A group of Russian nationals were able to donate to newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson’s campaign in 2018 by funneling the money through a U.S. company.

The Texas-based American Ethane company previously donated tens of thousands of dollars to the campaigns of Louisiana Republicans including Johnson, who was voted by the House to replace Rep. Kevin McCarthy as Speaker on Wednesday following three weeks of GOP chaos in the lower chamber.

While American Ethane was run in 2018 by American John Houghtaling, 88 percent of the firm was owned by three Russian nationals—Konstantin Nikolaev, Mikhail Yuriev, and Andrey Kunatbaev.

  • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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    1 year ago

    Nobody with a modicum of intelligence blames the Democrats for the impending shutdown.

    It is just that people have largely made their mind up over that and there is the expectation of “a brief shutdown” because of how dysfunctional the government is.

    In the likely event this continues? Then we will probably see that become a strong part of messaging. But even that only directly impacts a comparatively small part of the voting populace. Most people will instead blame “park rangers” for shutting down national parks and “lazy TSA” for the inevitable shitshow of airports. And continue to blame the USPS for everything else. Rather than realize there is one big connection between all those.

    • rockSlayer@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Well that’s the thing, rhetoric isn’t for the people that agree with you, it’s for the people that don’t. Conservatives aren’t completely hopeless, but their fear and anger are being weaponized to ignore fascist movements in their party while actively having their class consciousness suppressed. Deprogramming them will require a constant reminder about the failures of their party to actually improve their life through policy.

    • bobs_monkey@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Nobody with a modicum of intelligence blames the Democrats for the impending shutdown.

      Except Republicans and their voting base