Some like him, some don’t.

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) will face two factions a little more than a week from now, when Republicans pick out a new speaker of the House. He’ll need 218 votes to wield the gavel, but there will be only 222 Republicans in the chamber, meaning he can lose just five.

And wouldn’t you know it? Five GOP lawmakers have already announced that they won’t vote for McCarthy. Rep. Bob Good (R-VA) says there are upwards of 20 members in the Never Kevin movement.

Should the five follow through and actually vote against McCarthy, the whole process will be thrown into turmoil. Another group of Republicans is quietly working behind the scenes to find a replacement everyone can support.

The Only Kevin group is much larger, the Daily Beast reports.

“Dozens of GOP lawmakers, from moderates to MAGA loyalists, have said they will only vote for McCarthy for Speaker, no matter how many rounds of votes it takes. If followed, that commitment to respond to hardball with hardball would basically ensure no other Republican comes close to the gavel,” The Beast reported.

“The people that are supportive of Kevin, which are far more numerous than his critics, are dug in at least as deep as his critics are,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), a supporter of McCarthy, told The Beast. “The pressure won’t be on them. It’s gonna’ be on the people that brought down the whole edifice — for what? For what purpose? What end?”

Good, however, scoffed at Cole’s declaration. “That’s funny,” Good said. “The bottom line is, Kevin is not going to be speaker… He’s not going to have the votes, and the number of individuals who are committed to not voting for him — it’s growing, not receding.”

Republicans, Good said, need to “get past the denial stage” saying the sooner they start searching for a consensus candidate, “the better off we’re all going to be.”

Politico reported last week that a group of lawmakers has quietly approached Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), who is currently the No. 2 leader in the House GOP, about running for speaker if McCarthy comes up short.

“Steve, just be ready,” one member currently backing McCarthy told the liberal political website. Late last month, after it was clear Republicans had taken control of the House, Scalise ran unopposed for majority leader and won easily. The member said he “could be a good consensus leader if things don’t go well for Kevin.”

The situation is dicey. Scalise isn’t openly running for the position because it’s dangerous to announce a challenge to the powerful McCarthy: if someone tries and fails, that member could well by punished for their temerity.

“If somebody were to come out now and we didn’t deliver enough votes to stop Mr. McCarthy, that there would be a real potential for blowback,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) recently told The Hill. “They want to be very careful. So I think I think people are interested. They’ve expressed it to some of us … I think people are being wary.”

The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Joseph Curl has covered politics for 35 years, including 12 years as White House correspondent for a national newspaper. He was also the a.m. editor of the Drudge Report for four years. Send tips to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and follow him on Twitter @josephcurl.

Twitter received intelligence reports from U.S. agencies raising concerns about foreign influence by flagging users and posts focused on Ukraine “propaganda,” COVID vaccines, and much more, according to the latest disclosure in “The Twitter Files.”

Journalist Matt Taibbi shared on Saturday excerpts in a thread responding to the FBI defending as “traditional” and “longstanding” its correspondence with Twitter in the face of concerns that the bureau was going out of its way to pressure social media companies to censor content.

“Many people wonder if Internet platforms receive direction from intelligence agencies about moderation of foreign policy news stories. It appears Twitter did, in some cases by way of the” FBI and its Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), Taibbi said. “These reports are far more factually controversial than domestic counterparts,” he added.

The journalist shared screenshots of what he said were some of these intelligence reports, including one listing accounts “tied to ‘Ukraine ‘neo-Nazi’ Propaganda.” This document discussed the monitoring of a suspected Russian troll farm “propagating disinformation on Twitter about the U.S. and Ukrainian governments to support Russian actions in Ukraine” right around of the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February.

One of the “key findings” talked about “prevailing narratives” that “blame the U.S. for ‘Nazification’ of the Ukraine.” A bullet point underneath asserts that President Joe Biden helped orchestrate a coup in 2014 and put his son, Hunter Biden, on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company.

“Another report asserts a list of accounts accusing the ‘Biden administration’ of ‘corruption’ in vaccine distribution are part of a Russian influence campaign,” Taibbi said. The screen shot of this other report he shared included breakdowns on suspected “narratives,” including that the “Biden administration was selling better places in the COVID-19 vaccine queue to countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and therefor, U.S. corruption was influencing the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines.”

48. Another report asserts a list of accounts accusing the “Biden administration” of “corruption” in vaccine distribution are part of a Russian influence campaign: pic.twitter.com/RPDDFNWaji

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 24, 2022

Over the course of his 56-point thread, which also noted reports bearing lists of links and accounts suspected to bots and linked to foreign regimes, Taibbi said government agencies shared intelligence through the FBI and FITF with Twitter and other technology companies. Taibbi said Twitter did not always block flagged accounts, but he posited, “The line between ‘misinformation’ and ‘distorting propaganda’ is thin. Are we comfortable with so many companies receiving so many reports from a ‘more aggressive’ government?”

50. One report says a site “documenting purported rights abuses committed by Ukrainians” is directed by Russian agents: pic.twitter.com/2uzXLGP6CG

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 24, 2022

Though the provenance of each intelligence report was not so clear, Taibbi cited former CIA agent and whistleblower John Kiriakou expressing the belief that he recognized some of the formatting.

“‘Looks right on to me,’ Kiriakou says, noting that ‘what was cut off above [the ‘tearline’] was the originating CIA office and all the copied offices,” Taibbi tweeted. The journalist added that the CIA “has yet to comment on the nature of its relationship to tech companies like Twitter. Twitter had no input into anything I did or wrote.”