We'll never go out of style // What's Good: Aug. 11, 2023
A DJ, cashflows, and the Mississippi River.
Hello, good evening, happy Friday. I got some good news today. This week was busy, but also productive. Summer is soon ending, but I am determined to enjoy it while it lasts and then some.
Leading with a grift
To the surprise of no one:
A seditious conspiracy trial for members of the Proud Boys is over. But a legal loose end from the case is threatening to send the Proud Boys’ lawyers back to court—this time to defend themselves in a civil spat.
After members of the Proud Boys played a lead role in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, their defense attorneys unsuccessfully tried to move their cases out of D.C., arguing that the Proud Boys could not receive a fair trial in the left-leaning city. To aid their argument, an attorney for one of the Proud Boys commissioned a study on potential D.C. jurors’ attitudes toward the far-right group. The report cost $30,000.
But despite the document appearing in the Proud Boys’ court cases, its author says she still hasn’t been paid. She’s suing a group of attorneys for alleged copyright violations, claiming they all used her work without paying. Many of those lawyers, in turn, say they never agreed to pay for the report, and that a lone colleague is responsible for the latest legal hangover from the Jan. 6 attack.
How to lose a nomination
Sorry, this is not enough:
It’s an early mid-June evening in New Hampshire, and Asa Hutchinson — the former Arkansas governor and 2024 presidential candidate — is riding shotgun in a white Nissan SUV, fiddling with his iPhone after another day on the campaign trail. Between glances at his Twitter feed, he calls up the latest RealClearPolitics polling average for the 2024 Republican nomination and scrolls down to see the numbers: Former President Donald Trump, indicted just days prior for mishandling classified documents, towers over Ron DeSantis by 33 points — and the rest of the field by more than 50. Hutchinson then scrolls right a few touches, past several other single-digit hopefuls, to finally find his name: 8th place, 0.6 percent. (He has since bounced up to 1 percent — but still in 8th.)
Perusing the site’s videos section, Hutchinson — who appeared the day before on CNN’s State of the Union to defend the Justice Department and repeat his call for Trump to drop out — plays an interview from the same show with Vivek Ramaswamy promising the former president a Day One pardon, and swiftly closes it in disgust.
P.S. all conservatives are Bad, Actually.
Fuck around, find out
All is as it should be:
SPECIAL COUNSEL JACK Smith’s investigation appears to be zeroing in on Sidney Powell, a conspiracy-theory-obsessed lawyer who was a key figure in Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Four sources with knowledge of the matter, several witnesses, and Trump allies who’ve appeared before the special counsel — including at least one in the past few days — team seem to agree: Powell should be preparing now for Smith to bring criminal charges.
On Monday, Bernie Kerik — a longtime Rudy Giuliani associate and a Trump ally who worked on the Giuliani-led legal team challenging Trump’s 2020 defeat — sat with special counsel investigators for a roughly four-and-a-half-hour interview, according to his lawyer Tim Parlatore. (Parlatore previously served as a top attorney to Trump, advising the ex-president on Special Counsel Smith’s probes.)
Insider of insiders
What if being a DJ in your free time upsets your colleagues:
Even people fond of David Solomon acknowledge that his equilibrium state is what most of us would consider tense. The voice of the Goldman Sachs CEO is perpetually hoarse, as if he has permanently worn it out from screaming. “He sort of talks in a yelling voice,” says one colleague. “He’s not really yelling, but he sort of talks at you.” “When he talks, he shouts,” another banker agrees. “He always sounds like he’s shouting — always.” It’s a tendency he can’t even suppress in text: Solomon likes to MAKE NOTES ON DOCUMENTS IN ALL CAPS. The word a lot of people use about him is bully.
Solomon, 61, is bald and broad-shouldered, like a thicker and more wizened version of Mr. Clean, with eyes so squinted behind doughy features it’s hard to tell what color they are. He walks heavily, a venti iced coffee almost always in hand, as though the sport of being a banker were a physically taxing one. Several years ago, when Goldman’s board was auditioning him for promotion to CEO, the bank’s image specialists gave Solomon tips on becoming more approachable. They suggested he walk the floors more often and create opportunities for small talk — perhaps by stopping at an assistant’s desk to take a piece of candy.
Deferred but achieved
Overdue, but you love to see it:
Earlier this week, Amara Harris had one last chance to take a plea deal. For $100, she could have avoided a trial, the testimony of her former high school classmates and deans, and the stress of not knowing whether a jury would believe her when she said she had mistakenly picked up a classmate’s AirPods — not stolen them. It would’ve been over.
Instead, as she had for more than 3 ½ years, she chose to fight. Like other families and students across Illinois who have been ticketed by police for alleged behavior at school, Harris and her mother saw the system as unfair and capricious.
Overly ambitious
This just sounds ridiculous, sorry:
Claire Boucher and William Gratz had their sights set on the southern reaches of the Mississippi River when they packed their chickens, a sewing machine and 20 pounds of potatoes into a houseboat they crafted from scratch.
Calling themselves Veruschka and Zelda Xox, river names worthy of the grand adventure they envisioned, the young couple pushed off from the riverbank in north Minneapolis the first week of June.
But their journey ended only a few miles downstream after engine trouble and a three-week tangle with the cops. The Minneapolis park police trailed them from river bank to river bank, as Boucher and Gratz tried to get their boat in working order, often tying up to trees and hopping ashore to gather supplies from Craigslist and hardware stores.
Follow the money
Once again, it matters where the cash flows:
In recent years it’s been difficult to keep track of all the pundits or policy wonks on the American right who turn out to have secret—and often not-so-secret—lives as white supremacist provocateurs. This was certainly true during the Trump administrations, which had a weakness for appointing racist figures such as Sebastian Gorka and Darren Beattie. This was also true of nearly a dozen staffers associated with Tucker Carlson and his former show at Fox News. And it now applies to staffers and influencers in the circles around the presidential campaigns of both Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. These stories sometimes—although not invariably—end with the racist staffer being fired.
Richard Hanania, a policy entrepreneur who runs the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology and has a large social media footprint, recently joined the ever-expanding ranks of exposed racists. But he’s likely to continue to flourish, for reasons that illuminate the true sponsors of bigotry. Last Friday, Christopher Mathias published a superbly researched exposé in HuffPost documenting that between roughly 2008 and 2011 Hanania published, under a pseudonym, racist and misogynist comments barely distinguishable from Nazism. These included praise for eugenics and for the neo-Nazi agitator William Pierce (author of The Turner Diaries, an open call for race war). At the time, Hanania was between 23 and 28 years old.
You deserve some good animal content
https://twitter.com/mischiefanimals/status/1689049834852892673
https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac/status/1688768519650103296
https://twitter.com/catshouldnt/status/1688650732827037697
https://twitter.com/mischiefanimals/status/1687861653390680064
https://twitter.com/twperritos/status/1690223015982751744
https://twitter.com/RedPandaEveryHr/status/1690212558752387072
https://twitter.com/HourlyLizards/status/1690186354397786113
https://twitter.com/ServalEveryHr/status/1690182384086319104
https://twitter.com/CATBRAINCELL/status/1690159355944128514
Have a good weekend.
Addendums
DJ Casper’s ‘Cha Cha Slide’ Was Born In An Englewood Basement — And Became A Global Sensation. Jason Momoa tells tourists to stay far from Maui: ‘Not the place to have your vacation right now’. Lil Tay Hoax Hysteria Proves You Shouldn’t Believe Everything You Read. ‘Red White & Royal Blue’ Is a Gay Romcom So Bad It Might Be Good. Top Fox legal executive departs after $787 million Dominion settlement. Illinois Just Passed the Country's First Law Protecting Children of Influencers.