Raphael Warnock Wins Georgia, Giving Democrats 51 Seats in the Senate

Raphael Warnock won a historic second term as Georgia’s first Black senator Tuesday, beating conservative opponent Herschel Walker in the state runoff race, according to a projection from Decision Desk HQ.

Warnock, whose reelection means Democrats have an outright majority in the Senate, leads Walker 50.34 percent to 49.66 percent, with 84 percent reporting. Decision Desk made the call at 9:48 p.m. E.T.

Warnock and Walker faced off on Tuesday after neither one in November won the minimum 50 percent of votes required to avoid a runoff election.

Warnock was elected to Congress alongside fellow Democrat Jon Ossoff in January 2021, also in runoff elections, a major victory for Democrats in the historically red state. Georgia also went for President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.

Warnock’s win means that the Democrats now have an outright 51–49 majority in the Senate, instead of a 50–50 split with a tiebreak.

But despite the state’s recent history of leaning Democratic, Walker and Warnock were locked in a dead heat for almost the entire race.

A pastor, Warnock describes himself as “Christian progressive,” similar to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who presided at the same church in Atlanta where the senator now leads the congregation.

Warnock is pro-choice and campaigned on the belief that the United States can overcome its racist roots and enact social change. During the runoff, he focused on pocketbook issues such as inflation and health care and also sought to win over younger voters, as well as independents and more centrist Republicans.

Walker, meanwhile, ran on an ultra-right-wing platform, saying he is pro-life, supports traditional (heteronormative) family values, and would back another run by former President Donald Trump.

He complained about “wokeness” and says he does not believe racism exists. He also focused on mainly far-right dog-whistle issues, such as transgender athletes and abortion.

But he has also lied multiple times about his résumé and been accused by former partners as well as his son of domestic abuse. Two women came forward in October alleging he forced them to get abortions.

The Republican Party continued to back Walker, insisting that electing a Black senator proves their party is not racist, but they also began chaperoning him in interviews to try to curb his commentary.

Donald Trump has made quite a splash in the first weeks of his 2024 presidential campaign. Hitting key constituencies—antisemites, racists, and election denialists—he capped it all off with a call to terminate the Constitution and crown himself unelected president.

In response, most Republicans have remained silent. Those who have spoken out have managed to carefully avoid the words “Donald Trump.”

On Tuesday, asked about having to address Trump’s behavior two weeks in a row, Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell refused to say anything actually definitive.

“What I’m saying is it would be pretty hard to be sworn in to the presidency if you’re not willing to uphold the Constitution,” he replied, before ignoring a follow-up question about his personal support for Trump.

This mirrors his response to Trump dining with Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust-denying white nationalist who has threatened murder against Jews and expressed approval for the Taliban. Here, McConnell said it would “be pretty hard” for someone behaving this way to become president. Then he said someone meeting with an antisemite or white supremacist is “highly unlikely to ever be elected president.”

In neither instance does McConnell simply say: Donald Trump should not be president.

Also on Tuesday, Republican House Leader Kevin McCarthy—whose speakership is being challenged—could only muster, “I fully support the Constitution,” before running off from having to dare elaborate.

Senators John Thune (the number two Senate Republican), Roy Blunt, Mike Rounds, John Cornyn, and others have followed suit, expressing disapproval without unequivocally denouncing Trump.

Even people likely running against Trump for the Republican nomination have hesitated saying anything.

Time after time, minus a few exceptions, if a Republican does say something about Trump’s behavior, it’s grounded in some abstract nod to appropriate “sentiment” or “language” or a reflection that some things are just not “responsible” to say. Seldom do these statements rise to the degree of seriousness these incidents warrant. Unfortunately, kale and yoga mats draw more ire from these Republicans than a Nazi-friendly presidential candidate.

A Manhattan jury on Tuesday found the Trump Organization guilty on all charges of tax fraud and related crimes, connected to a 15-year scheme wherein top executives were compensated off the books with luxurious secret perks, subsequently enabling them to evade paying taxes.

Two Trump Organization companies—Trump Corp. and Trump Payroll Corp.—were convicted on 17 criminal counts, including scheming to defraud, conspiracy, tax fraud, and falsifying business records. The companies could face a maximum $1.6 million fine when sentenced next month.

Donald Trump, whose presidency benefited greatly from the company, will now be freshly associated with the criminal activity attached to the organization sporting his name as he seeks to regain the presidency.

Though Trump himself evaded any implication in the scheme, prosecutors said it was “sanctioned” and “the practice was known to Mr. Trump.” They have also indicated Trump himself remains under investigation.

The trial centered on testimony from longtime Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, who has worked with Trump’s family for nearly 50 years and who was testifying as part of a plea deal. In August, Weisselberg pleaded guilty to evading taxes on nearly $2 million in perks from the company. His testimony detailed the Trump Organization’s tactics to avoid payroll taxes and award high-level executives with perks like lavish apartments, private school tuition, and vehicles.

Numerous documents implicate some level of involvement from Trump. There was even a witness, Jeff McConney, the senior vice president at Trump Corp., who at first implicated Trump in the scheme but then walked back that testimony. McConney’s legal fees are paid for by the Trump Organization.

Meanwhile, Trump is still facing investigations on all sides—on the state and federal level—for his seizure of classified documents after he left the White House, his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and the accuracy of the Trump Organization’s financial records and valuations. The guilty verdict for his namesake organization today only adds fuel to the fire driving these investigations.

While the Trump Organization has been found guilty by the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation, the New York attorney general is also pursuing a $250 million civil lawsuit into whether Trump’s asset valuation statements were indicative of fraud. Among financial penalties, Trump and his family could be barred from leading business operations in New York ever again.

This story was updated.

Read more at CNN.

Representative Madison Cawthorn will have to pay more than $15,000 for promoting a cryptocurrency in violation of congressional conflict of interest rules, the House Ethics Committee said Tuesday.

An investigative subcommittee began investigating Cawthorn and his involvement with the cryptocurrency “Let’s Go Brandon,” or LGB Coin, in May. The North Carolina representative repeatedly promoted the coin on social media from December 2021 to March 2022.

The report, submitted a few weeks ago, found “substantial evidence that Representative Cawthorn promoted a cryptocurrency in which he had a financial interest in violation of rules protecting against conflicts of interest.”

According to the report, Cawthorn was not paid for his social media posts about LGB Coin, but in December 2021, he received 180 billion coins, worth more than $150,000, at a cheaper price than what was available to the public. He paid for the coins just a few days before LGB Coin announced it would sponsor a Nascar driver, sending its value up (Nascar later revoked the sponsorship). Cawthorn paid $14,237.49 less than the public price, meaning he received an improper gift from the cryptocurrency. He sold his LGB Coin shares throughout December and January.

The report also found Cawthorn failed to disclose these transactions to the House. It did not, however, find sufficient evidence that he was guilty of insider trading.

The bipartisan Ethics Committee unanimously adopted the report and ordered Cawthorn to pay $14,237.49 to a charitable organization of his choice. He must also pay $1,000 in late fees for his disclosure forms to the Treasury within the next two weeks.

LGB Coin has been accused of being a pump-and-dump scheme, meaning its value is falsely inflated through marketing. Once investors have bought in, giving it actual value (the “pump” part), the scheme organizers will “dump” their shares at a profit. After they sell off their shares, the asset’s value deflates rapidly, revealing it was worthless all along.

Cawthorn was elected in 2020 as an avid Donald Trump supporter, but his time in office has been plagued with scandal. He lost the Republican primary in May and will leave office in January. Multiple reports indicate that both his Washington and North Carolina offices have already been vacated.

In a scathing indictment, police officers ignored Republican leaders during a congressional ceremony Tuesday honoring law enforcement for defending the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, and Kevin McCarthy presented the officers with Congressional Gold Medals, Congress’s highest honor. The medals will be displayed in the U.S. Capitol Police headquarters, the Metropolitan Police Department, the Capitol, and the Smithsonian Institution to recognize the hundreds of officers who tried to fend off the insurrection by Donald Trump supporters.

During the ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda, the Democratic and Republican Party leaders stood in a line to greet the medal recipients, who included the parents of officer Brian Sicknick, who died after the riot. The officers and Sicknick family could clearly be seen in video shaking hands with Pelosi and Schumer but simply walking past McConnell and McCarthy.

“They’re just two-faced. I’m just tired of them standing there and saying how wonderful the Capitol Police is, and they turn around and … go down to Mar-a-Lago and kiss his ring,” Sicknick’s mother, Gladys Sicknick, said. “It just hurts.”

Sicknick’s brother Ken Sicknick said, “They have no idea what integrity is. They can’t stand up for what’s right and wrong.”

Police officers were brutally attacked during the January 6 riot by Trump supporters trying to overturn the 2020 election. In harrowing testimony, both to Congress and the House January 6 investigative committee, officers described their enduring physical and mental scars, with some detailing near-death experiences.

Two police officers died by suicide in the days after the riot. Officer Brian Sicknick collapsed when an insurrectionist sprayed him with a chemical, and he died the next day. That summer, two more officers took their own lives.

McCarthy and McConnell, both avid Trump supporters while he was in office, have failed to publicly take a firm stance on his involvement in January 6. Although they both condemned the riot, they have been careful to avoid implicating Trump directly. McCarthy has also refused to comply with a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the attack.

McConnell voted to acquit Trump during his historic second impeachment for involvement in the insurrection, and neither man has spoken out against his planned 2024 run for president, implying support.

Congress voted last summer to award the medals. Although the measure passed unanimously in the Senate, 21 House Republicans voted against it.

The House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol will be making criminal referrals to the Department of Justice. Committee Chairman Representative Bennie Thompson confirmed the decision to reporters on Tuesday, according to CNN.

Thompson did not indicate exactly who will be referred. But the committee’s investigations have been extremely comprehensive, potentially implicating a very wide array of individuals. The panel has interviewed over 1,000 people, reviewed over one million documents, and subpoenaed dozens of people including Mark Meadows, Stephen Bannon, Representative Kevin McCarthy, and Donald Trump himself.

The investigation runs concurrently to other probes, including a Georgia-based investigation that has similarly called individuals including Meadows, Senator Lindsey Graham, and others to testify and hand over documents.

Campaigning for Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker over the weekend, Republican Senator John Kennedy stuck to the kinds of kitchen table issues voters would definitely want to hear about as the fate of the Senate is on the line: “woke” people who “walk around with zip-lock bags of kale that they can eat to give them energy.”

“These woke, high-IQ stupid people, they’re easy to recognize. They hate George Washington, they hate Thomas Jefferson, they hate Dr. Seuss, and they hate Mr. Potato Head,” Kennedy began.

“These, these woke, high-IQ stupid people, they walk around, they walk around with zip-lock bags of kale that they can eat to give them energy,” Kennedy said, horrified. “Now, if you wanna eat kale, that’s up to you. I don’t eat kale. You know why? Because kale tastes to me like I’d rather be fat,” he declared proudly.

“And these high-IQ pe—stupid people, the wokers in charge of Washington, D.C., the berserk wing of the Democratic Party—they hyperventilate on their yoga mats if you use the wrong pronoun. They’re all over Washington, D.C.”

Kennedy—a totally not-berserk man not hyperventilating over a person he just made up—is himself ostensibly a fairly intelligent person. He graduated with honors from Vanderbilt University, before receiving a law degree from the University of Virginia and another degree with honors from Oxford.

Kale seems to be a favorite target of Kennedy’s ire (to a much stronger extent than, for example, a former president who incited an insurrection on the nation’s capital, dined with Nazis, and called to terminate the U.S. Constitution).

Last year, as President Joe Biden pushed to close an inheritance-tax loophole—something many “regular” Americans would likely get behind—Kennedy blasted the effort. “This is what happens when you have a president and a Treasury secretary who are on a mission from God to please pink-haired wokers who carry around Ziploc bags of kale.”

Many have wondered where Walker’s dishonest, incoherent, and culture-war-focused candidacy came from. Kennedy’s recent remarks affirm the idea that his candidacy is really nothing more than a weak appendage of the Republican Party.

Elon Musk’s medical implant company Neuralink is facing a federal probe over potential animal welfare violations.

Reuters first reported Monday evening that the company, which Musk says could begin human trials in the next six months, is being investigated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture over how Neuralink treats and conducts tests on animals.

Neuralink has killed about 1,500 animals during testing since 2018, Reuters said, citing internal documents and anonymous sources “with direct knowledge of the company’s animal-testing operations.”

Current and former Neuralink employees told Reuters that they worked under a constant state of pressure, with Musk repeatedly demanding that they work faster and encouraging them to “imagine they had a bomb strapped to their heads” or threatening to trigger a “market failure” at the company if they didn’t meet his goals.

As a result, animal testing was often rushed, meaning that the data sometimes contained errors and tests had to be repeated, causing unnecessary deaths. Other times, there were human errors during the surgeries to implant Neuralink chips, which employees attributed to lack of preparation.

Both Neuralink and Musk have publicly stated that their animal testing is used as the last step in the research process, with Musk describing it as “confirmatory, not exploratory” at a presentation in late November. But Reuters found that in October, Neuralink scrubbed the word “exploration” from study titles and banned employees from using it in the future.

What’s more, there have been numerous exploratory surgeries over several years, Reuters said, again citing company documents and anonymous internal sources.

Musk has previously been called out for his company’s use of animal testing. A few days before his November presentation, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a nonprofit research and advocacy group, set up a website detailing the effects of Neuralink tests on animals.

“Monkeys suffered paralysis, seizures, and such poor psychological health that they pulled out their own hair,” the group said.

The group’s director of research advocacy, Ryan Merkley, slammed Musk as “a modern-day P.T. Barnum.”

“He’s a showman who makes big promises while hiding the grisly details from the public.”

Musk’s slapdash approach to Neuralink testing should come as no surprise, given the way he has handled Twitter since taking over the social media platform in late October.

After a remarkable period of radio silence, some Republicans are finally saying something about their party leader calling to terminate the Constitution, counteract democracy, and crown him as an unelected president.

On Saturday, former President Donald Trump called to terminate the U.S. Constitution and reinstate himself back to power. He then tried to briefly walk back the comments, before doubling down on Monday, claiming yet again that there was massive fraud in the 2020 election.

Now Senate Republicans are beginning to finally speak out against Trump’s ridiculous remarks.

“I swear an oath to uphold the Constitution and it is a bedrock principle—it is the principle, the bedrock of our country. I couldn’t disagree more,” said Senator John Thune, the number two Senate Republican. “If you’re one of these other people who’s interested in running this year, this is certainly an opportunity that would create some contrast.”

Senator Roy Blunt echoed Thune, saying, “I think you take an oath to the Constitution. You don’t take it provisionally. And I can’t imagine that a former president would make that statement.”

Senator Mike Rounds released a full statement, saying, “Anyone who desires to lead our country must commit to protecting the Constitution. They should not threaten to terminate it.” He also noted “there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud that would alter the results of the 2020 election.”

Senator John Cornyn said Trump’s tirade was “not a responsible thing to say.”

Late Sunday, Senator Lisa Murkowski tweeted, “Suggesting the termination of the Constitution is not only a betrayal of our Oath of Office, it’s an affront to our Republic.”

Nevertheless, none of these explicitly, once and for all, denounce Trump. And these quotes come from just a smattering of Republicans among a larger party apparatus that refuses to stand unequivocally against Trump’s anti-democratic impulses. Senator Mitch McConnell, for example, has yet to say anything.

And if an entire political party largely refuses to defend basic democracy, all in deference to one individual, one could rightly denote that party as divested from democracy—or, as the White House said earlier this year, invested in fascism.

As Elon Musk continues on his quest to make Twitter as garbage as possible, he is ensuring no one will be around to clean it up—online or off.

On Monday, janitors and allies picketed outside of Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, in response to more than 20 workers being haphazardly laid off, according to a representative from SEIU Local 87, the union that represents the workers. Late last week, workers were told with no notice that Friday would be their last day.

Workers have been picketing most of Monday morning, and the union representative said they will continue until their demands for recourse are met—whether it’s getting their job back or attaining some form of compensation for lost wages and being abruptly fired with no notice.

This is not the first time Musk laid off unionized workers. At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic (shortly after Musk had said, “The coronavirus panic is dumb,” before over one million Americans would proceed to die from the virus), the Tesla CEO laid off 280 janitors and bus drivers. This, while fellow tech giants, including Facebook and Google, committed to keep paying their hourly workers during the pandemic.

This is a developing story.