Earlier this week, former president Donald Trump gave an interview to Univision, the Spanish-language broadcaster, during which he threatened to weaponize the F.B.I. and the Justice Department against his political opponents. The statements, which came on the heels of a Washington Post report revealing that Trump and his allies had been drawing up plans to use the federal government to retaliate against adversaries and former cabinet members, were arguably the most brazenly authoritarian remarks the presumptive Republican presidential nominee has made to date in a mainstream media interview. And the interview reasonably unnerved the political pundit class—’dangerous’ and ‘insane’ are among the words that have reverberated across cable news in the last 24 hours.
Inside Univision, however, the hour-long sit-down raised alarms for another reason. The interview, which was conducted by a non-Univision journalist who did little to question or push back on Trump’s claims, effectively functioned as a propaganda special, current and former Univision journalists have protested. In it, they saw glaring evidence of a broader effort by their new parent company, which has close ties to Trump and especially to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to curry favor with the former president and push the network further to the right.

Mike Johnson Is In Paris as Shutdown Looms

https://twitter.com/BFriedmanDC/status/1722827577369194574?s=20
- BFriedmanDC

Inside Mike Johnson’s Ties to a Far-Right Movement to Gut the Constitution

https://twitter.com/smc429/status/1723005374536487096?s=20
- smc429

The Key to Mike Johnson’s Christian Extremism Hangs Outside His Office

The newly elected House Speaker has ties to the far-right New Apostolic Reformation — which is hell-bent on turning America into a religious state

https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1723022540287639677?s=20
- tribelaw

Putin Wants the West to Give Up on Ukraine

Putin’s New Story About the War in Ukraine

How Russian Propaganda Went From “Denazification” to Fighting the West

https://twitter.com/JoyceWhiteVance/status/1722966205298864296?s=20
- JoyceWhiteVance

A lot of Americans embrace Trump’s authoritarianism

…it seems difficult to understand how he’s still running even with President Biden in early polling — or, in some cases leading him. A bevy of possibilities emerges: Is the media failing to inform voters? Are Trump-supportive voters tuning out media that’s reporting on his intentions? Is he simply seen as the lesser of two evils?
Parts of each of those are probably correct. But there’s a broader, simpler explanation, too: For many Americans, a turn toward authoritarianism isn’t seen as a negative. Many Americans support that idea.

Trump Bragged that Merkel Compared Him to Hitler

https://twitter.com/ehananoki/status/1723017834156921083?s=20
- ehananoki

Rudy Giuliani Spends His Nights Ranting Online

Every night, in the darkening stillness of his luxury apartment on the Upper East Side, Rudy Giuliani puts on a suit and a tie, affixes an American flag lapel pin above his left breast, sits at his desk in his wood-paneled corner library with views over Madison Avenue, stares into a camera, and starts talking.
And then he keeps on talking and talking, delivering, as he has for over a year, hundreds of hours of pure, uncut Rudy at his Rudest…
He has discovered that last refuge of the disgraced in 2023: The vodcast.