The Full Belmonte, 2/15/2023
Michigan State shooter was previously arrested, lied about having gun, father says
“The gunman who targeted two buildings at Michigan State University on Monday night, killing three students and critically wounding five, was arrested for carrying a loaded firearm without a concealed-weapons permit in 2019 and later lied about having gun inside his home, his father told The Washington Post.
Anthony Dwayne McRae, 43, was not affiliated with the university in any way before Monday’s shooting, Chris Rozman, MSU’s interim deputy police chief, said in a news conference. Authorities are still working to determine McRae’s motive.
Five of the wounded students remain in critical condition at Sparrow Hospital, and some of them have undergone surgery, hospital spokesman John Foren said Tuesday.
Rozman said Tuesday that authorities were trying to determine where McRae was living. Public records show he had lived on East Howe Avenue in Lansing since November 2017. Authorities said in the news conference that there was a police presence at Creston Avenue and East Howe Avenue, but they did not confirm whether this address was connected to the shooter.
At the time of the incident Monday night, McRae was wearing dark trousers, red shoes and a denim jacket. Much of his face was shielded — an item of clothing pulled up past his lips and a baseball cap pulled low. Police shared images of him on social media and said it was a citizen’s tip that led police to McRae.
McRae later shot and killed himself, and officers found his body off campus, police said. Police in Michigan and New Jersey confirmed on Tuesday that McRae had a note in his pocket indicating threats against two schools in Ewing, N.J., where he had family ties. Although all public schools in Ewing are closed Tuesday ‘out of an abundance of caution,’ police said there was no active threat.
They added that McRae had ‘a history of mental health issues.’
Corrections records obtained by The Washington Post on Tuesday show that McRae was previously arrested on a weapons charge. On June 7, 2019, he was questioned by police when he was spotted near an abandoned building after leaving a Lansing store at 1:30 a.m., according to the Michigan Department of Corrections. McRae admitted to police that he had a gun but did not have a concealed-weapons permit, records show….” Read more at Washington Post
Feinstein passes on Senate reelection in 2024
There’s already an active intraparty battle over who will succeed the California Democrat, the longest-serving woman in Senate history.
As she advanced deeper into her eighth decade, Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s political future sparked constant discussion and sharp questions about her cognitive fitness. | Francis Chung/POLITICO
'“Sen. Dianne Feinstein announced she will not run for reelection in 2024, capping a 30-year Senate career and accelerating a succession battle that’s already well underway.
The California Democrat, the longest-serving woman in Senate history, has notched accomplishments like an assault weapons ban and a report on CIA torture. But as she advanced deeper into her ninth decade, Feinstein’s political future sparked constant discussion and sharp questions about her cognitive fitness.
In a statement on her decision, Feinstein said she plans ‘to accomplish as much for California as I can through the end of next year when my term ends. Even with a divided Congress, we can still pass bills that will improve lives.’
Few people believed Feinstein would seek another term. Reps. Katie Porter and Adam Schiff have both launched campaigns for Senate — although Schiff said his was conditional on Feinstein not running again — and Rep. Barbara Lee is preparing to launch her own….
California’s primary system allows the top two vote-getters to advance to the general election regardless of party. Given the state’s overwhelmingly blue electorate, it’s quite possible that next November, Californians will choose between two Democrats as they select their next senator. That was the case during Feinstein’s 2018 victory over Democrat Kevin de León and now-Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2016 victory over former Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez.
And whoever does win that race could hold the seat for decades, as Feinstein did.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced Feinstein’s retirement at the Democratic caucus’ weekly lunch on Tuesday, where she received a standing ovation, according to party senators. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) also gave an introduction before Feinstein spoke….” Read more at POLITICO
Jack Smith, Special Counsel for Trump Inquiries, Steps Up the Pace
Named less than three months ago to oversee investigations into Donald J. Trump’s efforts to hold onto power and his handling of classified documents, the special counsel is moving aggressively.
“Did former President Donald J. Trump consume detailed information about foreign countries while in office? How extensively did he seek information about whether voting machines had been tampered with? Did he indicate he knew he was leaving when his term ended?
Those are among the questions that Justice Department investigators have been directing at witnesses as the special counsel, Jack Smith, takes control of the federal investigations into Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse his 2020 election loss and his handling of classified documents found in his possession after he left office.
Through witness interviews, subpoenas and other steps, Mr. Smith has been moving aggressively since being named to take over the inquiries nearly three months ago, seeking to make good on his goal of resolving as quickly as possible whether Mr. Trump, still a leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, should face charges.
Last week, he issued a subpoena to former Vice President Mike Pence, a potentially vital witness to Mr. Trump’s actions and state of mind in the days before the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.
His prosecutors have brought a member of Mr. Trump’s legal team, M. Evan Corcoran, before a federal grand jury investigating why Mr. Trump did not return classified information kept at his Mar-a-Lago residence and private club in Florida. Justice Department officials have interviewed at least one other Trump lawyer in connection with the documents case.
Since returning to Washington from The Hague, where he had been a war crimes prosecutor, Mr. Smith has set up shop across town from the Justice Department’s headquarters, and has built out a team. His operation’s structure seems to closely resemble the organization he oversaw when he ran the Justice Department’s public integrity unit from 2010 to 2015.
Three of his first hires — J.P. Cooney, Raymond Hulser and David Harbach — were trusted colleagues during Mr. Smith’s earlier stints in the department. Thomas P. Windom, a former federal prosecutor in Maryland who had been tapped in late 2021 by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland’s aides to oversee major elements of the Jan. 6 inquiry, remains part of the leadership team, according to several people familiar with the situation.
In addition to the documents and Jan. 6 investigations, Mr. Smith appears to be pursuing an offshoot of the Jan. 6 case, examining Save America, a pro-Trump political action committee, through which Mr. Trump raised millions of dollars with his false claims of election fraud. That investigation includes looking into how and why the committee’s vendors were paid.
Interviews with current and former officials, lawyers and other people who have insight into Mr. Smith’s actions and thinking provide an early portrait of how he is managing investigations that are as sprawling as they are politically explosive, with much at stake for Mr. Trump and the Justice Department.
Current and former officials say Mr. Smith appears to see the various strands of his investigations as being of a single piece, with interconnected elements, players and themes — even if they produce divergent outcomes.
Mr. Smith has kept a low profile, making no public appearances and sticking to a long pattern of empowering subordinates rather than interposing himself directly in investigations. It is a chain-of-command style honed during stints as a war crimes prosecutor in The Hague, a federal prosecutor in Tennessee and, most of all, during his tenure running the Justice Department’s public integrity unit, which investigates elected officials.
A spokesman for Mr. Smith had no comment.
But various developments that have surfaced publicly in recent days show his team taking steps on multiple fronts, illustrating how he is wrestling with multiple and sometimes conflicting imperatives of conducting an exhaustive investigation on a strictly circumscribed timetable.
The intensified pace of activity speaks to his goal of finishing up before the 2024 campaign gets going in earnest, probably by summer. At the same time, the sheer scale and complexity and the topics he is focused on — and the potential for the legal process to drag on, for example in a likely battle over whether any testimony by Mr. Pence would be subject to executive privilege — suggest that coming to firm conclusions within a matter of months could be a stretch.
‘The impulse to thoroughly investigate Trump’s possibly illegal actions and the impulse to complete the investigation as soon as possible, because of presidential election season, are at war with one another,’ said Jack Goldsmith, a former assistant attorney general and current Harvard Law professor. ‘One impulse will likely have to yield to the other.’
In looking into Mr. Trump’s efforts to hold onto power after his election loss and how they led to the Jan. 6 riot, Mr. Smith is overseeing a number of investigative strands. The subpoena to Mr. Pence indicates that he is seeking testimony that would go straight to the question of Mr. Trump’s role in trying to prevent certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the election and the steps Mr. Trump took in drawing a crowd of supporters to Washington and inciting them.
His team is sifting through mountains of testimony provided by the House Jan. 6 committee, including focusing on the so-called fake electors scheme in which some of Mr. Trump’s advisers and some campaign officials assembled alternate slates of Trump electors from contested states that he had lost.
How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.
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More recently his team has been asking witnesses about research the Trump campaign commissioned by an outside vendor shortly after the election that was intended to come up with evidence of election fraud. The existence of that research was reported earlierby The Washington Post.
The apparently related investigation into the activities of Mr. Trump’s main fund-raising arm, the Save America PAC in Florida, was emerging even before Mr. Smith arrived in Washington around Christmas from The Hague.
A vast array of Trump vendors have been subpoenaed. Investigators have been posing questions related to how money was paid to other vendors, indicating that they are interested in whether some entities were used to mask who was being paid or if the payments were for genuine services rendered.
In the investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified information, and whether he obstructed justice when the government sought the return of material he had taken from the White House, investigators are casting a wide net. They appear to be seeking to recreate not only what took place once Mr. Trump had departed the White House with hundreds of sensitive documents, but also how he approached classified material and presidential records long before that, according to multiple people briefed on the matter.
Mr. Smith’s team is seeking interviews with a number of people who worked in the Trump White House and who had familiarity with either how he consumed classified information, or how he dealt with paper that he routinely carted with him in cardboard boxes, during much of the span of his presidency.
Such interviews could help Mr. Smith establish patterns of behavior by Mr. Trump over time, such as how he handled secret information he was provided about foreign countries and how he treated presidential documents generally.
Mr. Trump was known to rip up pieces of paper, and to bring documents up to the White House residence. Notes taken by aides in 2018 show that Mr. Trump’s advisers appeared to be contending with tracking documents he had brought with him to his club in Bedminster, N.J., where he stayed over weekends during the warmer months of the year.
In some cases, Mr. Trump tore up documents and threw them in toilets in the White House. Aides would periodically retrieve what was not flushed down and let it dry, then tape it back together and pass the documents on to the staff secretary, whose office managed presidential paper flow, according to two people familiar with what took place.
In the documents investigation, Mr. Smith has the challenge of interviewing several unreliable narrators who may have an interest in protecting Mr. Trump.
Several of Mr. Trump’s advisers have been interviewed by the Justice Department. Some have gone before the grand jury, including Mr. Corcoran, who has represented Mr. Trump in the case related to his handling of classified material for many months and had a central role in dealing with the government’s efforts to retrieve the documents, according to two people briefed on his appearance.
Another aide to Mr. Trump, Christina Bobb, served as the custodian of the records the Justice Department was interested in. She signed an attestation in June claiming that a “diligent search” had been conducted of Mar-a-Lago in response to a grand jury subpoena. She asserted that the remaining documents turned over in June were all that remained.
Ms. Bobb has appeared twice before the Justice Department and has told people that Mr. Corcoran drafted the statement she signed; The Wall Street Journal reported that one visit was before the grand jury. She has also said she was connected with Mr. Corcoran by Boris Epshteyn, another Trump lawyer and adviser who brought Mr. Corcoran into Mr. Trump’s circle and, empowered by Mr. Trump, for months played a lead role coordinating lawyers in some of the investigations.
The Justice Department contacted another of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Alina Habba, late last year about an appearance. Ms. Habba does not represent Mr. Trump in the documents case, but she spoke about it on television. She also signed an affidavit in another case saying she had searched Mr. Trump’s office and residence in May, meaning investigators may be interested in whether she saw government documents there.
The Justice Department is also seeking to question a former Trump lawyer, Alex Cannon, who people briefed on the matter said repeatedly urged Mr. Trump to turn over the boxes of material that the National Archives was seeking.
Mr. Trump’s disclosure of newly located documents has been ongoing. Lawyers for the former president notified prosecutors recently about a potential witness they might want to speak with: a relatively junior former staff member to Mr. Trump who had uploaded classified material onto a laptop and discovered it only after the fact, according to a different person familiar with the incident.
The discovery occurred when the staff member was placing a large trove of Mr. Trump’s daily White House schedules on the computer and realized that a small amount of classified material had been included in the schedules, the person said.
In an interview with CNN on Sunday, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Tim Parlatore, said the Justice Department had issued a subpoena for a manila folder marked ‘classified evening summary’ after Mr. Trump’s aides provided the department with reports on materials they had found after their own searches. He said it was not actually a classified marking, contained nothing and was being used by Mr. Trump to dim a blue light on his bedside phone at Mar-a-Lago that ‘keeps him up at night.’
‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ Chuck Rosenberg, a former federal prosecutor and former F.B.I. official, said of the cascade of Trump aides and lawyers becoming drawn into investigations. ‘It’s just a whirling dust cloud, and everyone who gets near it gets covered in grime.’
While Mr. Smith did not ask Mr. Garland’s permission to subpoena Mr. Pence, one of the most extraordinary developments of his short time as special counsel, he almost certainly consulted him about it: Under the regulations, special counsels are expected to report major developments to the attorney general.
But many legal observers see the current situation — with two likely 2024 presidential rivals, Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, facing separate special counsel investigations — as evidence that the special counsel mechanism is being used far beyond its intended, limited purpose.
‘The special counsel regulations were an effort to give the attorney general some independence in a conflict-of-interest situation,’ Mr. Goldsmith added, ‘but it was never intended to carry the burdens that are being imposed on it now. It is a problem, these political investigations, that our constitutional system is not equipped to handle.’” [New York Times]
Pence to fight special counsel subpoena on 2020 election
By JILL COLVIN and ERIC TUCKER
FILE - Former Vice President Mike Pence speaks during an interview with The Associated Press, Nov. 16, 2022, in New York. The FBI is searching Pence's Indiana home on Feb. 10, 20223, as part of a classified records probe. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)
“WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Vice President Mike Pence is planning to fight a subpoena by the special counsel overseeing investigations into efforts by former President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 election, according to people familiar with his thinking.
Pence and his attorneys are planning to cite constitutional grounds as they prepare to resist special counsel Jack Smith’s efforts to compel his testimony before a grand jury. They argue that because Pence was serving in his role as president of the Senate on Jan. 6, 2021 as he presided over a joint session of Congress to certify the election results, he is protected from being forced to address his actions under the Constitution’s ‘speech-or-debate’ clause that shields members of Congress….” Read more at AP News
Floating ice around Antarctica just hit a record low
The record could be a hint that Antarctic sea ice is finally starting to behave as expected as the planet warms.
“The amount of floating sea ice encircling Antarctica reached the lowest level ever recorded, scientists reported Tuesday, a sign that one of the most remote and mysterious facets of the climate system may, at last, be responding to the overall planetary warming trend.
The latest measurements represent the lowest reading for overall Antarctic sea ice extent since satellite monitoring began in late 1978. This marks the second year in a row that, as the Antarctic summer wears on and the Southern Ocean’s blanket of sea ice shrinks to its yearly minimum extent, a record low has been recorded.
The extent of ice around Antarctica dwindled to roughly 737,000 square miles as of Feb. 13, based on data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado; it measured roughly 741,000 square miles during the previous low, on Feb. 25, 2022….” Read more at Washington Post
Biden dismisses scandal-plagued Capitol manager
Architect of the Capitol Brett Blanton will depart seven years before his term is up, facing allegations of misusing official resources.
Architect of the Capitol Brett Blanton faced a crescendo of criticism following a heated oversight hearing last week that centered on an internal watchdog report that catalogued his broad misuse of department resources. | Pool photo by Greg Nash
“The White House has removed the Capitol complex’s top manager from his post following a series of misconduct revelations that prompted calls for his axing by top lawmakers in both parties.
Architect of the Capitol Brett Blanton will depart seven years before his term is up under pressure from lawmakers across the Capitol. He faced a crescendo of criticism following a heated oversight hearing last week that centered on an internal watchdog report that cataloged his broad misuse of department resources.
The White House letter to Blanton was brief and terse: ‘At the direction of President Biden, I am writing to inform you that your appointment as Architect of the Capitol is terminated effective 5:00 p.m. today,’ read the notification from Gautam Raghavan, assistant to the president for presidential personnel.
A GOP aide familiar with the situation told POLITICO Blanton was not on the Capitol campus today. The Architect of the Capitol oversees a massive portfolio from preservation and upkeep of more than 17.4 million square feet of both historic and modern facilities and 580 acres of grounds on the Capitol campus to managing more than 2,000 employees.
There was bipartisan praise for Blanton’s firing, with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), chair of the Senate Rules Committee that has oversight of the Architect of the Capitol office, calling it ‘the right thing to do.’
GOP aides told POLITICO that top lawmakers and relevant committee heads were alerted beforehand to the White House’s move, which came shortly after Speaker Kevin McCarthy called for Blanton’s removal on Twitter. A White House official noted the decision to fire Blanton had already been made before the California Republican’s tweet.
‘The Architect of the Capitol, Brett Blanton, no longer has my confidence to continue in his job. He should resign or President Biden should remove him immediately,’ McCarthy tweeted midday Monday.
Filling the Architect of the Capitol role is a long and arduous process that could take months or years. A bicameral and bipartisan congressional commission must be assembled to recommend candidates to the president, and then the president chooses from that list.
The group is made up of 14 lawmakers, including the speaker, the president pro tempore and the majority and minority leaders of both chambers. It also includes the chairs and ranking members of the House Administration and Senate Rules Committees, plus the Appropriations panels in both chambers.
In the meantime, a vacant deputy role is complicating a temporary replacement for Blanton. Without a deputy architect in place, the agency’s chief of operations would be next in line to be acting architect upon Blanton’s exit. Joseph DiPietro assumed that role on Monday, with Mark Reed ending his tenure as acting chief of operations on Friday.
Blanton was a member of the three-person Capitol Police Board, which makes crucial security decisions for the complex. His exit paves the way for lawmakers to take up an examination of how the board is structured and best operating procedures.
Blanton was the last remaining member of the Capitol Police board who was in their role on Jan. 6, 2021 when Capitol defenses broke down and insurrectionists lay siege to the building. He prompted fury from lawmakers at the hearing last week when he said he had stayed away from the Hill the day of the attack, as it had not seemed ‘prudent’ to come in.
‘We will be reviewing the structure of the Capitol Police Board going forward. I will leave that there as a nugget that we will ultimately come back to in this committee,’ House Administration Chair Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Wis.) said following last week’s contentious hearing with Blanton. [POLITICO]
“Aliens? More balloons? Nope. The Biden administration said it suspects that three unidentified objects downed since last Friday served commercial purposes, not espionage, a judgment that may help ease anxiety over the alleged Chinese spy balloon that traversed the US before being shot down.” [Bloomberg]
US sailors recovering the Chinese balloon shot down earlier this month off the South Carolina coast. Photographer: Ryan Seelbach/Getty Images
Grocery prices rose 11.3% in January from a year earlier.
PHOTO: ASA FEATHERSTONE IV FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Inflation declined a bit in January, but remained high.
“The consumer-price index, a closely watched measure of inflation, climbed 6.4% last month from a year earlier, edging down from 6.5% in December, the Labor Department said. It was the seventh straight month of easing inflation since peaking at 9.1% in June, the highest reading since 1981. That cooling trend is moderating. The strong inflation report will likely keep the Fed on track to raise interest rates at the central bank’s March meeting and to signal that further increases are probably coming. U.S. stocks were mixed.” [Wall Street Journal]
“President Biden is reconfiguring his economic team as he enters the second half of this term, Axios' Neil Irwin reports. Lael Brainard, No. 2 at the Fed, will head the National Economic Council. Jared Bernstein will be nominated to chair the Council of Economic Advisers.” [Axios]
The U.S. might send Ukraine thousands of seized weapons and a million-plus rounds of ammunition once bound for Iran-backed fighters in Yemen, according to U.S. and European officials.
“The cache the Navy took from smugglers in recent months would be a new way for the West, which is having a hard time increasing its arms production, to give Ukraine the military support it needs as the war with Russia enters its second year. The Ukrainian embassy in Washington, D.C., didn’t respond immediately to requests for comment, and the National Security Council declined to comment.” [Wall Street Journal]
“Chinese leader Xi Jinping has pledged to deepen ties with Iran after meeting President Ebrahim Raisi in Beijing. This coming just weeks after the US said it would increase pressure on China to stop buying Iranian oil (Beijing is Tehran’s biggest customer). Raisi’s trip was the first by an Iranian president since 2018 and followed complaints from Iran’s other leaders that economic and political ties between the authoritarian governments had weakened.” [Bloomberg]
Ebrahim Raisi, left, meets Xi Jinping in Beijing on Feb. 14. Source: Office of the Iranian Presidency
“Louis Vuitton named music producer Pharrell Williams as its new menswear designer, filling a role previously held by the late Virgil Abloh. Williams will take the helm immediately and unveil his debut collection at the Paris menswear fashion week in June.” [Bloomberg]
Pharrell Williams Photographer: Paras Griffin/Getty Images North America
Spoken Latin Is Making a Comeback
Proponents of the teaching method argue that it encourages engagement with the language and the ancient past
“It’s a sweltering summer day in Rome, so hot that the lines for the city’s free water fountains stretch as far as the eye can see. A group of American high schoolers is clustered under one of the few shade-providing trees in the Roman Forum. The students are huddled over their books, trying to piece together a Latin passage.
As the teenagers hunt for sentences’ subjects and direct objects, noting the use of the accusative case or struggling with the meaning of a word, their teacher offers advice primarily in Latin: “Quid significat?” they might ask. (“What does this word mean?”) Responding to queries about sentence structure or whether an adjective references a certain person, students respond “ita” for “yes” and “minime” for “no.”
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The fact that these individuals are speaking Latin, a language most often seen in written form, is unusual in and of itself. But the more important aspect of the exercise is how the students are interacting with the text in a living way. They’re reading Plutarch’s depiction of Cicero’s death in the very place where, in 43 B.C.E., the famous orator’s cut-off hands were placed as a warning that the Roman Republic was ending and the empire was beginning.
Though Cicero didn’t exactly rise from the dust of the forum that July 2022 day, one instructor refers to the learning experience as a type of a séance. The excitement in the air is palpable as ancient Rome becomes less a place of words and books and more that of living, breathing humans. It’s hard to imagine the bustling forum as it once was—a site of power, religion and commerce, where Latin was spoken in a functional way. But as the teenagers speak the language, relishing its intonations and cadences, that image slowly clicks.
These students are part of the Paideia Institute’s flagship Living Latin in Rome program, which offers participants two weeks of intensive study in the heart of the ancient civilization. Headquartered in New York, the nonprofit promotes classical languages and literature through immersion programs held abroad, digital outreach and educational events in the United States. In addition to Living Latin in Rome (available for both high schoolers and students above age 18), Paideia offers Living Greek in Greece and Living Latin in Paris. All of these courses share the same underlying philosophy, encouraging students to actively use Latin and ancient Greek as living languages. Technically speaking, both are dead languages, meaning they’re “no longer learned as a first language or used in ordinary communication,” per Encyclopedia Britannica….” Read more at Smithsonian
M&M’s punked Tucker Carlson with Maya Rudolph Super Bowl fake-out
It was a stunt all along!
By John Russell Monday, February 13, 2023
The M&M's Super Bowl ad.Photo: Screenshot
“As promised, Maya Rudolph made her debut as the official spokesperson for M&M’s during the Super Bowl on Sunday night.
Late last month, a statement posted to the candy’s official Twitter account announced that the comedian would be replacing the animated ‘spokescandies’ that have been the face of M&M’s for decades. The message cited the ‘polarizing’ reaction to a recent redesign of the characters as the reason for the change, and many—including LGBTQ Nation—interpreted that as a reference to performative outrage from conservatives like Tucker Carlson over the more “inclusive” character designs.
But it turns out the whole thing was a stunt. Rudolph’s Super Bowl spot featured the Lootstar announcing the rebrand of the chocolate treats as candy-coated clam bites called ‘Ma&Ya’s.’
Of course, the rebrand was a joke.
In another ad that aired during the big game, the seven M&M’s spokescandies—in their current outrageously ‘woke’ incarnations—appeared at a press conference to announce that they are back for good.
Following the January 23 announcement that the spokescandies would take ‘an indefinite pause,’ M&M’s took plenty of heat for seeming to bend to Carlson’s bad-faith criticism. In a bizarre rant on his Fox News show, Carlson had blasted M&M’s for making its cartoon candies ‘less sexy.’
‘This is A LOT of energy to expend just because Tucker couldn’t achieve tumescence without the help of a laser box after you put your candy in less sexy shoes,’ comedian Jay Black commented on M&M’s tweet announcing the change.
‘This is absolutely pathetic,’ Travis Akers tweeted at the candy company. ‘You’re backing down from Tucker Carlson because he was sexually confused about your candy?!’
‘Your advertising was based on supporting women. You are now backing down from it because a conservative talk show host didn’t like supporting women,’ writer Tony Posnanski tweeted, referring to limited edition packages that featured the three female characters. ‘See, if you take the candy out of it, it’s a pretty crappy thing you did.’” [LGBTQ Nation]