Minnesota Republican Absurdly Blames Global Warming on Pride Month

There are an estimated 24 million people who identify as LGBTQ in America—a likely undercount, as more and more people grow comfortable embracing themselves. And yet, despite that progress, Republicans like Minnesota state Senator Eric Lucero are working overtime to turn back the clock.

“GLOBAL WARMING,” Lucero began in a tweet on Monday. “Our Creator hates PRIDE, and each of us as the creation will be held to account for our choices, eventually.”

“The 7-color natural rainbow is a reminder of His promise to never again enact worldwide judgment by WATER. The next worldwide judgment will be by FIRE.”

Neither the Bible nor any ancient religious text says anything about Pride Month, a modern-day celebration dedicated to people’s ability to love and live freely and wholly.

Deep theology aside, if there is a God or gods, they would likely be less concerned with their creations feeling the warmth of love, than, say, their creations degrading other creations around them.

As in, Lucero’s invocation of climate change as some sort of threat promised by God in response to “PRIDE,” might (shocker) be missing the mark of what God (or gods) is (or are) actually concerned with. Maybe, just maybe, the idea that global warming is spurred by relentless greed (an actual universally accepted sin) is more convincing than the idea that God is making the globe hotter because people are loving freely.

Lucero’s foolishness ought not be lost as Minnesota hosts some of the worst air quality in the world at this very moment due to wildfires made worse by climate change.

Not to be seen as an aberrant comment, Lucero’s tweet adds to a growing pathetic and creepish track record.

Last year, Lucero tried spreading fake rumors that schools were harboring litter boxes in bathrooms and uniforms with tails to accommodate kids who identify as cats.

On January 6, 2021, Lucero spoke at a “Storm the Capitol” rally in St. Paul, in support of the riots on the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. seeking to overturn the 2020 election results. “We are at the threshold of a Civil War … we need to purge. We need to pull the weeds,” one of Lucero’s fellow speakers said to the crowd.

Lucero, if nothing else, is a robotic outrage automaton, like many of his contemporaries. A day after Chaya Raichik posted a tweet displaying her complete lack of reading comprehension:

… Lucero tweeted essentially the exact same thing, showcasing his blithering desperation to be just like the other cool kids who see understanding words as a suggestion for, not a necessity to, daily life:

Over the weekend, videos of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. exercising circulated the internet. Groaning and glistening while donning tight jeans and no shirt, the presidential candidate earned the approval of an interesting array of people, namely far-right media and Twitter’s blue-check army.

“Getting in shape for my debates with President Biden!” Kennedy tweeted alongside a video of him squeezing through nine non–fully extended pushups.

“That’s a fit boy,” a voice said behind the camera.

Another video showcased Kennedy struggling through a similarly lackluster set of inclined bench presses at what appears to be a whopping 115 pounds—certainly nothing to dismiss on its own, but maybe not a performance to so excitedly cheer for if Kennedy’s body was as herculean as some have made it out to be (this was “his last drop set of the day,” the video tweeter assured the public).

Anyhow, the lovefest ensued.

The posts have also been part of a smear campaign against a prominent scientist who has been targeted for his support of vaccines. The implication being: Why trust a normal-looking scientist who supports vaccines when you have this red, meaty anti-vaxxer (who definitely doesn’t instead inject himself with steroids) right in front of you?

RFK Jr. prides his campaign on being health-centered in a way that no other candidate is, hence his latest strategy to showcase himself as uniquely fit relative to Biden (curiously, the comparison to the Republican front-runner, Donald Trump, has not been made by RFK Jr. or many of his ogling fans). But having a balanced diet and embracing physical activity certainly do not preclude someone from also taking rigorously studied vaccines against diseases that have killed millions of people.

Such revolutionarily basic logic unfortunately might not penetrate the force field humming around the freethinkers who have been led to believe that freethinking means free of thinking.

The sweaty Kennedy content was imposed so forcefully onto people’s Twitter timelines, it would not have been surprising if Elon Musk himself was juicing the numbers. And that might not be the only juicing relevant here. While Kennedy has prided himself on standing against vaccines researched and scrutinized by thousands of scientists around the world, one might not be out of bounds to question the particular puffiness of his stature.

It’s not bad for someone to take steroids, especially if they are proven to support one’s physical or mental health, or longevity. If only that logic would be extended to the millions of transgender people in this country, instead of for instance, Kennedy insinuating that chemicals in water are turning them trans.

A new report out Tuesday morning from a Senate committee rips the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security for ignoring “a massive amount of intelligence information” in the weeks leading up to the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

In one egregious example, the report from the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee charged that the bureau overlooked a December 2020 tip that members of the Proud Boys were gearing up to be in Washington on the day Congress voted to certify Joe Biden’s victory and that their “plan is to literally kill people,” in the report’s language. Numerous social media posts warned of violence erupting, including some that used language like “burn the place to the ground” (with respect to the Capitol) and, from a member of the Oath Keepers group: “There is only one way in. It is not signs. It’s not rallies. It’s fucking bullets!”

In addition to that, the social media company Parler, a platform favored by MAGA-land, directly sent the FBI a number of posts that it found alarming. According to the report, one read: “This is not a rally and it’s no longer a protest. This is a final stand where we are drawing the red line at Capitol Hill.… Don’t be surprised if we take the #capital [sic] building.”

And yet, with all those warnings and more, on the very morning of January 6, as Donald Trump was preparing to give his “fight like hell” speech, the FBI announced that there were “no credible threats at this time,” as the AP reported Tuesday morning.

“Our intelligence agencies completely dropped the ball,” said Senator Gary Peters, Democrat of Michigan and committee chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. “Despite a multitude of tips and other intelligence warnings of violence on Jan. 6, the report showed that these agencies repeatedly—repeatedly—downplayed the threat level and failed to share the intelligence they had with law enforcement partners.”

FBI officials have previously testified that they knew of no such intel. The report seems to contradict that completely. Maybe people just found it hard to believe that armed citizens would storm their Capitol building with the literal intent of killing members of Congress (and the vice president).

And, of course—maybe some people in the FBI suspected it might happen but didn’t disagree with the mob that the election was stolen. Whatever’s behind the failure, it’s a historic and humiliating one.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down the controversial “independent state legislature theory,” in a serious win for democracy.

The court voted 6–3 in the case Moore v. Harper to knock down the fringe right-wing legal theory, which would have given state legislatures broad, virtually unchecked authority to oversee federal elections.

The Supreme Court had been asked in the case to decide whether North Carolina’s Supreme Court had the power to throw out the Republican-controlled legislature’s congressional maps.

Last year, the state Supreme Court deemed the maps an “egregious and intentional partisan gerrymander” meant to favor Republicans—and court-drawn maps were instead used for the 2022 election.

North Carolina Republicans argued that under the Constitution’s elections clause, the state legislature has the ultimate authority over election laws, not the courts, and they wanted their gerrymandered map reinstated.

But the Supreme Court handily rejected their argument, writing: “The Elections Clause does not vest exclusive and independent authority in state legislatures to set the rules regarding federal elections.”

Had the court ruled differently, election deniers throughout the country would likely be rejoicing. In its most extreme form, the independent state legislature theory could allow state legislatures to bypass state courts and governors’ vetoes when it comes to election law, giving them virtually unchecked authority with no checks and balances. It could even allow state legislatures to certify presidential electors who were not approved by the voters. Unsurprisingly, the theory was one that Donald Trump and his allies used to try to overturn the 2020 election.

This story has been updated.

When Fox News fired Tucker Carlson in April, the network entered a tailspin. It had parted company with stars before—most notably Bill O’Reilly, after Fox News and the longtime host settled lawsuits with five women who had accused him of sexual misconduct—but always bounced back. Fox News, the thinking both inside and outside the network went, was bigger than its stars and could make or break them more or less at will.

This time was different, however. Carlson was a different type of Fox anchor: Less glued to the GOP establishment, he played a vital role in pushing nativist and far-right narratives into the mainstream. At the same time, Fox had genuine, if significantly smaller, competitors on its right; viewers had real alternatives, something that hadn’t always been the case. After Carlson departed the network, its rankings tanked. There were calls for boycotts and, most absurdly, allegations that Fox News had “gone woke.” In May, the ratings for Carlson’s 8 p.m. slot fell by more than 50 percent; the network’s prime time fell by about 40 percent. Fox News was in a genuine crisis.

At the end of June, that crisis seems to largely be over. The network’s ratings have rebounded, although they haven’t come close to what they were before Carlson’s defenestration. Last week, Fox News dethroned MSNBC—which had taken the top of the leaderboard during its right-wing competitor’s tailspin—averaging 1,536,000 viewers to MSNBC’s 1,397,000 in prime time. (CNN continued to lag behind with 800,000 viewers.) And on Monday, Fox News announced it was shaking up its post-Carlson lineup. Jesse Watters, who got his start doing racist “comedy” videos on O’Reilly’s show and has since become a star as the resident doofus on Fox News’s The Five, will take over Carlson’s old 8 p.m. show. Greg Gutfeld’s painfully unfunny late-night show, Gutfeld!, will move to 10 p.m.

Both hosts use the guise of comedy to push reactionary views. Both are also painfully unoriginal and predictable, using the same complaints about wokeness and crime again and again in predictable ways. Unlike with Carlson, you’ll never be surprised—even if you will occasionally be shocked—by what they say. That’s the point. Fox News’s brass grew frustrated with Carlson because they couldn’t control him. Carlson would stray—sometimes far—from Republican orthodoxy on a number of issues. He didn’t try to disguise his bigotry, as Watters and Gutfeld often do, with the possibility that they’re joking. He would push back at efforts to control him. Fox News executives don’t have to worry about Watters and Gutfeld. They are good soldiers who will follow the company line.