January 6 defendant David Brian Howard claims that Fox News played a significant role in his radicalization and eventual participation in the January 6 Capitol riot.

Howard was arrested on charges of breaching the Capitol and is set to face sentencing on Friday. According to court documents shared by CBS’s congressional correspondent Scott MacFarlane, Howard is “seeking mercy at sentencing” by noting that he was influenced by Fox News’s lies about the 2020 election.

The defendant “is/was simply a small-town man who between the years of 2014 and 2020 followed the media and news which much of his small community seemed to follow—Fox News,” the document read. While Howard “bought the lies sold to him and millions of others for many years and especially in the wake of the 2020 election,” the defense noted he has since had a change of heart, and is now “horrified by their ongoing misinformation, influence and affect and veers away from any of that.”

“Mr. Howard had no intention, ever, of engaging in the actions which led to his arrest. He came to Washington, DC, from Dallas (via Miami), on January 6th alone because he was led to believe—from his local media and large swaths of the community around him at home—that his vote for Mr. Trump in 2020 had been stolen; that the election had been stolen.”

Howard’s argument echoes that of critics who have placed some of the blame for the events of January 6 on Fox.

Media journalist Brian Stelter, for example, has argued that the Capitol riot was the culmination of “something that actually built up for months and months,” fed in no small part by the Big Lie narratives peddled by the conservative network. “We know that some rioters bought plane tickets and flew to Washington because of what they were being told on television, because of the lies that were being spread on television. I think it’s an underappreciated part of the story,” Stelter said on MSNBC in January.

Donald Trump was losing it over the “lunatics” behind Project 2025 long before the right-wing policy program’s director, Paul Dans, stepped down amid the backlash created by Trump himself.

Before issuing his first unconvincing attempt to distance himself from Project 2025 in July, Trump privately railed about the “lunatics” linked to Project 2025, who pushed for unpopular, sweeping abortion bans, two sources familiar told Rolling Stone.

Since Project 2025’s debut, Trump has attempted to appear more moderate on abortion, inspiring a huge shift in the Republican Party’s platform away from a federal abortion ban (and toward embracing the dozens of cruel state-level ones). The 900-plus plan document, which had been tailor-made for a Trump presidency, couldn’t follow the whims of the decidedly fluid Republican candidate.

Project 2025’s policy roadmap suggests a slate of horrifying hard-line rules on abortion, including withholding federal approval for abortion pills, restricting access to emergency contraception, using federal agencies to expand “abortion surveillance,” and of course, resuscitating the right-wing dream of a federal abortion ban.

Trump has been having a prolonged meltdown over the potential damage this plan could cause to his campaign for weeks. But he couldn’t help but get in his own way: During the RNC in late July, Trump tapped J.D. Vance to be his running mate.

For Trump, the Ohio senator was a chance to shore up support among white male voters. Instead, it seems Vance is a one-two punch of campaign destruction. Vance previously advocated for a federal abortion ban and was responsible for one of the strictest abortion bans in the country. He also has his own shocking links to Project 2025.

Vance wrote a particularly violent foreword to a forthcoming book by Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025. Roberts was fawning over Vance as soon as he was picked.

The swirling clouds of internet mayhem have parted, and the user behind the rumor that J.D. Vance once got sexual with a sectional has finally broken his silence.

In an interview with Business Insider, “Rick,” or @rickrudescalves (he’s since changed his username for privacy), explained why exactly he was inspired to invent a semi-believable lie that Donald Trump’s running mate had made love to a loveseat.

The day that Trump announced that Vance would be joining his ticket, Rick tweeted, “can’t say for sure but he might be the first vp pick to have admitted in a ny times bestseller to fucking an Inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (vance, hillbilly elegy, pp. 179-181).”

The story? A work of fiction by a disappointed guy from a working-class background. Rick, a desk worker who said he had a........

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