Musk is the big Paxton funder: According to campaign filings released yesterday, Elon Musk sent $158 million in September to a super PAC that immediately gave that amount of money to a group backing Texas Republican Ken Paxton's Senate bid against Democrat James Talarico.

"On Sept. 9, the first day of the GOP midterm convention in Dallas, Musk gave $75 million to SLF," reports The Texas Tribune. "The next day, SLF put $75 million into a new entity called Texas PAC. By the weekend after the convention, the new super PAC was up on the air with a positive spot about Paxton's work on sex trafficking and a negative ad attacking Talarico as being for 'they/them, not you.'"

Then, two weeks later, "Musk gave an additional $83 million to SLF, according to the group's filing. Sure enough, SLF deposited $83 million into Texas PAC's coffers the following day."

It would be wild if Paxton still loses. Paxton has been embroiled in rolling scandals for years, and some current polls have him underwater by 13 points. A New York Times/Siena survey found only 38 percent of likely Texas voters believe he has "good character," versus 56 percent for Talarico.

Paxton was indicted on securities fraud charges in 2015, and that case dragged on for most of a decade before ending in a pretrial agreement. Then the Texas House, led by Republicans, accused him of bribery and abuse of public trust and successfully impeached him in 2023. The charges centered on allegations that he used his office to help donor Nate Paul—so you can imagine why Musk might want to curry favor with Paxton. Though Paxton was later acquitted by the state Senate, scandal keeps chasing him: Last year, his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, filed for divorce on "biblical" grounds, citing adultery as one of the reasons.

Of course, many Republican voters at the state level saw the impeachment as nothing more than a political hit job, one echoing what's happened to President Donald Trump at the national level. But what far-right, already-convinced Republicans believe about Paxton is sort of beside the point: He needs turnout, and he needs to win over more moderate Republicans and maybe even some fence-sitters if he hopes to beat Talarico. It's possible Musk's cash infusion will help, but it's also possible a cash infusion of many millions of dollars won't be enough to rehabilitate Paxton's shitty image.

A poll from the University of Texas and Texas Politics Project conducted in August "contained four major warning signs for Paxton: a drop in his support from June, lagging GOP motivation to vote, worse favorability numbers than Talarico and Trump's approval being underwater in the state."

Scenes from New York: "When Gov. Kathy Hochul first ran for re-election, Republicans in New York tried to prey on fears over crime, rising inflation and illegal immigration to boost the chances of their ticket statewide in the critical 2022 midterms," reports The New York Times. "The strategy seemed to work. Republicans flipped four House seats in New York, while putting a scare into Ms. Hochul, who eked out a six-point victory over Lee Zeldin, then a Long Island congressman who now leads the E.P.A." This year, Republicans have picked Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive, as the guy with the best odds of beating Hochul, and they're running on crime fears again. But it's not working so well.

The crime and public disorder is, to my mind, still a problem, but it's not as rampant as it once was during the peak pandemic years. And it's certainly not perceived as very bad right now.

QUICK HITS

• "Three children and a teacher were killed, and two others were critically wounded, in a shooting Thursday at Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon, authorities said," reports CBS News. "The suspect, a 16-year-old male, was shot and killed by a bystander, Bend police said.…Officials would not say exactly what type of weapon was used in the attack or how many rounds were fired. Multiple law enforcement sources told CBS News the suspect used a shotgun, and The Associated Press cited a law enforcement official briefed on the incident as saying it was a pump-action shotgun purchased by his mother."
• "A climate of radical paranoia around AI seems like it will be a feature of our world for the foreseeable future," writes Ross Douthat in The Free Press, "because human beings are really good at being paranoid about mysterious new things. With, of course, the AI doomers themselves being a prime example: As Mike Solana of Pirate Wires notes in his own recent reading of the doom canon, the prophecies of Yudkowsky and Co. are already moderately less credible insofar as they don't account for their own cultural success."
• "Taiwan is preparing to tighten export controls on AI chips to further align with US restrictions, according to a senior official in Taipei, joining a Trump administration clampdown on the smuggling of cutting-edge semiconductors to China," reports Bloomberg. "Taipei plans to add artificial intelligence servers and cutting-edge semiconductors to a list of controlled items, Taiwan's Minister of Economic Affairs Kung Ming-hsin told Bloomberg News. After the measures take effect, he said, shipping restricted AI hardware to China will become a criminal offense under the Foreign Trade Act."
• I'll leave you with a quote from Kennedy (not John or Robert) to start your weekend off right: "Kimberly [Guilfoyle] talked about sex so cavalierly that she made Samantha from Sex and the City seem like Greta Thunberg."

The post Musk's Meddling appeared first on Reason Magazine.

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No one would claim that the Iran War has been a political godsend for President Donald Trump and the Republican Party. But some Israel-First conservatives are willing to say—and lately have been incessantly saying—that the Iran War hasn’t been a political scourge.

Those Israel-First conservatives are wrong, even if the devil is, at least partly, hidden in the details. The Iran War has damaged Trump’s approval ratings, consumed his presidency, and darkened the GOP’s prospects in the upcoming midterm elections.

A chief proponent of the argument that Trump hasn’t suffered all that much from the Iran War is Ben Shapiro of the Daily Wire. Shapiro’s political analysis is plainly motivated by the fact that he was a loud and influential proponent of the war who promised—falsely, as it turned out—that Iran couldn’t close the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint for the global energy trade.

“There’s an op right now to pretend that the real reason for President Trump’s unpopularity is foreign policy, but that is not true, by the polling data, it is not true,” said Shapiro on a recent episode of his podcast. “The reality is that Americans have affordability concerns, President Trump came into office saying he was going to alleviate the affordability concerns. He has not in fact alleviated the affordability concerns, and therefore, his polling numbers have consistently slid since Liberation Day.”

This is a bit like me saying my wife isn’t mad at me because of the drinking, but because I drunkenly crashed the car.

The Iran War, as everyone now knows, has driven up prices at the pump—prices which, unfortunately for Trump, are prominently displayed on every major street across the country. On the eve of the war, regular gasoline averaged $2.98 per gallon. Today, at the time of writing, the average price is $4.48. Americans are notoriously averse to high gasoline prices and tend to punish presidents over the issue, sometimes even when the president can’t justifiably be blamed.

But make no mistake: Virtually every sentient adult understands that 1) oil comes from the Middle East, 2) Trump started a big war in the region, and 3) gas prices shot up right afterwards. And again, even if Americans didn’t grok the connection between the war and the gas-price spike, the latter would still have hurt Trump politically, and it would still be a knock-on effect of the former.

It’s not just prices at the pump that have gone up because of the war. Groceries and other consumer goods travel across this vast land on tractor-trailers that run on diesel and get a lot fewer miles per gallon than even your Uncle Larry’s F-350. Diesel prices have smashed records and now sit at around $6.50, up from $3.76 before the war.

No wonder truckers are furious, prompting rumors of an imminent strike.

And no wonder the Iran War has contributed to general inflation in America. Anyone who has been reading the official economic reports knows the war is responsible for more than a third of recent inflation.

Before the war, inflation was trending down, only a couple ticks away from the Federal Reserve’s target of 2 percent. It seems likely that Trump, if he hadn’t started his dumb war in the Middle East, would have garnered praise for presiding over declining inflation and that the Fed would have cut interest rates, juicing economic growth. Instead, inflation now sits at 3.4 percent.

(As an aside, this weekend I traveled to Istanbul, where many Middle Easterners of various nationalities complained to me that Americans only oppose the war because of the gas prices. That’s simply not true. The war has been unpopular since day one, when all that Americans knew was the American-Israeli strikes had killed Iranian leaders including the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.)

Shapiro, ever the neoconservative, insinuated in the quote above that the decline in Trump’s approval rating owes more to his tariffs than to his war. The data doesn’t back that up, as the conservative commentator and election analyst Ryan Girdusky noted on X in response to new survey data. “The most eye opening part of this poll is that Trump’s approval rating and the strength of the economy went up right after Liberation Day,” Girdusky said. “Fell slightly afterward and then plummeted at the start of the Iran War.”

Shapiro has unwittingly helped uncover another, subtler, way in which the Iran War has indirectly damaged Trump’s approval ratings and, by extension, the Republican Party brand. Shapiro recently went on Fox News to commiserate with the host Mark Levin—another Israel-Firster and warmonger—over all those dastardly antiwar conservatives blaming the Iran War for everything.

“Iran is a 4-percent issue with the American people,” Levin said, as Shapiro nodded in agreement. Levin was referring to Fox News polling that shows not many Americans name the Iran War as their top issue. “So, whatever happens in the midterms, it doesn’t appear that Iran’s going to drive anything one way or another.”

“I think that’s exactly right,” Shapiro replied.

Part of the problem with Levin’s analysis has already been covered above. In the Fox poll, a plurality of Americans—34 percent—named the cost of living as the most important issue, and the Iran War has made living costlier.

But the subtler problem is perhaps even more illuminating. Simply put, Americans believe Trump is too focused on foreign policy at the expense of the problem they really care about, which, in fact, his Iran War has exacerbated. This is a PR disaster for the Trump administration and the GOP. Americans don’t prioritize the war that has dominated the headlines and distracted the White House, even as Trump claims to have boldly prevented Iran from unleashing nuclear apocalypse.

It may be grotesque to find silver linings in this dumb and deadly war, but here’s one: Americans no longer buy the war narratives. That is certainly not, however, a silver lining for Republican candidates in this year’s election, no matter how cynically they try to distance themselves from the war. In fact, it’s a good bet they’ll do much worse than if Trump hadn’t launched this unnecessary war, despite what Shapiro and his ilk may tell you.

Original article: theamericanconservative.com

With the US mid-terms in November looking like being somewhere between a heavy defeat and a bloodbath for the Republicans, Mark Littlewood looks at what comes after Trump and which are the bets worth taking.

The post What Follows Trump After the Dems Win in November? appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.