“How Charlie Kirk’s social media machine rewired a generation’s politics”

cheap speech, social media and social protests

WaPo:

Last month, as social media buzzed with news that Taylor Swift was engaged to Travis Kelce, Charlie Kirk advised one of the world’s most successful female musicians to leave “the island of the wokeys” and start having children with the star football player.

“Reject feminism,” Kirk urged the billionaire singer, in a video that has garnered 7.5 million viewson TikTok. “Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.”

The video drew accusations of sexism from liberals and Swifties, but it found an enthusiastic audience among Kirk’s Gen Z fans. The clip’s viral spread illustrated how the 31-year-oldactivist and provocateur harnessed the attention economy to build a political empire credited with shattering the left’s grip on young voters….

Kirk’s tactics came under scrutiny ahead of the 2020 election, when The Washington Post revealed that Turning Point Action paid teenagers to produce messages that reflected Trump’s talking points on social media — an operation experts compared to a troll farm. Facebook permanently banned a marketing firm that worked on the campaign on behalf of Turning Point, and Twitter suspended 262 accounts associated with the campaign for what it said was “platform manipulation and spam.” The companies did not suspend accounts affiliated with Turning Point or Kirk, citing insufficient evidence.

Before Jan. 6, 2021,Kirk tweeted that his group was “sending 80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” He later was named the 10th-biggest “superspreader” of misinformation about the 2020 election on Twitter, according to a consortium of researchers from Stanford University, the University of Washington and other organizations called the Election Integrity Partnership, which analyzed false claims about the election on social media. Kirk latercondemned the day’s violence but invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions about Turning Point’s role in the rally when he was deposed in 2022 before the House committee investigating the U.S. Capitol riots.

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“On the Supreme Court’s Emergency Docket, Sharp Partisan Divides”

Supreme Court

Adam Liptak for the NYT:

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh says good judges are like good referees.

“Am I calling it the same way for labor and management, for the business and the environmental interests, for the Republican and the Democrat?” he asked at a judicial conference over the summer. “If you can’t look in the mirror and say, ‘I would do the exact same thing if the parties were flipped,’ then you’re not being a good judge, just like you wouldn’t be a good referee if you were favoring one team over the other.”

A look at the court’s record in emergency rulings does not appear to reflect Justice Kavanaugh’s goal.

Drilling down to individual justices’ votes rounds out the group portrait.

In the 17 cases in which the Biden administration sought emergency relief from the Supreme Court over four years, for instance, Justice Kavanaugh voted in its favor 41 percent of the time, according to an analysis prepared for The New York Times by Lee Epstein and Andrew D. Martin, both of Washington University in St. Louis, and Michael J. Nelson of Penn State.

By contrast, in the 19 cases in which the court has ruled on applications from the second Trump administration, Justice Kavanaugh voted for the administration 89 percent of the time. That amounted to a 48 percentage-point gap in favor of President Trump…..

On the far right side of the court, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. voted with the Trump administration 95 percent of the time and the Biden administration just 18, for a gap of 77 percentage points.

On the far left, the size of the gap was identical, but in the other direction. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson favored the Biden administration by 77 percentage points….

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“How Nancy Pelosi Quietly Shaped California’s Redistricting Fight”

redistricting

NYT:

One Friday in early August, Nancy Pelosi and Gavin Newsom sat together in the historic governor’s mansion in Sacramento and began dialing some of the nation’s wealthiest Democrats for dollars.

Ms. Pelosi, the 85-year-old former House speaker, and Mr. Newsom, the 57-year-old governor of California, have known each other for decades. She has been his mentor, and their circles are so entwined as scions of San Francisco that their families were even blended by marriage at one point.

But this was something entirely new for them both as they raced to raise cash for a fall ballot campaign on redistricting that could shape the 2026 midterms.

Ms. Pelosi would begin with pleasantries, according to three people granted anonymity to discuss private fund-raising calls made that day. Then she would hand the phone to Mr. Newsom to close the deal. The choreography was partly borne of a mindfulness of tangled federal rules about soliciting outsized checks, and partly out of deference to Mr. Newsom.

Well, at least most of the time.

“That’s certainly not enough,” Ms. Pelosi blurted out to one potential contributor who had floated a sizable, but apparently not sizable enough, donation. Everyone burst out laughing, according to two people with knowledge of the tandem fund-raising. “I think we can do better,” she ribbed at another point.

The moment at the mansion provided a glimpse of Ms. Pelosi’s behind-the-scenes role in a redistricting push with national consequences. At President Trump’s behest, Republican-led states, starting with Texas, are moving rapidly to rip up their congressional boundaries and boost G.O.P. chances of keeping control of the House next fall. California represents Democrats’ biggest and best hope for a meaningful counteroffensive…..

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“Louisiana’s Chief Election Official Confirms Lack of Widespread Noncitizen Voting”

election administration

Brennan Center:

After reviewing state voter rolls going back to the 1980s, Louisiana’s Republican secretary of state announced this month that “non-citizens illegally registering or voting is not a systemic problem in Louisiana.” That finding aligns with years of research showing that, with vanishingly rare exceptions, only American citizens vote in American elections.

As part of what Secretary Nancy Landry called an ongoing investigation of potential noncitizen voting, officials ran the state’s voter files through the SAVE program, a federal tool that checks individuals’ citizenship status. In voting records dating back to the 1980s, Landry’s office identified up to 390 registered voters who could be noncitizens. Of those, 79 voted at least once during that more than 40-year period. However, list-matching alone — whether with SAVE or any other database, all of which contain flaws — isn’t enough to identify ineligible voters, let alone voter fraud. That’s why Landry has rightly acknowledged that the actual number could be even lower, as some of the potential noncitizen voter registrations flagged by the SAVE program could be the result of outdated or inaccurate data.

To put that number in perspective, we estimate that at least 74 million votes have been cast in Louisiana since the 1980s — and that estimate is a significant undercount due to data limitations. In other words, out of tens of millions of ballots cast in Louisiana over more than 40 years, only a tiny fraction of them were possibly cast by noncitizens, and even those cases are unconfirmed….

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“Brazil’s Former President Was Convicted of Plotting a Coup. What Comes Next?; Jair Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years in prison for conspiring to cling to power after losing the 2022 elections.”

election subversion risk

NYT:

Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, was sentenced to more than 27 years in prison on Thursday for overseeing a failed coup plot after losing the 2022 elections, a landmark ruling for Latin America’s largest nation.

Mr. Bolsonaro was convicted of orchestrating a vast conspiracy that included overturning the vote, dismantling courts, handing special powers to the military and assassinating the president-elect, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who won the election.

Mr. Bolsonaro denied plotting a coup or planning to kill his political rival. He accused the Supreme Court justice who oversaw his trial, Justice Alexandre de Moraes, of unfairly targeting him and his right-wing movement.

The ruling marks the first time that Brazil, a nation with a long history of coups, has held accountable a leader who tried to subvert its democracy. But it is far from clear whether Mr. Bolsonaro will actually end up behind bars.

His conviction could also worsen the diplomatic tension between Brazil and the United States, which escalated after President Trump’s tried to help Mr. Bolsonaro, an ally, by applying tariffs and sanctions on Brazil….

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