Sky Palma has been blogging about politics, social issues and religion for over a decade. He lives in Los Angeles and also enjoys Brazilian jiu jitsu, chess, music and art. He's the founder of the blog DeadState.org.
Republican House candidate Danielle Stella is wanted by the law, but that isn't stopping her from trying to take Rep. Ilhan Omar's (D-MN) seat in Congress. According to the Daily Beast, she been able to raise almost $84,000 despite being wanted for felony shoplifting. She also has a sizable presence on social media.
Stella's fellow candidates for Omar's seat aren't too thrilled about her presence in the race. According to Republican candidate Lacy Johnson, Stella's negative headlines, along with her apparent belief in the "QAnon" conspiracy theory, could undermine the rest of the candidates.
“Candidates are reflections of the party in a way, and it’s not a good reflection of the party in a sense,” Johnson told the Daily Beast. “But now, being in politics, you do learn that people do have all kinds of ways of looking at things."
Her dabbling in conspiracies is already having an effect. Police were called to a hotel in Osceola, Wisconsin, when people flooded the hotel with phone calls after a YouTube conspiracy theorist speculated that Stella was in some sort of unspecified danger at the location. She also got the Twitter account for her campaign suspended for sharing a rumor about Omar being an Iranian government asset and calling for her to be "tried for #treason and hanged.”
Stella's campaign is still active online, but Johnson is baffled as to how she plans to move forward, telling the Daily Beast, “I wouldn’t even run if I was on the run from the police."
Ever since she expressed support for the unsuccessful effort to keep Donald Trump off the state ballot for the 2024 election, Colorado's Secretary of State has seen an escalation in violent online threats.
Jena Griswold was brought in as a co-defendant when a group of Colorado residents sued the state to keep Trump off the ballot. Since then, according to a report from Rolling Stone which analyzed data provided by her office, threats targeting her increased by more than 600 percent.
The case against Trump cited the 14th Amendment, which bars insurrectionists from holding office. The effort was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this month.
“We are coming for you b----," one email to Griswold read.
“If you have kids, I hope they get murdered by illegal aliens,” read another.
“I can’t wait to find you and follow you to your house and expose your address," one person said in a voicemail.
“Take my advice and wear Kevlar… a lot of Kevlar!!!” one person told Griswold on social media.
According to Rolling Stone, threats from Trump supporters have "skyrocketed across the country," many of them directed at election officials and inspired by Trump and his allies' false claims of mass voter fraud in the 2020 election. Judges and prosecutors in Trump's various criminal and civil trials have also been on the receiving end of threats, as well as lawmakers who oppose Trump.
“This Big Lie from 2020 has morphed into a Big Threat,” Griswold said.
“At the secretary of state level and local levels across the nation, we are seeing extreme threats to election administrators — which are really fueled by elected officials or prominent people like Donald Trump, who spread disinformation, repeat the Big Lie, [and] undermine confidence. … This is the new MAGA strategy: spread lies and disinformation, undermine faith in our elections, disenfranchise voters, and intimidate election workers.”
New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan ruled Monday that Donald Trump's criminal trial for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's hush money case against the ex-president will begin on April 15.
In a Wednesday filing to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, Trump’s lawyers argued that the April 15 date likely will cause a conflict with the potential start date for his classified documents case trial.
MSNBC host and legal expert Katie Phang shared the document via X, writing, "NEW: (NOT-President) Donald Trump files this Notice of Trial Date to advise Judge Cannon that he is due to commence trial in his Manhattan DA criminal case on April 15th so he’s got scheduling conflicts now."
The Associated Press notes Cannon, "Has yet to set a firm trial date despite holding two hours-long hearings with lawyers this month. Multiple motions to dismiss the case are still pending, disputes over classified evidence have spanned months and a bitterly contested defense request to disclose the names of government witnesses remains unresolved.
The news outlet adds, "Complicating matters further is a recent order suggesting" Cannon is "still entertaining a Trump team claim about his rightful possession of the documents that she had appeared openly skeptical of days earlier."
The notice reads, On March 25, 2024, the judge presiding over People v. Trump scheduled jury selection to commence on April 15, 2024. While the exact end date of any trial cannot be known with certainty, because of jury selection, religious observances, and the anticipated schedule of the trial, we anticipate President Trump will be on trial in People v. Trump from April 15, 2024, through the end of May 2024.
It continued, "Our initial proposed schedule anticipated a March 25 trial date in People v. Trump, and therefore the dates that we proposed to the Court, particularly in late May and early June 2024, are no longer workable for President Trump in light of the adjourned trial date."
In an article published by The Bulwark last week, law professor and former federal prosecutor Kimberly Wehle noted, "Monday was supposed to mark the start of the trial itself, but Merchan pushed it back last week until at least mid-April. The indictment in this case, brought a year ago by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, was the first of the four criminal cases lodged against Trump since he left office, and probably the weakest. But Bragg's case may be the only one of the four that could actually go to trial before the November election."
An onslaught of conspiracy theories that followed the Baltimore bridge collapse Tuesday was seen by tens of millions of people — many of whom heard the “absurd” claims before they even heard the facts of what happened, CNN reported Thursday.
“Why? Just why?” anchor John Berman asked. “The absurd, not to mention offensive, alternative reality, devoid of facts, was created as search and rescue efforts were underway.”
Correspondent Donie O’Sullivan spent time detailing several of the more widespread stories that spread — and easily debunked each of them.
They included claims that the ship's captain was stricken by illness caused by a Covid vaccine; that there was a foreign cyber attack; and that Ukraine and Israel were involved.
“It just kind of got a bit wilder and wilder,” said O’Sullivan. “After that there was an Obama, the Obamas produced a movie on Netflix that had a tanker ship run aground in it. So, therefore, the Obamas had something to do with this. And this now tragic event was then used as a political battering ram in our culture wars in this country at the moment, and people decided to blame DEI, diversity and inclusion policies, in some way for the crashing of this ship.”
The Dali cargo ship, en route to Sri Lanka, rammed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge early Tuesday, causing the massive span to collapse into the water. On Thursday, searchers confirmed that two bodies had been recovered, though another four people are missing and presumed dead.
The ship issued a May Day call and lost power minutes before the crash.
Some of the conspiracy theories were spread by politicians, including Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) who blamed Biden's infrastructure law, and TV personalities such as Fox's Maria Bartiromo who tried to link it to the border crisis.
O’Sullivan said there was no evidence to suggest it was anything other than a terrible accident.
But, he added, “By the time most of us woke up on Tuesday morning to that news of the collapse of the bridge in Baltimore, there were already wild conspiracy theories circulating online just hours after the event occurred.”
He went on, “It was tens of millions of people saw these posts. It's very possible that tens of millions of Americans woke up on Tuesday morning and, before they actually saw … the facts of what happened in Baltimore, they would have read some of these conspiracy theories.”
“Really, the notable thing about this is how it is not extraordinary. There are, there's an alternate reality, right? Being created every day. Whether it’s Taylor Swift in the Super Bowl, or whether it is the 2020 election being rigged in favor of Joe Biden, both of which are false, but more and more Americans are living in this world and, look, the people who are making this misinformation and disinformation, … they're being rewarded greatly because platforms like X, which was formerly Twitter, now owned by Elon Musk, pay in certain cases, for posts to go viral and viral posts can oftentimes be false and scandalous and outlandish and false.
“ …I think that really we should take a step back and just see this is the landscape that we're going into the 2024 election and you can just see how well-oiled a machine the disinformation industry is.”