GOP candidate continues to maintain financial ties to Norfolk Southern, "X" allowed neo-nazi to monetize their content
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Yesterday, President Joe Biden was in Milwaukee, Wis. celebrating the Inflation Reduction Act’s anniversary and noting that Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) has advocated for outsourcing manufacturing jobs.
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WHAT YOU MISSED
Personal financial disclosures revealed that Matt Dolan, a Republican candidate for one of Ohio’s Senate seats, has held on to upwards of $50,000 worth of Norfolk Southern stock. The railroad company has been at the center of an environmental disaster from earlier this year, when one of its freight cars derailed and released toxic chemicals into the air and water around East Palestine, Ohio.
Dolan, who has served in both Ohio’s state Senate and House of Representatives, has also received campaign donations from the exceptionally lucrative company during his first attempt to reach the U.S. Senate in 2022.
Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen (R) insinuated, without evidence, to conservative radio station “Montana Talks” that abortion clinics run by Planned Parenthood are trafficking humans.
“There are numerous instances where Planned Parenthood has been flagrantly violated state law and not reported rape cases, even statutory rape cases, intentionally falsified records in order to protect people and not to tell the state,” Knudsen said.
“I don't think it's a stretch to say that this could be happening with human trafficking victims, but I will say, I mean, candidly, we just, that's not an area that we've got the bandwidth to get into.”
He then said he would not be investigating the reproductive care organization because his office doesn’t have the “bandwidth” for it.
X (the artist formerly known as Twitter) has been allowing sponsored content and ads from major brands like Amazon, Home Depot and the MLB to appear on an account that shares pro-Hitler content — thus allowing the neo-Nazi user to receive a small portion of ad revenue.
Under X’s new model, accounts can be monetized if they are verified and allow advertisements to be posted to their feed. “NewAmericanUnion,” the account in question, had done so and was sharing content that praised Adolf Hitler and referenced antisemitic conspiracies. The account has since been banned from the platform.
“Since Elon Musk took over the company, X has placed ads for numerous brands directly on Holocaust denial, white nationalist, and neo-Nazi accounts,” explained Media Matters’ Eric Hananoki, who first reported the circumstances of New American Union.
New X CEO Linda Yaccarino had previously claimed that popular brands were “protected from the risk of being next to” offensive posts.
With fourth indictment, Trump demonstrates a two-faced justice system
The phrase “the walls are closing in” was uttered so often during Donald Trump’s presidency that there was enough footage to create a montage of it. Even during his initial run for office, “Teflon Don” seemed to oafishly maneuver his way out of every possible act of scandal, controversy and blatant corruption. But now, as the former president faces down an unprecedented fourth indictment in Georgia for (allegedly) orchestrating a conspiracy to overturn the state’s electoral choices, could this be the Chinese finger trap that finally topples such the self-identified “extremely stable genius”?
I wouldn’t hold your breath. But not because Mr. Trump is some calculating Machiavelli. Nor are the coterie of malevolent legal honchos (who seemed to have no problem blatantly emailing each other about their attempts to illegally overturn an election) he surrounds himself uniquely positioned to rescue him.
Rather, it’s due to something that Trump has long understood and openly bragged about: If you’re rich enough, the rules that govern everyday people simply don’t apply to you.
Despite being indicted across three states and the District of Columbia with 91 felonies with cumulative sentences adding up to hypothetically hundreds of years in prison time, Trump has yet to even come close to being forced to sit behind bars. Meanwhile, at the same Fulton County, Ga. jail where he will turn himself in eventually, countless people have been incarcerated for years — and some have even died waiting for their trial.
As someone who has reported on criminal justice issues, I can tell you firsthand how unsurprising all this is; I’ve seen business owners who engaged in human trafficking receive a slap on the wrist, while young African-American men have been sentenced to spend years and years of their lives behind bars because of faulty intelligence gathered by federal law enforcement.
America’s bloated carceral system not only comes down hardest on the poorest people but seems uniquely designed to penalize them. Yes, some C-suite criminals like Trump do face consequences; Bernie Madoff and Jeffrey Skilling of Enron fame come to mind. But that’s usually the exception, not the rule. Even known perpetrators of violence like Jeffery Epstein and Harvey Weinstein were able to use their massive amounts of wealth to evade meaningful consequences for decades.
We are, after all, living in what the journalist Michael Hobbes calls “the golden age of white-collar crime.” That doesn’t just mean financial crimes in my mind, though: What mountains and mountains of reporting by my contemporaries and I have shown is that the uber-wealthy exist in an entirely different tier of the legal system. And if we want to hold people like Trump to account for attempting to use criminal means to destroy public institutions, we’ll have to reckon with that system as a whole first.