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      John Hinckley gains full freedom 41 years after Ronald Reagan assassination attempt

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      John Hinckley gains full freedom 41 years after Ronald Reagan assassination attemptHinckley, who shot and wounded the president in 1981 but was acquitted by reason of insanity, had decades of mental health supervision John Hinckley, who shot and wounded US president Ronald Reagan in 1981, has been freed from court oversight, officially concluding decades of supervision by legal and mental health professionals.“After 41 years 2 months and 15 days, FREEDOM AT LAST!!!,” he wrote on Twitter shortly after noon on Wednesday.The lifting of all restrictions had been expected since late September. US district court judge Paul L Friedman in Washington had said he would free Hinckley on 15 June if he continued to remain mentally stable in the community in Virginia where he has lived since 2016.Hinckley, who was acquitted of trying to kill the then US president by reason of insanity, spent the decades before that in a Washington mental hospital.Close calls: when American presidents diced with deathRead more Hinckley has gained nearly 30,000 followers on Twitter and YouTube in recent months as the judge loosened Hinckley’s restrictions before fully lifting all of them.But the greying 67-year-old is far from being the household name that he became after shooting and wounding the 40th US president and several others outside a Washington hotel. Today, historians say Hinckley is at best a question on a quiz show and someone who unintentionally helped build the Reagan legend and inspire a push for stricter gun control.“If Hinckley had succeeded in killing Reagan, then he would have been a pivotal historical figure,” HW Brands, a historian and Reagan biographer, wrote in an email to the Associated Press. “As it is, he is a misguided soul whom history has already forgotten.”Barbara A Perry, a professor and director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, said that Hinckley “would be maybe a Jeopardy question”. But his impact remains tangible in Reagan’s legacy.“For the president himself to have been so seriously wounded, and to come back from that that actually made Ronald Reagan the legend that he became … like the movie hero that he was,” Perry said.Reagan showed grace and humor in the face of death, Perry said. After being shot, the president told emergency room doctors that he hoped they were all Republicans. He later joked to his wife Nancy that he was sorry he “forgot to duck”.When the president first spoke to Congress after the shooting, he looked “just a little bit thinner, but he’s still the robust cowboy that is Ronald Reagan”, Perry said.‘Honey, I forgot to duck’: the attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan, 40 years onRead moreThe assassination attempt paralyzed Reagan press secretary James Brady, who died in 2014.In 1993, president Bill Clinton signed into law the Brady bill, which required a five-day waiting period for handgun purchases and background checks of prospective buyers. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence are named after Brady and his wife Sarah.The shooting also injured Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy and Washington police officer Thomas Delahanty.Hinckley was 25 and suffering from acute psychosis at the time of the attack. When jurors found him not guilty by reason of insanity, they said he needed treatment and not a lifetime in confinement. He was ordered to live at St Elizabeths hospital in Washington.In the 2000s, Hinckley began making visits to his parents’ home in a gated community in Williamsburg. A 2016 court order granted him permission to live with his mother full time, albeit under various restrictions, after experts said his mental illness had been in remission for decades.Hinckley’s mother died in July. He signed a lease on a one-bedroom apartment in the area last year and began living there with his cat, Theo, according to court filings.Over the years, the court restricted Hinckley from owning a gun or using drugs or alcohol. He also couldn’t contact the actor Jodie Foster, with whom he was obsessed at the time of the shooting, or any of his victims or their families.TopicsUS newsVirginiaRonald ReaganUS gun controlUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Mark Meadows is still registered to vote in South Carolina and Virginia, officials say

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      Mark Meadows is still registered to vote in South Carolina and Virginia, officials sayDonald Trump’s former chief of staff was removed from voter rolls in North Carolina earlier this month Mark Meadows, the former chief of staff to Donald Trump who was removed from North Carolina voter rolls earlier this month, is still a registered voter in two other states, according to officials.Chris Whitmire, a spokesperson for the South Carolina elections commission, said the former Republican congressman and his wife registered as voters in the state in March.“That’s when he became active,” Whitmire said, noting that neither Meadows had yet cast a vote in the state. “From our perspective, it just looks like any new South Carolina voter.”Ginni Thomas urged Trump’s chief of staff to overturn election resultsRead moreThe South Carolina registration was first reported by the Washington Post, which noted that Meadows had been a registered voter simultaneously in three states – the Carolinas and Virginia – until North Carolina removed him from its rolls earlier this month. Meadows remains a registered Virginia voter, the paper reported.Mark and Debra Meadows bought a home on Lake Keowee for $1.6m in July, according to records for the property, which was listed on their South Carolina voter registration records.The former North Carolina congressman appeared in South Carolina earlier this week with members of the state legislature’s newly formed Freedom Caucus, an offshoot of a conservative group Meadows helped found in the US House.A representative for Meadows declined to comment on the South Carolina voter registration.Last month, the office of the North Carolina attorney general, Josh Stein, asked the state bureau of investigation to look into Meadows’ voter registration in that state, which listed a home he never owned and may never have visited as his legal residence.Public records indicated Meadows had been registered to vote in Virginia and North Carolina, where he listed a Scaly Mountain mobile home he did not own as his legal residence weeks before casting an absentee 2020 presidential election ballot in the state.Trump, for whom Meadows was chief of staff at the time, won the battleground state by just over one percentage point.Marjorie Taylor Greene appears in court over attempt to bar her from CongressRead morePublic records indicate Meadows registered to vote in Alexandria, Virginia, about a year after he registered in Scaly Mountain and just weeks before Virginia’s high-profile governor’s election last fall.Meadows frequently raised the prospect of voter fraud before the 2020 presidential election as polls showed Trump trailing Joe Biden and in the months after Trump’s loss, to suggest Biden was not the legitimate winner.Judges, election officials in both parties and Trump’s own attorney general have concluded there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. Experts point to isolated incidents of intentional or unintentional violations of voter laws in every election.Through the Electronic Registration Information Center, a consortium through which states exchange data about voter registration, Whitmire also said officials periodically pull voter lists and remove those who have more recently registered in a new state.TopicsMark MeadowsUS politicsNorth CarolinaSouth CarolinaVirginianewsReuse this content More

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      IS terrorists who kidnapped James Foley ignored efforts to negotiate, court hears

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      IS terrorists who kidnapped James Foley ignored efforts to negotiate, court hearsFoley’s brother and mother testify at Virginia court trial of El Shafee Elsheikh, accused of kidnap and murder of US journalist The Islamic State terrorists who kidnapped American journalist James Foley never made serious attempts to negotiate a ransom before brutally executing him, family members have told a court.Foley’s brother and mother took the witness stand at US district court in Alexandria at the terror trial of El Shafee Elsheikh, a Briton accused of playing a leading role in a hostage-taking scheme that resulted in the deaths of Foley and three other Americans – Steven Sotloff, Peter Kassig and Kayla Mueller.James Foley, a freelance photographer who grew up in New Hampshire, left for Syria in October 2012. He was well aware of the potential dangers having spent more than a month in captivity in Libya while on assignment during that country’s civil war.Diane Foley, his mother, testified that she became deeply concerned about her son when he failed to call them as he usually would on Thanksgiving.It wasn’t until late November, after Thanksgiving, that they actually received an email from James’s captors seeking to establish a line of communication.Michael Foley, James’s brother, said the emails exchanged in November 2012 and January 2013 sought either the release of Muslim prisoners or €100m .“We had no ability to secure either of those demands,” he said. “It’s not a reasonable demand. It’s not a negotiation, in my mind.”The captors did provide evidence that they were in possession of Foley and that he was still alive by giving personal details about James’s life that would have been known only to him and his family.But despite repeated efforts to engage the hostage-takers in talks, the Foleys received no replies to multiple emails for roughly eight months. Finally, in August 2013, they received an email titled: “A message to the American government and their sheep-like citizens.”The email criticized the US for a recent bombing campaign that had been undertaken against the Islamic State.It promised retaliation, “the first of which being the blood of your American citizen, James Foley. He will be executed as a DIRECT result of your transgressions towards us!”A few days later, Foley was beheaded in a gruesome video broadcast across the Internet.Parents of journalist James Foley: US government and media failed our sonRead moreBoth Foleys testified that they first learned of James’s death from reporters calling for reaction. Michael Foley said he found the video readily available on the Internet and watched it repeatedly. Diane Foley said she kept hoping it was a cruel joke. She called the FBI and other government officials she’d been in contact with, but none would respond throughout the day. The first official confirmation she received was on the evening news, when then President Barack Obama confirmed the beheading.The refusal to negotiate in serious terms stands in contrast to earlier testimony, where negotiators for European hostages engaged in lengthy discussions that resulted in the release of hostages. One hostages was released after raising €2m, a negotiated figure that was just a fraction of what was demanded from the Foleys.Elsheikh is better known as one of “the Beatles”, a nickname he and at least two other Brits were given by their captives because of their accents. Elsheikh and a longtime friend, Alexenda Kotey, were captured together and brought to Virginia to face trial. Kotey pleaded guilty last year in a plea bargain that calls for a life sentence.A third Beatle, Mohammed Emwazi, served as executioner in the video of Foley’s execution. Emwazi was killed in a drone strike.There have been conflicting statements during the trial about the existence of a fourth member of the group. An individual previously identified in public discussion as the fourth man, Aine Davis, is serving a prison sentence in Turkey.Defense lawyers have highlighted the discrepancies over the Beatles’ identities, and say there is insufficient evidence to prove Elsheikh participated in the hostage-taking scheme. Prosecutors, though, plan to present evidence later in the trial that Elsheikh confessed to his role under questioning from interrogators and in media interviews.TopicsIslamic StateVirginiaUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      US trial for member of Islamic State group begins in Virginia

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      US trial for member of Islamic State group begins in VirginiaEl Shafee Elsheikh, 33, is accused of kidnap and murders of US journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, and aid workers Peter Kassig and Kayla Mueller Prosecutors told a federal jury in Virginia on Wednesday that a British national on trial for terrorist acts that resulted in the gruesome deaths of four American hostages had a reputation for outsize brutality.Opening arguments began in the first trial on US soil of an alleged major figure in the Islamic State (IS) group – an accused member of the kidnap-and-murder cell of four men called the “Beatles” by their hostages.El Shafee Elsheikh, 33, is accused of involvement in the murders of American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, as well as aid workers Peter Kassig and Kayla Mueller.Foley’s parents, John and Diane Foley, arrived at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, shortly before the proceedings began at 9am local time, making no comment to reporters outside.Speaking to AFP this week, Diane Foley said the trial had “been a long time coming”.“Accountability is essential if we’re ever going to stop hostage-taking,” she said.Elsheikh and another former British national, Alexanda Amon Kotey, were captured in January 2018 by Kurdish forces in Syria while attempting to flee to Turkey.They were turned over to US forces in Iraq and flown to Virginia in October 2020 to face charges of hostage-taking, conspiracy to murder US citizens and supporting a foreign terrorist organization.Kotey pleaded guilty in September 2021 and is facing life in prison. Under his plea agreement, Kotey will serve 15 years in jail in the US and then be extradited to Britain to face further charges.Elsheikh opted to fight the charges. He faces life imprisonment if convicted.Kotey and Elsheikh’s four-member jihadist cell, called the “Beatles” by their captives because of their British accents, was allegedly involved in the abductions of at least 27 people in Syria from 2012 to 2015.Face to face with ‘the Beatles’, the Isis torture squadRead moreThe hostages, some of whom were released after their governments paid ransoms, were from at least 15 countries, including the United States, Denmark, France, Japan, Norway and Spain.They allegedly tortured and killed their victims and IS released videos of the murders for propaganda purposes.Elsheikh was not a typical IS foot soldier; he was a senior leader who took particular pleasure in mistreating the hostages he held captive, the jury was told.Prosecutor John Gibbs said that Elsheikh played a leadership role and was known by his captives not only for his British accent but for his unusual penchant for brutality, even within a terrorist group known for its cruelty.According to Gibbs, surviving hostages will testify that Elsheikh and two British compatriots were more likely than day-to-day guards to hand out beatings.Even hostages about to be released after paying a ransom were given “going-away beatings” by the British men, Gibbs said.When Elsheikh and friends learned that a European hostage was marking his 25th birthday, they ensured they inflicted exactly 25 blows, Gibbs said.The individuals “were utterly terrifying” to the hostages, Gibbs said. If the Britons came into contact with hostages, they were supposed to kneel down, face the wall and avoid eye contact at all times.“If a hostage looked at any of the three men, they would be beaten,” Gibbs said. “In fact, they did not have to do anything to be beaten.”Waterboarding and other forms of torture were also inflicted on hostages, Gibbs said.Ringleader Mohamed Emwazi, referred to by some as “Jihadi John”, was killed by a US drone in Syria in November 2015. A fourth man, Aine Davis, is imprisoned in Turkey after being convicted on terrorism charges.Defense attorney Edward MacMahon highlighted a discrepancy about the number of so-called Beatles as he argued for his client’s innocence, saying Elsheikh was not part of that “cell” of men but a simple Islamic State foot soldier.MacMahon said surviving hostages have different recollections about each of the “Beatles” and their characteristics, and about whether there were three or four.He noted that the British speakers were careful to always wear masks, making identification difficult.According to the US authorities, Kotey and Elsheikh allegedly supervised detention facilities for hostages and coordinated ransom negotiations.The pair were also accused of engaging in a “prolonged pattern of physical and psychological violence against hostages”.Ricardo Garcia Vilanova, a Spanish photographer held captive for six months in 2014, told AFP that “torture and murder were daily occurrences” in an atmosphere of “sadism”.Several former European hostages are expected to testify at the trial along with a Yazidi woman detained with Mueller, a humanitarian worker who was abducted in Syria in 2013.Mueller’s parents say she was tortured before being handed over to Islamic State group leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who allegedly raped her repeatedly before killing her.According to the indictment, Elsheikh was born in Sudan and moved to Britain when he was a child.After becoming a fundamentalist believing in using extreme violence, he went to Syria in 2012 and joined IS.Britain stripped Kotey and Elsheikh of their UK citizenship but held up their transfer to the US until the American authorities assured London the death penalty would not be sought for the two men.TopicsIslamic StateVirginiaUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      If You Think Republicans Are Overplaying Schools, You Aren’t Paying Attention

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      The warning signs are everywhere. For 30 years, polls showed that Americans trusted Democrats over Republicans to invest in public education and strengthen schools. Within the past year, however, Republicans have closed the gap; a recent poll shows the two parties separated on the issue by less than the margin of error.Since the Republican Glenn Youngkin scored an upset win in Virginia’s race for governor by making education a central campaign issue, Republicans in state after state have capitalized on anger over mask mandates, parental rights and teaching about race, and their strategy seems to be working. The culture wars now threatening to consume American schools have produced an unlikely coalition — one that includes populists on the right and a growing number of affluent, educated white parents on the left. Both groups are increasingly at odds with the Democratic Party.For the party leaders tasked with crafting a midterm strategy, this development should set off alarms. Voters who feel looked down on by elites are now finding common cause with those elites, forming an alliance that could not only cost the Democrats the midterm elections but also fundamentally realign American politics.The Democrats know they have a problem. One recent analysis conducted by the Democratic Governors Association put it bluntly: “We need to retake education as a winning issue.” But reclaiming their trustworthiness on education will require more than just savvier messaging. Democrats are going to need to rethink a core assumption: that education is the key to addressing economic inequality.The party’s current education problem reflects a misguided policy shift made decades ago. Eager to reclaim the political center, Democratic politicians increasingly framed education, rather than labor unions or a progressive tax code, as the answer to many of our economic problems, embracing what Barack Obama would later call “ladders of opportunity,” such as “good” public schools and college degrees, which would offer a “hand up” rather than a handout. Bill Clinton famously pronounced, “What you earn depends on what you learn.”But this message has proved to be deeply alienating to the people who once made up the core of the party. As the philosopher Michael Sandel wrote in his recent book “The Tyranny of Merit,” Democrats often seemed to imply that people whose living standards were declining had only themselves to blame. Meanwhile, more affluent voters were congratulated for their smarts and hard work. Tired of being told to pick themselves up and go to college, working people increasingly turned against the Democrats.Today, as the middle class falls further behind the wealthy, the belief in education as the sole remedy for economic inequality appears more and more misguided. And yet, because Democrats have spent the past 30 years framing schooling as the surest route to the good life, any attempt to make our education system fairer is met with fierce resistance from affluent liberals worried that Democratic reforms might threaten their carefully laid plans to help their children get ahead.In California, plans to place less emphasis on calculus in an effort to address persistent racial and socioeconomic disparities in math achievement have spawned furious backlash. So, too, did the announcement last fall that New York City schools would be winding down their gifted and talented program, which has been widely criticized for exacerbating segregation — an announcement that Mayor Eric Adams has begun to walk back.Mr. Youngkin was one of the first to recognize that these anxieties could be used for political gain, and he carefully tailored his messaging to parents from both affluent families and the conservative movement. In his appeals to the Republican base, he railed against critical race theory and claimed that allies of George Soros had inserted “operatives” on local school boards. To centrist parents, he pledged to undo admissions policy changes aimed at bolstering diversity at Virginia’s prestigious Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, where graduates regularly go on to attend Ivy League universities.These promises seem to have worked. A recent focus group conducted by a Democratic polling firm showed that education was the top issue cited by Joe Biden supporters who had voted or considered voting for Mr. Youngkin. Participants referred to an array of complaints about education, including a sense that the focus on race and social justice in Virginia’s schools had gone too far, eclipsing core academic subjects. Similar charges echoed through the San Francisco school board election last month as Asian American voters, furious over changes to the admissions process at a highly selective high school, galvanized a movement to oust three school board members.How can Democrats claw out of this bind? In the near term, they can remind voters that Republican efforts to limit what kids are taught in school will hurt students, no matter their background. The College Board’s Advanced Placement program, for example, recently warned that it will remove the AP designation from courses when required topics are banned. Whatever the limitations of the AP program, students from all class backgrounds still use it to earn college credit and demonstrate engagement in rigorous coursework. Democrats could also take a page from Mr. Youngkin’s playbook and pledge, as he did, to invest more “than has ever been invested in education,” an issue that resonates across party lines.But if Democrats want to stop bleeding working-class votes, they need to begin telling a different story about education and what schools can and can’t do. For a generation, Democrats have framed a college degree as the main path to economic mobility, a foolproof way to expand the middle class. But now kids regularly emerge from college burdened with crushing student debt and struggling to find stable jobs. To these graduates and to their parents it is painfully obvious that degrees do not necessarily guarantee success. A generation ago, Mr. Clinton may have been able to make a convincing case that education could solve all people’s problems, but today Democrats risk irrelevance — or worse — by sticking with that tired mantra.So, yes, strong schools are essential for the health and well-being of young people: Schools are where they gain confidence in themselves and build relationships with adults and with one another, where they learn about the world and begin to imagine life beyond their neighborhoods. But schools can’t level a playing field marred by racial inequality and increasingly sharp class distinctions; to pretend otherwise is both bad policy and bad politics. Moreover, the idea that schools alone can foster equal opportunity is a dangerous form of magical thinking that not only justifies existing inequality but also exacerbates our political differences by pitting the winners in our economy against the losers.Democrats can reclaim education as a winning issue. They might even be able to carve out some badly needed common ground, bridging the gap between those who have college degrees and those who don’t by telling a more compelling story about why we have public education in this country. But that story must go beyond the scramble for social mobility if the party is to win back some of the working people it has lost over the past few decades.Schools may not be able to solve inequality. But they can give young people a common set of social and civic values, as well as the kind of education that is valuable in its own right and not merely as a means to an end. We don’t fund education with our tax dollars to wash our hands of whatever we might owe to the next generation. Instead, we do it to strengthen our communities — by preparing students for the wide range of roles they will inevitably play as equal members of a democratic society.Jennifer Berkshire (@BisforBerkshire) is a freelance journalist, and Jack Schneider (@Edu_Historian) is an associate professor of education at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. They are the authors of “A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School” and the hosts of the education policy podcast “Have You Heard.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Virginia governor Youngkin apologizes after mixing up Black state senators

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      Virginia governor Youngkin apologizes after mixing up Black state senatorsLouise Lucas noted she received a text from Glenn Youngkin congratulating her for a speech Mamie Locke gave The Virginia governor, Glenn Youngkin, has apologized after mistaking one Black legislator for another in a text message.Youngkin is the new Republican governor of the state, which has trended Democrat in recent election cycles but stunned observers by picking Youngkin as its new leader last year over a centrist Democrat candidate.Youngkin issued the apology after Louise Lucas, a state senator, called attention to the mistake on Twitter. She noted that she received a text message from Youngkin congratulating her for a floor speech connected to Black History Month.But it was another African American woman, Mamie Locke, who gave the speech, not Lucas.On Friday, Lucas sent out a tweet with pictures of herself and Locke, saying: “Study the photos and you will get this soon!”Lucas told the Washington Post that she initially planned to keep Youngkin’s gaffe private but reconsidered after a bitter debate between Youngkin, a Republican, and Senate Democrats over their refusal to confirm former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Andrew Wheeler as the state’s secretary of natural and historic resources.When Lucas responded privately to Youngkin’s text message earlier in the week informing him of the mistaken identity, Youngkin responded with an apology, according to the Post: “Goodness . so sorry about the confusion,” he wrote in a text response. “I will send her a note. Thanks for the note back!”His office issued a public apology on Friday after the mistake became public, telling news outlets: “I had the floor speeches on while doing too many things at once earlier this week. I made a mistake and I apologized to Senator Lucas.“TopicsVirginiaRaceUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Governor Glenn Youngkin accused of ‘toxic culture’ after aides attack teen on Twitter

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      Governor Glenn Youngkin accused of ‘toxic culture’ after aides attack teen on TwitterYoungkin’s campaign named and posted photo of Ethan Lynne, 17, on Twitter after he criticized the Republican The Virginia governor, Glenn Youngkin, was accused of creating “a culture of toxicity” in his first months in office, after campaign aides attacked a high-school student, naming and picturing the boy, for sharing a news story about the Republican official.On Saturday, Ethan Lynne, 17 and according to his Twitter biography a Democrat, posted an article which suggested Youngkin could be trying to stop work to highlight the history of enslaved people at the Virginia executive mansion.In response, Youngkin’s campaign account posted a picture of Lynne with the former governor Ralph Northam, next to a picture from Northam’s medical school yearbook of two men in racist costumes: one in Blackface and one in a Ku Klux Klan costume.“Here’s a picture of Ethan with a man that had a Blackface/KKK photo in his yearbook,” Team Youngkin tweeted.In 2019, Northam admitted being one of the men in the photograph, an admission he later recanted.Glenn Youngkin’s campaign Twitter account attacked a Hanover County high school student, @ethanclynne, last night after he shared my story. The Tweet was deleted after blowback and I’ve asked Youngkin’s team for an explanation. Ethan says he hasn’t heard anything from them. pic.twitter.com/YWMmLCOQys— Ben Paviour (@BPaves) February 6, 2022
      Virginia governors cannot serve consecutive terms. Youngkin beat the Democrat Terry McAuliffe, a former governor, in a bitter 2021 election in which the Republican made teaching about race and racism in US history a key campaign issue.Amid outrage at an attack on a minor, the Team Youngkin tweet was deleted.Speaking to the Washington Post, Lynne said: “A governor’s campaign account has attacked a minor – to me that was a new low … it was up for over 12 hours. I received no apology, no communication, nothing.”On Monday, Youngkin said: “On Saturday night, an unauthorized tweet came from a campaign account. I regret that this happened and it shouldn’t have. I have addressed it with my team. We must continue to work to bring Virginians together. There is so much more that unites us than divides us.”Lynne said: “While he acknowledged the situation, Governor Youngkin did not apologize and did not condemn what happened over the weekend. I still hope he does, and that he will take time to recognize the culture of toxicity he has created within his first month of office.”A Youngkin campaign spokesman, Matt Wolking, said the tweet was deleted when it was realised Lynne was a minor.Lynne’s Twitter biography reads: “Virginian. HS Senior. Democrat.”“It was brought to [our] attention that this Democrat party official repeatedly elevated by [state] senator Louise Lucas as a source of official Democrat party communications is actually a minor, so the tweet was removed,” Wolking said.The article Lynne posted was from VPM, a public radio station in Richmond, the state capital. It alleged Youngkin was converting a classroom in the executive mansion, used to educate on ties between the building and slavery, into a family room.The article also said an archeologist and historian who worked with the two previous governors had her office cleaned out.Lynne tweeted: “NEW: The historian tasked with teaching about slavery at the Virginia Governors Mansion just resigned after finding Youngkin converted her classroom into a family room – and emptied her office.”He added: “Shameful.”Corrections were later posted, saying Youngkin had not converted the classroom and the historian had resigned, but did seem to have had her office cleaned out. Lynne retweeted the correction. Nonetheless, the Youngkin campaign team attacked. Lynne said he did not notice their tweet for hours.“In school, we are taught how to spot bullying, and their tweet last night perfectly fit that description,” Lynne wrote on Sunday, also thanking people who offered support.“It is disgusting, disturbing, and unbecoming of the commonwealth to see the governor and his office stoop this low, especially on a public platform.”TopicsVirginiaUS politicsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      How Democrats Can Stop a Red Wave

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      Republicans like their chances in November. But politics can change quickly.A “red wave” is building this year — or so we’re told.Republicans are confident that the country’s sour mood will sweep them back into power in Congress, mainly because Americans are fed up with the coronavirus and inflation. They think they’ll pick up 30 or so House seats and four or five seats in the Senate.“It’s crystal clear,” said Corry Bliss, a partner at FP1 Strategies, a consulting firm that helps Republicans. He added: “The red wave is coming. Period. End of discussion.”But what if that’s wrong? We asked about two dozen strategists in both parties what would need to happen for Democrats to hold the House and Senate in November. And while we’re not making any predictions, it’s possible that Democrats could retain control of Congress. Difficult, but possible.Democrats have 222 seats in the House, and 50 seats in the Senate. That means Republicans need to pick up just six House seats and one Senate seat to take full control of Congress.Here’s what needs to happen for Democrats to pull off an upset in 2022:Biden voters show upPundits often make it sound like voters are judiciously studying each party’s arguments and forming conclusions. But that’s not really the way American politics works. Modern elections are much more about mobilization (getting your supporters to the polls) than persuasion (convincing the other side’s supporters to switch), though both matter.Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by more than 7 million votes in 2020. So for Democrats, winning in 2022 means figuring out how to get as many of those people as possible to vote, even though Trump won’t be on the ballot this time.“Their primary motivation for voting in the last election was defeating Trump,” said Guy Cecil, chairman of Priorities USA, which on Monday announced a $30 million program of digital ads aimed at reaching what he calls “new Biden voters” in seven swing states.The last two elections — the 2018 midterms and the 2020 presidential vote — saw the biggest turnout in history. That means there’s an unusual amount of uncertainty among insiders about which voters will show up in 2022.Regaining a sense of normalcyEvery person we spoke with agreed: This is the biggest unknown.While voters are upset about high prices today, inflation and the coronavirus could be down to manageable levels by the summer. Several strategists say it is also essential, politically speaking, that schools are fully open in September. If all of that happens, Democrats could enter the midterms as the party that defeated Covid and brought the economy roaring back to life, or at least fight Republicans to a draw on both issues.But the White House is well aware that it’s not really in control — the virus is.“The script’s not written yet for the remainder of the year,” said Representative Brad Schneider of Illinois, chair of the New Democrat Coalition, a group of House moderates.A Look Ahead to the 2022 U.S. Midterm ElectionsIn the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are 10 races to watch.In the House: Republicans and Democrats are seeking to gain an edge through redistricting and gerrymandering.Governors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Campaign Financing: With both parties awash in political money, billionaires and big checks are shaping the midterm elections.Key Issues: Democrats and Republicans are preparing for abortion and voting rights to be defining topics.Biden finds a winning messageFor months, Democrats have fretted that the White House was too slow to recognize inflation as a political problem, and was too mired in endless congressional negotiations. That’s changing.President Biden has been speaking more frequently about the issue, at the urging of moderate Democrats. “The president is recognizing his superpower, which is empathy,” said Representative Dean Phillips, a Democrat in a swing district in Minnesota.Sean McElwee, executive director of the group Data for Progress, told us that the president should embrace what he calls “solverism” — basically, being seen on TV every day tackling the problems that voters care about.After a fall characterized by damaging infighting, Democrats have been working to bring more harmony to their messages. With the State of the Union address coming up, President Biden has a chance to rally the country around his vision and the improving economic numbers. But with the fate of Build Back Better now in question, what will he talk about, exactly?Redistricting being more or less evenDemocrats feel good about the maps that have been approved so far. For now, there are only three Democrats running in House districts that Trump won in 2020, and nine Republicans in districts that Biden won.But a few unknowns remain. The Democratic-controlled State Legislature in New York is still weighing how aggressively to redraw the state’s maps. Courts have yet to render final judgments in Alabama, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania. And in Florida, Republicans are divided between Gov. Ron DeSantis’s maps and those proposed by the State Senate.We do know that many of the House districts that are up for grabs in November are in the suburbs, which have shifted left in recent elections. That could help Democrats. Liberal strategists point out that Republicans won’t be able to benefit from the massive margins that they run up in rural areas and they also note that the seats Republicans picked up in 2020 were the easy ones.To which Republicans counter: Look at what happened in suburban Virginia, where Glenn Youngkin pared back the party’s past losses to win the governor’s race.The Supreme Court overturns Roe v. WadeIn that Virginia race, the Democrat, Terry McAuliffe, spent millions of dollars portraying Youngkin as an extremist on abortion. Democrats were convinced that the issue would help them with suburban women in particular, and McAuliffe predicted that abortion would be a “huge motivator” for voters. His campaign ran three different ads on the subject, which collectively aired more than 1,000 times.It didn’t work.Youngkin danced around the issue, while saying he preferred to focus on the economy, jobs and education. According to exit polls conducted by Edison Research, just 8 percent of voters said abortion mattered most to their decision, the least of five preselected topics.But abortion could come roaring back as a voting issue if the Supreme Court issues a clear repudiation of Roe v. Wade this year. Should that happen, many Democrats say it could help their candidates in Senate races, where they can highlight Republican positions that polls suggest are out of the mainstream.Republican candidates go hard rightDemocrats are watching Republican primary campaigns closely, clipping and saving remarks that the candidates are making that could prove hard to defend in a general election. The need to cater to Trump’s hard-line base of voters has made the Republican brand toxic, they say. But that’s where the consensus ends.Endangered Democrats want to localize their races as much as possible, and prefer to talk about kitchen-table issues like jobs and the economy. Nationally, Democrats are still debating how to communicate their alarm about the state of American democracy, which can come across as either abstract to voters or simply more partisan noise.For now, Democrats are planning to use Jan. 6 as just one of several data points to portray Republicans as extremists on a range of issues, including abortion and climate.“I don’t think this election is going to easily fall into the traditional pattern, and it’s because of the radicalization of the Republican Party,” said Simon Rosenberg, the head of the New Democrat Network.Trump seizes center stageAfter the Virginia governor’s race, Democratic strategists launched various efforts to study the lessons of that campaign. One takeaway: Talking about Trump also energizes Republicans, which makes it tricky for Democrats to make the former president a central issue in 2022.Democrats have also found that it’s not effective simply to associate a Republican candidate with Trump, as McAuliffe did in Virginia. They believe they need to indict Republican candidates directly. But there’s an ongoing debate about whether Democratic candidates need to do this themselves, or have outside groups run attack ads on their behalf.The former president has endorsed dozens of candidates who in one way or another agree with his false notion that the 2020 election was stolen. On Sunday evening, he said it outright — claiming, falsely, that then-Vice President Mike Pence “could have overturned the election” on Jan. 6, 2021.If Democrats manage to hang on to their congressional majorities, Trump will be a major factor.What to readTrump had a greater role than previously known in plans to use his national security agencies to seize voting machines, our colleagues report.Marc Short, who was chief of staff to former Vice President Mike Pence, has testified before the congressional panel investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, Luke Broadwater reports.Katie Rogers reports that the White House has chosen Doug Jones, the former Democratic senator from Alabama, to shepherd its Supreme Court pick through the nomination process in the Senate.briefing bookGov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota filed amendments to a series of old F.E.C. reports.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesFilings cleanupAs our colleague Shane Goldmacher was digging on Monday through the glut of campaign disclosures covering the last quarter of 2021, he noticed updates to some very old filings.The filings, from as far back as 2017, were from the Keeping Republican Ideas Strong Timely & Inventive PAC. That’s better known as KRISTI PAC, as in Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, the former Republican congresswoman who created the committee.Governor Noem filed amendments to no fewer than 16 old Federal Election Commission reports this week. The amendments appeared mostly minor. But what is more interesting is that she was making those at all. It is the kind of cleanup that politicians typically do when they are considering a future run for president, mindful that opposition researchers will be looking for any slip-ups to feed to the press.The KRISTI PAC treasurer, Kevin Broghamer, simply told the F.E.C. that the PAC had “conducted a comprehensive review and reconciliation of all financial activity since January 1, 2017.”A spokesman for Noem, Joe Desilets, said that Broghamer had been asked to conduct the review “to ensure the governor’s committees were wholly compliant and amend any filings as needed. Unfortunately there isn’t anything else to read into with the amended filings.”Is 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