At the close of a week in which top Republicans roundly denounced former President Donald Trump’s dinner with white supremacist Nick Fuentes and increasingly antisemitic rapper Kanye West, now known as Ye, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has notably remained silent.
As of early Friday evening, DeSantis had not weighed in on the stunning meeting, and two spokespeople did not return requests for comment Friday. Instead, DeSantis appeared on Fox News cable host Tucker Carlson’s program and blasted Apple regarding its work in China, and attacked the communist regime there for its false claims about COVID-19 and its handling of growing protests.
The silence from DeSantis might not have drawn as much attention if he wasn’t viewed as Trump’s main competitor for the Republican nomination in 2024. GOP leaders in Congress and former Vice President Mike Pence, among others, condemned the dinner this week, stating that antisemitism and racism don’t belong in the Republican Party.
And the stunning escalation, particularly from Ye, has kept the issue front and center. But DeSantis, who helped build his reputation by appearing regularly on national cable television and inserting himself into national debates, like when he flew migrants in Texas to Massachusetts, seems to be avoiding the issue.
Fuentes, a far-right media figure who rose to prominence during Trump’s time in office, and who has pushed racist theories alleging that minorities are replacing white Americans, gave a nod to DeSantis this week while discussing his dinner with Trump. But Fuentes said he would support his other dinner partner, Ye, for president.
Meanwhile Ye spewed more and more antisemitic attacks this week as the issue exploded in the news.
In the wake of Ye’s increasing radicalism, social media staff for the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee deleted a tweet from October this year praising Ye, after the music star went on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s program covered in a black mask and said, “I like Hitler.”
Shortly after praising Hitler, Ye tweeted an image of a swastika and was suspended from Twitter by new CEO Elon Musk.
Twitter has given Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, a 12-hour suspension after he tweeted a photo of the Star of David merged with the swastika.
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“I was there as a spectator. I was just along for the ride,” said Jamar Montgomery, who told HuffPost he met Ye just a few days before joining him, Nick Fuentes and Donald Trump for dinner.
Election officials on Friday reported heavy turnout in Georgia on the last day of early voting ahead of the Dec. 6 runoff election that will determine whether Democrats can add to their razor-thin majority in the U.S. Senate. Voters in some locations faced waiting times of more than an hour to cast ballots in the contest between incumbent Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock and his Republican challenger, former football star Herschel Walker, county websites showed. It is the second time in two years that a Senate race has gone to a runoff in Georgia, a battleground state, because neither candidate secured a majority of the vote.
Donald Trump's namesake real estate company engaged in tax fraud and the former U.S. president knew it was going on, a prosecutor said in closing arguments in the Trump Organization's criminal trial on Friday, countering defense assertions that Trump was unaware of the scheme. In his final day of closing arguments, prosecutor Joshua Steinglass said Trump authorized an array of perks and payments for top executives, including apartment rent and Christmas bonuses, that cheated tax authorities by being either unreported or misreported as non-employee compensation.
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FBI Director Chris Wray is raising national security concerns about TikTok, warning Friday that control of the popular video sharing app is in the hands of a Chinese government “that doesn't share our values.” Wray said the FBI was concerned that the Chinese had the ability to control the app’s recommendation algorithm, “which allows them to manipulate content, and if they want to, to use it for influence operations.”
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Democrats voted Friday to remove Iowa as the leadoff state on the presidential nominating calendar and replace it with South Carolina starting in 2024, a dramatic shakeup championed by President Joe Biden to better reflect the party’s deeply diverse electorate. The Democratic National Committee's rule-making arm made the move to strip Iowa from the position it has held for five decades after technical meltdowns sparked chaos and marred results of the state's 2020 caucus. The change also comes after a long push by some of the party's top leaders to start choosing a president in states that are less white, especially given the importance of Black voters as Democrats' most loyal electoral base.
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SAN FRANCISCO — Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, slurs against Black Americans showed up on the social media service an average of 1,282 times a day. After the billionaire became Twitter’s owner, they jumped to 3,876 times a day. Slurs against gay men appeared on Twitter 2,506 times a day on average before Musk took over. Afterward, their use rose to 3,964 times a day. And antisemitic posts referring to Jews or Judaism soared more than 61% in the two weeks after Musk acquired the site. Sign up f
Members of the United Auto Workers union appeared on Friday to favor replacing many of their current leaders in an election that stemmed from a federal bribery and embezzlement scandal involving former union officials. Reform-minded candidates, many part of the UAW Members United slate, are leading or close in multiple key races with about 84% of the vote counted. With tallies from eight of nine UAW regions counted as of Friday evening, incumbent President Ray Curry had a small lead over Shawn Fain, an international union official who started at a Stellantis plant in Kokomo, Indiana, in a five-candidate race.
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