On August 30, 2022, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) released a report examining human rights violations in Azerbaijan, Benin, Nicaragua, Slovakia, Suriname, Zimbabwe, and the United States of America. A 24-member delegation from the United States including the mayor of Atlanta and representatives of federal and state agencies attended hearings held in Geneva, Switzerland. The United States is represented on CERD by Gay Johnson McDougall, a lawyer with expertise international human rights issues and racial discrimination. McDougall is affiliated with the Fordham University Law School.
Retired US army colonel Lawrence Wilkerson touches on a number of hot topics, from a potential war between Lebanon and “Israel”, the dwindling Israeli military capabilities, to Biden’s Middle East doctrine, all the while casting doubt on Trump’s re-election.
With his refusal to go along with lockdowns and mask mandates during the pandemic, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis emerged as a hero to many in libertarian circles. But as his name is now consistently put forward as a prospective or even likely 2024 Republican Presidential candidate, those who view him favorably should take a sober second look. On foreign policy in particular, DeSantis promises to continue the disastrous policies of his predecessors, which have made us uniformly less free, less safe, and much poorer.
The Independent State Legislatures doctrine used to be a fringe theory, but not anymore. Multiple Supreme Court justices are on the record in support of it. Right-wing legal activists from the Federalist Society and its “Honest Elections Project” are pushing for it in legal briefs authored by white-shoe law firms (BakerHostetler, counsel for the Honest Elections Project, has defended Republican gerrymandering in Pennsylvania and North Carolina.) And some GOP-controlled state legislatures, including Arizona, are considering bills that would allow them to intervene in presidential elections to choose electors themselves if election results are “unclear.” If a state were to pass this type of law, it would set the stage for a court to agree that the Independent State Legislature doctrine requires that in some circumstances, state legislatures rather than voters should determine election outcomes.
As Jane Mayer reported recently, right-wing funders like the Bradley Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have been working with Republican state legislators to advance ways to re-engineer how states allocate Electoral College votes. Last year, a GOP state representative from Arizona, Shawna Bulick, sat on an ALEC-convened working group that discussed the Electoral College, and this year, she introduced a bill that would have given the state legislature power to undo the certification of presidential electors by a simple majority vote up until the inauguration.
Pershing Square Capital boss Bill Ackman and tech billionaire Peter Thiel are among the investors backing an upstart fund that’s aiming to lead a movement against politically influenced “stakeholder capitalism.”
Eager to offset a Democratic advantage among so-called dark money groups, wealthy pro-Trump conservatives like Peter Thiel are involved in efforts to wield greater influence outside the traditional party machinery.
According to our conservative friends, being “woke” refers to those who are ridiculously politically correct and who speak out too much on social injustice. It’s commonly used as a pejorative term when referring to those on the left, increasingly paring it with phrases like “woke mob” or as a sledgehammer, using “anti-woke” to proclaim their vehement opposition.
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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