Those Maleficent Men and Their Lying Machines

From The Chronicle (Duke University):

Stephen Miller, White House senior advisor […] drew a firestorm of media attention this week after hundreds of his emails with a former Breitbart editor were reported by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Miller, an immigration hardliner who was reportedly an architect of President Donald Trump’s controversial “Muslim ban,” sent the emails to Katie McHugh, then an editor at Breitbart, in 2015 and 2016. The SPLC report paints a picture in which Miller would send information and story ideas—sometimes citing VDare, which has published work by white nationalists, and InfoWars, which is known for promoting conspiracy theories—to McHugh, who then often wrote about the topics for Breitbart.

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Judicial Ac-tea-vism

From THE PROGRESS REPORT at THINK PROGRESS:

Yesterday, a conservative district court judge appointed by President Ronald Reagan ruled that the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional, arguing further that, since he believes the mandate is “inextricably linked” to the rest of the measure, the entire law must be unconstitutional. “The act, like a defectively designed watch, needs to be redesigned and reconstructed by the watchmaker,” Judge Roger Vinson wrote. The ruling, however, contradicts 14 other court decisions, the opinion of over 100 law professors, not to mention recent polling showing that Americans want the law to be either protected or expanded. There is also a distinctly political aspect to the ruling. Vinson acknowledged borrowing heavily in his opinion from a brief written by the right-wing group Family Research Council, and he seemed to give a shout-out to the Tea Party in his ruling, which has long targeted health care reforms as “economic Marxism.”

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The United Hates of America

From the Southern Poverty Law Center:

The radical right caught fire last year, as broad-based populist anger at political, demographic and economic changes in America ignited an explosion of new extremist groups and activism across the nation.

Hate groups stayed at record levels — almost 1,000 — despite the total collapse of the second largest neo-Nazi group in America. Furious anti-immigrant vigilante groups soared by nearly 80%, adding some 136 new groups during 2009. And, most remarkably of all, so-called “Patriot” groups — militias and other organizations that see the federal government as part of a plot to impose “one-world government” on liberty-loving Americans — came roaring back after years out of the limelight.

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