We are now cast into that antic final period before an election where a raft of strange and outlandish stories suddenly spring up and mostly drop like a stone amidst the ongoing carnival of news. One of those stories popped up earlier this week in Florida when Marco Rubio announced on Twitter that a canvasser for his campaign was viciously beaten by anti-Republican street toughs who told him that Republicans weren’t welcome in their neighborhood. “Last night one of our canvassers wearing my T-shirt and a Desantis hat,” tweeted Rubio, “was brutally attacked by 4 animals who told him Republicans weren’t allowed in their neighborhood in #Hialeah#Florida.”
It sounded pretty bad — a canvasser for Rubio’s campaign was beaten badly enough that he had to be taken to a local hospital. But the story has played out a bit differently than might have been expected.
This article originally appeared at ProPublica and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.
Much of the cardboard and paper goods strewn about our homes — the mail-order boxes and grocery store bags — are sold by a single private company, with its name, Uline, stamped on the bottom. Few Americans know that a multibillion-dollar fortune made on those ubiquitous products is now fueling election deniers and other far-right candidates across the country.
Dick and Liz Uihlein of Illinois are the largest contributors to Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, who attended the Jan. 6 rally and was linked to a prominent antisemite, and have given to Jim Marchant, the Nevada Secretary of State nominee who says he opposed the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory in 2020. They are major funders to groups spreading election falsehoods, including Restoration of America, which, according to an internal document obtained by ProPublica, aims to “get on God’s side of the issues and stay there” and “punish leftists.”
Flush with profits from their shipping supply company, the Uihleins have emerged as the No. 1 federal campaign donors for Republicans ahead of the November elections, and the No. 2 donors overall behind liberal financier George Soros. The couple has spent at least $121 million on state and federal politics in the last two years alone, fighting taxes, unions, abortion rights and marijuana legalization.
Uline’s core business — selling boxes — is so boring there’s an entire Simpsons bit devoted to its dullness. But tax records obtained by ProPublica show the company, which is privately held and does not publicly disclose financial results, has experienced an astonishing boom.
The Uihleins, who make the vast majority of their money from the company, reported around $18 million in income in 2002, according to the records. That rocketed fortyfold, to $712 million, in 2018. Thanks to the pandemic-induced online shopping surge, Uline has grown even more since.
While the Uihleins rarely speak to the press — they didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story — they have become well known in political circles. But the explosion of the Uihleins’ wealth as well as the roots of their politics have not been well understood.
The German-American clan made their original fortune in the 19th century as owners of the Milwaukee brewery Schlitz. Family members were staples of the Chicago Tribune society pages. In 1917, Dick’s grandfather was identified as a millionaire in a Chicago Tribune humor item about how the wealthy man had fired an unqualified chauffeur.
When Dick and Liz Uihlein donated millions in recent years to the pro-Trump super PAC America First Action, they were following in a family tradition. Edgar J. Uihlein of Chicago was among the handful of largest donors to the original America First Committee, the aviator Charles Lindbergh’s group that opposed the United States’ entry into World War II. (It’s unclear whether that was Edgar Sr., Dick’s grandfather, or Edgar Jr., his father, who had just graduated from college.) While America First drew supporters from across the political spectrum, it was most associated with rightists. Uihlein’s donation was disclosed in 1941. Later that year, Lindbergh gave an openly antisemitic speech assailing Jewish influence.
When Edgar Uihlein Sr. died in 1956, his estate was valued at $4.8 million — more than $50 million in today’s dollars — and the money was left in a trust for his heirs, newspapers reported at the time.
Dick’s father, Edgar Uihlein Jr., who had started a plastics company after serving in the Navy during World War II, established himself as an important funder of far-right political groups in the 1960s.
A document from 1963 identify Edgar Uihlein Jr. as on the National Finance Committee of the John Birch Society. Founded a few years earlier, the group quickly became a significant force to the right of the Republican Party, known for its obsessively anti-communist politics. The Birchers combined hostility to New Deal social programs with lurid conspiracies, famously campaigning against “the horrors of fluoridation,” a supposed Red plot.
The group fiercely opposed civil rights. An entry in one 1963 Birch newsletter railed against the upcoming March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King would give his “I Have a Dream” speech: “the only good Americans who should have anything to do with this Communist-instigated mob in any way, or pay any attention to it in Washington, are the police required to maintain law and order.”
Edgar Uihlein Jr. supported politicians who embraced segregation. In early 1962, he sponsored a speech that brought to Chicago a former U.S. Army general named Edwin Walker. Walker toured the country attacking supposed communist conspiracies and civil rights, while celebrating the Southern defeat of Reconstruction, which he labeled “the tyranny within our own white race.”
The Anti-Defamation League, which tracked far-right figures in the period, has archives showing Edgar Uihlein Jr.’s involvement with several other groups and campaigns, including a $1,000 contribution to the presidential campaign of segregationist George Wallace in 1968. It’s not clear when, if ever, Uihlein’s association with the John Birch Society ended. As late as 1977, the founder of the group wrote a long letter to him asking for money.
Edgar Uihlein Jr.’s second child, Dick, born in 1945, grew up in the wealthy Chicago suburb of Lake Bluff and got the same sort of blue-blood education (Phillips Andover, Stanford) as his father (Hotchkiss, Princeton). Amid the social upheavals of the ’60s, Dick Uihlein didn’t waver: He married Liz before graduating from college in 1967, joined the family business and immersed himself in conservative politics. He worked on the 1969 Illinois congressional campaign of Phil Crane, who won a crowded Republican primary in an upset on a hardline anti-tax and anti-communist platform.
In one of the only interviews he’s ever given, Dick Uihlein told National Review in 2018 that he got his politics from his father, who often went by Ed. At the family breakfast table growing up, Uihlein recalled, “My father would talk about the importance of capitalism and the evils of socialism.” Dick said that same year that “my father shared many of the same values that I have, conservative values.”
Dick and Liz Uihlein continue to revere Edgar Jr., who died in 2005. Dick Uihlein named the family foundation after his father, and it now sends tens of millions of dollars to right-wing institutions. Among the recipients of the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation’s grants are the Federalist Society and think tanks that have pushed misleading claims about the 2020 election, such as the Conservative Partnership Institute and the Foundation for Government Accountability, as the Daily Beast reported.
Tucked in toward the back of the Uline catalog released this summer, sent out to millions of homes and businesses, was a long tribute to the “wise” Edgar Uihlein Jr.
“Father Uihlein, the head of the family, had a towering presence, and we respected his values,” wrote Liz Uihlein under a picture of her husband and father-in-law, recalling “frequent dinners at his house, where business, issues of the day, fishing muskies and, always, politics were discussed.”
She ended on a note of nostalgia tinged with bitterness: “Living your life and raising your kids were easier in an easier time. There was no legalized marijuana, defund the police or social media. We, like so many families, were raised with a sharp moral compass. The rules were the rules, but it was OK.”
The Uihleins’ political giving reflects these longings for a bygone era. Dick Uihlein is a major funder of the American Principles Project, which runs ads attacking what it calls “transgender ideology,” abortion and the teaching of “critical race theory.”
Last year, Uihlein weighed in on recalling four school board members in a small town north of Milwaukee because of their support for COVID-19 safety protocols and “equity” training for teachers. More recently, in his home state of Illinois, Uihlein has spent more than $50 million to back the Republican gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey, who has drawn criticism for saying the Holocaust “doesn’t even compare” to the toll of abortions and for accusing Democrats of “putting perversion into our schools” for adopting a sex ed bill that includes information about gender identity and same-sex couples.
The Uihleins were huge beneficiaries of a tax provision promoted by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., that was included in the Trump tax overhaul and are continuing to support the Wisconsin senator and fund attack ads against his opponent.
For all the Uihleins’ dismay at the disorder they see consuming the country, there is one domain where they can exert near total control. Former employees of Uline told ProPublica the couple’s traditionalist politics govern the smallest details of how the company is run.
For new staffers, it begins with the dress code in the employee handbook: Women are not permitted to wear pants except as part of a pantsuit or on Fridays; hose or stockings must be worn except during the warmer months; dresses “that are too short” and corduroy of any kind are strictly prohibited.
“DRESS CODE VIOLATIONS ARE TAKEN SERIOUSLY AND MAY RESULT IN DISCIPLINARY ACTION UP TO AND INCLUDING TERMINATION,” the handbook warns.
The handbook defines “tardy” as one minute past an employee’s scheduled start time. Just four personal items are allowed on employees’ desks, with maximum dimensions of 5 inches by 7 inches. One former staffer at Uline’s headquarters recalled a coworker who was forced to remove several drawings done by his young child. “Liz would walk up and down the aisles, and if your desk looked off, you’d be written up,” he recalled.
The Uihleins have enlisted company employees to manage their vast personal real estate holdings and maintain their exacting standards, records obtained by ProPublica show. While the Uihleins’ primary home is in Lake Forest, Illinois, they also have several waterfront properties in Florida. In one case, a Uline staffer emailed an official in Everglades City to complain after surveillance footage showed a local man “peeing off Dick’s dock.”
The family’s management style has worked well for the company. Founded in 1980 when Dick and Liz Uihlein saw a gap in the market and borrowed money from Dick’s father to launch a shipping supply distributor, Uline has grown to a network of 12 vast warehouses around the country as well as in Canada and Mexico. Uline’s signature marketing product, its Sears-style catalog, now runs over 800 pages, offering endless varieties of paper bags, packing tape, foaming hand soap, metal racks and more.
Liz Uihlein runs day-to-day operations from the company’s Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin headquarters, right over the Illinois border. Her obsessive focus on next-day shipping and customer service — “We answer the phones faster than 911,” a company saying goes — have powered Uline’s expansion.
Growth accelerated with the online shopping boom that relies on Uline’s specialty, cardboard boxes, which it carries in more than 1,700 sizes. “It’s weird to develop a love of corrugated boxes and shipping supplies, but I really enjoy” it, Liz Uihlein told a Milwaukee business newspaper.
Uline is now so dominant that its customers range from high-end firms like Tesla and Gucci to countless small merchants on Etsy to huge municipal governments. The New York City Department of Education and other agencies, for example, collectively spend more than half a million dollars per year with Uline.
Unlike at other corporate workplaces where discussing politics is tacitly discouraged, the Uihleins lean in to theirs. Employees gathered at the major Uline distribution center in Allentown, Pennsylvania, for a company party in 2019 were bemused when the entertainment hired by the company emerged on stage: a Donald Trump impersonator, wearing a red MAGA hat. The company regularly hosts “Lunch & Learn” sessions at its headquarters with figures such as former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, as the Guardian reported.
In 2018, when the New York Times published a profile labeling the Uihleins “The Most Powerful Conservative Couple You’ve Never Heard Of,” the company began to get calls from angry liberal customers canceling their accounts, a former sales staffer recalled. A website, Refuse Uline, was launched that lists alternatives to the company. But as the company’s only shareholders, the Uihleins only have to answer to themselves.
When COVID-19 hit, as Liz Uihlein campaigned against shutdowns and required workers to return to the office before vaccines were available, demand for Uline’s shipping and cleaning supplies surged. In 2020, as other businesses shuttered, sales at Uline shot up 14% to $6.5 billion, according to an internal report obtained by ProPublica. Stung by a worker shortage, Uihlein emailed Wisconsin’s Democratic governor in July 2021 urging him to “get government out of the way” by immediately cutting people off of expanded federal unemployment benefits that had helped people weather the pandemic. Uline needed to fill 500 jobs, she noted in the email, which ProPublica obtained via a public records request. The governor did not oblige.
It’s not clear when the Uihleins, who are both 77, will retire. But the next generation is in place. The couple’s adult children are executives at the company, and they have begun to give money to federal candidates — all conservatives. Dick and Liz Uihlein, meanwhile, have been taking steps to preserve their multibillion-dollar empire for their descendants by shielding it from the hated estate tax.
Over the years, they have gradually transferred the shares of Uline into a so-called “dynasty trust,” which now appears to hold a majority of the company, according to the tax records and business documents filed in Florida. Bob Lord, a lawyer at tax reform group Patriotic Millionaires, said dynasty trusts are typically designed to avoid estate and other transfer taxes for ultrarich families.
“The goal is for the company to remain in the family for possibly hundreds of years,” he said. “And the wealth generated by the company will accumulate untouched by estate tax.”
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
2000 Edits
Far-right commentator Dinesh D’Souza has re-released “2000 Mules,” aka a Bible for election deniers that’s based on his documentary of the same name, after the first version of the book was abruptly recalled due to what he called an unspecified “significant error”–but not before NPR got a copy.
These are some of the big changes from the recalled book that NPR spotted in the “official” version, which came after the nonprofits D’Souza accused of running voter fraud schemes started making noise about that characterization:
Left-wing nonprofits were “doing vote trafficking.” In the newly released book, they were just “potentially storing ballots.”
Black Lives Matter and Antifa were tied to the scheme; that claim has vanished.
The new version scrubbed out the names of the nonprofits D’Souza accused of orchestrating the scheme (but never fear, D’Souza assures readers; the election denial group that gave him the names “has offered to make them available as needed to the appropriate law enforcement authorities”).
What happened exactly? Here’s a hint:
When NPR contacted the five groups D’Souza had accused of involvement in election fraud, two went on the record to condemn the accusations as “trash,” “lies,” and “malarkey.” One of those groups described the allegations as potentially “libelous.”
Somebody should probably tell D’Souza to delete this tweet:
I am going to reveal the names of several of these nonprofit stash houses in my book “2000 Mules” that comes out in late August https://t.co/8Ym2FuI6vM
A South Carolina judge on Wednesday ordered ex-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to testify in front of the special grand jury in the Fulton County district attorney’s Trump election interference probe in Georgia.
Meadows’ lawyer signaled at first that he would appeal the ruling, then said a short while later he was “looking into legal options” based on the judge’s final written order.
Cassidy Hutchinson, one of Meadows’ ex-former aides, has reportedly been cooperating with the district attorney’s investigation.
Trump Team Finally Accepts Jan. 6 Panel’s Subpoena
The ex-president’s lawyers have accepted the bombshell subpoena from the House Jan. 6 Committee, which seeks both documents and his testimony.
Arizona Secretary Of State’s Campaign Office Burglarized
Someone broke into Arizona Secretary of State and Democratic gubernatorial nominee Katie Hobbs’s campaign headquarters in Phoenix and stole unspecified “items” from the office earlier this week, local authorities and Hobbs’ campaign reported yesterday.
They didn’t say which items were taken.
No suspects have been identified, the police said.
The burglary happened sometime on Monday night, when nobody was in the office, according to the campaign.
Like many other elections officials, Hobbs has been dealing with a deluge of threats ever since the 2020 election thanks to Trump’s voter fraud lies (lies that Kari Lake, Hobbs’ far-right rival, has put at the center of her campaign).
A Second Woman Alleges Walker Paid For Her Abortion
An unnamed woman (“Jane Doe”) represented by high-power lawyer Gloria Allred came forward during a virtual press conference saying Georgia GOP Senate nominee Herschel Walker had paid for her to get an abortion after impregnating her in 1993.
This is the second allegation that Walker, a self-declared anti-abortion hardliner, paid for a girlfriend’s abortion. Jane Doe came forward less than a month after another unidentified woman (who is also the mother of one of Walker’s kids) told the Daily Beast that the ex-NFL player gave her cash to terminate her pregnancy in 2009.
Jane Doe’s account was disturbing: She alleged that Walker had pressured her to get the abortion by driving her to the clinic and waiting outside for hours until she came out to make sure she’d gotten the procedure.
Walker predictably denied the allegation, as he had with the first report.
Alaska held a debate in the race for its lone House seat on Tuesday night with incumbent Rep. Mary Peltola (D-AK), Republican ex-vice presidential hopeful Sarah Palin, Republican businessman Nick Begich and Libertarian candidate Chris Bye.
TheAlaska Beacon: “Nation’s political divide is the focus of Alaska U.S. House debate”
CBS News: “Bipartisanship in focus in debate for Alaska’s only House seat”
On one hand, Mr. Fetterman, the Democratic nominee, was in a nationally watched debate months after a stroke left him with an auditory processing disorder, speaking openly about his disability — a remarkable moment for people who have felt pressure to hide their own, and who rarely see people like themselves in politics. On the other hand, much of the coverage of the debate focused on Mr. Fetterman’s verbal stumbles.
[Finger Guns]
As a Rascal Flatt Earther I believe that Earth is a highway
After reports surfaced last week suggesting that the Jan. 6 Committee was struggling to find a lawyer on Trump’s team who was authorized to accept service of a subpoena, team Trump has reportedly been served.
A second woman has come forward alleging that Georgia Republican Senate candidate and purported anti-abortion advocate Herschel Walker helped her get an abortion.
Another woman has come forward alleging that Herschel Walker pressured her to have an abortion after she became pregnant during a longterm extramarital affair with the former football star. This alleged incident occurred in Texas in the 1990s. The woman, who did not show her face during a virtual press conference today, appeared with her lawyer Gloria Allred.
We have fascinating and dangerous news out of Pennsylvania. Republicans in the state’s GOP dominated state legislature have filed articles of impeachment against Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner. If you’re not familiar with the players here, Krasner is one of the country’s most prominent reform DAs – and one of the first to win an election in a major American city back in 2017. Meanwhile there has been a spike in gun violence in the city and the murder rate has risen substantially. Krasner and his supporters argue that these shifts are mirrored across the country and are not a result of his policies. Republican critics and some Democrats disagree.
But here’s where this becomes more than just standard politics.
Ex-White House communications director Hope Hicks had a transcribed interview with the House Jan. 6 Committee on Tuesday, according to the New York Timesandseveralotheroutlets.
In the spring of 2020, George Floyd’s caught-on-camera murder by a Minneapolis police officer prompted massive social justice protests across the country. Millions of people marched for law enforcement reform — even Sen. Mitt Romney, the Utah Republican and onetime GOP presidential nominee. Activists pressed policymakers to “defund the police.”
Amid the pressure, elected officials pledged sweeping changes to how officers operate and how they’re overseen.
But two and a half years later, with violent crime increasing across the country, that momentum has seemingly stalled. In Washington, support for the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which would have created a national police misconduct registry among other measures, withered while lawmakers passed bipartisan legislation to invest in the police. A recent House bill would award local police departments $60 million annually for five years, with few of the kinds of accountability measures for cops that progressives had advocated.
To make sense of these shifts, I called Elizabeth Glazer, one of New York’s leading experts on criminal justice. For more than two decades, she’s been working in law enforcement and policymaking circles, first as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, where she leveraged federal racketeering laws to put shooters and their enablers behind bars, then as a government official, including the deputy secretary for public safety under New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Most recently, she served as the director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice during the Bill de Blasio administration.
This year, Glazer founded Vital City, a nonprofit dedicated to offering practical solutions to public safety problems. The endeavor is something of a call for a rebirth of civic mindedness, drawing on research that shows how communities can both be safer and feel safer if the whole of city government — not just the police — acts, including cleaning up vacant lots, turning on street lights and employing young people during the summer.
We discussed police reform post-Floyd, the role of the cops and the shifting narrative around public safety amid rising levels of crime. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
From your perch, what does the legislative inaction around the police reform agenda say about the ground-level movement that was spurred by Floyd’s murder? What happened?
Two things happened: One, there’s a kind of built-in conservatism about the importance of maintaining the police. As a country, we are afraid to change policing because we are so firmly attached to the view that it is only the police that can keep us safe.
The second thing is, the movement coincided with rocketing rates of increase in shootings. Suddenly, scary violence really erupted in ways we hadn’t seen in many years. And our reflex when crime happens is, “Call the police,” not, “Make sure you have enough summer youth employment.” That bolstered the reluctance to make changes.
But I think the other thing is that “defund the police” was really a lost opportunity. It sort of had this toxic messaging. So it was viewed as an existential threat to police departments. But in fact, it might’ve been an enormous opportunity if police departments didn’t view it that way. It could have been a chance for them to begin to reshape their roles in a way that focused on their core strengths and to begin to give back to other professionals the responsibility to deal with the homeless, those with mental illness and all these other areas where their authority had kind of expanded into.
I’ve always thought that some of the reformers and even the police union would have some common ground, especially when it comes to defining what the job of the cop is.
In fact, cops have often said: “We don’t want to be social workers. That’s not our job.” So it does seem like there’s an opportunity. But we don’t start from that point because I think there’s a sense from the profession that they are under attack and underappreciated. And if you say, ‘Do less,’ it feels like yet a further attack, as opposed to, ‘How can we support you to do what you do best?’ What’s happened is that the police department, as it accretes more and more functions, occupies a very prominent role among the city agencies. But actually we’re a civilian government, we have civilian heads whose job, really, is to ensure the police are part of an integrated civic approach, ensuring that communities thrive.
You’ve been making this argument for years. Why should policymakers listen today?
The police are great at solving crimes. And that is something that only they can do, and, really, that is what they should do.
But the line between who is police and who is government more broadly has become more and more blurred, so what you see is police really taking over all kinds of civic services. In New York City, the Police Department is funded to the tune of millions of dollars to construct community centers and do community programming. They have an employment program. They do graffiti removal. They do mentoring. They have a beekeeper. All of these are civic services. Why are the police doing it?
We seem to have gotten into this strange Rube Goldberg situation, in which the police, as a stated matter, are saying, “We’re doing it in order to build trust with the community.” But it’s really a backward way of doing it and ultimately, I think, ineffective because it is hard to make friends when it is an unequal relationship. It is hard to say: “Play basketball with me. By the way, I have a gun.” Or, “By the way, on another day I may be arresting you and your friends.” It’s just the way things are constructed. But the police can build respect by solving cases. And I think neighborhoods rely upon them, and have respect for them, when they do that job they can do so excellently.
In 1999, you wrote a piece for National Affairs that argued law enforcement needed to take a broader approach to crime reduction instead of focusing on arrests and one-off prosecutions. Today, 23 years later, do you feel as though the more things have changed, the more they are the same?
I think the frustration I was expressing then was that there didn’t seem to be a connection between going back in and arresting people over and over again and saying, “OK, well now a bunch of people who have been killing other people in the neighborhood have been arrested. Before another group steps in to fill the void, is there something else that can be done?” Who has that panoramic view?
A civilian needs to be the one who has that panoramic view, that civilian being the mayor, who oversees all the different services that are produced for the benefit of a city’s citizens and weaves them together toward one goal, which is supporting the well-being of New Yorkers. The police are an important part of that, but they are not the most important part, and they are not the point of the spear. They are a civic service that needs to be coordinated and synchronized with all these other efforts, focused on neighborhoods in need and working alongside their colleagues in housing, parks, employment and all the other things that keep us safe.
At the same time, when you think about this service of last resort, meaning the criminal justice system, it’s much more than just the city. Somebody also needs to coordinate that, and it needs to be someone who has enough gravitas and connections to have players who do not report to them be willing to think together and act together for a common goal.
Is there any recognition in the Adams administration that maybe the police don’t need to be as omnipresent in every aspect of city life? Or is that point lost on them?
I mean, certainly the mayor’s campaign rhetoric was very much about dealing with upstream issues. He famously quoted Bishop [Desmond] Tutu about making sure people don’t “fall into the river.” And he’s been a big proponent on summer youth employment. The difficulty is, it’s unclear what the plan is and how it all fits together. And then, even to the extent that one thing or another is announced, how are those things doing? And do they connect to anything else that’s being done?
How do you advise policymakers who are navigating the new terrain here when politicians weaponize crime stats for political ends? Yes, crime is up, but in truth there are some neighborhoods that are feeling it disproportionately.
Crime is now and always has been highly, highly concentrated, particularly violent crime. If you look at the neighborhoods that suffered the most number of shootings today and 30 years ago, they’re almost identical. Many fewer shootings now, but still, they lead the city. And right across the board, every social distress is borne in these neighborhoods, including poor health outcomes and high unemployment. So we’re seeing the durability of place.
There are community groups who have the slogan, “Nothing stops a bullet like a job.” And in fact they’re exactly right. Our problem is it doesn’t feel like immediate action. One of the great attractions, I think, for elected officials and for residents of sending in the police is it feels like something is being done. We’ve seen over and over again; that can’t be the only answer. And we have such incredibly good evidence about what else stops crime right now, not in 20 years, but right now. Turning on the lights reduces crime. Summer youth employment reduces crime.
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Ladies, Isn’t There Someone You Forgot To Ask?
As a man of science and medicine, Senate nominee Dr. Mehmet Oz (R-PA) wants the federal government to butt out of the issue of abortion. No, that needs to be left to the local government, Oz argued during his first debate with Democratic rival John Fetterman last night.
Oz’s proposal: “I want women, doctors, local political leaders letting the democracy that’s always allowed our nation to thrive to put the best ideas forward so states can decide for themselves.”
The Fetterman and Oz debate wasn’t the only face-off in a key midterms race last night: New York, Michigan, and Colorado held debates for their gubernatorial and Senate elections as well.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) vs. Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY): Takeaways by the New York Times, New York 1, and CNN
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) vs. conservative commentator Tudor Dixon: Takeaways by the Detroit News, Detroit Free Press, and CNN
The House Jan. 6 Committee held a transcribed interview with ex-White House communications director and top Trump adviser Hope Hicks yesterday, according tomultiplereports.
Hicks had previously had an “informal interview” with the panel, according to CNN.
Hicks had tried to convince Trump to accept his 2020 election defeat, prompting the ex-president to complain during meetings, “Well, Hope doesn’t believe in me,” according to a book by reporters Peter Baker and Susan Glasser. Hicks reportedly responded, “No, I don’t. Nobody’s convinced me otherwise.”
Trump Demands Masters Goes Harder On Big Lie
A new clip of a Fox News documentary shows Arizona GOP Senate nominee Blake Masters taking a call from the ex-president, who warns him against going “soft” on Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, or else “you’ll lose.”
The call apparently took place after Masters’ debate with incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) earlier this month, when the Republican nominee reversed course on his election denialism (like other election deniers trying to appeal to regular voters) and said that he hadn’t “seen evidence” of the 2020 election being rigged against Trump.
New—>Tucker Carlson doc on Blake Masters shows him taking call from Trump:
“If you want to get across the line, you need to be stronger on that one thing…lot of complaints about. Look at Kari … if they say, ‘How is your family?’ She says, ‘The election was rigged & stolen.’” https://t.co/hiU0TaC3Nxpic.twitter.com/BVtyNuHSuz
Progressive Dems Walk Back Letter To Biden On Ukraine Strategy
The Congressional Progressive Caucus on Tuesday withdrew its letter to Biden that urged the President to pursue direct negotiations with Russia to secure a ceasefire in Ukraine.
Caucus chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) said the letter had been drafted several months ago and was released by staff “without vetting.”
The reversal was spurred by the caucus’ worry that its proposal was being “conflated” with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) warning about the GOP potentially cutting Ukraine aid, Jayapal said.
Kanye (aka “Ye”) West’s anti-Semitic meltdown is starting to cost him, big time: Adidas, which manufactures and distributes the sneakers in West’s fashion line, announced on Tuesday that it was pulling the plug on its billion-dollar partnership with the rapper, whose “recent comments and actions have been unacceptable, hateful and dangerous.”
The sportswear giant’s announcement came several days after West bragged during a podcast that “I can literally say anti-Semitic shit, and they can’t drop me.” But don’t give Adidas too much credit: The company had been dragging its feet for weeks during the rapper’s tirades against the Jewish community before finally taking action yesterday.
The pressure for Adidas to drop West, who declared earlier this month that he would go “death con 3 ON JEWISH PEOPLE,” was amplified by the German corporation’s past ties to Nazism: Adi Dassler, the founder of Adidas, was a member of the Nazi Party (although he reportedlywasn’t a party loyalist, which was why he was allowed to keep running his business after World War II).
GOP Senator Glares At Gas Pump
Like Sen. Todd Young (R-IN), I too express my outrage at gas prices by sharing pictures of myself angrily gripping a pump without a car in sight:
Stopped to fill up in Gary while on my Hoosier Jobs Tour.
A gallon of gas was under $2 when President Biden took office. It’s now nearly $4 dollars. pic.twitter.com/Y7KnBP0qLW
