August 5, 2026

02d Agit-Prop

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Excerpt from www.motherjones.com

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In the coming weeks, the Supreme Court will wrap up a consequential term and issue decisions that are expected to undercut bedrock assumptions about each branch of government and create a new balance of powers—one that tips the scales toward an unassailable executive and an all-powerful judiciary. It began on Thursday, as the court gave states new leeway to discriminate against minority voters. The justices may soon add women’s right to healthcare to the list of privileges that a state may deprive its citizens, another step that would turn the clock back to a time when the Constitution viewed states rights as more sacrosanct than the rights of its people. Though the cases at issue address many different issues, a theme punctuating them all is that the Republican-appointed majority appears willing to do serious damage to American democracy.

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Excerpt from www.news-journal.com

‘The reality is that in the Supreme Court we have a code of ethics that is really more loophole than law’ says James J. Sample, Professor of Law at Hofstra University and judicial ethics expert. He was speaking to FRANCE 24’s Monte Francis about accusations levelled against Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito of having displayed a ‘Stop The Steal’ symbol on his lawn, adopted by Trump supporters seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Mr. Sample warns that Justice Alito’s actions “undermine the entire enterprise of separation of powers, of an independent judicial branch, and it calls into question the legitimacy of the rulings that come from that branch.” He asserts that the “rule of law’ is at stake: “The judicial branch depends on the public having faith in its rulings for the legitimacy of those rulings and for those rulings to be followed’.”

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Excerpt from www.barrons.com

Donald Trump drew disbelief — and some support — Wednesday after suggesting that standard language from an FBI search warrant executed in 2022 on his Florida mansion showed that President Joe Biden wanted armed agents to shoot him.

Trump’s latest incendiary claim was in response to a court filing outlining plans for the FBI search at the Mar-a-Lago club, where he kept classified national security documents after leaving the White House.

The filing included standard FBI wording stating that agents are allowed to use deadly force if someone is in imminent danger.

But Trump, who is running to unseat Biden in November’s election, distorted the statement to say that it showed the Justice Department was ready to shoot him and harm his family.

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Excerpt from www.newsbusters.org

The liberal media seem determined to declare anything a “symbol” of January 6 if they could use it to smear a conservative U.S. Supreme Court justice and manipulate upcoming rulings involving former President Trump. That much was clear during the Thursday morning newscasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC when they rallied to try to run a new conspiracy theory about Justice Samuel Alito up the flagpole to force him to recuse himself.

All three networks leaned heavily on a The New York Times report that Alito’s vacation home sported the Revolutionary War-era “An Appeal to Heaven” flag. But since two of the flags were seen during the riot at the Capitol, suddenly it was the “symbol” every “insurrectionist” was rallied behind. It was the second such “symbol” the media had declared to have discovered in as many weeks amid their effort to remove Alito.

NBC Today co-anchor Savannah Guthrie gave away the game during her lead into the segment. “Also this morning, the calls are growing louder for Supreme Court Justice Alito to recuse himself from any cases related to January 6. This comes after another image has surfaced showing a second controversial flag on display at one of his properties,” she declared.

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Excerpt from www.motherjones.com

The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the constitutionality of a South Carolina congressional map that a lower court had previously found diluted the power of Black voters. In a 6-3 decision authored by Justice Samuel Alito, the Court’s conservative supermajority wrote that “the Challengers provided no direct evidence of a racial gerrymander, and their circumstantial evidence is very weak.”

The court’s ruling protects the seat of GOP Rep. Nancy Mace, a onetime relative moderate who has veered sharply to the right after Republicans redrew her district following the 2020 census to make it more GOP-friendly. She was one of eight House Republicans who voted to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and she subsequently endorsed Donald Trump despite once saying that she held him responsible for the January 6 insurrection. Mace defeated Democrat Joe Cunningham by one point in 2020, but she won reelection in her redrawn Charleston-based district by 14 points in 2022.

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Excerpt from crooksandliars.com

MAGA Rep. Anna Paulina Luna told traitor Steve Bannon her plan to have the Sergeant at Arms arrest Attorney General Garland and jail him until he turns over audio to Congress, audio they’re hoping will diminish President Biden.

Rep. Luna-tic finally read the rules manual and thinks she has an idea to confine Garland until he complies with Republicans’ fishing operation.

BANNON: Tell me what’s going on, America on the contempt citation. I thought that was going to move too quickly, but then you’re coming out, you’ve got a plan B, is it?

LUNA: So, uh, so to kind of just quickly explain to the listeners, there’s two types of contempt of Congress. There’s criminal contempt, which Congress can bring towards anyone that violates a subpoena.

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Excerpt from www.politifact.com

Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker’s recent commencement address at Benedictine College has drawn criticism for his remarks about motherhood and sparked misinformation.

We’ve already debunked a claim that Butker said society would be better off if “women had more babies than thoughts.”

Another, in which the Kansas City Chiefs coach allegedly threatens to quit if the team drops Butker, is also fake.

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Excerpt from www.aljazeera.com

Whenever the International Criminal Court (ICC) opens an investigation into an ongoing war, versions of the following question will inevitably be asked: Does the pursuit of accountability risk leaving the warring parties with no incentive but to continue the fight?

The same question is again being asked now that ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan has made the landmark decision to request arrest warrants for top Israeli and Hamas leaders.

For years, I have tried to get to the bottom of what is often called the “peace versus justice” debate. I wrote a book about how that debate played out with the ICC interventions in Libya and Uganda. I have also published findings on the peace-justice relationship in Ukraine, Israel-Palestine, and elsewhere. While responses to the debate are often driven more by assumptions and hypotheticals than incontrovertible facts, the reality is that there is no special key that helps unlock the relationship between resolving wars and achieving accountability for wartime atrocities.

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Excerpt from www.politicususa.com

Trump came up with the conspiracy theory that it is fascists who are controlling the Oval Office who are behind his prosecution.

Trump said, “Such a disgrace. So sad to see what’s happened to our country. Our country is going to hell under Biden, but look at the person, why don’t you look at the person that argued their case to almost the entire case? Look at the, he comes from unbelievable. He came from Biden and I don’t know if it’s Biden because I don’t think Biden has any idea what the hell is happening. But it’s from the fascist circle in the Oval Office. They circle the Resolute Desk. The beautiful resolute desk that’s being stinked up.”

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Excerpt from www.rawstory.com

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was exposed on Wednesday by The New York Times for having flown yet another extremist symbol, this time an “Appeal to Heaven” pine flag at his beach house — an old revolutionary symbol that in recent years has been used predominantly by the extreme Christian nationalist movement, and was also commonly flown by rioters trying to stop election certification at the Capitol on January 6.

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Excerpt from unherd.com

When iconoclastic billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 he promised to restore free speech to the social media platform, whose previous regime had censored content and banned users practically indiscriminately. In the years since, Musk has faced questions about whether his policies are consistent with his bold promises — a criticism that has been reinforced by his recent treatment of the word “cisgender”.

Musk is clearly no fan of the term, which is often abbreviated to “cis” and used by social progressives to denote someone who is not transgender. He has called it a “slur” and announced some months ago that its repeated use would be treated as a violation of the harassment policies at X, as it’s now known. Now, users who post the term are reportedly seeing their posts restricted.

As TechCrunch reports, “If you write the words ‘cis’ or ‘cisgender’ on X, you might be served this full-screen message: ‘This post contains language that may be considered a slur by X and could be used in a harmful manner in violation of our rules.’ You can continue to publish the post or delete it.”

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Excerpt from www.motherjones.com

The trial of fugitive Chinese mogul Guo Wengui kicks off in New York Wednesday, as federal prosecutors prepare to lay out what they have called a “complex” conspiracy involving elaborate financial schemes, dozens of offshore accounts, and evidence translated from Mandarin. But the heart of the case is a simple and familiar American phenomenon: political grift—a confidence job in which a demagogic leader allegedly translated partisan passion into personal gain. If the case against Guo sounds a bit like what critics say about Donald Trump, that’s no coincidence. Guo’s rise was aided by some of the same people who have boosted the former president.

Guo grew up in China, made a fortune there through allegedly corrupt real estate maneuvers, and arrived in the United States in 2015 as a billionaire. Once in America, Guo built an eclectic empire of organizations, created a public brand as a leading critic of the Chinese Communist Party, and amassed large following of fellow Chinese emigres—people whose loyalty is reflected by their self-description as “ants.”

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Excerpt from www.dailykos.com

At least a few Republicans have issued mildly critical responses to Justice Samuel Alito’s upside-down flag, a symbol of support for Donald Trump, while the Supreme Court was debating election issues in 2021.

It’s been a long time since any statement from Donald Trump, no matter how outrageous, generated more from congressional Republicans than a kind of selective ignorance, or, of course, an announcement from Sen. Susan Collins that she is “very concerned.”

In the case of Alito, even reliable Trump lap dogs feel compelled to take a gentle poke. As HuffPost reports, that includes Sen. Lindsey Graham, who said that flying the inverted flag was “not good judgment.” Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said that Alito’s flag suggested “a partisan take” on an issue before the court. And Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota simply called it “weird.”

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Excerpt from www.politifact.com

Former President Donald Trump in a May 21 campaign email and social media posts falsely accused President Joe Biden of putting his life at risk in an August 2022 FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago.

“BREAKING FROM TRUMP: BIDEN’S DOJ WAS AUTHORIZED TO SHOOT ME!” read an all-caps subject line on an email from Trump’s campaign.

“It’s just been revealed that Biden’s DOJ was authorized to use DEADLY FORCE for their DESPICABLE raid in Mar-a-Lago. You know they’re just itching to do the unthinkable…Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger,” the email said.

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Excerpt from crooksandliars.com

Sloppy Steve Bannon spoke with Bloomberg News’s Joshua Green to ask him about his deep dive into Trump World in his latest piece. Bannon seems to think it’s cute when Trump talks about staying in power for more than two terms. Green noted that that’s a concern for voters, and they’re taking it seriously, Media Matters reports. And they should take it seriously.

“So my piece is called “Trump Forever?” with a question mark, and it’s based on, you know, I get to sit in on how to focus groups and stuff from time to time,” Green said. “Strategists in both parties will let me do this just to kind of get a pulse of what voters are talking about and worrying about.”

“And one thing that I picked up on was that a lot of undecided voters and a lot of voters who actually voted for Biden in 2020 but then have turned against him are hesitant to vote for Donald Trump because they’re afraid that if Trump is reelected, he’ll never leave the White House, that he’ll wipe out term limits, declare himself king and essentially establish a permanent presidency,” he continued. “And this is a real fear among real people who are out there.”

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Excerpt from www.newsbusters.org

NBC Capitol Hill correspondent Ali Vitali concluded her guest hosting of MSNBC’s Way Too Early on Wednesday by welcoming Shefali Luthra, health reporter for The 19th News, to promote her new book, where Luthra claims that the left’s position that pro-lifers simply seek to control women is not just a lazy opinion, but a fact confirmed by “research.”

Vitali was all for the conclusion, “I want to read something that I read in your book. You say ‘it wasn’t until 1880 that every state had passed laws criminalizing abortion, a shift that was less about religion and more a product of a campaign orchestrated by a male-dominated medical establishment.’”

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Excerpt from www.newsbusters.org

When compared to its network counterparts, Comedy Central’s The Daily Show is more likely to acknowledge that Democrats provide plenty of comedic material as evidenced by Tuesday’s show where Desi Lydic pretended to be Vice President Kamala Harris’s “holistic thought advisor” who is responsible for her various word salads. However, Wednesday’s show reverted back to the norm as Troy Iwata found the one man in America who is part of the Joe Biden personality cult, which naturally turned the show into a Biden 2024 commercial.

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Excerpt from amp.theguardian.com

12.40 EDT

A former White House lawyer for Donald Trump says he should already be on trial for the classified documents discovered at Mar-a-Lago, the Guardian’s Robert Tait reports:

 

Donald Trump’s former White House lawyer has attacked Aileen Cannon, the judge handling the ex-president’s classified documents charges, for repeated delays, attributing her rulings to “incompetence” and “perceived bias” and saying the case should have already come to trial.

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Excerpt from crooksandliars.com

Does the FBI really need to point this out? This is the state of our nation, when a presidential candidates uses this accusation (that the FBI planned to kill him) to fundraise. Not only was this standard procedure, it was the exact same language used in the warrant to search the Biden properties! But facts will never get in the way with this bunch. Via ABC News:

The FBI has issued a rare statement after former President Donald Trump and several GOP lawmakers spread false claims suggesting President Joe Biden authorized his assassination during the search of his Mar-a-Lago resort in 2022.

In a fundraising email responding to right-wing media reports that offered a distorted reading of a newly-unsealed court filing in Trump’s classified documents case, Trump falsely claimed Biden was “locked & loaded ready to take me out.”

[…] “The FBI followed standard protocol in this search as we do for all search warrants, which includes a standard policy statement limiting the use of deadly force,” the FBI said in a statement Tuesday evening. “No one ordered additional steps to be taken and there was no departure from the norm in this matter.”

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Excerpt from www.thenation.com

Consider Donald Trump to be in a racial bind when it comes to election 2024. After all, he needs Black voters to at least defect from Joe Biden in swing states, if not actually vote for him. Yet, more than ever, he also needs his white nationalist base to believe that a second Trump term will be even more racist than the first and he’s been openly claiming that he’ll address the ghost of anti-white racism. Not surprisingly, his evolving strategy for the Black vote has been high on empty symbolism and viral moments, but distinctly low on specific promised policy benefits for the Black community.

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Excerpt from www.politicususa.com

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito had his excuse for flying a flag supporting the insurrection shattered when it was reported that a different flag supporting Trump’s insurrection flew at his beach house last summer.

The New York Times reported:

Last summer, two years after an upside-down American flag was flown outside the Virginia home of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., another provocative symbol was displayed at his vacation house in New Jersey, according to interviews and photographs.

This time, it was the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which, like the inverted U.S. flag, was carried by rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Also known as the Pine Tree flag, it dates back to the Revolutionary War, but largely fell into obscurity until recent years and is now a symbol of support for former President Donald J. Trump, for a religious strand of the “Stop the Steal” campaign and for a push to remake American government in Christian terms.

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Excerpt from www.truthdig.com

 

Earlier this month, the MAGA world was elated when Republican attorney Charlie Spies resigned from his position as the Republican National Committee’s top lawyer after two tumultuous months on the job.

Following a sustained campaign to oust the veteran party attorney and strategist from his role as chief counsel to the RNC, Trump partisans saw the removal of Spies as a final, triumphant blow to the “establishment” wing of the GOP within the national organization. “President Trump woke up to the fact that he didn’t want a RINO in there who is doing nothing on the election integrity front,” declared Steve Bannon on his popular podcast. Trump himself crowed in a now-deleted Truth Social post that Spies’ ouster was “great news for the Republican Party.”

Despite framing his departure as voluntary, Spies was most likely forced out of his role by the former president after months of vociferous protest from the MAGA faithful. From the moment Spies’ RNC appointment was announced, Trump supporters began uncovering old quotes and videos of him criticizing the former president and rejecting conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. Though Spies was eager to help his most fire-breathing RNC colleagues in their “election integrity” drive, he could not escape from his past.

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Excerpt from www.vanityfair.com

There are political reasons for Donald Trump to hold a campaign rally in the Bronx. Some are even plausible. Polls have shown that his general election opponent, current president Joe Biden, is struggling to assemble support from voters of color, an essential part of Biden’s winning 2020 coalition. So appearing on Thursday night in the borough’s Crotona Park, a neighborhood with a predominantly Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Black population, allows Trump to highlight a Biden weakness and advertise himself as an alternative—though his actual audience is very much elsewhere. Four years ago, Biden won this county by about 68% of the vote, and Trump has no real hope of winning the Bronx, much less New York state, this time around.

Still, the fact that the rally will happen within easy reach of America’s densest concentration of reporters should generate cheap and wide coverage for Trump (yes, including this story). The Bronx rally is the latest and largest in a series of local Trump stunts. My favorite so far was the ex-president’s motorcade rolling up to a midtown Manhattan firehouse so Trump could wave to the cameras and redeliver a pair of (cold) pizzas delivered by his staff a half hour earlier. Trump has also visited a Harlem bodega where, two years ago, a clerk fatally stabbed a customer who jumped over the store counter and shoved him. Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, ultimately dropped second-degree murder charges after concluding that the clerk could have been acting in self-defense.

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Excerpt from www.thenation.com

On April 22, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments for Grants Pass v. Johnson, a case that focuses on whether unhoused—the term that has generally replaced “homeless”—people with no indoor shelter options can even pull a blanket around themselves outdoors without being subject to criminal punishment.

Before making its way to the Supreme Court on appeal, the Ninth Circuit Court held that municipalities can’t punish involuntarily homeless people for merely living in the place where they are. This is exactly what the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, did when it outlawed resting or sleeping anywhere on public property with so much as a blanket to survive in cold weather, even when no beds in shelters were available. The law makes it impossible for unhoused residents to stay in Grants Pass, effectively forcing them to either move to another city or face endless rounds of punishment. In Grants Pass, the punishment starts with a $295 fine that, if unpaid, goes up to $500, and can escalate from there to criminal trespass charges, penalties of up to 30 days in jail, and a $1,250 fine.

The issue before the court is whether such a law violates the Eighth Amendment’s restrictions against cruel and unusual punishment. The city is asking the court to decide that the Eighth Amendment doesn’t impose any substantive limit on what can be criminalized, so long as the punishment itself isn’t considered cruel and unusual. If so, municipalities across the nation would be free to make involuntary homelessness unlawful.

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Excerpt from scitechdaily.com

 

Gloom and doom warnings about climate change are often ineffective, as evidenced by a global survey involving 59,000 participants from 63 countries. Researchers developed an app to tailor climate change messages effectively, finding that scare tactics can sometimes backfire, especially in places like Norway where such approaches are less effective compared to more constructive messages.

To effectively communicate about climate change and global warming, it’s crucial to tailor your message to suit your target audience and your goals. Researchers have created an app designed to assist individuals keen on raising awareness about climate issues. This tool aims to maximize support, whether the users are researchers, politicians, decision-makers, or legislators.