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      Missouri Enacts Strict New Voter Rules and Will Switch to Caucuses

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      Missouri overhauled its election rules on Wednesday, enacting a voter identification law similar to one the state’s highest court blocked two years ago and doing away with its presidential primary in favor of a caucus system.The new law, which Gov. Michael L. Parson signed at the State Capitol in Jefferson City, requires voters to present a photo ID when casting a regular or absentee ballot. Those without such documentation will be required to fill out a provisional ballot that would be segregated until they provide photo identification or their signature is matched to the one kept on file by election officials.The voter identification rule was the latest instituted in a Republican-controlled state, and reflected the party’s continued mistrust of common voting practices, including the use of voting machines. It requires the use of hand-marked paper ballots statewide starting in 2023, with limited exceptions for certain touch-screen systems until the end of next year.Among the other changes is a prohibition against the use of drop boxes for absentee ballots — a practice that many Republicans criticized during the 2020 presidential election — and replacing Missouri’s presidential primary, held in recent years in March, with a series of caucuses.The proposal advanced in the spring from the Legislature, where its Republican sponsors have continued to cite unsubstantiated and nonspecific voter fraud claims — just as former President Donald J. Trump has done — as the impetus for the voter ID law.The law will take effect on Aug. 28, in time for the November election but not until after Missouri holds its primaries on Aug. 2.Missouri voters approved a constitutional amendment in 2016 that led to a previous set of voter ID rules, but the state Supreme Court gutted those rules in 2020. The rules had stipulated that voters without the required ID had to fill out an affidavit or use provisional ballots until their identity could be validated.The president of the League of Women Voters of Missouri told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch this month to expect legal challenges to the new law, which the group said could disenfranchise voters of color and those who are young or older.While paper ballots are already overwhelmingly used in Missouri, Republicans have sought to scale back the use of electronic voting equipment nationwide, spreading falsehoods that the devices were rigged during the 2020 presidential election.The new law repealed provisions enacted at the start of the coronavirus pandemic that permitted mail and absentee voting in the 2020 general election, but Republicans compromised with Democrats to allow two weeks of no-excuse in-person absentee balloting. However, those ballots must be submitted at a local election office. Military and overseas voters will still be permitted to mail their ballots.The law also makes it illegal for local election authorities to accept private donations in most circumstances. More

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      January 6 investigator resigns to run against Greitens for Senate in Missouri

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      January 6 investigator resigns to run against Greitens for Senate in MissouriJohn F Wood is seeking to stop far-right Republican who leads the field for nomination in the August primary An attorney who resigned last week as a senior investigator for the House January 6 committee is running for a Missouri US Senate seat as an independent, seeking to stop a far-right former governor, Eric Greitens, who leads the Republican field.Missouri Senate primary highlights rise of violent rhetoric on the rightRead moreJohn F Wood, who once worked in the administration of George W Bush, announced that he was beginning the effort to get on the November general election ballot for the seat held by Roy Blunt, a retiring Republican.Some Republican leaders have expressed concern that Greitens might prevail in a 21-candidate field for the Republican nomination in the 2 August primary, then lose to a Democrat in November because of sex and campaign finance scandals that pushed him from office in 2018.Greitens also faces allegations of physical abuse from his ex-wife, which he has denied. With the Senate evenly divided, the GOP cannot afford to lose what would otherwise be a safe seat.Those concerns intensified last week when Facebook removed a Greitens campaign video that shows him brandishing a shotgun and declaring that he is hunting Rinos, or Republicans In Name Only.“I am conservative and a life-long Republican. But the primaries for both parties have become a race to the bottom,” Wood said.“This was evident a few days ago when the leading candidate for one of the parties released a campaign advertisement glorifying violence against his political enemies, from his own party no less. Missouri deserves better. Missouri needs another option.”Wood, 52, was US attorney for Missouri’s western district from 2007 to 2009. He was general counsel for the US Chamber of Commerce when he stepped down in September to become senior investigative counsel for the January 6 committee. He resigned that post on Friday.A former Republican senator, John Danforth, has urged Wood to run as a right-leaning independent. Wood once worked for Danforth.Besides Greitens, other Republican contenders include the state attorney general, Eric Schmitt, US representatives Vicky Hartzler and Billy Long, the Missouri Senate president pro tem, Dave Schatz, and a St Louis attorney, Mark McCloskey, who became famous for pointing an assault rifle at protesters for racial equality.Schatz is positioning himself as a “Reagan Republican”. The others are strong supporters of Donald Trump, who has not yet endorsed a candidate in the race.Leading Democratic contenders include a former Marine, Lucas Kunce, and Trudy Busch Valentine, who is part of the Busch brewery family.TopicsMissouriRepublicansUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Eric Greitens to Face New G.O.P. Attacks in Missouri Senate Race

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      The long-awaited effort to stop Eric Greitens from becoming the Republican nominee for Senate in Missouri is finally getting underway.The big question is whether it’s too late to stop him.A robust, well-financed Republican campaign to highlight Greitens’s personal scandals — which include allegations of domestic and sexual abuse — is set to begin on Friday, starting with at least $1 million in paid television ads.Politico first reported the arrival of the new super PAC, Show Me Values, which is being led by Johnny DeStefano, a longtime aide to Representative John Boehner of Ohio who became a powerful figure inside the Trump White House.The leaders of the drive to halt Greitens, which is being spearheaded by a coalition of in-state donors, hope to fundamentally alter the dynamics of a race that has been stagnant for months by sounding a drumbeat of allegations about disturbing and erratic behavior by the former Missouri governor.But as they look to avoid jeopardizing what is most likely a safe Republican Senate seat, they face a tight timeline ahead of Missouri’s Aug. 2 primary, and it is unclear whether new details about Greitens’s alleged conduct will resonate with G.O.P. voters.The front-runner: Eric GreitensGreitens’s history has long been subject to scrutiny — and new accusations have steadily emerged.In 2018, he resigned as governor amid allegations that he had sexually abused a hair stylist with whom he was having an extramarital affair. Greitens denies the accusations, which the woman detailed in sworn testimony during an impeachment inquiry led by fellow Republicans in the state.His ex-wife, Sheena Greitens, a scholar of Asian geopolitics, left him after those allegations came to light and moved to Texas. The couple are now waging a bitter court battle over custody of their elementary-school-age children.Sheena Greitens, second from left, during a court session in her child custody case against her former husband on Thursday in Columbia, Mo.David A. Lieb/Associated PressIn a sworn affidavit released in April, Greitens accused her former husband of a pattern of abusive behavior, including allegedly “cuffing our then-3-year-old son across the face” and “yanking him around by his hair.”The former governor has denied all wrongdoing, and on Thursday his campaign pointed to a previous statement provided to The New York Times by Tim Parlatore, a lawyer for the candidate. The alleged abusive behavior “never happened,” Parlatore said.At a court hearing on Thursday, a lawyer for Sheena Greitens, Helen Wade, said that her client had received death threats this week after the former governor released a violent new political video that shows him armed with a shotgun and storming a home in search of “RINOs,” or Republicans in name only, along with what appears to be a SWAT team wielding military-style rifles. Wade did not respond to multiple messages seeking comment on Thursday.The kingmaker: Rex SinquefieldFor now, Greitens is ahead of his nearest opponent, Eric Schmitt, the Missouri attorney general, by about 3.5 percentage points, polling averages of the race show.Schmitt has the backing of Save Missouri Values, a super PAC bankrolled by Rex Sinquefield, a wealthy retired investor who is a dominant player in state politics.Sinquefield, who is also the primary funder of Show Me Values, the new anti-Greitens super PAC, is best known for his devotion to three “idiosyncratic passions,” according to a critical 2014 profile in Politico Magazine: “promoting chess, dismantling the traditional public school system and eliminating income taxes.”Until now in the Senate primary campaign, not one television ad has aired laying out Sheena Greitens’s most recent allegations. One of the new ads from Show Me Values will focus on her accusations, saying that Eric Greitens has faced “scandal after scandal,” according to two people familiar with its contents.The most effective knock on Greitens with likely Republican primary voters in Missouri, polling conducted by a rival campaign discovered, might sound a bit surprising.It involved informing them that he had previously identified as a Democrat and traveled to the Democratic National Convention in 2008 to hear a young, progressive senator named Barack Obama accept his party’s nomination for president.The X Factor: TrumpThe president’s endorsement could be decisive — and everybody knows it.Allies of both Schmitt and Representative Vicky Hartzler, another Senate candidate who is closely trailing Schmitt in most polling, have been cautioning Trump and his allies against backing Greitens.One argument that seems to resonate with the former president, according to people who have spoken with him: Don’t risk upsetting your pristine endorsement record in 2022 Senate races.On Wednesday, after Katie Britt defeated Representative Mo Brooks in a G.O.P. primary runoff for a Senate seat in Alabama, Trump boasted that his scorecard remained perfect in Senate primaries this year.“With the great ALABAMA win by Katie Britt tonight, I am pleased to announce that WE (MAGA!) are 12 WINS & ZERO LOSSES in U.S. Senate Primary races this cycle,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, his Twitter-like social media site. He made no mention of the fact that he had previously endorsed Brooks before souring on his candidacy.Eric Schmitt, left, the attorney general of Missouri, is hoping for a surge to win the Republican nomination for Senate.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesIn Missouri, Trump’s notoriously chaotic decision-making process is complicated by the fact that his son, Donald Trump Jr., and Kimberly Guilfoyle, Don Jr.’s fiancée, are backing Greitens.The younger Trump has advised his father to allow the primary to develop further before endorsing anyone, according to two people familiar with his thinking. A spokesman for Trump said that, to his knowledge, an endorsement was not “imminent,” and that he had not seen any draft announcements.Allies of Greitens are eager to link any effort to attack him to Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, who is a frequent target of Trump’s ire. McConnell’s team did not return phone calls on Thursday, but there is no evidence that his allies have any connection to the new super PAC.Republicans in Washington worry that if Greitens manages to win the primary, he might saddle their party with an embarrassing, and expensive, candidate who could throw the seat to Democrats.Guilfoyle is the national finance chair of Greitens’s campaign. Despite her help, his campaign has struggled to raise money, according to the most recent campaign finance reports, forcing him to rely almost exclusively on one Republican donor — the billionaire shipping magnate Richard Uihlein, who has given at least $2.5 million to a super PAC supporting Greitens’s candidacy.The potential sleeper: Josh HawleyAllies argue that Hartzler, a House lawmaker from western Missouri, has the best chance at beating Greitens. They are counting on the clout of Josh Hawley, the arch-conservative freshman senator who holds the state’s other Senate seat.Her campaign this week began airing a new ad promoting the endorsement of Hawley, who has capitalized on his opposition to the certification of the 2020 election results to earn Trump’s favor and build a nationwide grass-roots donor base.Polls show that Hawley is the state’s most popular politician, and the Hartzler campaign hopes to use his fund-raising prowess and omnipresence on Fox News to move voters in the state’s socially conservative hinterlands. Hawley raised about $400,000 for the campaign over a span of four days, his aides said.“There’s a lot of Republicans running for the Senate,” Hawley says in the ad. “I know all of them.”That’s an understatement: Hawley was the attorney general of Missouri while Greitens was governor, and the two men are not exactly friends.Josh Hawley, left, and Eric Greitens, right, with Steven Mnuchin at a Trump rally in St. Louis in 2017. Whitney Curtis/Getty ImagesIn 2018, Hawley accused Greitens of misusing the donor list of his veterans charity and called on him to resign over the allegations involving the hair stylist.The move helped sideline Greitens, a potential rival for Missouri’s other Senate seat, which Hawley assumed after defeating Claire McCaskill, the incumbent Democrat, in 2018.“Fortunately for Josh,” Greitens shot back at the time, “he’s better at press conferences than the law.”What to read tonightThe Jan. 6 committee revealed on Thursday that a White House lawyer told Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department attorney pushing a Trump-backed plan to subvert the 2020 election results, that he would be committing a felony if he helped to overturn the outcome. Catch up with our live coverage of the day’s big hearing here.In a separate development, federal investigators carried out a predawn search on Clark’s home in connection with the Justice Department’s sprawling inquiry into efforts to overturn the 2020 contest, Alan Feuer, Adam Goldman and Maggie Haberman report.The day’s other big political news: The Supreme Court struck down New York’s gun law, most likely limiting the ability of state and local governments to restrict guns outside the home. Hours later, the Senate advanced a bipartisan gun safety bill that responded to a spate of mass shootings.Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.— BlakeIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      In Ad, Shotgun-Toting Greitens Asks Voters to Go ‘RINO Hunting’

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      A right-wing Senate candidate accompanies a squad of heavily armed men as they storm a home looking for ‘Republicans in name only.’Eric Greitens, a Republican candidate for the United States Senate in Missouri, released a violent new political advertisement on Monday showing himself racking a shotgun and accompanying a team of men armed with assault rifles as they stormed — SWAT team-style — into a home in search of “RINOs,” or Republicans in name only.“Join the MAGA crew,” Mr. Greitens, a former Navy SEAL, declares in the ad. “Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”The ad by Mr. Greitens was just the latest but perhaps most menacing in a long line of Republican campaign ads featuring firearms and seeking to equate hard-core conservatism with the use of deadly weapons.It was posted online less than a week after the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol showed how threats by former President Donald J. Trump against his own vice president, Mike Pence, had helped to instigate the mob attack on the building.During a hearing by the committee on Thursday, J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge widely respected by conservatives, suggested that Mr. Trump and his allies posed a “clear and present danger to American democracy.”The use of violent rhetoric has steadily increased in Republican circles in recent months as threats and aggressive imagery have become more commonplace in community meeting rooms, congressional offices and on the campaign trail.While much of the violent speech and image-making by Republicans has been aimed at Democrats, some of it, as in Mr. Greitens’s ad, has been focused on fellow party members thought to be insufficiently conservative.On Sunday, Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois and a member of the Jan. 6 committee, published a letter addressed to his wife from someone who had threatened to execute the couple.By midafternoon on Monday, Twitter had hidden Mr. Greitens’ new ad behind a warning saying that it violated rules about “abusive behavior.” Facebook removed the ad altogether.Mr. Greitens’s campaign made no apologies for it, however. “If anyone doesn’t get the metaphor, they are either lying or dumb,” said Dylan Johnson, the campaign manager.The ad by Mr. Greitens, a former Missouri governor, comes as his campaign for Senate has stumbled following lurid allegations of blackmail, sexual misconduct and child abuse. In March, Mr. Greitens’s former wife, Sheena Greitens, accused him of abusive behavior, including an incident she recounted that loosened one of their son’s teeth. A number of Republicans, including Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, called on Mr. Greitens then to quit the race.Mr. Greitens has sought an endorsement from Mr. Trump, so far without success. His campaign chair is Kimberly Guilfoyle, the fiancée of Donald Trump Jr.Experts have warned that violent rhetoric can often result in actual physical violence.“When individuals feel more confident and legitimate in voicing violent sentiments, it can encourage others to feel more confident in making actual violence easier,” said Robert Pape, who studies political violence at the University of Chicago. “Unfortunately, this is a self-reinforcing spiral.”Some Republicans criticized Mr. Greitens for posting the ad.“Every Republican should denounce this sick and dangerous ad from Eric Greitens,” Barbara Comstock, a former Republican congresswoman from Virginia, said on Monday. “This is just a taste of the ‘clear and present danger’ that Judge Luttig talked about last week.” More

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      Missouri Senate primary highlights rise of violent rhetoric on the right

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      Missouri Senate primary highlights rise of violent rhetoric on the rightIn an era of polarization, candidates posing with guns and using extreme language about opponents threatens more violence On 25 April, the former Missouri governor Eric Greitens, now running for US Senate, posted a video on Twitter of him and Donald Trump Jr, firing semi-automatic rifles at a range.“Striking fear in the hearts of liberals everywhere,” the former president’s son said.Republican Senate hopeful Eric Greitens accused of abuse by ex-wife Read moreIn the accompanying post, Greitens wrote: “Striking fear into the hearts of liberals, RINOs, and the fake media.”Greitens, a former Navy Seal, shared the video even though a woman whom he had an affair with accused him of tying her up and tearing her clothes off without her consent, and his ex-wife, Sheena, accused him of knocking her down and hitting one of their sons hard enough to knock one of his teeth loose, according to an affidavit filed as part of a child custody dispute.She also alleged that he purchased a gun, refused to tell her where it was and threatened to kill himself unless she expressed public support for him.Greitens’ gun-focused messaging is concerning, according to researchers who study links between communication and political violence, not only because more than a third of the mass shooters in recent years also had a history of committing domestic violence, according to a Bloomberg report.But it’s also part of a significant increase among politicians – largely Republicans – in recent years in references to guns and threatening language in campaign ads, according to researchers.That rhetoric contributes to polarization in our society and can translate to physical violence, they say.Given the tense political climate, researchers expect rhetoric from rightwing political figures to continue to coarsen and lead to more violence before the pendulum swings back to a less charged time.“Violence is in politics as a violation of the idea that people have an equal say in the political process of choosing their governments and of being able to express themselves freely,” said Nathan Kalmoe, professor of political communication at Louisiana State University and author of Radical American Partisanship. “Clearly this kind of messaging, where you’re calling out political opponents while you’re shooting at a gun range, is a kind of a violent threat.”Since Donald Trump became president in 2016, the number of threats against members of Congress has soared, according to data provided by the Capitol police to news organizations. That year, there were 902 threats against the lawmakers. In 2021, there were 9,600.Republicans are also more likely than Democrats to think civilians may need to engage in combat to save America. A majority of Republicans support the possible use of force to preserve the “traditional American way of life”, according to a 2021 George Washington University Politics Poll. Among Democrats the number was 15%.When asked if a time will come when “patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands”, 47% of Republicans agreed, as opposed to 9% of Democrats.About one-third of Republicans also agreed that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country”, according to a 2021 survey from the Public Religion Research Institute. Among Democrats, the number was 18%.But the use of incendiary speech to rile up supporters in a democracy did not start with Trump.“Certainly, we’ve experienced time periods in the US that were as divisive and as polarized as today,” James Piazza, professor of political science at Penn State University, said. “It kind of goes in waves. And if you look at the type of speech and rhetoric that politicians used in those previous eras of polarization and division, they look a lot like what you see today; it’s dehumanizing speech.”Trump and other Republicans are using threatening language to tap into anger about the shifting demographics of the United States and the sense that a Christian way of life is coming under threat, according to political scientists.“Trump played into that anger and amplified it and went much further than most Republican leaders, especially the most prominent, had gone in very explicitly making these statements, not just the election rejection, but also the other kinds of anti-democratic statements, including hostility towards various racial, ethnic and religious minority groups,” said Kalmoe.One key difference between the Trump era and other highly polarized periods is the advent of social media, which amplifies speech by instantly sending it to millions of people and often strips nuance from a statement, according to Helio Fred Garcia, professor of professional development and leadership at Columbia University and the author of Words on Fire: The Power of Incendiary Language and How to Confront It.“There’s a giant megaphone that is out there,” said Piazza, who authored a study on the connection between political hate speech and domestic terrorism. “There really is a whole new realm of the ability to mobilize people, to radicalize people, to have more fringe voices play an outsized role in national discussions.”Greitens is not alone among Republicans in using such incendiary language. For example, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, recently told Real America’s Voice, a media group, “The Democrats are the party of pedophiles. The Democrats are the party of princess predators from Disney … Their identity is the most disgusting, evil, horrible thing happening in our country.”In interviews, political scientists said such language was occurring mostly but not exclusively on the right. But they struggled to provide examples of Democrats doing the same thing.In 2018, former attorney general Eric Holder, who served in Obama administration, said: “When they go low, we kick ’em. That’s what this new Democratic party is about.”“Immediately the right jumped on him and said, ‘He’s provoking violence.’” Garcia said. “Interestingly, the same people who said, ‘No, Trump isn’t promoting violence,’” criticized Holder.Given the charged political climate, the academics say more violence like – or worse than – the January 6 Capitol riot is inevitable. Piazza said this wave of divisiveness and polarization is reminiscent of the time before the civil war when “you had similar politician rhetoric to mobilize voters and to demobilize and demonize the other side that resulted in political violence”.That said, Piazza does not expect something like the civil war to erupt.“We do actually have pretty strong political institutions in the United States, and we have strong security institutions. The US military is extraordinarily professionalized, and the US military has done an extremely good job of being apolitical,” he said.Garcia also forecasts more violence. He thought the US could return to a more normal place after the end of Trump’s presidency but because Trump still insists he won, Garcia thinks it will take more than eight years and further carnage for the pendulum to swing back to a more normal place.To avoid that, Piazza and others call for more regulation of social media. He is encouraged by bipartisan efforts to hold the companies accountable.He hopes the government introduces regulations so that a politician “trying to rile people up for political gain or attention, or to raise money, wouldn’t be able to get away with that on social media. They would have to really watch what they had to say in terms of demonizing others and engaging in hate speech,” he said.In the meantime, Greitens ranks third in the Republican Senate primary polling but still leads against Democratic candidates, according to FiveThirtyEight. Greitens and his primary opponents did not respond to requests for comment.In the campaign ad, Greitens and Trump switch from the semi-automatic rifles to handguns.It closes with them firing more shots and Greitens saying: “Liberals beware.”TopicsRepublicansUS politicsMissourifeaturesReuse this content More

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      Eric Greitens Tests the Limits of the Trump Scandal-Survival Playbook

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      A leading Republican candidate for Senate in Missouri, Greitens faces new allegations from his ex-wife that join a long list of controversies. But for now, he’s staying in the race.Lurid allegations of blackmail, sexual misconduct and child abuse would doom most politicians.Not Eric Greitens. Or at least not yet.Until recently, the former Missouri governor was the undisputed leader of the state’s Senate race, despite facing years of scandals. Republicans have urged him to drop out amid fears that his possible victory in the Aug. 2 primary could hand a seat in the chamber to Democrats — or at least force the G.O.P. to stomach an unpalatable candidate in a state that should be undisputed Republican turf.Pressure has grown on Greitens in recent weeks over allegations made in court filings by his ex-wife, Sheena Chestnut Greitens. In a statement to a Missouri judge first published on Tuesday, she said he had become “unhinged” and “threatening.”Sheena Greitens, a scholar of Asian geopolitics, had previously accused her former husband of abusive behavior, including an alleged incident that loosened one of their son’s teeth. In her new statement, she said she stood ready to provide “photographic evidence” of the child’s injuries “at the appropriate time.”Instead of stepping aside, Eric Greitens has made a brazen attempt to defy political gravity. Short on cash and bereft of allies, he has vowed to fight on, arguing without evidence that national Republican figures are conspiring with his ex-wife to sully his reputation, which she denies.“I want to tell you directly, Karl Rove and Mitch McConnell,” Greitens said late last month in a video shared on his social media accounts. “Hear me now. You are disgusting cowards. And we are coming for you.”Greitens has denied all wrongdoing, and on Tuesday, Tim Parlatore, a lawyer for the candidate, said in a statement that the alleged abusive behavior “never happened” and accused Sheena Greitens of lying.A shrinking base of supportNews of Sheena Greitens’s latest statement rippled through Republican political circles in Missouri, where anxiety over the former governor’s bid to replace the retiring Senator Roy Blunt was already extremely high. Greitens, a former Navy SEAL and Rhodes scholar, resigned as governor in 2018 amid allegations that he had tied up his former hairdresser, taken an explicit photo of her and threatened to make it public if she revealed their sexual affair.“The latest revelations that hit this morning will upend his candidacy and will mean catastrophic shrinkage in his effort,” said Peter Kinder, a Republican former Missouri lieutenant governor who is supporting one of Greitens’s opponents, Representative Vicky Hartzler. The other major contender in the Republican primary is Attorney General Eric Schmitt, who has the backing of some in the state party establishment.There are some signs that Greitens’s support is softening. The latest public poll of the primary, by the Trafalgar Group, showed Greitens falling into second place among likely primary voters for the first time. Another recent survey commissioned by Schmitt’s campaign showed similar results. And on Saturday, in what some saw as evidence of his growing difficulties, Greitens skipped a Republican Party event in Taney County, one of the bigger annual gatherings of activists in the state. The turmoil in the Republican primary has complicated Donald Trump’s efforts to influence the outcome. Some party insiders had feared that Trump would endorse Greitens, who has tailored his campaign message around “defending President Trump’s ‘America First’ policies” and has questioned the 2020 presidential election results.After the previous round of allegations by Sheena Greitens, Trump issued a statement praising “the big, loud and proud personality of Congressman Billy Long,” who is also running for the Missouri Senate seat but has failed to gain much traction. “This is not an Endorsement, but I’m just askin’?” Trump said.Eric Greitens has struggled to raise money, with finance reports showing that his campaign had less than $300,000 in the bank as of January. Super PACs supporting Greitens have received large donations from two Republican billionaires, Richard Uihlein, a shipping magnate, and Bernard Marcus, a founder of Home Depot. Greitens has also brought in nearly $900,000 through his joint fund-raising committee, and a spokesman said his upcoming fund-raising report would show that the campaign had raised a “six-figure” sum of money since Sheena Greitens made her first statement.But James Harris, a Republican lobbyist who has been talking with Missouri donors and activists about the race, said, “They’re really just done with him.” Harris recounted a conversation with a donor who recently turned down a fund-raising pitch by Greitens, saying his wife would “kill me” if he gave money to the former governor.And now, the entry into the race of an heiress to a beer-company fortune threatens to make the general election competitive.Trudy Busch Valentine, an heiress to the Anheuser-Busch fortune, is a well-known donor in Missouri.Hillary Levin/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, via Associated PressDemocrats’ dilemma: The heiress or the veteran?Republicans are warily eyeing the newly announced campaign of Trudy Busch Valentine, who is the daughter of August Busch Jr., the Anheuser-Busch beer baron who died in 1989.A registered nurse who grew up on her family’s 281-acre estate, Grant’s Farm, Busch Valentine is making empathy central to her campaign message.“It seems we have lost our ability to be understanding and compassionate for each other,” she said in her announcement video. “We have so much more that unites us than divides us.”In the video, she also spoke about her son’s death in 2020 from opioid abuse.“Twenty months ago, my oldest son died of an opioid overdose,” Busch Valentine said. “Matt’s death brought us so much sadness, but his death also reignites the passion in me to make a positive difference for others, this time on a larger scale.”Busch Valentine has never held elected office, but she’s a well-known donor in Missouri. Democrats expect her to plow her personal fortune into her campaign, with a focus on winning back some of the white rural voters who have defected to Republicans in recent elections. She is close friends with Claire McCaskill, the last Democrat to win a Senate seat in Missouri.Busch Valentine is already facing questions about her past. And she’ll first have to dispatch her main rival in the Democratic primary, Lucas Kunce, a retired Marine and former Pentagon official whose campaign could hardly be more different.In an interview, Kunce said he was running to “fundamentally change who has power in this country.” He explained how he grew up keenly aware of his parents’ struggles with money — recalling how his family went bankrupt when his sister was born — and laughingly described participating in medical experiments at a V.A. hospital to earn money while he was in college.A veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Kunce said he was disgusted by how American politicians had spent hundreds of billions of dollars on those conflicts while starving their own communities of resources.“There’s always money for war and Wall Street, never for stuff back home,” he said.Kunce has sworn off money from corporate PACs and federal lobbyists, and his campaign says it has raised nearly $3 million, primarily from grass-roots donations online. He’s as critical of Democrats as he is of Republicans; voters in Missouri have lost faith in both parties, he said.“People feel betrayed by Democrats,” Kunce said. “They think they don’t stand up for working people anymore.”Kirsten Noyes More

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      Ex-Wife of Eric Greitens, Missouri Senate Candidate, Accuses Him of Abuse 

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      Sheena Greitens said in an affidavit that her former husband had physically abused both her and their young son. Mr. Greitens, a former governor of Missouri, denied the accusation.The former wife of Eric Greitens, a leading Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Missouri, has accused him of physically abusing her and one of their sons in a sworn affidavit that could have serious implications in the race for the seat of Senator Roy Blunt, who is retiring.Mr. Greitens, whose campaign denied the allegations on Monday, abruptly resigned as governor in 2018 amid a swirling scandal that involved a sexual relationship with his former hairdresser and allegations that he had taken an explicit photograph of her without her permission. He was also accused by prosecutors of misusing his charity’s donor list for political purposes.But until the latest revelation, his attempt at a political comeback had appeared improbably successful, despite efforts by Missouri’s Republican establishment to block it. Mr. Greitens, 47, a former Navy SEAL, had aligned squarely with former President Donald J. Trump, cheered on anti-vaccine and anti-mask protesters, and surged to the lead in a crowded Republican primary race for a key open Senate seat.He now faces fresh calls from his opponents to drop out, lest he turn a reliably red seat competitive in November.Representative Vicky Hartzler of Missouri, who is running against Mr. Greitens in the Republican primary and has garnered support from many top state officials, issued a statement accusing Mr. Greitens of “a pattern of criminal behavior that makes Eric unfit to hold any public office.”“He should drop out of the U.S. Senate race immediately,” she said. Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, who as the state’s attorney general in 2018 pressed Mr. Greitens to resign as governor, wrote on Twitter, “If you hit a woman or a child, you belong in handcuffs, not the United States Senate.”Part of a continuing child custody dispute, the sworn affidavit from Sheena Chestnut Greitens, 39, a professor of public policy at the University of Texas at Austin, accused Mr. Greitens of physical abuse and “unstable and coercive behavior.” The 41-page affidavit, filed on Monday in Boone County Circuit Court in Missouri, said that Mr. Greitens had become increasingly violent in 2018 as his sex scandal threatened to end a once-promising political rise that he hoped would take him to the White House.“Prior to our divorce, during an argument in late April 2018, Eric knocked me down and confiscated my cellphone, wallet and keys so that I was unable to call for help or extricate myself and our children from our home,” wrote Dr. Greitens, who has two young sons with Mr. Greitens and whose divorce from him became final in May 2020.She added that his “behavior included physical violence toward our children, such as cuffing our then-3-year-old son across the face at the dinner table in front of me and yanking him around by his hair.”In a statement on Monday, Mr. Greitens’s campaign denied the allegations and said that they were politically motivated. The statement said that Dr. Greitens was “engaged in a last-ditch attempt to vindictively destroy her ex-husband.” Mr. Greitens later issued a personal statement saying he would continue “fighting for the truth and against completely fabricated, baseless allegations.” A lawyer for Dr. Greitens did not respond to requests for comment on Monday about the affidavit, which was reported earlier by The Associated Press. Representative Billy Long of Missouri, another Republican candidate for the Senate seat, said on Monday that he was “shocked and appalled” by the affidavit, adding that Mr. Greitens was “clearly unfit to represent” their state in the Senate.Mr. Greitens’s lead in the polls has flummoxed other Republicans like Mr. Long, considering that the 2018 investigation of Mr. Greitens was led by Republicans and looming impeachment proceedings would have been carried out by the Republican-controlled legislature.In 2018, Mr. Greitens’s former hairdresser described an alarming sexual encounter in which, she said, he had taken a photo of her and threatened to share it if she told anyone about their affair. Around the same time, questions began to emerge about whether he had used the donor list of a veterans charity he founded to help his political campaign in 2016.In her affidavit, Dr. Greitens said her husband had bought a gun but refused to tell her where he had hidden it. She said he had threatened to kill himself “unless I provided specific public political support to him,” despite accusations of infidelity that she said he had admitted to, even as she said he threatened her with legal action if she revealed that confession.Mr. Greitens is one of several Republican candidates aligned with Mr. Trump who have drawn concerns from top party leaders in Washington, though the former president has yet to endorse anyone in the Missouri race. In November, Sean Parnell, a Trump-endorsed candidate for the Pennsylvania Senate seat being vacated by Patrick J. Toomey, a Republican, dropped out of that contest after a judge ruled in favor of his estranged wife in a custody fight that also involved allegations of abuse. In Ohio, a former Trump White House aide, Max Miller, challenged Representative Anthony Gonzalez after Mr. Gonzalez voted to impeach Mr. Trump, helping to push the incumbent into retirement. Mr. Miller is now suing an ex-girlfriend and former White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, after she accused him of physical abuse.In December, another Trump-backed Senate candidate, the former professional football player Herschel Walker, who is running in Georgia, told Axios he was “accountable” for past violent behavior toward his former wife, Cindy Grossman. However, his campaign said he still denied accusations from two other women who said he had displayed threatening behavior toward them.Hannah Norton contributed reporting. More

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      Toni Morrison novel The Bluest Eye off banned list in St Louis schools

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      Toni Morrison novel The Bluest Eye off banned list in St Louis schoolsNobel laureate’s classic debut was removed from libraries but backlash and lawsuits prompted vote to restore

      Books bans and ‘gag orders’: the crackdown no one asked for
      A banned book by the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison will be available again to high school students in a district in St Louis, Missouri, after the Wentzville school board reversed its decision to ban The Bluest Eye, in the face of criticism and a class-action lawsuit.‘Adults are banning books, but they’re not asking our opinions’: meet the teens of the Banned Book ClubRead moreThe board made national news last month when it voted 4-3 to removed the book from school libraries, citing themes of racism, incest and child molestation.Morrison’s 1970 debut novel is one of several titles, including Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe and L8R, G8R by Lauren Myracle, to have gained the attention of school boards in conservative US areas.The Wentzville ban was imposed after a challenge by a parent exercising the right to request titles not be available to their children. Backlash was swift, critics saying the board had violated first amendment rights.In a letter of protest, the Intellectual Freedom Committee of the Missouri Library Association said: “We encourage you to reexamine the depth of your commitment to education in the truest sense, and to find your courage in the face of baseless political grandstanding at the expense of educators and students in your district.”The American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri sued the district on behalf of two students. According to the St Louis Post-Dispatch, the board accepted a review committee’s recommendation to retain Morrison’s book, voting 5-2 on Friday to rescind the ban. An ACLU official, Anthony Rothert, welcomed the news but warned that books remain suppressed including All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M Johnson, Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, Heavy by Kiese Laymon and Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison. Challenges against two other books had been withdrawn, the Post-Dispatch reported.The board also approved the retention of Gabi, a Girl in Pieces by Isabel Quintero, which faced challenges regarding language and depiction of rape.“Wentzville’s policies still make it easy for any community member to force any book from the shelves even when they shamelessly target books by and about communities of color, LGBTQ people and other marginalized groups,” said Rothert. “Access to The Bluest Eye was taken from students for three months just because a community member did not think they should have access to Toni Morrison’s story.”Many library associations argue that parents of minors should be able to control their children’s reading but should not make books unavailable to others.Opponents of Morrison’s book, including conservative lawmakers, urged the school board to maintain its ban. After the decision, board member Sandy Garber maintained that The Bluest Eye “doesn’t offer anything to our children”.According to the American Library Association, which monitors challenges to books, calls for bans are increasing.“It’s a volume of challenges I’ve never seen in my time at the ALA – the last 20 years,” the director of the ALA office of intellectual freedom, Deborah Caldwell-Stone, told the Guardian in November. “We’ve never had a time when we’ve gotten four or five reports a day for days on end, sometimes as many as eight in a day.Reuse this content More