Category: Politics

Amazon will retire its charity platform, Amazon Smile, and the Big Tech company aims to replace some of that effort with other charitable programs, but it declined to comment on whether it will continue to systematically exclude conservative and Christian groups from its charitable efforts.

The company announced Wednesday that it will “wind down” Amazon Smile by Feb. 20, 2023, after a round of layoffs. The company determined that the platform, launched in 2013, “has not grown to create the impact we had originally hoped. With so many eligible organizations—more than 1 million globally—our ability to have an impact was often spread too thin.”

Amazon had previously faced criticism for relying on the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center’s discredited “hate group” accusations to exclude certain conservative and Christian nonprofits from receiving funds on Amazon Smile. When Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., asked then-Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos why Amazon relies on the SPLC, Bezos acknowledged “this is an imperfect system,” but neither Bezos nor current CEO Andy Jassy addressed the issue again.

Amazon PR Manager Patrick Malone told The Daily Signal that this criticism did not impact the decision to terminate Amazon Smile.

“We made this decision based on how we can most impact the communities we serve,” Malone added. “We are shifting our focus to programs that will create a bigger impact in communities across the U.S./U.K./Germany.”

While Amazon Smile allowed Amazon customers to select which charities would receive a cut of the profits of their Amazon purchases, Amazon’s new programs appear to take the decision away from customers.

RELATED: Conservatives, Christians Systematically Excluded From Benefits of Christmas Shopping on Amazon

The press release listed a few charities and communities that Amazon will support, including the company’s “Housing Equity Fund,” its “Amazon Future Engineer” program, food bank and disaster relief programs, and “Community giving.” In that last category, Amazon says it supports “hundreds of local nonprofits doing meaningful work in cities where our employees and their families live,” such as youth sports leagues, community colleges, and homeless shelters.

Malone declined to comment on whether Amazon would continue to use the SPLC’s “hate group” list to exclude certain charities from its programs.

As I explain in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC took the program it used to bankrupt organizations associated with the Ku Klux Klan and weaponized it against conservative groups, partially in order to scare donors into ponying up cash and partially to silence its ideological opponents. The SPLC places conservative organizations such as Alliance Defending Freedom, the Family Research Council, and the American Freedom Law Center on a “hate map” along with Ku Klux Klan chapters.

In 2012, a terrorist targeted the Family Research Council’s headquarters in the nation’s capital, entering the lobby with a semiautomatic pistol and then shooting and wounding a guard. The man told the FBI that he found the conservative organization on the SPLC’s “hate map” and intended to kill everyone in the building. The man later pleaded guilty to committing an act of terror and received a 25-year prison sentence. The SPLC condemned the attack, but has kept the Family Research Council on the “hate map” ever since.

After the SPLC fired its co-founder amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal in 2019, a former staffer claimed that the SPLC’s accusations of “hate” are a “cynical fundraising scam” aimed at “bilking northern liberals.” Critics across the political spectrum have voiced opposition and alarm at the “hate group” smears.

Many nonpartisan organizations have criticized Amazon for using the SPLC, including the Free Enterprise Project at the National Center for Public Policy Research, the New Tolerance Campaign, and the Coalition for Jewish Values, a coalition of over 2,000 Orthodox Jewish rabbis.

“Amazon, like so many other companies, has rhetorically embraced ‘stakeholder capitalism,’” Scott Shepard, director of the Free Enterprise Project, told The Daily Signal in a Thursday phone interview. While Amazon Smile “allowed all the customers, all the stakeholders, to contribute in the ways they wished, the lefties who run Amazon didn’t like the distribution.”

Citing the “Housing Equity Fund,” as “coded language for distributing to its favored racial and ethnic groups,” Shepard claimed that Amazon “immediately promised to start providing its giving in racially and ethnically discriminatory ways.”

“Unless Amazon has publicly and absolutely promised not to use the ‘hate’ source of the SPLC, they’ll be going back to using them, just as we already know that they’re taking away this program from individual choice, customer choice, so they can return to partisan left-wing goals,” he added. “If Amazon wants to challenge that characterization in any way, it ought to release the distribution of where customers were sending their money.”

“The Amazon Smile program was problematic from the start,” Gregory T. Angelo, president of the New Tolerance Campaign, told The Daily Signal. “It promoted ‘feel-good shopping,’ but generated minimal revenue for nonprofits. And by using the Southern Poverty Law Center’s discredited ‘hate list’ as a gatekeeper for donations, Amazon alienated customers.”

“It will be interesting to see where Amazon pivots as it seeks to modify its charitable initiatives—the New Tolerance Campaign will be watching,” Angelo added.

Rabbi Yaakov Menken, managing director of the Coalition for Jewish Values, told The Daily Signal that Amazon’s shift seems likely to be worse for conservative nonprofits, even though the company may no longer need to rely on the SPLC.

“If they’re going to be doing direct charitable things, they’re not going to be using SPLC because they’re not even going to talk to conservative charities in the first place,” he said in an in-person interview Thursday. “In their search for equity, they’re being inequitable.”

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email [email protected] and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

Renowned French author Laurent Obertone presents a bleak future of a France in conflict in his books, but he says that such a reality is not far from fiction.

An exclusive interview with French journalist, essayist, and novelist Laurent Obertone, author of the prophetic bestseller novel “Guerilla – The day everything went up in flames” (in French: “Guérilla – Le jour où tout s’embrasa”) and of several essays on the violent and totalitarian drift of French society (“La France Orange Mécanique” – Clockwork Orange France, “La France Big Brother” – Big Brother France, etc.). Following its big success in France, the novel “Guerilla” has also been translated into German, Italian, Hungarian, and Japanese, and will soon be published in Spanish

You are the author of several bestsellers in France, including the famous “La France Orange mécanique,” published in 2013, which documents insecurity in France based on local press publications that are rarely picked up at the national level. You then published, among other titles, the novel “Guerrilla” in 2016. This novel takes place over three days in a France sinking into civil war after yet another violent incident between thugs and police in an “ethnic” suburb. These are undoubtedly your two most often quoted works and the most vilified by the French political and media mainstream, but many see the first one as a realistic assessment of the current situation and the second one as a plausible prognosis for the future. Very recently, while reacting to Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin’s comments on the share of foreigners in crime, you said: “The path we are following today is one of chaos.” So, in your opinion, nothing has changed in France since the publication of “La France orange mécanique” and “Guerilla”?

Unfortunately, things have gotten pretty bad. Violence against persons has continued to rise sharply, reaching a record of 900 assaults per day, including 120 assaults involving bladed weapons. This is according to the Interior Ministry’s figures. Although they only take into account crimes for which complaints are filed, they still show 220 daily cases of sexual violence in France on average. Homicides and attempted homicides have been rising sharply in recent years. After decades of mass immigration, France has never had so many people in jail and so many illegal aliens on its territory.

The president of the republic in your novel “Guerrilla,” who gets brutally assassinated by thugs while trying to mediate, was very reminiscent of François Hollande, but he could just as easily remind us of Emmanuel Macron. The latter’s former Minister of the Interior Gérard Collomb, who warned against the risk of civil war because of mass immigration when he resigned in 2018, has criticized the welcoming of the Ocean Viking [a ship that rescues would-be immigrants in the Mediterranean and brings them to France] and its illegal immigrants in an interview for the Le Point weekly, saying that “by welcoming the Ocean Viking, we open a breach.” In this interview, he describes President Macron as being very much in favor of welcoming so-called “migrants,” i.e., illegal immigrants. Do you really think that the reception of the Ocean Viking opens a new breach and is a step further toward chaos in France?”

The Ocean Viking is just a drop in the bucket: In 2021, there were 121,554 applications for asylum filed, as well as 279,925 residence permits and 733,070 visas issued. That is well over a dozen Ocean Vikings per day. And all this in a perfectly legal way, without counting the irregular [illegal] immigrants who are very rarely deported. The French administration has been organizing such mass immigration for quite a long time, despite the fact the French people never wanted it and despite its consequences in terms of security, social cohesion, or standard of living being dramatic and incalculable.

Isn’t it encouraging, though, that a former interior minister is now sending out the same message as you?

“His courage comes too late. He now admits that he preferred to let a dangerous situation fester rather than risk telling the truth and therefore – it is he who says it – getting Marine Le Pen elected. This is exactly what prevents any debate and any serious political reaction to insecurity and immigration: There is permanent blackmail with the threat of the “far right,” leading in the end to realistic French people remaining silent so as not to be accused of “playing into the hands” of the National Rally.[Marine Le Pen’s party] Our elites have given up on the truth and prefer to lie to their people. Since they are unable to fulfill the basic missions of the state, their legitimacy is in question.

Trials were held this year in relation to the Paris and Nice terrorist attacks of 2015 and 2016, and it looks like there are fewer such attacks in France, or at least there are no longer large attacks with such death tolls. Don’t you think that France is winning the fight against Islamic terrorism? Or do you rather think that the threat of radical Islam and its jihadist-terrorist form, which we see playing an important role in the outbreak of the civil war described in your novel “Guerrilla,” remains at the same level?

“The fears of the intelligence community have not waned. Many people are listed as “risky” and apart from listing them, we are just waiting to see what happens. There are many isolated acts, committed by allegedly “disturbed” persons. These incidents make less noise in the media, but in the long run, they make just as many victims. And this “insecurity,” which translates into multiple “gratuitous” lynchings or attacks with bladed weapons, is a form of ordinary, trivialized terrorism that makes many of our cities dangerous.

In his book “Tout ce qu’il ne faut pas dire” (Everything you must not say) published the same year as “Guerilla,” gendarmerie general Bertrand Soubelet wrote: “In the large urban areas of France, there are stocks of illicit weapons that are the remnants of the wars in Central Europe (in the Balkans). What frightens us, the gendarmes, is that those stocks of weapons, which are lying dormant at the moment, will one day get into the hands of determined and organized people.” Since 2016, have the French authorities acted to recover these stocks of weapons, or are they still in the hands of these “rebellious, misguided children who have lost their way and are in need of guidance,” and among whom “the jihad does its business,” as they are described by General Soubelet?

“The French state is only strong with the weak, with those who fear its wrath, the police, and the justice system. This is absolutely not the case with these [Muslim] gangs and in the suburbs, which are breeding grounds for criminals and jihadists. Obviously, they have no respect for firearms legislation, which is only designed to disarm honest citizens, as honest citizens are the only real threat to our rulers.

In “Guerilla,” the French army does not intervene, or at least not massively, to restore order. This is because it is feared that the troops of immigrant and/or Muslim origin will join the mobs of armed “youth” who hate France and the “Gallic” French. Is this what you think would happen in the event of a civil war in France? Has the French army’s lack of cohesion deteriorated to such a point?

“This is a major fear of the military commanders, who have to deal with a lot of sectarian tensions in the army’s ranks. But the army is above all made unable to act by the moral prohibitions that bind our elites: it is morally unthinkable to send in the troops against our neighborhoods and the criminals who thrive there, who are often of French nationality and who have been presented to us for several decades as “victims of society.” Even the police have orders to restrict their pursuits and to avoid certain neighborhoods so as not to set fire to the powder.

President Macron and his current minister of the interior now want to intensify the distribution of “migrants” throughout the country, including in rural areas. Such migrant centers also play a role in France’s three-day descent into civil war described in your novel “Guerrilla.” It is a civil war against which many leading politicians, including Presidents François Hollande and Emmanuel Macron, have warned. How do you explain the fact that the French political class complains of the consequences but cherishes their causes so much?

What can be their motives?

“There is an old economic belief: The more people there are, the more the country’s GDP will increase, so there will be more pieces of the cake to share. Some business bosses are very keen on low-cost labor. But the most profound belief is moral: Our elites, still colonial in mentality, are convinced that human beings from all over the world are interchangeable, that all you have to do is give anyone a good school, welfare benefits, and a city park to make them good French citizens, even better than our dusty natives. This is obviously a fantasy: Countries are the products of peoples, not the other way around. But, as we have said, it is the nature of Utopians not to be bothered with such realities.

After the horrendous murder of Lola, that 12-year-old girl who was raped, tortured, and murdered by an Algerian woman who had been left free to move around despite a deportation order, you said that if nothing is done now, nothing will ever be done. One month later, do you see some positive change? Is anything being done now?

“Absolutely not. There are new victims all the time. Immigration is not questioned, and neither is the justice system. We all know very well that deportation orders are not going to be enforced any better than before. The talk is mostly about new ways to accommodate migrants. The more time passes, the less reversible the situation will be. Unless there is an economic or social accident, French society will continue its drift toward fragmentation and regression.

Former President Donald Trump and his lawyers must pay almost $1 million in sanctions after filing a “completely frivolous” lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. In a Thursday ruling, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida ordered Trump and his lead attorney, Alina Habba of Habba Madaio & Associates, to pay $937,989.39.

The ruling stems from a lawsuit filed by Trump in March 2022. Trump’s suit accused Clinton, the Democratic Party, the Democratic National Committee, former FBI Director James Comey, and a number of others of a racketeering “plot” against him. Clinton and the others had “maliciously conspired to weave a false narrative that their Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump, was colluding with a hostile foreign sovereignty” during the 2016 election, it said.

“This case should never have been brought,” wrote Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks in yesterday’s decision. “Its inadequacy as a legal claim was evident from the start. No reasonable lawyer would have filed it. Intended for a political purpose, none of the counts of the amended complaint stated a cognizable legal claim.”

He went on to call Trump’s complaint “completely frivolous, both factually and legally … brought in bad faith for an improper purpose,”  “a hodgepodge of disconnected, often immaterial events, followed by an implausible conclusion,” and “a deliberate attempt to harass; to tell a story without regard to facts.”

“A continuing pattern of misuse of the courts by Mr. Trump and his lawyers undermines the rule of law, portrays judges as partisans, and diverts resources from those who have suffered actual legal harm,” wrote Middlebrooks, who dismissed the suit last September and had already granted one motion for sanctions from a defendant in the suit. That motion, granted last November, was brought by Charles Dolan. The motion for sanctions Middlebrooks just ruled on was brought by 18 other defendants that had been named in Trump’s lawsuit.

To demonstrate this “pattern of misuse of the courts,” the judge referred to Trump’s 2021 lawsuit against the Pulitzer Board (which called on the board to “take immediate steps to strip the New York Times and the Washington Post of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting”), his 2021 lawsuit against New York Attorney General Letitia James, his 2021 lawsuit against Twitter for suspending his account, and his 2020 libel suit against CNN.

The judge awarded the defendants the nearly $1 million to cover fees and costs associated with defending themselves against Trump’s lawsuit. “Almost all of Defendants’ attorneys seek substantially discounted rates, ranging from 28% to 66% less than the rates actually billed,” he pointed out.

FREE MINDS

An interesting First Amendment—and property rights?—question out of Jacksonville, Florida, where people keep projecting antisemitic imagery onto buildings. The city council is now discussing making this a crime. A proposal filed by City Council President Terrance Freeman would make it unlawful to project words or images onto a property without the owner’s consent, reports First Coast News.

#HAPPENINGNOW Legislation being discussed to make it unlawful to project images onto buildings w/o consent

This legislation is separate from legislation City Councilmember Cumber has a presser on @ 10

Mayor @lennycurry & @JSOPIO sheriff: “We know who these people are.”@FCN2go pic.twitter.com/P6FQaaUStO

— Renata Di Gregorio (@RenataFCNews) January 19, 2023

Council Member LeAnna Cumber introduced similar legislation on Wednesday. “Property owners and the city of Jacksonville should have the right to approve what’s being presented and projected on buildings,” she said in a statement.

But would these measures unconstitutionally restrict free speech by banning projections onto public buildings?

“When you get to a public building, it’s a lot more complicated when it comes to the First Amendment because you could argue that it’s a public forum,” Council Member Rory Diamond told the Jacksonville Daily Record. The Daily Record writes that “there could be a second piece of legislation in the future that could define a permitted process addressing speech projected on publicly owned properties.”

FREE MARKETS

Immaculate disinflation? Will the U.S. come out of this inflationary period without a recession after all? Economics writer Timothy B. Lee suggests we might:

In recent weeks, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has made a series of announcements that have made me more optimistic about America’s economic prospects in 2023. On January 6, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that the economy added a healthy 223,000 jobs in December, while the unemployment rate declined slightly to 3.5 percent.

A week later, the BLS announced that prices actually fell slightly between November and December. The annual inflation rate for December was 6.5 percent, the lowest it’s been since October 2021.

Then on Wednesday, we learned that the situation is similar for the producer price index, which measures costs faced by businesses. It fell a surprisingly large 0.5 percent between November and December, while the annual inflation rate for producers was 6.2 percent. And on Thursday, the Labor Department announced that there were 190,000 new unemployment claims filed last week—the lowest number of new claims in several months.

In short, we’re seeing two salutary trends at the same time: inflation is coming down, while the job market continues to boom.

This is all much better than experts expected things to be going right now.

“It’s too early for Powell to take a victory lap,” writes Lee. “The inflation situation is fluid, and the inflation rate could start to creep back up in the coming months. But it now looks like there’s a real possibility that the recession everyone was dreading in 2023 won’t happen. We might get an ‘immaculate disinflation’ instead.”

QUICK HITS

Please judge my forthcoming book by its cover, because I absolutely love it! Out this fall. pic.twitter.com/jZPeVkaWqS

— Jeff Kosseff (@jkosseff) January 18, 2023

• “A rule that Attorney General Merrick Garland issued in 2021” says if people “have been convicted of a sex offense, they must register with their state, even when the state neither requires nor allows them to do so,” and must also “supply the state with all the information required by federal law, even when the state does not collect that information,” notes Jacob Sullum. A federal judge has just ruled that this violates the right to due process.

• A Virginia lawmaker wants to classify fentanyl as a “weapon of terrorism.”

• Utah legislators are working on legislation that would make all social media age-verify users.

• “In his first move as governor of Pennsylvania, Democrat Josh Shapiro signed an executive order abolishing four-year-degree requirements for the vast majority of state government jobs,” reports National Review.

On my first full day in office, I just announced that effective immediately, 92% of state government jobs – about 65,000 positions – do not require a four-year college degree.

We’re not wasting a second. pic.twitter.com/lajbkKpt07

— Gov. Josh Shapiro (@GovernorShapiro) January 18, 2023

• A Mississippi bill would “require public schools and postsecondary institutions to install video surveillance cameras all over their campuses,” require the cameras to record audio, and allow parents to view live feeds of these recordings.

• A fun fact from Eric Boehm’s review of a podcast about 1990s music: 2 Live Crew “dropped the epic dis track ‘Fuck Martinez,’ a profanity-laden anthem aimed squarely, or so it would seem, at sitting Florida Gov. Bob Martinez. But, in what Ringer podcaster and music critic Rob Harvilla calls ‘the greatest legal maneuver in the history of the concept of law,’ the group got a guy in Miami also named Bob Martinez to sign an affidavit claiming the song was about him.”

• North Dakota is considering legislation that would criminalize “sexually explicit” material in public libraries.

• If Kamala Harris is the future of the Democratic Party, it’s doomed:

‘The Levelling Up Bill is hugely disappointing. It is big on hype and allusions but with no real policies or resources’

Prem Sikka is an Emeritus Professor of Accounting at the University of Essex and the University of Sheffield, a Labour member of the House of Lords, and Contributing Editor at Left Foot Forward.

Unpopular governments deflect attention away from their failures by coining new slogans and making promises that they think people want to hear. In the case of the UK government, the slogan is ‘levelling-up’.

The government has actually introduced a Bill with the deceptive title of “Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill”. It promises to “reduce disparities between regions and within regions of the UK across economic, social and environmental measures”. The aim of the measures in the Bill is to increase living standards: pay, employment and productivity, healthcare, life expectancy, investment in housing and infrastructure, public services, research development; decentralise decision-making, and empower local communities.

That sounds good, but the government has done the opposite for the last 13 years. It has cut real wages, pensions and social security benefits. The average real wage is now less than what it was in 2007 and is falling at the fastest rate for two decades. Last year, FTSE100 CEOs secured a median pay rise of 39%. Some 7.2 million people are waiting for a hospital appointment in England. Life expectancy is declining. In Blackpool, average life expectancy of males and females has shrunk to 74 years and 79 years, considerably lower than other regions.

Even with the recently announced increase, spending per pupil by 2024 will be 3% below 2010 levels in real-terms.

Tax laws are a huge contributor to individual and regional inequalities. For example, capital gains are taxed at the rates of 18%-28%, compared to 20%-45% for earned income. For the year 2020-21 capital gains tax (CGT) of £14.3bn was paid by 323,000 taxpayers on £80bn of gains. The biggest winners from the low CGT rates live in London and the south-east of England. Indeed, numerous policies prioritise London and the south-east and neglect welfare of the regions.

So how does the “Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill” address the problems created by defunct economic ideologies? The answer is that it doesn’t. The Bill does not contain anything that will reduce inequalities, increase disposable income, end regressive taxation, increase spending on schools, and provide social housing or anything else. Climate change has a significant impact on economic development, but is missing altogether from the Bill. It is a mish-mash of measures about planning laws.

The Bill claims to decentralise decision-making but centralisation has intensified. The Bill permits the Ministers to override, change or impose any plans on local authorities by claiming that something is a “nationally significant” development. Local authorities have no right of appeal. Ministers can make new regulations without a vote in parliament.

Some 4.2 million people are in need of social housing in England. In 2015, government promised to build 200,000 starter homes, but none were delivered by 2019. In 2019, it promised 300,000 new homes a year, but the target has not been met. The government now wants to make it easier for developers to buy land, but the private sector is always focused on profits. As Shelter, a housing charity puts it: “The current planning system prioritises maximum delivery of unaffordable homes that can be sold to the highest bidder, instead of well-planned developments with homes that people can genuinely afford.” The Bill contains no mechanisms for changing that.

The Bill enables local councils to charge up to double the rate of council tax on second homes, but without more up to date valuation of homes it will remain ineffective. Of course, the rich can own property through anonymous companies and under different family names and bypass the ‘second home’ charge. The Bill contains no anti-avoidance provisions.

Councils will also be permitted to levy an ‘empty homes premium’ to boost their income. That may help rich boroughs like Chelsea and South Kensington, where expensive homes are owned by rich foreigners, but won’t do much for poorer areas.

Even if all runs smoothly, the resulting revenues won’t compensate local authorities for the 37% cut in real-terms in central government grants during the period 2009/10 to 2019/20. Inevitably, local authorities are reducing services such as refuse collection and significantly increasing council tax, which in turn will deplete disposable incomes and possibilities of building a sustainable economy.

Regeneration requires investment in new industries, but the UK has no industrial strategy. This week, Northumberland-based Britishvolt, a start-up of lithium-ion batteries for the automotive industry, filed for bankruptcy. The government could nationalise it to get a foothold in the emerging industry but won’t. That leaves the Chinese-owned Envision AESC as the only UK car-battery manufacturer. The government wants to end the sale of petrol and diesel vehicles by 2030. The UK state has largely withdrawn from direct investment in new industries and Ministers wring their hands.

The Levelling Up Bill is hugely disappointing. It is big on hype and allusions but with no real policies or resources. Even investment in public projects is based on political favouritism. This week the government allocated £2.1bn for 100 regional regeneration projects, but the biggest winners are Conservative constituencies and many deprived areas have received little or no money. Incessant cuts to wages and workers’ rights can’t be reconciled with any claim of levelling-up or regenerating the economy.

As you’re here, we have something to ask you. What we do here to deliver real news is more important than ever. But there’s a problem: we need readers like you to chip in to help us survive. We deliver progressive, independent media, that challenges the right’s hateful rhetoric. Together we can find the stories that get lost.

We’re not bankrolled by billionaire donors, but rely on readers chipping in whatever they can afford to protect our independence. What we do isn’t free, and we run on a shoestring. Can you help by chipping in as little as £1 a week to help us survive? Whatever you can donate, we’re so grateful – and we will ensure your money goes as far as possible to deliver hard-hitting news.

In the summer of 2011, as Washington deadlocked over the once routine task of raising the nation’s debt ceiling, Kevin McCarthy, then the House GOP whip, decided to mix things up. At a closed-door caucus meeting, the California Republican cut the lights to screen a clip from the heist movie The Town, where Ben Affleck and Jeremy Renner plot a violent act of revenge.

“I need your help,” Affleck’s character says. “I can’t tell you what it is. You can never ask me about it later. And we’re gonna hurt some people.”

When the lights flicked on, Allen West, a first-term Florida congressman who had become a conservative hero after firing a gun past an Iraqi detainee’s head, rose to offer a version of Renner’s response.

“I’m ready to drive the car,” West said. 

For McCarthy, his political ambitions have always come with a catch: To get where he wanted to go, he first had to hand over the keys. His elevation to speaker of the House in January on the 15th ballot was the culmination of his life’s work and a demonstration of his powers. In nailing down a belligerent caucus, McCarthy leaned on relationships cultivated over a decade-and-half on the campaign trail, at the Capitol, and on the fundraising circuit. But it was also a reminder of the compromises he made to get there. McCarthy won the gavel, but not the authority it traditionally brings, by ceding control to the insurrectionists and austerity-obsessed hard-liners who blocked his nomination 14 times. His victory was in many ways the story not just of his own career, but of the trio of Republican “Young Guns” with whom he rose through the ranks. McCarthy is the last one of them standing, because he already surrendered long ago.

When McCarthy posed with Reps. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) and Eric Cantor (R-Va.) for a Weekly Standard cover in the fall of 2007, their party was undergoing a generational collapse. The Republican Revolution of the 1990s had produced brazen corruption and interventionism, and a string of ethically challenged leaders. One GOP speaker of the House resigned in disgrace. Another, Dennis Hastert, turned out to be a child molester. What figureheads the party had were not just ineffectual, but kind of wooden. Democrats, on the other hand, had Barack Obama, someone conservatives accused of actually being too cool to be president. The three lawmakers, the magazine suggested, offered a new foundation. In the cover photo, Ryan’s hair is parted like a 1920s banker. Cantor looks skeptical, as if someone has just passed gas. McCarthy, standing awkwardly off to the side, looks like that someone is him.

From the start, the “Young Guns,” as the cover read, were more a branding exercise than an argument, a phrase chosen because “Capitol Hill careerists fast approaching middle age” doesn’t sound as good. They were the future because someone had to be. In the magazine’s framing, and in the trio’s subsequent 2010 bestseller, Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders— Fred Barnes, a Weekly Standard editor whose son worked for McCarthy, wrote the forward—Cantor was “the leader” and speaker-in-waiting. Ryan was “the thinker,” a budget-wonk who wrote about reining in Social Security and Medicare, and saving America from the “soft despotism” of a “takers” mentality. McCarthy’s portion of the book was largely bereft of policy specifics. He was “the strategist.”

A longtime Republican staffer handed a southern California district by his retiring boss, McCarthy spent much of his first campaign fundraising for other candidates. Once in office, he pored over demographic data and election returns, nurturing a reputation as a campaign savant. He read the Almanac of American Politics on cross-country flights. He dragged colleagues to watch Moneyball for strategic inspiration (movies, it seemed, were his thing). In Young Guns, McCarthy described the kind of candidates he believed would return the party to greatness—people outside politics, who would not only run better campaigns, but be better legislators.

But McCarthy wasn’t a stickler. For a long time, the joke about the candidates who bore the Young Guns imprimatur was that they were actually kind of old. In 2010, after the candidate program was adopted by the National Republican Congressional Committee, the Daily Beast calculated that the median “Young Gun” was almost 50. The oldest Young Gun on record, Amie Hober, was 74. 

Ideology, temperament, and biography were negotiable too. The now-retired Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), a “FWD: FWD: FWD” email chain in human form, was listed in the book’s appendix as an original member. In due time, Lauren Boebert and Madison Cawthorn would be NRCC-designated Young Guns. Wendy Rogers, who was later censured by the Arizona state senate for calling for her enemies to be publicly hanged, was twice a failed Young Gun. George Santos—whose campaign manager reportedly fundraised by impersonating McCarthy’s chief of staff—claimed to be a Young Gun, and in a surprise twist, actually was.

I am excited and humbled to be named an official @NRCC Young Gun! We are one step closer to taking back the House in November and stopping socialism once and for all! pic.twitter.com/kGUFnYVZGS

— George Santos (@Santos4Congress) June 14, 2022

The definition of a Young Gun proved so broad as to be meaningless. The key to McCarthy’s politics wasn’t any particular code, but the lack of one—anyone who won a primary and hit their fundraising marks was invited into the club. That lack of standards, and willingness to embrace the party’s increasingly rabid rank-and-file, was an ideology every bit as significant as Ryan’s austerity—and ultimately more useful. McCarthyism was whatever Republicans were in the mood for.

The Young Guns book was a Polaroid of anti-Obama conservatism, snapped just before its protagonists assumed the burdens of actual responsibility. It detailed the ways Democrats—and their health care law in particular—were ruining what America was, and how Republicans would save it. When they won, the bill came due. The tension between the image of three Young Guns in charge and the reality of their caucus has defined Congress ever since.

One after another, this new generation of conservative leaders was undone by the new generation of conservatives they had anointed themselves to lead—and who demanded more than the Triumvirate could deliver. Hard-liners forced a 16-day government shutdown in 2013 by refusing to pass a budget unless it defunded the Affordable Care Act. These GOP representatives disliked Obama, but it sometimes seemed like they disliked their leadership even more. Cantor fell first, losing a 2014 primary to an economics professor who said the incumbent had sold out conservatives. The former majority leader, who now works at a Wall Street investment bank, told Washingtonian a few years later that he “never believed” his rhetoric about repealing Obamacare while there was still a Democrat in the White House—but that he let conservatives think otherwise because the “anger” worked in his favor. His defeat confirmed the obvious: Republican leaders had unleashed forces they could not control.

McCarthy looked like he’d be next. His 2015 bid for speaker in Cantor’s wake failed after resistance from a group of conservatives led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). The caucus united around Ryan, whose budget—so severe and unpopular that it helped Obama win reelection after the Young Gun joined the 2012 Republican presidential ticket—was a point in his favor. But Ryan too, struggled to control an unwieldy majority. The Weekly Standard didn’t set the tone for conservatives in Washington—the House Freedom Caucus did.

Trump, though, offered McCarthy another chance. While Ryan and even Mitch McConnell sometimes expressed frustration with the man in the Oval Office, McCarthy charted a different course. During Trump’s campaign, he stayed close while others denounced him, eventually becoming his chief enabler on the Hill—a man who questioned nothing, propping up a man who would say anything. He egged on the president’s lies about the 2020 election and demonstrated his fealty behind the scenes, once presenting the commander in chief with a jar of Starbursts with Trump’s least-favorite flavors removed. There was never a better time in Republican politics to be a nihilist. 

On January 6th, 2021, as a mob of Trump supporters besieged the Capitol to block the certification of his loss, McCarthy called the president and asked him to call off the dogs.

“Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you,” Trump said.

“More upset?” McCarthy replied, according to one account. “They’re trying to fucking kill me.”

But getting ahead in the GOP meant taking the death threats in stride. Although in the riot’s aftermath, McCarthy said that Trump “bears responsibility” and briefly considered a censure vote, he ultimately stuck with the president. He joined most House Republicans in voting to reject the election results when the chamber reconvened, and a few weeks later, after the tear-gas had cleared, flew to Mar-a-Lago to make sure there were no hard feelings. Trump, prone to handing out disparaging epithets, gave McCarthy a pet name instead: “My Kevin.”

Today, Young Guns makes for a strange read. The book reflects wishful thinking for a golden age that never materialized, from a magazine that went out of business during the Trump presidency. Conservatives craved something coarser and meaner than what Beltway lifers prescribed. The big idea—Ryan’s budget—was political poison, the sort of bloodless think-tank pablum that Trump made a mockery of as a candidate. The book name-checks Mitt Romney and Meg Whitman. “It’s the party of Rubio, Jindal, and Daniels,” Cantor wrote. Instead, it got “Kanye. Elon. Trump.”

One of the promising candidates McCarthy promoted in the book was Adam Kinzinger, a 32-year-old Illinois Air Force vet who once received an award from the Red Cross for rescuing a woman from a knife attack. The YG Action Fund, a super-PAC run by an ex-Cantor aide, later waded into a primary, backing him against a 10-term Republican incumbent. Kinzinger, McCarthy said, would bring “accountability back to Washington.” In a roundabout way, he was right; Kinzinger, who retired in  January, voted to impeach Trump after the insurrection, and defied McCarthy by serving as one of two Republicans on the special January 6 committee.

“It’s sad to see a man that I think has so much potential just totally sell himself,” Kinzinger said recently. McCarthy, he predicted, would not even win his election for speaker.

He almost didn’t. But McCarthy made it this far by embracing shamelessness as a value and appeasement as a path to power. To win, he needed to flip the guy who compared the rioters to tourists (Andrew Clyde of Georgia), and he needed to bring along the woman who quoted Hitler on January 5th (Mary Miller of Illinois). He needed the vote of the representative who addressed a white nationalist conference and shared a meme of himself murdering a colleague (Paul Gosar of Arizona), and one from the person who addressed a white nationalist conference and posted on Facebook about executing Nancy Pelosi (Marjorie Taylor Greene). He agreed to gut his own powers and put the House Freedom Caucus behind the wheel. Above all, he needed to reassure some of Washington’s most intransigent people that he was, once again, a new generation of conservative leader, poised to move his party on from failures of the past.

“He’s different,” Rep. Brian Mast of Florida said in his speech nominating McCarthy before the eighth vote. “He’s not Paul Ryan.”

At the beginning of this month, the House endured the longest contest to elect a speaker in 164 years. Rep. Kevin McCarthy ultimately was elected speaker, but only after he made several concessions to a small but influential faction of dissenting conservative Republicans. Though not every member of the Freedom Caucus — a far-right coalition of Republican lawmakers — voted against McCarthy, nearly every member who did oppose him was a member of the Freedom Caucus. 

That commonality has drawn renewed attention to the Freedom Caucus and its role within Congress. Despite being a minority in the House, the Freedom Caucus has repeatedly punched above its weight and effected genuine change in the chamber. Powerful political factions are as old as American politics, and in most ways, the Freedom Caucus is just a continuation of that tradition. But in a few key ways, its members are doing something different: voting as a bloc, willing to go against their own party’s leadership and to gum up the works to make a statement. Those differences have allowed the Freedom Caucus to exercise influence over the better part of the past decade — and are why it’s only just getting started.

What’s the deal with the Freedom Caucus? | FiveThirtyEight

Modern congressional caucuses emerged in the last century, though less formal organizations of like-minded members have existed in Congress since the start, according to Ruth Bloch Rubin, a political science professor at the University of Chicago and the author of “Building the Bloc: Intraparty Organization in the U.S. Congress.” During the Progressive Era in the early 20th century, a group of insurgent Republicans worked alongside Democrats to strip away some of the powers that had been consolidated by the speaker. In the 1960s and ’70s, the left-leaning Democratic Study Group worked to push through civil rights legislation (along with, later, the Congressional Black Caucus), against bitter opposition from conservative Southern Democrats.

Typically, such influential intraparty factions emerge only when parties find themselves especially divided, Bloch Rubin said. “It’s usually because there’s enough of a cleavage within the party that these sort of factions have enough members and the distance between one faction and a competitor faction within the same party is enough that it warrants this kind of organizational work,” she said.

This was true of the Freedom Caucus. In the 2010 midterms, during former President Barack Obama’s first term, a Republican wave elected scores of conservative lawmakers to Congress, giving the party six more seats in the Senate and flipping the House. At that time, there was already a conservative caucus within the House, the Republican Study Committee, and many newly elected Republicans joined. But so did many of the more moderate members, according to former Rep. John Fleming, one of the founding members of the Freedom Caucus. 

“We noticed that the committee was growing rapidly. And we were seeing faces in there that we had never seen before. We saw people who were not known to be very conservative joining the group,” Fleming said, adding that he believed then-House Speaker John Boehner had been encouraging moderate members to join in order to “co-opt” the committee.

In 1995, just 7 percent of House GOP members were in the RSC. By early 2011, nearly three-quarters were. Fleming said he and some fellow conservatives tried to keep the group tied to its rightward roots, including by electing Rep. Jim Jordan as chairman of the group in 2011. But as the membership swelled, the ideology got a bit diluted. At the same time, many of these same members were growing increasingly frustrated with leadership in the House — particularly with Boehner — and the status quo. The far-right flank of the party felt Boehner wasn’t taking advantage of the GOP majority to get more conservative legislation passed, so they needled him. Boehner retaliated by, according to Fleming, punishing conservative members — including by removing them from committee assignments — to keep them in line. Boehner did not respond to a request for an interview.

“We were irritations for Boehner, and Boehner was an irritation for us,” Fleming said.

By Thanksgiving 2014, Fleming and a handful of other members were at their wits’ end, so they decided to form their own group. In early 2015, the Freedom Caucus was born. It was designed to be very selective about its closed, sometimes secretive membership — only ultraconservatives allowed —  in order to serve as what Fleming calls the conservative “anchor” of the GOP in the House. Its members would attempt to tow the party toward the right, and once they staked out a position, they wouldn’t budge. 

While the Freedom Caucus had policy goals in mind, most of its work has focused on disrupting and altering the internal workings of the House. If it could wrest away some of the speaker’s power, the thinking went, more conservative legislation might have a better shot at passing. One early and consistent way the Freedom Caucus did this was by voting against House rules, slowing down the legislative process and making it harder for bills that the caucus wasn’t happy with to come up for a vote. But it also took some bigger swings. While the Freedom Caucus didn’t agree to former Rep. Mark Meadows’s decision to file a motion to vacate the chair in the summer of 2015 in an effort to oust Boehner, it backed him after the fact, and that consensus was part of what led Boehner to resign as speaker.

Part of what makes the Freedom Caucus a unique intraparty faction is also its greatest strength. If 80 percent of its members agree to a position or action, everyone has to be on board. That’s different from other groups throughout American history, according to Matthew Green, a professor of politics at The Catholic University of America and the author of a book about the Freedom Caucus. It isn’t just a group of likeminded members; it’s also an effective, disruptive voting bloc that stands together. Members are willing to do this because in order to get to that 80 percent threshold, there’s a lot of debate and persuading internally, according to former Rep. Raúl Labrador, one of the founding members of the Freedom Caucus and now Idaho’s attorney general. “The best debates I ever had in Washington, D.C., were in the Freedom Caucus,” Labrador said.

Another difference is the caucus’s willingness to buck the speaker and establishment — a disposition that can come with political consequences, which is why intraparty factions have historically avoided such sparring.

“That’s a big ask. That’s a risky thing to do,” Green said. “The speaker is powerful, the speaker has powerful friends and you’re risking your committee assignments. You could put your fundraising abilities in danger.”

These differences are part of how the Freedom Caucus has leveraged its relatively small size (it’s estimated to have around 40 members currently, though exact membership numbers are not public) to have outsized impact. Perhaps most notably, it aligned behind former President Donald Trump more resolutely than the Republican Party establishment, gaining access and influence through the White House. (To wit: Many former Freedom Caucus members, including Meadows and Fleming, went on to hold positions in Trump’s administration.)

Now, with the GOP holding just a narrow majority in the House, the Freedom Caucus can wield its unity and antagonism to even sharper effect. As the vote for speaker demonstrated, a group even half the size of the Freedom Caucus can hold the chamber hostage for days. So when fully unified, just imagine what it might unleash.