Slate Voice

Following President Trump’s election, the Democratic Party urged its enraged grass-roots to channel their energy into politics and run for office. But the party didn’t actually want just anyone to run. They wanted candidates with resumes and resources they deem most palatable in a general election, and for everyone else to get out of the way.

On Thursday night, the New York Times put a “BREAKING NEWS” alert across the top of its homepage and sent out an accompanying push notification. The siren was for a story entitled “N.R.A. Suggests Trump May Retreat From Gun Control,” written by three Times reporters.

When the California Democratic Party declined to endorse Sen. Dianne Feinstein last week, it was taken as a sign that progressives might be poised to update the political order in the Golden State. Kevin de León, the leader of Democrats in the state Senate and a proud progressive, won 54 percent of the vote to Feinstein’s 37 percent—shy of the 60 percent needed to win the party’s endorsement but an impressive upset nonetheless.

This piece was adapted from a Spiel on The Gist. It has been edited for clarity. Dana Loesch, National Rifle Association spokeswoman, is kind of a cross between Kellyanne Conway and an Uzi, with cooler glasses. She has physical beauty on her side. She is charismatic. She is capable of unleashing a rhetorical fusillade. But like the Uzi and Kellyanne, she spews stats and arguments with abandon and inaccuracy.

The National Rifle Association knows exactly whom to blame for the Feb. 14 mass shooting in Parkland, Florida. The real culprit, says the NRA, is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. As the NRA points out, the FBI failed to heed warnings about the shooter. But there’s a bigger story behind this rebuke. To protect its political allies, the NRA has become an enemy of law enforcement. Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s CEO, likes to talk about “criminals” and “good guys.

An ugly public spat has broken out between two sets of Texas anti-abortion advocates in advance of the state’s March 6 Republican primary. One group, the Texas Catholic Conference of Bishops, is accusing another, Texas Right to Life, of attacking perfectly pro-life Republican incumbents. Texas Right to Life says that the conference supports “death panels” and that conservatives in the state legislature aren’t doing enough to ban abortion.

DES MOINES, Iowa—At a rally on Friday to endorse his former Iowa campaign coordinator, Bernie Sanders dusted off the stump speech that nearly propelled him to victory here two years ago, and added some obligatory references to the man he is backing for a local congressional seat. “Pete D’Alessandro understands that … we need fundamental campaign finance reform,” Sanders told a crowd of about 250 supporters gathered in a converted auto glass shop.

If you believe the accounts of a few anonymous members of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, Ivanka Trump cried when her father refused to apologize for saying he groped women’s genitals. Frustrated by the then-candidate’s blasé response to the Access Hollywood “grab ‘em by the pussy” comments, Ivanka rushed out of the campaign war room, red-faced and weepy-eyed.

NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland—There was much talk, throughout this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, about the supposed crisis of free speech—the purported epidemic of conservative speakers being oppressed, suppressed, threatened, and silenced not only on college campuses but, as the NRA’s Dana Loesch reminded attendees during her speech Thursday, within the mainstream press.

The shape of the Parkland, Florida, shooting’s aftermath is unlike that of any other American massacre. For the first time, the teenage survivors of a school shooting have assumed the mantle of leading the activist response to the tragedy. Their courage in the face of fear and loss has inspired several nationwide actions this week, including student-led walkouts at middle schools and high schools in Virginia, Maryland, Arizona, and Kentucky, among other states.

On the off chance that gun control legislation of some kind passes in the wake of the Stoneman Douglas massacre, we’ll have the kids, and only the kids, to thank.

On Thursday morning, Donald Trump addressed the country about Wednesday’s school shooting in Parkland, Florida that left at least 17 dead and 15 injured, many of them children. Trump blamed the carnage in part on the shooter’s “mental health” and on kids feeling alone. He also called on Americans to “work together to create a culture in our country that embraces the dignity of life.

Mitt Romney is finally going to Washington. And Romney is going there on a mission: to bring “Utah’s values” to the nation’s capital, he explained in a video last Friday kicking off his campaign to replace the retiring Orrin Hatch in the U.S. Senate. A Senate campaign launched from Utah is neither the starting point, nor the D.C. destination that Romney had long envisioned.

Despite the overwhelming evidence that time is a flat circle, Donald Trump has been in office just a hair past one year. Prior to his inauguration, we asked Slate staff and other experts to make predictions on how his presidency would change America. We recently asked the contributors to reassess those predictions, as a window into just how influential—and unpredictable—this presidency has been so far.

Donald Trump used to have a simple message about the Russia investigation: It isn’t really about Russia; that’s just a Democratic excuse for losing the 2016 election. Trump said he had never cared about Russia. So when investigators found people around him doing suspicious things with Russians—Paul Manafort, Mike Flynn, George Papadopoulos—Trump said those interactions had nothing to do with him. The brushoff strategy was smart.

On Tuesday afternoon, the New York Times announced that it would be hiring Quinn Norton as an editorial board member. Shortly before 10 p.m., the paper fired her. Norton has been a prolific tech journalist—covering issues ranging from bioethics to the Anonymous movement for publications like Wired and the Atlantic—and seemed initially to be a remarkably good pick to become the Times’ lead opinion writer “on the power, culture, and consequences of technology.

Every few months, some public figure comes up with the brilliant idea that porn is bad for women. They worry that teens will never have normal, pleasurable sex if all they watch is gang-bangs, that porn allows misogyny to sustain and replicate itself, and that women learn to be aroused by their own degradation when they see ejaculatory “facials” onscreen. None of these arguments are exactly wrong.

“Peoples lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation. Some are true and some are false. Some are old and some are new. There is no recovery for someone falsely accused - life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?” This was President Trump’s tweeted response after White House staffers David Sorensen and Rob Porter resigned over domestic-abuse allegations last week.

We aren’t exactly wanting for examples of Republican shamelessness in the Trump era. Pundits, liberal and conservative alike, routinely demand that the party do more to stand up to the president on this or that issue in defense of American political norms and in the hope that defiance might bring us more speedily back to something like normalcy. But normalcy was, itself, deeply rotten and nauseating.

On Wednesday afternoon, Sens. Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell announced a bipartisan two-year budget deal. The $400 billion dollar package increases military funding and upends caps on domestic spending in place since the 2011 Budget Control Act, a significant win for Democrats. But the deal was reached without a DACA fix.