An Oregon man who invoked a coded vulgar insult of President Biden during a Christmas Eve call-in event with the president and first lady is considering running for office and says he would welcome former president Donald Trump’s blessing.

“I want to pray about it, see what God has for me,” Jared Schmeck said of his political ambitions during an interview this week with conservative Christian broadcaster Todd Starnes that focused on his use of the phrase ‘Let’s go Brandon.”

“At the end of the day, I want [God’s] will for my life and the direction that it goes,” Schmeck added. “And I strongly believe that standing up is the right thing to do here as long as that message that I’m portraying is glorifying his name. And yeah, I’ll see where it goes.”

“Something tells me if you do run, you’ll be invited to a certain place in Florida,” Starnes said, referring to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, where the former president now lives.

The D.C. attorney general recently filed a lawsuit against the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, two extremist groups, for their role in planning and executing the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

The case is notable for its attempt to hold accountable those responsible for violence that occurred that day. But just as notable is how the attorney general intends to make the case against them: through a statute that reaches all the way back to the civil rights battles of the Reconstruction era.

The central pillar of this extraordinary new lawsuit is the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. The law was designed to enforce the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, which abolished slavery, prohibited states from denying any person in the United States the equal protection of the laws and vested in every citizen the right to vote. White-supremacist violence was rampant in the wake of these Reconstruction amendments, and the KKK Act was intended to prevent the efforts by the KKK and other white-supremacist actors to effectively re-enslave Black people in the former Confederate states after the Civil War.

The law includes Section 1983, a mainstay in our courts that provides a private right of action against state actors who deprive residents of their constitutional rights. It also includes Section 1985, a lesser-known counterpart that regulates private conduct in a much narrower set of circumstances: when private individuals or organizations, such as the KKK, engage in a conspiracy to interfere with the government, obstruct justice or deprive people of their civil rights.

A court in Moscow ordered the closure of the Memorial Human Rights Center on Wednesday, in the latest blow to Russian civil society groups.

The center was charged with multiple violations of Russia's "foreign agent" law and "justifying terrorism and extremism" in its publications, a lawyer for the organization, Ilya Novikov, told CNN.
The decision comes a day after Russia's Supreme Court decided to close its sister group Memorial International. Novikov said they would launch an appeal.

"It is quite an expected decision after yesterday's [decision of the Supreme Court to shut down Memorial International]. We did not have any illusions about the hearing today," Novikov told CNN by telephone from the court.

"But it is crucial that those persecutions did not discourage people and I think will not make people to stop their human rights work. The legal entity can be liquidated but the work remains and people remain.
Amnesty International's Eastern Europe and Central Asia Director Marie Struthers called the ruling "heartless" in a statement published Wednesday.

The past few weeks have been filled with the deaths of acclaimed scientists, political veterans and cultural giants. They are men and women of advanced age who have succumbed to a variety of chronic ailments or simply to the passing of time. They enjoyed long lives and accomplished a great many things; theirs were not lives cut short, but rather ones that followed a gloriously long trajectory.

And yet their deaths seem especially sad, not because their lives were of any greater inherent value than a Jane Doe who might have died anonymously or a singular relative in a quiet corner of a small town who left this earth surrounded by friends and family, but because their particular prominence was a bright reminder of something that seems endangered or wholly missing in these times. They were warming lights in the midst of darkness.

They were complicated just as everyone is, but their deaths are a reminder that the culture has little ability to stomach nuance and complexity, shades of gray and the middle ground. The details of their lives fill books, perhaps they have even pontificated in their own memoirs. But the heartfelt sorrow over their deaths is more often sparked by a minute detail in the grand sweep of their story, an intimate moment amid all of the public accolades, a disappointment faced with aplomb.....

As we mourn the dead, we make peace with their flaws and appreciate their talents. We reminisce about their sense of humor, their kindness and their generosity. The statesman Robert J. Dole, 98, is memorialized in the same pages as the fashion editor Grace Mirabella, 92, and the children’s book author Beverly Cleary, 104. All of them shaped the culture, and their deaths leave us longing for something that they represented. Dole was the military veteran with political ambition whose death reminded Washington that it wasn’t always so inhospitable to compromise and civility, let alone facts. Mirabella, a former editor in chief of Vogue who rebounded from being fired to launch an admired glossy that bore her name, believed style was a conversation starter but should not be the entirety of its content. And Cleary saw childhood in all of its scary, joyful, boring reality.

They were reminders of what it means to be flexible in a world that has gone rigid. They recognized that the very things that complicate life can also power us through it. We are not one thing or the other. We are a host of messy bits and pieces. And we mourn them because they made being fully human both an admirable and daunting accomplishment.