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Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state, is seeking the GOP nomination to replace retiring Republican Pat Roberts in this year's race for Roberts' U.S. Senate seat. And he has to thank for his campaign's viability an $850,000 investment from controversial tech billionaire Peter Thiel.

"I think the money that that super PAC is putting into the raceprimarily through this one rich guyis absolutely the lifeblood of the pro-Kobach campaign at this moment," Patrick Miller, a political scientist at the University of Kansas, told Recode. "You take that money away and Kobach doesn't have a lot of campaign left."

That Thieloften identified, including by himself, as a libertarianis dedicating himself to a candidate whose primary obsession is immigration restriction is a further sign of the tumultuous swirl of hypernationalism pushed by and surrounding Thiel (and discussed at length in a story in the August/September issue of Reason, now available online to subscribers).

Unnamed friends of Thiel tell Recodethat Thiel "has a really strong preference for people who stick their middle finger up to the status quo and conventional wisdom. There is nobody who I think was more obviously sticking his middle finger up at conventional wisdom quite like Kris Kobach."

Thiel back in 2016 shook up some of his libertarian fans by becoming a Trump delegate and hyping him onstage at the Republican National Convention. Thiel went on to become a poster boy for the new conservative nationalism and has been reported to be disappointed in the president lately and so far sitting out this presidential race.

Thiel had, however, reportedly began donating to immigration-restrictionist causes at least as far back as 2008, and over the years he's given to a wide variety of GOP candidates and PACs, including $2 million to a Carly Fiorina PAC.

Thiel's interest in Kobach is likely rooted in the same reasons he was enthusiastic about Trump. Kobach was one of the minds behind Trump's Muslim registry and his unrepentant anti-immigration views mark him as perhaps Trumpier than Trump. (Kobach believes COVID-19 death numbers are being manipulated up to harm the president, for one.) Trump endorsed Kobach in his failed attempt to become governor of Kansas in 2018, and Thiel began funding Kobach during that race. Fellow disillusioned Trump superfan and immigration-hater Ann Coulter co-hosted a Kobach fundraiser in Thiel's New York apartment.

Recodereports that Thiel has "cut at least three successive checks to [a pro-Kobach PAC called Free Forever], the most recent for a half-million dollars last month." The PAC has "spent more than four times what Kobach's campaign itself has spent on television and radio adsThe heavy amount of mailers sent by the PAC have run the gamut of attacking [Republican challenger Roger] Marshall as 'anti-American' for being insufficiently tough on immigration, alleging that he voted to fund 'Rosie O'Donnell summer camp,' 'global warming musicals,' and 'transgender plays,' and promising that Kobach will 'stop the next Ruth Bader Ginsburg.'"

Thiel's other candidate donations this year are going to another super immigration hawk, and advocate of sending in federal troops to quell protesters, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton.

Kobach is also one of the leading voices claiming American elections are rife with fraud and had his attempt to fight it when he was Kansas' secretary of state overturned in 2018 by a federal judge who questioned the reality of the problem Kobach was allegedly solving.

The primary election for the U.S. Senate seat Kobach is vying for will be held on August 4.

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Immigration Hawk Kris Kobach's Senate Campaign Is Heavily Supported by Peter Thiel - Reason

In usually deep-red Kansas, Democrats have the luxury of a sleepy primary contest for US Senate. Republicans do not.

Thats because in the Democratic primary the Kansas state senator Barbara Bollier is the heavy favorite to win her partys nomination and then run a competitive general election campaign fueled by a large war chest of cash.

That prospect is sharpened because Republicans are having to go through a bloody primary between the Kansas congressman Roger Marshall and former Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach, the immigration hardliner and former Republican nominee for governor whose unpopularity should he win the nod could hand the Democrats a vital Senate seat they would never normally hope to win.

Kobachs candidacy is notable for its support from the billionaire Peter Thiel, the libertarian venture capitalist who has at times expressed the same type of hardline immigration stances as Kobach.

Thiels support for Kobach has flowed through a pro-Kobach Super Pac called the Freedom Forever Political Action Committee. That support has allowed Kobach to effectively remain competitive with the more establishment-aligned Marshall. It has also meant that Republicans have had to sort out their contentious primary right up until the election on 4 August rather than focus on their Democratic opponent.

Thiels support is not based on a longtime relationship with Kobach, despite comments by both of them that places them roughly in the same immigration hawk wing of the Republican party.

Rather, Thiels support for Kobach stems from Ann Coulter, who connected the two and helped host a 2019 fundraiser for Kobach featuring Thiel. Other high-profile Republican donors such as Rebekah Mercer and Eric Prince attended. Kobach and Thiel first interacted in 2015, according to Recode. But Thiel really decided to support Kobach in 2019 after being pitched on supporting the pro-Kobach Super Pac, according to the Recode report.

Peter and Kris dont actually know each other reasonably well, said one well-entrenched Kansas Republican operative. Ann Coulters one of Peters best friends, and he kind of does whatever she tells him to.

Thiel has poured over $850,000 into the race to support Kobach. That support has buoyed the Kansas secretary of state through a multi-candidate primary and sparked a string of stinging attacks between Kobach and Marshall.

Super Pacs have played an influential role in this Senate race. A mystery Super Pac with ties to Democrats has tried to play spoiler in the Republican primary. Marshall also has a Super Pac supporting him.

Some Republicans cant see Kobach winning the primary, even with Thiels money behind him.

Republicans in Kansas want a proven winner, not a proven loser. Kobachs toast, the edge goes to Marshall, said the Republican strategist Chris LaCivita, who is helping run the pro-Marshall Super Pac.

But in the final few days before the primary internal campaign polling has found Marshall with a single-digit lead over Kobach, according to multiple Republicans with knowledge of those figures. More concerning for Republicans is that polling also shows Bollier competitive against either candidate.

If Bollier won the Senate race, it could dramatically shift control of the Senate to Democrats. It would also end the eight-decade streak of Republican control of both Kansas Senate seats. Statewide Democratic victories in Kansas arent unheard of. In 2018 the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Laura Kelly, defeated Kobach after a grueling Republican primary fight. Now Republicans worry 2020 could be deja vu.

Theres plenty Kobach and Thiel have in common.

Thiel has donated money to NumbersUSA, the anti-immigration group thats supported Kobach. Both have considered running for governorships with Thiel weighing a bid in California. Both have ties to Trump. Thiel spoke at the 2016 Republican national convention for Trump, donated $1.25m to the Trump campaign, and had been in consideration to serve on the Trump administrations intelligence advisory board.

Kobach had been mentioned as a potential secretary of the Department of Homeland Security or immigration tsar but those talks fell apart after an unusually long list of Kobachs demands to serve in the Trump administration became public.

Both Thiel and Kobach have connections to extremely aggressive approaches to curb immigration. Software from Palantir, a company co-founded by Thiel, was used to target the relatives of migrant children, according to a report in the Intercept. Kobach has also laid out a blueprint for a federal registry for immigrants from Muslim countries.

The Kansas Senate race has emerged as one of the more competitive races regardless of who wins. Trump does not plan to weigh in in the primary despite having endorsed Kobach when he ran for governor in 2018. Aides and advisers see Marshall as the more competitive opponent in the general election.

On Wednesday on Air Force One Trump indicated he would stay out of the primary. During a conversation on that flight the Texas senator Ted Cruz reminded Trump that Marshall supported the former Ohio governor John Kasich and not Trump in the 2016 Republican presidential primary.

Cruz has ties to Thiel as well. Thiel has been a longtime donor to Cruz campaigns going back to Cruzs initial interest in running for attorney general of Texas. So the forces pushing Kobach extend to multiple corners of the Republican party.

Other parts of the party remain unconvinced. I think if Kobach is going to be the nominee its over, fretted a longtime Republican strategist.

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Why is a Silicon Valley billionaire trying to get an immigration hawk elected to the US Senate? - The Guardian

r/The_Donald, the largest group on Reddit devoted to discussing Donald Trump, has been banned from the site for violating three of the sites' rules, namely, rules 1, 2, and 8:

Rule 1Remember the human. Reddit is a place for creating community and belonging, not for attacking marginalized or vulnerable groups of people. Everyone has a right to use Reddit free of harassment, bullying, and threats of violence. Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned.

Rule 2Abide by community rules. Post authentic content into communities where you have a personal interest, and do not cheat or engage in content manipulation (including spamming, vote manipulation, ban evasion, or subscriber fraud) or otherwise interfere with or disrupt Reddit communities.

Rule 8Dont break the site or do anything that interferes with normal use of Reddit.

"All communities on Reddit must abide by our content policy in good faith," a spokesperson for Reddit said. "We banned r/The_Donald because it has not done so, despite every opportunity. The community has consistently hosted and upvoted more rule-breaking content than average (Rule 1), antagonized us and other communities (Rules 2 and 8), and its mods have refused to meet our most basic expectations. Until now, weve worked in good faith to help them preserve the community as a space for its usersthrough warnings, mod changes, quarantining, and more."

The virtual "quarantine" had been in place for just over a year, and required viewers to opt-in before being able to see the site. Reddit had previously hidden popular r/The_Donald posts from the site's front page.

r/The_Donald has often become embroiled in the discussion of conspiracy theories, including Pizzagate and the alleged involvement of the Clintons in the 2017 murder of Seth Rich. It was also a hotbed of racism, Islamphobia, and misogyny. While Trump wasn't officially affiliated with the subreddit, he did an AMA there in 2016. Other AMAs hosted on the subreddit included Ann Coulter, Alex Jones, Roger Stone, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Tucker Carlson.

Along with r/The_Donald, around 2000 other subreddits, including one for discussing podcast Chapo Trap House, were banned.

Meanwhile, streaming site Twitch temporarily suspended Trump's own account today. A spokesperson for the site told TechCrunch, "Hateful conduct is not allowed on Twitch. In line with our policies, President Trumps channel has been issued a temporary suspension from Twitch for comments made on stream, and the offending content has been removed."

The comments that led to the suspension were from two of Trump's campaign rallies, the first from his 2015 campaign kickoff:

When Mexico sends its people, theyre not sending their best. Theyre not sending you. Theyre not sending you. Theyre sending people that have lots of problems, and theyre bringing those problems with us. Theyre bringing drugs. Theyre bringing crime. Theyre rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. But I speak to border guards and they tell us what were getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. Theyre sending us not the right people.

The second comment was much more recent, coming from his Tulsa, Oklahoma rally earlier this month:

Hey, its 1:00 oclock in the morning and a very tough, Ive used the word on occasion, hombre, a very tough hombre is breaking into the window of a young woman whose husband is away as a traveling salesman or whatever he may do. And you call 911 and they say, Im sorry, this numbers no longer working. By the way, you have many cases like that, many, many, many. Whether its a young woman, an old woman, a young man or an old man and youre sleeping.

"Like anyone else," Twitch told TechCrunch, "politicians on Twitch must adhere to our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines. We do not make exceptions for political or newsworthy content, and will take action on content reported to us that violates our rules."

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r/The_Donald banned from Reddit as Trump suspended from Twitch - Brooklyn Vegan

President Trump is racing to fulfill immigration-related campaign promises as he enters a tough reelection fight against Democratic challenger Joe Biden.

Trumps most memorable promise from the 2016 race was his pledge to build a wall along the United Statess border with Mexico. The administration is touting 200 miles of recently completed border security fencing, on track to reach about 450 miles by the end of the year.

Well have 500 miles just a little bit after the end of the year, Trump said during his Fox News town hall meeting in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on Thursday night.

Trump also extended his executive order temporarily suspending most immigration during a period of high unemployment following the coronavirus lockdowns, expanding it to include many of the guest-worker programs immigration hawks were disappointed to see exempted when the first version of the edict was handed down back in April.

It seems to me that curtailing the issuance of work visas at a time of massive unemployment is a matter of common sense, said Jerry Kammer, author of the new book Losing Control: How A Left-Right Coalition Blocked Immigration Reform and Provoked the Backlash That Elected Trump. But, of course, the immigration lobby's hunger for foreign workers is insatiable. At times like this, it's unconscionable.

President Trump has repeatedly promised that he would put American workers first, and to his credit, he did just that, said Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, in a statement. Stein had been critical of the order before it covered more nonimmigrant temporary workers, but the FAIR told the Washington Examiner it was now mostly satisfied" with it.

Trump won the 2016 Republican presidential nomination and then the general election in part because he vowed to break with the last two presidents of both parties, who were in favor of offering legal status to most illegal immigrants in the U.S. and expanding immigration more generally. He was advised on the issue by restrictionists such as Jeff Sessions, Steve Bannon, and Stephen Miller and later endorsed legislation sponsored by Republican Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and David Perdue of Georgia that would reduce legal immigration levels.

The president has been under fire from Democrats and immigrant rights activists for his record on this issue the entire time he has been in office. But the Trump White House is not uniformly populated by immigration hardliners, and he hasnt always satisfied immigration hawks either.

Syndicated conservative columnist Ann Coulter famously backed Trump over his tough immigration stance but has spent most of the last four years criticizing him for not completing the border wall or overhauling the system and for breaking with Sessions. The In Trump We Trust author has said she is undecided on whether to vote for Trump this November.

Kammer, a senior research fellow at the restrictionist Center for Immigration Studies, noted that Trump, who campaigned on a pledge to make E-Verify mandatory, has now backed away from that commitment. Sen. Mitt Romney, a Utah Republican and Trump nemesis, this week touted the system for preventing employers from hiring illegal immigrants.

The Trump campaign is highlighting the presidents immigration record under the banner of Promises Made, Promises Kept, citing an 84% reduction in apprehensions along the southern border. Arrests tend to track the number of people trying to enter. While Joe Biden campaigns on open borders, President Trump is keeping his promise to protect the safety and health of Americans by securing our Southern Borders, said Trump campaign spokeswoman Abigail Marone in a statement.

The Biden people and he's controlled totally by the radical left, as you understand. Hes not controlling it; they're controlling him, Trump said at a border security roundtable discussion in Yuma, Arizona, on Tuesday. They want open borders. They want criminal sanctuaries. They want everything that doesn't work.

Trump has fallen behind Biden in his race for a second term. He trails the former vice president by 9.6 points in the RealClearPolitics national polling average and is also down in both the Fox News and New York Times/Siena College battleground state polls. Returning to the immigration issue is potentially one way to fire up his base and win back wavering supporters.

If my speeches ever get a little off, Trump said during his first campaign, I just go: We will build a wall! You know, if it gets a little boring, if I see people starting to sort of maybe thinking about leaving I can sort of tell the audience I just say, We will build the wall, and they go nuts.

Trump has held steady among Hispanic voters but has lost ground with white people. While college-educated suburbanites tend to be turned off by his immigration rhetoric, showing he has kept his promises could attract more of the working class.

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Trump moving fast to shore up immigration campaign promises - Washington Examiner

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that Trump violated the Constitution by stealing money from the Pentagon in order to fund his ridiculous border wall. This means that, pending appeal, the $2.5 billion that Trump thought he could spend is now tied up in limbo, hopefully long enough to wait out Trumps entire term in office. Ring of Fires Farron Cousins explains the legal justification for denying Trump the Pentagon money.

Transcript:

*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Uh, big news on Friday, they kind of got overshadowed by everything else happening in this country, but its still good news. Nonetheless, a, a three judge panel actually ruled in two separate cases, uh, that both directly say that Donald Trump was wrong. And in fact, lacked the constitutional authority to steal money from the Pentagon in order to pay for his border wall. Um, you know, lest we forget before the whole pandemic broke out, uh, before we had all the civil unrest as a response to the gross racial inequality here in the United States, there was the border wall and Trump was doing everything possible to go full steam ahead on the border wall because he knew if he couldnt get that done or at least enough of it done to show off before November, that that would have been the issue that could have tanked him at the polls.

Now, obviously several other things have arisen since then that, uh, any one of them would take them out. All three of them together. You know, the, the racial inequality, the pandemic and the economic collapse, uh, all three of those together have pretty much already tanked Trumps reelection chances. But before that it was hinged on whether or not he could get that border wall, because thats how you get the crazy radicals like Ann Coulter to continue to support your campaign. If you dont have that, youre losing a large chunk of the Republican base who view you as weak and ineffective and could likely stay home in November. Well, thats when Trump decided Ill just take money out of the militarys budget, right? I can totally do that. Im the president. Well, this, this panel is echoing what legal experts had said at the time, which is legally, no, you cant.

Uh, that is in fact unconstitutional because Congress has the power of the purse. They have the power to pass the budgets. They allocate where the money goes. Now you can spend it, but you have to spend it on what they tell you. You can, and you cannot deviate from the norms. So then of course, Trump declares his national emergency on the Southern border. And then he says, aha, well, now its an emergency because Ive decided to call it one. So Im gonna take two and a half billion dollars from the Pentagon, and Im gonna use that to pay for my border wall. But even then, as, as we had pointed out back in the day, thats still illegal. You still cant take that money and just do whatever the heck you want with it. Congress would still have to approve it, or you would have to prove that there was a legitimate threat to the American public that would warrant this emergency decision by the president to spend the money on a border wall.

And in two separate rulings on Friday, this a three judge panels from the ninth circuit said, yeah, you havent demonstrated at all that theres any kind of threat. In fact, heres a direct quote out of the ruling, uh, from judge Sidney Thomas, uh, the executive branch has failure to show in concrete that the public interest favors a border wall is particularly significant given that Congress determined fencing to be a lower budgetary priority. And the department of Justices own data points to a contrary conclusion. So theyre looking at Trumps own data by the way, and saying, Hey, what youre showing us here shows that we dont need this thing. And it certainly isnt an emergency. You know, there theres no caravans folks remember hearing every six months like clockwork for the first two and a half years of Trumps administration, that there was a caravan. Theres now a caravan.

Theres new Dinu caravan. Theres a bigger caravan and theyre all coming to the border. And yet none of them ever actually came to the United States border. And its not because they were afraid of the border wall. Its not because they were afraid of Trump its because in most instances they didnt actually exist in the way that he said they existed. And the judges are looking at the data, looking at immigration data, looking at the threat statistics and saying, you know what? There is nothing that you have shown us that warrants stealing money unconstitutionally from the Pentagon in order to pay for your ridiculous border wall. So in light of all of the other things that Trump has, that are threatening his reelection campaign. Now we can go ahead and add on top of that for the hardcore conservatives, thats your boy cant even get the money for his border wall. And that was the only thing yall wanted from him. And its been a spectacular failure, even when he breaks the law to get the funding for it. He still cant make it happen.

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Court Says Trump Violated Constitution With Border Wall Cash Grab - The Ring of Fire Network - The Ring of Fire Network