Ronna McDaniel Reelected as RNC Chair, Despite Republican Party’s Recent Losses

Republicans voted Friday to reelect Ronna McDaniel to lead the party’s national committee, doubling down on the agenda that led them to underperform in the midterm elections.

Incumbent McDaniel won 111 votes, while Harmeet Dhillon won 51. They also faced off against Mike Lindell, the founder of MyPillow and wild conspiracy theorist, who won four votes.

A total of 101 RNC members endorsed McDaniel in October for another two-year term. She sought to cast herself as a solid leader who could unite the GOP’s warring factions. Under her leadership, the RNC spent at least $20 million trying to thwart Democrats’ attempts to make voting easier during the pandemic. She also shared an RNC-sponsored video containing falsehoods about voter fraud ahead of the 2022 midterms.

McDaniel is staunchly loyal to Trump, who has been widely blamed for Republicans’ poor performance during the November elections. Despite the lack of a promised “red wave” at the time, the GOP endorsing her for RNC chair shows the former president still holds considerable sway over the party.

Dhillon, on the other hand, tried to capitalize on the growing dissatisfaction with Trumpism. A lawyer, Dhillon insists she is not an election denier, but she has represented several in court, including failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and Trump himself.

In a major coup, Ron DeSantis—who is favored to beat Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination—endorsed Dhillon Thursday.

Dhillon ran a complicated campaign, trying to highlight both her ties to Trump’s MAGA message and her independence from the party establishment. Her campaign manager also organized the January 6, 2021, rally that turned into the Capitol insurrection. But Dhillon also said she had not sought either Trump’s or Desantis’s endorsement, playing to the party activists demanding new leadership.

It seems her strategy did not pay off.

Nearly three months after Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, was attacked by a home invader, the authorities released body cam footage and 911 call audio tape detailing what exactly transpired during the attack. The footage, warning, is graphic, and can be seen here.

Before the footage was released, right-wingers fomented gross conspiracy about the attack, even going as far as to simply joke about and laugh at it.

One of the conspiracies was that the attacker, David Depape, was a lover of Paul Pelosi. Despite the footage, 911 call, and testimony, some right-wingers (and their fans) are still persisting in peddling their baseless theories, citing things like Pelosi not wearing pants or that he was holding a glass in his hand.

This Twitter user, a proud self-proclaimed “MAGA” “Elon Groupie” gleefully wrote “it’s finally hammer time!”

And even Fox News, both the home of mainstream already-radical conservatism and the off-ramp toward even more extreme sources, couldn’t simply say, “This is horrifying,” and move on:

But contrary to this Fox host’s point, it doesn’t matter if your impulse is to feel conspiratorial about a straightforward case of violence (especially when your network is primarily guilty of training that impulse). As right-wing hero Ben Shapiro always says, facts don’t care about your feelings. But for some reason, facts—and even video evidence—just aren’t a match for the visceral, mind-melting conspiracy sensations that right-wingers have developed.

Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed Friday that President Joe Biden “abused his power” by lowering gas prices in order to influence the outcome of the midterm elections, leading many to speculate whether Republicans wanted lower gas prices.

In the months ahead of the November vote, Biden took multiple steps to bring down gasoline prices that had surged due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. One major move was to release 15 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which helped flood the U.S. gas market. The national average price per gallon dropped dramatically to $3.76 in October from about $5 per gallon in June.

Speaking on the floor of the House of Representatives, Greene accused Biden of driving down gas prices for political gain. Republicans campaigned heavily on inflation, particularly gas prices, ahead of the 2022 midterms. While Democrats saw historic wins during the elections, about a third of voters said inflation was a top factor in how they voted, according to a CNN exit poll. More than seven out of 10 of those people voted for Republicans.

Republicans spent months blaming Biden for the exorbitant gas prices, and now they apparently are also angry at him for bringing those prices down.

As if this nonsensical about-face weren’t enough, Greene apparently has zero sense of self-awareness.

“It’s a shame to trick the American people just to win an election,” she chastises. “No president should be able to use their emergency powers for politics.”

Says the woman who apparently has Donald Trump on speed dial, the man who lied that the 2020 election was stolen from him and used his emergency powers several times for his own political agenda.

“Where was the humanity? They beat my son like a piñata.”

Friday morning, CNN’s Don Lemon interviewed Tyre Nichols’s mother, RowVaughn Wells, and stepfather, Rodney Wells, about the violent police beating to death of her son, Tyre.

On January 7, Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, was reportedly pulled over about 250 feet away from his home by Memphis police officers. A police statement said Nichols was pulled over for suspected reckless driving, after which a “confrontation” ensued. Five officers were involved in beating Nichols to the brink of death; he succumbed to his injuries three days later from said “confrontation.” He died in the hospital.

The five officers were fired nearly two weeks after the traffic stop; each was arrested and charged with numerous crimes, including second-degree murder, on Thursday.

In an interview following the indictment of the five officers, Nichols’s mother revealed that police had initially blocked her from seeing her dying son at the hospital because he was “under arrest.”

Nichols was “already gone” by the time she and her husband arrived at the hospital, she said. “They had beat him to a pulp.”

After losing their son to such heinous violence dealt by those supposedly meant to “protect and serve,” Nichols’s family now is just trying to make sense of such senselessness.

“Where was the humanity?” Nichols’s mother asked. She described the shocking imbalance—her 150-pound son, afflicted with Crohn’s disease, being beaten to death by five police officers.

She actually feels “sorry” for the officers. She described the harm and shame the officers have brought to their own families and to the Black community. “They didn’t have to do this.”

“I don’t hate anybody, that’s not in my nature,” she said. “I just feel sorry for them because they did something horrendous.”

To hear Nichols’s mother is to attempt to understand the profoundly difficult burden she now holds. Mired in the grief of such unspeakable violence, she speaks to the severe lack of humanity that plagues our structures of policing, and the vicious consequences of that poison.

Watch the CNN interview here.

Gay and bisexual men would no longer have to abstain from sex before donating blood under rules changes the Food and Drug Administration proposed Friday, but only if they are in monogamous relationships.

Men who have sex with men, or MSM, were initially banned from donating blood during the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s. The FDA relaxed those rules, first in 2015 by deciding MSM could donate after remaining celibate for a year and then again in 2020 by changing the abstention period to three months.

Under the newly recommended changes, all potential blood donors—regardless of gender or sexual orientation—would report whether they had seen multiple sexual partners or a new partner in the past three months. If so, they would be asked if they had anal sex. If they have, they would have to wait before they can donate blood.

There will be no change in deferral time for people taking PrEP or PEP, landmark HIV-prevention drugs, for people who consistently wear condoms during sex, or for people who present a negative HIV test.

The American Medical Association, blood banks, and LGBTQ rights organizations have urged the FDA for years to change its rules for blood donation. Health experts say the current regulations are homophobic, outdated, and don’t actually work to keep the nation’s donated blood supply safe.

Some experts worry that the proposed changes would still single out MSM, many of whom say they have felt like pariahs for decades because the FDA rules make them feel as if they are seen as untrustworthy or merely disease transmitters.

The Human Rights Campaign hailed the potential changes as “an important first step toward dismantling an antiquated and discriminatory blood donation policy.”

But “while today’s announcement is a victory, it’s not the end of the road,” HRC President Kelley Robinson said in a statement, calling on the FDA to adopt “an approach rooted in science, not identity.”

The FDA proposal will be open for public comment for 60 days, after which the agency will review the comments and make a final decision.