extreme -ist radical

1/20

NOTE THIS REFERS TO ATTACKS ON LEFT

SEE DEMONIZATION, TERROR 3 BS RUBIO MILLER

8/20 i added "radical", since interchangeable (shades into "activist"? also socialist, communist, marxist?)

as in islamic extremist = terrorist?

merri ok

irony as in overton hard shift to rt/ TP evangelicals

SEE IRRATIONAL INSANE CRAZY

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/gop-purges-right-wing-members-from-congress-to-replace-them-with-even-more-radical-candidates

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aha 9 22: we are sensible rational real am, center, whereas THEY are crazy, irrational, lunatic, not to be negotiated with, fringe

MISO WOMEN EMPATHY --> CRAZY GUTFELD 2 26

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main trump ploy 202o?

prolly some rubber glue projection GOP has gone hard right trumpiSta house wackos boebert MTG really are extreme fundamentalist

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HUFFPO 5 26

Donald Trump Blames 'Radical Left Lunatics' After Giuliani's Hospitalization | HuffPost Latest News

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// SOME STD TWT TODAY // GLAD MUELLER DEAD

AN 3 26

President Donald Trump and his supporters describe liberals as “radical” and “extreme,” an accusation that one comedy writer describes as “epic-level gaslighting.”

“Republicans have made it abundantly clear, from behind the presidential seal and in the halls of Congress and on all manner of news networks, that the extremists in America are liberals like me,” wrote humor columnist Rex Huppke for USA Today on Sunday. “We are, in the oft-repeated words of President Donald Trump, ‘radical left lunatics.’ We are agitators. Insurrectionists. Thugs. Our ideas are extreme, always. ‘Radical left climate extremism.’ ‘Extreme gender ideology.’”

Yet Huppke pointed out that Trump supporters “all kneel at the altar of a narcissistic conman who eviscerates every democratic norm he comes across and slaps his name on things like a dollar-store Mussolini,” making it ludicrous for them to accuse people who merely want a clean planet and equal rights for all gender identities of being extremist or dangerous.

“As the Republican Party has morphed into an averse-to-democracy cult of personality – 63% of Republicans now identify as part of Trump’s MAGA movement – their labeling of the left as radicals has had to keep pace,” Huppke wrote. “It’s the ‘No I’m Not, YOU ARE!’ approach honed throughout history by bullies and abusers.”

Huppke went on to point out that Trump has failed to solve the myriad problems his administration blamed on the supposed radicalism of President Joe Biden (rising prices, a ballooning national debt, lawfare against political opponents). Additionally, one of Trump’s first acts as president was to pardon the insurrectionists who attempted a coup on Jan. 6, 2021 so that Trump could steal the 2020 presidential election.

“Promoting mass deportation, Trump and his party have proudly dispatched squads of masked and warrantless federal immigration agents across the country, resulting in the killing of U.S. citizens and repeated acts of transparent inhumanity,” Huppke added. “Without any form of approval, Trump had the historic East Wing of the White House demolished to make way for a ballroom funded by corporate and private donors, opening a door for shameless influence peddling.”

He then pointed out, “War, cruelty and racism. Isn't that all a bit extreme?”

Huppke also described as “extreme” Trump waging war against Iran without congressional approval, allowing a Christian nationalist pastor to lead a Pentagon worship service and creating a party in which Young Republican leaders in Arizona, Kansas, New York and Vermont “were found to be swimming in racist and antisemitic chats, saying things like ‘I love Hitler’ and casually using slurs for Black people.” He also mentioned the party’s Islamophobia, proposed $1 Trump coin in circulation and use of a neo-Nazi anthem (By God We’ll Have Our Home Again’) to recruit for the Department of Homeland Security.

“Frankly, I don’t ever want to hear the term ‘radical leftist’ again,” Huppke said. “At least not as long as Republicans are okey doke with a man whose every utterance is radical, a man who has subjugated an entire party and brainwashed them to obey his every whim.”

Huppke, despite being best known as a humorist, is also frequently scathingly critical of Trump. In December he claimed Trump had reached a “new low” after a “decade of Trumpian loathsomeness” because Trump applauded the murder of director/actor Rob Reiner, another frequent Trump critic. In November Huppke urged Americans to confront their Trump-supporting relatives at Thanksgiving, arguing that “at this moment in history, I wholly reject avoiding a subject that, thanks to Trump’s extremism and unquenchable thirst for attention, envelops virtually every aspect of our lives.”

Further into the article he added “not talking politics with your MAGA relatives is letting them off the hook. When a president is routinely bombing boats in international waters, ordering masked federal agents to round up hardworking immigrant families and sidestepping Congress while slapping tariffs on countries willy-nilly, those who disagree with such things have a responsibility to speak up.”

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MMA

February 3, 2026, edition of Fox News' The Five

GREG GUTFELD (CO-HOST): You go back to the revolutions. The Bolsheviks, a radical minority, trying to impose their will and power on the majority, and they can only do that through fear, intimidation, organized violence, oppression, and the way they often do that is they use women and children. Why? Because children don't know any better and it's frightening to see it happen. And women can have their compassion and their emotions hijacked and they're often the most passionate revolutionaries. I mean, the Manson family, those murders were done by young women who believed in a cause. And when you talk to them, they don't know why.

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AN 1 26

President Donald Trump is rapidly losing faith in one of his most senior-level Cabinet members, and his complaints about her have lately become more frequent.

That's according to a Monday article in the *Wall Street Journal, which reported that Trump views Attorney General Pam Bondi as "weak and an ineffective enforcer of his agenda." The *Journal cited unnamed administration officials and others close to the president in reporting that Trump is angling for Bondi to be more aggressive in using the Department of Justice (DOJ) to pursue his political enemies.

The Journal further reported that Trump is now considering naming various special counsels to handle investigations into his opponents, as he is unhappy with the pace of Bondi's DOJ in filing criminal charges against his chief rivals. The president is reportedly upset with how the DOJ has handled the investigations of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) in the Eastern District of Virginia.

The cases against Comey and James were ultimately dismissed after Lindsey Halligan — who Trump appointed to the replace U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert after he was pressured to resign for saying there was insufficient evidence to bring cases — was found to have been improperly appointed.

Trump is also reportedly upset with Bondi over her handling of documents pertaining to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. According to the Journal, the president publicly agreed with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles when she told Vanity Fair that Bondi "completely whiffed" on the Epstein files and caused months of political consternation for Trump. The president is also reportedly upset that Bondi hasn't done more to investigate the 2020 election, which he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

The complaints with Bondi also reportedly run deep within Trump's MAGA base. Former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon claimed that Bondi was "bleeding support" from Trump's "most loyal troops" due to a perceived lack of urgency.

"Folks are desperate for action and just haven’t seen it," Bannon said.

The Journal's report comes on the heels of a recently announced DOJ investigation into Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell renovation of its Washington D.C. offices. Powell has maintained that the investigation is due to him refusing to accede to Trump's demand that the Fed lower interest rates. Despite the report, the White House is praising Bondi on the record, with Trump telling the outlet: "Pam is doing an excellent job. She has been my friend for many years. Tremendous progress is being made against radical left lunatics who are good at only one thing, cheating in elections and the crimes they commit."

Click here to read the Journal's full report (subscription required).

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AN 11 25

CNN anchor Pamela Brown had a difficult time keeping Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins on track and answering questions on a Thursday interview with “The Situation Room.”

One point of contention was whether the Trump administration could indeed move federal money to fund SNAP food for low-income and impoverished families for a year, as ordered by a Rhode Island judge.

“I’m just reading through the court filings, the judge also said … that there was money available in another funding pots like the one that was used for $750 million transferred to WIC,” Brown told Rollins. “… This judge said you didn't do that. You didn't use that. You could have to fully fund SNAP, and you fought it all the way to the Supreme Court.”

“Okay, let's talk about that,” said Rollins. “That judge in Rhode Island is the largest Democrat donor—”

Brown attempted to pull her back to the question but Rollins insisted “Well, it's important.”

“This was a radical left judge who decided that we could take money — listen, there was a ‘No Kings’ rally, but then, all of a sudden, a radical left judge in Rhode Island, of all places, says, ‘oh no, but please make yourself king and find that money out of the clear blue sky and redirect it into the SNAP program.'"

“But there was $23 billion in Section 32 for the child nutrition program. And so this judge says that $4 billion could have been moved from that Section 32 fund to fully fund SNAP. Is that accurate facts?”

“No, that is not facts,” said Rollins. “That money is congressionally authorized. If we had used that money, it would have taken food out of the mouths of school children that came from an entirely different pot of money, non-congressionally authorized.”

“I just want to go back on this because in reading through the court cases ... the government did admit to the judge, and this was, I believe, the judge in Boston, that, yes, it could have dipped into this child nutrition fund that was an available option. This fund, again, had $23 billion in it, right? And even if you took out $4 billion to fully fund SNAP, that pot of money would still feed children through next year," Brown explained.

“Are we serious right now?” demanded Rollins. “Are we really talking about moving billions of dollars from one pot to another to feed children through next year, when the Democrats 15 different times voted not to?”

“I understand you want to keep it on Democrats, but what about the children that are hungry now because they didn't get the full SNAP?” Brown asked.

“Well, they should understand that the Democrats are the ones that are keeping — they even admitted it. ‘This is our greatest leverage point. If planes fall out of the sky, that may be what it takes.’ It was one thing after another, Pamela … I mean, for you to try to put this back on ‘this court said that and this left-leaning judge said that, and you guys, you guys should move this.’ It's completely a false narrative.”

“That's why I'm asking you,” said Brown. “These are just the facts. These are in court cases. This is what the USDA has previously said from the 2019 shutdown.”

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trump manta post kirk shoot

AN 9 25 CLAIM NO SUPPORT

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller was Vice President JD Vance’s guest on Monday’s edition of “The Charlie Kirk Show,” just days after the right-wing political commentator was assassinated. The suspected gunman’s motives and political beliefs remain unclear, but the vice president pinned the blame for Kirk’s murder on “left-wing extremism.”

“While our side of the aisle certainly has its crazies,” Vance declared, “it is a statistical fact that most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of the far-left.”

IFrame Content

The vice president did not define “lunatics,” but statistics from the Cato Institute show that the vast majority of political violence comes from the far-right.

Guest-hosting for the late organizer and activist, Vice President Vance viewers, “I wanted to zoom out and talk with Stephen [Miller] a little bit, and talk about all of the ways that we’re trying to figure out how to prevent this festering violence that you see on the far-left from becoming even more and more mainstream.”

IFrame Content

The vice president—who placed blame at least in part on the left for Kirk’s death—said, “we have to talk about this incredibly destructive movement of left-wing extremism that has grown up over the last few years, and I believe is part of the reason why Charlie was killed by an assassin’s bullet.”

“We’re gonna talk about how to dismantle that,” he continued, “and how to bring real unity, real unity that can only come when we tell the truth and everybody knows that they can speak their mind about the issues of the day without being cut down by a murderer’s gun.”

Miller, who is considered by many—including some highly respected conservatives—a skilled propagandist, on Friday spoke out against what he called left-wing violent extremism.

IFrame Content

“I’ve not shared with anybody, but the last message that Charlie Kirk gave to me before he joined his Creator in heaven was, he said that we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence.”

“That was the last message that he sent me before that assassin stole him from all of us.”

“And we are gonna do that,” Miller vowed. “Under President Trump’s leadership, I don’t care how—it could be a RICO charge, a conspiracy charge, conspiracy against the United States, insurrection—but we are going to do what it takes to dismantle the organizations and the entities that are fomenting riots, that are doxing, that are trying to inspire terrorism, and that are committing acts of wanton violence.”

IFrame Content

“It has to stop,” he declared, “and my message is to all of the domestic terrorists in this country spreading this evil hate? You want us to live in fear? We will not live in fear, but you will live in exile. Because the power of law enforcement under President Trump’s leadership will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and if you’ve broken the law, to take away your freedom.”

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NOTE DECRIES DEM RHET WHILE USING ELIMINATIONALIST

an 7 25

U.S. Senator Ashley Moody (R-FL) is calling Democrats who oppose the often warrantless raids and tactics used by President Donald Trump’s frequently masked ICE agents, “pawns” of an “anarchist agenda.”

Senator Moody on Thursday (video below) denounced “lawmakers using this really incendiary rhetoric and showing up at ICE facilities and saying it’s ‘inspiring’ that people are going after and targeting ICE, using words like the ‘Gestapo.'”

Telling Newsmax that she is the wife of a law enforcement officer, Moody noted that “we watch them day in, day out, put their lives on the line for us.”

“All they are doing,” she said of those opposing ICE, “by demonstrating these thoughtless, careless words that are inciting violence against officers — they are just showing that they are ignorant pawns of a subversive anarchist agenda, and that has to stop.”

IFrame Content

On Wednesday, she also denounced Democrats opposing ICE.

“Yeah, to my colleagues and other lawmakers around this nation that are using words like ‘inspiring’ and encouraging these acts, I would just say, you have gone well beyond advancing and arguing for political parties.”

“You are now becoming more like agents of our foreign adversaries that want to destabilize our nation and attack our institutions and government.”

Commenting on the Trump Department of Justice now investigating former Obama CIA Director John Brennan and former Biden and Trump FBI Director Jim Comey, Senator Moody referred to them as “radicals” and praised President Donald Trump for “fumigating” those institutions.

“I’m gonna go back to the hypocrisy of the Democrats,” she told Fox News. “They keep talking about that Trump is bringing ‘retribution’ and that he’s using these institutions for political reasons. This is not retribution. This is fumigation.”

“You’ve had radicals roaming in these institutions like termites, destabilizing them, weakening them, the Democrats talk about these institutions being weakened by Trump. He is fumigating these,” Moody continued.

“He is bringing back integrity and accountability, and I believe that these things should be looked at so that the American people can be restored and their belief in these institutions and know that they are, in fact, a government of the people, not a government of a political party seeking to deliver a political agenda.”

Watch the videos below or at this link.

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rww 6 24 team trump $ ltr logo]

House Speaker Mike Johnson accused Democrats of trying to “destroy the American dream” in a fundraising email sent to right-wing activists Thursday morning. Johnson, who told Christian nationalist lawmakers last year that God put him in power as an American “Moses,” wrote, “The radical Left hates our freedom, they hate our Judeo-Christian values, and they hate our Constitution.”

Johnson has led congressional Republicans in supporting former President Donald Trump’s efforts to discredit his recent criminal prosecution and conviction. Johnson continued the attack in today’s email, writing, “They manipulated a coordinated political hitjob to escalate a cluster of bogus charges to 34 felony convictions – with the help of a Biden-minion judge and prosecutor!”

Johnson wrote that the 2024 election is not only the most important in our lifetimes, but “the most important election in our country’s history.” He asked for cash to “Expose the Democrats for their failures and attempts to destroy the American dream, and fundamentally change our great country.” He accused the left of “attempting to bring in a legion of illegal immigrants and turn them into voters by neglecting the border.”

Johnson’s email is headed by a “Team Trump Official” logo. It is raising money for his own campaign account and for a joint Trump-RNC fundraising committee. The default allocation for a $100 contribution is $95 to Johnson and $5 to the Trump National Committee JFC President.

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tucker no time to give up ar15

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April 29, 2024 RWW

David Lane gripes that “America was not settled by lily-livered Christians,” but “over the last 200 years, however, radical change has overtaken the nation, resulting in benumbing paganism now being America’s official religion.”

Mark Meckler calls for former President Donald Trump, if he’s reelected, to use a “weaponized DOJ” to raid the homes and offices of left-wing organizations: “We need to engage in full lawfare against the radical left.”

Christian nationalists Steve Cruz and Ben Zeisloft agree that any woman who gets an abortion “should be killed”: “She should be tried and convicted; dig a hole and put her down.”

Jason Rapert fumes over the U.S. providing humanitarian aid to Gaza: “You are lying devils and you’re evil.”

Shane Vaughn claims that Federalist 43 lays out “why Donald Trump is absolutely immune from prosecution.” Vaughn clearly never actually read that essay, since it says nothing of the sort.
Finally, MAGA pastor/self-proclaimed “prophet” Hank Kunneman used his Sunday sermon to declare that “God is far right” while ranting that Democrats are “dark black evil.”

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Exclusive: Circuit Court Ruling on Biden DOE's Appliance Regulation 'a Win' for Americans

PJ Media

Climate Depot's Marc Morano called the DOE's revoked regulations “a complete bypassing of democracy through the unelected regulatory state” and ...

Exclusive: Circuit Court Ruling on Biden DOE’s Appliance Regulation ‘a Win’ for Americans

CATHERINE SALGADO | 6:52 PM ON JANUARY 09, 2024

The Biden Department of Energy (DOE) just lost a case on its heavy and damaging regulation of laundry and dishwashing machines, and a consumer advocate is celebrating the move as “a win” for Americans’ “consumer choice.”

Fifth Circuit Court judges Clement, Wilson, and Oldham ruled on Jan. 8: “In 2022, the Department of Energy tightened the regulatory regime surrounding America’s dishwashers and laundry machines. Petitioners sued. The Department’s actions were arbitrary and capricious. So we grant the petition and remand to the Department.”

The Biden administration has been attempting to wage a war on appliances on multiple occasions and fronts, partly due to its radical and unscientific climate alarmist agenda.

Consumers’ Research Executive Director Will Hild is one expert who sees the court ruling as a victory. Consumers’ Research is a consumer advocacy organization that says it is “focused on educating consumers on the policies, products, and services of concern to them and to promote the freedom to act on that knowledge and understanding.”

This new ruling against the DOE appears to be pro-freedom and pro-consumer. “This is a fantastic ruling for American consumers,” Hild said in exclusive comments to PJ Media.

Hild explained that the DOE appliance regulations came out of the Biden administration’s Environmental, Social, and Governance goals (ESG, or woke standards poisoning our government and businesses). “These regulations were part of Biden’s ESG agenda, that was more about pushing a radical environmentalist agenda than protecting and serving consumers, and today is a win for consumer choice and our standard of living,” Hild said.

*For Our VIPs:I’m So Glad I Have a Gas Stove Right Now

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rww 4 23

no twt

Levin appeared on Fox & Friends March 31, 2023 to denounce the indictment of Donald Trump (and plug his book).

When news broke Thursday that a Manhattan grand jury had voted to indict former President Donald Trump, Trump and his supporters were quick to portray him as an innocent victim and to suggest that his prosecution spelled the end of democracy in America.

The charges follow an investigation into a hush money payment made to former adult film star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. With the indictment under seal, the exact charges have not yet been made public, though some news reports suggest Trump faces about 30 charges and that he is expected to be charged with falsifying business records to cover up the payment.

Trump himself displayed his trademark narcissism Thursday, writing in one of many urgent emails, “We are living through the darkest chapter of American history.”

The always-blustery right-wing pundit Mark Levin ranted on “Fox & Friends” Friday morning, “We have crossed the Rubicon. This is atyrannynow.”

Right-wing youth leader Charlie Kirk, who heads Turning Point USA, claimed that the indictment of Trump is a “designed campaign” by the left to provoke right-wing violence “to justify the next phase of their takeover of the country.”

Ali Alexander, a leader of the “Stop the Steal” effort to keep Trump in power after his 2020 loss, wrote on his Telegram account, “TRUMP INDICTMENT refocuses some things. We’re approaching Luciferian-triggered civil war. We must fight Them.May God bless and forgive us where we fall short.”

Far-right broadcaster Pete Santilli—who last week said that if Trump were arrested, the military and law enforcement should round up and execute former President Barack Obama and other members of the “criminal cabal”—reacted to the news by telling his viewers that “these leftist, gun-grabbing Maoists, you will never have a peaceful resolution with. They’re going to come and kill you.:

amid reports that New York law enforcement officials are preparing for possible violence, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted, “I’m going to New York on Tuesday. We MUST protest the unconstitutional WITCH HUNT!”

Although details of the indictment haven’t been made public,Sen. Ted Cruzused his “Verdict” podcast to denounce the indictment as “utter and complete garbage,” describing himself as angry and “heartbroken” over what he called a “devastating” blow to the rule of law. Cruz claimed that the Manhattan investigation was an effort by “radical Democrats” to “steal” the 2024 presidential election.

Cruz said the indictment would boost Trump’s election campaign, a sentiment echoed by other far-right followers of the twice-impeached former president. The Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody said the indictment had made Trump a “political martyr.”

On “FlashPoint,” a show that appears on evangelist Kenneth Copeland’s Victory Channel that was a steady source of misinformation about the 2020 election and Jan. 6 insurrection, failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate and election denier Kari Lake denounced what she called “false, phony charges.” Trump’s supporters, she said, are “tried and true” and will stay with him “all the way.”

Trump’s religious-right backers also rallied around him, with Franklin Graham calling it a “shameful day for America.”

As noted by religion scholar Diana Butler Bass in her latest newsletter, Trump has been using increasingly messianic and apocalyptic languagein reference to his legal troubles in an effort to maintain religious-right support.Trump followers who believe he is anointed by God and is being persecuted like Jesus by the legions of Satan is “a theo-political wild card we’ve got to pay attention to,”Bass writes. She points to the biblical story of Jesus’ arrest in whichone of his disciples attacked one of the soldiers. While Jesus insisted, “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword,” Bass warns, “Do not expect the same from Trump.”

Tags: Charlie Kirk David Brody Donald Trump Franklin Graham Kari Lake Marjorie Taylor Greene Mark Levin Pete Santilli Donald Trump Election 2024 Rule of Law Trump Indictment

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an 1 23

12:29 a.m.:

What will the Great State of Georgia do with the Ruby Freeman MESS? Why not just tell the TRUTH, get rid of the turmoil and guilt, and take our Country back from the evils and treachery of theRadical Left monsters who want to see America die? MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

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an 9 22 i struck

Tuesday, August 23, liberal economist Robert Reich expressed his disdain for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis when he visited Twitter and posted, “Just wondering if ‘DeSantis’ is now officially a synonym for ‘fascist.’” Many MAGA Republicans had an angry reaction, bombarding the University of California, Berkeley professor with familiar Republican insults like “coastal elitist.”[W exm?] But in an op-ed published by The Guardian on August 31, Reich doesn’t back down from his anti-DeSantis views.

In fact, Reich doubles down on them, laying out an abundance of reasons why DeSantis’ agenda is consistent with the elements of fascism.

“I was surprised at the outrage my little tweet provoked in right-wing media,” Reich notes. “The Washington Examiner, for example, called me an‘ultra-left-wing elitist’ who wrote an ‘insulting slur,’ which is ‘what left-wing ideologues do when they discuss Republican politicians who pose any threat to the existence of their political ideology.… Anyone the Democrats don’t like or disagree with is a fascist.’ This was among the kindest responses…. The size of the blowback on my little tweet makes me think I struck a nerve.”

Reich points out that DeSantis is “the most likely rival to Trump for the Republican nomination in 2024” and has been called “Donald Trump with a brain.”

“DeSantis is the nation’s consummate culture warrior,” Reich explains. “Lately, he has been campaigning on behalf of Republican election-deniers around the country, including gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania and US Senate candidate J.D. Vance in Ohio. In Florida, discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity are now barred in schools. Math textbooks have been rejected for what officials call ‘indoctrination.’ Claiming tenured professors in Florida’s public universities were ‘indoctrinating’ students, DeSantis spearheaded a law requiring them to be reviewed every five years. Teachers are limited in what they can teach about racism and other tragic aspects of American history.”

Reich continues, “DeSantis has got personally involved in local school board races, endorsing and campaigning for 30 board candidates who agree with him. So far, 20 have won outright, five are going to runoffs. Abortions are banned after 15 weeks. DeSantis recently suspended an elected prosecutor who said he would refuse to enforce the anti-abortion law. A new state office has been created to investigate ‘election crimes.’ Florida’s Medicaid regulator is considering denying state-subsidized treatments to transgender people. Its medical board may ban gender-affirming medical treatment for youths. Disney, Florida’s largest employer, has been stripped of the ability to govern itself in retaliation for the company’s opposition to the crackdown on LGBTQ+ conversations with schoolchildren.”

The words “fascist” and “authoritarian” have been used interchangeably by DeSantis’ critics, who aren’t strictly liberals and progressives. Many Never Trump conservatives have been scathing critics of DeSantis and slammed him as dangerously authoritarian, from The Bulwark’s Tim Miller to the Washington Post’s Max Boot to MSNBC host:{ Joe Scarborough (a former GOP congressman). The debate among right-wing Never Trumpers, in fact, is whether Trump or DeSantis would be a more authoritarian Republican candidate in 2024.}:

Reich argues that the word “fascist” captures DeSantis’ views even better than “authoritarian.”

“Authoritarianism implies the absence of democracy, a dictatorship,” Reich writes. “Fascism — from the Latin fasces, denoting a tightly bound bundle of wooden rods typically including a protruding axe blade, adopted by Benito Mussolini in the 1930s to symbolize his total power — is different. Fascism also includes hatred of ‘them’ — people considered different by race or religion, or outside the mainstream, or who were born abroad; control over what people learn and what books they are allowed to read, control over what had been independent government units…. control over women and the most intimate and difficult decisions they’ll ever make, and demands that the private sector support the regime. Perhaps my ‘just wondering’ tweet about DeSantis hit the nerve of the fascism now taking root in the Republican Party?”

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inequality productions: many vids

left vs rt shift clinton triangulate: polar ~elon Musk BS, see extreme/ radical/ commie

ineq expl 12 min rr primer; dynastic wealth // royal, ~ meritocracy estate and capital gains tax --> amplifying

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOI8RuhW7q0

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aha 1120: rooted in hofstaedter paranoid style? trump trial balllonong lots of anti-socialist, extreme-ist BS in campaign, trying to make us afraid of green new deal AOC The Squadantifa arsonists who are coming to your burbs; (not so much socialized medicine?)

Note extreme is me vswe the good true REAL Americans vs those ppl/ enemy who hate Am (silent majority who want law and order?) it's not at all extreme to take a baby from mom's breast;

commie sorta replaced by globalist global elite // coastal elite but sorta evokes Illuminati trilateral bilderbeg anti-sem BS [note SOROS in stop the steal clown car legal BS, also Hugo Chavez; Agenda 21 was anti-green TP reincarnation. TP is core of trumpistas?

sparked by

stop the steal clown car elite strike team:

...After Giuliani's segment ended, Powell took the lectern and alleged without evidence that an international Communist plot had been engineered by Venezuela, Cuba, China, Hugo Chávez (who died in 2013), George Soros, and the Clinton Foundation, to rig the 2020 election.^[9][43] She also alleged that Dominion Voting Systems "can set and run an algorithm that probably ran all over the country to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flip them to President Biden."^[44]

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aha conspiracy theories just this stew of memes that get recycled and combined? related to pseudo-populism? the system is rigged, just not in the way you think.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump-voters-2649007931/

roger s salon

Plaintiffs in a number of the Trump campaign's lawsuits challenging the president's electoral defeat have peddled conspiracy theories and made racist comments. One of them, a plaintiff represented by Rudy Giuliani in federal court this week, was even implicated in an election fraud scheme of his own.

The new revelations, first reported by Salon, add another dimension of doubt to President Donald Trump's widely discredited, last-ditch legal challenges to President-elect Joe Biden's electoral victory.

"We are through the looking glass when Rudy Giuliani is appearing in court to allege voter fraud in the presidential race on behalf of a plaintiff who has previously been implicated in election fraud schemes himself," Kyle Herrig, president of government watchdog Accountable.US, told Salon in a statement. "The plaintiffs in these cases have long histories peddling conspiracy theories online. It is time for this legal freak-show to exit the courtroom and go back to the chat room where it belongs."

Among the more recent of the campaign's lawsuits is a complaint filed in Pennsylvania, which seeks a court order to block the certification of votes in the state. Giuliani took over that case on Tuesday, when he made his first arguments before a federal bench since 1992.

The amended complaint to that case includes allegations from a Uniontown resident named Larry Roberts, who claims the state did not notify him after his ballot was canceled.

Roberts is a former Pennsylvania Democratic state representative, who served from 1993-2006. During that time, he was accused of violating campaign laws multiple times, including election fraud.

In 2004, Roberts was accused of bribing a stalking-horse candidate to siphon primary votes from a Democratic challenger. That spoiler candidate, Michael Ciampanelli, at the time 20 years old, told the local board of elections that Roberts had paid him $200 to put his name on the ballot. A state grand jury investigated the claims, as did the attorney general, but what became of the probe is unclear.

That same year, the rival also accused Roberts of forging 33 signatures on his own nominating petition. The allegation was backed up by a woman who worked in one of Roberts' offices. The woman said Roberts staff told her to lie about the matter, warning her she could face jail time "if the real story came out," according to the Associated Press.

In 2007, the Pennsylvania State Ethics Commission slapped Roberts with a $600 fine for violations in 2001 and 2004, including unlawfully using legislative staff to organize campaign events and co-opting his legislative office as a drop-off point for campaign materials.

A separate Pennsylvania lawsuit dropped on Thursday by the campaign featured Ted Dannerth as a plaintiff, a man who has repeatedly spread conspiracy theories online.

For instance, Dannerth has tweeted multiple times this year about "Project Blue Beam," an apparent reference to a fringe conspiracy theory falsely claiming that a NASA-Illuminati joint effort is engineering earthquakes in order to establish a new-age religion led by the antichrist. Dannerth has also called women a "weapon" against what he considers to be the "imminent threat" of sterility that would accompany a COVID-19 vaccine.

The Trump campaign plaintiff stitched a number of baseless fringe, QAnon-adjacent theories together in a lengthy Facebook post this April. Among other things, he claimed that Oprah Winfrey's house had been raided in a sex-trafficking sting and the media had brainwashed Americans against the president, who "is working from the bottom up, to remove the Democrat/Communist/Socialist Epstein/Deep State/CCP scourge from the planet."

Dannerth was also involved in a previous 2020 election lawsuit challenging public use of a private grant to fund election initiatives over his opposition to "the election of progressive candidates in local, state and federal elections." That suit was dismissed by District Judge Matthew Brann, who is presiding over the Trump campaign's current lawsuit.

Several plaintiffs in the campaign's challenge to block Michigan canvassers from certifying Detroit-area ballots present similar personal histories.

Eric Ostergen, a Republican poll challenger named in the suit, has repeatedly pushed misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic. This April, he shared a Washington Times op-ed calling coronavirus "the biggest hoax in political history," on Facebook. In a separate post, he endorsed the since-discredited treatment hydroxychloroquine.

Ostergen posted two times on Facebook about lawsuits he filed against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, D-Mich., over coronavirus measures, saying that "the tyrants will now be reeled in." He has also denied climate change science on Facebook, a platform where he has also posted baseless claims about Hunter Biden's laptop and voter fraud in Detroit's 2016 election.

The Trump campaign's Michigan case also features another coronavirus truther, Marian Sheridan, head of the Michigan Conservative Coalition (MCC), who in October led a "guard the vote" project after Trump's calls to recruit an "army" of poll-watchers.

In April, Sheridan's group staged "Operation Gridlock," where thousands of protesters jammed the streets of Lansing with their vehicles to express displeasure with Whitmer's stay-home orders. MCC also launched "Operation Haircut" in defense of a barber who opened his shop for illegal haircuts amid the state's lockdowns. And Sheridan hosted a Tea Party event to educate the public about "the common roots of COVID-19 hysteria and climate change."

A third plaintiff in the Michigan lawsuit, Grosse Pointe City Councilman Matt Seely, has mocked allegations of sexual assault in social media posts, including against Trump and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

"I'M SORRY THAT BAD MAN TOUCHED YOU INAPPROPRIATELY," read one meme, featuring a crying woman, which Seely shared during the Kavanaugh hearings. "LET'S WAIT 30 OR 40 YEARS … UNTIL HE RUNS FOR OFFICE … AGAINST A DEMOCRAT."

Seely also drew criticism for a social media post in which he connected four Democratic Congresswomen of color, known collectively as "the Squad," to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In the post — which was published on the 2019 anniversary of the attacks — Seely said the elevation of those women to Congress was "proof we have forgotten" about 9/11. The words accompanied a picture of the Twin Towers on fire.

Seely pushed back against criticism over the post, saying he could express political views on his private Facebook page. In doing so, he was backed by the mayor of Grosse Pointe Shores and other city council members.

In Nevada, former Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle — who already had a mail-in ballot case tossed in October — filed a lawsuit parallel to other GOP election challenges in the state, asking the court to stop the state from certifying its votes.

Angle is known for repeatedly pushing right-wing conspiracy theories, such as warning that American towns would fall to Sharia law and claiming fluoride in drinking water is a "communist plot to undermine Western democracy."

In a radio interview ahead of the 2010 midterms, Angle, who at the time was running against Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, alluded to armed insurrection as a remedy for a liberal Congress, saying — citing Thomas Jefferson — that "it's good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years."

"I hope that's not where we're going, but, you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying, 'My goodness, what can we do to turn this country around?" Angle said. "I'll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out."

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11/17/20

aha: authoritarian/ coup needs either massice econ failure or mult failures/crises? (death spiral?); massive and growing inequality amplifed (accel) by covid; note below two stories: economic factors were probably a "wash" in terms of the 2020 election, with some American voters likely blaming Trump for the current bad economy (and correctly so) while others may have blamed the COVID-19 lockdowns and supported Trump's opposition to them.

"He's taken advantage of being president to further his white nationalism, but I don't think that's his main goal," Wilderquist told Salon. "I think Trump's main goal for his entire life is to convince as many people as possible that he's a winner that he wins and wins and wins, and that he's the world's biggest winner.And like a lot of us, he doesn't want to be a loser. The way to step down without feeling like a loser is to convince his echo chamber that he didn't lose. He won and that it was stolen from him. He doesn't need a coup to do that. He just needs to complain a lot."

aha K: story 1 capitaLISM is awesome and so is USAUSA, so if we are not winning it is b/c limp lefties betrayed us in trade talks so our natural inevitable winners hobbled. Story 2: we used to be the colinial imperal power sole superpower but [corp dems]either antiipinko BS kept us from having a nat'l econ strategy like Japan and now china, or corps so corrupted politics that rules favoered max profit = outsourcing, so now (rural?) am abandoned or colonized (no unions in So).

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/experts-explain-the-economic-situations-that-beget-successful-coups/

matt r

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aha dr video especially potent b/c selective POV pick of content helps with alt fact post truth BS, PLUS seeing is belieiving, looks like raw unfakeable reality verite right there on the screen, PLUS images bypass rational brain; PLUS designed to go viral, and even if debunked [and we have ppl dying of covid who think it's bs, stop cursing tyhe nurses for wearing ppe only when intubated], plus it's made to support existing BS narrative (or combo, some cultivated for decades like myth of liberal press [death spiral?]; and even if debunked it still has emotional effect [ampl by alogithms] even after rational mind accepts it was not true/never happnened?!

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/ivanka-trump

roger salon

As right-wing groups clashed with counter-protesters at pro-Trump demonstrations over the weekend, Ivanka Trump, the senior White House adviser and daughter of outgoing President Donald Trump, condemned the media on Twitter for "near total silence" over alleged assaults on conservatives. The tweet came as selectively edited video wrongly portraying Trump supporters as victims of violence circulated online in right-wing circles.NOTE THIS SETS UP RATIONALE FOR MORE RW VIOLENCE]

"The media's near total silence about the physical violence being perpetrated against conservatives is shameful & dangerous. Just image the outrage and indignation if this went the other way," Ivanka tweeted. "Violence is never the answer and instigators must be condemned and prosecuted." ATLAS, BANNON BOOGALOO...]

Donald Trump Jr. one-upped his sister's allegation an hour later by claiming, without evidence, that the media was "complicit." He also suggested that "they might as well" put Trump supporters on a non-existent Gulag list controlled by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. [THE NEW PELOSI?]

"The media's silence on the violence against Trump supporters is deafening. After four years of calling them Nazis, at this point they might as well just dox them all or add the[m] to AOC's lists for the Gulags," Don Jr. baselessly tweeted. "They are complicit in the violence. They are the worst of the worst."

Trump supporters and right-wing groups marched in several cities on Saturday in protest of the president's recent electoral loss to President-elect Joe Biden. The demonstrators echoed the president's evidence-free allegations of a stolen election.

Many of these groups were met by counter-protests, and violence broke out in some instances. The most serious of these incidents took place in Washington, where Proud Boys and other right-wing groups and militia members clashed with counter-protesters, according to multiple reports. Contrary to the Trump family's assertions, conservatives were filmed launching attacks. 2 STABBINGS ONE PROUD?]

It was not the first time Ivanka had misleadingly tweeted about political violence. In a tweet referencing "inner city communities," the first daughter cited the wrong number of people killed and wounded in the wrong location ("near a playground") over the course of a weekend in Chicago in August 2019.

In his first debate with Biden, President Trump told the Proud Boys to "stand back, and stand by." Unlike his offspring, the president outwardly applauded Saturday's violence in the streets.

"ANTIFA SCUM ran for the hills today when they tried attacking the people at the Trump Rally, because those people aggressively fought back," he tweeted.

The president also shared a selectively edited video posted by Andy Ngo, a right-wing sympathizer with a history of wrongly framing left-wing groups. The clip showed a man getting knocked out by a counter-protester after being attacked from behind.

"A close-up angle of BLM rioters knocking a man unconscious who was leaving the #MillionMAGAMarch in DC earlier today," Ngo wrote. "They also steal his phone when he's on the ground."

"Human Radical Left garbage did this," the president added, quoting Ngo's original tweet. "Being arrested now!"

But an extended clip appears to shows the man was with a group of Trump supporters who earlier attacked a counter-protester holding a bullhorn by pushing him down to the street and stepping on his head.

D.C. police on Sunday said they hadarrested nearly two dozen people, many of them on gun charges, according to The Washington Post. One person was stabbed,and four officers were injured.

Police Chief Peter Newsham told The Post that groups on both sides had descended on the city "intent on clashing," and "the police department was put directly in the middle of it."

In Sacramento, Calif., a group of Proud Boys met counter-protesters with bear spray, according to the Bay Area's ABC7 News. Police broke up the incident.

President Trump urged police to use force on counter-protesters, tweeting: "Antifa waited until tonight, when 99% were gone, to attack innocent #MAGA People. DC Police, get going — do your job and don't hold back!!!"

There is no evidence to support the protesters' accusations of widespread electoral fraud in the presidential election. Courts have summarily dismissed the vast majority of the Trump campaign's lawsuits.

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aha: herd immunity latest fallback , magical thinking? does not req admit fail, how admit dumb lack vision do not undersatand # sci killed 100x 911?

250k KIA azar praise

Trump plan for mass death is unfolding before our eyes

Cody Fenwick

On Friday, the COVID Tracking Project reported that the number of positive coronavirus infections in the last day had reached 170,000, the highest record ever and a number tha...

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aha yikes herd idiocy is all we have left when freeDUMB rules, plus // w/ darwin libtard reductionist BS

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aha: scotus attack on unions is 2x whammy ~ moderation; McConn ct packing :he's amplifying polarization, whih will cripple self-correction of sys, increase instability --> crises/sys fail; moderation = DEMOC?! maybe not 2x whammy so much as cascade fail?

an 1120

The core of the Republican Party strength is concentrated in the 27 Right to Work states.As discussed in a previous article, Right to Work laws are designed to weaken unions by cutting their revenue and membership. Unions represent just 7.5% of the workforce in right to work states but almost 16% in "fair share" states. The 27 "right to work" states account for 83% of the currently seated Republican Senators and 70% of their Representatives. In 2016, Trump carried 25 of the 27 these states.

JUDICIAL BRANCH – Anti-Union/Pro Business Judges Dominate the Supreme Court and Appellate Courts

The Republican Party has worked for a long time to ensure that the federal court system is dominated by conservative, pro-business/anti-union judges over the long term. Indeed, Republicans basically packed the court system when Senate Majority Leader McConnell refused to allow the Senate to vote on 105 judicial vacancies during the Obama administration which were later filled by Trump appointees.

Supreme Court. The Supreme Court now has 6 Republican appointed justices and 3 Democratic Justices. Each of the three Trump appointees had a proven anti-union/pro-corporate bias before being nominated.

Amy Coney Barrett. During her term on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, Barrett ruled in favor of corporate interest more than 75% of the time. She ruled that corporations are entitled to set job requirements that exclude older workers and that they may segregate workers at different locations by race. She has also expressed support for striking the entire Affordable Care Act which would deprive health insurance for 20 million people and end protections for 100 million people with pre-existing conditions.

Neil Gorsuch. During his term on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, Gorsuch repeatedly ruled against workers and in favor of corporations. For example, Gorsuch dissented from a majority ruling upholding a National Labor Relations Board decision that an employer must give full back pay to workers it illegally fired for union activity. Gorsuch dissented in cases in which the circuit court majority supported pro-worker NLRB decisions stating that the NLRB exceeded the scope of its authority. However, Gorsuch made no such dissent when the court ruled in favor of NLRB decisions that supported management.

Brett Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh served on the extremely important US District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. This court is second only to the Supreme Court in terms of prestige and power because it has jurisdiction over Congress and most federal regulations and agencies. The People for the American Way compiled a list of rulings showing that Kavanaugh consistently ruled against workers and for corporations during his 12½ years on the DC Circuit Court. Examples include Kavanaugh's opinions that would "entirely eviscerate collective bargaining;" his support for corporations seeking criminal citations for lawful union protests; and support for corporations that failed to protect workers health and safety.

Other Federal Courts. In almost 4 years Trump and the Republican Senate have appointed 24% of all active federal judges (194 of 792). There are 35 more nominations currently pending. Trump has appointed 30% of all active federal appeals court judges (54 of 179). This is more than any other president over the last 40 years. Overall, Republican appointees now account for 54% of all federal circuit court judges. The circuit courts are especially powerful because they function as final arbiter for the vast majority of cases since the Supreme Court accepts fewer than 2% of the 7-8,000 cases filed with it annually. These courts ultimately determine what the federal government can and cannot regulate – this is especially important to unions in relation to the right to organize and collectively bargain for wages, benefits and working conditions as well as the relative power of unions and corporations....

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aha: i got that this was transactional before, but now i see also extraction/extortion; capitalism, he is ultimate / apotheosis of me vs we.

grifter libtards decry gubmint but 1st to line up to suck off taxpyer resouces/ buffer/commons

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/donald-trump-hunger-games-meme/

truscott 4

Remember this number: $3.

That's how much Trump charged the federal government for a glass of water in April of 2018 when he and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe met at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. According to the Washington Post, Trump's company also charged the government "$13,700 for guest rooms, $16,500 for food and wine and $6,000 for the roses and other floral arrangements," over the two days he held meetings with Abe at the resort. But one day, Trump was scheduled to meet with Abe without aides and advisers, with no meal service or cocktails or any other celebratory nonsense. Just the two leaders, alone in a room, talking. According to the Post, the bill for that day contained a line item reading, "Bilateral meeting. Water. $3.00 each."

Donald Trump has been paid "at least $2.5 million by the U.S. government," since taking office, according to official documents obtained by the Post. Trump has made more than 280 visits to his own hotels and golf clubs over the last four years, and the payments covered costs for "hotel rooms, ballrooms, cottages, rental houses, golf carts, votive candles, floating candles, candelabras, furniture moving, resort fees, decorative palm trees, strip steak, chocolate cake, breakfast buffets, $88 bottles of wine and $1,000 worth of liquor for White House aides." according to the Post.

And water. A total of six bucks for water, no charge being too small to make it onto a bill to the government for a payment going straight into the pocket of the man who owns the Trump Organization and everything it comprises, including his resort in Palm Beach.

It's apparently a good part of what the Trump base likes about him — his appetites, his pure, unadulterated, money-grubbing-right-down-to-$3-for-water greed. Trump has wanted more his entire life. He wants more money, of course. He has spent a lifetime in pursuit of more money, and then some more, and more and more. He borrowed so much money in pursuit of even more money that it drove him into bankruptcy, several bankruptcies in fact. Today, as president, he is said to be in debt for nearly $1 billion to banks and other lenders, a debt that will come due within the next few years, according to the New York Times and other reports.

Trump wants more fame, a drive that started off with mentions in gossip columns like the New York Post's "Page Six," during the years he was coming into his own as a builder in New York City. He used to call gossip columnists and plant items about himself, posing as a PR person, and then he would call the columnists the next day and comment on their mention of him in order to gain yet another column inch or two in the tabloids. Some said he ran for president back in 2016 to "burnish his brand," to achieve even more fame and use it to make even more money. Since he became president, he has been relentless in his pursuit of attention, tweeting at all hours, criticizing cable networks who don't give him enough coverage, calling in to shows like "Fox & Friends" and "Hannity" both to reward them for the coverage they've already given him, and to get more coverage.

He wants more women, from wife No. 1, Ivana, when he was just starting out, to wife No. 2, Marla Maples, after he jettisoned Ivana, and now wife No. 3, Melania, who replaced No. 2 when he determined she had a few too many miles on her. And then there were all the women in between, in and among his marriages, the women he groped on airplanes and at bars and during parties, the women he (allegedly) raped in places like a Bergdorf's dressing room or a hotel room or a bathroom during a party, the women whose mouths he forced his tongue down, the women he pushed up against walls and pressed himself against, the women whose bodies he commented on in offices or across rooms, the women whose skirts he put his hand up at restaurant tables, the women whose breasts he grabbed at tennis tournaments and beauty pageants, the women whose rear ends he grabbed in green rooms before television show tapings, the women he dragged behind curtains at New Year's Eve parties and forcibly kissed and groped. All of those women. Trump wanted their bodies and their mouths and he took them without asking permission because he was Donald Trump, and he took what he wanted.

He wanted more golf, so he played more golf more frequently than any president before him. He wanted so much golf that he went around the world buying and building his own golf courses, and then he played them, because he owned them, and because he owned the golf carts, as president he could charge the government for his own Secret Service agents. He could even charge the government for the hotel rooms the agents stayed in while they protected him. He charged the government $17,000 a month for a cottage at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf course, which the Secret Service had to rent month after month just in case he had a mind to play a round of golf.

Trump wants more adulation, more love from the "base," and when he feels he isn't getting enough, he tweets. There aren't enough hours in the day for Donald Trump. He was up at 3 a.m. this week, tweeting about the Supreme Court, the court to which he has appointed three arch-conservative justices, yelling at them for their recent decisions allowing mail-in votes to be counted after Election Day, because of course, he wants more votes. He's been up at 3 a.m. tweeting before, taunting a Miss Universe contestant for a "sex tape," taunting CNN as "low rated," bragging about his debate performance, yelling at polls that show him losing.

And now Trump is making his final campaign swing through the "battleground states," feeding the insatiable need of his base for more of himself. "Four more years" has become "12 more years." Somehow Trump is owed more years of the presidency because "they" took two or three years away from him during the Russia investigation, because "they" spied on his 2016 campaign, because "they" don't deserve to win. The red-hat-wearing mobs of un-masked fans at his rallies want more of the America they think Trump is bringing back to them. It's an America that is more white, has more guns, has more churches, more of "us," less of "them."

That's what they like about him. They want it all, the same way he does. That's what opposition to affirmative action has always been. They don't want some of the college admissions, they want them all. That's what Shelby County v. Holder was about, that's what voter IDs and all the restrictive rules about voting by mail are about. They want all the votes.

For the Trump base, making America great again means making America ours again, but he's going to make sure he puts it on their tab, right there with $3 for water and $546 for rooms and $50 for decorative palm trees for table decorations and $1,005.60 for 26 servings of Patron and Don Julio tequila, 22 Chopin vodkas, and six glasses of Woodford Reserve bourbon consumed by White House staffers at the Mar-a-Lago bar. It's going to cost us more than votes to get our country back. We're going to be paying for Trump's insatiable greed long after he's gone. More than 228,000 of us have already paid with our lives. If the Friday totals keep up — 98,500 new cases and more than 900 dead — a half million of us may perish by the time Trump walks out of the White House for the last time.

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aha, no accident this is most pronounced on youtube? post-literate, video enflames emotiions more than print, bypass brain, plus algo amplification:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/are-fox-news-viewers-racist/

It's no secret that U.S. politics has become highly polarized.

Even so, there are probably few living Americans who ever witnessed anything that quite compares with this fall's first presidential debate.

Was it really the case that the nation could do no better than a verbal food fight, with two candidates hurling fourth-grade insults and talking past each other?

To us, the discordant debate was just one more symptom of the nation's fraying civic discourse, which, in a recent study, we were able to show extends to the words we use to talk about politics.

Earlier this year, we started constructing a data set that consists of all of the viewer comments on YouTube videos posted by four television networks — MSNBC, CNN, Fox News and One America News Network — that target slices of the political spectrum. Together, the data set contains over 85 million comments on over 200,000 videos from 6.5 million viewers since 2014.

We studied whether there are distinct variants of English written in the comments sections, akin to the distinction between British English and American English.

Using machine learning methods, we found these permutations do exist. Moreover, we can rank them in terms of the "left-ness" and the "right-ness." To the best of our knowledge, this is the first empirical demonstration of quantifiable linguistic differences in news audiences.

Our second finding, however, was even more unexpected.

Our machine learning translation system found that words with vastly different meanings, like "KKK" and "BLM," were used in the exact same contexts depending on the YouTube channel being analyzed.

The company a word keeps

When translating two different languages — say, Spanish and English — automated translation systems like Google Translate begin with a large training set of texts in both languages. The system then applies machine learning methods to become better at translating.

Over the years, this technology has become increasingly accurate, thanks to two key insights.

The first dates back to the 1950s, when linguist John Rupert Firth came up with the aphorism "You shall know a word by the company it keeps."

To modern machine translation systems, the "company" a word keeps is its "context," or the words surrounding it. For example, the English word "grape" occurs in contexts such as "grape juice" and "grape vine," while the equivalent word in Spanish, uva, occurs in the same contexts — jugo de uva, vid de uva — in Spanish sentences.

The second important discovery came rather recently. A 2013 study found a way to identify — and thereby link — a word's context in one language to its context in another. Modern machine translation depends heavily on this process.

What we have done is to use this type of translation in an entirely new way: to translate English to English.

When "Trumptards" become "snowflakes"

That may sound bizarre. Why translate English to English?

Well, consider American English and British English. Many words are the same in both languages. Yet there can be subtle differences. For instance, "apartment" in American English may translate into "flat" in British English.

For the purposes of our study, we labeled the language used in each network's comment section "MSNBC-English," "CNN-English," "Fox-English" and "OneAmerica-English." After analyzing the comments, our translation algorithms uncovered two different patterns of "misaligned words" — terms that aren't identical across the comment sections but are used in the same contexts.

One type was similar to "flat" and "apartment," in the sense that both are describing ostensibly the same thing. However, the word pairs we uncovered have different intonations. For example, we found that what one community calls "Pelosi," the other one calls "Pelousy"; and "Trump" in one news-language translates into "Drumpf" in another.

A second — and deeper — kind of misalignment occurred when the two words refer to two fundamentally different things.

For example, we found that in CNN-English, "KKK" — the abbreviation for the Ku Klux Klan — is translated by our algorithm to "BLM" — shorthand for Black Lives Matter — in Fox-English. The algorithm is basically finding that the comments made by one community about KKK are very much like the comments made by the other about BLM. While the belief systems of the KKK and BLM are about as different as can be, depending on the comment section, they seem to each represent something similarly ominous and threatening.

CNN-English and Fox-English are not the only two languages displaying these types of misalignments. The conservative end of the spectrum itself breaks into two languages.For example, "mask" in Fox-English translates to "muzzle" in OneAmerica-English, reflecting the differing attitudes across these subcommunities.

There seems to be a mirrorlike duality at play. "Conservatism" becomes "liberalism," "red" is translated to "blue," while "Cooper" is converted into "Hannity."

There's also no lack of what can only be called childish name-calling.

"Trumptards" in CNN-English translates to "snowflakes" in Fox-English; "Trumpty" in CNN-English translates to "Obummer" in Fox-English; and "republicunts" in CNN-English translates to "democraps" in Fox-English.

Uncharted territory

Linguists have long emphasized how effective communication among people with different beliefs requires common ground. Our findings show that the way we talk about political issues is becoming more divergent; depending on who's writing, a common word can be imbued with an entirely different meaning.

We wonder: How far are we from the point of no return when these linguistic differences begin to erode the common ground needed for productive communication?

Have echo chambers on social media exacerbated political polarization to the point where these linguistic misalignments have become ingrained in political discourse?

When will "democracy" in one language variant stop translating into "democracy" in the other?

Mark Kamlet, University Professor of Economics and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University; Ashique KhudaBukhsh, Project Scientist at the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, and Tom Mitchell, Founders University Professor of Machine Learning, Carnegie Mellon University

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aha: both putin meddling and trump is trying to undermine confidence in system // tobacco FF corps denial to sow doubt?!

who broke America: RR, grover, gingrich koch libtards, beck limbaugh, jbs larouche, everyone who has been systematically attacking govt so now we have gubmint wackos xian ammon bundy but also wolverines saying tax = theft, traitors FEMA camps jade helm bill gates microchips in the vax.

an 1020 cdv

tim snyder yale:

...I think your word "fear," though, is very well taken. But I'd push that out in a different direction.

:{:{}:

Fear is also an important concept here. Trump is running for reelection based on fear – much more so than in 2016. In 2016, it was a mix. Trump and his campaign were talking about infrastructure. They were trying to go to the left of the Democrats on some issues. Whereas in 2020, it's now just pure fear. A fear that Black people are going to rape white women in the suburbs, and they are going to burn down the cities. The pandemic is either Black people's fault or it is a conspiracy, or it is not really happening. Fear is being consciously created and then manipulated. The Democrats are really running against a Reichstag Fire. The Democrats are not really running against a political party and Donald Trump's campaign.

...

What do we know about the connections between a humane society and authoritarianism?

There is a strong connection. In my new book "Our Malady" I explore this.

For example, on an individual level, when you can't talk, you do not have freedom of speech. When you can't move, you do not have freedom of assembly. When you do not think that you are going to have a future, then freedom is no longer a meaningful concept.

If you cannot afford health care, you're afraid. If you're ashamed to talk about health care, you're less free. If you're aware of that the access to health care is going to be competitive and somebody who's less sick than you might come ahead of you because they have better insurance and better connections or whatever it might be, then you are less free. Pandemic or not, it all creates a situation where there is not an unnecessary reservoir of anxiety and fear. And that totally unnecessary reservoir of anxiety and fear can be directed to other places.

The talent that Donald Trump has is to either generate that anxiety or to take the anxiety and fear that already exists in America and to direct it in the ways that he wants to. Authoritarianism works through taking abuse and trauma and pushing it in other directions.

Donald Trump understands that he cannot win a free and fair election.Trump knows that the pandemic and the economic downturn can give him the sources of energy that he just might be able to use to stay in power some other way than an election. Donald Trump is in "the worse, the better" territory now, because he understands abuse, pain, trauma, fear and related things. Evil understands evil. Trump understands that the more anxiety and fear is out there, the larger the chances he must somehow turn the election in his direction and then pick up the pieces.

Election Day is imminent. How do you respond to those critics who would say that, "You were talking about a Reichstag Fire! It didn't happen! You are an alarmist. Hysterical! None of that happened!" What would you tell such people?

Obviously, we are in a slow-motion Reichstag Fire right now. That is what is happening. Donald Trump is not as skilled as Hitler. He doesn't work as hard as Hitler. He doesn't have the same level of confidence as Hitler, but he's clearly looking for that Reichstag Fire emergency. Trump tried to make Black Lives Matter into that emergency. "Antifascists" and "thugs" and "law and order" and so on is part of that effort. Donald Trump keeps trying to make the Reichstag Fire work.

If Trump is not successful, then that is a credit to the people who are resisting. Donald Trump is not involved in a political campaign; it is emergency politics in the constant search of an emergency. Whether Trump and his allies can line up the emergency politics with the emergency, I do not know. But that is all that Trump and his allies have got on their side — and it all they are going to have through to Election Day.

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aha: who broke America: RR, gramms, gingrich---> REPAIR THE COMMONS

RR: fairness doctrine kill --> Rush, Fox anti-trust --> FANG 1 plus 2 --> Qanon

gubmint useless/wasteful if not evil --> aGENDA 21, 2 santas , militias boogaloo

student debt

libtard financialization, militarization, criminalization War on Drugs

death squads MS13

CU, cheney

graham OIRA tozzi DQA, DEREG PVT

xian

gang of 5 manafort, atwater

wise use

risk assess

vigurie direct mail

yaf/leadership inst?

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RW has PR advantage b/c of four simpleinterlocking isms: xian, free mkt, anti-commie, pro-milita

trump pays lip service to xian (uses them, but pvtly despises as suckers, // to KIA/vets USSR putin bounty; pretends to be capitalist but repeated fails, subsidies avoids taxes (also for suckers); massive corp socialism in CARES? kush covid grifter?

VP buys god loves capitalism?

OMG INTERLOCK STORY DOVETAIL, property and wealth are sacred? thus kyle mom standing O

sparked by

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/mike-pence-is-a-reminder-that-destructive-leaders-are-symptoms-of-an-anti-democratic-status-quo/

norm s

If President Trump dies from the coronavirus that has killed more than 200,000 Americans largely due to his deliberate negligence, the man replacing him will be no less dangerous. While Mike Pence has eluded tough media scrutiny -- in part because he exhibits such a low-key style in contrast to Trump -- the pair has been a good fit for an administration that exemplifies the partnership of religious fundamentalism and corporate power.

The vice president, a former Indiana talk-show host who went on to become a six-term congressman and then governor, has described himself as "a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order." But he remains at cross-purposes with the biblical admonition (Matthew 6:24) that "you cannot serve both God and money." Whether Pence has truly served God is a subjective matter, but his massive service to money—big money—is incontrovertible.

Pence ranks high as a Christian soldier marching in lockstep with Trump on all major policy issues, a process that routinely puts business interests ahead of human lives. Whatever his personal piety might be, the results of Pence's fidelity to right-wing agendas have further consolidated a de facto coalition of those seeking ever-lower taxes on wealth and corporations; denial of LGBTQ rights; a ban on abortion and severe restrictions on other reproductive rights; voter suppression and barriers to voting by people of color; obstruction of healthcare for low-income people; and on and on.

Pence embodies the political alliance of very conservative evangelical forces with anti-regulatory forces of corporatism. In the arenas of elections and governance, that coalition is the present-day Republican Party, dedicated to imposing the edicts of religious dogma, rolling back democratic reforms and serving the rich at the expense of everyone else.

"As vice president, Mike Pence is doing everything in his power to control people's bodies," the Planned Parenthood Action Fund declares. Meanwhile, those who are inclined toward racism or outright believers in white supremacy are bolstered. And Wall Street has never had a better friend in Washington.

Pence's most consequential role during 44 months as vice president has been as chair of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Since late February, he has functioned—in effect—as Trump's willing executioner, standing by and blowing smoke while Trump obfuscated and lied as the death toll kept mounting.

"The truth is that we've made great progress over the past four months," Pence proclaimed in a mid-June statement, "and it's a testament to the leadership of President Trump." Pence charged that "the media has taken to sounding the alarm bells over a 'second wave' of coronavirus infections"—but "such panic is overblown."

To underscore his full devotion to Lord Trump's downplaying of the virus, the vice president concluded with a blame-the-messenger flourish: "The truth is, whatever the media says, our whole-of-America approach has been a success. We've slowed the spread, we've cared for the most vulnerable, we've saved lives, and we've created a solid foundation for whatever challenges we may face in the future. That's a cause for celebration, not the media's fear mongering."

Pence's June 16 statement made its way into the Wall Street Journal as a prominent op-ed piece whistling past Covid graveyards. "It was so clearly wrong back then and has turned out to be so clearly wrong since that I hope there's some part of him that's embarrassed," Ashish Jha, the head of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said in late summer. "I had already been seeing data for a good week that things were really heading in the wrong direction." The Washington Post editorial board immediately responded with a denunciation under the headline "Mike Pence Is a Case Study in Irresponsibility."

No one with any discernment would associate Trump with religiosity because he held up a Bible at a photo op. But the other half of the ticket is a very different matter. Days after the November 2016 election, Jeremy Scahill wrote that Trump is "a Trojan horse for a cabal of vicious zealots who have long craved an extremist Christian theocracy, and Pence is one of its most prized warriors."

Scahill quoted an author of books on far-right fundamentalism, Jeff Sharlet, who said that "when they speak of business, they're speaking not of something separate from God, but they're speaking of what, in Mike Pence's circles, would be called biblical capitalism, the idea that this economic system is God-ordained."

What does all this mean for progressives? The case of Mike Pence should be an ongoing urgent reminder that—as toxic and truly evil as Donald Trump is—the current president is a product and poisonous symptom of an inherently unjust and anti-democratic status quo.

Instead of focusing our rage on the persona of one destructive leader, we should remember that corporate domination provides an endless supply of destructive leaders.While they come and go, the system of corporate power remains—and we must replace that system with genuine democracy.

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boz omg /aha yikes: two robots meld: LLC corp and algorithm / AI: // danny h

https://mainebeacon.com/anonymous-maine-news-site-tied-to-conservative-pac-funded-network/

at first glance, Maine Business Daily seems like some kind of local corporate newsletter, combining niche industry reports, localized data summaries, and press releases from regional Maine Chambers of Commerce. The earliest articles on the site date back to spring 2018 and the vast majority of the articles are attributed to anonymous bylines “Maine Business Daily reports” or “Local Labs News Service.”

However, nestled amid the banal business reporting are two recent stories on the allegations that Democratic Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon, who is mounting a challenge to U.S. Senator Susan Collins, violated campaign finance rules. Jason Savage, executive director of the Maine GOP, is quoted heavily in the posts, which are attributed to West Virginia-based freelance journalist Kyla Asbury (and are the only stories on Maine Business Daily that have an actual name as a byline).

The publication and promotion of these pieces raised some flags for Maine readers, with one Reddit user writing “I’ve never heard of Maine Business Daily, but two of the top three articles in their ‘public policy’ section right now are political articles about Sara Gideon that have nothing to do with policy.”

Screenshot of a portion of the Maine Business Daily website featuring stories on House Speaker Sara Gideon.

Maine Business Daily’s “About” section also provides scant information about who is operating the site, though it does note that part of its mission is to “inspire productive discussion among policy makers, business leaders and the public.”

The Maine State Chamber of Commerce told Beacon that, despite the reposting of local chamber releases, it is not affiliated with the website.

The homepage of Maine Business Daily includes a link to theMetro Business Network, which lists 30 other state-based sites as part of its organization. According to its website, the Metro Business Network “provides a fresh take on business news. Launching in all 50 states plus DC, we aim to cover news from Fortune 500’s to SMB’s on Main Steet [sic].”

Matt Gertz, a senior fellow with Media Matters for America who specializes in conservative media infrastructure, says that these kinds of networks have flourished amid the decline of local news.

“As local newspapers get wiped out or bought out by big chains and reporters get laid off and chains try to seek efficiencies, you see a void around local news and these news networks try to fill that void,” Gertz said. “A lot of sites are providing information about local events that previously you would get from local newspaper, so you come for information about a local event and if you end up with some sort of ideological screed about the terrors of government, it’s a win for them.”

The Metro Business web

The Metro Business Network sites are uniform in appearance and content. The same stories appear across the entire network, with each “Education” page filled with versions of this story: “Graduates earn 91 degrees, certificates from the University of Maine at Machias” and each “Public Policy” section has a regional version of this one: “Maine ranks 3rd for rental car tax rates, study finds.”

Gertz said the content is likely being generated by an algorithm, which provides “a way to mass produce seemingly local content almost with no overhead, because you are paying no reporters to write stories but you can pump out a huge amount of stuff.”

Buried amid the posts, however, are partisan landmines such as this op-ed that appeared on numerous publications in the network, “Next Step in Dismantling Obamacare: Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB),” that concludes: “This is America. Rationing is for commies. Repeal IPAB now!” The column is written by notorious fake pollster and right wing conspiracy theorist Dean Chambers.

Other articles are more subtle, such as this Illinois news story arguing against the local minimum wage increase.

Anonymous news with a worldview

The website’s privacy policy states that Maine Business Daily and these other business news sites are operated by theDelaware-based Locality Labs, LLC, which, according to an April 2018 investigation by the Chicago Tribune, is owned by the conservative Chicago-based media entrepreneur Brian Timpone.

“A firm of Timpone’s called Journatic once used database mining and low-cost freelance writers to create hyperlocal news stories for the Tribune until complaints emergedof plagiarism and faked bylines,” the Tribune reported. That firm is “now known as Locality Labs.”

An earlier piece published in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2016 revealed that Locality Labs, or Local Labs as it is often called, is part of a web of content creators, online and print publications run by Timpone and his cohorts that were accused of electioneering due to their coverage of and connection to candidates and political action committees. Some of Timpone’s news ventures received hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding from theLiberty Principles PAC, whose objective is to “support candidates for state and local offices who are committed to the economic liberty policy agenda.”

Ashbury, who authored the two stories on Gideon, has bylines published on other Locality Labs-owned sites, including the Cook County Record, West Virginia Record, and Legal Newsline — the website of which explains that its coverage is focused on how state court rulings impact the “legal landscape for corporate executives.”

Asbury’s LinkedIn profile says that for the past year she has worked as a freelance writer for a company called Interactive Content Services. The 2018 Tribune article said that another Trimpone-owned firm Newsinator “has a history of doing paid political work and offers marketing services to companies under the name Interactive Content Services.”...

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9/20 "weaponize": ok i have used the term myself for rw taking something good/true/benign and pervert/evil it for political gain, going on offense in an unfair way

but now they are mirroring/co-opting our term, just like Fake News, an applying it to any (scientifc evidence, in this case wildfires, maybe the most in your face of AGW, eg Australia, amazon rainforest

this may be extension of thoughts and prayers now is not the time in our grief over mass shootings we cannot be rational in our decision (to increase gun control regulations)

how sleazy is the left that they would use the lives of children and grief of parents to score political points

not so much a myth as a tactic; note it also gets to play on some sort of xian piety, mass shooting is mindless act of crazy gunman, part of god's plan? we are calm strong contemplative ppl of faith, must no yeild to irrational lefties

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aha 3 forks marg mead

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aha/yikes: the ppl's tools PROPS ~ corps hijacked by them; jiu jitsu? asset/buffer flips to liability/vulnerability?

note gun to head soda tax, juul fail on local prop b/c of bad PR at inopportune moment? prop 37 beat by last minute TV ads?

relentless ads on roku "free" tv:

an 1020 also lyft and doordash

Expert: Uber-funded ballot measure in California would create 'permanent underclass of workers'

Nicole Karlis

Those who took high school civics may recall that our democracies lives on fractions. A majority vote — one-half plus one — is what it takes to pass a bill in most legislative bodies.

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aha/DOH: trump is VERBAL in insult nickname demonization diminish the weak [fashy] in tweets and i guess speak to press; but visual (escalator ride [down? should have known ; god deigns to descend and be among the little ppl?), trump tower gold; Kremlin eagles crest and soldier door reveal; RNC convention = TV, fireworks (patriotic, war?) craves North Korea parade

9/20 aha, fash-y, strong man acting alone: trump loves signing things foto op with fawning followers (he leaches gravitas, assent/ applause from them) maybe experts who look like they know what they're doing, but congress deadlocked/polarysys (in pocket of corps that want to continue extract $ HMO] and does not want to ACT, just make it look like he HAS many eg neglected but typical: gop beat up bad 2018 blue wave on pre-existing conds, to trump pretends to defend AT THE SAME TIME still trying to kill ACA that actually provides; also visual, reality TV apprentice-like

trump mocked for finally releasing ‘health care plan’ — which is really a ‘toothless’ executive order

David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement September 25, 2020

For at least four years President Donald Trump has been promising the American people a health care plan. He famously sat for the “60 Minutes” cameras just days after the…

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-breaks-out-all-tools-denier-playbook-downplay-climate-changes-role-western-wildfires

fox breaks out all the tools in the denier playbook to downplay climate change's role in western wildfires

09/17/20 12:15 PM EDT

Climate denial, conspiracy theories, and misleading information -- Fox recycles old arguments year after year in wildfire coverage

Special PROGRAMS

CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY TED MACDONALD

PUBLISHED 09/17/20 12:15 PM EDT

Ignoring the clear scientific links between the climate crisis and this year’s apocalyptic wildfires on the West Coast, coverage on Fox News and Fox Business has downplayed and denied the role of climate change in these devastating fires, deflecting from climate science while pushing President Donald Trump’s perennial claim that forest mismanagement is to blame. At least two Fox programs have even falsely suggested that an organized campaign of arson is responsible for igniting the fires in the Pacific Northwest -- a harmful conspiracy theory that has also quickly spread across social media platforms.

Fox shows are following a playbook that they have used with other major fire disasters linked to climate change, including last year’s catastrophic bushfires in Australia and previous catastrophic fires in California.

The goal of Fox’s coverage is always the same: deflect from the scientific reality of climate change and paint Democratic policies as the true culprits in worsening the wildfires.

Deny and downplay the climate crisis

Fox News prime-time host Tucker Carlson is leading the network on denying the indisputable connection between climate change and the catastrophic fires burning on the West Coast. On three recent episodes of Tucker Carlson Tonight, the host and his guests spread dangerous disinformation about the fires.

On September 10, Carlson claimed that “there’s no evidence” climate change contributed to the western wildfires, instead arguing that state regulations and energy grid mismanagement were the real problems responsible for the blazes. Carlson took this a step further on September 11, when he called climate change “systemic racism in the sky” and stated with a straight face that “there is not a single scientist on Earth who knows whether or by how much these fires may have been, quote, ‘exacerbated’ by warmer temperatures caused by climate change.”

To top it off, Carlson invited Marc Morano-- perhaps the most notorious climate denier in the U.S. -- on the September 15 edition of his show to falsely claim that these fires are “not unprecedented” and that it’s really just “climate ambulance-chasing at its core” and “weaponizing weather events” to link them to climate change.

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The exact same line of “weaponizing weather” was used on an episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight last year to dismiss climate connections during the Amazon fires. During a segment discussing those fires in August 2019, climate-denying meteorologist Joe Bastardi claimed that “if humans are causing climate change, it's very, very slight,” and said that any attempts to pin the Amazon fires on climate change was “weaponization of the weather.”

Carlson’s climate-denying rants fly in the face of well-established scientific evidence that climate change is both prolonging the fire season and intensifying the size and scale of the fires. Climate scientists have also called these wildfires “unprecedented” and linked a climate-fueled drought to conditions worsening the fires.

Additionally, Carlson’s claim that “not a single scientist” can link the fires to climate change is also demonstrably false -- and taken laughably out of context. Climate scientist Daniel Swain addressed this point on Twitter, noting that his featured quote from Carlson’s show was “fundamentally misrepresenting climate scientists' public statements on wildfires and climate change”:

Carlson is no stranger to peddling dangerous climate misinformation. Just last year, he invited Moranoto hype a silly, debunked document that claims clouds are responsible for global warming. In March 2019, he stated without evidence that if climate change is affecting natural disasters, “it might be making them in some ways better too.” (Earlier that same month, the Fox host also baselessly accused undocumented immigrants of killing more people in the U.S. than climate change.)

In addition to outright denial, the network has regularly downplayed the connection between climate and the catastrophic fires. A Media Matters study from 2018 found that Fox ran only two segments on California’s wildfires in November of that year that mentioned climate; both of those segments downplayed the role of climate change.

In recent days, Fox shows have attempted to downplay climate’s role by politicizing the climate argument and purposely shifting blame for the fires to other issues. Neil Cavuto did just this on the September 10 edition of Fox Business’ Cavuto: Coast to Coast:

On the September 14 edition of Special Report with Bret Baier, correspondent John Roberts provided cover for Trump’s outright denial of climate change by calling it a “glaring difference of opinion” with California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. Later on in the show, Fox News politics editor Chris Stirewalt attempted to pass off Trump’s clear climate denial as a problem for both sides of the political aisle, calling his response an example of “why people hate our system, because when bad things happen, the two parties want to pick and choose what’s to blame. … Instead, what they hear is politicians picking and choosing the things they like from the menu.”

This strategy of partisan obfuscation also has precedent on Fox: During California’s 2019 fire season, Fox & Friends responded to Newsom criticizing Trump’s assault on climate action by bringing a talk show host with no background in science, Mike Slater, to explain why “liberal policies are really to blame” for that year’s massive wildfires in California.

Jumping to blame “forest management” practices for the fires, while generally ignoring the role of climate change

On the September 14 edition of Your World with Neil Cavuto, Cal Fire Assistant Deputy Director Daniel Berlant dropped a rare example of climate truth on Fox:

DANIEL BERLANT (CAL FIRE): In California, there really is no debate that our fire seasons are getting longer. We are seeing larger fires and more explosive fires. In fact, on average right now, our fire season is on average 75 days longer than they were just four decades ago. And so, you know, we can debate all we want, but I can tell you here on the ground, we are seeing fires that are incredibly destructive and incredibly fast moving.

But right after this segment, guest host Sandra Smith interviewed Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-AR) to downplay climate’s role in the fires and instead promote “sound scientific management” of forests and his Trillion Trees Act, which climate scientists say is absolutely not a way of solving climate change, as the best solutions to worsening wildfires.

Poor forest management has played a role in California wildfires along with climate change and the expansion of people moving into the wildlife-urban interface, which “has increased the likelihood that wildfires will threaten structures and people.” But from watching coverage of the fires in numerous Fox segments, one would probably come away with the idea that it’s been only California’s forest management policies driving the worsening fires.

The jump by Fox to assign blame to the state for poor forest management as a tactic to downplay climate change goes back to at least 2018, when Trump first blamed California’s forestry policies while touring the aftermath of the deadly Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise. At the time, Trump’s response was parroted by Fox News host Sean Hannity, who stated that he was “right” to blame California wildfires on poor forest management, and Fox’s Laura Ingraham, who on her radio show cherry-picked a BBC article to claim that “Trump was right” about wildfires and forest management.

Neither of these segments mentioned climate change. Even worse, Ingraham glossed over the major mentions of climate in the BBC article, which specifically stated that “many experts point out that climate change has made things worse” in relation to those fires.

This framing of the fires by zeroing-in entirely on forest management doesn’t hold up to what climate science is saying -- especially this year. Fire scientists have said that “climate change, not forest management, is a driving factor behind the state’s fires becoming worse and more deadly.” Wildfire expert Stefan Doerr has also stated, “The bottom line remains that the extreme meteorological conditions are the main drivers for these extreme fires,” and he specifically noted hotter, drier, and windier conditions with climate change “has now created a tinderbox of vegetation.” Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe also pointed out on Twitter that it’s a myth to suggest that “the only reason wildfires are burning more area is because of poor forest management.”

Fox’s attempts to cast blame solely on the state’s leadership for poor forest management also fall flat when you consider that the federal government owns the majority of land out west -- in California, 57% is owned by the federal government, while the state government only owns 3%.

The network’s discussion of forest management hit a high point during midday of September 14, when Trump visited California and once again blamed forest management for the wildfires, ignoring climate change. In one example on the September 14 edition of Outnumbered Overtime, Fox contributor Jason Chaffetz called Trump “absolutely right” and blamed the wildfires primarily on a lack of clearing brush, saying “Democrats have been the biggest impediment to doing so.” Later on The Five, co-host Greg Gutfeld stated that forest management is “the problem in California. It's not climate change. It’s forest management.”

Other examples abound. On two separate occasions in the past week, Fox Business’ Varney & Co. hosted conservative talk radio host Larry Elder to talk up poor forest management. On the September 8 edition, he agreed with Trump’s comments and said, “You can’t do a whole lot about the weather but you can do something about the fuel that these fires feed upon that makes these fires so intense and so serious.” Again on the September 14 edition, he repeated that forest management is the biggest issue in fighting the fires and said that “Donald Trump does not believe in climate change alarmism.”

On Fox News, Environmental Progress president and climate contrarian Michael Shellenberger appeared on the September 10 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight to talk up the role of poor forest management at the expense of climate change, claiming that the media’s climate coverage of the fires “has been really irresponsible.” He largely dismissed climate change again on the September 14 edition of Fox News @ Night, when he falsely stated that saturated wood fuel “is driving the intensity of these fires. It's not climate change.”

Later that night on Hannity, host Sean Hannity again made forest management the focal point of blame for the fires, calling it “an important piece of the puzzle.”

Advancing the dangerous arson conspiracy theory

While the conspiracy theory that arson is behind the wildfires has not yet been as pervasive on Fox News as it was in January, when the network’s prime-time hosts pushed the debunked idea that arson was driving the Australian wildfires, it has already been pushed by at least two of Fox News’ shows covering the West Coast fires.

As Media Matters reported on September 14:

During the month of September, record wildfires made worse by climate change have raged across California, Oregon, and Washington. As the fires have spread and officials have tried to contain them, a conspiracy theory claiming that “antifa” has been behind the wildfires has spread across major social media platforms. In reality, as NBC News noted, incidents like “lightning, faulty or knocked-down power lines and accidents” have been reported as the cause of many of the fires. Authorities, including the FBI, have been forced to rebut the false “antifa“ claim as people have refused to evacuate and militia groups are getting active.

The use of focus on arson as a counter-narrative to climate change follows the exact same playbook used during Australia's deadly wildfires from late 2019 into early 2020, when Murdoch-owned media and other right wing outlets peddled false claims that arsonists were to blame for the historic blazes, and not climate change. However, this talking point was debunked; as one study found, only a handful of blazes out of 11,000 were deliberately set. Notably, the arson conspiracy theory now not only distracts from the climate crisis, but is also an attempt to vilify activists protesting police brutality. For right-wing media, this false narrative is the proverbial killing of two birds with one stone.

....

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aha: values /freedom/liberty trinity (taught/enforced by strict fr vs godless commies and hippies

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Aha: this is an extension of pinko prof brainwashing and campus conserv student silencing b/c of PC cancel culture; gin up hype in front of election (TP kirk bloody revenge coming for your kids?! also reaction to BLM for end of systemic racism.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/loving-your-country-is-not-the-same-as-loving-trump-how-the-right-makes-a-mockery-of-us-patriotism

on September 17, in a speech delivered at the National Archives Museum, President Trump announced he was signing an executive order establishing the 1776 Commission, aimed at promoting what he called a “patriotic” and “pro-America” education. The announcement was a direct attack on the 1619 Project, a New York Times initiative that explores the legacy of slavery in the United States. For Trump, teaching critical race studies is akin to committing child abuse “in the truest sense of those words.”

“Our youth will be taught to love America with all of their heart and souls,” Trump announced. He accused the left of destroying children’s love of their country by teaching the facts of its history — facts, he claimed, wrongly “rewrite” American history as founded on oppression rather than freedom. He’s demanded that schools “teach American exceptionalism” and said that schools are teaching students to “hate their own country.”

This was just the latest show of Trump’s blatant conflation of racism with patriotismand it served as yet another example of how Trump has turned patriotism into a self-serving performance free of any connection to facts. From the start, Trump has attempted to define patriotism not as loving the country, but rather as loving Trump. All we need to do is remember that the same man who dodged military service spent over $2.5 million on a Fourth of July military parade designed to be primarily a celebration of himself.

Before analyzing the damage Trump has done to U.S. patriotism, let me be blunt: “loving” your country is stupid. Patriotism, when it is nothing more than blind adoration of a country, is idiotic at best and fascist at worst. Countries don’t need to be loved; they need to be built, critiqued, developed and improved. They need to be held to the highest ideals and they need to face their shortcomings so that they can strive to be better. The relationship citizens have to their nations may always include some affect, but real support for a nation thrives when citizens emote less and reflect and engage more. So, when patriotism is synonymous with loving your country, it is always, already a bad idea. but setting aside the question of whether it even makes sense to debate who does or doesn’t love their country, there seems little doubt that the time has come to push back on the way that the right has conflated loving the United States with loving Trump....

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aha: reduction = retaliation = transaction

terministic screen/tunnel vision limits to small number of visible things right here and now vs larger complex system/ long term; also zero sum

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/americas-enemies-perceive-weakness-in-donald-trump-foreign-policy-expert-explains-how-the-president-squandered-us-exceptionalism/

no lnx audio

c de v

bot line chaotic makes him weak/played

president of the United States takes the following oath at his or her inauguration: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Donald Trump has repeatedly betrayed this promise, and should long since have been removed from office for doing so.

The Constitution deems that the president is commander in chief of the military. As revealed in famed journalist Bob Woodward’s new book “Rage”, Donald Trump believes that members of the U.S. military who have been wounded or killed in battle are “suckers” and “losers” for not being as selfish and cowardly as he is. Trump also believes that disabled veterans should not be seen in public because they somehow shame or embarrass the country.

Trump also has no respect for the United States military’s role as defender of the country’s democracy from threats both foreign and domestic. To that end, he attempted to order military commanders to attack Americans who were (and are) exercising their constitutionally-guaranteed civil rights by protesting against his regime in response to the police killing of George Floyd, as well as in support of social justice more generally.

Fortunately, military commanders put the institutional legitimacy of the armed forces ahead of the president’s whims by deflecting his orders. Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has also apologized for appearing alongside Trump on the streets of Washington.

Trump has repeatedly suggested that he is likely ignore the results of the 2020 election, and may seek to use the military to quell protests or other acts of resistance, perhaps by invoking the Insurrection Act.

Trump has also pardoned accused or convicted war criminals because he idolizes cruelty and lawlessness. Trump and his regime, in fact, views war criminals as useful tools in his authoritarian campaign against American democracy.

Many of the United States’ most senior retired military personnel, members of the intelligence community and diplomats, as well as other elites in the national defense community, have publicly condemned Donald Trump as an extreme threat to the country’s safety, security and democracy.

Overall, Donald Trump has made the United States less safe, less respected, less powerful, less influential, and less respected as a world power. In the Age of Trump and the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. has become a pariah nation, shamed before the world.

Is there any strategic logic to Trump’s decision-making about the United States and its role in the world? How do Trump’s ignorance, selfishness and authoritarian beliefs, combined with his conviction that his own personal interests are identical to the nation’s, imperil our safety and security? Does the Trump regime’s contempt for the truth and empirical reality endanger the long-term future of our nation?

In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with Jim Sciutto, CNN’s chief national security correspondent and co-anchor of “CNN Newsroom.” Sciutto previously served as ABC News’ senior foreign correspondent and during his extensive career has reported from more than 50 countries, including Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. His new book is “The Madman Theory: Trump Takes on the World.”

At the end of this conversation Sciutto warns that the consensus among many of the country’s senior defense and intelligence professionals is that Donald Trump idolizes Vladimir Putin, and is somehow personally bound to him. If this is true, Trump’s fealty to a foreign leader has fatally compromised his ability to make decisions in the best interests of the United States and the American people.

You can also listen to my conversation with Jim Sciutto on my podcast “The Truth Report” or through the player embedded below.

How are you feeling, given all that is happening and has happened with Donald Trump and his administration?

I’m feeling stress for my country. That is not a political sentiment. I love my country. I’ve spent a lot of time outside of it for professional reasons. As a foreign correspondent, you end up loving America more because you live in places where they do not have our freedoms or institutions, many of which we take for granted. When I see those institutions being undermined here in the United States and people losing confidence in their own country, I am very concerned. I am still an optimist, but there is much to be concerned about here in the United States because of Donald Trump and all that has happened.

How does America look from abroad?

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There is not a lot of respect right now for the United States. I do not want to overstate that because, frankly, there are many countries in the world with much bigger problems than this country right now.

For example, the COVID outbreak. The U.S. has certainly been one of the worst in terms of responding to it. That is not a political statement. It is based on the data. Europe is doing much better for example than the United States with the pandemic and its deadly consequences and other problems.

The state of the country’s political discourse is also not good. Is the United States able to solve problems in the way it did not too long ago? Pew polling shows that the world’s opinion of the United States has greatly diminished. The world is viewed much worse than it was during another low point, which was during George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

How are career diplomats and other public servants reacting to the Trump regime and its assaults on norms and values? These are government professionals who have served in multiple administrations. How are they making sense of this tumult?

Here is what is different. There have always been disagreements about policy and how best to accomplish those goals. What is different now is that there is an assault on the truth. There is not an agreed-upon set of facts. At first, I thought that maybe having to confront a pandemic would do that. Another example would be Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. There was a bipartisan judgment that Russia interfered, and that the Russians did so to help Trump win.

It came out of committees, as well as the intelligence agencies. Trump attacked those findings and took them personally. That was a consensus not just of a bipartisan committee but the country’s intelligence community as well. Intelligence findings can be attacked more easily because it is still a matter of interpretation.

But in the middle of a pandemic, there are hard facts. People are dying. You can count the number of people dying. You can count and document the positive infection rates.

You can count the number of infections. One can easily disprove Donald Trump’s claims that cases are only rising because there is more testing, because the percentage of people testing positive is also going up. But not in this environment where even the facts are disputed. Conspiracy theories existed well before Donald Trump, but he has super-turbocharged them to the point where they are leaking more and more into mainstream conversation. Democracy cannot operate without an agreed-upon set of facts and the country is miles down that rabbit hole right now.

:{:{}:

Does Donald Trump have an ideology? Is his administration guided by some overriding principle that orients its approach to the world?

:{:{}:

He has an approach and a view of the world. It is an open question as to whether he has a strategy — and that is a question raised by people who worked for him. For my new book, I spoke only to people who worked for Trump and were appointed by him at the highest levels.

:{:{}:

When I asked those officials to describe Trump’s view of the world it was described as transactional: “What can you do for me? I scratch your back. You scratch mine.” Trump has done that equally with adversaries and allies. Trump has no worldview beyond that. There is no understanding of the ancillary benefit of friendships and alliances.

[Former national security adviser] H.R. McMaster told me how much trouble he had convincing Trump that there was more to alliances than just some sort of quid pro quo bottom line. These include shared history, shared values, a shared interest in the rule of law, sharing of intelligence to fight terrorism and other understandings. Trump does not see the world and alliances in that way. As such, Donald Trump will just as easily upend a friendship as he will antagonize a competitor. The United States is on a path of confrontation with China. But the United States also has highly antagonistic relationships now with our closest allies in Europe. With South Korea, the president is demanding they quintuple their contribution to the deployment of U.S. forces there and is threatening to take those forces away in the midst of the worsening standoff with North Korea.

Or even consider Canada, arguably one of our closest allies. Trump has used national security powers to impose economic sanctions on them including tariffs. In essence, Donald Trump has labeled Canada a national security threat.

Donald Trump does not read. He is proudly ignorant. He is a malignant narcissist. How is it even possible to have a coherent foreign policy with such a president?

Trump’s national security advisers knew and realized that he was not reading any of the briefing notes. So early on, McMaster’s team came up with the idea of boiling the briefings down to note cards with just three bullet points, thinking that would get through to Trump....

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AHA: schiff impeach oversight is MODERATION checks and balance = diversity

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/experts-who-warned-trumpism-could-destroy-us-democracy-in-2018-are-even-more-worried-now-we-werent-alarmist-enough/

alex h

When Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s book, “How Democracies Die,” was released in January 2018, critics of the Harvard University political science professors described them as alarmists. The book had a dire warning: the United States’ liberal democracy was in danger because of Trumpism. But two years later, Levitsky and Ziblatt have not backed down from that message — in fact, they are now saying that they should have been more worried in 2018.

Levitsky told HuffPost, “Joe Scarborough ridiculed it on TV, saying, ‘These guys are alarmists.’ It turns out we weren’t alarmist enough.”

Scarborough, the Never Trump conservative who hosts MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” is no fan of President Donald Trump — who he bashes consistently. But when “How Democracies Die” came out, Scarborough argued that the United States’ democracy was robust enough to withstand Trump’s train wreck of a presidency. Scarborough, in a March 15, 2018 op-ed for the Washington Post, argued that American democracy was much stronger than Trump’s chaotic administration.

Journalist Travis Waldron, in HuffPost, notes that Levitsky and Ziblatt aren’t the only “political scholars” or “political leaders” who are “warning that 2020 is a referendum not just on Trump, but on the nation’s democratic experiment as a whole.” But Levitsky fears that too many Americans aren’t as worried as they need to be.

"People are getting killed over politics,” Levitsky told HuffPost. “There’s questions about whether the election will be free. Law enforcement bodies are being manipulated to protect allies of the president and go after rivals of the president. Things are happening on various fronts, and we’re not putting it all together and realizing that our democracy is on the line.”

Liberal democracies don’t necessarily come to power because of an armed coup d’etat or golpe de estado: in some cases, authoritarians are voted into office and gradually undermine a country’s checks and balances. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is an obvious example. And Waldron cites Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro as an example of a far-right authoritarian who was elected in a liberal democracy, warning that democracy in the U.S. is also in danger.

“Republicans in Congress have done whatever they can to protect Trump,” Waldron explains. “They blocked his removal from office after House Democrats impeached him and have kept administration officials from facing consequences for shirking their oversight duties.Without those checks, Trump has proceeded to do whatever he wants: fire inspectors general, attack the judiciary, violate laws and profit off his own office.”

Levitsky told HuffPost, “U.S. democracy has proven weaker and more vulnerable than I thought.”

Amy Erica Smith, a political science professor at Iowa State University, warns that some countries pretend to be democratic and have elections but are actually authoritarian states — or as she calls them, “hybrid regimes.”

“The number one defining feature of a hybrid regime is that the incumbent is using ― and I’ll say ‘his’ because almost always ‘his’ ― all of the benefits that come from office to get himself reelected in an unfair way,” Smith told HuffPost.

Waldron points to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian President Viktor Orbán as examples of authoritarians who pretend to hold fair elections and argues that Trump is trying to do the same type of thing in the U.S. “through his efforts to undermine the U.S. Postal Service and discredit the election as fraudulent before it even takes place — an admittedly odd tactic for a leader already in power…. Trump’s attacks on democracy are in effect thefinal shattering of the idea of American exceptionalism.”

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aha: fox is a corp, and like all psychopathic robots, its function is maximize profit which means max ratings [instant quant fdbk] which means max activation of trumpistas via red meat; this is in conflict w/ mission/function of jrnlism, straight news provides cover/fig leaf; successful red meat hypes fear and anger, and includes energizes the RW trump story/schemas of victimization. murdoch war crimes on AGW amd covid?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/media-critic-fox-news-is-bigger-than-trump-if-he-fights-the-network-hell-lose

do executives at Fox News secretly hope that Donald Trump loses this November because that would be good for the network’s ratings? Before you dismiss that as crazy talk, given the record ratings Fox News has seen during Trump’s presidency, realize that Fox could see even higher ratings when it no longer has to defend Trump’s unpredictable words and deeds and can solely focus on what Brian Stelter calls its “secret sauce”: attacking Democrats and liberals.

Stelter, the host of CNN’s “Reliable Sources” and author of the new book, “Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth,” raised that very scenario during our “Salon Talks” conversation. As he explains it, Fox News has always been more comfortable attacking Democratic administrations, which traditionally has yielded a ratings boon for the network. “The network in a Biden presidency is almost a situation where tails you win and heads you win,” he said. Fox News might face other problems with Trump as a former president, however. Stelter describes Trump as the Frankenstein monster that Fox News helped create, and as in the tale of Frankenstein, he could end up turning against his creator and starting a competing right-wing network.

In our recent conversation, Stelter also addressed Trump’s nonstop attacks on the media, which Stelter says have taken a toll on the credibility of the Fourth Estate: “He has said ‘fake news’ and ‘hoax’ so many times that it has poisoned the public discourse. It’s like a slow-acting poison that kind of gradually moves to the veins of the American body. And we can’t fully know what the impacts are of that yet.”

Watch my “Salon Talks” interview with Brian Stelter below or read the following transcript of our conversation — lightly edited for length and clarity — to learn more about “Hoax,” his harsh words on the Fox News obsession with ratings and his blunt advice for how larger media outlets can rehabilitate their credibility in a post-Trump America.

Your book “Hoax” is like a feedback loop. Does Trump drive Fox News, does Fox News drive Trump, or does it move back and forth all the time?

It is hard to tell where Fox ends and Trump begins. But if I had to choose one side of this, I would say Fox drives Trump more than Trump drives Fox. Fox has more of an agenda setting role than the President does,which is an astonishing thing to say. But when you look at the power of “Fox & Friends,” when you look at the power of Sean Hannity and recently Tucker Carlson, who is achieving policy goals based on segments he produces on his show. I think it’s clear that Trump is usually in a reactive mode, reacting to what he sees and hears on Fox.

Just this morning Trump was tweeting again about what was going on on “Fox & Friends.” It really is his morning briefing. You mention in the book that Fox News does not have a traditional standards-and-practices department like other news organizations do. Even I have encountered this as a columnist for CNN Opinion. Just this past weekend, the standards department made me rework an op-ed. I was like, “But it’s an opinion piece!” They still had issues because they had our common best interests in mind. Could you share with people what standards and practices do traditionally? And by contrast what is going on at Fox News?

Fox is described as a news operation, a news network, but it’s also a political operation. And right now the propaganda is winning and the news is losing. I had staffers at the network say to me that it’s like working at a place that’s anti-journalism. So you’re trying to produce journalism at a place that’s anti-journalism. I’m wearing my CNN hoodie right now. It says “The World Needs Journalists.” The sense that the world needs journalists, that should be a pretty basic concept. It’s hard to disagree with that idea. However, at Fox, there is disagreement. So Sean Hannity says journalism is dead. You’ve got all these folks on Fox denigrating the media every single day and saying the world doesn’t need these journalists.

That creates a real hostile environment for the actual reporters who do still work at Fox. I point out in “Hoax” that many have left. And I have a lot of stories about people that have left for various reasons, including Shep Smith, but a lot of other names you might not know. For the journalists who remain there, it’s this really awkward, tough, sometimes hostile environment. I think the lack of standards and practices speaks to this problem. There is not a unit, a desk or a division that’s charged with vetting news before it gets onto the air. There are some informal processes, but there’s not that official checks and balances system that CNN has. And every other outlet has — forget about CNN — at the New York Times or Washington Post, there are reasons why there are editors and vetters and researchers. That structure just doesn’t exist at Fox.

You make the point that at Fox, ratings are everything. Everyone is profoundly afraid of losing the audience. Does that then mean that the people bringing in a lot of money, Hannity or Tucker Carlson or Laura Ingraham, can literally say anything they want on air, as long as it feeds the audience? Is there no one at Fox News who will say, hey, that’s beyond the pale of what’s acceptable?

There are some exceptions, but what you just said is broadly correct, broadly true and really problematic. There is not this kind of follow-through or accountability that I know happens at other networks and should happen everywhere. This is really most clear in primetime with Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. When something really bad happens, when something really outrageous or racist happens on the air, there’s finger-pointing that goes on inside Fox. Some people will point the finger at the head of the network, Suzanne Scott. Others will point at a woman named Meade Cooper, who’s the executive vice president of primetime. Others will point at the executive producers for those specific shows, right? So they’ll shift the blame, no one agrees on who’s responsible or who’s at fault. And then there’s an attempt to move on and pretend that these embarrassing episodes didn’t happen.

That’s when they go on vacation, right. All of a sudden Tucker Carlson is on a pre-planned vacation?

Sometimes. Although I promise some of these vacations are actually scheduled, they’re just at bad times. Bill O’Reilly truly was always going to go to Italy when the scandal erupted about his secret settlements with women that accused him of harassment. So he decided to go on the vacation that he already scheduled, and then of course, he never came back. He was forced out when he was in Italy. But there are other times, yes, where Fox uses this vacation illusion where they’ll say someone’s going on vacation to let the noise subside around their program and try to preserve their advertisers.

One of the really interesting things in the book are the little details. You mention Bill O’Reilly going to Italy and meeting with the pope. It seemed like, at least the way you were shaping it, that perhaps the pope could save his job. Even that didn’t work out.

I think there’s so many stories about the last five years, these big stars at Fox, who thought they were kings of the world, who thought they were bigger than the network. And it turns out no, Fox is the star, not these individuals. No matter who’s on at 8 p.m. or 9 p.m., Fox’s ratings are going to remain really high. It speaks to the fact that Fox has a monopoly position in this area of the media.

You write about how Fox got sued because of what some people viewed as misinformation regarding COVID-19 by some of the hosts. When it comes to Fox News and the misinformation that it has shared about COVID, do you feel that the network has responsibility for misleading Americans?

I think there’s a lot of blame and a lot of responsibility to go around about the pandemic, but Fox had the biggest platform on cable and President Trump had the biggest platform in the country. He has the loudest megaphone and he knows how to use it. So the failures of Trump and his media allies to warn the country and prepare the country for what was coming were absolutely shameful. That’s why we called the book “Hoax.” We were originally going to call it “Wingman.” But when Trump came out and said, “These Democrats, they tried to impeach me, now they’re hyping coronavirus, they’re politicizing the virus. It’s their new hoax.” And Sean Hannity said something very similar a week and a half later. They were viewing this as politics, not as a medical emergency. That was the fundamental problem.

And they were always two or three weeks too late, meaning that when Trump finally took action involving flights from Europe, the virus had already gotten in and it was spreading silently across New York City and several other states. And of course, when he announced the European restrictions, there were these long lines of people all shoved together at airports. Fox, to its credit, had a reporter who called that out and criticized the government for it. There were these moments on Fox where there was great reporting, excellent medical advice, excellent segments with doctors. But I think those segments were drowned out by the downplaying of the disease, by the attempts to politicize this and downplay it.

I’ve never seen a president make life and death a partisan issue. And it’s not over. In North Carolina, he and his supporters were not wearing masks. Donald Trump Jr. has been out there attacking the media saying that it’s a lie, that people were wearing masks. Last week, Trump made fun of Joe Biden for wearing a mask. If you take a step back and look at this is, does it feel surreal that you have a president dealing with a life-and-death pandemic in this way, where it’s all about him? Everyone’s doing things to hurt him as opposed to wanting to simply save lives.

It’s embarrassing. And sometimes you need a little bit of perspective, you need to zoom out a little bit. You need to think back six months — it’s been about exactly six months since all our lives changed and these lockdowns began. Now we’re slowly coming out of it and looking around and seeing what the world is like. And the words from the president six months ago sound even worse now, right? We had a sense when he was contradicting his science experts and health experts that he was doing damage. We had a sense when he was downplaying the disease that it was dangerous. We know now, much more clearly, how dangerous and damaging it was.

This is true for his media allies as well. His pro-Trump propagandists. Trump was calling up Hannity at the end of March and saying, “How are my ratings? How do we rate? I called into your show, Sean, how did I rate?” A good friend would have said to him, “Donald, don’t ever ask about that again, we’re in the middle of a crisis. We’ve got hospitals overwhelmed by the surge, we’re trying to order body bags. Don’t ask about your ratings. Please don’t tweet about your ratings again. Please don’t do it, it’s bad for you.” But instead, his so-called friends feed his ego rather than trying to actually help him. I would argue that they actually hurt him when they claim to help him by telling him about his ratings.

The book could have been called “Ratings, Ratings, Ratings” because that’s what Fox News is moved by. It’s a profit machine. When your only touchstone as a news outlet is ratings, what compromises do you end up seeing on screen?

Let me be clear, I’m in television, I’m on CNN. I care about ratings. I care about my show doing well. I look at the ratings every day. But there’s much more of a fixation at Fox on winning because this network’s been No. 1 for 18 years. Everybody knows what’s at stake and what’s on the line, and there’s this intense desire to feed the audience what it wants and keep the audience at all costs. I had producers at Fox describe this as a really unhealthy relationship, where sometimes they fear the audience. Sometimes they don’t respect the audience, but they’re desperate to keep the audience’s attention. What that leads to is Trumpier and Trumpier segments. Segments that are unhinged from reality, that are based in conspiracy theory, that are feeding the audience’s wants and desires and not what they need. And again, this is the problem across television. It is much more severe at Fox.

As you mentioned, at CNN, MSNBC and all the big media outlets, ratings are important. They are connected to profits. But when your only goal is ratings, it’s going to cause massive compromises. Shep Smith and others behind the scenes at Fox News understood that they were putting their careers on the line given that ratings are everything.

Well, also, the ratings also tell you what the audience wants, what the audience expects. Shep Smith’s show at 3 p.m. was the lowest-rated show in daytime, the lowest-rated hour of the day on Fox. It meant that viewers were turning the channel actively when he came on. They did not want to hear him with his corrections to what was aired earlier in the day and his fact checks of the president’s lies.

In the ratings for notable Democratic events, like Joe Biden’s speech or the funeral of John Lewis, you see dramatic declines in Fox’s ratings. Viewers turn it off when the Democrats are speaking and they turn it back on when the rebuttal from the Republicans is starting. So you end up thinking that the audience has been radicalized. What else can you say?

They’ve been served a diet of red meat. Fox News should come with a warning: It serves so much red meat that it’s not healthy. I mean, look, Chris Wallace, Bret Baier, they’re more news journalists. On some level, though, they’re part of the Fox News machine. Is it fair to say they’re also complicit in what is going on?

Well, that’s certainly what some of their friends say, or their former friends. The Trump era has done damage to those kind of gentlemanly, old-fashioned, courteous relationships that you see between television anchors and rivals and all that. And certainly throughout my reporting, talking to dozens of people that were complicit that came up a lot, this sense that the news anchors there are like fig leaves of respectability. One person once said to Chris Wallace at a Columbia event, “Do you think you are there to truth-wash primetime?” That was an interesting term, “truth-wash.” Wallace is on one hour a week, Sean Hannity’s on one hour, five nights a week, in a much, much higher-rated program. You’ve got to look at Fox and say that the identity of Fox is Hannity and “Fox & Friends,” these bigger shows.

But I still think the journalists there do serve important purposes. I understand why they stay. They want to be there for big events. They want to provide a reality check, a fact check to the rest of the programming. But let’s say Bret Baier’s show, for example, is on at 6 p.m. “The Five” is much higher rated at 5 p.m., and then the ratings drop at 6. Not everybody wants to see a newscast, but even his newscast is tilted to the right toward Trump. His panels, for example, in the back half of the show, are tilted to the right. Sometimes the lefty will be a journalist and then he’ll have a pro-Trump person and another right-wing figure.

He tells people that he does this because he wants to have left, right and Trump. And I get it that sometimes “right” and “Trump” are not the same thing, but those panels are not balanced. Those panels are not representative of where the country is, right? If you want to have a panel that represented the country, that’s not how it would look. My point is, even on the newscasts, these programs are tilted in Trump’s favor.

Clearly, Trump has had an impact on Fox News. You’ve mentioned that Trump is their Frankenstein monster, but I want to get a sense from you on how the rest of the media is doing. Do you think the media is better at covering Trump this time, in terms of using the right language? For a long time, people didn’t want to call him a liar, you probably remember that. Now we’re beyond that. We’re two months out from 2020, using terms like “white supremacist” about Donald Trump, using the term “fascist” in an academic sense, not a hyperbolic sense. Are we at the point where the media can speak bluntly about it? ...[much more]

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aha/sum/analysis 9/5/20

anarchism is a real actual historical thing, but often mischaracterized; latest incarnation blends with Antifa, which basically says we cannot afford to give the streets/public space to brownshirts, alt rt/ militias, and we must be prepared to meet the force/violence they explicitly want and have come equipped for [note f/u portland guy killed, he said defend AA friends/allies, ~ // kyle self-defense]; we cannot depend on the police to stop their violence, because they are allies, and the police also use force/violence against AA POC peaceful protesters; Black Bloc says power never gives up power voluntarily; people and their rights do not matter, but OUR property must be protected at all costs (AA lives have no value/importance); BB says we will impose [a transaction?] cost, if you ignore the will of the ppl, it will COST you in terms of property damage [if you lock us in ghetto/poverty/ lower working service gig economy class, we will destroy your stuff/ability to do biz/make more $

ARSON metaphorical: anger /rage physical manifestation, // trump 2016 hand grenade the system is rigged against us, so let's blow it up/burn it down (if we cannot benefit, neither can you]; most good sized/ rowdy protests will have garbage set on fire, this inevitably portrayed by rw fox news as VIOLENCE; next level is smash windows, next level is loot; kyle R responded to militia facebook post to protect property (gas station/ car dealer/repiar?) he was initially reported to be a property/biz [small biz entre hero backbone meritocrisy] defending his property / stand your ground mcCloskey suburb heroes rnc for gun brandish; --> thugs on a plane foment riots as coup to get rid of trump [add to long list of failled attempts, impeach, fake covid ...]

all get conflated into enemy mob who hate america/western civ: anarchist = socialist = communist = violent left-wing extremist = thug = AA= paid protester = soros/jew

is this product of being baffled/ ~ to intersectionality?

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WHEELER BS FIX EJ: BUT FREE MKT FUNDAMENTALISM IS THE CAUSE NOT THE CURE

one upon a time, LBJ was able to harness the pressure of CRM, and maybe 60's ctr-culture, and perhaps the martyrdom of JFK, MLK and RFK to jam thru civil rights and voter rights acts, as well the the Great Society, oft wrongly seen as a failure; it did affirmative/ active programs that gave poor ppl money, education, job training...[RR cut housing 80? rick p WITH pod 920)

Later affirm action lost in ct? Bakke? UC? 187? RR attack mythical welfare queen, so direct assistance became taboo [BC did welfare reform, 3 strikes superpredators?]

But must at least be seen to do something for inner city POC, so we get opportunity/empowerment zone, tax breaks for real estate dev in crappy parts of town;

so not giving cash to poor ppl, but only a tax/break incentive to competent rich white guys, then the benefits will tricke down on poor ppl. // urban renewal? gentrification? sports stadiums?

NOW 920 Wheeler needs cover because the massive EPA rollback on regs clearly hurt POC, especially kids, so extends paul driessen Green blk death energy poverty BS or maybe more generally and slightly less cynically, cut red tape will allow economy to thrive, blk ppl will get some of that $, and can then afford to move away from toxins?

...“Communities that deal with the worst pollution in this country—and tend to be low-income and minority—face multiple environmental problems that need solving,” Wheeler said. He suggested President Donald Trump’s “opportunity zones” plan—recognized by experts as a giveaway to the rich—as a remedy to environmental injustice....

===

[[[cascade update:

404

an 920

the coronavirus pandemic has only made the opioid epidemic worse

The Conversation September 3, 2020

by Elizabeth Chiarello, Saint Louis University COVID-19 has overshadowed the U.S. opioid crisis, but that doesn’t mean opioid addiction has gone away. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the opioid crisis has…

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cascade / compound/ interacting factors

Hurricane Laura worsens already inhumane ICE conditions

Gabe Ortiz / Daily Kos

Detained people already suffer dangerous conditions while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody, including inhumane living arrangements, medical mistreatment or no treatment at all, and systemic patterns of abuse. The novel coronavirus pandemic has only piled…

cascade interactions: AGW --> drought --> bark beetle = fuel --> fire --> move infected ppl into confined large shelter and pollutes air /aggravates lungs --> infections

820 ew ]]]

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STORY (btw left/commie infidels who do not believe this story of Am exceptionalism hate america/freedom and want destroy/supplant it}:

see strict fr

see god/devil terms

cf 4 horse dovetail ism pattern match experiment vs phobias; --> coherent story?

aha 820 entrepreneur as CONCEPT/GOD TERM: sparked by rnc convention: entre is also a GOD term, ties into Yankee ingenuity/ am exceptionalism sil valley garage mystique: affirms meritocrisy [sic] that racism will fix itself when AA POC start small biz that expand (cain godfather pizza 999 RIP?] overlooking the fact that redlining by gov't and banks deprived of capital for decades; but of course you have to get rid of burdensome regulation/red tape that stiffle [when in fact corps/amazon will use data to steal your idea/product and crush you or buy you out. small biz and gig economy means own boss thus in control thus = freedom --> fix for INEQUALITY THUS RACISM

but of course to be an entre you must have skills/a good education but socialist dems want to trap poor kids in failing public/gov't schools to serve big corrupt union bosses, so devos waNts FREEDOM TO CHOOSE/SHOP voucher/charter b/c free mkt will create better schools [vs suck/extract from big part of public budget/ schools are the COMMONS THAT MADE DEMOC AND PROSPERITY POSSIBLE; --> scam online virtual classes [jail the blk girl who refuses pointless jumpthruhoop fill in the blanck

aha: concept of control = freedom, loss of control = slavery

commies want to control your mind, your actions, your energy use (as a way of controlling your behavior)

control is also law and order, which the strict father must impose/ punish transgression because children / POC do not have discipline (or intelligence) to control their own actions/base impulses

order is enforcement of hierarchy; the job of the strict father is to instill discipline in sons who can handle it and marry off daughter, outsource/delegate the job of control/disc of women

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/rnc-review-speakers-described-an-alternate-reality-in-which-chaos-and-violence-of-the-trump-era-is-joe-bidens-fault/

no lnx twt

RNC review: Speakers described an alternate reality in which chaos and violence of the Trump era is Joe Biden’s fault

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Once Upon a Time the pilgrims were being discriminated against [by a Prot?] King geo III, so like good entrpreneur/pioneer/explorers they sailed to New World discovered by Columbus to bring God to America; friends w/ Nat Am first thxgiving, Boston Tea Party no Tax w/o rep, Lexington Minutemen militia w/ musket beat dumb/dainty Redcoats, Dec Indep, Sacred Const by Founding fathers all men created equal, gave th gift of democ/freedom/light to world,

undergd railroad, civil war for states rights (freedom from gubmint tyranny; rebs underdogs fought well but beat (by industrial/banker?) north, emanc proc freed slaves, reconciliation, all americans.

Railroads, robber barons fixed by trustbuster Teddy; we stayed out of endless pointless Eur wars, till WWI (WW promised to keep out in ca,pign) now war to make world sagfe for democ? war to end all wars [jail/deport reds who said war for capital/bosses via espionage act]. Yanks won war, no L of N but after Gt Depression we won WWII [UN? boo] became superpower vs USSR; Reagan thatcher won the cold war, socialism forever discredited, some tyrants manage to hold on Cuba and even export to S Am Chavez and Central Am [guate coup 1954, Iran year before]; MLK > Malcolm/panthers fixes racism; Contras beat by Ollie and Reagan; End of History, Free Mkt fundamentalism Ayn Rand Greenspan. tax and spend liberal dems cripple our economy with regulations to solve non-existent problems like asbestos, carcinogens, AGW [Heartland says hoax, reverse engineer, Agenda 21 comie one world plot to take our freedom]

unions are corrupt and hinder economy; teachers unions control dems and trap our/POC kids in failing schools; a few bad cops shot AA men, but look they shoot each other all the time selling drugs; Blue Lives matter, Biden and KH want to get rid of cops, so no protection so you need a GUN.[also to fight off gov't tyrannt like woam dem gov of Mich who takes away your Const freedom by forcing you to wear a mask, worst kind of nanny state;

Biden son corrupt, sol us out to ChiCom who sent covid virus, which djt quickly took action by shutting border // caravan/muslim; he created prosperity by rolling back regulations and gave massive tax cut to the job creators; the lazy/dumb/sinful deserve to be poor; [opportunity zone actually real estate scam for rich?]

but now the godless commies have come back for your guns, and the gov't will destroy your white quality of life suburbs by rezoning low quality apts (which bring low quality POC criminals/gangster] who will make you unsafe and drive down the value of your house/property/equit/ retirement nest egg.

trump the strong man/strict fr will protect us from godless irrational muslim extremeist jihadi terrorists, the brown horde at southern border WALL and from antifa extrmeisty terrorists who want to loot and burn even small biz of POC entre.

dems will let crims out of jail. invite MS13 into suburbs, coddle anarchists/antifa; trump will send in the tough guys to restore law and order/control, put those ppl back in their place [and deploy at polls to ensure not rigged/cheating]

BLM is identity politics, put me at head of line give me a handout i do not deserve b/c i'm lazy; worst form is reparations for sin of slavery [nikki h at UN tyrants defy us and then demand $, a lot of it that we could use to build our country MAGA]

trump master negotiator will make better deal (nafta the worst deal in the history of the world don jr rnc], NATO pay fair share we will not be chumps to freeloaders.

this story has to explain how we lost power/prestige/leadership/prospeirty and how we will get it back

---

aha: concept of control = freedom, loss of control = slavery

commies want to control your mind, your actions, your energy use (as a way of controlling your behavior)

control is also law and order, which the strict father must impose/ punish transgression because children / POC do not have discipline (or intelligence) to control their own actions/base impulses

order is enforcement of hierarchy; the job of the strict father is to instill discipline in sons who can handle it and marry off daughter, outsource/delegate the job of control/disc of women

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/rnc-review-speakers-described-an-alternate-reality-in-which-chaos-and-violence-of-the-trump-era-is-joe-bidens-fault/

no lnx twt

RNC review: Speakers described an alternate reality in which chaos and violence of the Trump era is Joe Biden’s fault

Written by Igor Derysh / Salon August 25, 2020 Commentary

The first night of the Republican National Convention featured a diverse lineup that defended President Donald Trump from charges of racism, even as other speakers sought to stoke racial fears and push conspiracy theories.

The convention, largely consisting of a mix of live and pre-taped speeches before an empty auditorium, appeared to take place in an alternate reality where Trump had successfully beaten back the coronavirus pandemic, and where the protests, violence and racial division seen during Trump’s presidency would only get worse Democratic nominee Joe Biden is elected. It was a wildly dishonest night, with the New York Times fact-checking team counting at least 30 false and misleading claims.

“This one half-night of Republican programming so far has been exponentially more dishonest than the entire four nights of the Democratic convention,” wrote CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale.

While Republicans insisted that their convention would be optimistic, and headliners like former UN ambassador Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina delivered speeches on the promise of America that could have taken place under any other Republican president, the tone of the night was dark and the theme was racial fear-mongering.

The night kicked off with a speech by Charlie Kirk, founder of the right-wing student group Turning Point USA, who described Trump as a “bodyguard of Western civilization” — a common white nationalist dog whistle — who is defending America against a “vengeful mob that seeks to destroy our way of life, our neighborhoods, schools, churches and values.”

Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio gave a speech riddled with falsehoods accusing Democrats of stoking “crime, violence, and mob rule.” Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, one of Trump’s most loyal followers in Congress, bizarrely warned that Democrats will “disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home, and invite MS-13 to live next door.”

Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple who threatened Black Lives Matter supporters with guns, delivered a gloomy, downbeat chat accusing “radical Democrats” of trying to destroy the suburbs.

“They are not satisfied with spreading the chaos and violence into our communities. They want to abolish the suburbs altogether by ending single-family home zoning,” Patricia McCloskey said. “This forced rezoning would bring crime, lawlessness and low-quality apartments into thriving suburban neighborhoods.

“These are the policies that are coming to a neighborhood near you,” she added. “So make no mistake: No matter where you live, your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats’ America.”

These divisive speeches were interspersed between people of color who insisted that neither Trump, the Republican Party nor the nation had a problem with racism.

:{:{}:

Former NFL player Herschel Walker — who once played for the New Jersey Generals, a long-gone USFL team owned by Trump — said it “hurt my soul” to hear people call Trump “racist,” noting their long friendship. Haley, speaking of her own experience as the daughter of Indian immigrants, said that “America is not a racist country” but a “work in progress.”

Scott, the night’s keynote speaker, [heh appt by nikki] delivered a powerful speech on the promise of America and his own experiences with racism. Scott urged viewers to “not look simply at what the candidates say” before listing a number of remarks made by Biden to suggest that he, and not Trump, would ignore minority communities. Scott repeatedly insisted that Biden wants to turn the U.S. into a “socialist utopia,” which would be news to Biden and the progressive primary challenges who repeatedly criticized him for being too conservative.

But while the headliners tried to ignore the division stoked by Trump since long before he launched his 2016 campaign, Donald Trump Jr. and his girlfriend, former Fox News personality Kimberly Guilfoyle, stole the show with stunningly dark and loud diatribes that prompted viewers to question whether cocaine was involved.

Guilfoyle, who earns $180,000 per year from the Trump campaign, shouted an amped-up speech into the empty auditorium comparing Democrats to socialistsin Cuba and Venezuela. Guilfoyle, who was formerly married to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, claimed that Democrats (including her ex-husband, apparently) had turned California into a “land of discarded heroin needles in parks, riots in streets and blackouts in homes.”

“They want to control what you see and think and believe so that they can control how you live,” she warned. “They want to enslave you to the weak, dependent liberal victim ideology to the point that you will not recognize this country or yourself.”

“Biden, Harris and the rest of the socialists will fundamentally change this nation,” she continued. “They want open borders, closed schools, dangerous amnesty, and will selfishly send your jobs back to China while they get rich. They will defund, dismantle and destroy America’s law enforcement. When you are in trouble and need police, don’t count on the Democrats.”

Donald Trump Jr. gave a speech touting his father’s response to the pandemic, albeit one that was entirely detached from reality.

He claimed that the president had “acted quickly,” even though Trump spent the crucial early weeks downplaying the threat, and that the administration had delivered supplies to “hospitals that needed them most,” even though the Health and Human Services Department’s inspector general found rampant shortages of vital supplies. Six months into the pandemic, such equipment remains in short supply.

:{:{}:

The night also featured segments in which Trump hyped hydroxychloroquine, a drug that has repeatedly been found ineffective in treating the coronavirus, and a video that touted Trump’s “rapid policy changes” in the face of the pandemic.

MSNBC broke away from the broadcast to fact-check the claims.

“To say that 170,000 souls lost in our country up to now is a success by any measure is fantasy,” Dr. Vin Gupta, a disease expert at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, said during the segment. “It’s disrespectful to the families who lost loved ones, to frontline clinicians who put their lives at risk. It’s just fantasy. It’s propaganda.”

During another segment, Trump spoke with a group of Americans who had been freed from overseas prisons, including pastor Andrew Brunson, who was arrested by Turkey during President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s purge following an unsuccessful coup attempt.

“To me, President Erdogan was very good,” Trump told the pastor, who was detained for two years.

Though all of the major news networks break away during portions of the convention for analysis and ads, Fox News host Sean Hannity warned his viewers that “the media won’t cover large parts of the RNC that we’ll be showing.”

:{:{}:

Twitter users couldn’t help but notice that Fox News actually aired fewer segments from the convention than CNN and MSNBC. Trump’s former campaign manager, Brad Parscale, tweeted his complaints at Fox News.

:{:{}:

“Can’t believe I have to watch the convention on @CNN,” he wrote. “Unbelievable.”

---

tentative nodes: asymmetry and projection:

aha: I try to stay away from pop psych, but trump seems to obviously be doing projection i know i am but what are you? so biden and hunter are corrupt etc etcv, massive voter fraud by dems poc...but triggering the libs means pushing their PC buttons, perhaps saying shit you don't mean/beleive; but here's the projection part: conservative are hard-wired to be afraid, and fox stock in trade is to stoke fear and hatred of dems, but triggering wants to portray the DEMS as FEARFUL (or just naive?)

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520 aha; strange how much grift around god, guns, patriotism, televangelist, NRA, hype/ fear good for fundraising cf direct mail funding fr vigurie

aha: fraud often targets older ppl who might be less web savvy, but it's also easier to scare them; conservatives in general are easier to trigger re threat; if in an info silo/bubble easier to scare and harder for them to get better/ info

aha wall grift: fear involved b/c we ned protective barrier to keep THEM POC mex rapists out; but wife in Hamptons said about WINNING which means have money and pref fame; LOSERS deserve their fate, not smart hardworking thus moral, thus do anything /crime to not be in lower cat;

stock market supposed to be ultra smart # guys making rational decisions, but often said driven by two base emotions: fear and greed.

---

[[ aha: anez bolivia evang // bolsonaro re-assert rightful place above uppity indigenous?

has doing god's will earned him "magical authority? see below

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-and-white-evangelical-christians-are-bonded-by-sadism/

john s eb

there’s still too much confusion over the president’s bond with white evangelical Protestants (WEPs). I suppose there will always be as long as outsiders presume that Donald Trump’s strongest supporters believe in loving thy neighbor as thyself. Once you see that WEPs do not apply the Golden Rule universally and unconditionally, things become clearer. Once this Christian concept is removed from the discussion, “paradoxes” melt into the air. What’s left is a natural alignment of political interests.

How do I know WEPs don’t truly believe in the Golden Rule? From life experience. I know what I’m talking about. All you have to do is listen carefully, however, and know what to listen for. Elizabeth Dias wrote a big piece in the Times last week trying to clear up the “contradiction” of WEPs standing by Trump “when he shut out Muslim refugees. When he separated children from their parents at the border. When he issued brash insults over social media. When he uttered falsehoods as if they were true. When he was impeached.” A source explains helpfully that there’s no contradiction at all.

“The years of the Obama presidency were confusing to her,” Dias wrote of her source. “She said she heard talk of giving freedoms to gay people and members of minority groups. But to her it felt like her freedoms were being taken away. And that she was turning into the minority.” The source: “I do not love Trump. I think Trump is good for America as a country. I think Trump is going to restore our freedoms, where we spent eight years, if not more, with our freedoms slowly being taken away under the guise of giving freedoms to all. Caucasian-Americans are becoming a minority. Rapidly.”

This makes no sense to outsiders. Freedom for “gay people and members of minority groups” is not taking anything away from anybody. This makes no sense, because outsiders do not generally accept a worldview in which power is ordered. First God, then man, then woman, then child. White over nonwhite. Heterosexual over LGBTQ. Christian over non-Christian. When you believe with your whole being that power is ordered according to God’s will, “giving freedoms to gay people and members of minority groups” is not political equality, as outsiders would often see it. It’s knocking you out of the order of power. It’s taking something away. Equality is literally theft

when political equality is theft, you cannot apply the Golden Rule universally and unconditionally. If you did, you’d be complicit in a crime. The Golden Rule demands white people share power with nonwhite people. It demands husbands share power with their wives. Neither can ever be done.A wife, according to the same source in Dias’ reporting, must “submit” to her husband in accordance with God’s law. If she does not, she’s trying “to rule over him.” Same for whites and nonwhites. If white people are not at the top of the order, they are being ruled over. This is why Dias’ source says that, “Caucasian-Americans are becoming a minority. Rapidly.” The more for “them,” the less for “us.” They believe Trump prevents that from happening.

They believe Trump is “restoring their freedom.” Utter nonsense. What they are really saying is that the president will prevent people lower down the order of power from achieving more freedom and equality, “violating” their “freedom.” He must do that by any means, even if he confiscates kids from their mothers, bans a world religion, orcommits treason. None of that matters as much as maintaining the supremacy of a religious identity built on sand.And make no mistake: this is a religious identity. These are very real anti-democratic Christians hostile to critical thinking, modernity, pluralism, and all forms of equality. “It’s almost like it is a reverse intolerance,” a WEP source told Dias. “If you have somebody that’s maybe on the liberal side, they say that we are intolerant of them. But it is inverse intolerant if we can’t live out our faith.”[ // reverse discrimination]

If WEPs believed in the Golden Rule, they’d never tolerate other people’s pain. They do tolerate it, however. Indeed, they like it. It feels good to see the president “restoring their freedom.” When WEPs say they want to “live out our faith,” what they mean is sadism is and should be a natural consequence of the natural order of things in which God’s people are chosen to rule in God’s name. “Evangelicals did not support Mr. Trump in spite of who he is,” Dias wrote. “They supported him because of who he is, and because of who they are.” That’s correct, but take that to its logical conclusion. His enemies are their enemies. His pleasures, their pleasures. Their bond is far from a contradiction. It’s an alignment of political interests in which sadism is the point.

----

has doing god's will earned him "magical authority? ends justify the means? see above

mis-spoke? made up extreme exec priv or somesuch? invokes article II? or somesuch?that chosen onewas a goof/joke? tho rw in bolivia ~ evo m claims she is restoring xian thus doing god's will? reasserts hier over indig prez

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/former-dhs-staff-trump-claimed-magical-authorities-to-break-the-law/

no lnx

no lnx twt text

Former DHS staff: Trump claimed ‘magical authorities’ to break the law...]]

LOIO

8/20 orphan, sparked by? // amplify? accelerate?proliferates geometrically/ [kids say, exponentially [ incorrectly for increase = rate on increase increases?

aha 820 spark 2 is "streisand effect" hydra-head whackamole on de-platform; it's a network resilience effect

eg Qanon:

https://www.axios.com/qanons-2020-resurgence-41759d2b-7d08-4d6e-bad0-d2a63b6285ad.html

aug 4

strange realities of 2020 have perfectly played to the kind of fear QAnon thrives on, driving record online interest in the conspiracy theory.

Why it matters: QAnon is not just one fringe conspiracy theory — it's a sprawling network of falsehoods that's seeping into the mainstream. Its growing influence is sowing fear and confusion around some of today's most important issues, such as election integrity and the coronavirus pandemic.

Catch up quick: QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory that alleges the "deep state" is engaged in a global fight to take down President Trump.

QAnon rose out of the 2016 Pizzagate conspiracy theory and has grown into a decentralized network that analyzes cryptic prophecies dropped in remote online forums by "Q," who claims, without ever offering evidence, to be a Trump administration official with high-level clearance.
Q maintains President Trump is secretly fighting a child-selling cabal in the U.S., though the conspiracy has spiraled to cover a vast array of claims, from JFK Jr. having faked his death to help Trump behind the scenes to the coronavirus being a hoax or a biological weapon engineered in either case by sinister elites.

By the numbers: Conspiracy theories tied to QAnon are growing more popular.

There was more than 10 times as much Google search interest in QAnon in mid-July than in mid-January, according to Google Trends data.
QAnon pages and groups on Facebook had nearly 10 times more likes at the end of last month than they did last July, according to data tracked by the Atlantic Council and shared with Axios.
There has been a 190% increase in the daily average number of tweets with popular QAnon hashtags since March as compared to the seven months prior,according to data from GroupSense provided to Axios.

Parts of the mainstream Republican party have latched on, helping drive its conspiracy theories mainstream.

11 QAnon supporters are now 2020 Republican Congressional nominees.
President Trump himself has retweeted QAnon followers at least 90 times since the pandemic began, and others in Trump's inner circle have also shared Q content.

Between the lines: For all its twisty logic and branching details, Qanon is premised on a simple narrative of the good working to vanquish the evil, who are responsible for all the world's ills. There are very real concerns that may be driving more people to that narrative.

2020's battered economy has spurred wide-ranging anxiety and uncertainty.
Child trafficking, central to QAnon, has seen greater visibility, with the Jeffrey Epstein saga working as "gasoline poured onto QAnon embers, springing the theory back to life at a moment when some believers were suffering doubts," said Ethan Zuckerman, director of MIT's Center for Civic Media.
Coronavirus has funneled what might otherwise be disparate conspiracy theories about cover-ups and global vaccine schemes into the grand unified theory offered by QAnon.

QAnon could pose real-world danger as it grows, scholars and analysts worry.

Experts are particularly concerned it could undermine faith in democracy, with recent Q posts questioning vote-by-mail and election integrity.
The web of misinformation expanding from within QAnon "definitely has real teeth," said Bryce Webster-Jacobsen of cyber intelligence firm GroupSense.

What to watch: Tech giants are starting to crack down on QAnon, but policies around it are inconsistent and may in some cases be easily dodged.

Twitter recently shut down 7,000 Q-related accounts. It expects broader policy changes to limit the reach of another 150,000 accounts, per NBC News.
Facebook removed five pages, 20 accounts, and six groups associated with QAnon for violating its content manipulation policies in May.
TikTok blocked several hashtags related to QAnon last month from its search results, although some of the videos that originally had the hashtags may still be available on the platform.

Yes, but: Studies have shown that users are more likely to seek out bad information when a Big Tech platform flags it as false.

"There's sort of this censorship backfire that happens, and people start becoming outraged that [a video is] being taken down and then sharing it more and more and more," said Zarine Kharazian, assistant editor at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.[// STREISAND EFFECT?!

Meanwhile: New platforms such as Parler and TheDonald.win are giving the conspiracy theory places to spread unchecked.

On Parler, which has attracted conservatives, Webster-Jacobsen said there are 10,000 to 15,000 new posts every day with the hashtags #QAnon or #WWG1WGA — which stands for the Q catchphrase "where we go one, we go all."

The bottom line: Trust in U.S. institutions is dangerously low, which creates a ripe environment for big-tent conspiracies such as QAnon.

"In some senses, the QAnon conspiracy is a deeply comfortable one: the idea that pedophile alien lizard people led by Hillary Clinton are running everything is more comfortable than the truth that no one has their hand firmly on the tiller,” Zuckerman say

[[ child molesters:

doh pizzagate/qanon

oddly // voter fraud, the gop decry it but only ones doing it.

---

aha: anti-semitism is root of conspiracy (right behind masons and the Bavarian Illuinati see idiot Am bk), blood libel xian babies drink blood; 60 min ripoff To Catch a Predator basically sting, proto Reality TV? also Internet new scary thing; child molesters routinely killed in prison by murderers and rapists? Maybe since the list of RW and televangelists crimes and sins so long, they have to prove THEY enemy Dems/infidels are worse. lack of proof is proof [meadows on voter fraud]

Roman catholic fail; oddly both a reaL THING and a delusion? // urban legend, a new thing we fear; helicopter parents?

"gym" jordan

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west wing: ~ pension plan only way to end career in in DC is a live boy or a dead woman; [don't lick the pages]

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Epstein showed off 14-year-old victim to Trump at Mar-a-Lago: lawsuit

Brad Reed / Raw StoryAugust 17, 2020

A new lawsuit claims that late alleged child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein brought one of his victims to see President Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort when she was just 14 years…[el moz pref 12 yo]

7/20? trump wishes female enabler well

https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/rachel-maddow-details-the-disturbing-new-ruling-against-trumps-labor-secretary-in-the-case-of-an-alleged-billionaire-child-molester/

https://www.newsweek.com/jim-jordan-dennis-hastert-ohio-state-alleged-sexual-abuse-bill-maher-1472204

no lnx pix

U.S.

Bill Maher Compares GOP Congressman Jim Jordan to Dennis Hastert Amid Sex Abuse allegations...]]

---

aha/doh see novels! = STORY

BLM 1619 Project invite a questioning of am exceptionalism/chosen by God to spread freedom vs colonial/racist/PIC

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/white-evangelicalism-is-in-decline-and-qanon-could-take-its-place/

Remember the “Left Behind” series [story], about how the Rapture would whisk away all devout right-wing Christians before Jesus Christ unleashed the apocalypse on the unbelievers? Purity rings? Jesus Camp? Breathless stories about “girls gone mild,” giving up sex and tank tops for the Lord? A federal health official who believed that women who had premarital sex couldn’t feel love? Jerry Falwell Sr. and Pat Robertson blaming 9/11 on the “pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way”?

There can be no doubt that the heyday of Christian fundamentalism in America was the George W. Bush administration. Conservatives craved reassurance that they were defenders of “morality”, despite supporting an indefensible invasion of Iraq that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands. These claims to moral superiority over liberals mainly came in the form of policing hymen status, harassing women at abortion clinics and claiming a right to Christian forgiveness (for yourself) whencaught with prostitutes or soliciting gay sex in public bathrooms.

White evangelicals still hold considerable political power, which is why Donald Trump occasionally tries to get photographed fondling a Bible in ways he vainly hopes are convincing. Abortion and LGBTQ rights are still under serious threat, as the Christian right has made major inroads into the federal judiciary.

Perversely, however, the cultural power of white evangelicals is clearly fading, both in terms of numbers and relevance, and that process started long before Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr.’s namewas ever associated with a “pool boy.” Bibles have been largely replaced with Pepe the Frog memes. Public prayer has given way, among right-wingers, to chants of “Lock her up.” You hardly hear anyone on Fox News these days talking up premarital abstinence anymore. They’re too busy arguing that it’s no big deal that Trump has routinely cheated on his wives, or that it’s “pearl-clutching” to be angry that he has bragged about committing sexual assault.

white evangelicalism is in decline, but another movement is rising to take its place, a movement that scratches that same right-wing itch towards false piety and elaborate tribalist mythologies that are incomprehensible to outsiders: QAnon.

Yes, QAnon, the bizarre paranoid conspiracy theory that holds (more or less) that behind the scenes of observable reality lies a shadowy worldwide pedophile ring run by Democrats and prominent celebrities, and that Trump’s bizarre and self-serving authoritarian behavior is actually an elaborate ruse to hide his secret fight to destroy this elite child-abuse conspiracy.

QAnon has grown rapidly since it first emerged in 2017, morphing from an online conspiracy theory to anexplosive political and cultural phenomenon, one that can probably be considered a cult — although it lacks leaders in any conventional sense. While there hasn’t been systematic research into how many Americans are QAnoners, an NBC News study earlier this month discovered that QAnon accounts on Facebook have more than 3 million followers.

An estimated 20 QAnon adherents are running for congressional office this year. One of them, Marjorie Taylor Greene, just won a primary race for the Republican nomination in a Georgia district that is nearly certain to go red in November, in a landslide that suggests, at the very least, that her wacky beliefs didn’t scare off Republican voters. While some Republicans have publicly expressed reservations about Greene — who has apparently made racist comments and used sexist slurs — Donald Trump just called her a “future Republican Star”.

It’s a measure of our bizarre political climate that the Trump campaign sees QAnon as the future, but it’s hardly a surprise. Trump hasn’t been shy about courting QAnon followers, frequently retweeting its adherents (while later suggesting he doesn’t know much about it). But this public endorsement of a QAnon candidate brings the public embrace of the movement to the next level. Now Trump’s campaign is publicly attacking at least one Republican congressman who committed the sin of criticizing QAnon, with Trump’s deputy communications director arguing that the “real” conspiracy theory is the Russian collusion story. (That’s actually true, even if Team Trump has the story upside down.)

As ridiculous as all of this is — in the real world, Trump has wished accused child-sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell “well,” and has shown no particular interest in the issue — the rise of QAnon as a more secular replacement for evangelical Christianity makes a lot of sense.

By claiming to pursue a crusade against the sexual abuse of children, QAnon gives its adherents a feeling of self-righteousness, one that allows them to ignore the reality that they support a deeply immoral and sociopathic president who is bragging about his efforts to steal the November election, and whose malicious mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic has destroyed our economy and led to 166,000 deaths and millions of damaged lives. It lets them construct a story where they’re the good guys who oppose sexual exploitation, when in fact they are fiercely loyal to a man who has been credibly accused of sexual assault by two dozen women.

Evangelical Christianity played the same role for conservatives in the pre-Trump years, letting them feel holy and moral despite openly backing politicians who promoted immoral policies. But it came with a bunch of downsides, like being made to feel guilty for premarital sex, divorce or even (as Falwell Jr. found out) drinking and partying. With QAnon, you get to sleep in on Sunday and have all the sex you like, without giving up that pious assertion of moral superiority or the presumption of secret knowledge.

QAnon even swipes a central tactic from the Christian right: Focusing its concern on imaginary threats to children, while ignoring the very real threat to children (and everyone else) posed by their beliefs and actions.

With the Christian right, it’s all about melodramatic appeals that abortion supposedly “kills babies,” rhetoric that allows them to feel righteous while they undermine the services — social welfare, health care, housing and education — that allow parents to raise actual living children in safe, healthy environments.

QAnon claims to be fighting for children, but the child sex-trafficking victims they speak for are exclusively in their heads. In fact, QAnoners not only ignore the real cases of sex trafficking that exist, which have nothing to do with their conspiracy theory, but get in the way of activists who fight the real problemby clogging up phone lines, confusing their fundraising efforts, and interfering with social media campaigns.And they certainly don’t give a damn about the real-life children that Donald Trump separated from their parents and stuffed in cages along the border.

Embracing ridiculous beliefs, whether in the Rapture or in Pizzagate, seems to be a part of American right-wing DNA, perhaps because wild fantasies are the only way they can distract themselves from the real evil they do in the world.In light of that, the rise of QAnon makes sense. It’s the perfect mechanism, in Trump’s America, for conservatives to tell themselves a story about how they’renoble warriors for truth and justice in the face of overwhelming evidence that they’re not.Hardly anyone likes to face the genuinely bad things they’ve done, and QAnon provides Trump-loving conservatives a fable to justify all their dreadful choices.

---

aha? turner dis a compensatory fable for powerlessness (ppl will not buy racism/ anti-semite) but a fantasy about triggering a cascade effect, notion that popularity of their ideas/power is latent and must be catalyzed [cataclysm? = orgasmic climax? an orgy of violence when others/they will be put in their lower place or obliterated but also a blueprint. who is the hero? takes action/command in the name of? by right of?]

---

aha /yikes

does a factual basis for a bigger lie disable fact check capability eg this on twitter? rhet: note slippage : the flag and bible are sacred (and conflated, see dovetails) but they are objects/property, but their destruction is violence, destruction/desecration; thus the enemy is evil, irrational, cannot be reasoned with so force is essential; plus kirk sez war on US/XIAN by new bogeyman (who are btw the old one, commies extremist/radicals)

escalator, activ meas WT/WE as crossover

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/how-trump-is-once-again-colluding-with-russia/

no lnx twt

how Trump is once again colluding with Russia

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly August 14, 2020

Almost two weeks ago, a story circulated that Portland protesters were burning Bibles and American flags. It spread via social media and was picked up by conservative outlets, such as the Washington Examiner. Of course, several Republican leaders joined the bandwagon.

---

DOUBT CORROLLORY: DELAY IS A WIN SEE FALLBACKS:

1) it's not real

2) it's real but just natural variation (sunspots, medieval ice age...)

3) it's real and human caused, but too expensive to fix (wreck economy)

3a) Lomborg: more efficient to do Y (or do evil in the guise/name of green: frack, nuke)

3b: wheeler many decades out, 3rd world clean water (ignores that coal poisons am water/kids, coal ash, arsenic...)

---

see lomborg shuffle (clintel covid fight covid not carbon) ALSO SHILLENBERGER

820 aha: this is variant last stage of fallback strategy: 1) not real 2) real but not anthro 3) agw but too expensive to fix (wreck gnp) 4: we can afford to fix it, but we must be smart/targeted w/ $ 4a we cvan't really afford to fix big global warming, but we can do smaller green humanitarian stuff [WHEELER CLEAN WATER IN 3RD WORLD] that will make some ppl's lives better and might let us move incrementally to fix climate [and BTW the worst effect/chaos in in far future if ever]

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evil crypto because to promotes denial IN THE NAME OF humanitarianism/ EJ when in fact poor POC in 3rd world will bhe hit 1st and worst, and have least ability to cope and made least contribution to the problem

---

aha-ish: Bannon promoted djt as disruptor, the system is sick/rigged so he will blow it up and give us something better; he will fight your enemies (the chinese, the godless commies/boomers, drain the swamp, restore American prode/dominance [coal mfg]; relatd to throw the bums out they are all crooks? What do trumpistas think the swamp is? they atre fine with crony capitalism b/c bizmen are tough minded, numbers-based tough realists who will bwe efficient and stop wasting our tax money on losers/POC lazy welfare queens. so we should not be surprised when system crashes, because trump ppl know nothing, and are grifter rent-seekers. all they know about gov't is how to leech off it and dump their messes on it. short term / self-ish thinking: how do I/the books look good for next qtr (or for trump the next news cycle, which is 12 hours?!)

as someone else recently observed (burn dwn hs gingrich?) gop has built in political/rhet advantage b/c willing to crash the system to maintain power. (gives them leverage in negot? BUT lost votes in gov't shutdowns?]

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-derangement-syndrome-those-of-us-who-warned-america-that-fascism-was-coming-were-called-hysterical-alarmists-we-were-right-all-along/

Do you remember “Trump Derangement Syndrome?”

It was a cute phrase that likely first appeared in 2015, deployed by prominent voices across the political spectrum to demean, mock, reject, dismiss and deflect the warnings that Donald Trump was a fascist, an authoritarian and a white supremacist, not to mention a vile and dangerous human being with apparent mental pathologies who posed a massive threat to American democracy....

no lnx

Do you remember “Trump Derangement Syndrome?”

Such truth-telling patriots were called “hysterical” and “alarmist,” or told they were “out of touch” and overly “bitter” about Hillary Clinton’s defeat thanks to the antiquated mechanism of the Electoral College and Russian interference. Those who first raised the alarm about Trumpism as a new version of fascism were also assured that ” the institutions were strong” and fascism could never take hold in America — and most certainly not in the form of a proudly ignorant wrestling-heel wannabe and reality-TV huckster.

When Trump won the presidential election in 2016, there were some on the left eager to dance on Hillary Clinton’s grave. A few even gave Trump the totally unearned benefit of the doubt: He claimed to oppose globalization, neoliberalism and “endless war,” and to speak for the “white working class”.

Centrist Democrats and the so-called mainstream American news media also rejected the existential threat to democracy that Trump represented. They convinced themselves, over and over, that the supposed power and gravity of the office would normalize and mature him. He was a “businessman” and a “pragmatist” eager to make deals, not an ideologue — so why worry? Trump was “brash” and “unconventional,” but America’s political institutions were strong.

The stenographers of current events and the other hope-peddlers, with their horse-race journalism, false equivalence “both-sides-ism” and obsession with meaningless controversies would not let themselves see the truth of Trump’s danger or that of his neo-fascist movement. To admit the truth about Trump would mean that the old habits of writing and thinking about American politics are obsolete. Moreover, such an admission would demand speaking truth to power in a way that many members of the mainstream news media, specifically, are too afraid to, for both professional and personal reasons.

Republicans and other members of the Trump movement used “Trump Derangement Syndrome” to bully their critics into silence. The American right celebrated drinking “liberal tears” and loved the way Trump’s victory had made Democrats and so-called progressives go “crazy.”[// to the fed art'l that mollie h etc do not defend djt cos can't but own the libs/ hit bogey[wo]men]

Trump Derangement Syndrome is weaponized language in the same vein as the myth of the “liberal media.” Both lies put Democrats and the mainstream news media on the defense. While the American right and the Republican Party (and now Trump’s neo-fascist movement) drag the issue-space further and further to the right — and have done so for decades — the “liberal media” tries to find an imaginary balance by presenting right-wing extremism as somehow a “reasonable” alternative point of view.

Trump Derangement Syndrome was also a smokescreen for Donald Trump’s wild success in advancing the agenda of the plutocrats, gangster capitalists, Christian nationalists and “Dominionists” — as well as overt white supremacists — in destroying the very idea of government itself as well as American multiracial democracy.

Of course, it was not Donald Trump’s most vocal critics who were “deranged” but his followers, enablers and allies. As I explained in January 2017, shortly before his inauguration:

It is not those who oppose Trump who are deranged, but rather those voters who convinced themselves that a plutocrat authoritarian reality TV star con man and professional wrestler wannabe with no experience in government at any level was qualified to be president of the United States.

This is America’s great national derangement. Those who stand against and oppose Donald Trump are patriots who are trying to return the country to sanity.

Now, some three months away from another Election Day, Donald Trump has finally arrived at the moment which those of us who were slurred as “hysterical” and “alarmist” have warned about for more than five years.

Last Thursday, Trump issued this now-infamous tweet:

With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote??? [// muslim ban "whAT'S GOIng on" = agenda/ deep state]

That same afternoon, when questioned about Trump’s threats to interfere with the 2020 election, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the U.S. Senate: “In the end, the Department of Justice and others will make that legal determination.” This is not true. The Department of Justice and the president possess no legitimate authority to delay or cancel a federal election.

Later in the day, Trump continued to work from the authoritarian’s playbook, attempting to pivot away from his earlier statements. During a White House press event, Trump said:

Do I want to see a date change? No. But I don’t want to see a crooked election. What will happen in November – it’s a mess. I want a result much more than you… I don’t want to be waiting around for weeks and months.

This is a familiar strategy in which the authoritarian challenges norms and boundaries by floating trial balloons and then pretends to change his mind as a way to make the heretofore-unthinkable into something acceptable.

Trump’s most recent threats are but another crescendo in he and his servants’ efforts to subvert and eventually overturn secular multiracial democracy and the rule of law in America.

Only weeks ago Trump began deploying his own personal secret police force, hoping to enforce his will by suppressing dissent and free speech in Democratic-led cities all over the United States. The events in Portland, Oregon, are but a prelude to Trump’s national terrordome.

Trump’s own personal secret police force along with his civilian “watchdogs,” may well be used to intimidate Democratic voters on Election Day and beyond. Trump has repeatedly asked hostile foreign countries to interfere in the 2020 presidential election on his behalf. He was impeached for doing just that with his attempt to blackmail the government of Ukraine to launch a phony investigation of Joe Biden.

Trump continues to threaten senior Democratic leaders, including Biden, Barack Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and others withtreasoncharges, potential imprisonment and perhaps even execution. Former national security adviser John Bolton’s recent book includes details of Trump’s lurid fantasies about having journalists killed. According to Bolton, Trump supports imprisoning his “enemies” in concentration camps — something he is already doing with brown and Black migrants and refugees from Latin America, the Caribbean and other parts of the nonwhite world.

Donald Trump, has repeated his threats, ever since the 2016 campaign, that he will not respect the will of the American people if he loses a presidential election.

In sum, Donald Trump is not pretending. None of this is a game. He is a neo-fascist. Such observations and warnings are not hysterical. They are plain observations based on a consensus of the available facts. [also he can be prosecuted, just today info DA new charges?]

As historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat explained in a 2017 essay at The Washington Post:

The strongman knows that it starts with words. He uses them early on to test out his plans to expand and personalize executive power on political elites, the press and the public, watching their reactions as they arrange into the timeless categories of allies, enemies and those who help him by remaining silent. Some say the strongman is all bluster, but he takes words seriously, including the issue of which ones should be banned.

Now what to do?

In a perfect and just world, the hope peddlers, professional centrists, stenographers of current events and others who maintain the boundaries of approved public discourse in America would go to the public square, prostrate themselves before the world and then beg forgiveness for how they, for years and by various means, empowered Donald Trump.

That will not happen. Instead, such voices will proclaim that they were sounding the alarm about Donald Trump years ago and are the real vanguard defenders of American democracy. In reality, such voices were enablers, far behind the truth if not actively running away it. They are now trying to position themselves on the correct side of history because their shame and failure to protect America from Donald Trump and his neo-fascist movement are so great.

In the weeks remaining before Election Day — which will certainly not be “free and fair” and when Trump’s machinations will be at their most extreme — the mainstream news media and theAmerican people must internalize the fact that the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution mean little for Trump and his regime.

Hopeful claims — or delusions — that the Constitution and state laws dictate the rules of Election Day must be viewed with extreme cynicism. Trump and his enforcers are not restrained by such arcane conventions.

If there is indeed an election on Nov. 3, Americans mUst vote against Trump in overwhelming numbers in order to force him to step down. Unless Donald Trump is convincingly vanquished at the polls, he will find some way to stay in office.

If Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr try to cancel the presidential election or interfere with it in any other way, Americans must take to the streets and engage in corporeal politics — including a national strike and other plans to disrupt day-to-day life and “business as usual” — on a scale so large that they make the George Floyd people’s uprising look like a PTA meeting.

Ultimately, those of us who warned the American people for years, sometimes on a daily basis, about this Mad King and would-be tyrant take no joy from saying, We told you so. There is no satisfaction in being correct about such a horrible thing.

On this point,Jared Yates Sexton, author of “American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World But Failed Its People,” wrote last Thursday on Twitter:

Those of us warning that Trump is an authoritarian capable of destroying democracy haven’t been doing it for profit or attention or out of unwarranted alarmism. None of this is hard to predict. They don’t hide it at all. Stop expecting everything to be fine because “America.”

To watch American democracy, fall so ill so fast, and now to be on the verge of collapse — when such a thing could have been so easily prevented — is a world historical tragedy. SYSTEM CRASH economy, health care sys?!

---

aha rw pundits have an almost perfect record of being wrong [cleese Tetlock 284?], yet somehow paul Ehrlich gets to be poster boy punching bag for inaccurate prediction (did not help he lost long bet). Club of Rome? greens get tarred with that brush.

common ploy / complaint is that left is rooting for catastrophe (motive? if capitalist system crashes we get to build a better one? We hate America and thus want it to fail for pure spite?

related to alarmist Alare Scare chemophobia, manly stoic clear-eyes scientists and engineers are not scared b/c they see reality and are masters of the physical universe. eg nuclear power

Relates to to American Exceptionalism: we are not bound by rules/history, if we run out of X we'll just use Y (or as in peak oil, frack our way out).

---

example

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https://www.nationalreview.com/**2017/04/**judicial-watch-lawsuit-seeks-obama-white-house-records-controversial-global-warming/

former scientist at the NOAA has exposed a shoddy report on global warming. Judicial Watch is suing to learn more.

:{:{}:

following allegations of impropriety over the handling of a controversial climate change report, a government watchdog group now wants to know whether there was any collaboration between the report’s lead author and a key Obama adviser. On March 27, Judicial Watchfiled a lawsuit seeking “all records of communications between a pair of federal scientists who heavily influenced the Obama administration’s climate change policy and its backing of the Paris Agreement.”}:

The FOIA specifically requests correspondence between Tom Karl, the former head of the climate-data program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and John Holdren, the director of Obama’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. Holdren is from that species of Baby Boomer global catastrophists who make changing predictions each decade about how we will all die. He also happens to be the science guy who had the president’s ear for eight years.

aha: is Q an interdisc hub? // anti-mask? [vax, militia?] alt rt boogaloo? already had it as amplify/accelerate

aha: gop/rt busted so many times for dark $/corruption that it needs whatabout so soros = kochs and actblue = dark $/scam

plus they need to neutralize blm demand for justice, and it's a scam than racism not real

note chan origin then moves up escalator to dobbs

=---

6/20

https://www.mediamatters.org/fake-news/debunked-conspiracy-theory-about-black-lives-matter-actblue-and-democrats-can-be-traced

no lnx many pix

A false money laundering conspiracy theory regarding the Black Lives Matter movement's use of a payment processing company for donations has gained traction online among right-wing figures and can be traced back to far-right message boards.

The conspiracy theory alleges that the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement is some kind of a front to launder money to Democrats because the BLM website uses ActBlue to process its online fundraising payments. ActBlue is a payment processor used widely by progressive groups and organizations affiliated with the Democratic Party, and the Republican Party has an equivalent processing company called WinRed. As the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics has noted, “many candidates use [ActBlue] to process donations but that money isn't pooled to be shared across candidates or groups,” and “a donation to BLM through ActBlue goes just to BLM, not any other group.” But the conspiracy theory still has earned well over a million shares and views on social media and has been amplified by a Fox Nation host.

A review by Media Matters found that before it gained traction, the conspiracy theory had been circulating for days on far-right message boards. The earliest mention our review found was at the beginning of June on Twitter, when an account that has pushed the slogan for the QAnon conspiracy theory repeatedly tweeted the claim on June 1 and June 2. The account claimed it had sent the conspiracy theory to the FBI and President Donald Trump, and it urged the Ohio Police Department to investigate the claim.

@OneVoiceUS

The conspiracy theory popped up days later on June 5 on TheDonald.win, a new forum for the subreddit “r/TheDonald,” which was known for violent rhetoric and was ultimately quarantined by Reddit. On TheDonald.win, a user wrote that “when you go to donate on the blacklivesmatter.com website,” you are redirected to ActBlue, which means entities “donating to Black Lives Matter are actually donating to ActBlue.” That means, the user wrote, that the donations may be “just going straight to fund the Democratic presidential campaign.”

The next day, another user on the forum wrote in a post that “BLM is a bait and switch fundraising scam” for the Democratic National Committee “by laundering money through Act Blue.” The user urged others to “tell everyone you know.” This post gained more traction on the forum than the first one, which it directly referenced in the comments. Similar language made its way to Facebook minutes later.

The Donald subreddit forum ActBlue1

Over the next few days, the conspiracy theory also began circulating on 4chan’s “/pol/” message board, a known hotspot for white nationalists, where users pointed to ActBlue to claim Black Lives Matter was “a fundraising apparatus” and a “slush fund” for Democrats. One 4chan user pushing the claim on June 8 used nearly the exact same language as the June 5 post from TheDonald.win.

4chan ActBlue claim

The conspiracy theory also continued to circulate on TheDonald.win on June 8 and reached the subreddit “r/conservative,” where a user called Black Lives Matter a “money laundering scheme” for Democrats via ActBlue. That post was later shared in a YouTube video.

The following day, on June 9, The Gateway Pundit, a far-right blog that has a history of publishing misinformation, posted that the BLM site “appears to be aninternational money laundering scheme used by the Democrats to raise money from an international audience,” claiming ActBlue appears to be “a funding arm of the DNC.” (The site’s owner Jim Hoft shared the post on Twitter, calling it an “exclusive.”) The post gave a “hat tip” to TheDonald.win for the claim. The post was picked up by multiple far-right figures, including by a QAnon-supporting former congressional candidate on Twitter, another QAnon Twitter account with a major following who keeps evading his Twitter ban, and by trollMilo Yiannopoulos on Telegram.

Gateway Pundit ActBlue claim

On June 10, right-wing pundit Candace Owens quote-tweeted an Instagram video pushing the conspiracy theory and accused Black Lives Matters of being a “shell company” for Democrats via ActBlue(Owens also posted the video on Instagram, where it received well over a million views). Minutes later, “Q,” the central entity of the QAnon conspiracy theory, posted a link to Owens’ tweet on 8kun’s “/qresearch/” message board. Owens’ post has been retweeted more than 64,000 times so far.

Candace Owens ActBlue claim

Following Owens’ post, the conspiracy theory began spreading to other conservative figures, such as Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch; a Florida Republican congressional candidate who has given credence toQAnon; Students for Trump founder Ryan Fournier (who, like Owens, incorrectly called ActBlue a “Democrat super PAC”); Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk; and former editor-in-chief of Breitbart’s London bureau Raheem Kassam.

Additionally, two major conservative TikTok accounts, @therepublicanhypehouse and @conservativehypehouse, both posted videos pushing the conspiracy theory, getting more than 370,000 views combined (even though TikTok has an anti-misinformation policy).

The conspiracy theory also apparently reached Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren, who has a history of pushing claims from message boards. She tweeted, “When you donate to BLM you’re donating to the Dems.”

Tomi Lahren ActBlue claim

These tweets and videos combined have gotten hundreds of thousands of shares and views and have amplified the conspiracy theory far beyond fringe message boards.

---

720

aha: trump utter fail on covid. numbers scary and undeniable (tho they try to suppress by route to DHS, swat secret police];

BLM not really subsiding, and they need it a bogeyman so trump can do Nixonian Law and Order scam; cruel irony/paradox is trump/libtards unable or unwilling to govern, so crash/crisis then gives cover for I alone am strong man who can deal with these commie degenerates who hate aMerica. [tho so far just kick blame to states [tho kemp under the bus on covid mask lawsuit?]

yes i am a vulgar bigot, but look at the stock mkt! and corp tax cut, dereg] but he can't depend on corp dark money to buy election [esp if zuck cuts ads] thus he needs the economy to re-open, which means he needs schools open (for child care?) so willing to kill kids?! no rallies (basis of ego boost, proof of popularity/thus legit // inaug crowd BS, pix of trumpistas will be on TV and soc med]

one of 4 horses, related to all but esp militarization, esp on climate refugee; note sublethal used on nat aM dapl remote ppl of color now pepperball explodes to head of activist, press lost eye? state of exception/margin periphery comes to Portland

yikes primary 7/20 portland secret police

combo of militarization and criminalization (of undoc immigrant, periphery, then sanctuary city, BLM ACTIVIST AND PRESS SUB-LETHAL WEAPONS)

why did portland get hit 1st by secret police vs seattle autonomous zone?

Washington enacted a measure in June 2019 in favor of sanctuary cities, similar to California and Oregon laws which are among the strongest statewide mandates in the nation.^[186]

Seattle^[187]

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aha: the original and most durable conspiracy theory? anything not white, male and xian is suspect/inferior? i forgot anti-sem in phobia ~ PC intersectional

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/how-donald-trump-will-try-to-scapegoat-george-soros-to-win-re-election/

no lnx twt

How Donald Trump will try to scapegoat George Soros to win re-election

Written by The Conversation July 16, 2020

by Neil McLaughlin, McMaster University and Iga Mergler, McMaster University

When future scholars write the history of the administration of Donald Trump, he may end up being called — among many other things — the conspiracy theorist president. Trump famously began his ascent to power with the false and racist “birther” claim that Barack Obama was not really an American.

Trump and his followers have also legitimized bizarre conspiracy theories against Hungarian American financier and philanthropist George Soros. It now appears continued attacks toward Soros will be a part of the president’s re-election campaign.

Soros has been a punching bag for authoritarians, anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists around the world since 1992, when he became famous as “The Man Who Broke the Bank of England” by making more than US$1 billion by “shorting” the British pound.

Born in Budapest in 1930, Soros barely survived the destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis. Living in New York City since 1956, he has combined a long career as a successful capitalist while doing philanthropy under the banner of his Open Society Foundations.

Anti-Semitic attacks

Attacks on Soros have circulated on the margins of mainstream politics for years, tinged with anti-Semitism and fuelled by half-truths and outright lies. Russia has always been at the heart of anti-Soros propaganda, and it’s now joined by China in promoting attacks, distortions and lies. Over the last few years, these conspiracies have entered mainstream debate in Hungary, Poland, Brazil and the United States.

The Trump movement attempted to scapegoat Soros as part of its Make America Great Again rhetoric. Trump supporters accused Soros, among other things, of supporting the caravan of migrants attempting to enter the United States from Central America, being behind the attacks on Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court nomination (a falsehood Trump himself tweeted about) and promoting an elitist globalist agenda that undermined American jobs and culture.

Most incredibly, in recent weeks Soros has been accused of paying Black Lives Matter protesters who demonstrated across the United States after the police killing of George Floyd.

Trump has major liabilities in his quest for re-election: his incompetent handling of the coronavirus pandemic, his polarizing opposition to protesters after the Floyd killing and the decline of the U.S. economy since the outbreak of COVID-19. Loss of support among suburban white women, members of the military elite and moderate Republicans are now a threat to his electoral prospects.

Attacking Soros part of the plan

Attacking China, stoking nationalist resentments, uncritically defending the police, claiming economic competence and bashing Joe Biden will be Trump’s major electoral strategy. But Republican attacks on Soros are also likely to circulate widely until the election.

Soros is a perfect foil to try to convince people that Trump stands for the average American. What better scapegoat than a wealthy, uber-liberal currency speculator who helped fund Obama and Hillary Clinton, supports abortion, gay and trans rights and gives generously to the electoral campaigns of liberal public defenders and prosecutors? In Trumpist rhetoric, Soros is soft on crime and promotes the values of cultural liberalism and global elites over the average American. [HE'S ALSO THE WHATABOUTISM CORP OLIGARCH FOR KOCH BOROS; I'M NOT CORRUPT YOU'RE CORRUPT KNEE-JERK REFLEXIVE ST'D MOVE

Soros’s history of supporting Palestinian rights and calling for a negotiated peace settlement created an opportunity for the White House to exploit. Rhetoric about big finance linked to a “globalist” Jewish philanthropist understandably concerns Jewish voters and others opposed to anti-Semitism, but anti-Soros rhetoric can unify evangelical Christian Zionists, pro-Israel Republicans, interventionist neo-conservatives and far-right extremists.

Attacking Soros is also part of a Trumpist appeal to conservative Black voters, now being led Candace Owens, a young media figure and Republican activist.

Owens spreads paranoia

Prone to gaffes that expose her ignorance about history and politics, Owens has gained a massive online presence among far right-wing Trump supporters by directly challenging the mainstream Democratic Party narrative on racism, police violence and poverty in America. She’s also attacked George Floyd’s character. What’s more, Owens has spread anti-Soros paranoia online, giving it a cooler, hipper and younger flavour.

The core of the Trumpist scapegoating of Soros is an attempt to blame Soros for the Black Lives Matter protests and calls for defunding the police. The lie that Soros is paying for the protests that have swept through the United States and is promoting riots is deeply corrosive to American democracy.

Conspiracy theories work best when lies, exaggerations and paranoia are linked to real things in the world that can be distorted by spin. Soros’s recent pledge of US$220 million to support civil rights and racial equality groups like Black Voters Matter will add fuel to extremist fire.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson will play a major role in all this. During a recent segment on his show, former Missouri governor Eric Greitens attempted to link Soros to anti-police violence and made reference to a “George Soros-funded prosecutor” involved in the case of the couple in St. Louis who stood in front of their house with guns while anti-racism protesters marched on their street.

None of this is likely to save Trump from going down to an electoral defeat in November. While there are legitimate criticisms to be made of the role of billionaires like Soros in politics and economic life, the divisiveness of anti-Soros paranoia will take years to repair.

The Conversation

Neil McLaughlin, Professor of Sociology, McMaster University and Iga Mergler, PhD Candidate in Sociology,, McMaster University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

---

aha pseudo-populism trashes expertise (of science and gubmint), free mkt says all gov't inept, the only real expert is pvt biz/accounting consultant, which lead to more hollowing out: mck wants to keep all data propietary so can sell to mult gov't agy, HENCE EXTRACTION

death spiral, pro pub 720:

Given that McKinsey consultants operate as advisers, with government officials charged with making final decisions, it can be hard to identify the firm’s responsibility for any given decision. But the firm’s government work has been steadily rising in the wake of a multidecade hollowing out of government (a trend McKinsey has promoted and ridden). Today, that increasingly means that if you examine the government’s response to the pandemic, you’re likely to find McKinsey’s fingerprints.

===

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aha recall that someone desmog? said plastic is the next big revenue stream for frack/fossil fuels, so must be defended and blk ppl get cancer collateral damage?

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https://theintercept.com/2020/06/25/environmental-activists-charged-terrorizing-louisiana-formosa/

TWO LEADERS OF the long-running fight for environmental justice in Louisiana turned themselves in to police in Baton Rouge Thursday morning. The activists, who work in a part of the state known as “Cancer Alley,” faced charges of “terrorizing” related to a nonviolent protest action. Civil liberties attorneys are calling the charges a dramatic escalation of a yearslong effort by the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries to criminalize efforts to halt the expansion of polluting facilities in the state — part of a nationwide trend of cracking down on dissent around climate change issues.

:{:{}:

The accusations against the activists, Anne Rolfes and Kate McIntosh, stem from a seemingly innocuous activist stunt carried out in December, the day after a festival designed to draw attention to the environmental misdeeds of Formosa Plastics. The Taiwanese petrochemical company plans to build a massive plastics manufacturing complex in a largely Black Louisiana community that has already suffered health problems linked to local industry. In October, Formosa agreed to a $50 million settlement for dumping pollutants, including the small pellets that form the building blocks for plastic products known as nurdles, into Texas’s Lavaca Bay — the largest settlement of a Clean Water Act lawsuit filed by private citizens.

with a key environmental permit still pending for Formosa in Louisiana, the action — dubbed “Nurdlefest” — was meant to pressure the state’s Department of Environmental Quality to scrutinize the company’s record. Boxes of the plastic pellets, used as evidence in the Texas case, were carted to the front of the agency, where around 75 people gathered in the rain.

What apparently terrorized community members, however, was a container of the pellets that appeared on the porch of an oil and gas lobbyist, with a detailed note attached, explaining what they were and their Texas origin. “We have delivered this package of nurdles as a reminder – Louisiana does not need anymore pollution, plastics or otherwise,” the letter said. “We demand that LDEQ DENY Formosa’s air emissions permit application.”

:{:{[ltr doc Letter Included in "Nurdles" Package Sent by Louisiana Activists]:(style="font-family:Merriweather"):}: }:

---

an 820

...That is particularly true as the president seems to have simultaneously launched an initiative to suggest that Biden is against the Bible and God. For example, during a “telerally” with Pennsylvania voters on Sunday, Trump said, “Joe Biden, the radical Democrats are against fracking, they’re against guns, and they’re against the Bible, essentially, they’re against God.”Here is what he said in Ohio on Thursday

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620

aha: us vs them enemy: we are the reasonable rational people, within accepted norms, but THEY are dangerous, deranged, cannot be reasoned with so MUST be met with FORCE, strict father must punish mis-behavior; [fundamentalist they are evil? end time armageddon?]

RANGE:

alarmist is irrationally worried about an issue, worst case will get some policy enacted that will increase friction/cost/bureaucracy

activist, same as above but is ACTIVE in street or politics, so can increase cost/damage

extremist sorta tied with militant, but latter ominous suggestion of force? well doth do, but hard to picture Pelosi busting out AR 15? IRRATIONAL, CAN ONLY BE DEALT W/ VIA FORCE

easy slide over to terrorism (eco economic)

fascist one man alone can fix the (single?) threat/problem

takes immediate swift unilateral Executive order action

aha: do nothing congress was an actual thing, commented on (repeatedly?) by Maddow in comparison on recent GOP led senate (recall mtg right after BO where (openly vs leaked?) declared we will pass nothing even if we favor it); so lack of any gov't action that could help ppl is blamed on dems; plus a MAN of action will get it done whatever it takes, HARD vs soft dems/fems

@realDonaldTrump

Interesting how ANTIFA and other Far Left militant groups can take over a city without barely a wimpier [FREUDIAN TYPO?] from soft Do Nothing Democrat leadership, yet thesesame weak leaders become RADICAL when it comes to shutting down a state or city and its hard working, tax paying citizens!

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/fox-news-removes-unethical-digitally-altered-images-of-police-brutality-protests-in-seattle

ok he was there, but a week before?

no lnx pix twt

fox News removes ‘unethical’ digitally altered images of police brutality protests in Seattle

Royalty-free stock photo ID: 1288386304 Tallinn, Estonia - 01/18/2019: Fox News website homepage. Fox News channel logo visible through a magnifying glass.

Written by Roger Sollenberger / Salon June 16, 2020

Fox News over the weekend removed misleading images from stories about protests against police brutality in Seattle from its website after it was revealed they had been digitally altered in a manner which made the scene appear dangerous.

The Seattle Times published a report Friday calling out multiple images from Fox News coverage of the police-free “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” (CHAZ) in the city.

One photo illustration appearing on the Fox News homepage showed a masked man with an assault rifle and tactical vest standing in front of a sign reading, “You are now entering Free Cap Hill.” The outlet did not originally disclose that the photo of the scene and the photo of the armed man had been spliced together using two different photos, which were taken more than a week apart.

The original photo, from Getty Images, shows the armed man in front of a car.

He was digitally placed in front of the entrance sign.

The same image of the man appeared in at least one other image on Fox News’ website, in front of a smashed retail storefront. According to The Times, it was also a combination of multiple images.

“It is definitely Photoshopped,” freelance photographer David Ryder, who took the original photo and published it through Getty images, told the outlet. “To use a photo out of context in a journalistic setting like that seems unethical.”

Conservatives, including President Donald Trump, have attempted to sculpt the CHAZ storyline into a political flashpoint. Protesters converted the area into a street festival after police, who teargassed demonstrators, left the precinct in an effort to de-escalate tensions.

Trump tweeted Thursday that “Radical Left Governor [J]ay Inslee and the Mayor of Seattle are being taunted and played at a level that our great Country has never seen before. Take back your city NOW. If you don’t do it, I will. This is not a game. These ugly Anarchists must be stooped [sic] IMMEDIATELY. MOVE FAST!”

The mayor told the president, “Make us all safe. Go back to your bunker.”

Fox News on Friday used a photo of a man running through an urban inferno as a banner image for a group of stories about Seattle under the headline, “CRAZY TOWN || Seattle helpless as armed guards patrol anarchists’ autonomous zone, shake down businesses: cops.”

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The photo was unaltered, but it was an AP photo taken May 30 in St. Paul, Minn. Fox News later removed it.

The articles did not notify readers that the photos were altered, and it remains unclear who was responsible for the decision to do so. A Fox News spokesperson did not immediately respond to Salon’s request for comment.

In an emailed statement, a Fox News spokeswoman told The Times: “We have replaced our photo illustration with the clearly delineated images of a gunman and a shattered storefront, both of which were taken this week in Seattle’s autonomous zone.”

However, that statement itself was inaccurate. While the gunman was photographed that week — June 10 — the smashed storefront images were first published by Getty on May 30.

Fox News fully apologized Saturday in an editor’s note accompanying its CHAZ coverage, acknowledging that it “did not clearly delineate” the photo illustrations, which it labeled a “collage.” The site also apologized for falsely attributing the shot of the Minneapolis fire. “Fox News regrets these errors,” the note said.

Talent at the conservative network have attempted to use the Seattle protests as a political wedge issue. For example, primetime host Tucker Carlson accused the people in the zone of advocating segregation.

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The network also reported an anecdotal claim from Seattle Assistant Chief of Police Deanna Nollette.

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“We’ve heard, anecdotally, reports of citizens and businesses being asked to pay a fee to operate within this area,” Nollette said. “This is the crime of extortion.”

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Police Chief Carmen Best later corrected that statement.

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“We haven’t had any formal reports of this occurring,” she said, indicating the reports had come from rumors spread on social media.

Though the Seattle protests have at times been home to contentious scenes of unrest — including a cop filmed forcibly removing his partner’s knee from someone’s neck and a man filmed driving into a crowd of protesters and shooting a black man — the CHAZ street scene has been almost entirely peaceful, featuring musical and visual artists, free street food, concerts and movies.

Best said she did not think the officers should have abandoned the precinct, a move which she claims has led to longer 911 response times.

Trump called demonstrators “domestic terrorists” over the weekend and threatened federal action unless local officials “take back” the area. He also falsely claimed that antifa forces had taken over the city.

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Interesting how ANTIFA and other Far Left militant groups can take over a city without barely a wimpier from soft Do Nothing Democrat leadership, yet thesesame weak leaders become RADICAL when it comes to shutting down a state or city and its hard working, tax paying citizens!

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“City officials have not interacted with ‘armed antifa militants’ at this site,” a city spokesperson told CNN.

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1/20

https://www.ecowatch.com/blm-public-lands-pendley-2643719726.html

The man who once wrote that "the Founding Fathers intended all lands owned by the federal government to be sold" has had his time in charge of U.S. public lands extended.

Interior Secretary David Bernhardt signed an order Thursday leaving William Perry Pendley in charge of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) until April 3, The Hill reported. Pendley has been criticized for his support of selling public lands or opening them to fossil fuel extraction and other industrial uses, The Washington Post reported. He also sued the Interior Department in support of oil and gas exploration and against endangered species protections when he ran the Mountain States Legal Foundation. Despite this, he is now in charge of 245 million acres of public lands and 700 million acres of natural resources.

"Secretary Bernhardt's redelegation of the BLM director's authority to anti-public lands zealot Pendley is a slap in the face to all public land users and the U.S. Constitution," Western Values Project Deputy Director Jayson O'Neill said in a statement reported by The Washington Post. "[Putting Pendley] in charge of the BLM again is the equivalent of the Trump administration openly putting America's public lands up for sale."

Bernhardt's decision came only days after 91 conservation, wildlife and outdoor groups signed a letter to Bernhardt calling for Pendley to either resign or be removed.

One major concern raised in the letter is that Pendley is running the BLM without having been appointed by the president or confirmed by the Senate. Instead, Bernhardt appointed him "deputy director for policy and programs — exercising authority of the director" in July, according to InsideClimate News.

The BLM has not had a Senate-confirmed director during the Trump administration, and some critics are concerned the series of temporary leaders are part of an attempt to dismantle the agency.

"Only a Senate-confirmed Director or a Presidentially-appointed Acting Director would have legal legitimacy to lead the Bureau," the letter read.

The letter writers also raised concerns about Pendley's actions and opinions in and out of office.

In November, he publicly expressed support for the views of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), an extremist public lands organization affiliated with armed militants Ammon and Cliven Bundy.
He has variousconflicts of interests. He represented three Utah counties in their attempt to shrink Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments and still receives payments from former-employer the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which is still suing the BLM.
He is overseeing a controversial move of the BLM headquarters from Washington, DC to Colorado that has not been approved by Congress.
He holds controversial views. In addition to arguing in support of selling off public lands, he also thinks that wild horses are the biggest issue facing Western public lands, ignoring issues like fossil fuel extraction and the climate crisis, the fate of the endangered greater sage-grouse and Gunnison sage-grouse and overgrazing by livestock.

"Putting someone like William Perry Pendley in charge of what happens on these public lands is likely to just accelerate climate disruption," Shelley Silbert, letter signatory and executive director of conservation group Great Old Broads for Wilderness, told InsideClimate News.

The Interior Department dismissed the concerns of the letter writers.

"For this group of environmental extremists to call themselves sportsman and conservationists is as laughable as this letter. Mr. Pendley brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the Department and is committed to carrying out the Administration's priorities for the betterment of the American people," an Interior spokesperson told The Hill Monday.

But environmental groups argue that Pendley's positions are the extreme ones.

"William Perry Pendley is an ideological zealot with values that are deeply out of touch with the mainstream," Wilderness Society conservation director Phil Hanceford