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McConnell’s New Bill Reveals Unrelenting Pressure To Curb Judge-Shopping

Just a few weeks ago, it seemed that the energy around addressing the increasingly common practice of plaintiffs handpicking their...

Facebook posts – A Tennessee bill doesn’t ban vaccines from being pumped into the food supply

Tennessee has become the first state in the U.S. to ban Bill Gates’ mRNA from being pumped into the food supply.

Lara Trump downplays hush money charges as simple ‘bookkeeping error’



Lara Trump downplayed the criminal charges against her father-in-law Donald Trump as a mere "bookkeeping error."

The Republican National Committee co-chair appeared Wednesday on Sean Hannity's Fox News program, where she suggested Manhattan prosecutors were engaged in election interference for trying the former president on 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up alleged hush money payments to adult movie actress Stormy Daniels, reported HuffPost.

"Everyone can see what this is about," Lara Trump said. "They have, and are forcing, Donald Trump to sit in a courtroom — this is a former president of the United States, the current nominee for the Republican side of the aisle for president — for weeks on end. For what, Sean? They claim a bookkeeping error — really?"

“This is insane," she added. "We can all see exactly what this is all about and what the goal of this is. Of course, it’s to keep Donald Trump from the campaign trail."

Prosecutors allege in their indictment that Trump directed his then-attorney Michael Cohen, who has already served nearly three years in prison after pleading guilty in the scheme, to pay Daniels off in the weeks before the 2016 election to ensure her silence about an extramarital affair.

ALSO READ: A neuroscientist explains how Trump is using existential fear to win the election

Trump then allegedly falsified business records by reimbursing Cohen in a series of transactions described as payment for legal services.

Trump has denied all the allegations.

The ex-president's campaign circulated talking points ahead of the trial, which started Monday, directing surrogates to describe the case as a "a full-frontal assault on American Democracy and the Constitution" and a "witch hunt," and recommending that supporters do not refer to the case as a "hush money case," but to instead describe it as "entries in the company’s records."

Watch the video below or at this link.

Judge strikes Rudy Giuliani’s demand to overturn defamation case verdict



Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani's request that a jury's verdict that he defamed election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman be thrown out was rejected Monday.

Just Security's Adam Klasfeld posted about the failure of his motion, stating that Judge Beryl Howell ruled that the "massive" judgment still stands.

Giuliani, who claims he is broke and has filed for bankruptcy, owes the Georgia women more than $145 million. Giuliani had accused them of committing election fraud while counting votes in Fulton County in 2020.

Meanwhile, an amendment to his bankruptcy declaration revealed his secretive defense fund is paying up to $675 an hour for bankruptcy lawyers.

"GIuliani's renewed motion urging this Court to reverse its prior findings and rulings and to override the jury's considered verdict on the basis of five threadbare arguments falls well short of persuading that 'the evidence and all reasonable interferences that can be drawn therefrom are so one-sided that reasonable men and women could not have reached a 'verdict in [plantiffs'] favor,'" Howell wrote.

"... The jury's verdict of awarding plaintiffs compensatory and punitive damages for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress caused by Giuliani and his co-conspirators, as reflected in the Final Judgment, in the amount of $145,969,000, plus post-judgment interest ... stands."

ALSO READ: A neuroscientist explains how Trump is using existential fear to win the election

The 48-page opinion also explained just how Giuliani's bankruptcy paused everything for the victims involved.

"A unanimous jury awarded plaintiffs Ruby Freeman and Wandrea’ ArShaye “Shaye” Moss, on December 15, 2023, a total of $148,169,000.00, in compensatory and punitive damages for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress, against defendant Rudolph W. Giuliani," the filing began.

But Giuliani stopped all of it with his next move.

"This jury award was followed, in rapid succession, three days later, by entry of the final judgment against Giuliani, and two days after that, by this Court’s order dissolving the 30-day automatic stay for enforcement of judgment to permit plaintiffs to register their judgment immediately in any district," Judge Howell wrote.

"The very next day, on December 21, 2023, Giuliani filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition in the Southern District of New York, which filing automatically halted all proceedings in this case, including plaintiffs’ right to exercise the authority granted by this Court to seek prompt enforcement of the judgment against Giuliani."

Read the full filing here.

Pro-Trump media landscape ‘utterly collapsing’ compared to last election cycle: report



In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, a slew of far-right websites popped up and cashed in on content propping up then-candidate Donald Trump. And those sites continued to rake in millions of dollars during Trump's time in the White House. But since 2020, the right-wing media cash spigot has effectively slowed to a trickle.

A new report in the Atlantic found that since the 2020 election cycle, the most prominent pro-Trump websites have seen their once robust traffic dry up. Writer Paul Farhi analyzed data from media analysis website The Righting, which focuses on conservative publishers, and reported that of the 10 most popular right-wing websites, traffic was down by an average of roughly 40%.

"The flow of traffic to Donald Trump’s most loyal digital-media boosters isn’t just slowing, as in the rest of the industry; it’s utterly collapsing," Farhi wrote. "Some of the bigger names in the field have been pummeled the hardest: The Daily Caller lost 57 percent of its audience; Drudge Report, the granddaddy of conservative aggregation, was down 81 percent; and The Federalist, founded just over a decade ago, lost a staggering 91 percent."

ALSO READ: A neuroscientist explains how Trump is using existential fear to win the election

"FoxNews.com, by far the most popular conservative-news site, has fared better, losing 'only' 22 percent of traffic, which translates to 23 million fewer monthly site visitors compared with four years ago," he added.

According to Farhi's research, the primary reason for the precipitous drop in clicks for far-right websites is ultimately due to Facebook. Conservative publishers were for years dependent on Facebook engagement as a primary source of traffic. The social media platform's algorithm (the complex code that determines what content shows up in a user's feed) had predominantly favored outrage, as content that provokes a negative reaction is more likely to get a user to click, like, comment or share a post.

In 2020, Vox reported that the Facebook algorithm was overwhelmingly favorable to conservatives, with far-right pundits like Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino bringing in tens of millions of clicks per month from Facebook engagement. Progressive media analysis group Media Matter for America found that anti-transgender content in particular generated a disproportionate amount of clicks for conservative websites. New York Times columnist Kevin Roose found that "conservative pages were beating out liberals’ [pages] in making it into the day’s top 10 Facebook posts with links in the United States, based on engagement, like the number of reactions, comments, and shares the posts receive."

Amid a wave of criticism from Congress and international bodies over Facebook being exploited by bad actors to influence elections, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced changes to the algorithm in 2018 aimed at promoting content from friends and family over news publishers. He further tweaked it in 2021 to further deprioritize content from publishers, which has, over time, resulted in far fewer clicks for the conservative publishers that used to dominate the platform.

"All of this monkeying with the internet’s plumbing drastically reduced the referral traffic flowing to news and commentary sites," Farhi wrote. "The changes have affected everyone involved in digital media, including some liberal-leaning sites—such as Slate (which saw a 42 percent traffic drop), the Daily Beast (41 percent), and Vox (62 percent, after losing its two most prominent writers)—but the impact appears to have been the worst, on average, for conservative media."

According to Farhi, conservatives are now retreating from websites depending on clicks to other forms of media entirely, like podcasts, Substack newsletters, YouTube channels and videos on the far-right broadcasting platform Rumble.

"There’s a lot of choice," said The Righting owner Howard Polskin. "Even if [the big] sites went out of business tomorrow, there are a lot of voices still out there."

Click here to read Farhi's Atlantic article in full.