Byron Donalds Cannot Stop Praising the Jim Crow Era

Byron Donalds just can’t escape his insane comment suggesting that Black Americans were better off during the Jim Crow era, a time period defined by laws institutionalizing racial segregation in the United States. It’s gotten so bad, he’s even getting grief about it from Fox News.

“During Jim Crow, the Black family was together,” Donalds said during an event earlier this week. “During Jim Crow, more Black people were not just conservative, because Black people have always been conservative-minded, but more Black people voted conservatively.” Ever since, he has continued to double down on this demented sentiment, despite drawing an insane amount of backlash.

Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer incredulously asked Donalds during an interview Friday about his belief that Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program in the 1960s, which expanded Social Security benefits and Medicare and raised the minimum wage, among other things, had “led African Americans down a worse road.”

“Let’s be clear, it’s not about belief—it’s the empirical fact,” Donalds said. “The marriage rate in Black America declined rapidly after the passage of a lot of the Great Society policies.”

MSNBC anchor Joy Reid also slammed Donalds for his ridiculous comment during an interview the night before and pushed him to get real about his assertion that the Jim Crow era had somehow been better for Black people. “Is there a specific period between 1867 and 1968 that you thought was this golden era for Black families or a time that was good for Black families?” Reid asked.

Donalds was incensed by the question and accused Reid of “gaslighting” him, because he’d never said it was the “golden age,” only better for marriage rates. In context, Donalds clearly hadn’t said it was just better for marriage rates—he’d said it was better for the conservative party.

Reid continued to lambaste Donalds’s longing for that era of American policies. “During Jim Crow, could your family have existed? You are in an interracial marriage, your wife is a white conservative activist,” she said. “Could your family have existed at all during Jim Crow?”

“No it could not, Joy, we all know that. But that’s why I am blessed to live in America today, as opposed to America during that time,” he said, insisting that it was important for Black men to be present fathers—somehow completely missing that his response indicates that Jim Crow wasn’t so great for Black people after all, a point Reid seized upon.

“What I am grateful for is that we do not live in the Jim Crow era and that fathers do not face the threat of lynching,” Reid replied. “And perhaps don’t bring up Jim Crow when you’re trying to make that example.”

Donald Trump signaled, and conservative lawmakers listened.

Speaking to The Meg Ellefson Show last week, Wisconsin Representative Derrick Van Orden accused Democrats, the justice system, and U.S. media of being in cahoots to prevent Trump from winning the presidency. He also insisted that anyone who respects the decision made by 12 jurors who convicted Trump are actually “fascists,” on a power trip akin to Adolf Hitler’s takeover of Germany, and claimed President Joe Biden’s “job” is to go back in time and change history “if it doesn’t reflect the current outlook that the regime wants.”

Referring to William Shirer’s book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Orden claimed that the similarities between the Democratic Party and the Nazi Party “cannot be denied at this point.”

“The Democrats are going to start shouting, saying this guy, ‘He’s a convicted felon. He’s a convicted felon,’” said Van Orden. “Every single person that was sentenced to decades in the gulag and died there, committed suicide there because it was so dreary, every single one of them was convicted by a court in the Soviet Union. All of them. And what the Biden administration and the leftists have done is they have essentially destroyed the confidence in the American judicial system for over half the country.”

And for Van Orden, any level of unity in accepting the conviction is akin to conspiracy.

“If you can’t look at the left-wing media … and see that they’re marching lockstep together and pushing a consistent message over all different forms of media, then you’re blind,” he added.

These new accusations against liberals belie the reality that some members of the far right have actually—albeit, some insisting playfully—proclaimed themselves as fascists. Trump himself has spoken at length on what he loved about Hitler, and the presumptive GOP presidential nominee’s political maneuverings are near identical to those of the most prominent fascist leaders of the twentieth century.

Van Orden’s heightened language also comes just a few short days after Trump increased his own use of fascist descriptors for the liberal party.

The Republican National Committee has decided to draft a 2024 party platform, and it’s hired a leader of the “Stop the Steal” election-denier movement to help.

On May 15, Ed Martin, a former chair of the Missouri Republican Party, was hired to serve as the ​​deputy policy director of the platform committee, reported NBC News. Martin is well known for supporting Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, even giving a speech in Washington, D.C., the day before the January 6 Capitol riots in 2021 to rally Trump’s supporters.

“No matter what happens tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after, we still need to be in the fight. There’s no summer soldiers and springtime patriots here. There’s the die-hard true Americans,” Martin said in that speech. “We start today, go through tomorrow and every day till we have a last breath and go home to the Lord because we will stop the steal.”

On January 6 itself, he was present on the Capitol grounds, posting on social media the entire time and claiming that the crowd was “rowdy” but otherwise fine, even after rioters had already breached the Capitol building.

“I’m at the Capitol right now,” Martin posted on Twitter. “Rowdy crowd but nothing out of hand. Ignore the #FakeNews.”

“Like Mardi Gras in DC today: love, faith and joy,” Martin tweeted minutes later.

Martin would later be subpoenaed by the House January 6 committee, which said it had evidence that he helped plan the rally preceding the riots and paid some of the costs for the rally’s vendors. Martin didn’t show up to a deposition with the committee, though. He later spread conspiracy theories about the riots, claiming that government operatives were responsible, and attended events with other election deniers such as Michael Flynn and Ali Alexander. 

The GOP is drafting a party platform for the first time in eight years, after deciding in 2020 that it would recycle 2016’s platform and “continue to enthusiastically support the president’s America-first agenda,” referring to Trump. Martin’s appointment suggests that 2024’s platform will include challenging the integrity of any election that Republicans lose. And he’s not the first election denier the RNC has hired since Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump took over as the committee’s co-chair. Lawyer Christina Bobb, who faces charges in Arizona for helping to overturn the state’s election results, was tapped to head the committee’s “election integrity” division.

Donald Trump thinks that everyone needs to lay off covering the bad things he’s done, for his family’s sake.

In a one-on-one interview on Dr. Phil Primetime Thursday, Trump fretted over the consequences of his actions from a gold-plated hall at his Mar-a-Lago resort.

“It has to affect my family, and I think that’s really unfair,” Trump said. “Because I have a very good family, I have good kids, I have a wonderful wife. I mean, it’s not easy for her to read this kind of stuff that’s fake. That’s fake stuff. And—but that’s the way it is. It certainly is not a good thing.”

That “fake stuff” to which Trump refers is the ongoing barrage of lawsuits he finds himself engaged in, as a result of his own alleged duplicitous actions. It’s impossible to imagine which of these legal battles, which Trump has deemed a “witch hunt,” would affect his wife Melania the most.

Most recently, Trump was found guilty by a New York jury of 34 felony counts for efforts to cover up hush-money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels so she wouldn’t spill about an affair the two had. But Trump has a lengthy laundry list of bad acts that anyone with an internet connection could read about, including his family.

Before that, he was convicted of civil fraud, for which he owes hundreds of millions, and found guilty of sexual abuse and defamation, for which he owes tens of millions. He is also facing racketeering charges for an alleged scheme to overturn Georgia’s election results, and another suit for lifting classified documents from the White House.

This would embarrass any normal husband or father, but Trump has been shameless about his many alleged (and proven) crimes. To him, the attention functions more like a badge of honor in his campaign to be the most persecuted man in America.

In all this time, it would never occur to Trump that to stop having his family read about the bad things he’s done, he should simply stop doing them.

Donald Trump’s glitches are getting worse: During an appearance at a Turning Point USA rally in Arizona on Thursday, Trump incoherently declared, “When I’m president, I will use title 42 to end the tri—” before glitching to “and we have to do this.”

It’s not clear what exactly he was trying to say, but Trump’s mental rainbow wheels of death have become more prominent in recent months. He froze for more than 30 seconds during an NRA convention in May, and has been caught slurring his words at numerous campaign stops. Clips of Trump’s glitches, the verbal equivalent of watching a train crash unfurl in slow motion, have circulated widely among critics questioning his cognitive fitness as he touts a new cognitive test that does not exist as evidence of his mental prowess—and who can forget the infamous “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV” fake cognitive test Trump took during his presidency.

When he’s not glitching, he’s word association-style rambling himself into the sunset. During his lackluster Bronx campaign rally in May, Trump fantasized about someone in awe of his ability to put on his pants after veering off-script. At his meandering post-conviction press conference, Trump claimed witnesses were “literally crucified” and described Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg as looking “so nice and so soft.” It’s unclear what verbal faux pas Trump will stumble over next, but you can rest assured The New Republic will cover it, and it will be glabghrasrsnbed-ahhh.

One of the primordial rules of running a newsroom sounds simple: Don’t mix editorial with business. And yet that’s exactly what The Washington Post’s publisher and CEO, Will Lewis, has done since taking the reins of the prestigious D.C. publication in January—over and over and over.

NPR’s David Folkenflik reported Thursday that the British tabloid journalist had offered him an unsavory exchange: an exclusive on the Post’s health if he promised to squash a story about Lewis’s involvement in a phone-hacking lawsuit filed by attorneys for Prince Harry, Guy Ritchie, and Hugh Grant. The suit named Lewis at the center of a cover-up at Rupert Murdoch’s News UK—accusing Lewis of “giving a green light” to erase millions of emails pertaining to the phone-hacking accusations, even after authorities had instructed the company to retain all of its records.

“In several conversations, Lewis repeatedly—and heatedly—offered to give me an exclusive interview about the Post’s future, as long as I dropped the story about the allegations,” Folkenflik reported. “At that time, the same spokesperson, who works directly for Lewis from the U.K. and has advised him since his days at the Wall Street Journal—confirmed to me that an explicit offer was on the table: drop the story, get the interview.”

That’s on top of another scandal that seemingly fueled the unceremonious departure of the Post’s editor in chief Sally Buzbee on Sunday. Buzbee reportedly refused to cave to Lewis’s demands, in conversations about the paper’s own coverage of his legal battles in March and May, though the discussions left her “rattled.”

“When Ms. Buzbee said The Post would publish an article anyway, he said her decision represented a lapse in judgment and abruptly ended the conversation,” reported The New York Times.

Judge Aileen Cannon, who is presiding over Donald Trump’s classified documents case, may be in over her head due to a serious lack of experience, according to a new report from CNN.

The news outlet spoke to 10 attorneys who had cases before Cannon in the Southern District of Florida—and they painted a picture of a judge with limited trial experience, who’s prone to getting bogged down by irrelevant legal questions and struggles to manage her docket of cases efficiently.

Before Trump appointed her to the federal bench in 2020, Cannon was an attorney in the Justice Department for seven years and only took part in four criminal trials. In her four years as a judge, she hasn’t presided over many criminal cases either—and attorneys said it shows.

“She just seems overwhelmed by the process,” one lawyer told CNN. Other lawyers said that she lets small, marginal issues overwhelm the major details of cases. She also has rejected joint motions, agreed upon by both parties in a case with no dispute.

“You can’t assume that just because there’s agreement between the parties that she will go along,” one lawyer said, describing her as “incredibly hands on.”

“She wants to be the decision-maker of everything,” the lawyer said.

Defense attorneys that spoke to CNN described her as tough on defendants and notoriously strict on sentencing. But in Trump’s classified documents case, she has given him a long leash, which has not gone unnoticed.

“She’s certainly not sympathetic to most defendants, and she’s certainly playing a different game with the current defendant before her,” one lawyer told CNN regarding Trump.

Whether Cannon’s odd handling of Trump’s case is due to inexperience or a deliberate attempt to help Trump, he seems to be happy with her.

After a weekend full of crisis-actor-level tears from right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, he has officially moved to liquidate all of his assets in order to pay the $1.5 billion he owes to the families of children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary.

The “hoax”-pushing supplement hawker, who was found guilty of defamation in 2022, filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11 that same year, allowing him to maintain operations of his businesses and rely on reorganization to come up with the funds. But it wasn’t enough, with the families warning in 2023 that Jones’s plan fell “woefully short.”

In a filing on Thursday, Jones’s lawyers wrote that there was “no reasonable prospect for a successful reorganization” and that filing for liquidation under Chapter 7 was the massacre denier’s only option. This latest decision lays the groundwork for Alex Jones to lose his stake in InfoWars, the pulpit from which the podcaster has continued to spew misinformation.

Earlier this week, a judge prolonged Jones’s slow financial death and allowed him to continue running his media company Free Speech Systems until June 14. This newest move signals that Jones’s ownership will more than likely be sold, according to Avi Moshenberg, an attorney for the families, who spoke to CNN on Thursday. Free Speech Systems had nearly $4 million in cash on hand at the end of April.

The decision came after Jones posted several videos of himself in hysterics, in which he wailed over the prospect of selling his media company. “All we’re trying to do is save America, and they’re fucking us over, over and over again,” he sobbed in an “emergency broadcast” on Saturday. “And it’s just so sick—it’s sick, it’s sick. I want to leave—because it’s going to be over, folks.”

On Thursday, a lawyer for the families, Chris Mattei, said that Jones’s decision to liquidate his assets “will hasten the end of these bankruptcies and facilitate the liquidation of Jones’s assets, which is the same reason we have moved to convert his company’s case to Chapter 7.”

Mattei had accused Jones in court Monday of “manufacturing a crisis.”

Last month, Jones was granted permission to sell his ranch, which is valued at $2.8 million, one large chunk of his approximate total $9 million in assets.

A unique detail of Jones’s case is that he can’t skirt payments by declaring bankruptcy. The judge who presided over Jones’s bankruptcy filing last year made his debt “non-dischargeable” through bankruptcy, meaning he has to continue paying the families until he has fully settled the $1.5 billion debt.

As a result, Jones will likely be “basically broke now for the rest of his life,” Harry Litman, a former U.S. attorney, told MSNBC at the time.

During an appearance Thursday on a web show hosted by Phil McGraw, also known as Dr. Phil, Donald Trump spoke of his recent conviction on 34 felony counts in his hush-money trial—and his appetite for revenge against his political rivals.

Dr. Phil McGraw—once an acclaimed talk show staple—now hosts a web show sympathetically interviewing far-right trolls and peddling extremist conspiracies, going the way of innumerable has-beens. McGraw griped that the country is in such shambles that Trump regaining office would be too busy to “have time to get even.”

“Well, revenge does take time,” Trump replied. “And sometimes revenge can be justified, Phil. I have to be honest. Sometimes it can.”

Trump has repeatedly spoken about his revenge fantasies after being convicted, at least three times alone this week. On Newsmax Tuesday, he suggested he may pursue charges against Biden in retaliation for his hush-money trial—an investigation that he blames on Biden but which began in 2018—more than a year before Biden announced his 2020 run for president.

“It’s a terrible, terrible path that they’re leading us to,” Trump said on Newsmax, framing his felony conviction by a New York jury as a dangerous precedent instead of a rare instance of the criminal justice system asserting that no one is above the law. “And it’s very possible that it’s going to have to happen to them,” Trump added.

“Does that mean the next president does it to them? That’s really the question,” Trump continued.

On Wednesday, he repeated his promise for retribution, telling Fox’s Sean Hannity that he has the “right” to send the Department of Justice against his political enemies.

Aspiring to imprison political enemies is nothing new for Trump. He infamously led calls to “lock her up” while running against Hillary Clinton—a phrase Trump now claims he never said.

Two police officers who were injured by rioters during the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol were met with an appalling cacophony of boos and hisses from several Republicans during a visit to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. Some lawmakers even stormed out of the hall.

Former U.S. Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn and former Sergeant Aquilino Gonell had been touring through Pennsylvania as part of President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, but according to The Washington Post, several so-called conservative state lawmakers just couldn’t handle their presence Wednesday and threw a complete tantrum.

Dunn, who was pepper-sprayed and injured in hand-to-hand combat during the insurrection, said it was “sad though unsurprising that [Donald] Trump’s allies in the Pennsylvania state House followed his lead in mocking the January 6 attack.”

“The fact they’re scared to listen to those of us who were there and witnessed the political violence of January 6 firsthand speaks volumes,” he said Thursday in a statement.

Gonnell, who was battered during the riot three years ago, wrote in a post on X that Pennsylvania House Republicans had “abandoned the truth” and “sided with those who attacked us.”

Pennsylvania Democrats rallied to the former officers’ defense. Representative Arvind Venkat told the Post that he was “shocked and appalled” to see eight to 10 of his Republican colleagues walk out as the two were announced. Representative Mike Schlossberg said that a majority of Republicans did not stand and applaud the two men, who were introduced as “heroes” by House Speaker Joanna McClinton.

McClinton released a statement about the incident, saying, “The GOP members’ shameful behavior was unbecoming of our institution for any guest, let alone two of the men responsible for defending our democracy during a dark day in our nation’s history.”

Representative Jordan A. Harris, also a Democrat, criticized the Republican response to honoring members of law enforcement. “We talk about backing the blue, but people turned their backs on blue yesterday,” said Harris.

But Pennsylvania House Republican Leader Bryan Cutler hit back at the criticism from Democrats, accusing them of “antagonizing members and inviting division and discord for their political and campaign purposes.” He insisted that he had stayed on the floor.

The shocking incident is a sign of how divisive the January 6 insurrection is, with many Republicans continuing to insist that rioters had not been in the wrong and that the 2020 election was rigged.