Fox News Comes Down with Corrupt Claims about the 2020 Presidential Election: The Case of Rupert Murdoch and the Dominion Voting Systems

The suits were dismissed by Fox as attempts to stifle legitimate coverage of election fraud which includes the U.S. president and his top campaign advisers. The original sin in the eyes of Trump and his campaign was Fox’s projection of Arizona for Biden. As viewers abandoned the network for harder-edged fare on Newsmax, OAN and elsewhere, some Fox stars served up incendiary rhetoric and challenged the legitimacy of Biden’s pending certification in early January.

The right exposed how opinion formers can be held hostage to the fury they helped to inspire in Fox News. Extraordinary revelations this week from a defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems showed that Fox Corporation Chairman Rupert Murdoch admitted under oath that some of the channel’s top stars endorsed false claims that the 2020 election was stolen as he tried to stop viewers from defecting. Some of the Fox hosts were concerned that if they told the truth about Trump’s false claims, their audience would desert them.

Judge Eric M. Davis affirmed in a ruling yesterday that the contracts should be given to Dominion.

“A reasonable viewer would have readily understood that hosts were not espousing the President’s allegations themselves, but were providing a forum for the principal architects of those legal challenges,” Fox lawyers said in a brief filed this month.

In his exchanges with the judge, Keller drew a line distinguishing between a host or producer “who are sometimes pre-scripting material for the show, that is going to be tethered to a specific channel’s telecast” and a network executive.

Newsmax needs to be watched, according to an email from Murdoch to Suzanne Scott, the Fox News chief executive. Murdoch said that he didn’t “want to antagonize Trump further” and stressed to her, “everything at stake here.”

Nelson pointed to a document that he said talked about the daily editorial meeting, which included almost all of these executives.

Lawyers for Dominion Voting Systems released portions of unflattering messages and depositions in court filings as part of their $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox for broadcasting conspiracy theories about Dominion’s role in the 2020 presidential election.

Lawyers for Fox, which filed its response to Dominion in court on Monday, have argued that its broadcasts after the election did not amount to defamation because they were protected under the First Amendment. Fox has defended its reporting and commentary as the kind of work any journalistic organization would do by covering events and newsmakers that are out of the ordinary.

The fear that Fox News’ audience would abandon it for good also appeared to drive programming decisions. Alex Pfeiffer, a Carlson producer, told the host that many viewers were upset that they didn’t cover election fraud. It’s all our viewers care about right now.”

Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of Fox Corporation, acknowledged in a deposition taken by Dominion Voting Systems that some Fox News hosts endorsed false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Murdoch told Lou Dobbs to be fired because he was an “idiot” but allowed him to continue to host his show until after the election. It is argued that Dobbs was popular with Trump and his supporters and the network was trying to retain viewers to Newsmax.

In recent weeks, Dominion has argued that Fox host Jeanine Pirro – a former district attorney and New York state judge as well as a Trump confidant – sits at the heart of its case. NPR previously revealed that an anguished email from a Fox News producer begged colleagues to keep its host off the air because of her lies about election fraud.

CNN’s Stephen Collinson puts it perfectly: “Fox News is the latest example of opinion formers on the right exposed for being held hostage to the fury they helped to incite. … The new details underscored how key players on the right feel they have no choice but to appease, satisfy and further inflame the voters and viewers on whom their profits or hopes of political power depend.”

Murdoch, the network’s controlling owner, followed the lead of the network’s senior executives and sidestepped the truth for a pro- Trump audience angered by the facts.

In that case, Murdoch is accusing a much smaller media outlet of defamation. He will force the site to pay out for highly critical commentary several times previously and now plans to use the suit as a test case for recent changes in libel law in that country. In Australia, media outlets don’t have the legal cover that they do in the US.

Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul who controls some of the most powerful organs in conservative media, appeared to make clear Wednesday that he would prefer to cast aside former President Donald Trump in favor of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as the leader of the Republican party.​

For one Republican, though, the night got better and better as it went on. The governor won reelection by nearly 20 points, in a night that saw the one-time swing state turn red. He wouldn’t have to share the spotlight as the Republican losses mounted and anyone on the right who was searching for a beacon of hope would have to turn their attention to Florida.

The home page of Fox News also prominently featured a column by conservative commentator Liz Peek that declared DeSantis “the new leader of the Republican Party.” Fox News referred to it as a new era.

And The Wall Street Journal, the broadsheet owned by Murdoch, the newspaper’s conservative editorial board published a piece proclaiming the “DeSantis Florida tsunami.”

Donald Trump is a Florida resident. TheDump Trump crowd does not seem to understand that the cult of personality around Trump is still going strong in some parts of the party.

Why did Murdoch after the 2018 midterms change the political map? The need for a White House bid when the GOP lost the 2020 election

Some media commentators would argue that Murdoch’s entire business model – using television stations in his native Australia and tabloid newspapers like The Sun in Britain, as well as Fox News in the US – has evolved from seizing upon and feeding political anger. And while he’s more known for backing conservatives, Murdoch has switched sides when business demands – for instance, when The Sun endorsed the British Labour Party’s Tony Blair over the fading Conservative Party in a 1997 general election.

Murdoch remarked to Trump after the 2020 election, that we should throw him over, as reported by a reporter at The New York Times.

Glenn Beck, the right-wing talk radio host, was half-joking when he made this suggestion the day after Tuesday’s elections, but he voiced a longing that a number of Republicans had after the midterms: a hope to linger with the visions of a red tsunami that wiped out Democratic power across the country. The reality – that the party had an unusually poor showing in a midterm that many expected would be a historic blowout – felt too sour to linger on.

As confetti rained down on him and his family, DeSantis declared that he and his supporters had changed the political map. The crowd shouted, “Two more years!”, while urging him to consider a White House bid.

He has become a strong man with the political style that he has married. The governor has targeted those who oppose his policies such as universities, public health workers and corporations. He has sent police to round up voters with felony convictions who, confused by the state’s efforts to strip their voting rights after voters reinstated them a few years ago, mistakenly voted in recent elections. He bent theflorida legislature to his will and supported anti-gay laws, a new legislative map and legislation against Disney after it criticized the state’s “don’t say gay” bill

But as Sen. Marco Rubio, a one-time frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, knows, neither success in Florida nor success in theory naturally translates into national victory. Part of that is due to the particulars of Florida. The electorate there has been trending more conservative in recent years, even as the country as a whole has coalesced around center-left policies (note how even many red states now vote for Medicaid expansion, abortion protections and higher minimum wage laws).

Meanwhile, unlike the national party, the Democratic Party in Florida is in tatters, struggling to field and support candidates and to organize and mobilize voters. And Florida has a specific mix of Latino voters that is unlike most other states, weighted heavily toward immigrants from Cuba and Venezuela who respond favorably to DeSantis’s attack on Democrats as socialists.

Just two years ago, the party failed to pass a policy platform, instead issuing a statement of loyalty to Trump. After the election loss of Trump, the party elites were unable to bring the party with them. Instead, the majority of Republicans in the House voted to overturn the election and the vast majority of Republican voters clung to the belief that the 2020 election was stolen.

“There’s no way to deny Donald Trump was fired on Tuesday night, there’s no way to deny”, said Georgia Lt. Gov. The search committee brought a few names to the forefront, and Ron DeSantis is one of them. Ron is being rewarded for his new thought process with Republicans, as well as solid leadership.

DeSantis allies said they do not expect the Florida governor to engage at all with Trump’s bashing for as long as he can avoid it. The overall midterm results were not brought up in two press conferences about Hurricane Nicole, where DeSantis won by a 19-point margin. Notably, he has also avoided taking a victory lap on Fox News, which would undoubtedly inquire about Trump and 2024, after appearing frequently on the network while campaigning for reelection.

“Build anticipation,” one longtime Republican fundraiser with knowledge of DeSantis’ operation said. “I think DeSantis controls the time frame. Everyone anticipates things. You want him to call the shots now.

The intrigue surrounding a potential Trump-DeSantis showdown reached the White House on Wednesday. President Joe Biden remarked that it would be fun to see the two Republican challengers take on each other.

CNN was told by multiple people that DeSantis would organize a legislative session filled with conservative priorities that he could carry into the GOP presidential primary. Republicans won the majority in the legislature on Tuesday, allowing them to make certain anti-choice changes and make it easier to carry a gun.

A GOP Consultant said the legislative session will be a lot of fun. “Whatever he proposes, they will pass it, and it will become law.”

The Republican fundraiser said that “anything ‘woke’ they can find to kill within their path, they’re going to do that” and predicted that financial institutions, in particular, would be a DeSantis target this spring.

In the meantime, DeSantis will continue to build out a political operation that has already proved it can raise money at an impressive clip. His reelection effort brought in $200 million between his two political committees, making it 888-282-0465 888-282-0465 888-282-0465 888-282-0465 888-282-0465 888-282-0465, breaking national records for a gubernatorial campaign. The committees had $65 million in unspent cash as of November 3. CNN reported that a political team has looked into ways to use unused money to support a presidential campaign. Sources confirmed that it remains the plan.

He’s going to continue to travel outside the state to raise money and to grow his brand. After avoiding public events outside Florida for most of his first term, Ron DeSantis took a calculated gamble to hold rallies in support of the Republican candidates in some of the most competitive governor and Senate races in the country. He continued to travel up until 10 days before the election.

One Republican consultant in Florida said that if you go into a presidential primary with Donald Trump and think you’ll kick his ass you’ll have another thing coming.

As he stepped back on the trail, Trump had betrayed his irritation with the criticism of his campaign by left no doubt that he was still thinking about DeSantis.

Trump will announce his candidacy soon despite his poor showing. Ghitis noted that most Democrats find the prospect hard to stomach and that Republicans want him to focus on his golf game.

Trump later downplayed Tuesday’s election results, noting he received “more votes” than DeSantis in Florida in 2020. The president has a larger margin of victory over the vice president than it does in the midterms.

What Do Young People Think About Voting the Midterm Elections? CNN’s Sherlock Holmes’s Story about a Famed Racehorse

Editor’s Note: Sign up to get this weekly column as a newsletter. We’re looking back at the strongest, smartest opinion takes of the week from CNN and other outlets.

In Arthur Conan Doyle’s story, “Silver Blaze,” Sherlock Holmes investigates the disappearance of a famous racehorse and the “tragic murder of its trainer.” The detective is asked if there is any point in which he would like to draw the inspector’s attention.

Republicans failed to achieve the resounding midterm victory typically won by an opposition party against a president with a low approval rating. Democrats not only held on to control of the Senate but could increase their number by one if Georgia Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock defeats Republican Herschel Walker in a runoff election next month. And if Republicans win a House majority, it will be by just a few seats.

It was only a little more than a week ago that Republicans thought they’d be savoring a crushing victory – and some Democrats were starting to blame each other for what they feared would be a disaster.

The New Yorker’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells reported November 4 that GOP campaign strategists said their candidates wereheading for a clean sweep, including Walker in Georgia, and Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania. Wallace-Wells wrote, “The word that kept coming up in these conversations was ‘bloodbath.’”

“People sometimes wonder what it will take to get young people to the polls,” wrote Dolores Hernandez, a junior at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. “Well, after the 2022 midterms, they no longer have to guess.”

It is in front of us a big issue which could determine our future. We will turn out in droves if we know we can have a say in the issues that affect our votes. Hernandez and her fellow Gen Z friends saw abortion as that kind of existential issue.

The University of Michigan experienced a long line of students waiting for the same-day registration to register to vote on Election Day. There was a palpable sense of excitement and urgency around the election on campus. Many young people, especially young women, had a motivating issue that drove their participation: abortion rights.

It was shown in exit polls that voters between the ages of 18 and 29 supported Democrats over Republicans by a big margin, and that voters over 45 were very much in favor of Republicans.

Before the election, some pundits argued that the anger of many voters at the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade had faded after five months, and that inflation would blot out most other concerns. They argued that President Biden was out of touch when he talked about the threat election deniers posed to democracy. Both of those issues were felt to be important.

“The abortion-rights side seemingly went a perfect five-for-five when it came to ballot initiatives, recognizing a state right to abortion in Michigan, California and Vermont,” wrote law professor Mary Ziegler. “Kentucky, a deep red state, turned away an attempt to say that the state constitution did not protect a right to abortion. Montana’s abortion measure, which threatened to impose criminal penalties on health care providers, was rejected by voters in Tuesday’s referendum.”

John Avlon thought that the election lies of Donald Trump were a repudiation of him and many of his supporters.

“What a relief,” wrote Roxanne Jones. “It finally feels like a majority of voters want to re-center American politics away from the toxic, conspiracy theory-driven rhetoric we’ve experienced over the past several years.”

Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, defeated Doug Mastriano, a Republican, for governor in Pennsylvania. Mastriano “scared many Pennsylvanians with his brash, take-no-prisoners Trump swagger,” wrote Joyce M. Davis of The Patriot-News, the newspaper serving Harrisburg. He embraced Christian nationalism, once said women who violated his proposed abortion ban should be charged with murder, and inflammatory racial tensions. Davis commented that he is an election denier.

“Plenty of voters are worried about unchecked progressivism on the left, but they’re even more worried about unchecked extremism on the right,” observed Tim Alberta, in the Atlantic.

“That extremism takes many forms: delegitimizing our elections system, endorsing the January 6 assault on the Capitol, cracking jokes and spreading lies about the assault on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband. Donald Trump embodied all of this extremism, which many swing voters rejected on Tuesday.

There is concern about Trump’s viability as a candidate among Republicans. “After he underperformed in the last three election cycles, they’re worried that he could give Joe Biden another four years in the White House.”

Biden not only defeated an incumbent president, but was “able to move a formidable legislative agenda through Congress, overcoming fierce Republican opposition and even winning a few GOP votes along the way. The American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act stand up as a historic trifecta – a legislative track record arguably more significant than any that we have seen since President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.”

“In exit polls, 28% of voters said they chose their House vote ‘to oppose Donald Trump.’ And just 37% said they had a favorable view of the former president, the presumed GOP front-runner, at least before this election. The party should be alarmed by that.

Five Lessons on Midterms: Why We Are Seeing Sexy Men in the First Black Woman Governor’s Day? A Comment on the Case of Beto O’Rourke

“Had Abrams succeeded, she would have been the first Black woman to become the governor of a US state. After her second straight electoral loss, America is still waiting for that breakthrough.”

It was a repeat of her defeat to Kemp four years prior when the two tangled for a seat in Georgia’s legislature.

In Texas, Democrat Beto O’Rourke lost to incumbent Republican Greg Abbott for governor. Nicole Russell wrote that it’s time for him to stop running for offices in Texas after his third huge loss. We have had enough Beto for a long time. … His policies are not welcome in Texas.

The military machine he built is broken, the economy is scarred, and his reputation is in tatters. Even though Putin-the-legend is dead, he may stay in power for a while.

The actor Chris Evans received an honor that was first bestowed onMel Gibson in 1985, and he has not aged well.

“People magazine recently announced this year’s Sexiest Man Alive, which makes it a great time to ask: Can we get rid of the whole tradition of People’s Sexiest Man Alive?”

Think about how ridiculous it is to declare someone the most beautiful person in the world. Sexiness, by its very nature, is subjective. It is a joke that people give out their own tastes as if they are everyone’s. And by making their subject male, they’re tacitly saying: See, we’re not objectifying women, we’re so evolved. Men can be objects of lust too! Maybe that was (arguably) a subversive statement in the 1980s, when Playboy, Penthouse and other magazines imposed a misogynist ideal of sexiness at the newsstands. But now? Not a lot.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/13/opinions/five-lessons-midterms-opinion-columns-galant/index.html

“The Crown”: Five Lessons Midterms Opinion Columns Galant (II): Social Media Disruption after Elon Musk Becomes the Queen

The new season of “The Crown,” which was released on Wednesday, chronicles the royal course during the turbulent ’90s, including Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s divorce, and the fire that destroyed most of Windsor Castle.

“Details of the show’s storylines doing the rounds earlier this fall quickly drew ire, and one reportedly involving Charles, now King, lobbying for the Queen’s abdication prompted former UK Prime Minister John Major to describe the series as a ‘barrel-load of nonsense.’” Dame Judi Dench also warned that the series might “blur the lines between historical accuracy and crude sensationalism” as the nation continues to mourn Queen Elizabeth II, who died two months ago.

Elon Musk is going to have to try to fix Twitter without the help of journalist Roxanne Jones. She’s had enough. “I deleted Twitter on the day Elon Musk became the platform’s new owner,” Jones wrote. “After a mostly dysfunctional 12-year relationship with Twitter that I admit brought some moments of joy, it was time to exercise my freedom of speech to say goodbye and good riddance.”

Data points on rising racism on the micro-messaging platform can be illuminating, but they do not reinforce what we already know. Like many Black women on the site, I can testify about what it feels like to be harassed and threatened with violence. I’ve experienced it all. I’m done. I will walk in the real world with my power and voice.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/13/opinions/five-lessons-midterms-opinion-columns-galant/index.html

The Story of Superman, and How Bill Carter Was Inspired by the Legend of Scrooge McDuck, and the Rise and Fall of Powerball

Bill Carter doesn’t usually buy lottery tickets because it felt like burning a $10 bill on a barbecue grill.

But last week’s Powerball caught their attention as it soared toward a $2 billion jackpot – and they bought a few tickets. Imagine what we could do with that money.

So what would we do with the money? After helping the kids, donating to charities, buying several homes, etc., what else? Build a ‘money bin’ and swim around in it like Scrooge McDuck? (Unwise. Money can make you wealthy, but it is not liquid.

The story of the Man of Steel is well-known. As pop culture historian Roy Schwartz noted, “In 1934, at the age of 18, (Joseph) Shuster and classmate Jerome Siegel came up with a revolutionary idea: Superman. He was the first superhero, a concept so unprecedented that, as Siegel detailed in his unpublished memoir, every newspaper syndicate in the US rejected it for being too fantastic for children to relate to.”

As Schwartz wrote, there was a relationship between Shuster and Helen Louise Cohen, a fellow resident of Cleveland, who might have had a resemblance to Lois Lane. Shuster sent her sketches of Superman along with at least one drawing of Cohen, and heartfelt letters in neat script.

She broke it off, marrying a officer who later received the Legion of Merit, and eventually becoming a colonel in the Army. Shuster was too nearsighted to enlist in the military during World War II.

Cohen would later tell her sons, as Schwartz noted, that “Shuster was simply too mild-mannered for her.” She kept his sketches and letters, and now the family is sharing them with the world.

The First “America First” Candidates: The Trump-Leading House Steps Toward a Consistent 2020 Presidential Candidate

Donald Trump will start the next phase of his political career under attack if he announces his third presidential bid on Tuesday.

Even with his loyal base still intact, it could be difficult for Donald Trump to return to the presidency because of the many obstacles he will have to overcome in the months to come. He has spent the days since the midterm elections fending off criticism from fellow Republicans over his ill-fated involvement in key contests, furiously lashing out at two GOP heavyweights who could complicate his path to the White House if they mount their own presidential campaigns, and fretting that he or associates could soon be indicted by federal investigators in two separate Justice Department probes.

The straddle between winning a party’s base voters and trying to court middle America has long tested Democratic and Republican nominees when they have to pivot to a general election. This political leap may require a supreme political skill from whoever emerges from the GOP’s first “America First” primary.

Mehmet Oz, Adam Laxalt and Blake Masters, three Republican Senate candidates who earned Trump’s support in their primaries, respectively lost to Democratic opponents in Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona. Meanwhile, Herschel Walker, a longtime Trump friend challenging Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, is headed to a December runoff after both failed to reach 50% support in Georgia.

Three sources familiar with the matter said the former president believed Youngkin was supportive of comments his lieutenant governor, Winsome Earle-Sears, made during a Fox Business appearance last week. She told the network she would not support Trump if he runs for president a third time.

Responding to repeated questions about Trump’s impending 2024 announcement, Earle-Sears said, “A true leader understands when they have become a liability. A true leader understands that it’s time to step off the stage, and the voters have given us that very clear message.”

According to one of his advisers, the former president caught on to the fact that Youngkin was going to split from Trump and asked Sears about it.

If Glenn Youngkin runs for president, it will be his choice. John Fredericks, a Virginia-based conservative radio host who chaired Trump’s campaigns in the state in 2016 and 2020, said that Team Trump will mount a huge effort to win the delegates in Milwaukee.

“I know there’s a lot of criticism and people saying, ‘Just focus on Georgia,’ but he figures there’s no point in waiting. A Trump adviser said that if Herschel loses, he will be blamed for the distraction, but if he wins, he doesn’t believe he’ll get credit for getting the base revved up.

“Nobody should be surprised. Michael Caputo is a former Trump administration official who is close to the former president. You should ask if this format can work for him again.

“One of our biggest challenges will be the fundraising component but I do think [Trump] has proved that he doesn’t need deep-pocketed donors, per se,” said a person close to Trump, noting the enduring strength of his small-dollar operation.

Some Trump allies said the donor challenges, midterm outcome and questions about his stature has left a dearth of seasoned campaign operatives willing to join his next campaign. The president told his allies that he wanted his operation to be lean, but some of them privately questioned whether it was out of preference or due to recruitment troubles. CNN has previously reported that Trump’s likely campaign is expected to be helmed by three current advisers – Susie Wiles, Chris LaCivita and Brian Jack – with assistance from a group of additional aides and advisers with whom the former president is already familiar. His 2020 apparatus is expected to be smaller than that of his reelection campaign two years ago.

Either way, as Trump works to find his footing on the verge of a presidential campaign that could coast to the party’s nominating convention or encounter any number of unforeseen troubles, allies who have stuck by his side said they are ready for battle one last time.

The Dean Obeidallah Show: The Case Against Covid-19 and The Implications for the Republican Candidate Coronavirus

Editor’s Note: Dean Obeidallah, a former attorney, is the host of SiriusXM radio’s daily program “The Dean Obeidallah Show.” Masto.ai gives a password to follow Dean Obeidallah. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. Don’t forget to give opinions on CNN.

It’s hard to know for sure who the “fool” is that Lake was referring to, but my guess would be Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who seems to be biding his time ahead of a possible White House run. DeSantis appears — at least for the moment — to pose the greatest threat to Trump’s bid to repeat as the Republican Party’s presidential standard-bearer.

Lang confronts Rocky at a press conference, publicly mocking the champ for refusing to fight a “real man,” and screaming out to the assembled crowd: “If he ain’t no coward, why won’t he fight me then?”

“I had governors that decided not to close a thing and that was up to them,” Trump said. He said that the Florida governor had changed his tune a lot and that he was taking aim at him.

In March 2020, in response to the rapidly spreading pandemic, the Florida governor issued an executive order closing bars and nightclubs, and urged people to follow US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines limiting gatherings on beaches to no more than 10 people.

But his recent remarks and pronouncements have veered sharply away from sensible, government-imposed Covid-19 protections in what appears to be a desperate bid to appeal to the GOP’s Covid-denying base voters ahead of an anticipated presidential run.

DeSantis has come out against lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccines and other measures meant to combat the spread of the coronavirus. The supposition is that the about-face was driven by an impending White House bid.

When Rubio and the FBI met: How Rubio fought and lost the Florida GOP primary in 1990-93 Rescuing the Fate of the Italian Stallion

But any potential run inevitably means a face-off with Trump, who is, as yet, the only Republican to have formally announced in the race. “Rocky III” marked the 40th anniversary of its release last year, but the 2024 GOP nominating campaign might be Rocky vs. Clubber Lang all over again.

But barring prosecution of the former President, if DeSantis wants to win in 2024, he can’t keep ducking Trump’s barbs. DeSantis should remember that even though in “Rocky III” the iconic fighter lost his title early in the film to the menacing and cruel Clubber Lang, the “Italian Stallion” prevailed in the end.

But if the former President is not exactly an underdog in the White House nomination contest, he certainly has been on the ropes of late, with polls showing a certain Trump fatigue among many voters in his party who would rather someone else be the GOP nominee.

But as time went on, he didn’t attack Trump directly. That changed when Rubio faced a “do or die” moment, finding himself in third place behind Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas in the delegate count, with little time to make up ground ahead of a March 2016 primary in his home state of Florida.

That’s when Rubio finally took the gloves off, calling Trump “an embarrassment” and a demagogue. But it was too little, too late for Rubio, who lost the Florida GOP primary, and ended up dropping out of the race the next day.

Wearing a flight suit and seated in the cockpit of a fighter jet as the “Top Gov,” DeSantis revealed his “rules of engagement,” declaring, “No. 1 — don’t fire unless fired upon, but when they fire, you fire back with overwhelming force.” He continued: “No. 2 — never, ever back down from a fight.”

Maybe, though, he is waiting to see if Trump will be indicted in order to not have to confront him on the battlefield. The Fulton County District Attorney told a judge last week that she was close to making a decision in the investigation into President Trump and his associates’ possible interference in the 2020 election in Georgia.

There’s also special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump over the January 6, 2021, attack and the trove of classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago that might yield charges. While Trump can still legally run for president while under indictment — or even if convicted of a crime — as a practical matter it would likely be devastating to his election prospects.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/29/opinions/trump-ron-desantis-rocky-iii-obeidallah/index.html

The Aspects of Candidate Reionization: The New Hampshire Story of a Man Who Came to the United States, and Where He Came From

But to prevail, you have to put up a fight. There could come a time when GOP voters view DeSantis’ refusal to defend himself and punch back as a sign of weakness.

The longer he is silent in the face of Trump’s barrage of punches, the more likely people will ask themselves, as Rocky’s nemesis did: If he ain’t no coward, why won’t he fight?

There was also something jarring about a former president who tried to steal the last election – and incited an insurrection to try to cling to power – campaigning and being embraced by supporters as if nothing happened.

There is a strong sense in the room that Trump thinks he’s owed the GOP nomination, and that some of his party aren’t too appreciative of his turbulent one-term presidency.

“So then when I hear he might run, I consider that very disloyal. But it’s not about loyalty – but to me it is, it’s always about loyalty – but for a lot of people it’s not about loyalty,” Trump told reporters, including CNN’s Kristen Holmes, aboard his jet this weekend.

“He comes to New Hampshire, and, frankly, he gives a very mundane speech. He stuck to the talking points, Sununu told Bash, and the response we have gotten is that he went away. A lot of folks saw that fire and the energy that it brought, but he is not really bringing that fire. It was a little disappointing to some people. … So I think a lot of folks understand that he’s going to be a candidate, but he’s also going to have to earn it. And that’s New Hampshire.”

Judging by his remarks about DeSantis and evangelical leaders, Trump is not yet ready to acknowledge that reality. Though his decision to visit an ice cream parlor late in the day in South Carolina was an unusual foray into retail politics and first-person contact with voters.

The campaign will be about the future. The campaign will focus on issues. According to Trump, Joe Biden has put America on the fast track to ruin and destruction, so we will make sure that he doesn’t receive four more years.

But he hasn’t abandoned all of his standard rhetoric. On Sunday evening, he called into a rally for one on his favorite election-denying midterm candidates – failed Arizona gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, who is still falsely insisting she won in November. And earlier on Saturday, in New Hampshire, the former president – who is facing criminal investigations by the Justice Department and a district attorney in Georgia over his attempt to overturn the 2020 election – could not resist taking aim at institutions that are revealing the true course of events in 2020.

Trump signaled that he would use his campaign and potential second presidency to try to thwart Justice Department efforts to enforce accountability over his election-stealing activity.

“We’re going to stop the appalling weaponization of our justice system. This is a justice system that has never been done before. It is an investigation, according to Trump. And he branded his resistance to such probes as more proof of the very quality that many Republicans embraced in 2016 and that helped propel him to the White House.

“There’s only one president who has ever challenged the entire establishment in Washington, and with your vote next year, we will do it again and I will do it again,” he said Saturday.

Did Fox News Disturb Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and the Real Candidates of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election?

Did Fox viewers question the election because of what they saw on the network, or did Fox allow election falsehoods on its air because it feared its viewers?

The messages showed that Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham brutally mocked lies being pushed by former President Donald Trump’s camp asserting that the election was rigged.

But, despite privately acknowledging the realiity of the situation, the network allowed the lies to take hold on its air, in large part because executives and hosts were terrified that telling its sizable audience the truth would prompt them to tune out.

A week after the election had been called, Sean Hannity told Carlson and Ingraham, “In one week and one debate they destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable.”

The hosts were so alarmed by Newsmax’s rise, they were enraged when their colleague, White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich, tweeted a mere fact check of Trump’s election lies.

That’s how we know Tucker Carlson tried to get a Fox News White House correspondent fired for fact-checking former President Donald Trump’s false tweet about election fraud.

► Murdoch responded to one email from Ryan by telling him that Sean Hannity had “been privately disgusted by Trump for weeks, but was scared to lose viewers.” In other words, Hannity, who always claims to say the same things on camera as when he’s off camera, was not being up front with his loyal audience for fear they’d rebel against him.

Behind the scenes, however, Fox News chief executive Scott had been wooing Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder, major advertiser and pro-Trump conspiracy theorist, according to Dominion’s filing. Scott sent Lindell a personal note and a gift while encouraging Fox shows to book him as a guest to “get ratings.”

When I met Sarah: A successful South Carolina governor and an Indian citizen, and how she and her husband fought for Ukraine in the 2016 South Korean Crimea annexation

“There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners, but the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution and protected by New York Times v. Sullivan,” the network said.

Yup, Fox hosts and the Murdoch family were OK with discrediting the core engine of America’s democracy — our ability to peacefully and legitimately transfer power — if it would hold their audience and boost their stock.

I’ve never met Haley, but from afar it seemed that she had a reasonably good story to tell — a successful South Carolina governor from 2011 to 2017, Trump’s first U.N. ambassador and the daughter of Indian immigrants. Her mother, Raj, studied law in New Delhi before moving to South Carolina where she became a public-school teacher. Her father taught biology at the college for 29 years after he earned a doctorate from the University of British Columbia. On the side, they even opened a clothing boutique.

DeSantis argued in an interview with Fox News in May 2015 that Putin “knows he can get away with things there. I think if we had a firm policy in place of armedUkraine with defensive and offensive weapons to defend themselves, Putin would make different calculations.

“I think that when someone like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin sees Obama being indecisive, I think that whets his appetite to create more trouble in the area. I believe that if we were to arm the Ukrainians, that it would send a message to him that he shouldn’t be going any further.

The US and its European allies protested and punished Russia for annexing the peninsula of Crimea in February and March of 2014.

In May 2015, DeSantis voted for an amendment in the defense spending bill that would bar funds to implement the START treaty, a nuclear deterrent treaty between the US and Russia, until then-President Obama certified Russian forces were no longer illegally occupying Ukrainian territory. The House approved the amendment, Congress passed the legislation, but Obama vetoed the bill.

He said in March that they have a common cause with those people who protested the annexation, but that it is just a type of situation where we don’t have any other options. I don’t know if the whole country is written off but I don’t think there will be much going on to reunify the peninsula with Ukraine.

He thinks that the policy of weakness by Obama is making a larger conflict more likely. And I think if you had Reagan’s policy of strength, I think you’d see people like Putin not wanna mess with us.”

Following Russia’s initial invasion in February 2022, DeSantis remained quiet on the issue until he criticized the Biden administration’s response and blamed the invasion on President Joe Biden, citing the Afghanistan withdrawal.

“My feeling is that they haven’t done enough, Europe or Biden’s administration, to really hit Putin where it counts,” he said in a February 2022 news conference, emphasizing the Russian economy’s reliance on oil and gas exports.

If you go into a country with an armed population that is bent on resisting you, it’s going to be death by a thousand cuts for the Russian army.

The news conference that DeSantis held the day after said that Putin might not have done this if he thought the United States was strong.

“Some of our commentators were endorsing it,,” Murdoch said, according to the filing, when asked about the talk hosts’ on-air positions about the election. “I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it, in hindsight,” he added.

It is a major blow for the First Amendment, because it leaves Fox with a more precarious situation to defend against the lawsuit on First Amendment grounds.

Tushnet said she had never seen such incriminating evidence collected before a trial in a defamation suit.

Why do Fox News executives should stop broadcasting lies? The Murdochs have no right to stop. They should just move on from Donald Trump and stop lying about the election

In his deposition, Mr. Dinh, when asked if Fox executives had an obligation to stop hosts of shows from broadcasting lies, said: “Yes, to prevent and correct known falsehoods.”

TheReliable Sources newsletter has a version of this article. Sign up for the daily digest chronicling the evolving media landscape here.

► Behind the scenes, Paul Ryan repeatedly warned the Murdochs to stop allowing the spread of election lies. The former House speaker said that Fox News should “move on from Donald Trump” and “stop spouting election lies.” Ryan told the Murdochs that many of those who thought the election had been stolen did so “because they got a diet of information telling them the election was stolen from what they believe were credible sources.” He was correct.

► Murdoch gave Jared Kushner “confidential information” about then-candidate Joe Biden’s ads “along with debate strategy” in 2020, the filing said, offering Trump’s son-in-law “a preview of Biden’s ads before they were public.” At most news organizations, this type of action would result in an investigation and disciplinary measures.

The documents reveal that the business model of the Channel is to feed its audience content that keeps them coming back to watch, even though they might not know anything about it.

Murdoch was asked if he could have told Fox News’ executives to stop giving airtime to Rudy Giuliani. “I could have,” Murdoch said. “But I didn’t.”

Dominion’s legal team is presenting only the evidence it believes will propel its case; Fox Corp. is arguing that the parent company and its top executives are wrongly being held responsible for reporting on the baseless assertions of a president and his advisers.

The Murdochs and other senior figures in Fox have deep involvement with the network’s editorial path.

Murdoch talks daily to Scott, she testified. Lachlan Murdoch said he had a daily chat with Scott but his father said it only happened once or twice a week.

Murdoch, who is close to his 93rd birthday, said in his deposition that he is a journalist. I enjoy being involved in these things.

He was adamant about defending Fox News’ call of the key state of Arizona to Joe Biden on election night. Murdoch testified that he could hear Trump shouting in the background as the then-president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, told him the situation was “terrible.”

Scott forwarded his recommendation to a top executive. According to the filings, she canceled the show because of her fear that guests would say the election was rigged and if she fought back it would be just a token.

By Nov. 13, Raj Shah, a senior vice president at Fox Corp., was advising Lachlan Murdoch, Scott and Dinh of the “strong conservative and viewer backlash to Fox that we are working to track and mitigate.” He said that positive impressions among Fox News viewers “dropped precipitously after Election Day to the lowest levels we’ve ever seen.”

The next day, Lachlan Murdoch warned Scott that a Fox News anchor’s coverage of a pro-Trump rally was “[s]mug and obnoxious”; Scott responded that she was “calling now” to remedy. Leland Vittert’s last appearance on Fox was in January of 2020 and he is now an anchor at NewsNation.

Former House Speaker Paul Ryan, who sits on the Fox Corporation board, sent an email to Murdoch about the circular false information loop – election deniers “got a diet of information telling them the election was stolen from what they believe were credible sources,” he wrote.

Rupert advised Lachlan, “Just tell her … Fox News, which correctly predicted the election, is changing its tune. It might seem easy, but it’s not as easy as it might seem.

On Jan. 26, Tucker Carlson had Lindell on his show. Murdoch told the attorneys that he was not interested in taking money for MyPillow ads.

The Tea Party, Fox Politics and the Radical Left: How Kevin McCarthy overcame the 2016 Capitol Insurgency to Become President of the United States

The ex-presidents entire political career, the current Republican Party, and a vast conservative media empire are all based on the same idea: giving the party base exactly what it wants to hear.

Key players on the right feel that they have no choice but to appease and inflame voters in order to win over them, and this is exactly what they are trying to do.

The GOP has led by the voters who are fervent, constantly self-radicalizing. GOP luminaries who resist the tide, like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, ex-Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake and former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, see their careers expire. The ones that buy in are the ones that can rocket to prominence.

There are also signs that the billionaire publisher may finally be getting buyer’s remorse over Trump given the headline in his New York Post after the ex-president’s low energy 2024 campaign launch in November, which read, “Been there, Don that.”

In a deposition made public in a court filing, he said that the dollar is green and not red or blue.

Republican politicians on Fox are influenced by the calculation of what will happen in the political market. Their adoption of a lot of the doctrine favored by the conservatives stretched American democracy to the limit.

Catering to that group helped propel Trump to victory in the 2016 presidential election. GOP lawmakers whose hold on power depended on not crossing the reality-star-turned-president then allowed Trump to run riot. That helped foster an unstoppable radical tide that led to the US Capitol insurrection in 2021 and eventually to Republicans acquitting him in not one but two impeachment dramas.

It was the Republican base’s power that forced the new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to make concessions to the most radical representatives in the conference after 15 rounds of voting to win his job. McCarthy had earlier watched as two predecessors, former Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan, tried to resist the GOP’s far right insurgency and lost their job. As McCarthy showed by handing Fox host Tucker Carlson access to hours of Capitol Hill security footage last week – despite Carlson’s conspiracy theories about January 6, 2021 – his speakership is a totally owned subsidiary of the GOP’s most extreme elements.

Murdoch worried about driving away the GOP base that McCarthy dominated and now many financial experts are fretting about a possibleDEFAULT that could rattle the global economy.

Trump, a man who had lived in Manhattan for most of his life, was the perfect choice for the moment because he spoke to people in a way they hadn’t before. He was condemned by liberals for his extreme, racialized and sometimes profane rhetoric. The early rallies were more like stand-up comedy shows than presidential events and they were fun for his crowds. Here was someone who was shouting out loud what millions of Americans had believed for years but felt constrained from saying because of social convention. Many commentators decried Trump’s demagoguery but fewer examined the social, economic and political reasons for his rise.

“This persistent theme — that Republicans in Washington fail to effectively represent the values of the people who elect them – foreshadowed the nomination of Donald Trump in 2016,” DeSantis writes in “The Courage to be Free,” published on Tuesday.

The behavior of party leaders in Washington and the aspirations of the GOP voter base would grow wider over time.

When politicians go to Washington, they forget where they come from and end up as instruments of a political system that works against their interests. Yet issues like the need to raise the debt ceiling to keep the government solvent and the economy running or key foreign policy questions, like US support for Ukraine, sometimes require leaders to take a different view of the national interest than prevails back at home.

At the annual Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City, Trump talked about the marriage of convenience between his presidency and the conservative media.

“Stick with us. Don’t believe what they are saying, the fake news. He said that what you’re reading is not what’s happening.

The Left Behind: What Do Some Left Behind When They See It? The Case of Trump, Fox News, the Left Behind and the Freedom Caucus

Every TV anchor and media executive should understand the painful truth that when a company is sued it is not always known which email or text message is released.

If you see the messages that show you are letting false information on the air, it is very painful.

“Because there isn’t a bigger platform than this in America,” Ryan said. The conservative movement is in a state of turmoil, and I don’t like it.

During the George W. Bush administration, Fox would have been a major backer of military aid for Ukraine if Russia had invaded as it did a year ago. Many guests on the network speak of the importance of Ukranian aid.

But its top stars, like Carlson, are mimicking Trump and questioning whether the US should be opposed to Russia’s authoritarianism and invasion of Ukraine.

Trump will appear this weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference, long a major stop for potential Republican presidential candidates. The other major announced candidate, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, will also attend.

CNN’s Melanie Zanona and Manu Raju interviewed two dozen or so lawmakers that Raju described as “hardcore Trump supporters, people who are part of the Freedom Caucus, people who were essentially his staunchest defenders during his four years in office.”

Multiple members of the Freedom Caucus actually traveled to Florida not to meet with Trump, but instead to talk to DeSantis, according to Raju. They were impressed with what they saw.