expansion of one existing terminal’s permit to export from the Gulf of Mexico.
5.Farm work is among the nation’s most dangerous occupations and has become even deadlier due to more intense and frequent heat waves driven by climate change. Nearly half of farmworkers nationwide are undocumented and face even greater risks because they’re afraid to complain about unsafe working conditions. Will you give these workers some form of legal status and implement a federal heat standard that ensures the health and safety of those exposed to dangerous heat conditions at work?
Context: Rising temperatures have prompted questions about whether employers should be required to provide shade, rest periods, and cool water to workers who face health risks because of extreme heat, particularly those who must work outdoors, like farmworkers and construction workers. After the heat-related death of a 38-year-old farmworker in Oregon during the historic 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave, that state put new heat-protection rules in place. But Florida’s legislature and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis approved legislation early this year banning localities from establishing such rules. The Biden administration proposed the first federal worker heat protection standards in July, three years after the president first promised them. It will be up to the next president to decide whether to finalize that plan or abandon it in the face of certain legal challenges from business groups and their political allies.
The Florida government seems to be doing everything it can—including potentially breaking the law—to prevent voters from approving an abortion rights ballot measure in November.
On Thursday, the state’s health department debuted a webpage spreading misinformation about Amendment 4, a ballot measure appearing in November seeking to override the state’s six-week abortion ban that the Florida Supreme Court approved in April. If it receives the required 60 percent of votes to pass, the amendment would guarantee the right to abortion before the point of so-called fetal viability, which is generally understood to be around 24 weeks gestation. But the state’s new webpage—which DeSantis has since defended as a “public service announcement”—attacks the initiative with a litany of false claims, including that it “threatens women’s safety,” would “eliminate parental consent” for minors seeking abortions, and could “lead to unregulated and unsafe abortions” by allowing people without healthcare expertise to perform the procedure.
Those claims, though, are easily debunked by taking a look at the actual text of the amendment, which explicitly states that a patient’s healthcare provider is responsible for determining when an abortion after viability is necessary to protect a patient’s health. It also says that passage of the amendment would not override the authority of the legislature to require that a minor’s parent or guardian is notified before they obtain an abortion.
But the state’s campaign against the amendment doesn’t stop there. On the same day of the site’s launch, the Tampa Bay Times reported that the Florida Department of State was looking for evidence of fraud in the more than 30,000 citizen signatures used to get the amendment on the November ballot. Two election supervisors told the paper that the move was “highly unusual” given that the signatures had already been approved by local supervisors. The Tampa Bay Times also reported Friday that police had visited the homes of at least two voters who had signed the petition supporting Amendment 4 seeking to verify their signatures.
The anti-abortion efforts are the latest in Gov. Ron DeSantis‘ ongoing fight to defeat Amendment 4 after launching a political spending committee aimed at doing just that in May. (It has raised $3.7 million to date.) Now abortion rights advocates say DeSantis’ government is hoping to scare voters into voting against the amendment. “To our knowledge, it is unprecedented for the State to expressly advocate against a citizen-led initiative,” Bacardi Jackson, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, said Thursday. “This kind of propaganda issued by the state, using taxpayer money and operating outside of the political process sets a dangerous precedent.”
On Friday, the Florida Democratic Party said in a statement that it had submitted a public records request seeking information on when the agency started working on the webpage and who was involved. “Ron [DeSantis] and his buddies know they’re losing, and they’re willing to do anything—including breaking the law—to rig the results in their favor,”Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried said in a statement, adding that the party is also pursuing legal action to try to have the page taken down. State Senate Democratic Leader Lauren Book also said her office was investigating legal action in response to the webpage.
The Florida Agency for Health Care Administration did not respond to questions from Mother Jones about how much the web page cost to establish and maintain, who demanded its creation, why it includes false and misleading information, and how officials respond to criticism about the site. Instead, the agency provided the following statement: “Part of the Agency’s mission is to provide information and transparency to Floridians on the quality of care they receive. Our new transparency page serves to educate Floridians on the state’s current abortion laws and provide information on a proposed policy change that would impact care across the state.”
Now some have warned that the DeSantis administration’s use of government resources for political purposes could be illegal. Meanwhile, polling suggests the majority of Florida voters support the amendment.
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(@catturd2) September 11, 2024
