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OPINION

‘DC Gulag’: Possible Trump AG Wants to ‘Denaturalize’ and ‘Deport’ MSNBC Host

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Correction, November 22, 2023: A previous version of this article said that Mike Davis was the head of Project 2025. Davis is unaffiliated with the group. 

He’s vowed to inflict a “reign of terror” and said it will be “glorious” when he puts migrant kids in cages. Now he wants to throw MSNBC host Medhi Hasan into a “gulag.” It would all be ludicrous if he weren’t connected to powerful Republicans in the Senate, the Supreme Court, throughout government, and the private sector, and if he hadn’t already been floated as a possible Trump attorney general.

At the Federalist Society, Mike Davis’ bio says he “has served in all three branches of the federal government, including for President George W. Bush, the Justice Department, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and current Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.”

He was Chief Counsel for Nominations to then-Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, but his current job is the one that is causing grave concern to those who see a second Trump term as ushering in fascism, and are worried about “the very future of American democracy.”

Like MSNBC host Medhi Hasan, who provided viewers on Sunday with an overview of Davis, and other possible top Trump officials should the ex-president get re-elected.

Davis is the founder of the Article III Project, which aims to put conservative judges on the bench. It is named for Article III of the Constitution, which lays out the judicial system of the United States.

READ MORE: ‘Terrible, Wrong and Brutal for Minorities’: Appeals Court Guts Voting Rights Act

“According to a new NBC News poll out just this morning for the first time, Donald Trump is now leading in a hypothetical general election matchup,” Hasan noted on Sunday (video below). “Now, this isn’t just bad news for President Biden, this is terrible news for the very future of American democracy.”

“For weeks we’ve been warning you on this show about the dangers of a second Trump term. The former president, after all has promised retribution, pledged to round up protesters with the military and suggested using the Justice Department to go after his political enemies,” the MSNBC host continued. “These are plans that should terrify each and every single one of us. But tonight, I want to pull back the curtain and take a look at who could be tasked with carrying out Trump’s radical agenda come 2025 and answer the question: what would a second Trump presidency without any human guardrails, without any adults in the room actually look like?”

After looking at a possible Vice President Tucker Carlson, and (again) a possible National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, Hasan focused on “a man a lot of people may not have heard of yet, Mike Davis.”

“He’s the man many in Trump’s inner circle including his own son Don Jr. and Steve Bannon are pitching to be the country’s next possible Attorney General. Earlier this week over on my Peacock show,” Hasan explained, “I dove deep into the conservative lawyer’s record from Davis’ threats to send journalists to the ‘DC Gulag.’ He has repeatedly called on social media for his followers to quote ‘arm up against the violent Black underclass,’ and it appears I may have struck a nerve.”

“Davis has since responded to my monologue from earlier this week, pledging to indict me when he’s AG for what I’m not sure but he’s also threatened to send me to the DC Gulag.”

READ MORE: Trump Lawyer Trips Over His Own Argument as Judges Appear Skeptical of Gag Order Appeal

“That’s a totally normal, non-fascistic response from a man trying to become the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.”

Indeed, Davis on Monday afternoon doubled down on his vow to send Hasan to the “DC Gulag.”

(For those wondering, “gulag” is a Russian term referring to forced labor camps under Lenin and Stalin. In America, we don’t have gulags.)

Monday afternoon, Davis wrote on Elon Musk’s social media platform X, that Hasan “is now on my Lists 2 (indict), 4 (detain), 6 (denaturalize), and 3 (deport).”

“I already have his spot picked out in the DC gulag,” Davis reiterated, before attacking MSNBC contributor Tim Miller.

“But I’ll put him in the women’s cell block, with @Timodc,” he added. “So these whiny leftists don’t get beat up as often.”

Davis also posted a link to Hasan’s NBC Peacock segment on him, and called it his “application” to become AG.

READ MORE: Hate Group Stages Boycott of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade Over Nonbinary Broadway Actors

“Dear President Trump,” Davis wrote. “Here’s my application to serve as your next Attorney General. (And if you pick me, I promise to put @mehdirhasan on Lists 2, 4, and 6.)”

Watch Hasan’s segment below or at this link.

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OPINION

Could RFK Jr. Be Trump’s Project 2025 Liaison? Asked to ‘Help Pick’ Government Officials

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Just days after suspending his run for the White House and endorsing Republican nominee Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in an interview with Tucker Carlson he has been asked to join the ex-president’s presidential transition team and “help pick” the administration officials in charge of running the government.

Although Trump and his campaign have tried to distance themselves from the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s extremist and now-toxic Project 2025, what RFK Jr. is describing is central to what Project 2025 was designed to do: Heritage calls its nearly 900-page Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” a “Presidential Transition Project.”

“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration,” explains The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 website. “This is the goal of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project. The project will build on four pillars that will, collectively, pave the way for an effective conservative administration: a policy agenda, personnel, training, and a 180-day playbook.”

ProPublica earlier this month explained, “The most important pillar of Project 2025 has always been about personnel, not policy. Or rather, the whole effort is animated by the Reagan-era maxim that personnel is policy, that power flows from having the right people in the right jobs. To that end, the plan’s most pertinent proposal is reinstating Schedule F — a provision unveiled near the very end of Trump’s term, then repealed by the Biden administration — which would shift as many as 50,000 career employees in policy-shaping positions into a new job category that would make them much easier to fire.”

READ MORE: Expert Predicts ‘Smith Will Win’ as Special Counsel Appeals Trump Docs Case Dismissal

Enter RFK Jr., an attorney, conspiracy theorist, anti-vaxxer, and HIV/AIDS denialist. Despite having initially launched his 2024 campaign as a Democrat, the Kennedy scion denounced by some of his family members is apparently familiar with Project 2025.

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime Democrat populist running for president as an independent, has a copy of Heritage’s ‘Mandate for Leadership’ on his desk. He attributes his own study of Heritage’s plan as an effort to collect ‘all of these different points of view about wasteful programs in government that could be eliminated,'” Deseret News reported in December of 2023. “Kennedy denies that he’s had any conversations with Project 2025, but he left the door open.”

Last month the progressive political action committee MoveOn commented on the report, writing: “That doesn’t seem like reference material a so-called ‘independent’ candidate would need to have.” 

The progressive group’s spokesperson Britt Jacovich wrote: “RFK Jr. has told us he’s open to using MAGA’s Project 2025 playbook for inspiration. That’s troubling and disqualifying. The Trump and Heritage Foundation effort would gut checks and balances and give MAGA full rein to ban abortions and end the rule of law by allowing the Justice Department to prosecute Trump’s political enemies.”

“You either support Trump and Project 2025, or you don’t,” Jacovich added. “By spoiling the race and reelecting Trump, he’d all but ensure this hellscape would become the law of the land.”

Project 2025 also appears to be familiar with RFK Jr.

Last year in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, James Bacon, described in the WSJ as “a senior adviser to the Heritage Foundation’s Presidential Transition Project,” penned a piece titled, “2024 Presidential Candidates Against the Administrative State.”

“Trump, DeSantis and even Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” he wrote, “recognize the need to reassert political control.”

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” he added, “began his White House bid by saying he’d ‘take the CIA and shatter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.'”

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Fast forward to last week.

Paul Dans, the former Heritage official who was head of Project 2025 until he “stepped down amid intense criticism including from the former president,” as CNN reported his exit at the end of July, is supportive of RFK Jr.

“I can’t tell you how many MAGA people that I work with, really the hardcore, the most based, who are huge RFK Jr. fans,” Dans said last week, Media Matters reported. “And they kind of were always kind of talking about it. But, remember, RFK Jr. went and interviewed for a job in 2016 at Trump Tower. So, you know, their relationship goes back years. Obviously there’s a lot that doesn’t — some of his positions aren’t square with America First, traditional America First. But certainly, there’s no one better, I think, in the entire country to take on the administrative state, particularly HHS.”

In his interview with far-right host Tucker Carlson, RFK Jr. says, “I’ve been asked to go on to the transition team to help pick the people who will be running the government.”

Watch below or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Black Jobs’: Trump Clarifies What He Meant

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OPINION

The DNC Was a Celebration of American Values. Peggy Noonan Is Accusing Democrats of Theft.

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The four-night Democratic National Convention concluded Thursday with Kamala Harris’s speech accepting her party’s nomination for President, and a massive balloon drop, as the polls show the Vice President continuing to beat and increase her lead against her Republican opponent, Donald Trump.

After Monday night’s four-minute standing ovation of President Joe Biden, with Chicago’s United Center arena filled with thousands of cheering supporters shouting “We love Joe,” Los Angeles Times‘ columnist LZ Granderson wrote those “deafening chants” really meant, “We love American values.”

American values were the centerpiece of the Democrats’ convention.

Vice presidential nominee Governor Tim Walz “sought to turn Republican arguments on their head while making an appeal for common sense rooted in his Midwestern values,” the Associated Press wrote after the third night. “’When they were banning books from their schools, we were banishing hunger from ours,’ he jabbed.”

READ MORE: Here’s What Donald Trump Will Get When RFK Jr. Endorses Him

“The differences between Harris’ speech in Chicago and the one Trump delivered last month at the Republican convention in Milwaukee could not have been more stark — and set the stage for the sprint to the November 5 election, with head-to-head confrontations in debates yet to come,” CNN reported Friday. “Vice President Kamala Harris capped one of the most extraordinary months in modern political history Thursday night with a speech that rallied Democrats around themes of patriotism — and cast Donald Trump as the enemy of classic American principles.”

But over at The Wall Street Journal, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Peggy Noonan, the former President Ronald Reagan speechwriter, had a different take.

“Kamala Harris’s speech was fine, and delivered with assurance. I prefer ‘Ask not what your country can do for you’ to ‘Never do anything half-assed,’ but tastes vary,” was Noonan’s opening salvo, criticizing the Vice President for sharing a direct quote from her late beloved mother, whom she and her sister had paid homage to on stage during the convention.

To her credit, Noonan’s piece is titled, “Kamala Harris Gets Off to a Strong Start,” and she offered up this comparison of Democrats vs. Republicans, or at least their parties:

“The Democratic Party has more substantial characters of recent American history to parade around on stage. The Clintons, the Obamas, Jesse Jackson, who, whatever your view of him, was there, on the balcony at the Lorraine Motel, when Martin Luther King was shot. This conveyed a party with a storied past, and if you join it you’re joining something real. The Republican Party, in its great toppling, has rejected its past. You lose something when you cast your history aside, and all you’ve got for prime time is Trump sons.”

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But Noonan is being resoundingly chastised for this allegation: Democrats “stole traditional Republican themes (faith, patriotism) and claimed them as their own.”

The Washington Post‘s Mariana Alfaro on Tuesday had reported: “The Democratic Party is presenting a message that there is ‘nothing more American than freedom,’ Democratic National Committee spokesman Abhi Rahman said.”

“’There’s no reason for us to be afraid of using those symbols, because those symbols are our symbols and there’s nobody that’s more proud to be American than we are,’ Rahman said.”

Mother Jones’ D.C. bureau chief David Corn responded to Noonan:”Stole? No one has an exclusive claim to patriotism.”

Former political science professor and attorney Carol Schultz Vento wrote: “My WW paratrooper dad was a patriot and person of faith and a Democrat before Peggy Noonan was born. The Republicans can no longer hijack those values from the rest of us.”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

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OPINION

Here’s What Donald Trump Will Get When RFK Jr. Endorses Him

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On Friday, when the 70-year-old scion of a political family whose time in the White House was likened to “Camelot” endorses Donald Trump’s presidential bid, as expected, independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will bring with him some of his single-digit array of voters, and enough baggage that could sink the possibly-soon-to-be-sentenced convicted ex-president’s campaign.

Over the past month or so, since the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, RFK Jr. has been chatting with the GOP presidential nominee, as a recording leaked by his nephew revealed the ex-president dangling a possible position in the Trump administration to the son of the late, great U.S. Attorney General and U.S. Senator, Robert Kennedy.

“I would love for you to serve,” Trump told RFK Jr. in the July video posted and subsequently deleted by Robert Kennedy III. During that call the two men arranged to meet while Trump would be in Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention later that month. “I would love you to do stuff and I think it’d be so good for your and so big for you. And we’re gonna win. We’re way ahead of the guy,”

When the two did meet, their discussion reportedly “included possible jobs that Kennedy could be given in a second Trump administration, either at the Cabinet level or posts that do not require Senate confirmation. The discussion also included the prospect of Kennedy leaving the race and endorsing Trump,” The Washington Post had reported, citing sources.

READ MORE: DNC to Showcase Next-Gen Dems, a Contrast to GOP’s ‘North Korean-Style Wasteland’: Critics

Now, RFK Jr. has said he will make an announcement Friday afternoon, “about the present historical moment and his path forward.”

NBC News reports Trump might nominate the anti-vaccine and AIDS denialist conspiracy theorist to be Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Kennedy, NPR reported last year, “paints a dark, conspiratorial picture of the world, bristling with debunked theories, misleading claims and outright falsehoods.”

“Wi-Fi causes cancer and ‘leaky brain,’ Kennedy told podcaster Joe Rogan,” NPR added. “Antidepressants are to blame for school shootings, he mused during an appearance with Twitter CEO Elon Musk. Chemicals in the water supply could turn children transgender, he told right-wing Canadian psychologist and podcaster Jordan Peterson, echoing a false assertion made by serial fabulist Alex Jones. AIDS may not be caused by HIV, he has suggested multiple times.”

NPR also reports, “what stands out in Kennedy’s case is the sheer volume of what he has asserted over the years, from his insistence that Republicans stole the 2004 election to his claims that 5G networks are being used for mass surveillance to his belief that the CIA assassinated his uncle.”

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Kennedy’s conspiracy theories don’t end there, with NPR adding Kennedy has “compared vaccine mandates to Nazi Germany and promoted a film targeting disproven claims about vaccines to Black Americans. He touted the alternative treatments ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, which have not been found to be effective at treating COVID-19. He appeared at the Christian nationalist ReAwaken America Tour alongside MAGA stars Roger Stone and Michael Flynn and QAnon conspiracy theorists.”

“My mission over the next 18 months of this campaign and throughout my presidency will be to end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power that is threatening now to impose a new kind of corporate feudalism on our country,” Kennedy said last year.

NPR also notes, “the pandemic united anti-vaccine and anti-government groups,” and “Kennedy’s message has found fertile ground among an odd-bedfellows coalition of supporters, from vaccine opponents to far-right conspiracy theorists such as Jones, Stone and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, to deep-pocketed Silicon Valley magnates including Musk, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and venture capitalist David Sacks, who hold Kennedy up as a contrarian free-thinker.”

Recently, Kennedy has embraced the crypto crowd, declaring, “Transactional freedom is as important as freedom of expression,” and claiming, “I’m going to put the entire U.S. budget on blockchain.”

David Corn, Mother Jones. D.C. bureau chief, on Wednesday noted, “If RFK Jr. endorses Trump, it will demonstrate he doesn’t care anything about climate change, clean air and water, women’s freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. Just one disingenuous conspiracy-theory-monger joining forces with another. A sad ending to a once noble brand.”

READ MORE: Seven Swing States Now ‘Toss-Ups’ According to Polling Analysis

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