Secret Service set to turn over ‘erased’ Jan. 6 texts

BY REBECCA BEITSCH AND MIKE LILLIS - 07/19/22 6:00 AM ET

AOC's Fake Handcuffs Reveal Politicians Have Become Influencers—and Nothing More | Opinion

Video of Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar went viral on Tuesday which seemed to show the two Congresswomen pretending to be handcuffed as police escorted them away from a pro-abortion protest. Both Representatives were led away peacefully but seemed to be feigning being cuffed, walking with their hands clasped behind their backs, only to raise their fists defiantly a few moments later.

The Congresswomen were indeed arrested, per Capitol Police, alongside 14 other House Democrats, but there were no handcuffs. The arrest consisted of being led by police to a shady area and fined $50, though the dramatic antics and histrionics of the Congresswomen, their staff, and their media sycophants would have you believe that they were under serious duress.

...It would all be quite astonishing—if it weren't quite so commonplace. Performative duress is now a common mode of operation for a new generation of politicians who have been shaped by social media and are armed and ready with the toolkit of the digital influencer. Moments like this serve as a reminder of how the advent of social media and the impact it has had on the attention economy is now enabling our politicians to reframe their political aims in emotional terms, recasting what should be politics as little more than careerist sentimental posturing.

The Congresswomen's antics perfectly encapsulate how the performative conventions of social media—with staples like virtue signaling and self victimization—are infecting the way our politicians conduct and aggrandize themselves in public. Every moment is now a potential performance to an imaginary audience, their hands willingly held behind their backs to perform for the cameras and their fists raised in the air to signal to their fans.

AOC is especially adept at the art of influencer antics, her infamous Met Gala "Tax the Rich" dress yet another example of a media stunt dressed up as a political statement that was designed to stir up controversy and bolster her image as an underdog—even though she is a Congresswoman in the most powerful nation on earth. Another classic of this genre was the famous photo of her dressed all in white crying outside of a migrant detention center.

Today again we saw this tactic used, with lawmakers feigning being handcuffed for pro-abortion activism instead of, you know, legislating the right to an abortion, something they alone have the power to do.

This is no accident: Social media has given our politicians the power to generate spectacles and dramatic, emotional scenarios that reframe their power in emotional, rather than political terms. It allows them to create the illusion that they are on the same level as the people who they represent, whose only power is activism; in other words, their activism is cosplay, pretending they are no longer the representatives we elect to serve our interests but instead our social media friends, our influencers, our source of entertainment and aspirational consumption.

Expect more of this. This blurring of the lines between the simulacra of social media and real life politics is now the future of political public relations, and it will inevitably shift the way politicians and representatives conduct themselves in the public sphere.

Mystery solved: DOJ secretly thwarted release of Russia documents declassified by Trump

Department used last-minute privacy concerns to halt release, then ignored direct order from president to make memos public.

In the final hours of the Trump presidency, the U.S. Justice Department raised privacy concerns to thwart the release of hundreds of pages of documents that Donald Trump had declassified to expose FBI abuses during the Russia collusion probe, and the agency then defied a subsequent order to release the materials after redactions were made, according to interviews and documents.

The previously untold story of how highly anticipated declassified material never became public is contained in a memo obtained by Just the News from the National Archives that was written by then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows just hours before Trump left office on noon of Jan. 20, 2021.

Secret Service turned over just one text message to January 6 panel, sources say

House committee wants all communications from day before and day of Capitol attack but agency indicates such messages are lost