Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann. Do us a favor if you’re watching this on Substack: tap the ❤️ and restack this newsletter. Those two clicks make sure our independent journalism breaks through and reaches the people who really need it.
Last night, Donald Trump used an antisemitic slur at a campaign rally in Kansas while stumping for a GOP senator who’s in an unexpectedly tight race. A heckler in Michigan who got embarrassed by Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in a viral exchange is actually the son of a Republican operative whose firm was just paid a quarter of a million dollars to oppose the surging progressive. Republicans in Ohio are under fire after featuring the estranged mother of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton in an attack ad. Acton’s brother says the ad is shamelessly exploiting the abuse his sister endured as a child. And finally, Texas’ most populous county has officially shattered its early voting record just on the first day alone, with two weeks left before the midterms.
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Donald Trump was in Kansas on Monday night headlining a rally for Republican Senator Roger Marshall when he uttered a word commonly used to malign the Jewish community.
The New York Times reported last month that Marshall, who was an OB-GYN before launching his political career, sued hundreds of patients over unpaid medical bills of sometimes negligible amounts of money. Those lawsuits sometimes resulted in people getting arrested for missing court dates. Marshall’s lawyer insists his client had nothing to do with the warrants, and the senator himself called the report a “hit job.”
Trump addressed the report onstage, insisting Marshall “got screwed” by the New York Times and lamented that it made the senator look like “some kind of a shylock-type guy.” Marshall isn’t Jewish, but that word has been widely recognized as an antisemitic slur. It comes from a Jewish character in Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” which the Anti-Defamation League says unfairly portrays Jewish people as greedy and cruel.
That isn’t the first time Trump used that same slur. He uttered it last year to describe predatory bankers while promoting his Big Ugly Bill, which led to Jewish groups condemned him. The president said at the time that he’d “never heard it that way.” The White House has yet to comment on this latest utterance. Meanwhile, Marshall is in a dead heat with Democrat Adam Hamilton, a megachurch pastor and former Republican. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates the race as a toss-up. Kansas hasn’t elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate in nearly 100 years.
When a president uses a slur for Jews and money twice in a year and then shrugs off criticism, that can no longer be chalked up to a slip of the tongue. Henry Ford spent most of the 1920s laundering open antisemitism through his Dearborn Independent newspaper, and it took an organized boycott effort and even a libel lawsuit to finally get him to stop. That’s worth remembering now that the president won’t even bother to respond to allegations of antisemitism.
In Michigan, new details are emerging about a viral exchange between Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and a young heckler named “Tommy.”
Last weekend, Tommy stood up during a town hall event and asked El-Sayed if he would “disavow” the Muslim Brotherhood. The Democratic candidate said he would, but then turned the question back on Tommy and what he was implying. The five-minute exchange — in which El-Sayed got Tommy to admit he didn’t believe in a core component of the Constitution — has racked up more than 50 million views online.
Journalist Marisa Kabas’ “The Handbasket” newsletter first identified the heckler as Thomas “Tommy” Teepell, who is a former operations director for Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri until February of this year. The Guardian additionally reported that Teepell is the son of Timmy Teepell, a longtime Hawley strategist and former aide to two-term Republican Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana.
There’s also a significant amount of money involved. Federal Election Commission filings show that on September 29, Breakthrough LLC — the firm owned by Tommy’s father — was paid $250,000 from Jindal’s America Next dark money group for “canvassing and influencer marketing” to oppose El-Sayed’s candidacy. Both groups share an office in Baton Rouge. And according to the Michigan Daily, a College Republicans member claiming to act on behalf of Jindal’s group offered students $200 to boo El-Sayed at a Flint town hall.
Nothing in the filings confirms whether Tommy Teepell himself was paid for the stunt at the El-Sayed town hall. But Republicans have been continuing to push the Muslim Brotherhood smear for weeks, despite there being no evidence El-Sayed has ever been involved with the group.
This is what politics looks like a decade and a half after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. FEC decision, in which a nonprofit that doesn’t have to disclose its donors can write a check for a quarter of a million dollars for “influencer marketing” while the rest of us have to guess which viral moments are actually real. Our system can only work if citizens can discern a would-be constituent asking a candidate an honest question from a paid actor acting in bad faith. The people cashing billionaires’ checks are betting that we won’t be able to.
Ohio’s gubernatorial race took a particularly ugly turn with just two weeks to go before voters cast their ballots.
A new attack ad recently aired that featured Donna Arthur, the estranged mother of Democratic gubernatorial nominee Dr. Amy Acton, who has led Ohio’s Department of Health under Republican Governor Mike DeWine’s administration. In the ad, Arthur calls her daughter a liar and accuses Acton of concocting her story of a rough upbringing, which included the family living in a tent for a time. Newsweek couldn’t verify who actually produced or funded the production costs of the ad, but Ohio-based political writer D.J. Byrnes (who writes under the moniker “The Rooster”) has accused Republican gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy of recruiting Arthur.
Acton has been public about her childhood for years. A 2019 column in the Youngstown Vindicator described how Acton’s family frequently moved through roughly 18 homes on Youngstown’s hardscrabble North Side neighborhood. Acton has said she was sexually abused by her stepfather, which led to criminal charges being filed while the family lived in a tent outside the city. Both her mother and stepfather went on the run while out on bond.
Acton’s brother, Philip Stearns, responded to the ad by releasing a statement accusing the Ramaswamy campaign of exploiting the sexual abuse his sister endured at just 12 years old to score cheap political points. He also pointed out that their mother stayed married to Acton’s abuser despite his crimes until he died, while calling the attack ad “desperate” and “disgusting.” Byrnes argued the ad with Acton’s mother shows that Ramaswamy knows he’s losing badly despite his party expecting a cakewalk.
Dirty political tricks like these are sadly older than our republic. Back in 1884, Grover Cleveland’s opposition tried to sink him with the chant “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa.” But there should be a fine line between criticizing a candidate and dredging up the trauma of a survivor of child sex abuse. Whoever paid for this ad knowingly crossed it. That should tell you exactly how little Ohio’s Republican donors view survivors of abuse, and how low they’re willing to go to accumulate power.
Our final story this morning: Texas voters are sending a loud message of their own. In Harris County — the state’s most populous, which houses Houston —104,734 voters cast ballots cast by 8 PM local time on just the first day of early voting. That easily shatters the previous record of 63,000, which was set during the 2018 midterm election.
Lines reportedly stretched out the doors across the county’s 75 early voting locations. Voters told local media they were fed up with the cost of living, with one voter saying that a big can of coffee that cost $12 two years ago is now $25. Others said they were motivated to vote over Trump’s vastly unpopular war with Iran. Another voter said that after 30 years of one party running the Lone Star State, the other side should have a chance to lead.
Early voting continues for 11 more days. Voters will not only be electing a new U.S. senator between Democratic state representative James Talarico and Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, but are also deciding whether to reelect Republican Governor Greg Abbott or Democratic state representative Gina Hinojosa.
Texas was one of the final states that still has a poll tax until the 24th Amendment was ratified, officially killing it in 1964. There was never a mystery as to why Texas had a poll tax, as the politicians in the state capitol understood that a line of ordinary citizens stretching on for blocks is the one thing a one-party state can’t survive. Harris County just gave everyone a great reminder.
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