Fox News correspondent Alexandria Hoff reports on the impact that presidential candidate RFK Jr., could have on the 2024 race on'Special Report.' Republicans are hammering independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over a resurfaced video where he says individuals in red states are more likely to commit heinous crimes and "murder you." In a resurfaced video, posted by former President Donald Trump's MAGA War Room X account Wednesday, RFK Jr. is seen making the disparaging comments about Republicans at a 2005 IdeaCity speech. "Red state people are more likely to murder you, to impregnate your teenage daughter, to commit a violent crime against you, to commit a nonviolent crime against you, to watch Desperate Housewives on TV, to buy pornography, to buy degenerate video games like'Grand Theft Auto,'" RFK Jr. told a crowd. Social media users, including several Republican members of congress, immediately hit back at what they called "divisive attacks."

Political discourse in the United States is getting increasingly polarized. This polarization frequently causes different communities to react very differently to the same news events. Political blogs as a form of social media provide an unique insight into this phenomenon. We present a multitarget, semisupervised latent variable model, MCR-LDA to model this process by analyzing political blogs posts and their comment sections from different political communities jointly to predict the degree of polarization that news topics cause. Inspecting the model after inference reveals topics and the degree to which it triggers polarization. In this approach, community responses to news topics are observed using sentiment polarity and comment volume which serves as a proxy for the level of interest in the topic. In this context, we also present computational methods to assign sentiment polarity to the comments which serve as targets for latent variable models that predict the polarity based on the topics in the blog content. Our results show that the joint modeling of communities with different political beliefs using MCR-LDA does not sacrifice accuracy in sentiment polarity prediction when compared to approaches that are tailored to specific communities and additionally provides a view of the polarization in responses from the different communities.