The dog-killing South Dakota governor’s VP hopes are in tatters. But she’s not the first politician to flame out with an own goal

She could have been a contender. But then she wrote a book. And suddenly Kristi Noem was caught like a rabbit – or a rambunctious puppy – in the headlights.

The governor of South Dakota found herself insisting that a false claim she met the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un had been put in her book by accident. Wait, said Elizabeth Vargas of NewsNation, you recorded the whole audiobook version and read this passage out loud. Why didn’t you take it out then?

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© Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

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© Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

Trump will look to again cast Biden as greatly diminished while Biden will aim to remind voters why they rejected Trump in 2020

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It’s game on for a pair of presidential debates between two unpopular candidates most Americans wish weren’t running for the nation’s highest office.

In a ratatat social media exchange on Wednesday, Joe Biden and Donald Trump agreed to participate in two debates on 27 June, hosted by CNN, and on 10 September, hosted by ABC.

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© Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

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© Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

A GOP Texas school board member campaigned against schools indoctrinating kids. Then she read the curriculum. The pervasive indoctrination she had railed against simply did not exist. Children were not being sexualized, and she could find no examples of critical race theory, an advanced academic concept that examines systemic racism. - Her fellow Republicans were not relieved to hear this news.

Even in a state where surveillance is almost total, the experience of tyranny and injustice can radicalize people. Anger at arbitrary power will always lead someone to start thinking about another system, a better way to run society. [...] If people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those concepts have to be poisoned. [...] Here is a difficult truth: A part of the American political spectrum is not merely a passive recipient of the combined authoritarian narratives that come from Russia, China, and their ilk, but an active participant in creating and spreading them. Like the leaders of those countries, the American MAGA right also wants Americans to believe that their democracy is degenerate, their elections illegitimate, their civilization dying. The MAGA movement's leaders also have an interest in pumping nihilism and cynicism into the brains of their fellow citizens, and in convincing them that nothing they see is true. Their goals are so similar that it is hard to distinguish between the online American alt-right and its foreign amplifiers, who have multiplied since the days when this was solely a Russian project. Tucker Carlson has even promoted the fear of a color revolution in America, lifting the phrase directly from Russian propaganda.

The New Propaganda War: Autocrats in China, Russia, and elsewhere are now making common cause with MAGA Republicans to discredit liberalism and freedom around the world. [SLAtlantic]