SantaCon Isn’t Just Obnoxious

The organizers behind the December charity pub crawl lovingly dubbed SantaCon appear to be a little heavier on the con than the spirit of giving.

Over the last decade, the group’s organizers claim to have raised more than $1 million for charitable causes, according to their website, but not much of that money seems to have gone to charity. Instead, they blew more than a third of the funds on bad crypto investments and groups tied to Burning Man, ultimately giving less than a fifth of that money to actual nonprofits, according to a Gothamist analysis of the group’s financial documents.

The group’s biggest act of giving—more than $66,000—went to a for-profit film production crew called Spectaculum Productions, which made the medical fraud documentary At Your Cervix.

The lion’s share of the money raised by SantaCon—$832,000, or 59 percent—goes to maintenance, according to the group’s founder and director, Stefan Pildes, who told Gothamist that the bills add up for the single-day event, citing expenditures like temporary staff, street permits, and D.J.s.

“It’s not a small undertaking,” Pildes said.

SantaCon falls under the helm of a tax-exempt nonprofit, Participatory Safety. And while anybody can join the citywide bar hop for free, they also offer participants a $15 “Santa Badge” that comes with additional benefits. That has helped the outfit grow tremendously, though the money is specifically described as set aside for “Santa’s charity drive,” according to SantaCon’s website.

“Regardless of what they want to label it, throwing the party is not a charitable activity,” Lloyd Mayer, a Notre Dame University Law School professor, told the outlet. “It’s great to go to this party, right? But don’t pat yourself on the back that you’re helping out the Girl Scouts.” SantaCon organizers and participants regularly tout their group’s charitable side as a shield against allegations that it is a drunken free-for-all that leaves parts of New York City filthy. Even without any waste—and there seems to be quite a bit of it—it’s a lackluster charitable organization, raising barely more than $100,000 a year.

Russia resumed its cruise missile attack on Kyiv after an 80-day hiatus early Friday morning, an action that critics say is the direct result of Republicans blocking a foreign aid package to help Ukraine.

The two-hour barrage was impeded by air defenses that thwarted all missiles headed for the Ukrainian capital, according to the Kyiv city military administration. Other missiles resulted in casualties, including one that struck the city of Pavlohrad, which killed one and injured four others, and another that landed in the eastern Kharkiv region and killed one person and injured another seven, according to CNN.

The missile barrage comes just two days after Senate Republicans voted to block a $110.5 billion emergency spending bill for Ukraine and Israel. Putin allies celebrated America’s right-wing party for what they interpreted as the first step in the total withdrawal of U.S. support from Ukraine.

“Well done, Republicans! They’re standing firm! That’s good for us,” said propagandist Olga Skabeeva on Russian state TV, grinning.

“This will be a great revelation to other countries. It is even more dangerous to be a friend of the United States than its enemy. In the end, they will abandon you, leaving nothing but the scorched earth on your territory,” said Golovanov Time host Roman Golovanov, according to The Daily Beast.

And Putin loyalists made it clear they had another reason to celebrate, predicting that the failed aid package would lend itself to the downfall of President Joe Biden and the subsequent return of Donald Trump.

“The downfall of Ukraine means the downfall of Biden! Two birds with one stone,” said America analyst Dmitry Drobnitsky, the Beast reported.

The foreign aid package is tied up in a pseudo hostage situation as Republicans hound Democrats for an extreme border security package that includes Trump-tried policies—something that the White House has said it’s open to.

Republicans have been unable to prove that President Joe Biden is guilty of wrongdoing, and on Friday, even Fox News was forced to admit it.

The House is expected to vote next week on whether to formally open an impeachment inquiry into Biden. Republicans have for months accused Biden of corruption and of benefiting from his son Hunter’s overseas business, but they have yet to produce any actual proof.

“The House Oversight Committee has been at this for years, and they have so far not been able to provide any concrete evidence that Joe Biden personally profited from his son Hunter’s overseas business,” Fox reporter Peter Doocy said Friday, clearly physically struggling to say the word “not.”

“But they are going to try again with this impeachment inquiry that’s set to start next week.”

This isn’t the first time that Fox has acknowledged Republicans have no proof of Biden’s alleged criminal behavior. In May, Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy, who is Peter Doocy’s father, pressed Representative James Comer about the investigation. Comer, who has spearheaded the investigation, has been one of the most vocal lawmakers in pushing the accusations against the Bidens.

“You don’t actually have any facts to that point. You’ve got some circumstantial evidence,” Doocy said. “And the other thing is, of all those names, the one person who didn’t profit is—there’s no evidence that Joe Biden did anything illegally.”

Republicans continue to insist that Biden and his family are guilty of corruption, despite every piece of evidence they produce failing to show that the president was involved. Even the GOP’s own star witnesses have repeatedly refuted the lawmakers’ claims. As a result, Republicans have resorted to the most bonkers logic to back up their own accusations.

Donald Trump is on to his next big, white, election-engineering whale.

The former president and his far-right associates have moved on from targeting Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic and are now attempting to harpoon a system meant to detect and prevent voter fraud, the Electronic Registration Information Center, better known as ERIC.

So far this year, Trump has baselessly claimed that the voting accuracy system is a “terrible Voter Registration System that ‘pumps the rolls’ for Democrats and does nothing to clean them up,” and has openly speculated how he might make the system “illegal” across the country should he regain the White House, reports Rolling Stone.

Making a political hooplah out of a system designed by a nonpartisan group in 2012 holds a bounty of possibilities for Trump in 2024, including seeding more chaos in the aftermath of Election Day than he did in 2020.

Trump and his allies’ efforts to discredit the system include attempting to get a swath of GOP-led states to depart from the platform. Louisiana led the bunch, removing itself from ERIC in 2022. Since then, Alabama, Florida, Iowa, Missouri, Ohio, Virginia, and West Virginia have done so too—dropping its membership to 25 states plus Washington, D.C.—though more resignations are anticipated, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

ERIC, in truth, is nothing short of a software engineering marvel that allows states to compare their voter rolls against other states’. Operated by a staff of three with no philanthropic funding, ERIC provides election officials with reports on potential inaccuracies in voter lists and identifies people who are registered to vote in more than one state, or inaccurately registered multiple times in a single state, from data collected from state records like change of address records, DMV data, and Social Security Administration death records.

If we lived in a world where Trump was motivated by more than an unimpeded ascent to power, you might be fooled into thinking that this is exactly the kind of system he cried out for after losing the last election. Without it, experts say that voting systems in those states are “likely to be significantly less accurate” and have the potential to “fuel false claims of potential voter fraud.”

“Faulty voter files create long lines on Election Day, delays in getting mail-in ballots, an increase in provisional ballots, and delays in determining a winner,” ERIC co-founder David Becker, who resigned from his role as executive director of the program following a right-wing pressure campaign, told Rolling Stone.

“The bigger potential damage here is that election losers—people who have lost an election or perceive themselves to be about to lose an election—will have more time and more space to create false narratives about an election being stolen,” Becker added. “The more problems at the polls, the more lines, the more provisional ballots, the longer it takes to count overall ballots and get an unofficial winner, those all feed into the potential for chaos and even incitement to violence by election losers.”

A new study found that the number of people who travel out of their home state for an abortion has doubled since the nationwide right to the procedure was rolled back.

Nearly one in five patients traveled out of state for abortion care in the first six months of the year, according to a study released Thursday by the Guttmacher Institute. In comparison, during the same period in 2020 (two years before Roe v. Wade was overturned), just one in 10 patients had to travel for care.

“We knew that more people have been traveling across state lines for abortion since the end of Roe, but these findings are stunning nonetheless, and powerfully illustrate just how disruptive the overturning of Roe has been for tens of thousands of abortion patients,” Isaac Maddow-Zimet, a Guttmacher data scientists and the study lead, said in the press release.

The study found that people who have to travel tend to be from states with total abortion bans or short windows when abortions are allowed. The patients then travel to neighboring states with more open abortion rules. Some of the most popular states for abortion seekers in the first half of 2023 include Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Colorado, and North Carolina.

Researchers also noted that their study does not “capture the experiences of people for whom abortion bans or increased restrictions have proven impossible to navigate.” This includes people who can’t afford to travel or are unable to due to disability. People of color tend to be hit hardest by abortion bans because of “persistent racial and economic oppression.”

Within a month of Roe being overturned, Colorado abortion clinics reported that wait times had doubled due to the surge in out-of-state patients. In 2023, though, Illinois saw the largest increase in out-of-state patients because it borders Indiana, Kentucky, and Missouri, all of which have completely banned abortion.

The most popular states for abortion seekers has likely changed, though, after North Carolina Republicans in May successfully forced through a law banning abortion after 12 weeks. In Florida, the state’s 15-week abortion ban went before the state Supreme Court in September. If the court upholds the law, then an even more restrictive measure banning abortion at six weeks—before most people know they are pregnant—will go into effect. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed the hugely unpopular bill in April.

Abortion travel may also be affected by the growing “brain drain” out of Republican-led states. Young professionals such as ob-gyns have begun leaving red states due to restrictive GOP laws and threats of repercussions for simply doing their job. If someone needs an abortion and lives in a state where the procedure is technically legal, they may still need to travel out of state because there just isn’t anywhere to get an abortion nearby.

The White House’s involvement in Congress’s border talks appears to be taking a hard-right turn.

Immigration officials in the Biden administration have signaled to Senate Republicans that they’re open to a swath of Democrat-opposed border policies, including some that were previously tried by Donald Trump, reported The Wall Street Journal.

Those include alterations to the asylum process that would make it harder for migrants to get full asylum, by tightening the initial screening procedure, and expanding a fast-track deportation program for use across the country instead of just at the border. The administration has also said it’s open to designating other countries as “safe third countries” as possible deportation zones.

It also appears to be in favor of adding 12,000 beds to detention centers, raising the total to 46,500 beds, in an apparent attempt to compromise on a Republican proposal to detain asylum-seekers instead of releasing them with a court date, according to the outlet.

At stake for the administration is a contentious foreign aid package to Israel and Ukraine that the GOP has effectively held hostage in exchange for bigger changes at the border—though it also comes as the latest in a series of blows that Biden has made against his own voting base, particularly young voters and people of color, making it harder for the president to turn to their linchpin support again in the upcoming election.

“Extreme Republicans are playing chicken with our national security, holding Ukraine’s funding hostage to their extreme partisan border policies,” Biden told Congress in a speech on Wednesday. “And I’m willing to do significantly more. But in terms of changes to policy and to provide resources that we need at the border, I’m willing to change policy as well.”

“I’ve asked for billions of dollars for more border agents, more immigration judges, more asylum officers,” he added. “Republicans have to decide if they want a political issue or if they want a solution at the border. Do they really want a solution?”

Young voters have also come out in droves against Biden’s unwavering support of Israel, a move that could radically depress voter turnout for the incumbent.

A November survey by The New York Times/Siena College showed that the president was neck and neck with Trump among voters younger than 30, with Biden pulling at 30 percentage points and Trump at 29 percent. Meanwhile, conspiracy-touting independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. inspired 34 percent of the surveyed young voters.

“We write to you to issue a very stark and unmistakable warning: you and your Administration’s stance on Gaza risks millions of young voters staying home or voting third party next year,” read an open letter to Biden penned by March for Our Lives, GenZ for Change, and the Sunrise Movement.

House Republicans have launched an investigation into antisemitism at MIT, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania, following a hearing with those colleges’ presidents that highlights the GOP’s hypocrisy when it comes to free speech.

Harvard president Claudine Gay, MIT president Sally Kornbluth, and University of Pennsylvania president Elizabeth Magill testified before the House Education and Workforce Committee on Tuesday about their responses to incidents of antisemitism on their campuses. All three women have been criticized for saying that responses to alleged antisemitic instances—including the content of chants popular at pro-Palestinian marches—need to be context-specific.

“After this week’s pathetic and morally bankrupt testimony by university presidents … the Education and Workforce committee is launching an official Congressional investigation with the full force of subpoena power into Penn, MIT, & Harvard and others,” committee Chair Elise Stefanik said in a statement Thursday.

“We will use our full Congressional authority to hold these schools accountable for their failure on the global stage.”

Stefanik had asked the university presidents whether students chanting “Intifada” violated the schools’ codes of conduct. Each president said it would depend on the context, with Gay pointing out that chants she finds “personally abhorrent” could still be protected under freedom of speech. Stefanik then insisted that this chant was calling for “genocide of the Jews,” a contested and subjective interpretation at best. A clip of her questioning that omitted the context—that the line of questioning was rooted on “Intifada” and not calls for genocide—then went viral, creating a firestorm.

Magill explained her stance further in a video on Wednesday, saying that “speech alone is not punishable,” but calls for genocide would be “harassment or intimidation.”

It does not seem to have occurred to Republicans, who regularly pride themselves on being the protectors of free speech, that they have launched a project to essentially police free speech on college campuses. The GOP seems to have no problem upholding free speech when, say, Donald Trump is threatening his political opponents.

Representative Jerry Nadler slammed his Republican colleagues on Tuesday for moves that “weaponize Jewish lives for political gains” while in reality doing nothing to “genuinely counter” antisemitism.

Republicans also don’t seem to have an issue upholding free speech when it relates to Islamophobia. Although they have taken many steps to supposedly address rising antisemitism, they have made no mention of the sharp rise in Islamophobia in recent months.

In fact, many Republicans are actually suppressing the free speech of groups trying to combat Islamophobia. In November, the University of Florida chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine sued state Governor Ron DeSantis, university chancellor Ray Rodrigues, and university president Ben Sasse for barring the group from campus.

The students, backed by the ACLU, accused them of “violating their [First] Amendment rights.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton threatened doctors who perform abortions with felony charges, even if a court says they can conduct the procedure.

A Travis County district judge issued a temporary restraining order Thursday against Texas’s strict abortion laws to allow a woman to terminate her pregnancy. The woman, Dallas resident Kate Cox, and her husband had wanted to have a child, but doctors warned the fetus had a lethal abnormality and would not survive past birth.

Within hours, Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a warning of his own. “The Temporary Restraining Order (“TRO”) granted by the Travis County district judge purporting to allow an abortion to proceed will not insulate hospitals, doctors, or anyone else from civil and criminal liability for violating Texas’ abortion laws,” he said in a statement.

“This includes first degree felony prosecutions.”

Paxton acknowledged that Cox’s ob-gyn, Dr. Damla Karsan, was shielded by the order; the TRO “does not enjoin actions brought by private citizens”—a blatant threat to people who seek or provide abortions.

Cox was 20 weeks’ pregnant when she found out her fetus had trisomy 18, a condition caused by having an extra chromosome. This abnormality is almost always fatal, either before birth or soon after.

After Roe v. Wade was overturned, abortions were banned in Texas except to save the life of the pregnant person. Since trisomy 18 is only fatal to the fetus, not the patient, Cox’s situation did not qualify for a medically necessary abortion.

She filed a lawsuit Tuesday asking a judge to let her terminate her pregnancy. Thursday’s ruling was the first time in at least 50 years that a judge has intervened to allow an adult to get an abortion.

Paxton’s office can appeal the ruling and ask a higher court to prevent Cox from getting an abortion, but he has not yet done so.

This is not the first time that Texas’s cruel and restrictive laws have caused legal backlash. Over the summer, a group of 15 women sued the state after they were denied abortions. All of the women had wanted to carry their pregnancies to term but needed abortions because their fetuses had fatal anomalies.

One defendant, Samantha Casiano, vomited in court while telling the story of how she was forced to give birth to a baby without parts of the brain and skull. Casiano said she had to watch her child die four hours after being born.

Mike Johnson compared himself to Moses and said that becoming House speaker was part of God’s plan.

Johnson was the keynote speaker at Tuesday evening’s National Association of Christian Lawmakers’ annual gala. The NACL is a Christian nationalist organization that says its goal is to codify a “biblical worldview” into law. Both its founder and Johnson are big fans of the “Appeal to Heaven” Christian nationalist flag.

During his speech, Johnson said that a few weeks before Kevin McCarthy was ousted from the speakership, God told him to “prepare and be ready.”

“We’re coming to a Red Sea moment. What does that mean, Lord?” Johnson said, referring to when God parted the Red Sea so Moses could lead the enslaved Jews out of Egypt.

“When the speaker’s race happened and Kevin McCarthy, who’s a dear friend of mine, was deposed and vacated from the chair, oh wow! Well, this is what the Lord may have been preparing us for.”

“At the time, I assumed the Lord is going to choose a new Moses, and thank you Lord, you’re going to allow me to be Aaron,” Johnson continued, referring to Moses’s brother.

But as the votes dragged on, Johnson said, God told him, “Now, step forward.”

While Aaron did help Moses, he also nearly caused the destruction of the Israelites. When Moses went up Mount Sinai to get the Ten Commandments, the people grew tired of waiting. They convinced Aaron to make a statue of a golden calf, and Aaron was going to become the new leader. So really, Johnson said he was prepared to lead a rebel group that worships a false idol.

Johnson repeatedly eschews the separation of church and state, instead flaunting his extremist Christian beliefs. And yet he is still allowed to stay in power, despite the risk his ideology poses to the country.

Americans seem to have no interest in the Republican primary debates, even with two more of the mud-slinging spectacles freshly lined up by CNN for January.

Over the last several months, viewership of the debates has tanked. The first crowded debate in August hit a high of 14.2 million viewers, though those numbers have since plummeted, with just 3.2 million people tuning in to Wednesday’s debate between Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Koch-backed former Ambassador Nikki Haley, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and biotech millionaire Vivek Ramaswamy.

The 90-minute punch-packed bully specials haven’t done much for any of the GOP contenders in the polls, according to aggregated data from FiveThirtyEight. As of Thursday, DeSantis’s and Haley’s numbers have barely budged; they continued to poll at a measly 12.7 and 10.6 percent, respectively.

At this point, it’s a scramble to gain an inkling of the attention so easily pulled by the GOP’s greatest showman, Donald Trump, whose strategy of outright avoiding public debates has proved effective among Republican voters—he leads the primary with around 60 percent of the vote, per aggregate polling.

To that point—Fox News’s sleepy town hall between Sean Hannity and a sluggish Trump was the most watched program on Tuesday, pulling just as many viewers as a full and formal debate stage, according to ratings released by the network.

If Americans are voting with their remotes, they’ve made it abundantly clear that none of the candidates on the GOP debate stage are of any interest to them.

Even DeSantis’s one-off, completely unrelated matchup against California Governor Gavin Newsom held more public interest than the most recent debate. Fox’s “Great Red vs. Blue State” publicity stunt, which saw the Florida governor thoroughly scorched and humiliated amid his own references to poop and science denialism, garnered 4.7 million viewers.

Still, faltering public interest might not be the only reason why Wednesday’s debate fell flat on its face. Droves of potential viewers complained online that they weren’t able to find it—perhaps unsurprising given that the debate was aired on The CW, the network most famous for airing Gossip Girl and the final (and worst) season of Gilmore Girls.