Arotrios

Last month marked the official end of the Reddit protests. Any subreddit that had changed its rules or gone dark — or forced its users to post exclusively about John Oliver — has now gone back to normal. On the surface, it seems like a complete victory for Reddit, but things aren’t so simple when a major element of that victory was forcibly removing moderators for dozens of communities. In fact, according to Reddit users, the protests have caused a major brain drain on the site. The question is: can you prove it? And the answer is: well, sort of, yes.

For the last six months, we've been tracking the top Reddit posts every month. When we first started, the subreddit with the most posts in the top 20 was r/OddlySatisfying, with three posts. As of last month, however, 10 of the top 20 posts all came from r/MadeMeSmile.

The fact that all of the top posts on Reddit are coming from the same subreddit, as far as we're concerned, means either people aren’t browsing as much or there just aren’t as many people on Reddit. But it was hard to tell which was which, since the actual number of upvotes on the most popular posts are pretty identical to where they were six months ago. But investigating that, I found that Reddit has always had certain caps on how many upvotes a post can get, which suggests that isn’t a good way to measure. Over on Subreddit Stats, however, we found a much better way of working this out.

Most major subreddits show a decrease of between 50 and 90 percent in average daily posts and comments, when compared to a year ago. This suggests the problem is way fewer users, not the same number of users browsing less. The huge and universal dropoff also suggests that people left, either because of the changes or the protests, and they aren’t coming back.

This chart from SubredditStats show the daily comments and posts for 5 major subreddits: r/news, r/facepalm, r/mademesmile, r/oddlysatisfying, r/mildlyinfuriating.

And that’s how we've now ended up with a Reddit full of r/MadeMeSmile. And, just in case you're curious about what that looks like — four of the top five Reddit posts were reposted TikToks.

Reddit was one of the last major spots online where you could expect to interact with people who aren’t making money off you. Which also why Reddit was able to completely replace its existing moderators since they were virtually all unpaid.

We’ve talked a lot about Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification”, but he was only talking about individual platforms. Larger trends like AI and crypto (or even pivoting to video) have a cascading effect on the process. One big platform trying something is enough to legitimize it, and soon everywhere you can go has a noticeably worse user experience. If people stay off Reddit, then the site definitely didn’t “win” the protests, but neither did anyone else.

When Reddit announced the API pricing that kicked all this off, they justified it by talking about lucrative AI tools trained on Reddit data, saying, “we don’t need to give all that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free”. Ironically, that’s exactly what you do every time you go online, and it looks like a lot of people have decided to choose the same thing for themselves by staying off Reddit.

Child poverty in the United States more than doubled and median household income declined last year when coronavirus pandemic-era government benefits expired and inflation kept rising, according to figures released Tuesday by the U.S. Census Bureau.

At the same time, the official poverty rate for Black Americans dropped to its lowest level on record, and income inequality declined for the first time since 2007, when looking at pre-tax income, due to income declines in the middle and top income brackets.

However, income inequality increased when using after-tax income, another result of the end of pandemic-era tax credits, according to Census Bureau reports on income, poverty and health insurance.

The reports reflected the sometimes-conflicting factors last year buffeting U.S. households. Workers faced a robust jobs market, with the number of full-time employees increasing year over year, the share of women working full time year-round reaching an all-time high and an increase in income for households run by someone with no high school diploma. But they also faced rising inflation and the end of pandemic-era stimulus benefits.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which started in 2020, the federal government expanded the child tax credit and sent payments to people who had suffered from the pandemic, lowering poverty measures in 2021. The expansion of the child tax credit expired at the end of 2021, and other pandemic-related benefits have expired within the past year.

As a result, the supplemental poverty measure rate for children jumped 7.2 percentage points to 12.4% in 2022, according to the Census Bureau.

“This represents a return to child poverty levels prior to the pandemic,” Liana Fox, an assistant division chief at the Census Bureau, said during a news conference. “We did see the child tax credit had a substantial decrease in child poverty.”

In a statement, President Joe Biden blamed congressional Republicans for failing to extend the enhanced child tax credit and vowed to restore it.

“The rise reported today in child poverty is no accident,” said Biden, a Democrat.

Opponents objected to extending the credit out of concern that the money would discourage people from working and that any additional federal spending would fuel inflation, which climbed to a 40-year high.

Before the pandemic, the Rev. Mary Downey would received from 400 to 600 calls a month from people seeking assistance from the center that she operates for homeless people and those living in poverty in Osceola County, Florida. She is now receiving 1,800 calls a month.

The expiration of the child tax credit expansion has been “devastating” to the people she serves in metro Orlando, and addressing poverty should be a bipartisan issue, she said.

“There is no surprise here. The bigger question is, ‘What we are going to do?’” said Downey, CEO of Hope Partnership. “Hungry babies deserve to be fed and have roofs over their heads.”

The median household income in 2022 was $74,580, a decline of 2.3% from 2021, and about 4.7% lower than in 2019 before the pandemic’s start. Asian Americans had the highest median household income, at almost $109,000, while Black Americans had the lowest, at about $53,000. Regionally, it was highest in the West, at almost $83,000, followed by the Northeast at more than $80,000, the Midwest at more than $73,000 and the South at more than $68,000.

The official poverty rate in 2022 was 11.5%, not statistically different from 2021, and for Black Americans it was 17.1%, the lowest on record. The supplemental poverty measure was 12.4%, an increase of 4.6 percentage points from 2021.

The U.S. Census Bureau releases two poverty measures. The official poverty measure is based on cash resources. The supplemental poverty measure includes both cash and noncash benefits and subtracts necessary expenses such as taxes and medical expenses.

The rate of people lacking health insurance dropped almost half a percentage point to 7.9%, driven by workers’ getting health insurance and growth in the rate of people receiving Medicare due to an increase in the number of people aged 65 or older in the U.S. It declined for people in all age groups except those who were age 18 or younger, though that gain for children wasn’t statistically significant, according to the Census Bureau.

The uninsured rate of children who were foreign born was more than 20%, and it was almost 25% for children who weren’t citizens.

Anti-poverty experts worry the poverty rate will only get worse without a long-term, systemic solution, as the pullback from the pandemic-era benefits has coincided with housing cost increases, jumps in homelessness and a rising cost of living.

“We know better, and we should do better. To see the increase in poverty, particularly for children, is very worrisome,” said Kim Janey, a former mayor of Boston who now heads an anti-poverty nonprofit. “If we want to be a country where the American dream is within reach, then we have to invest in our children and try to eradicate poverty in our nation.”

The discourse of the Trump era has been dominated by a conceit that the two major parties have swapped economic identities. The Democrats have supposedly abandoned their historical role as spokespeople for the working class to represent the neoliberal global elite, while the Republicans have been transmuted into scruffy populists. On the left, a mood of self-flagellating agony has prevailed, even as the party has won several elections in a row. On the right, the Republicans’ populist credibility has intensified their long-standing paranoia, “proving” that everything from the culture wars to Donald Trump’s endless crime spree is in fact a plot by the powerful to control them.

Yet, funnily enough, the two parties remain stubbornly attached to their traditional distributive goals. The Democrats still want to tax the rich and spend on the non-rich. Republicans still want very badly to do the opposite.

The Washington Post reports that Donald Trump’s campaign brain trust is working on a new economic plan to anchor his campaign. The leading idea is to pass another huge tax cut for the wealthy (a cut in corporate tax rates), paired with a tax increase on the middle class (a 10 percent tariff).

Trump’s brain trust believes current economic conditions indicate the U.S. economy is being harmed by excessively progressive taxes. To be sure, they have consistently believed this for more than 30 years through every conceivable combination of economic circumstances: high inflation, low inflation, recession, boom, war and peace,

Supply-side economics is a religion masquerading as an economic theory, and Trump’s brain trust, as it were, is a collection of the high priests of the supply-side cult: Arthur Laffer (who first began promoting supply-side economics nearly 50 years ago), Stephen Moore, Lawrence Kudlow, and Newt Gingrich.

The same crew wormed its way into Trump’s inner circle in 2016, probably because most legitimate Republican economists were too grossed out by Trump. Despite intermittently promising to make rich people pay higher taxes, Trump’s first-term accomplishment centered on passing a tax cut that disproportionately benefited the rich:

The putative goal of cutting taxes for business owners was to incentivize them to plow more money into domestic investment. That did not happen. However, the Trump tax cuts also didn’t have any obvious or immediate costs. At the time, interest rates were very low and the labor market had not yet fully recovered from the 2008 recession. A deficit-financed tax cut, combined with a general spending spree, injected more demand into the economy and helped produce full employment and rising incomes until the pandemic struck.

The economic situation Trump would inherit in 2025 would be very different. Higher deficits and interest rates mean that borrowing money to fund a regressive tax cut would have an immediate economic cost. That’s why his advisers are planning to pair the next Trump tax cut for the rich with a 10 percent tariff, the revenue from which would, presumably, offset the cost.

The political trouble with this plan is that it exposes rather than hides the trade-offs inherent in giving rich people a huge tax cut. (Consumers would pay higher prices for a lot of goods right away.) The long-standing Republican formula, one employed by Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump, is to pair huge tax cuts for the rich with small tax cuts for everybody else. Democrats complain the rich are getting a disproportionate share, Republicans lie about it and then make a lot of noise about some other, more easily digestible wedge issue (the war on terror, gay marriage, the caravan, etc.).

The supply-siders are not concerned about this cost because they really, really care about the issue. To them, cutting taxes for the rich is the main purpose of politics. They’re not doing it to get elected; they’re trying to get elected to do this, and they are willing to bear whatever cost comes along with pursuing their central objective. The sheer depth of their commitment is, in a way, admirable, if you overlook both the total objective failure of their economic model and their promiscuous dishonesty about it.

But where that leaves the rest of the party is another matter. The supply-side wing’s strangehold on the Republican policymaking apparatus is a historical marvel, one I studied in my first book two decades ago. The party’s voters don’t share this priority at all. Increasingly, Republican-aligned intellectuals also reject it. Trump has allowed the conservative intelligentsia to develop a deep fantasy in which they represent a barefoot movement of the soil. Many of them truly seem to believe their own pseudo-populist rhetoric; they are motivated by team loyalty more than any specific policy, to which they generally pay little attention.

But Trump is a crook, not an enemy of the rich. And the next Trump term, should there be one, will be even more oligarchic than the last.

Donald Trump is a dictator in waiting. Like other dictators, he is threatening to put his "enemies" in prison – and to do even worse things to them. These are not idle threats or empty acts of ideation: Donald Trump is a violent man who is a proven enemy of democracy and freedom.

These threats of violence against his enemies are part of a much larger pattern of violent and dangerous behavior that is only growing worse as he faces criminal trials and the possibility of going to prison for hundreds of years.

In the most recent example, Donald Trump told Glenn Beck during an interview last week that he is going to put President Biden and other "enemies" in prison when he takes by the White House in 2025.

In a Sunday evening post on his Truth Social disinformation social media platform, Trump was even more explicit with his threats of violence and harm, threatening that he would treat Biden and the other "enemies" like they do in "banana republics":

The Crooked Joe Biden Campaign has thrown so many Indictments and lawsuits against me that Republicans are already thinking about what we are going to do to Biden and the Communists when it's our turn. They have started a whole new Banana Republic way of thinking about political campaigns. So cheap and dirty, but that's where America is right now. Be careful what you wish for!

In "banana republics" the enemies of the leader and the regime are usually imprisoned, tortured, executed, and face death squads and mass executions. Trump himself has publicly expressed his admiration for murderous dictators and autocrats such as Vladimir Putin and N. Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

The corporate news media — with MSNBC being a notable exception — as is their policy, mostly ignored Trump's most recent threats to kill and imprison President Joe Biden and the other "enemies" of the MAGA movement. Ignoring the danger will not make it disappear or otherwise go away; moreover, to ignore Trumpism and neofascism is to normalize them.

During an interview Saturday on MSNBC, Miles Taylor, who was a senior member of Trump's administration and author of the New York Times' "Anonymous" op-ed, warned that the ex-president's desires to imprison his "enemies" are not new:

A number of folks who worked in the Trump administration with me and have since spoken out against the ex-president, we joke darkly about the fact that in a second term, a number of us will be in orange jumpsuits in Guantanamo Bay. I say that the comment is half facetious because Donald Trump actually did have a vision while I was in the administration to go use the terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay to house political prisoners. And in that case what he wanted to do is use it to move people from the southern border to send a message and put them in the same place where people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, sits behind bars, and send a message. The only reason Donald Trump didn't start sending people to Gitmo is because he was convinced it would be too expensive, and the facility couldn't house the number of people he wanted to send there. That was the mindset of the man when he was president of the United States. You have seen him since double down on his intention to again use the justice system for political purposes, and specifically admitting that he would do so to go after his enemies. I think that's very chilling.

In a recent conversation here at Salon, Taylor also issued this warning:

If I were to bet on who is going to be the next president of the United States, I would put my money on Donald Trump. Obviously, that is the last thing I want to see happen. But if I had to make a bet today, despite the impeachments and the indictments, and the widespread opposition to him, I think he's likely to be the next President of the United States. That should be a five-alarm fire for our democracy. Our democracy right now is at very grave risk of going through a period of destruction, and in many ways it already has. … As the saying goes, "Stalin was bad, but the little Stalins were a hell of a lot worse". And that is what we would be seeing in a second Trump term. As bad as Donald Trump will be if he wins a second term, his lieutenants will likely be people who are even more evil than he is. That is going to be true of Trump's successors too because they will be following his authoritarian playbook to win the MAGA base.

During a fake interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson two weeks ago, Trump engaged in obvious acts of mental projection and fantasy as he shared his fears of being assassinated by "the left', the Democrats, the "deep state" and other imagined enemies.

The most foolish and dangerous example of wish-casting is the argument that "Trump can't win anyway" or that he will be in prison or disqualified under the 14th Amendment.

These lies are part of a right-wing disinformation campaign in service to the Big Lie that Trump won the 2020 presidential election and that it was stolen from him by Biden and the Democrats. No evidence exists to support such claims.

The reality: Law enforcement and other experts have repeatedly warned (and documented) that the greatest threat to the country's domestic safety is from right-wing extremism. One such right-wing terrorist, a neo-Nazi terrorist, murdered three black people at a Dollar General Store in Jacksonville, Florida two Saturdays ago.

The "enemies" that Trump and his next regime want to put in prison or worse, include not just President Biden, the Democratic Party's leadership, and the members of law enforcement who are prosecuting Trump for his crimes, but all people who he and the Republican fascists and MAGA movement deem to be "the enemy" and "un-American".

Here are some specific examples.

If you do not support Donald Trump and the Republican fascists and the MAGA movement (or are deemed insufficiently loyal) you will face prison or worse.

The American right-wing wing has been trained for decades by their news media and other political leaders and influentials to believe that Democrats, liberals, progressives, feminists, progressives and others who are not "real Americans" are to be eliminated and subjected to other genocidal violence.

If you are a black or brown person, a Muslim, Jewish, an atheist, not a White Christian, a members of the LGBTQI community, believe in women's reproductive rights and freedoms, are deemed to be "Woke" or tainted by the "Critical Race Theory Mind Virus" or otherwise deemed to be the Other you will also be targeted by Trump's next regime and movement.

Dictators and other authoritarians expand the category of "the enemy" in response to political necessity and the whims, grievances, and others mercurial needs and impulses of the leader(s). This dynamic is even more powerful in a political personality cult such as Trumpism.

Even more so in personality cult such as Trumpism. No American, not even Trump's MAGA supporters and other Republican voters, will be safe from being put in prison or targeted for violence by the next Trump regime.

Trump and his advisers are actively creating the infrastructure for him to follow through on his plans to be a dictator when/if he retakes the White House in 2025. Trump's Agenda 47 is a plan to radically remake the presidency and American government (and American society) in service to his neofascist vision that includes such goals as ending birthright citizenship, criminalizing migrants and refugees, putting homeless people in camps, instituting national stop and frisk laws, restricting freedom of the press, ending academic freedom at the country's universities and colleges and other institutions of higher education, replacing quality public education that teaches critical thinking and the country's real history with a form of fascist "patriotic" indoctrination, ending environmental regulations, more gangster capitalism and power for the richest Americans and corporations, reversing the progress of the civil rights movement and the Black Freedom Struggle, taking away the rights of gays and lesbians and other queer people, further restricting women's civil and human rights, and ending US support for Ukraine.

Project 2025 is a strategy that has been developed by right-wing think tanks and interest groups such as the Heritage Foundation. The main focus of Project 2025 is to launch a blitzkrieg assault on the American government by ending career civil service and replacing it with Trump loyalists with the goal of eliminating any internal opposition to the Trump dictatorship. In essence, these Trump loyalists will place his vision above the Constitution and the rule of law.

Salon's Areeba Shah explains more:

A network of conservative groups is gearing up for the potential reelection of Donald Trump, actively enlisting an "army" of Americans to come to Washington with a mission to disassemble the federal government and substitute it with a vision that aligns more closely with their own beliefs and ideas, according to The Associated Press.

Organized by the Heritage Foundation, the sweeping new initiative called Project 2025, offers a policy agenda, transition plan, a playbook for the first 180 days and a personnel database for the next GOP president to access from the very beginning to take control, reform, and eliminate what Republicans criticize as the "deep state" bureaucracy. Their plan includes the possibility of firing as many as 50,000 federal employees.

Democracy experts view Project 2025 as an authoritarian attempt to seize power by filling the federal government, including the Department of Justice and the FBI, with unwavering Trump supporters, which could potentially erode the country's system of checks and balances.

"The irony of course is that in the name of 'draining the swamp', it creates opportunities to make the federal government actually quite corrupt and turn the country into a more authoritarian kind of government," Matt Dallek, a professor at George Washington's Graduate School of Political Management, who studies the American right, told Salon.

Those who remain in denial about the realities of Trump's plans to become a dictator and the country's worsening democracy crisis, would likely object to these warnings with foolish deflections such as Trump is just making "empty threats" and that he is "disorganized and not disciplined" and "the law would stop him" because "of American Exceptionalism" and "the institutions and the guardrails of democracy…".

Such voices have learned little, which seven years later is a choice, from the Age of Trump, the horrors it unleashed, and the system's failures that vomited it out.

By definition, fascists and other authoritarians such as Donald Trump and his fake populist MAGA movement do not care about the law or "institutions". The cry "that's illegal!" is one of the final things that many people in societies around the world have said when an authoritarian and their forces take power.

In addition, the last seven years have also highlighted how vulnerable and weak America's governing social and political institutions are to neofascism and other forms of authoritarianism and illiberalism. A second Trump regime, and the Republican Party and "conservative movement" more generally, have gained great experience with exploiting these vulnerabilities and are now trying to fully explode them – from both inside and outside the country's governing institutions.

The most foolish and dangerous example of wish-casting is the argument that "Trump can't win anyway" or that he will be in prison or disqualified under the 14th Amendment. Trump is a symbol and leader of a movement. The decades-long neofascist campaign to end multiracial pluralistic democracy will continue without him and will likely become even more effective and dangerous if a committed and disciplined ideologue in the mold of Ron DeSantis were to become its leader.

Or perhaps those members of the news media, political class, and among the general public who want to ignore or downplay Trump's escalating dictatorial threats would heed the warnings of former Republicans, the same people who helped to create the circumstances for Trump and the MAGA movement's rise to power?

As a group those Never-Trumpers and other pro-democracy voices from the "conservative" movement are sounding the alarm, almost screaming, that Donald Trump means everything that he says about becoming a dictator for life and getting revenge on those people who dare(d) to oppose him. Those same people are also warning, repeatedly, that Trump's chances of winning the 2024 Election are much higher than the mainstream news media and pundit class want to admit.

If Donald Trump was a private citizen and he was threatening his neighbors with violence and other harm, he would likely be put in jail or otherwise removed from society. But Donald Trump is not a regular person. He is a former president who commands the loyalty of tens of millions of people. When a person tells you who they are believe them. That wisdom and warning most certainly applies to Trump and his MAGAites and the other neofascists and members of the white right. Denial will not save you no matter how much you wish it would.

The Trump campaign has accused advocates of the legal theory of 'stretching the law beyond recognition'

A longshot legal bid to disqualify and remove Donald Trump from the 2024 US presidential ballot has been gaining traction.

Initially heralded by liberal activists, the theory has burst to the fore in recent weeks as prominent conservatives embrace the effort.

But critics warn that, if it moves forward, it risks robbing voters of the right to deliver their own verdict on whether the former president should return to the White House.

The untested legal gambit is a last-ditch bid of sorts against an ex-president who remains popular with his base. Its ultimate arbiter could be the conservative Supreme Court he helped shape - if it even gets that far.

On Wednesday, a Washington-based watchdog group sued to block Mr Trump from the Republican primary in the state of Colorado - likely the first of several lawsuits of its kind.

The Trump campaign quickly shot back that the legal challenge is "stretching the law beyond recognition" and has no basis "except in the minds of those who are pushing it".

"Joe Biden, Democrats, and Never Trumpers are scared to death because they see polls showing President Trump winning in the general election," spokesman Steven Cheung told the BBC's US partner CBS News.

Despite his mounting legal troubles, Mr Trump remains the dominant frontrunner for the Republican nomination and is polling neck-and-neck with President Joe Biden ahead of their expected rematch.

The strategy to bar him from the primary ballot invokes a rarely used provision of the US Constitution - Section Three of the 14th Amendment - that bars those who have "engaged in insurrection or rebellion" against the country from holding federal office.

The 14th Amendment was ratified after the Civil War, and Section 3 was deployed to bar secessionists from returning to previous government posts once southern states re-joined the Union.

It was used against people like Confederate president Jefferson Davis and his vice-president Alexander Stephens, both of whom had served in Congress, but it has seldom been invoked since.

Yet it has re-emerged as a political flashpoint in the wake of Mr Trump's sprawling effort to overturn his 2020 election defeat, which culminated in the riot at the US Capitol in January 2021.

In the attack's aftermath, the US House of Representatives impeached the then-president on a charge of "incitement of insurrection".

Had the US Senate voted to convict him on that charge, it would have had the option to take a second, simple-majority vote to bar him from ever serving in office again, on the basis of the 14th Amendment.

But that never happened: the Senate failed to reach the two-thirds majority required to convict Mr Trump, so the second vote never happened.

Two and a half years later, with Mr Trump's third bid for the presidency remarkably buoyant, the 14th Amendment is once again the talk of Washington.

At the vanguard of the effort is Free Speech For People, a self-described non-partisan advocacy group that last year filed challenges against Trump-backing lawmakers it labelled "insurrectionists".

The 14th Amendment was not written solely to apply to the post-Civil War era, but also to future insurrections, argues Ron Fein, the organisation's legal director.

He told the BBC the US Capitol riot succeeded "in delaying the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in our nation's history, which is further than the Confederates ever got".

"The particular candidates we challenged in 2022 had participated or assisted in the efforts that led up to the insurrection," Mr Fein said.

And, he added, their cases established important legal precedents that can be applied to show "Trump is the chief insurrectionist".

Free Speech For People intends to seek disqualification in multiple states. It is also separately petitioning the top election officials in at least nine states to unilaterally excise Mr Trump from the primary ballot.

Either move will inevitably draw an objection from the candidate himself, triggering a process that could ultimately place his fate in the hands of the US Supreme Court.

The legal strategy has picked up considerable steam since August, when Mr Trump was accused of election subversion in two separate criminal cases.

That same month, conservative legal scholars William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen wrote in a law review paper that Section 3 is "self-executing, operating as an immediate disqualification from office, without the need for additional action by Congress".

Mr Trump could therefore be rendered ineligible for the ballot "by every official, state or federal, who judges qualifications", the pair concluded.

Mr Baude and Mr Paulsen are members of the Federalist Society, a highly influential, conservative advocacy group.

They adhere to the view that the Constitution must be interpreted as its authors intended at the time, and their stance has since been backed by other legal experts with conservative credentials.

Even the Supreme Court, with its conservative majority and trio of Trump-appointed judges, may be receptive to their argument, said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a dean at the Yale School of Management who supports the Baude-Paulsen perspective.

"All that is needed is that one of 50 state election officials has to find him ineligible," he told the BBC.

"Just one will send it to a state court review, which will be appealed by either side and sent to the US Supreme Court for a speedy resolution."

With voters heading to the polls early next year, the case will be decided quickly, he predicted.

But the effort is not without its detractors, who question the theory's viability and whether it should even be implemented in a highly partisan America.

In an opinion piece for Bloomberg, liberal professor Noah Feldman wrote: "Donald Trump is manifestly unfit to be president. But it's up to voters to block him. Magic words from the past won't save us."

"To make a tortured legalistic logic to try to stop people from voting for who they want to vote for is a Soviet-style, banana republic argument," said New Hampshire Republican Party chairman Chris Ager.

"I'm not a Trump supporter. I'm neutral. But this whole attempt is bad for the country."

Even Brad Raffensperger, the top elections official in Georgia and a target of Mr Trump's ire, rejected the move as "merely the newest way of attempting to short-circuit the ballot box".

But at least two of his counterparts elsewhere have said the matter is under consideration.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, told MSNBC she was "taking it seriously" and would confer with colleagues in other key states like Pennsylvania and Georgia.

And in a joint statement last week, New Hampshire's attorney general and secretary of state - both Republicans - said they were "carefully reviewing the legal issues involved".

The latter is particularly notable, as their state holds the distinction of being the first in the nation to vote in the Republican primary.

The New Hampshire challenge is notably being touted by Bryant "Corky" Messner, a top Republican attorney who ran for the US Senate in 2020 with Mr Trump's endorsement.

Mr Messner, who intends to finance any 14th Amendment challenges to Mr Trump in his state, wants the courts to deliver their verdict before he can decide on whether to support Mr Trump.

"To me, it's purely about the Constitution," he said. "The US Constitution is more important than any one individual, be it Donald Trump or anyone else."

"If he ends up being the nominee of the Republican Party and he's not disqualified, I'll vote for him."

While some states are banning books left and right, California is set to enact a law that would penalise schools that ban any book reflecting the state’s diversity, including those that explore LGBTQ+ identities and race.

The legislation, Assembly Bill 1078 (AB 1078), would prevent school boards from “refusing to approve or prohibiting the use of any textbook, instructional material or other curriculum or any book or other resource in a school library” on the basis that it includes topics related to LGBTQ+, Black, Latino, Asian and Indigenous people or other marginalised groups.

School districts failing to comply with the bill would face a “fiscal penalty” that would see a decrease in state funds through changes in California’s school funding formulas.

It extends California’s already existing education code, which requires schools to include the experiences of LGBTQ+ people and other groups in its curriculum.

AB 1078 passed its final major legislative hurdle on Thursday (7 September) when the state Senate passed it 30-9. It then moved to governor Gavin Newsom’s desk.

Newsom celebrated the bill’s passage in a statement on X, once known as Twitter, saying it proves California is the “true freedom state”.

“California is the true freedom state: a place where families – not political fanatics – have the freedom to decide what’s right for them,” Newsom wrote.

“With the passage of this legislation that bans book bans and ensures all students have textbooks, our state’s Family Agenda is now even stronger.

“All students deserve the freedom to read and learn about the truth, the world and themselves.”

Assembly member Corey Jackson, the bill’s author, also celebrated the state for taking a “stand against book banning” in schools and ensuring students have “access to educational materials that accurately represent the rich cultural and racial diversity of our society”.

The legislation came after a showdown over LGBTQ+ inclusive materials earlier this year in Temecula.

The Temecula Valley School Board rejected a social studies curriculum with supplemental materials that referenced the late LGBTQ+ civil rights leader Harvey Milk. Two board members made the baseless accusation that Milk was a “paedophile”.

In June, Newsom condemned the school board members’ “offensive statement”.

Just a short while later, Newsom threatened to send textbooks to the schools and fine the district if the board didn’t approve the curriculum. The school board eventually adopted it.

August was another month of relatively good news for the Amazon rainforest: The rate of deforestation has continued to decline significantly.

Earlier this week, Marina Silva, Brazil’s environment minister, announced a 66.1 percent decrease in Amazon deforestation compared to last August. That amounted to a loss of about 217 square miles, according to Reuters. These figures come during a time of year when destruction of the rainforest is usually quite high, and follows a similar trend seen in July.

So far this year, the rate of deforestation is 48 percent lower than in 2022 and is at levels not seen since 2018. The numbers are another victory for President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has made protecting the Amazon a policy priority.

“These results show the determination of the Lula administration to break the cycle of abandonment and regression seen under the previous government,” Marina Silva said, according to the BBC.

The Amazon, the world’s largest tropical rainforest, covers some two and a half million square miles — an area roughly twice the size of India. It’s a critical carbon sink for greenhouse gas emissions and home to 20 percent of the world’s fresh water. But deforestation and climate change are degrading the Amazon and its ability to sop up carbon from the atmosphere. Some scientists fear that if deforestation continues, the rainforest could reach a point beyond which it cannot recover and would become a grassy savannah.

The tenure of Lula’s predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, saw a rollback of environmental regulations and enforcement, and a spike in deforestation. Since taking office in January, Lula has, among other steps, renewed efforts to combat illegal clearing and reactivated the $630 million Amazon Fund, which is aimed at supporting the government’s push to protect the rainforest.

“This shows the importance of governments acting on climate change,” Erika Berenguer, a senior research associate focused on the Amazon at Oxford University, said of the figures released this week. She is currently doing field work in the rainforest, and says the decreasing rate of deforestation is an important signal for voters.

“Often people vote and feel disempowered,” she said. “This shows how an election can change the fate of the Amazon.”

Some scientists, however, prefer to follow the annual rather than monthly deforestation data. “It’s a hopeful story,” said Alexandra Tyukavina, a geographer at the University of Maryland who focuses on tropical forest loss. But she adds that there could be a lag in capturing deforestation via satellite imagery and “there is quite a bit of deforestation happening in the second half of the year.”

While the progress so far has been critical, Berenguer calls it “low-hanging fruit” that largely revolved around getting back to where the country was before Bolsarano. “Then you have to pick the fruit at the top of the trees and it’s much more difficult,” she said. “The question becomes what we do to reduce rates even more from what they were pre-Bolsonaro.”

The Lula administration has set a goal of zero deforestation by 2030. But whether Lula meets that goal, or how close he comes, remains an open question, and there is at least some cause for skepticism. A meeting of Amazon nations early this year, for example, failed to reach an agreement on important barriers to progress, such as deforestation targets and the future of oil and gas development in the rainforest.

“We cannot just give ourselves a pat on the shoulder and be happy about it,” said Berenguer. “We cannot get too comfy.”

The climate crisis and soaring temperatures are worsening air quality, WMO (World Meteorological Organization) says, with ‘knock-on effects’

The concept of a “vicious cycle” between heatwaves and air pollution is a significant concern for meteorologists and climate scientists. This cycle refers to the mutually reinforcing relationship between extreme heat events and increased air pollution, which can have detrimental effects on both human health and the environment. Here’s how this cycle typically works:

1. Heatwaves: Heatwaves are prolonged periods of excessively hot weather, often accompanied by high temperatures and reduced precipitation. Climate change has been linked to an increase in the frequency and intensity of heatwaves in many regions around the world.
2. Air Pollution: High temperatures and stagnant air conditions during heatwaves can lead to the accumulation of air pollutants near the Earth’s surface. This includes pollutants like ground-level ozone (a major component of smog), particulate matter (tiny airborne particles), and various volatile organic compounds.
3. Mutual Reinforcement: The combination of extreme heat and air pollution can create a feedback loop. Here’s how it works:

• Increased Emissions: During heatwaves, there is often an increase in energy demand, leading to more fossil fuel combustion for electricity generation and transportation. This, in turn, leads to higher emissions of air pollutants.
• Chemical Reactions: High temperatures can promote chemical reactions in the atmosphere that transform some pollutants into more harmful substances. For example, increased sunlight and heat can lead to the formation of ground-level ozone.
• Health Impacts: Elevated levels of air pollutants, especially ozone and fine particulate matter, can exacerbate respiratory and cardiovascular problems in humans. These health issues can become more severe during heatwaves when people are more vulnerable.

1. Environmental Impact: The vicious cycle can also harm ecosystems. High temperatures, combined with air pollution, can stress plants and wildlife, leading to decreased crop yields, forest damage, and disruptions in the food chain.
2. Climate Change Feedback: The increased emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels during heatwaves contribute to the ongoing problem of climate change, further exacerbating the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, including heatwaves.

Addressing this vicious cycle requires comprehensive strategies to mitigate both the impacts of heatwaves and air pollution. These strategies may include reducing greenhouse gas emissions to combat climate change, implementing air quality regulations, improving urban planning to reduce heat island effects, and developing early warning systems to protect vulnerable populations during extreme heat events. Collaboration between meteorologists, environmental scientists, public health officials, and policymakers is essential to tackle this complex challenge and protect both human health and the environment.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has said extreme temperatures are not the only hazard from heatwaves but that they also cause pollution-related health problems.

In their annual air quality and climate bulletin, the meteorologists have highlighted a “vicious cycle” of climate breakdown and air pollution.
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The report points out that heatwaves can trigger wildfires, as observed in the northwestern United States. These wildfires release large amounts of smoke and pollutants into the atmosphere, further deteriorating air quality and posing health risks to nearby populations.

Another aspect highlighted is the intrusion of desert dust during heatwaves. In 2022, there was an unusually high influx of desert dust over the Mediterranean and Europe. Desert dust carries particulate matter and can worsen air quality when combined with hot and stagnant atmospheric conditions.

1. The bulletin mentions that Europe experienced record-breaking temperatures in 2022, which contributed to higher levels of particulate matter in the air. Extreme heat can exacerbate air pollution by enhancing the formation of ground-level ozone and other pollutants.

These findings underscore the complex relationship between climate change, extreme weather events like heatwaves, and their cascading impacts on air quality. Addressing this issue requires coordinated efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve air quality regulations, and develop strategies to adapt to and mitigate the effects of heatwaves. It also highlights the need for early warning systems and public health measures to protect vulnerable populations during extreme heat events and episodes of poor air quality.

Individuals and communities can take action to mitigate the effects of air pollution, especially during heatwaves and wildfires. The case studies from Brazil mentioned in the bulletin highlight some effective measures:

1. Urban Green Spaces: Parks and tree-covered areas within urban environments can play a crucial role in improving air quality. Trees and vegetation help absorb carbon dioxide, which is a greenhouse gas contributing to climate change. Additionally, they act as natural air filters, trapping and removing pollutants from the atmosphere. Planting and maintaining green spaces in cities can help reduce the concentration of harmful pollutants during heatwaves and other pollution-related events.
2. Community Engagement: Encouraging local communities to actively participate in tree planting and green space maintenance can have a significant impact. Engaging residents in tree-planting initiatives not only enhances urban aesthetics but also fosters a sense of ownership and environmental stewardship.
3. Public Awareness: Educating the public about the relationship between air quality, climate change, and their health is essential. Providing information on how individuals can reduce their contributions to air pollution, such as by using public transportation, reducing energy consumption, and avoiding activities that emit pollutants, can make a difference.
4. Air Quality Monitoring: Utilizing air quality monitoring systems and apps can help individuals and communities stay informed about local air quality conditions. This information can be used to adjust outdoor activities and protect vulnerable populations during periods of poor air quality, like heatwaves and wildfire events.
5. Supporting Policy Changes: Advocating for and supporting policies that address air pollution and climate change at the local, regional, and national levels is critical. Such policies can include regulations on emissions from industrial sources, the promotion of clean energy, and incentives for sustainable transportation.

These case studies from Brazil highlight the importance of nature-based solutions and community involvement in addressing air pollution and its associated health and environmental impacts. By taking proactive steps and implementing measures like those mentioned above, individuals and communities can contribute to improving air quality and building resilience against the challenges posed by heatwaves and wildfires exacerbated by climate change.

“Heatwaves and wildfires are closely linked. Smoke from wildfires contains a witch’s brew of chemicals that affects not only air quality and health, but also damages plants, ecosystems and crops – and leads to more carbon emissions and so more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” says Dr Lorenzo Labrador, a WMO scientific officer in the Global Atmosphere Watch network which compiled the bulletin.

It’s official: Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert (R) is scared. Recent polling has shown Democratic frontrunner Adam Frisch in the lead in Boebert’s district, and now the anti-LGBTQ+ Congresswoman is pleading with voters for help.

According to the Aspen Daily News, Boebert’s campaign sent three successive emails at the end of August that acknowledged the possibility of Boebert’s defeat.

“If we don’t turn things around quickly, we could lose this seat to the Democrats,” one email reportedly stated. “I can’t believe I’m saying those words, but I need you to understand how dire this situation is.” Another email written by Kellyanne Conway stated she was being “pummeled” and a third said, “If the Election were held today … Lauren would lose.”

The emails were reacting to the results of a Keating Research poll that showed Frish beating Boebert in the 2024 election to represent Colorado’s Third Congressional District.

The poll showed that 50% of likely voters in the district say they will vote for Frisch, who almost beat Boebert in 2022 in the purple district, and only 48% say they’re voting for Boebert. Frisch holds a bigger advantage – 17 points – when it comes to unaffiliated voters, the group that the Frisch campaign has said it’s trying to appeal to in this election cycle. He also has a 32-point advantage with Latin voters.

A majority – 53% – of likely voters in the survey had an unfavorable view of Boebert, and only 42% had a favorable view of her. 34% had a favorable view of Frisch, while 26% viewed him unfavorably.

In 2022, Frisch ran a campaign as a moderate Democrat against the far-right congressmember who has made a name for herself by, among other things, staunchly opposing LGBTQ+ equality and spreading hate speech about LGBTQ+ people. Frisch came close to beating her, losing by 551 votes, or fewer than 0.5% of the total votes.

Many believe that at this point the writing is on the wall and Boebert’s days in Congress are numbered. As LGBTQ Nation correspondent John Gallagher wrote, “The prospect of tossing Boebert out of Congress has energized not just rank-and-file Democrats but the party apparatus as well. The party has targeted Boebert’s seat as one that they intend to flip in 2024.”

ATLANTA (AP) — Sixty-one people have been indicted in Georgia on racketeering charges following a long-running state investigation into protests against a planned police and firefighter training facility in the Atlanta area that critics call “Cop City.”

In the sweeping indictment released Tuesday, Republican Attorney General Chris Carr alleged the defendants are “militant anarchists” who supported a violent movement that prosecutors trace to the widespread 2020 racial justice protests.

The Aug. 29 indictment is the latest application of the state’s anti-racketeering law, also known as a RICO law, and comes just weeks after the Fulton County prosecutor used the statute to charge former President Donald Trump and 18 other defendants.

The “Stop Cop City” effort has gone on for more than two years and at times veered into vandalism and violence. Opponents fear the training center will lead to greater militarization of the police, and that its construction in an urban forest will exacerbate environmental damage in a poor, majority-Black area.

Most of those indicted have already been charged over their alleged involvement in the movement. RICO charges carry a heavy potential sentence that can be added on top of the penalty for the underlying acts.

Among the defendants: more than three dozen people already facing domestic terrorism charges in connection to violent protests; three leaders of a bail fund previously accused of money laundering; and three activists previously charged with felony intimidation after authorities said they distributed flyers calling a state trooper a “murderer” for his involvement in the fatal shooting of a protester.

“The 61 defendants together have conspired to prevent the construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center by conducting, coordinating and organizing acts of violence, intimidation and property destruction,” Carr said during a news conference Tuesday.

In linking the defendants to the alleged conspiracy, prosecutors have made a huge series of allegations. Those include everything from possessing fire accelerant and throwing Molotov cocktails at police officers, to being reimbursed for glue and food for activists who spent months camping in the woods near the construction site.

Activists leading an ongoing referendum effort against the project immediately condemned the charges, calling them “anti-democratic.”

“Chris Carr may try to use his prosecutors and power to build his gubernatorial campaign and silence free speech, but his threats will not silence our commitment to standing up for our future, our community, and our city,” the Cop City Vote coalition said in a statement.

Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, meanwhile, praised the indictment, saying in a statement, “My top priority is and always will be keeping Georgians safe, especially against out-of-state radicals that threaten the safety of our citizens and law enforcement.”

Protests against the training center escalated after the fatal shooting in January of 26-year-old protester Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, known as Tortuguita. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation has said state troopers fired in self-defense after Paez Terán shot at them while they cleared protesters from a wooded area near the proposed facility site. But the troopers involved weren’t wearing body cameras, and activists have questioned the official narrative.

Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens and others say the 85-acre, $90 million facility would replace inadequate training facilities, and would help address difficulties in hiring and retaining police officers.

Prosecutors trace the roots of the “Stop Cop City” movement back to May 25, 2020, the date George Floyd was murdered by police officers in Minneapolis, even though the resulting protests occurred months before officials announced plans for the training center. Long after the racial justice protests died down, “violent anti-police sentiment” persisted among some Atlantans and it remains one of the demonstrators’ “core driving motives,” according to the indictment.

Since 2021, numerous instances of violence and vandalism have been linked to the movement. Days after the killing of Paez Terán, a police car was set alight at a January protest in downtown Atlanta. In March, more than 150 masked protesters chased off police at the construction site and torched construction equipment before fleeing and blending in with a crowd at a nearby music festival. Those two instances have led to dozens of people being charged with domestic terrorism, although prosecutors previously admitted they’ve had difficulty proving that many of those arrested were in fact those who took part in the violence.

Among those charged with domestic terrorism in March near the music festival and indicted last week is Thomas Jurgens, a Southern Poverty Law Center staff attorney. Jurgens’ lawyer has said his client wore a bright green hat — a well-known identifier used by legal observers — and his arrest alarmed many human rights organizations.

The law center called it an example of “heavy-handed law enforcement intervention against protesters.” DeKalb County District Attorney Sherry Boston, a Democrat, mentioned her concerns about Jurgens’ prosecution in announcing her June decision to withdraw from criminal cases connected to the movement, citing disagreements with Carr over how to handle the matters.

In addition to the 61 racketeering indictments, five of the defendants were also indicted on domestic terrorism and first-degree arson charges. Three previously charged leaders of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, which has provided bail money and helped find attorneys for arrested protesters, were also each indicted on 15 counts of money laundering.

The case was initially assigned to Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, the judge overseeing the racketeering case against Trump and 18 others. But McAfee recused himself, saying he’d worked with prosecutors on the case prior to his judicial appointment. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Kimberly Esmond Adams now oversees the case.

Around six billion tonnes of sand is dredged from the world's oceans every year, endangering marine life and coastal communities, the UN says.

Sand is the most exploited natural resource in the world after water and is used to produce concrete and glass.

The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) said some vessels were acting as vacuum cleaners, dredging both sand and micro-organisms that fish feed on.

This means that life may never recover in some areas.

The new data coincides with the launch of a new analysis tool called Marine Sand Watch that monitors dredging activities using marine tracking and artificial intelligence.

"The scale of environmental impacts of shallow sea mining activities and dredging is alarming," said Pascal Peduzzi, who heads UNEP's analytics centre GRID-Geneva.

The new platform estimates that out of some 50bn tonnes of sand and gravel used by humanity each year, an average of six billion tonnes come from the world's oceans and seas.

This is the equivalent of "more than one million dump trucks every day", Mr Peduzzi said.

The marine environment must be given time to recover, he said, adding that "it's not sustainable".

Large vessels were "basically sterilising the bottom of the sea by extracting sand and crunching all the microorganisms that are feeding fish", Mr Peduzzi said.

Sometimes the sand is dredged to the bedrock, meaning marine life may never recover, he added.

The UNEP recommended that sand dredging should also be banned from beaches to protect coastal resilience and economies.

Sand is essential for constructing buildings, roads, hydroelectric damns and solar panels. It can also play an important environmental role, protecting communities from rising sea levels.

The South China Sea, the North Sea and the US east coast are among the areas where the most dredging has occurred, the report states.

A network of conservative groups is gearing up for the potential reelection of Donald Trump, actively enlisting an "army" of Americans to come to Washington with a mission to disassemble the federal government and substitute it with a vision that aligns more closely with their own beliefs and ideas, according to The Associated Press.

Organized by the Heritage Foundation, the sweeping new initiative called Project 2025, offers a policy agenda, transition plan, a playbook for the first 180 days and a personnel database for the next GOP president to access from the very beginning to take control, reform, and eliminate what Republicans criticize as the "deep state" bureaucracy. Their plan includes the possibility of firing as many as 50,000 federal employees.

Democracy experts view Project 2025 as an authoritarian attempt to seize power by filling the federal government, including the Department of Justice and the FBI, with unwavering Trump supporters, which could potentially erode the country's system of checks and balances.

"The irony of course is that in the name of 'draining the swamp', it creates opportunities to make the federal government actually quite corrupt and turn the country into a more authoritarian kind of government," Matt Dallek, a professor at George Washington's Graduate School of Political Management, who studies the American right, told Salon.

One of the most important bulwarks of democracy is the career of federal civil service, he added. Civil servants often have decades of experience inside their agencies and provide knowledge of policy and law in the federal government that enables them to serve the public.

"The country relies on these people to not only enact administration or presidential priorities, but also to enact the laws and fulfill their oath of office," Dallek said.

He pointed to one of the dangers of this project, which includes "the purging of federal employees," as he described it, or the project's plans to fire and replace federal workers en masse in an effort to dismantle the "deep state."

"In basically one fell swoop – if this plan were to be implemented – we would, as a society, lose many of the people who help [the federal government] function and also the people who are not subjected to the whims of the president," Dallek said.

This would make it difficult for agencies like the FBI, the DOJ or the CIA to carry out their nonpartisan missions and to fulfill their oath of office and oath to the Constitution, Dallek explained.

By replacing federal employees with like-minded officials, Trump-era conservatives are planning to remove federal employees whom they perceive as obstacles to the president's agenda early on. This would avoid "the pitfalls of Trump's first years in office," and eliminate the possibility of any resistance a Republican president would encounter, the AP reported.

"Project 2025 is extremists' newest plan to set fire to our democracy," Kyle Herrig, a senior adviser at the left-leaning government watchdog group Accountable.US, told Salon. "It would allow far-right groups like Heritage and the Conservative Partnership Institute to implement their dangerous wish lists with no regard for everyday Americans."

If Project 2025 is implemented, it would reinstate Schedule F — an executive order from the Trump era aimed at redefining the employment status of tens of thousands of federal employees, effectively making them at-will workers and removing protections for anyone in decision-making positions.

Upon taking office in 2021, Biden revoked the executive order. However, Trump, along with other potential presidential candidates, is pledging to reinstate it.

Anywhere from 50,000 to hundreds of thousands of federal employees can be impacted by it since Schedule F is "ambiguously written," allowing political appointees to extend its application from top civil servants to those in lower ranks, Mary Guy, a professor of public administration at the University of Colorado Denver, told Salon.

"The problem with removing job protections from civil servants is that experienced executives are no longer protected should they need to speak truth to power and explain the downsides to what otherwise seems like a 'good' idea," Guy said. "They are at risk of being fired for offering alternative points of view or insisting that laws, such as the Administrative Procedures Act, be followed."

Project 2025's nearly 1,000-page policy blueprint, called "Mandate for Leadership," serves as a step-by-step guide for the incoming president, from proposing a comprehensive transformation of the Department of Justice to ending the FBI's efforts to combat the dissemination of misinformation. It even includes plans to intensify the prosecution of individuals involved in providing or distributing abortion pills by mail.

"The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors," the document says. "This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity ('SOGI'), diversity, equity, and inclusion Project ('DEI'), gender, gender equality, gender equity … and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists."

There are suggestions to reverse the Biden Administration's use of the federal government's resources to "further the woke agenda" and erase them from all policy manuals, guidance documents and agendas.

"From gutting critical climate protections to dismantling checks and balances to put maximum power in the hands of the president, Project 2025 takes extremism to a whole new level," Herrig said. "The project — and the dark network propping it up — must be held accountable for their efforts to undermine our democracy."

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Although presidents usually depend on Congress to implement policies, the Heritage Project embraces a perspective known to legal scholars as a unitary view of executive power. This perspective asserts that the president possesses extensive authority to act alone, as the AP report highlights.

The dangers of subordinating the entire federal government to the "whims of one person," is like pointing "a dagger at the heart of democracy," Dallek said.

"It's a central threat to democracy because what we would lose is some of the important checks and balances that are within the executive branch, and that frankly, we saw playing out in the run-up to January 6," he added.

While these checks and balances were not perfect, he pointed out, senior officials in the federal government were able to push back on the Big Lie and the delaying of the certification of the election.

"It showed that even at the end of Trump's first term, there were some mechanisms in place to defeat Trump's efforts basically to steal the election," Dallek said. "The danger of this project is that it would weaken these already atrophied mechanisms."

In addition to this, the project would also "demonize" civil servants, who do the type of work that keeps democracy functioning, he added.

"So an attack on them is also an attack on democracy, and that's why I think it has advocates of democracy so concerned about the future of the country," Dallek said.