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Norman Lear: “I Love Liberty.”

Editor’s note: 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 of Our Land here. 

A year ago, I received a phone call out of the blue from the legendary producer Norman Lear. He said he was ringing me to say that he was impressed with my work, mentioning my recently published book American Psychosis and my appearances on MSNBC. I wondered if there was something more to the call. Did he need me for anything? No. He just wanted to pass along a compliment and chat. Norman was 100 years old at the time, but he was, as usual, astute, funny, and well-informed during our wide-ranging discussion of the news of the moment, the dire state of American politics, and the continuing threat to democracy posed by MAGAism. “I love liberty,” he told me. “It’s the heart and soul of all I’ve tried to do.”

When our conversation was done, I was in the clouds. The man who changed American culture with All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Maude, and his many other successful television endeavors and who had long been a champion of liberalism with his creation of People for the American Way (formed to challenge the religious right) and his decades of extensive philanthropy appreciated my work. But it was especially an honor coming from a fellow who was extraordinary also because of his personal qualities. As many have noted through the years, Norman was one of the most engaging, intelligent, witty, warm, and delightful men you could meet. It is difficult to convey the experience of being in his company. He exuded decency, smarts, and affability, and he possessed a remarkable ability to connect. He had an aura, and it was a rush to be within it.

Norman died at the age of 101 last week. His obituaries depict him, quite rightfully, as a towering figure of modern America. His accomplishments in transforming America are staggering. What also deserves mentioning is that he was a helluva guy. He embodied the best of liberalism and the American spirit.

His call to me was not my first encounter with Norman. We met in the late 1980s or early 1990s. I was having lunch outdoors at a Los Angeles restaurant with Stanley Sheinbaum, a philanthropist and civic activist widely considered to be one of the top L.A. liberals. Norman and his wife Lyn sat down at the other end of the patio. Even at that distance, Norman, then pushing 70, had this hard-to-believe healthy glow to him. “I hope,” I thought to myself, “I look that good when I’m 50.” 

“Look at Norman,” Stanley said to me. “He’s two years younger than me but looks 20 years younger. When he first came to town, I introduced him around. Soon everybody liked him better than me.” When we finished lunch, Stanley introduced me to Norman and Lyn. Norman was the bigshot, but he asked me, this young pisher, a host of questions about my work. He made me feel 10 feet tall. “Keep in touch,” he said, as we left. It was a much-valued invitation. At that point, he was not just a showbiz titan; he was a political force.

Norman was an early participant in the nation’s culture wars—but as a positive and witty warrior. His early TV hits in the 1970s injected social issues into primetime network sitcoms for the first time, poking fun at bigotry, hatred, and small-mindedness. A key value all his storylines advanced was tolerance. Naturally, he was aghast to see at that time the rise of the religious right—most notably, the Moral Majority led by Jerry Falwell—and its powerful merger of fundamentalist intolerance and politics.

As he recounts in his wonderful memoir, Even This I Get to Experience, one day he was watching the highly popular televangelist Jimmy Swaggart (not yet disgraced in a prostitution scandal) and saw him ask his viewers to pray for the “removal” of a Supreme Court justice. Requesting good Christians to beseech God for the death of a justice pushed Norman over the edge. Soon thereafter he created a public service announcement with an actor portraying a hard-hat worker standing next to a forklift who says straight into the camera:

We’re a religious family, but that don’t mean we see things the same way politically. Now, here come certain preachers on radio and TV and in the mail, telling us on a bunch of political issues that there’s just one Christian position, and implying if we don’t agree we’re not good Christians. So, my son is a bad Christian on two issues. My wife is a good Christian on those issues, but she’s a bad Christian on two others… [M]aybe there’s something wrong when people, even preachers, suggest that other people are good Christians or bad Christians depending on their political views. That’s not the American way.

Whoa, his friends told Norman. You’re Jewish, rich, and a Hollywood top dog, and you want to go to war on your own against the Christian right? Norman recognized his pals were right. He recruited prominent religious leaders to endorse this spot: Father Theodore Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame; Rev. Jimmy Allen, president of the Southern Baptist Convention (yes, you read that right—the last moderate to hold that post); William Sloane Coffin, a prominent liberal Episcopalian clergyman; Charles Bergstrom, the spokesperson for the Lutheran Church; and others.

With the support of these folks (including Stanley Sheinbaum), he organized People for the American Way, a nonprofit to advance liberal causes and values, and barnstormed across the nation raising money for the new outfit. PFAW eventually bought time to play the PSA on a Washington, DC, television station. That landed Norman and former Iowa Sen. Harold Hughes, a Democrat, evangelical Christian, and PFAW supporter, on the Today show. Norman’s group was now officially on the map. More PSAs followed (including several directed by Jonathan Demme, who would go on to fame as the director of The Silence of the Lambs). Norman produced a blistering half-hour documentary on the Moral Majority that indicted the extremist organization by showing the speeches and sermons delivered by its officials. Burt Lancaster narrated the film. (Today, PFAW is a vital piece of the progressive infrastructure; among its many activities, it funds the essential Right Wing Watch.)

Continuing in this vein, Norman pitched to the three broadcast networks a variety show to be called I Love Liberty. His plan was for it to be a star-studded, completely nonpartisan, two-hour salute to America to mark the 250th anniversary of George Washington’s birthday in 1982. The executives had a tough time believing an avowedly liberal group like PFAW would be able to eschew partisanship, but ABC told Norman that if he could get two ex-presidents—a Democrat and a Republican—to co-sponsor the shindig, they’d go for it. Jimmy Carter was the only living former Democratic president and still unpopular after his recent loss to Ronald Reagan, and Richard Nixon, well….you know. So Norman countered: How about an ex-president and a former first lady? He had Gerald Ford and Lady Bird Johnson in mind. With the help of Betty Ford, a fan of Maude, Norman roped in her husband. Johnson subsequently agreed as well.

The showed began with Sen. Barry Goldwater, the legendary Arizona conservative and former GOP presidential candidate, standing alone in a spotlight. He said that he had wanted an enormous opening with a great deal of patriotic hoopla but that the producer had desired something much more modest. Then came the number: a jamboree with 1,700 performers, including marching bands, a dozen Uncle Sams on stilts, dancers, jugglers, 16,000 red-white-and-blue balloons, the reenactment of the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima, and much more.

When it was done, the camera cut to Goldwater: “That was the compromise.”

The rest of the show featured the Muppets as members of the Continental Congress, Martin Sheen reading a letter from George Washington, a host of patriotic tunes, Jane Fonda, Jimmy Buffett, LeVar Burton, and other famous entertainers, as well as Barbra Streisand singing “America the Beautiful.” In one segment, a Black man, a Latino, a Native American, a woman, and a gay man each vented his or her frustration that the United States had yet to deliver fully on its promise of equality. They concluded their remarks with this line: “Right now America isn’t working that well for me, but I love my country.”

One of the best bits was Robin Williams performing as the US flag:

The Christian Science Monitor praised the show: “Through the skillful use of songs, dance, dramatic skits, and recitations, ‘I Love Liberty’ tries to wrest away from and then share the mantle of patriotism with those who insist upon using the flag as their exclusive cloak. It invests the love of freedom, liberty, and the flag symbol itself with a kind of natural and refreshing sophistication in which all Americans can join unashamedly. However, besides championing good old-fashioned patriotism, ‘I Love Liberty’ succeeds in being good, old-fashioned family fun.”

Several times when I chatted with Norman about his television career, he reminisced more about I Love Liberty than his many other achievements in the business. At the time, he knew that he was in a knife fight with the reactionary forces of the right, but he brought to this clash not another knife, but humor, goodwill, creativity, and entertainment. He refused to concede patriotism to the bigots of the religious right and their political allies.

Not long after that phone call from Norman last year, I was in Los Angeles and went to see him at his home. He was in a wheelchair, wearing his customary bucket hat, and a motorized lift carried him up the stairs to his memorabilia-filled office. We spent about two hours together. His mind was sharp. But he did say that he was getting forgetful about certain matters. He asked me to remind him of some of our previous encounters, and I recounted for him an evening during President Barack Obama’s first inauguration when we had dinner in Washington, DC, with Mike Mills and Michael Stipe of REM. I have no idea how we managed to gather in this group. But the five of us ended up at a fancy restaurant having a wonderful time. As we dined and drank, Lynda Carter, who had starred as Wonder Woman in the television series, walked past. She spotted Norman and tried to vault over a group of large planters to say hello, stumbled, fell to the ground, and then stood up and with great dignity presented herself to him. He was, of course, gracious and chatted with her for a while. Wonder Woman doing whatever was necessary to be with Norman—that made sense. “Ah, yes,” he said to me, perhaps remembering. But maybe not.

We discussed the never-ending tribalization of American politics, the grip that hate-fueled Trumpism had on the GOP and millions of Americans, and the unsettling prospects of a Donald Trump restoration. Though the recent midterm elections had provided reason for hope, he knew that the dangers of MAGA demagoguery had not passed. “It’s never over,” he said with a sigh, referring to the battle to preserve tolerance and progressive gains. This was a fight he had led for over four decades.

As he did so often, during our visit, Norman expressed astonishment at his immense good fortune. He reminisced about his television years and chuckled when I told him I was a big fan of some of his lesser-known shows, particularly Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, a soap opera spoof, and Fernwood 2 Night, which became America 2 Night, perhaps the first send-up of late-night talk shows. He was developing a television show, he said, that he wanted me to work on. It was about a host on a liberal cable news network whose adult daughter was a Trump conservative. Once again, in All in the Family style, he would be exploring modern-day politics through family dynamics, but in an inversion of the relationship between conservative Archie Bunker and his liberal daughter Gloria and son-in-law Michael. He told me one of his own children was a Trump supporter, and the two of them had to rely on love to navigate through their political differences.

Norman, I said, you’re 100. You have future projects? He described the five shows in development he was overseeing, including an animated version of Good Times. And I could see he was not kidding. Throughout our conversation, the telephone kept ringing. He would pick it up and say something brief like, I read the script; the notes are on the way. Or, I can review the edit tomorrow. Or, Arrange a meeting so we can flesh that out further. He was creating and juggling—and still looking for how he could be a meaningful part of a debate that could make the United States a better nation. And, damnit, he still looked good. The glow was there.

If anyone could cheat the Grim Reaper—hold him at bay, perhaps with a mischievous smile, a wink—it would be Norman. His optimism was contagious. Maybe, I thought, we would soon be working on a sitcom that would convince people that they can find shared values and connect across harshly drawn lines in these divisive times. Alas, it was not to be.

I don’t know how he did it, but I felt as if I became a better person just by sitting next to Norman. When I tweeted that sentiment upon the news of his death, actor John Cusack, who had worked with Norman, replied, “Feel exactly the same. Whenever you left his company you left a better and more thoughtful kind person.” Norman was responsible for so many marvelous and important parts of American life. (His film company backed This Is Spinal Tap when others wouldn’t touch it.) He deserves all the encomiums he’s now receiving. But for those lucky enough to have known him, he uniquely graced their lives. That’s a success that can’t be honored with an Emmy.

For more on Norman Lear, watch the 2016 documentary  Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You:

David Corn’s American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, a New York Times bestseller, has been released in a new and expanded paperback edition. 

Nikki Haley Touts an Embellished Account of Her UN “Triumphs”

When the super PAC supporting Nikki Haley’s presidential campaign released its first ad touting the former Republican South Carolina governor, the spot led with her service as United Nations ambassador during the Trump administration. Opening with a shot of Haley at the UN, the 30-second ad declared, “Nikki Haley fought America’s enemies at the UN and won.” It proclaimed she was “tough as nails, smart as a whip, unafraid to speak the truth.” In her recent book, With All Due Respect, though, Haley embellishes the truth about her days at the UN. She hails the supposedly tough stances she took there in service of Trump’s erratic foreign policy as tremendous diplomatic achievements. Yet two supposed wins she highlights were hollow and produced little in real-wold results that bolstered the security of the United States. They arguably made the world less safe.

These two matters involved top-drawer national security challenges: North Korea and Iran. 

Referring to the hermit kingdom in East Asia, Haley boasts in the book, “We passed three separate and strong packages of sanctions on North Korea for its nuclear program. That meant doing what had never been done before, bringing China along.” In her narrative, however, Haley skirts three significant elements: what came before, during, and after she shook a stick at North Korea. 

The UN sanctions she helped enact were hardly the first penalties levied on the North Korean regime for its development of nuclear weapons. In 2006, the UN Security Council condemned Pyongyang’s first nuclear test and imposed sanctions on heavy weaponry, missile technology, and luxury goods. China voted for that resolution. Four years later, during the Obama administration, the UN tightened these sanctions after a second North Korean nuclear explosion. (China backed this move.) The UN did so again in 2013, after North Korea’s third nuclear test. (China supported that measure, too.) After a fourth nuclear blast, the UN strengthened sanctions in March 2016. It did so again later that year—banning the export to North Korea of minerals, helicopters, and other items—in response to North Korea’s fifth nuclear test. (China went along with both of those 2016 resolutions.)

That is, the two administrations before Trump’s had succeeded in winning UN support for sanctions on North Korea in an effort to thwart its pursuit of nuclear weapons. China was part of those efforts. Unfortunately, those measures did not succeeded in curbing North Korea’s nuclear endeavors. 

What Haley did at the UN was not much different and no more effective. But her attempt to rein in North Korea was unique in that while she was striving to squash its nuclear ambitions, her boss was in a dysfunctional relationship with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. 

During his first year in the White House, Trump’s approach to the problem of North Korean nuclearization was to taunt Kim. In early August 2017, after the UN Security Council approved the first of the sanction resolutions that Haley calls “a real triumph,” Trump warned North Korea that it “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen,” if it threatens the United States. Shortly after that, he tweeted, “Military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely. Hopefully Kim Jong Un will find another path!” The trash talk and the new sanctions didn’t deter Kim. Three weeks later, North Korea conducted its sixth nuclear test. 

A few days afterward, the UN Security Council, pushed by Haley, passed another measure levying sanctions on North Korea that hit oil imports for the country. Following that, during a speech at the UN, Trump declared the United States was willing “to totally destroy North Korea,” if Kim attacked the United States or its allies. He derided the North Korean tyrant as “Rocket Man” and demanded that North Korea denuclearize. Kim replied that Trump’s speech “convinced me, rather than frightening or stopping me, that the path I chose is correct and that it is the one I have to follow to the last… I will surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged US dotard with fire.” Two months later, Kim ratcheted up the conflict by launching a missile that could hit anywhere in the United States.

The sanctions Haley had helped engineer were not working. Her third round of sanctions approved by the UN in December also did not change Kim’s tune. In a speech on New Year’s Day, he proclaimed, “The entire US mainland is in our nuclear striking range, and … a nuclear button is always on my office desk.” He added, “The nuclear weapons research and rocket industry sectors must mass produce nuclear warheads and ballistic rockets.” Trump tweeted back, “Will someone from [Kim Jong Un’s] depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”

For months, this juvenile back-and-forth continued. But in June, Trump and Kim held what would be the first of three summit meetings. The two sides committed to establishing new bilateral relations and to work to build “a lasting and stable peace regime.” North Korea also agreed to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” That sounded good, but for the North Koreans that meant removing nuclear weapons from North Korea, South Korea, and all areas from which they could be targeted at the Korean peninsula. That was not how the US saw it. More important, nothing in the agreement referred to a timeframe or verification protocols for denuclearization. There was no promise from Kim to end his ballistic missile program. It was all rhetoric. Yet Trump tweeted, “everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office. There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.” That was typical Trump BS. And at a West Virginia political rally in September, 2018, Trump even proclaimed that he and Kim “fell in love,” and that Kim writes him “beautiful letters.”

Haley left the UN post at the end of 2018, and in her book, she has little to say about the series of meetings Trump held with the brutal dictator.—which granted Kim the recognition and standing he craved. Nor does she refer to Trump’s fawning comments about Kim. These summits produced no deal. But she claims that when she finished at the UN, due to the sanctions she engineered and other measures implemented by the United States, the North Korea situation was “in a better place in 2019 than…in 2016 and 2017.” She maintains, “By the end of my term as ambassador, we had  sanctioned North Korea more harshly than any country in a generation.” Moreover, she insists, Kim was “demonstrably less able to threaten America and the world.”

That is more wish than fact. Despite the UN sanctions, North Korea continued to conduct test launches of ballistic missiles and develop more weapons and nuclear material. Thanks to Trump’s meetings with Kim, this tyrant became less isolated and was granted more latitude within the global community. The nuclear threat posed by North Korea was not less; it was likely greater. In a 2021 assessment, the Defense Intelligence Agency noted that following Trump’s initial 2018 summit with Kim, “North Korea tested multiple new missiles that threaten South Korea and U.S. forces stationed there, displayed a new potentially more capable ICBM and new weapons for its conventional force. Additionally, there continues to be activity at North Korea’s nuclear sites.” The Arms Control Association reached a similar conclusion, reporting that after Trump’s sit-downs with Kim, North Korea “has continued to produce fissile material for its nuclear weapons program and has resumed testing short-, medium-, and very recently longer-range ballistic missiles. It has also likely continued to produce additional numbers of already-tested types of short-, medium-, and longer-range ballistic missiles.”

Haley did succeed in slapping North Korea with sanctions. But this was hardly a breakthrough; it had been done before (with China’s support). Like previous sanctions, they did not succeed. She and Trump did not diminish the threat posed by Kim. On their watch, it increased.

Another major win Haley claims for herself in her book is using her position as UN ambassador to end US participation in the deal the Obama administration, joined by Russia, China, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, struck with Iran to prevent Tehran from developing nuclear weapons. In her book, she describes in vivid detail how she clashed with Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first secretary of state, who favored keeping Washington in this accord.

Haley contends that the Iran deal didn’t end Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon and only “paused it, at best” for 10 to 15 years. She recounts that she favored a US pull-out because the Iranian government was supporting the murderous Syrian regime and terrorist groups throughout the Middle East, violating the human rights of its own people, and had in years past lied about its nuclear program. Her argument was that because Iran was a bad actor on the world stage, any deal with it could not be trusted. Despite the International Atomic Energy Agency’s conclusion that Iran had not “materially breached” the agreement, Haley and her aides believed it was not fully abiding by the deal and hiding nuclear sites from inspectors.

In public, Haley blasted the deal and was heartened when Trump in May 2018 kept a campaign promise and announced the United States would withdraw from the Obama-negotiated pact, pronouncing it “decaying and rotten.” Trump had promised that he could work out a “better deal.” (The other participating nations said they would try to keep the accord alive.) In her book, Haley, praising Trump’s decision, writes, “The reaction of the defenders of the deal was telling. Few attempted to rebut the administration’s critique. Instead, there was immediate, fierce criticism that the U.S. withdrawal put us on the wrong side of our European allies.” And, she adds, the reasons the British, French, and Germans put forward for staying in the accord “were not substantive. They boiled down to little more than a fierce protection of the status quo.” 

Her dismissive characterization of the reaction to Trump’s withdrawal is inaccurate. Members of Congress who supported the deal—Democrats and Republicans—assailed the move for undermining an important non-proliferation agreement that was deemed to be working. The European Union responded by noting that the accord was “a key element of the global nuclear non-proliferation architecture” and “crucial for the security of the region.” It added, “As long as Iran continues to implement its nuclear related commitments, as it has been doing so far and has been confirmed by the International Atomic Energy Agency in 10 consecutive reports, the EU will remain committed to the continued full and effective implementation oft he nuclear deal.” German Chancellor Angela Merkel, UK Prime Minister Theresa May and French President Emmanuel Macron issued a joint statement noting that they would “remain committed to ensuring the agreement is upheld,” maintaining that the Iran deal had made the world a “safer place.” 

In her book, Haley points to Iran’s aggression—such as the seizing of international ships in the Strait of Hormuz—to justify Trump’s decision “to withdraw from what was a terrible deal.” She cites ending the supposed appeasement of Iran as one of the accomplishments of the Trump administration that occurred during her time at the UN. Yet none of this slowed Iran’s nuclear program.

Not surprisingly, the “better deal” Trump promised never materialized. (Haley neglects to mention this.) And nonproliferation experts say that in the years following Trump’s withdrawal—and his imposition of new sanctions on Tehran—Iran moved closer to a nuclear weapon. A year after Trump’s announcement, Iran went back to nuclear activities that had been curbed by the accord. As Foreign Policy summed it up, “Tehran has resumed its enrichment of uranium, restarted research and development on advanced centrifuges, and expanded its stockpile of nuclear fuel, cutting in half the time it would need to produce enough weapons-grade fuel to build a nuclear bomb.” Even in her book, Haley acknowledges that “the Iranian regime has begun enriching uranium beyond the level permitted in the agreement.” So what was the big win for Haley here? Her actions at the UN did nothing to restrain Iran.

Haley and her campaign crow that at the UN she battled America’s foes and prevailed. But her account of her heroic exploits at the international body are overblown. More important, her actions did not address the nuclear threats from North Korea and Iran that imperil the United States and its allies. Her book demonstrates she can talk tough; it also shows she has a tough time sticking to the truth. 

An Idiotic Proposal From Nikki Haley

Editor’s note: 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 of Our Land here. 

Nikki Haley served six years as governor of South Carolina. Imagine if during her tenure, all the people running the state’s agricultural department were forced to leave their jobs. And the state’s banking commission. And its department of commerce. And the corrections department. And its emergency management agency. And its fiscal accountability office. And its department of health and environmental control. And the highway patrol. And its judicial department. And its national guard. And its port authority. And its public service commission. And its department of revenue. And the state’s law enforcement agency. And the DMV.

Haley would have been slammed by a tsunami of chaos. Her government would have come to a standstill. Replacing all these state officials and workers would have subsumed her administration. And all the agencies would be in turmoil. Even if vacancies were filled, these departments would be at a loss for institutional memory and expertise. The turnover would diminish services for the good citizens of the Palmetto State and perhaps even endanger them. It’s a no-brainer: Government works best when it’s run by dedicated civil servants with experience.

Yet Haley, trying desperately to gain ground on Donald Trump in the 2024 GOP presidential sweepstakes, has decided to match his know-nothing populism by urging a five-year term limit on government “bureaucrats.” Haley recently tweeted that under her proposed “Freedom Plan, we won’t just have term limits for politicians—we will limit bureaucrats too. No bureaucrat should hold the same position for more than five years.”

Under #TheFreedomPlan, we won’t just have term limits for politicians—we will limit bureaucrats too. No bureaucrat should hold the same position for more than five years. https://t.co/zI3H5WqL0B

— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) November 22, 2023

Trump has blathered about blasting apart the Deep State, and his allies have cooked up a scheme under which Trump, if he regains the White House, would be able to pink-slip tens of thousands of federal workers not deemed loyal to him or sufficiently enthusiastic about his policies. (Federal workers now can only be fired for cause and must be afforded due process.) The goal is to destroy what Trump compatriots like Steve Bannon call the “administrative state.” This is but one element of the authoritarian blueprint being drafted for Trump 2.0 by a group of right-wing organizations that have formed Project 2025. 

Once touted as a reasonable Republican, Haley has decided to compete with Trump on the anti-government front. There are (of course) no firm details to her proposal to toss out “bureaucrats” (a derisive term for often hard-working federal employees), but this would seem to cover TSA officials, federal law enforcement officials, intelligence analysts, food and drug safety officials, National Institues of Health research supervisors, counterterrorism experts, counterintelligence officers, workplace safety regulators, financial regulators, public health officials, border security officials, IRS tax collectors, trade officials, climate change negotiators, and you can fill in the rest.

With this stunt, Haley is exploiting the right-wing war on expertise. (See Tom Nichols’ 2017 book, The Death of Expertise.) She wants to kick all that expertise to the curb. But her proposal is fully in sync with Trump’s narrative that demonizes elites and government.

Her plan would be a boon to the country’s enemies and to corporate interests that often attempt to outfox or outmaneuver government regulations. Such a move would emasculate federal agencies. It would also make it more difficult for the federal government to recruit the best candidates. If the reward for doing a good job at the Federal Trade Commission breaking up monopolies is mandatory dismissal or reassignment after five years of service, the most qualified people—who can earn more in the private sector—will probably take a pass.

Haley herself served longer than five years as governor and as a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives. Was each of those stints too long?

With Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis struggling in polls and his campaign in upheaval, Haley has emerged as perhaps the better bet for non-Trump Republicans. In the past week, there has been a rash of stories in the political press about top GOP donors swinging—or considering swinging—behind Haley. The big bucks and the momentum are prompting her to make a concerted effort to pick off Trump voters. How does a Republican candidate do that? Certainly not by being reasonable. As her thirst increases—and her advisers whisper in her ear that she’s the one—it’s no surprise to see her pandering to the worst impulses of the Trump mob. We can wonder what other nonsense will emerge from Haley as the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary approach.

David Corn’s American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, a New York Times bestseller, has been released in a new and expanded paperback edition. 

Dead at 100, Henry Kissinger Leaves Behind a Bloody Legacy

Do not speak ill of the dead. That’s an honorable admonition. But what of the truth? When a person dies, should he be remembered accurately? That question is acutely posed by the demise of Henry Kissinger. The veteran diplomat passed away on Wednesday at the age of 100, leaving behind a long legacy that includes such highs as the opening to China, as well as foul deeds that resulted in mayhem and death—thousands and thousands of deaths. His obituaries will be filled with hosannas from the foreign policy establishment that hailed him as the wisest of wise men. Unfortunately, those who were slaughtered in part due to his global gamesmanship are not able to comment on his contribution to international affairs.

Earlier this year, ahead of his centennial birthday, I published an assessment of his career. I noted, “Kissinger is indeed a monumental figure who shaped much of the past 50 years. He brokered the US opening to China and pursued detente with the Soviet Union during his stints as President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser and secretary of state. Yet it is an insult to history that he is not equally known and regarded for his many acts of treachery—secret bombings, coup-plotting, supporting military juntas—that resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands.” I provided a break-down of these episodes. Is it an appropriate moment to revisit Kissinger’s dark past? We can only imagine what the dead would say. Here’s the roll call.

Cambodia: In early 1969, shortly after Nixon moved into the White House and inherited the Vietnam War, he, Kissinger, and others cooked up a plan to secretly bomb Cambodia, in pursuit of enemy camps. With the perversely-named “Operation Breakfast” launched, White House chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman wrote in his diary, Kissinger and Nixon were “really excited.” The action, though, was of dubious legality; the United States was not at war with Cambodia and Congress had not authorized the carpet-bombing, which Nixon tried to keep a secret. The US military dropped 540,000 tons of bombs. They didn’t just hit enemy outposts. The estimates of Cambodian civilians killed range between 150,000 and 500,000.

Bangladesh: In 1970, a political party advocating autonomy for East Pakistan won legislative elections. The military dictator ruling Pakistan, Gen. Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, arrested the leader of that party and ordered his army to crush the Bengalis. At the time, Yahya, a US ally, was helping Kissinger and Nixon establish ties with China, and they didn’t want to get in his way. The top US diplomat in East Pakistan sent in a cable detailing and decrying the atrocities committed by Yahya’s troops and reported they were committing “genocide.” Yet Nixon and Kissinger declined to criticize Yahya or take action to end the barbarous assault. (This became known as “the tilt” toward Pakistan.) Kissinger and Nixon turned a blind eye to—arguably, they tacitly approved—Pakistan’s genocidal slaughter of 300,000 Bengalis, most of them Hindus.

Chile: Nixon and Kissinger plotted to covertly thwart the democratic election of socialist president Salvador Allende in 1970. This included Kissinger supervising clandestine operations aimed at destabilizing Chile and triggering a military coup. This scheming yielded the assassination of Chile’s commander-in-chief of the Army. Eventually, a military junta led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet seized power, killed thousands of Chileans, and implemented a dictatorship. Following the coup, Kissinger backed Pinochet to the hilt. During a private conversation with the Chilean tyrant in 1976, he told Pinochet, “My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going communist.”

East Timor: In December 1975, President Suharto of Indonesia was contemplating an invasion of East Timor, which had recently been a Portuguese colony and was moving toward independence. On December 6, President Gerald Ford and Kissinger, then Ford’s secretary of state, en route from a visit to Beijing, stopped in Jakarta to meet with Suharto, who headed the nation’s military regime. Suharto signaled he intended to send troops into East Timor and integrate the territory into Indonesia. Ford and Kissinger did not object. Ford told Suharto, “We will understand and will not press you on the issue. We understand the problem and the intentions you have.” Kissinger added, “It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly.” He pointed out that Suharto would be wise to wait until Ford and Kissinger returned to the United States, where they “would be able to influence the reaction in America.” The invasion began the next day. Here was a “green light” from Kissinger (and Ford). Suharto’s brutal invasion of East Timor resulted in 200,000 deaths.

Argentina: In March 1976, a neofascist military junta overthrew President Isabel Perón and launched what would be called the Dirty War, torturing, disappearing, and killing political opponents it branded as terrorists. Once again, Kissinger provided a “green light,” this time to a campaign of terror and murder. He did so during a private meeting in June 1976 with the junta’s foreign minister, Cesar Augusto Guzzetti. At that sit-down, according to a memo obtained in 2004 by the National Security Archive, a nonprofit organization, Guzzetti told Kissinger, “our main problem in Argentina is terrorism.” Kissinger replied, “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly.” In other words, go ahead with your savage crusade against the leftists. The Dirty War would claim the lives of an estimated 30,000 Argentine civilians.

Throughout his career in government and politics, Kissinger was an unprincipled schemer who engaged in multiple acts of skullduggery. During the 1968 presidential campaign, while he advised the Johnson administration’s team at the Paris peace talks, which were aimed at ending the Vietnam War, he underhandedly passed information on the talks to Nixon’s camp, which was plotting to sabotage the negotiations, out of fear that success at the talks would boost the prospects of Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Nixon’s opponent in the race. After the secret bombing in Cambodia was revealed by the New York Times, Kissinger, acting at Nixon’s request, urged FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to wiretap his own aides and journalists to discover who was leaking. This operation failed to uncover who had outed the covert bombing, but, as historian Garrett Graff noted in his recent book, Watergate: A New History, this effort seeded “the administration’s taste for spying on its enemies—real or imagined.” 

In 1976, Kissinger was briefed on Operation Condor, a secret program created by the intelligence services of the military dictatorships of South America to assassinate their political foes inside and outside their countries. He then blocked a State Department effort to warn these military juntas not to proceed with international assassinations. As the National Security Archive points out in a dossier it released this week on various Kissinger controversies, “Five days later, Condor’s boldest and most infamous terrorist attack took place in downtown Washington D.C. when a car-bomb, planted by Pinochet’s agents, killed former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his young colleague, Ronni Moffitt.”

It’s easy to cast Kissinger as a master geostrategist, an expert player in the game of nations. But do the math. Hundreds of thousands of dead in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and East Timor, perhaps a million in total. Tens of thousands dead in Argentina’s Dirty War. Thousands killed and tens of thousands tortured by the Chilean military dictatorship, and a democracy destroyed. His hands were drenched in blood. 

Kissinger was routinely lambasted by his critics as a “war criminal,” though has never been held accountable for his misdeeds. He made millions as a consultant, author, and commentator in the decades since he left government. I once heard of a Manhattan cocktail reception where he scoffed at the “war criminal” label and referred to it almost as a badge of honor. (“Bill Clinton does not have the spine to be a war criminal,” he joshed.) Kissinger expressed few, if any, regrets about the cruel and deadly results of his moves on the global chessboard. When Ted Koppel in an interview this year gently nudged him about the secret bombing in Cambodia, Kissinger took enormous umbrage and shot back: “This program you’re doing because I’m going to be 100 years old. And you are picking a topic of something that happened 60 years ago? You have to know it was a necessary step.” As for those who still protest him for that and other acts, he huffed, “Now the younger generation feels if they can raise their emotions, they don’t have to think.”

There were no apologies from Kissinger. But the rest of us will owe history—and the thousands dead because of his diplomatic scheming—an apology, if we do not consider the man in full. Whatever his accomplishments, his legacy includes an enormous pile of corpses. 

Who Owns Ron DeSantis?

In recent months, Ron DeSantis has received a load of bad press focused on his slippage in the 2024 polls, shake-ups within his organization, and less-than-stellar campaign finances. Yet the Florida governor is one of the most prodigious political cash-chasers in recent US history. When he successfully ran for reelection in Florida in 2022, DeSantis, who was first elected to the Sunshine State’s top executive position four years earlier, raised a whopping $211 million for his state political committee and set an all-time record for gubernatorial fundraising. Along the way, he collected huge bundles of campaign money from eccentric billionaires, magnates who had run afoul of the law, corporations that seek lucrative contracts from the government he runs, and even a prominent businessman once identified by law enforcement authorities as associated with a Mafia crime family. 

What made DeSantis’ money-grab such a feat was that most of the candidates he surpassed were tycoons who had poured their own fortunes into their campaign treasuries. (Businesswoman Meg Whitman dumped $144 million of personal funds into her unsuccessful quest in 2010 for the California governorship.) DeSantis topped them all by hitting up corporations, fat-cat donors, and political action committees for super-sized contributions. Gargantuan donations in the six-, seven-, and eight-digit range poured into his political pockets. Of the more than 200,000 contributors to his 2022 effort, 313 handed him $100,000 or more, with 11 slipping DeSantis $1 million or more. These $100,000-and-above donations accounted for $113 million, or 54 percent of his total take. 

Florida imposes no restraints on the size of political donations to state political committees. (In a presidential race, a contributor can only give $3,300 directly to a candidate, but an unlimited amount to an independent-expenditure committee, better known as a super PAC, which supports the candidate.) DeSantis took advantage of Florida’s wide-open campaign finance system to bring in a never-before-seen amount of dollars, swamping his Democratic opponent Charlie Crist, who collected a measly $32 million. Despite DeSantis’ current financial woes, the 2022 contest demonstrates that he can pull in the big bucks. It also shows who has their hooks into DeSantis.

A large chunk of the cash DeSantis raised for his gubernatorial race has gone into boosting his presidential bid—perhaps illegally. At the end of his successful reelection contest, DeSantis had about $82 million remaining in his war chest. Earlier this year, what was left of his state campaign committee transferred that money to a super PAC called Never Back Down that has been supporting DeSantis’ presidential effort. “There’s no question that it’s illegal for a federal candidate to transfer money they raised for a state committee to a federal super PAC,” Erin Chlopak, senior director for campaign finance at Campaign Legal Center who worked for nearly a decade as part of the Federal Election Commission’s Office of General Counsel, told OpenSecrets, a nonprofit, in May. The Campaign Legal Center and End Citizens United each have filed complaints with the Federal Election Commission alleging that DeSantis’ transfer of money raised for a state campaign to a federal campaign violates federal election law. 

Though DeSantis routinely blasts the so-called swamp—”I don’t want top drain the swamp, I want to break it,” he has exclaimed—and decries elites and the “ruling class,” this list of donors is chockfull of the rich and powerful: people, companies, and PACs that seek out policies and favors from elected officials. While major presidential candidates are often the recipients of similar largesse via political parties and PACs, few office-seekers in modern-day America have directly received such immense donations from so many sources as has DeSantis. He is—or was—a king of big-money politics.

His 2022 gubernatorial race provides a perspective into DeSantis’ fundraising world. It reveals that while holding power in the state of Florida, he has pursued ultra-rich and out-of-state donors to fill his campaign chest. His roster of contributors includes businesses that his administration awarded major contracts.

So even as DeSantis trods a rougher path in the 2024 GOP race, it’s worth looking at the well-heeled spenders who financed his last political venture. These are his underwriters—the people and organizations to which he is indebted and would be should he find himself in the White House. 

Below is a long list of the members of DeSantis’ $100,000-Plus Club. (The number of donors who handed him between $10,000 and $100,000—nothing to sneeze at—is also substantial: 1,754 people and entities.) And there are contributors and patterns that warrant a shout-out before we turn to the roll call.  

The most generous financial supporters of DeSantis’ gubernatorial campaign were Republican outfits, such as the Republican Governors Association ($21 million), and the usual assortment of GOP megadonors: Robert Bigelow ($10 million), a hotel magnate who has used his fortune to fund efforts seeking to prove the existence of UFO aliens and an afterlife; Ken Griffin ($5 million), the CEO of multinational hedge fund Citadel and a reliable source of money for conservative candidates and causes; Walter Buckley Jr. ($1.25 million), the co-founder of a venture capital fund that made a fortune in the dot-com bubble; Paul Tudor Jones II ($1 million), a hedge-fund billionaire who has played both sides of the street by supporting the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Rudy Giuliani; and Bruce Rauner, ($960,000), a former GOP governor of Illinois who lives in a posh gated community in Key Largo, Florida, which received early access to Covid vaccination. (Griffin has yet to commit to a 2024 candidate. Recently, he was talking up former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.)

The list continues: Richard Uihlein ($700,000), the billionaire co-founder with wife Elizabeth Uihlein ($500,000) of the Uline shipping company, who financed a group that organized the rally that preceded the January 6 attack on the US Capitol and candidates involved in the effort to overturn the 2020 election; Charles Johnson ($594,919), a principle partner of the San Francisco Giants and a financial underwriter of pro-Trump election deniers; Edward DeBartolo Jr. ($522,000), a businessman best known as former owner of the San Francisco 49ers, who was pardoned by President Donald Trump in 2020 for his involvement in a gambling fraud case in Louisiana in the 1990s; Bernie Marcus ($500,000), a cofounder of Home Depot, who has denounced “woke people [who] have taken over the world” (Marcus recently endorsed Donald Trump); and John Childs ($456,592), the chairman of a private equity firm who was charged with solicitation of prostitution in 2019 in a Florida sex spa scandal. (The charges were later dropped and his record expunged.) 

Of course, far-right groups kicked in loads of cash, led by the Club for Growth PAC ($2 million) and the Judicial Crisis Network ($500,000). DeSantis’ money-bags included business PACs—for instance, the Realtors Political Advocacy Committee ($375,203) and the Voice of Florida Business Political Action Committee ($475,000)—as well as those companies and entities that do business with the state, foremost among them the Seminole Tribe of Florida ($2 million), with whom DeSantis forged a $2.5 billion deal that allowed the tribe to expand its gambling operations to include sports betting, craps, and roulette.

Other one-hand-washes-the-other contributions came from Phillips and Jordan ($252,500), a construction firm that was granted a $175.8 million contract by the state for an Everglades restoration project; Nomi Health ($252,250), which was handed $46 million in contracts by the state in 2021 for Covid-19 testing and vaccine work; and Herzog Contracting ($250,000), which pocketed at least $32.7 million in contracts from the Florida Department of Transportation during DeSantis’ tenure. JM Family Enterprises, a huge automotive conglomerate that lobbied the state legislature to pass a bill banning most automaker-to-consumer direct sales that DeSantis later signed, sent $325,000 to his campaign. 

DeSantis’ top donors are riddled with folks and outfits with checkered pasts. For example, HillCour, Inc. ($312,409) and another firm agreed to pay over $7 million to the US Health and Human Services Department to resolve allegations in 2018 related to a Medicaid kickback scheme. Onetime Los Angeles nightclub mogul Sam Nazarian ($179,581) in 2014 gave up control of a Las Vegas hotel after an investigation revealed he had used drugs and paid $3 million in alleged extortion payments to felons. Health Option One ($125,000) faced a lawsuit in 2021 for an alleged bait-and-switch scam in which customers were duped into buying limited-coverage health care plans. The company denied the allegations and later agreed to settle the dispute.

Businessman John Cafaro ($120,000) in 2010 was sentenced to three years’ probation for failing to disclose a loan to his daughter’s congressional campaign. Las Vegas tycoon Steve Wynn ($100,000) was accused last year by the Justice Department of acting as an unregistered foreign agent for China and lobbying Trump on that country’s behalf in order to protect his business interests in Macau. (A federal judged dismissed the case; government lawyers are currently appealing the decision.) Separately, Wynn was accused of sexually harassing dozens of his employees and pressuring them to perform sexual acts. He agreed to pay Nevada a $10 million settlement in July to resolve the sexual misconduct case. DeSantis accepted $100,000 from the John Rosatti Trust, a fund connected to businessman John Rosatti, an automotive and restaurant tycoon (and founder of BurgerFi) who three decades ago was linked to the mob. Rosatti was identified by the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement as an alleged associate of the Colombo crime family in New York City, according to a 1993 decision by the state’s Casino Control Commission. 

Other notable contributions came from Leila Centner ($301,000), the co-founder of the Miami-based Centner Academy, which was a hotbed of anti-vax activism and disinformation during the Covid pandemic; Adam Marcus Hendry ($100,000), whose company, Tzadik Management, filed more evictions during the early days of the pandemic than any other landlord in Florida, according to a July 2020 analysis by the Center for Public Integrity; and the Portopiccolo Group ($100,000), a private equity company that acquired nursing homes during the pandemic and caused disruptions at facilities that resulted in weakened care for residents, according to investigations by the Washington Post and the New Yorker. Tread Standard LLC, a mysterious shell company, handed $210,000 to DeSantis. 

DeSantis rounded up quite a collection of billionaires, corporations, right-wingers, and reprobates, as he collected over one-fifth of a billion dollars for his 2022 campaign. Never before in modern American politics has a non-presidential candidate bagged so much in direct donations from the well-heeled and special interests. At this point, DeSantis is far from a good bet to be the next resident of the White House. But whatever happens in the GOP presidential sweepstakes, he will stay a powerful force in Florida and likely continue to be prominent within national politics. That means all these donations could remain solid investments and hold their value. 

The DeSantis campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment regarding the fundraising for his 2022 race or the transfer of funds from that effort to the super PAC now supporting his presidential bid. 

Here are the 313 donors who invested $100,000 or more in DeSantis during his 2022 reelection campaign:

$21 million, Republican Governors Association$10 million, Robert Bigelow, hotel magnate$7.3 million, Florida state matching funds$7 million, Republican Party of Florida$5 million, Ken Griffin, founder of hedge fund Citadel$2 million, Club for Growth PAC$2 million, Seminole Tribe of Florida$1.25 million, Walter Buckley, Jr., retired venture capitalist$1.1 million, David MacNeil, car accessories company founder$1 million, James Bowen, Jr., financial services chairman$1 million, Paul Tudor Jones II, hedge fund billionaire$960,000, Bruce Rauner, former Illinois governor$700,000, Richard Uihlein, billionaire co-founder of Uline shipping company$680,000, Florida Prosperity Fund$594,919, Charles Johnson, San Francisco Giants principal partner$522,000, Edward DeBartolo, Jr., businessman and former 49ers owner$521,325, James Pallotta, investment company founder$509,200, Sun Labs USA Inc, healthcare company$505,000, Gale Lemerand, restauranteur$500,000, Patricia Duggan, glass artist and museum founder$500,000, Spring Bay Capital, investment firm$500,000, Judicial Crisis Network$500,000, Bernie Marcus, Home Depot co-founder$500,000, Disruptor, Inc., investment firm$500,000, Elizabeth Uihlein, billionaire co-founder of Uline shipping firm$500,000, Craig Mateer, investment manager$487,500, J. Christopher Reyes Trust$475,000, Voice of Florida Business Political Action Committee$462,500, M. Jude Reyes 1999 Trust$456,592, John Childs, chairman of private equity fund$450,960, NextGen Management LLC, medical technology company$440,000, Floridians for a Stronger Democracy$405,000, Hutson Companies LLC, real estate developer$400,000, McCormick Drive LLC, real estate investment company$400,000, Florida Care, Inc., healthcare company$375,204, Realtors Political Advocacy Committee$370,000, Associated Industries of Florida Political Action Committee$367,750, TECO Energy, Inc., utilities company$360,000, Floridian’s United for Our Children’s Future$360,000, Thomas Peterffy, Hungarian American billionaire$350,000, Floridians for Economic Advancement$345,000, Palm Beach Innovation Task Force$325,000, JM Family Enterprises, Inc., automotive company$325,000, Fidelity National Financial, Inc. PAC for Florida$312,409, HillCour Inc, healthcare services$305,000, Timothy and Harvey Youngquist, drilling company executives$304,000, Roma-HC Bridge LLC$303,000, Conservatives for Principled Leadership$303,000, Charter Communications, Inc., telecommunications provider$301,000, Leila Centner, co-founder of Centner Academy$300,000, Cannae Holdings LLC, investment and management company$300,000, iGas USA Inc, refrigerant supplier$300,000, MasTec Inc, infrastructure construction company$295,000, Elaine Wold, philanthropist$288,426, Steven Scott, healthcare and technology investor$277,650, Anderson Columbia Company Inc, heavy civil construction firm$261,308, Testing Matters, Inc., clinical laboratory$257,000, Dawn and John Hamlin, marketing executive and wife$255,000, Betty Roschman, wife of late fast food restauranteur$252,500, Phillips and Jordan Inc, construction company$252,250, Nomi Health, Inc., health care services provider$250,000, Lorybo Holdings LLC, financial company$250,000, Whip Fund Raising LLC$250,000, Herzog Contracting Corporation, railroad and highway contractor$250,000, Moshe Popack, real estate investor$250,000, Black Knight Infoserv LLC, data and analytics provider$250,000, Nilda Milton Revocable Trust$250,000, Eisenhower Management, Inc., real estate developer$250,000, Driven Capital Management LLC, real estate investment manager$250,000, Nathan Saks, real estate developer$250,000, Steven Herrig, insurance company executive$250,000, John W. Childs 2013 Revocable Trust$250,000, Rural Route 3 Holdings LP$250,000, Barrow Realty LLC$250,000, Island Doctors$248,189, Thomas Corr, oil import executive$229,221, Ged Lawyers LLP$225,000, Daytona Toyota$225,000, Maya Ezratti Revocable Trust$225,000, Daniel Doyle, Jr., imaging equipment executive  $220,000, Florida Chamber of Commerce PAC$214,200, Blake Casper, businessman and former restauranteur$210,000, Anthony Lomangino, trash and recycling tycoon$210,000, Stephen Ross, real estate executive$210,000, Tread Standard LLC$200,000, Thomas Smith, investment manager$200,000, William Austin, hearing aid manufacturing executive$200,000, JL Holding Corp, property management$200,000, The Big Easy Casino$200,000, CFG Community Bank$200,000, The Committee for Justice, Transportation and Business$200,000, Dosal Tobacco Corporation$200,000, South Development Corporation$200,000, Florida Phosphate Political Committee, Inc.$200,000, Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits LLC$200,000, Automated Healthcare Solutions LLC$200,000, Book Capital Enterprises LLC$200,000, Riaz Valani, investor and early e-cigarette investor$200,000, Lawrence DeGeorge, venture capitalist$200,000, Ronald Foster, Jr., construction executive$200,000, Supporters of Comprehensive Primary Care PC$200,000, UnitedHealth Group, Inc.$200,000, Kane Financial Services LLC$200,000, Junction City Mining Co LLC$200,000, Andrew James McKenna, late McDonald’s chairman $187,500, Cheryl and Michael Meads, DeSantis appointee to a water board and her husband$187,000, Troy Link, meat snacks executive$179,581, Sam Nazarian, veteran nightclub mogul$178,000, Ygrene Energy Fund Inc, home improvement loan provider$175,000, Raymond Hyer, retired asphalt executive$175,000, Richard Corbett, real estate developer$175,000, Murray Goodman, real estate developer$175,000, Metro Development Group LLC$175,000, Alex Kleyner, real estate investor $170,597, Bank of Tampa Money Market Account$170,000, James Davis, billionaire co-founder of staffing agency$170,000, Committee of Safety Net Hospitals of Florida$169,735, The Villages of Lake Sumter, Inc., retirement community$165,000, Homes by WestBay LLC, home construction company$161,071, ICI Homes Residential Holdings LLC, home building company$160,000, Hudson Capital Group$160,000, Rom L. Reddy Revocable Trust$160,000, Jorie Kent, travel company co-owner$158,350, John Rood, real estate executive$155,454, Patrick Neal, Florida real estate developer and former politician$155,031, Rahul Patel, DeSantis-appointed University of Florida trustee $155,000, FTA PAC, Inc.$153,000, Florida Credit Union Political Action Committee (Florida CUPAC)$150,745, Jay Demetree, Jr., real estate developer$150,350, James Heavener, real estate manager$150,229, Humana Inc, health insurance company$150,000, John Foster Kirtley, investment firm co-founder$150,000, Dennis and Graciela McGillicuddy, real estate director and philanthropist$150,000, Strong Communities of Southwest Florida PC$150,000, William Parfet, former CEO of drug testing company$150,000, Wayne Huizenga Jr., son of billionaire who launched Blockbuster$150,000, Vahan Gureghian, charter school entrepreneur$150,000, Dream Finders Homes LLC$150,000, Equality Champions, political committee$150,000, La Ley Con John H. Ruiz PA, law firm$150,000, DentaQuest PAC TN C$150,000, Sasha Averdick, design studio owner$150,000, R & L Transfer Inc, freight shipping company$150,000, Publix Super Markets, Inc.$150,000, Lockwood Management LLC, property management company$150,000, James Liautaud, founder of Jimmy John’s sandwich chain$150,000, P&L Investments LLC, investment management firm$150,000, RaceTrac Petroleum Inc$145,000, Gregory Burns, freight shipping executive$145,000, Jeffrey Silverman, investment management executive$140,000, SPF Roofing Systems, Inc.$137,500, FTBA Transportation PAC$137,500, Brent Sembler, real estate development executive$136,000, Partridge Investments LLC$135,000, Peter Morse, investment manager$133,000, Marshall Field, investor and department store heir$130,079, Fort Partners LLC, real estate company$130,000, Citizens for Principled Leadership PC$128,000, Florida Medical Association Political Action Committee$128,000, Jacksonville Kennel Club, Inc., greyhound racing$125,000, Florida Harbor Pilots Association, Inc.$125,000, Davidson 2005 LLC, textile manufacturing$125,000, Ring Power Corporation, construction equipment dealer$125,000, Independent Living Systems, home health services company$125,000, Jonathan Lubert, hedge fund executive$125,000, Cody Khan, hotel and resort owner$125,000, ECN Capital Advisory Group LLC$125,000, LaunchED, education company$125,000, Charles Lydecker, insurance executive$125,000, FPF Fire PC, firefighters association political committee$125,000, Bruce Toll, luxury-home building company co-founder$125,000, Health Option One LLC, insurance company$125,000, Keeping Florida Affordable PC$125,000, 10jin LLC, technology provider for schools$125,000, Thomas Murphy, Boca Raton resident$125,000, ABC Liquors, Inc.$125,000, Vecellio Group, Inc., construction company$125,000, The Presidential Coalition LLC, conservative political organization$125,000, Trulieve Inc, cannabis dispensary$120,000, John Cafaro, real estate developer and investor$120,000, Elevated LLC$120,000, Aspect Holdings LLC, investment firm$120,000, Centene Management Company LLC, health insurance company$120,000, Richard Cole, DeSantis-appointed University of Florida trustee$117,250, Florida Home Builders PAC$115,313, Herbert Henkel, former CEO of Ingersoll-Rand$115,000, Benjerome Trust$115,000, Toyota of Orlando$114,653, Omeed Malik, former Bank of America executive$113,783, St. Joe Company, real estate developer$111,250, Barbara Feingold, DeSantis-appointed Florida Atlantic University trustee$111,217, William Foley II, insurance company executive$110,000, Roy Hinman II, family medicine physician$110,000, Thomas Sabatino, Florida resident$110,000, John Slavic, investment management executive$110,000, Richard Chaifetz, billionaire founder of ComPsych Corporation $110,000, Silva & Silva PA, law firm$110,000, Daniel Baker, concrete company founder$110,000, Greener Pastures LLC, landscaping company$109,978, Brian Sidman, founder of real estate private equity firm$109,000, Willis Johnson, billionaire founder of car auction company$108,000, Robert W. Stork Revocable Trust$106,809, Disney Worldwide Services, Inc.$105,000, Foley & Lardner LLP, law firm$105,000, Michael Rabinowitz, investment banking executive$105,000, Diane Weiss, retired Boca Raton resident$104,704, Nancy and Gary Chartrand, philanthropists$103,290, Vector Group Ltd, holding company for tobacco and real estate$103,000, RAI Services Company, tobacco company$103,000, Digrijay Gaekwad, entrepreneur$103,000, Orange Park Kennel Club Inc, greyhound racing$103,000, Anthony Imbesi, luxury yacht broker$102,500, McNitt Management, Inc., construction management$102,500, Jason Hope, technology executive$100,500, Kemp Ruge & Green Law Group$100,200, Neomi Dezertzov, wife of real estate executive$100,125, Richard Boyce, former investment firm partner$100,000, Jeff Yass, billionaire co-founder of trading firm Susquehanna $100,000, JAT Capital Partners LP$100,000, James Davis, billionaire majority owner of New Balance$100,000, Victoria Rose, retired Pompano Beach resident  $100,000, Wilbur Ross, businessman and former secretary of commerce$100,000, HGI DB Fund I LLC, capital management$100,000, Jamie B. Coulter Trust$100,000, Heritage Insurance Holdings, Inc.$100,000, Helen Schwab, wife of investment firm founder Charles Schwab$100,000, Kenny Troutt, billionaire founder of Excel Communications$100,000, Myrtle Management, Inc., real estate company$100,000, Summit Contracting Group, Inc., construction company$100,000, The Portopiccolo Group, private equity firm$100,000, Evan Trestman, attorney$100,000, Joseph Imbesi, real estate investor$100,000, Morris Automotive Consultants LLC$100,000, Arch Aplin III, former head of convenience chain Buc-ee’s$100,000, Discover, LLC, investment management$100,000, Jay Francis, auto sales manager $100,000, Steve Wynn, former luxury casino and hotel developer$100,000, Miller Electric Company$100,000, Colleen Simeone, Florida resident$100,000, David K Reyes Living Trust$100,000, Victoria Stapleton, marketing executive$100,000, Douglas Scharbauer, Texas oil mogul and racehorse owner$100,000, Joseph O’Brien, Jr., auto dealer$100,000, K12 Management, Inc., education company$100,000, Indelible Business Solutions, Inc., management consulting firm$100,000, Phillip Frost, health care investor$100,000, Phillip Ruffin, gambling industry billionaire$100,000, Brenda O’Loughlin, real estate developer$100,000, Wendover Art Group, wall art company$100,000, Amscot Corporation, financial services company$100,000, Intrivo Diagnostics Inc, at-home COVID tests company$100,000, IGT Global Solutions, gambling equipment manufacturer$100,000, The Collection, automotive dealership$100,000, ICI Homes, Inc., home construction company$100,000, Itzhak Ezratti, Israeli founder of homebuilding company$100,000, Payward, Inc., cryptocurrency exchange and trading platform$100,000, PPRE LLC, development company$100,000, Adam Marcus Hendry, real estate executive$100,000, Boyne Capital Management LLC$100,000, Standard Industries, Inc., industrial company$100,000, Elijah Norton, Arizona insurance executive and political candidate$100,000, Wayne Boich, investment executive$100,000, Pamela Muma, philanthropist$100,000, Dynamic Commerce Ventures LLC, real estate development$100,000, Dwight Schar, founder of homebuilding giant NVR$100,000, Creighton Companies LLC, construction company$100,000, Administrative Group LLC, restaurant management$100,000, Purple Good Government PAC$100,000, TCI Holdings LLC, construction company$100,000, Michael William Kosloske, retired insurance executive$100,000, Wescon Management Group Inc, automotive services$100,000, Joseph White, plumbing company chairman$100,000, Stuart Lasher, financial manager$100,000, The Vestcor Companies Inc, real estate development$100,000, Sharon Nuckolls, Florida resident$100,000, George Heisel, Jr., financial company shareholder$100,000, Dhruv Management LLC, hotel management$100,000, Cirilla Milton, homemaker$100,000, Franklin Street Financial Partners$100,000, Lester Woerner, real estate investment chairman$100,000, Mark Kolokotrones, financial and venture capital executive$100,000, ANF Group Inc, Florida-based contractor$100,000, Florida Free Enterprise Fund$100,000, Mara L. S. Delminium Trust$100,000, David Baum, sensor manufacturing executive$100,000, Anita Zucker, chemical manufacturing executive$100,000, Gary Yeomans, car dealerships owner$100,000, UBS Financial Services$100,000, John Falkner, industrial farm owner and developer$100,000, John Rosatti Trust$100,000, Cherna Moskowitz, wife of late businessman Irving Moskowitz$100,000, John Rakolta III, president of Detroit-based construction company$100,000, Florida Manufactured Housing Association PAC, Inc.$100,000, Chris D. Peyerk Trust$100,000, Steven Witkoff, founder of real estate firm$100,000, Thomas Tull, billionaire former film producer$100,000, First Coast Energy LLP, major distributor of Shell gas$100,000, Michael White, insurance sales$100,000, Gregory Cook, co-founder of multilevel marketing company doTerra$100,000, Derek Carr, retired Boca Raton resident$100,000, Darwin Deason, billionaire computer services entrepreneur$100,000, Benderson Development Co LLC$100,000, Jeffrey Roschman, fast food heir and executive$100,000, Belleair Bluffs Management LLC, investment management$100,000, Denise Coyle, property development executive$100,000, Debra Gelband, foundation executive$100,000, Rick Case Enterprises, automotive dealerships company$100,000, John Kang, health care company founder$100,000, Peter Worth, insurance executive$100,000, Granger Family Investment Holdings LLC, investment firm$100,000, Robert Day, asset management firm founder$100,000, Frisbie Group LLC, real estate company$100,000, Robert Willenborg, gaming company executive

George Santos Won’t Seek Re-Election. This Damning Ethics Report Shows Why.

The bizarre saga of George Santos as a member of the US House of Representatives is heading toward its finale. One way or another. On Thursday morning, the New York Republican and champion liar announced that he will not seek reelection. This came after the release of a humiliating House Ethics Committee report—which itself might lead to an even earlier finish to Santos’ congressional career.

The 56-page report—which is accompanied with hundreds of pages of exhibits and evidence—is no surprise, but it is still an incredibly damning document. It depicts Santos as a total con man who perpetuated an almost unimaginable series of frauds involving campaign money and his personal finances. The committee details many of the schemes in which Santos is already implicated and provides federal prosecutors with more potential crimes to investigate. The House Ethics Committee voted to refer evidence to the Justice Department, which has already charged Santos with 23 counts of criminal activity in two indictments this year. The report raises the possibility that Santos could be indicted yet again before a trial scheduled set to begin in September 2024.

Among other potential crimes, the Investigative Subcommittee of the Ethics Committee (known as the ISC) found that Santos had falsified personal financial disclosures and used campaign funds for personal expenses. The report details cases where Santos allegedly spent campaign funds on botox, OnlyFans, an Atlantic City casino, a skincare spa, and other things unrelated to running for Congress. The ISC recommended that the Ethic Committee publicly condemn Santos as having engaged in conduct “beneath the dignity of the office” and having “brought severe discredit upon the House.”

As Mother Jones reported earlier this year, Santos’ campaign listed fake contributions during his 2020 and 2022 House campaigns. Santos has tried to blame the alleged campaign finance violations he has been charged with on his former treasurer, Nancy Marks. The report makes clear that Santos and Marks collaborated closely. Santos told campaign staff that Marks was “untouchable,” and a former staffer compared the campaign’s finances to a “black box” that only Santos and Marks could access. Marks has pleaded guilty to plotting with Santos to falsify his campaign’s financial reports.

The ISC calls Santos a total fraud:

Representative Santos’ congressional campaigns were built around his backstory as a successful man of means: a grandson of Holocaust survivors and graduate from Baruch College with a Master’s in Business Administration from New York University, who went on to work at Citi Group and Goldman Sachs, owned multiple properties, and was the beneficiary of a family trust worth millions of dollars left by his mother, who passed years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks as a result of long-term health effects related to being at one of the towers.  No part of that backstory has been found to be true.

It notes he was non-stop grifter:

Representative Santos sought to fraudulently exploit every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit. He blatantly stole from his campaign. He deceived donors into providing what they thought were contributions to his campaign but were in fact payments for his personal benefit. He reported fictitious loans to his political committees to induce donors and party committees to make further contributions to his campaign—and then diverted more campaign money to himself as purported “repayments” of those fictitious loans. He used his connections to high value donors and other political campaigns to obtain additional funds for himself through fraudulent or otherwise questionable business dealings. And he sustained all of this through a constant series of lies to his constituents, donors, and staff about his background and experience.

In December 2021, according to the report, Santos’ own campaign team presented him with a 141-page “vulnerability report” that made clear that the candidate was running on a fabricated record. His staff pushed him to drop out of the race, and three staff members quit the campaign when he refused to do so. “This was a key moment wherein Representative Santos could have put an end to all the lies he told, or at a minimum, taken steps to correct the record about his background and personal and campaign finances,” the ISC report says. “Instead, he downplayed the significance of the report.”

The ISC report reveals that Santos was such a liar that his campaign aides believed he suffered from a psychological condition that required professional care:

Since winning his election, Representative Santos has admitted that he “embellished” parts of his background in order to be taken seriously as a candidate; however, the ISC’s review revealed significantly more fraudulent activity by Representative Santos. As an initial matter, members of Representative Santos’ own campaign staff viewed him as a “fabulist,” whose penchant for telling lies was so concerning that he was encouraged to seek treatment.

The report is overflowing with plots Santos allegedly cooked up for private profit. During the 2020 campaign, he reported more than $80,000 in personal loans to his campaign. In reality, he’d only loaned the campaign $3,500. Nevertheless, the campaign repaid him more than $30,000. 

The ISC recounts numerous instances when campaign funds were transferred to Santos’ personal bank accounts or to the account for his private business, the Devolder Orgnaization. Here’s one: 

The $20,000 transfer to a Devolder Organization account…was made at a time when that account had a negative balance; in the week after it was transferred to Devolder Organization, it was used to make about $6,000 worth of purchases at Ferragamo stores, withdraw $800 in cash from an ATM at a casino, withdraw $1,000 in cash from an ATM near Representative Santos’ apartment, and to pay Representative Santos’ rent.

A $50,000 transfer of money from political contributors ended up, according to the report, in “Santos’ personal accounts, [and] the funds were used to, among other things: pay down personal credit card bills and other debt; make a $4,127.80 purchase at Hermes; and for smaller purchases at Only Fans; Sephora; and for meals and for parking.” 

The Justice Department, the report notes, has been investigating a suspicious payments totaling $800,000 that Santos received in late 2022, around the same time Santos made significant loans to his most recent campaign. The report states that investigators “had serious questions regarding whether these payments were intended to benefit Representative Santos’ campaign and thus were unlawful excessive contributions.” They did not pursue those questions due to “specific deferral requests” from the Justice Department. 

After all this digging, the investigators remained mystified by some aspects of Santos’ finances. They compiled a record that included more than 170,000 pages of documents. Still, they point out they couldn’t figure out all the convolutions of his money flow:

Representative Santos was frequently in debt, had an abysmal credit score, and relied on an ever-growing wallet of high-interest credit cards to fund his luxury spending habits. He occasionally deposited large amounts of cash that he has never accounted for, moved money between his various bank accounts in a highly suspicious manner, and made over $240,000 cash withdrawals for unknown purposes.

Santos’ congressional financial disclosures were filled with lies, the ISC found. Looking at his 2022 disclosure, the investigators state:

Representative Santos reported four assets: (i) an apartment in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil valued between $500,001 and $1,000,000; (ii) a checking account with between $100,001 and $250,000; (iii) a savings account with between $1,000,001 and $5,000,000; and (iv) 100% ownership of Devolder Organization, valued between $1,000,001 and $5,000,000, with dividends of over $1,000,001 in both 2021 and 2022. Each of these disclosures was false.

The ethics committee report is a total evisceration of Santos. It blows up every lie that Santos has told to cover-up his previous lies. It notes that he lied to the committee investigators. Though Santos survived a recent move to expel him from the House—when most Republicans backed him—this report certainly serves up plenty of ammunition for another effort to oust him. (Some Democrats who opposed the expulsion cited the need for due process and said they wanted to see the investigative findings of the ethics committee.)

Following the release of the report, Santos tacitly acknowledged that his time as a lawmaker could be drawing to an inauspicious close. After saying he would not seek reelection—which, given his upcoming trial, might not even be an option for him—he wrote on social media that he would continue to serve in Congress “up until I am allowed.” The phrasing suggests Santos recognizes and accepts a painful reality for him: This report could soon bring about the end of his days in Washington.

How Money Flowed From Moscow to the Seychelles to Belize to Scotland to a GOP Lobbyist

Five years ago, Mother Jones broke a wild story: A mysterious Scotland-based shell company had paid a GOP-linked American lobbyist to help a presidential candidate in Albania court support from the Trump administration—and the money was apparently tied to Russia. Now a new piece of the puzzle has materialized. 

In 2017, Nick Muzin—a former aide to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) who became a well-connected and highly paid lobbyist—reported in filings with the Justice Department that he had been hired to win backing in the United States for Lulzim Basha, the head of the center-right Democratic Party of Albania (DPA), who was then challenging the incumbent prime minister of Albania. There was nothing unusual about a DC-based influence peddler being retained by a foreign politician. But a $150,000 payment for Muzin’s services had come from a bizarre source: Biniatta Trade LP, a shell company registered in Scotland by two other shell companies based in Belize.

Biniatta Trade had a convoluted chain of corporate relationships. Those based-in-Belize companies were listed in corporate filings as officers of yet two other firms, and those two companies were controlled by Russian nationals. Moreover, there was no public sign that Biniatta Trade did anything. Its website, registered by a resident of Odessa, Ukraine, was comprised of stock images and boilerplate language. The British phone number it listed did not work. It appeared to be a front. We couldn’t tell for who or for what. But the corporate links tracked back to Russia.

The story—a strong indicator that a person or entity in Russia was using an American lobbyist to influence an election in Albania—generated front-page headlines in Albania. The possibility of secret Russian intervention made sense. Basha’s party opposed the government led by Prime Minister Edi Rama, who had been steering Albania into the European Union and warning of the rise of Russian influence in the Balkans. Moscow certainly had an interest in Basha ousting Rama. 

The DPA denounced the article and Mother Jones, claiming the piece was part of a conspiracy involving billionaire philanthropist George Soros. Eventually, Albanian prosecutors charged Basha with money laundering and falsifying documents in connection with the matter. That prosecution was later suspended. The controversy oddly came up in the case of Charles McGonigal, the former head of the FBI counterintelligence division in New York who pleaded guilty in September to crimes that included accepting a $225,000 loan from a Rama ally and then ordering up an FBI investigation of US lobbying efforts conducted on behalf of Basha.

Last year, a State Department report offered a strong suggestion that the Biniatta Trade payment to Muzin was part of an international clandestine Russian influence operation. In a summary of a US intelligence review, the department said that the Kremlin since 2014 had slipped at least $300 million to political parties and politicians outside Russia “to shape foreign political environments in Moscow’s favor.” An administration source familiar with the report told the AFP that Russia “spent around $500,000 to back Albania’s center-right Democratic Party in 2017 elections.” (Muzin also received a $500,000 payment connected to his Albanian lobbying; the origins of these funds are disputed.)

“We have been clear about our concern about Russia’s activity to influence the democratic process in various countries around the world, including our own,” a State Department spokesman at the time told Mother Jones, in response to questions regarding the Albanian funding. “Our concern over Russia’s activity in this regard is not with any one country, but global in nature as we continue to face challenges against democratic societies.”

The Russian role in the Albanian lobbying matter, by then, looked increasingly clear. But a key question remained: Who exactly in Russia was behind it? 

Earlier this month, a team of investigative reporters at the BBC, the Seychelles Broadcasting Corporation, and Finance Uncovered solved part of the mystery. They discovered that the Scottish shell company that paid for Muzin’s lobbying in the US for Basha was owned by a Moscow resident.

These journalists are part of an international consortium that has been plowing through the Pandora Papers, a massive trove of leaked files from more than a dozen corporate services firms—companies that create and administer offshore firms that help high-wealth clients move and hide money. Though first revealed in 2021, the papers, which include almost 12 million files, are still spilling secrets. 

This team of investigative reporters recently dug into documents from one of the companies whose files are included in the Pandora Papers: Alpha Consulting. That firm, based in the Seychelles and owned by a Russia citizen named Victoria Valkovskaya, sets up secretive offshore companies for its clients, many in the former Soviet Union, reportedly including members of Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. 

Biniatta Trade was among the shell companies created by Alpha Consulting, which used complex corporate structures in what appears to be a deliberate effort to conceal the real owners of the firms it concocted. Within the Pandora Papers is a September 28, 2018, private agreement that listed a 40-year old Muscovite named Maxim Trofimets as Biniatta Trade’s owner.

The reporters who pursued this story did not learn why Trofimets was registered as owning Biniatta. But they noted that on LinkedIn Trofimets described himself as a sales director at a Russian helicopter company called Exclases Holding. That company says it sells Italian helicopters to clients, including an unnamed Russian government agency, for carrying out “special security missions.”

The leaked documents indicate that Alpha Consulting attempted to keep Trofimets’ control of Biniatta secret. A 2017 law attempting to promote increased transparency among Scottish corporations requires firms registered in Scotland to disclose their real owners, or “persons with significant control.” On September 27, 2017, Alpha in a form sent to Scottish regulators that no one had such control over Biniatta. The next day it quietly completed another document, found among the trove of leaked Pandora Papers, stating that Trofimets controlled the company. 

After Mother Jones’ report on Biniatta appeared in March 2018, Valkovskaya moved to rejigger Biniatta’s complex ownership. She switched control of the company to firms located in the Marshall Islands. Those Marshall Islands firms were run by a foundation controlled by five directors, all Seychelles citizens. In an email to associates, cited by Finance Undercover and the other outlets, Valkovskaya wrote that the owner of Biniatta was “a private Seychelles foundation, in which there are five councillors,” and, thus, there was no need “to declare a controlling person” to regulators.

A lot remains murky. The newly discovered documents reveal that a Moscow helicopter salesman was running a Scottish shell company that was paying for lobbying in the United States to help an Albanian party that was challenging a government headed by a prime minister opposed to Putin. But was Trofimets a front for the real source of the money that went to Muzin?

Neither Trofimets nor Valkovskaya responded to Mother Jones‘ inquires. Muzin, who said in 2018 that he believed Biniatta was a private company owned by DPA supporters, did not respond to a request for comment.

This new information unearthed from the Pandora Papers is more proof that the payment Muzin received was linked to a Russian influence project. This particular operation was part of that larger clandestine effort that included Russia’s successful attempt to help Trump win the White House in 2016. As Trump and his allies keep insisting that Russian interference was all a hoax, evidence to the contrary keeps emerging.

Pastor John Hagee Says an Israel-Palestinian Peace Deal Will Be the Work of the Anti-Christ

As tens of thousands of Americans were heading toward the National Mall in Washington, DC, on Tuesday to attend a rally professing support of Israel, a controversy erupted over the appearance of a particular speaker: John Hagee, the pastor of an evangelical megachurch in Texas. The head of an influential group called Christians United for Israel, Hagee made national news in 2008 when Sen. John McCain, the GOP presidential nominee, was forced to disavow his endorsement after anti-Catholic remarks Hagee had made were publicized. (He eventually apologized.) Hagee also has been a zealous foe of gay rights and claimed Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment against New Orleans for hosting a gay pride parade. 

So when word hit that he was on the line-up for Tuesday’s event, other supporters of the rally raised hell. Hadar Susskind, the head of Americans for Peace Now, an endorser of the demonstration, declared, “I am horrified that he was given this platform. His history of hateful comments should disqualify him from decent company, much less from speaking on stage. He is not welcome and should not speak.” And J Street, another liberal Jewish American organization, stated, “A dangerous bigot like Hagee should not be welcomed anywhere in our community. Period.”

This opposition was driven by Hagee’s previous anti-Catholicism and homophobia. But there was another reason why Hagee was an odd choice as a speaker: He claims that an inevitable peace accord between Israel and Palestinians will be the work of the anti-Christ—literally.

Hagee, who at the rally led the crowd in a chant of “Israel, you’re not alone,” has long maintained that he does not accept the notion that by supporting Israel, evangelical Christians can somehow hasten the end of days. “Christian support of Israel is based on the promises of God in Scripture that affirm a future for the Jewish people and God’s continued faithfulness to that nation, not on prophecies regarding the end times or speeding the return of Christ,” his organization says.

But Hagee is a big believer in End Times Christianity and preaches that, according to the Bible, at some point the anti-Christ will arrive, Jesus and the dead will rise, the rapture will ensue (lifting the truly faithful into air and toward heaven), and that everyone left behind will witness years of destruction, disasters, and absolute misery. Hailing Jews as God’s “chosen people,” Hagee asserts that Israel plays a crucial role in this grand finale. Not surprisingly, Hagee sells books and videos in which he explains all this in great detail based on biblical passages.

In a sermon he delivered in March, Hagee laid out the Big Picture and explained how the conflict between Israel and Palestinians fits into this. He rambled a bit. He noted that biblical prophecy is clear that during this final conflagration, five armies will invade Israel. They will be led by Russia and Iran and also include forces from Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Turkey. He didn’t say how this unlikely alliance would be formed. But, have no fear, he told his parishioners, God—angry about the removal of prayer from schools, abortion, the separation of church and state, and the overall immorality of the world—will “smash this force” to protect Israel and kill five out of every six of its soldiers. 

Shortly before this invasion, the anti-Christ will arrive. At this time, Hagee said, a global economic crisis will be underway, “the church is gone,” and “the world is desperate to resolve its difference.” So the anti-Christ—who claims to be a “man of peace” and who many wrongly view as the Messiah—manages somehow to cook up a seven-year-long peace treaty with “many, including the Jewish people, the Palestinians, and the Roman Catholic Church.” This deal will allow the Jews to take control of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, which is a holy site for Muslims and currently a major flashpoint between Palestinians and Israel. The accord, per Hagee, will hand control of “the holy sites in Jerusalem” to the Catholic Church. (He claimed the Catholic Church has been “trying to gain a sense of control of Jerusalem and the holy sites for decades.” Really?) Moreover, the anti-Christ’s deal will—with “some arm-twisting”—force a two-state solution on Israel and the Palestinians.

But three and a half years after this treaty is inked, this Russia-led invasion of Israel—propelled by “the demonic spirit of antisemitism”—interrupts, with Russian leader Vladimir Putin trying to “rule the world” by gaining control of natural gas reserves off Israel’s coast. This collection of armies, Hagee pointed out, will include millions of radical Islamists from Russia who have a “compulsion…to attack Israel and the Jewish people.” It will be a global jihad. Hagee also suggested that the European Union will be part of this war on Israel, noting that Russia, the European Union, China, and Egypt have “two things in common…to destroy the Jewish people and to rule the world.”

The tale Hagee presented was truly head-spinning. To return specifically to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, he was clear that the two-state solution “will never happen until the anti-Christ comes and the rapture of the church has happened.” That is, peace in the Middle East can only be brought about by the anti-Christ. That’s not good news—unless you’re going to be part of the rapture. It would seem to suggest that potential peace brokers will be in league with the devil. 

For Hagee and his fellow believers, this is all hunky-dory. During that March sermon, he exclaimed that “the time of the end…that’s right now!” Excitedly, he told his audience, “The next thing we’re going to have happen is the triumph God. The dead and Christ are going to rise…We shall be brought up to be with the Lord in the air. Pray up! Pack up! Look up! We’re going up!” 

Only then, when Hagee and his coreligionists are soaring up to heaven—and everyone else is stuck on Earth contending with with assorted global calamities—will there be movement toward a resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, thanks to the devilish anti-Christ. This scenario does not seem good for the Jews—or anyone else outside Hagee’s flock. Given Hagee’s Israel narrative—along with his record of bigotry—it’s rather curious that any organizers of this pro-Israel rally thought he deserved a speaking slot and validation. Could this be a sign the end times are near?

Next for the GOP on Abortion: Minority Rule

Once again, American voters in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision that last year nullified a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion have told the Republican Party what they think of its crusade to restrict reproductive freedom: Get lost.

On Tuesday, abortion won. In Ohio, 57 percent of the Buckeyes who went to the polls, in an election that saw supercharged turnout, supported a measure to amend the state constitution to guarantee individuals the “right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions.” (Ohio is the seventh state, including Kansas and Kentucky, to vote in favor of abortion access since Dobbs.) Democratic candidates who championed reproductive rights, including incumbent Gov. Andy Beshear in Kentucky, prevailed. In Virginia, the issue helped Democrats retain the state Senate and gain control of the House of Delegates—a tremendous political blow to Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin. 

Complaining about GOP losses, former Senator Rick Santorum said “pure democracies are not the way to run a country.”

So what’s the GOP response to this continuous beat-down it is suffering on this front? Minority rule. 

After it was clear that a whopping majority of Ohio citizens, despite it being a red state, favored allowing women to make their own choices, the Ohio House speaker, Jason Stephens, a Republican, declared, “I remain steadfastly committed to protecting life, and that commitment is unwavering. The legislature has multiple paths that we will explore to continue to protect innocent life. This is not the end of the conversation.” 

In other words: We don’t care what the vast majority of Ohioans want on this deeply personal matter; we will find a way to impose our position—a minority-held view—on everyone. 

This is a rather anti-democratic stance. But it’s been at the heart of GOP policy on abortion for decades. While polling on this issue tends to show that Americans hold conflicting beliefs on the subject, the numbers continuously have demonstrated that a majority does not want to ban or severely limit abortion. That is why conservatives and the religious right decades ago adopted a strategy of ending abortion through court decisions.

In the 1970s, the newly-born religious right backed Ronald Reagan and helped elect him president in 1980. In turn, Reagan embraced the movement and the anti-abortion cause. Still, he took few concrete steps to actually stop abortions. He and his crew focused instead on economic matters (tax cuts and deregulation!) and national security, and neglected contentious social issues that might not have majority support. This led leaders of the right to conclude that the abortion battle was best waged in the courts, and they concentrated on seeding the judiciary and the Supreme Court with conservatives who could render decisions that ran counter to public opinion. That effort eventually yielded the Dobbs decision.

Dobbs sparked anger and outrage: Five unelected justices—three of whom were appointed by a president who lost the popular vote—overturned Roe v. Wade and declared abortion was not a protected right under the Constitution. (Talk about judicial activism!) Somehow this decision, decried as an anti-democratic action, encouraged some within the Republican Party and the conservative movement to move toward a more extremist position: barring all abortions without exception. That is close to the view held by the top GOP official in the land: House Speaker Mike Johnson. He has called abortion a “holocaust,” comparing the argument in favor of reproductive rights to Hitler’s philosophy, and he sponsored legislation to ban all abortions after six weeks with no exceptions for rape and incest. 

With popular opinion clear on preserving abortion rights, Republicans and anti-abortion advocates obviously still have the opportunity to try to persuade their fellow Americans to change their minds. But many seem intent on dismissing the majority sentiment. Rick Santorum, the former GOP senator and far-right cultural warrior (who likened homosexuality to bestiality and pedophilia), showed us how that’s done when he appeared on Newsmax on Tuesday night to discuss the Ohio results. “You put very sexy things like abortion and marijuana on the ballot, and a lot of young people come out to vote,” he groused. “It was a secret sauce for disaster in Ohio. I don’t know what they were thinking. Thank goodness that most of the states in this country don’t allow you to put everything on the ballot because pure democracies are not the way to run a country.”

this Newsmax copium is actually hitting pretty good pic.twitter.com/7UpFEar53Y

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 8, 2023

Vox populi is not good for the anti-abortion right. The same is true for many Republican policies. This gap between their desired legislation and actual voters feeds a popular talking point on the right: The US is a republic, not a democracy. Speaker Johnson often repeats this mantra in interviews and podcasts; he is fond of quipping that democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what’s for dinner. Couple that with his views that America is a “completely amoral society” and that only those who have a “biblical worldview”—meaning they are fundamentalist Christians who believe the Bible is literally true—are worthy candidates for political office, and his math is clear: A righteous (and self-righteous) minority must do what it can to force its truth on the rest.

As election night was turning into a disaster for Republicans and abortion foes, a panel on Fox News accused Democrats of being demagogues on abortion, with host Sean Hannity complaining, “Democrats are trying to scare women into thinking Republicans don’t want abortion legal under any circumstances.”

Fox News’ Sean Hannity: “Democrats are trying to scare women into thinking Republicans don’t want abortion legal under any circumstances.” pic.twitter.com/VDc7xcJWqe

— The Recount (@therecount) November 8, 2023

But many Republicans have indeed passed and proposed measures to prohibit most, if not all, abortions. This is not a question of demagoguery, but democracy. 

Ohio Speaker Stephens did not explain what he has in mind to subvert the overwhelming Ohio vote for abortion rights. But he made it obvious that he and his conservative comrades will cook up anti-democratic work-arounds in an attempt to circumvent the popular desire for preserving women’s freedom. It’s a strategy befitting Gilead, and Republicans are fine with that. 

During a Trip to Israel, Mike Johnson Connected With Far-Right Extremists

In his first major initiative as GOP House speaker, Mike Johnson pushed through a bill to provide $14 billion in military assistance to Israel. “Israel doesn’t need a cease-fire,” he declared before the vote. “It needs its allies to…deliver support now.” As the legislation heads to the Senate, it’s an appropriate moment to look back at a 2020 trip Johnson took to Israel, where he hobnobbed with far-right extremists. 

In February of that year, Johnson traveled to Israel with Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). The sponsor for this trip was the New York-based 12Tribe Films Foundation, a small outfit that that describes itself as “online warriors for truth about Israel and the Jewish people.” The organization spent $34,520—about one-quarter of its revenue that year—to fly the two lawmakers and their wives to Israel and host them for the week-long trip. The itinerary included visits to the Golan Heights, Jerusalem, and Hebron, a city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, as well as meetings with Israeli military officials, business owners, and political leaders—including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other members of the right-wing Likud Party. The two congressmen also received a briefing from the Kohelet Policy Forum, a far-right Israeli think tank that would later help cook up the Netanyahu administration’s controversial plan to weaken the country’s judiciary. At the Golan Heights, the pair posed and smiled in front of a sign for Trump Heights, a new Israeli settlement in occupied territory claimed by Israel but that is widely considered to violate international law.

During the trip, Johnson observed, “You hear in the US about how the Palestinians or the Arab people are oppressed in these areas, and have these terrible lives. None of that is true. We didn’t see any of it.” According to the itinerary filed with the House Ethics Committee, the congressmen did not travel to Gaza or meet with Palestinian leaders or activists. (The Human Rights Watch 2020 report on Israel cited significant Israeli human rights violations related to Palestinians.)

“You hear in the US about how the Palestinians or the Arab people are oppressed in these areas, and have these terrible lives. None of that is true. We didn’t see any of it.”

Along for this ride was Avi Abelow, the director of 12Tribe Films Foundations. A New York-born Jew who lives in Jerusalem, Abelov is an arch-Zionist and a zealously religious supporter of Israel. He’s also a Temple Mount activist who has called for Jewish control of Haram-al-Sharif in the Israeli-occupied Old City of Jerusalem—the third holiest Islamic site in the world and the home of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. This site is also revered by Jews because they believe the First Temple and the Second Temple once stood there. Its Western Wall, also known as the Wailing Wall, is a famous site for Jewish prayer. For 266 years, under an agreement implemented during the Ottoman Empire, Jews have been allowed to visit the Temple Mount but not pray within its confines. (They can pray at the Western Wall outside the compound.) But some ultra-religious Jewish activists have fought to overturn that rule and have even attempted to violate it, waging prayer incursions on the site that have spurred Arab anger and triggered violence. Some Temple Mount activists have called for razing the Muslim structures there and building the Third Temple to usher in the coming of the Messiah. (To quicken the Messiah’s arrival, animal sacrifices would be held within it.)

During a visit to the Temple Mount in 2018, while Abelow was escorting another GOP congressional delegation, Jean Tipton, the wife of Rep. Scott Tipton (R-Colo.), suggested that Jews seize the Temple Mount and proclaim, “It’s ours. Always was, and it is again.” Abelow told her she was “correct,” but he noted that such a move was opposed by the Israeli government, which feared the tremendous trouble that would cause. Abelow said that he and others were trying to “generate the awareness necessary to prepare the Jewish people to be ready to then declare sovereignty” over the site. 

Abelow has voiced hardline stances associated with the religious far-right in Israel. In 2008, during an interview with CNN, he appeared to express sympathy for West Bank settlers who engaged in violent action against Palestinians or Israeli soldiers (who forcibly dismantled settlements the Israeli government deemed illegal). “Unfortunately, there is always going to be a minority that’s going to lead to violence, but that’s because the system took away all the legal means,” Abelow argued. “When you take away all the legal means and people feel that they’re powerless at the hands of a democratic system, that leads individuals to take—to do things on their own hands.”

In a 2020 interview, Abelow rejected the idea of Israel conceding any land in the occupied territories to the Palestinians as part of a peace deal. “We don’t have the right to give away land that God gave to us…It’s not mine to give it away,” he said. “God gave it to me to protect for the future generation. How can I give it away?”

Abelow recently decried the massive protests in Israel against Netanyahu and his effort to weaken the Israeli judiciary, calling this movement a phony campaign orchestrated by “a tiny elite that hates their fellow, proud, traditional and religious Jews.” He added, “[T]oo many Jews today, on the political left, hate their fellow Jews more than they hate our actual enemies…They are doing everything they can to turn the public against the religious, and the ‘settlers.'”

Mother Jones sent emails to Abelow inquiring about his political views and the source of funding for Johnson and Jordan’s trip to Israel. He did not respond.

During Johnson and Jordan’s tour of Israel, Abelow escorted them to the various stops on the itinerary. On the fourth day, Johnson and Jordan visited Jerusalem’s Old City to see the Temple Mount. Their guide that morning was Yehuda Glick, an American-born rabbi and a far-right former Likud member of the Israeli Knesset. Glick, a settler activist, has been a leader in the Temple Mount movement. In 2014, he was shot and seriously injured by a Palestinian assailant.

Glick has long been tied to extremists. As a Knesset member in 2016, he agreed to speak at a memorial service for Meir Kahane, the Brooklyn-born Orthodox rabbi and religious zealot who founded the Jewish Defense League in the US and the Kach party in Israel, which called for removing Arabs from Israel. The FBI characterized Kahane’s JDL as “a violent extremist Jewish organization” that engaged in terrorism. Kahane’s Kach party was disqualified from participating in the 1988 elections in Israel under a law barring political parties that incite racism. Six years later, the Israeli government banned the Kach movement under its anti-terrorism laws. When asked about speaking at an event honoring Kahane, Glick at the time said, “You can participate in someone’s memorial without agreeing with their ideas.” He added, “Rabbi Meir Kahane accomplished a great deal, including helping to open up the gates of the Soviet Union for Jews [seeking to leave].” According to Jewish Currents, in 2017, Glick helped two leading Kahanists plan the “single largest Temple Movement incursion into Al-Aqsa to date.”

Glick has regularly led tour groups to Haram al-Sharif and instructed visitors to pray in defiance of the status quo agreement. As he guided Johnson and Jordan onto the site, he told them he would be praying “the whole time” and he pulled out a list of the names of people from around the world who had asked him to pray for them at the Temple Mount. He noted he would be offering a special prayer for the ailing daughter of a Texas pastor. Later in the day, Glick returned to the site and was arrested for allegedly violating the visiting rules and provoking Israeli police officers. Glick has tried to depict the Temple Mount issue as one of religious freedom—though many rabbis in Israel prohibit their followers from visiting it. Moreover, the Temple Mount, a Palestinian national symbol, is one of the most sensitive flashpoints in Jerusalem, and as Haaretz noted, it “continues to harness a volatile potential which could trigger a wider explosion.” (In the years afterward, Glick continued to lead Jews into the compound on provocative prayer incursions.) 

This visit to Israel—Johnson’s second—seems to have influenced the future speaker’s views regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At the end of the visit, he and Jordan recorded a podcast with Abelow. Johnson gushed that he saw the trip “as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy—that we’re here at this time.” He said nothing about the problems faced by Palestinians. He claimed that from what he witnessed during these five days, the Palestinian and Israeli people were “working well together” and that there was a “great cohesion of the people” in the West Bank. He blamed “activists and the leftist groups” for “pushing” the narrative that there was conflict. He told Abelow, “We have to get so many other members of Congress to come and experience this.”